TWO

One of the problems was that Wade came from an up-island family who all appeared to have more energy than they knew what to do with. Their purpose in life, it seemed to him as a boy, was simply to burn up as much of it as they could, as fast as possible. Work, work, work. They were scared to stop in case all that energy should pile up, unused, and overwhelm them. His father worked all day on the mountains as a second-loader for the logging company, and drove the crummy besides, and once he got home came inside the house only long enough to gulp down his supper before going outside again to work on what he called his stump ranch. In his evenings he cleared field after field out of the bush with