ONE DAY CLAY CLINTON INFORMED ME that the two of us had to defend the honor of his sister, Horseface. I never did learn the exact nature of the insult to Olivia, but I was more than willing to help. Clay told me that revenge had to be exacted. This is how he was talking, revenge had to be exacted, satisfaction given, recompense had for the besmirchment of the family name. I said fair enough. So, Clay told me, go get a bag full of dog dirt.
Well, a lifelong problem has been this inability of mine to think things through, but a bag full of dog dirt made as much sense as anything else back then. My next-door neighbor was an old widow woman named Mrs. Dougherty, and she had a dog. Her dog was a particularly gruesome thing, one of those wrinkled little brutes that God dropped on its face two or three times before setting onto the earth. This dog—I can even remember its name, Rex—spent all of its waking hours rooting in Mrs. Dougherty’s vegetable garden. The beast was inordinately fond of radishes, so Mrs. Dougherty, having no one else to fuss over and being a motherly sort, grew the dog a whole backyard full of the little red things. Rex was out in the garden most of the time, chewing on radishes and passing them, and it was not a matter of much difficulty to go over into the yard and gather up a big sack full of shit.
Then, at night, after I was supposed to be asleep, I snuck out my bedroom window and carried this bag over to the house of Clay Clinton.
The first thing Clay did—and mind you, this is absolutely typical—is go on about how much I smelt. What the Jesus did he expect? First he tells me to get shit, then he’s mad because the stuff stinks. He made me walk ten paces behind him. We walked straight downtown, across Rideau Street and into the market, just the place you want to be when you’re carting a three-pounder of dog do. Then we went into a little residential area—poor people, I saw, but not as poor as my family, and certainly nowhere near eel-poor—and Clay Clinton stopped and told me, “His name is Humphries.”
“Whose name is Humphries?” I wanted to know. It hadn’t occurred to me that any specific person had insulted Horseface’s honor. I sort of figured it was something that just happened.
“He lives,” Clay went on, “right over there.”
Clay pointed to a tiny wooden house with a rickety porch. There was a chicken tied up in the front yard.
Clinton produced a box of Eddy matches. It all became clear. This was how Clinton intended to avenge his sister, the old light-the-bag-of-dog-shit caper. Clay did his best to laugh ghoulishly. Even as a boy he was concerned mostly with style. Clinton pressed the matches into my hand and whispered, “Percival, the honor is yours.”
“Horseface is your sister!” I argued.
“She’s your betrothed, isn’t she?” News to me. “You watched her take a bath.”
I couldn’t quarrel there. If watching a girl bathe meant you and she were betrothed, well, that’s the way the world rolls. I took the matches and the bag of dog dirt up onto the little front porch.
The way the stunt works, of course, is: you light the bag aflame, knock on the door, and then scamper to a hiding place with a view. The victim opens the door and naturally starts stomping on the fire. He ends up with dog shit all over his foot. It ain’t the people’s choice for defending the honor of a young maiden, and maybe Clay hadn’t put as much thought into the whole affair as he might have. It’s all historical anyway. I set a match to the brown paper, knocked on the door, screamed, “This is for Horseface!” and then hightailed it to where Clay was hiding.
Naturally enough, Humphries wasn’t home. He was likely out insulting someone else’s honor. This might have been the best thing that could have happened. The paper bag might have burned and left behind a pile of smoldering manure and that would have been the end of it, were it not for Rex’s strange diet. The ugly little beast ate nothing but radishes, and they rendered his shit volatile. All of a sudden there was a series of pops and fizzles coming from the front porch, and the air filled with a thick gray smoke. Great licks of flame started shooting from the bag. Then, with an enormous boom, the little porch exploded.
Clay Clinton said, with uncommon understatement, “Shit.”
I ran for the porch, thinking that I might somehow be able to put the fire out. The house, however, was old and wooden, and the air was dry and hot, and it didn’t take but a few seconds before the place was gone. I stood there and waved my hands, and about all I really accomplished was pointing out to all the neighbors that I was the one who had started the fire.
I didn’t even bother looking for Clay. I knew he’d be long gone.
I was found guilty in the juvenile court of arson (I wasn’t charged for killing the chicken) and sentenced to spend time at the Bowmanville (Annex) Reformatory for Boys. My crime was judged a serious one, and the judge shook his jowls somberly and said he thought it would be best if I stayed at the reform school until my sixteenth birthday. The judge kind of implied that when I turned sixteen he’d throw me into a real grown-up slammer.
Clay Clinton attended the court proceedings, dressed in a blue suit with short pants. He nodded judiciously throughout and seemed to think the judge’s verdict was a wise one.
So they took me on the train down to Bowmanville, Ont. I was accompanied by a correctional officer, a fat man who smoked cigars and didn’t say a solitary word to me. The general feeling was that I’d turned out bad, but this fellow seemed to think I was headed for the gallows. When he noticed people staring at us, and quite a few people did, the correctional officer would say to them, “Arsonist,” and tip his head in my direction.
The first few times I tried to say, “I didn’t know Rex’s dung would explode!” but every time I said that, the correctional officer would give me a cuff on the side of the head.
At the Bowmanville train station, I was turned over to my new keepers. I thought things had gone from bad to worse.
They were monks.
There were four of them, all dressed in long black robes like they were waiting for a funeral to pass by. And as if them being monks wasn’t bad enough—if the old man saw a monk he’d cross his fingers and wouldn’t uncross them until he’d seen a horse sneeze—they were the oddest assemblage of monks the world has ever seen.
One was a great big cusser, ugly as all get-out. He looked like what dogs are dreaming about when their back legs start twitching. Another of the monks looked like a fireplug, short and squat, even to the extent of having a bright red face with a little yellow top, that being his blond hair. If this man of the cloth marched into any seaside groghouse, the drunken sailors would back out politely. The third monk was just barely there, that’s how slight he was. He looked like something was eating him up from the inside. The skin on his face looked as thin as tissue paper.
The fourth was a regular enough goom, except for his eyes. They were crossed and bossed and weird in every way, a strange milky blue color. This was Brother Isaiah, about whom there were two schools of thought. The most popularly held position was that Brother Isaiah was as blind as a bat. The other school (Brother Isaiah himself being practically the only adherent) had it that Brother Isaiah could see perfectly well. To add fodder to this case, Isaiah was always saying sentences that began, “I see …” or “You look …”. That’s what he did now. He leant in real close to me and rested those egg blue eyes on my chest for a few seconds and then said, “I see you have arrived safe and sound, Mr. Leary.”
I grunted, my old mother’s admonitions of politeness be damned.
The ugly one made a big show of puckering his mouth. Speech took some preparation in his case. “Did you have a nice trip?” the monster demanded.
Next the tough little fireplug monk wanted to know if I was tired, and the skinny one asked, “Are you hungry?”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking of asking the correctional officer if he might be interested in adopting me.
The monks lined out (they couldn’t walk to the icebox, I was to find out, without forming into a single file), and they led me to an old cart that was full of farming equipment, groceries, and gewgaws. There were two old horses hitched up front, and they seemed to get uneasy on our arrival, snorting and shifting their trembling legs around. I found out why. The blind monk, Brother Isaiah, climbed up onto the box. It took him upwards of two minutes to even find the reins, him groping with his hands, those two bossy-milk eyes of his no use at all.
Then the monk made a sharp chicky sound with his tongue and the side of his mouth. The old nags started moving forward and this Brother Isaiah started steering. If you want to call it steering. The wagon kept going back and forth across the road, and a few times we came within an ace of tumbling into the ditch. I was the only one who seemed to notice or care. One time the blind monk drove the horses straight for an old oak tree. I watched the two ancient beasts exchange glances, and I guess they decided that the time had finally come for rebellious action, because they pulled away just in time.
The three others sat with me in the cart and paid this wagoneer no mind. They kept trying to make conversation, but I wasn’t having none of it. Instead, to keep myself occupied, I started digging around in all the junk, looking to see if there was anything interesting.
I found a hockey puck. It seemed a strange thing to find in a cart full of monks. I rooted around some more and came up with a pair of skates and a couple of sticks.
The ugly one, who’d told me that his name was Brother Simon, puckered up his face truly gruesome in order to ask, “Do you play hockey, Percival?”
I shrugged juvenile delinquent-style, but managed to sneak a little nod into it.
The fireplug, Brother Andrew, grinned and said, “Most excellent.” He had a nice smile, except for the lack of teeth. He had the same amount of teeth as I do now, approximately one.
The skinny one—sunlight passed through the man—whose name was Brother Theodore, he asked, “What position do you play?”
“Mostly the centerman, but I can play the point or the cover-point. I can play the rover. I could play the wings. It none of it makes any difference to Little Leary. You could stick me in goal for all of that.”
Brother Isaiah all of a sudden swung around and aimed his strange wally eyes somewhere in my general vicinity. “Mr. Leary,” he said, “your new home.”
Ahead of me, sitting at the end of a road and the top of a hill, was a castle. It looked like a picture ripped out of one of my brother Lloyd’s storybooks, The Knights of the Round Table. The first time I saw it, the reformatory was golden in the autumn sun, all covered by clouds and ivy. It had turrets and round windows and even a moat, except for the moat was just an ambitious ditch. We had to cross a small bridge to get over, and then we had to pass under a gateway. I looked up and saw that someone had burned these words into the wood:
TO KEEP A BOY OUT OF HOT WATER, PUT HIM ON ICE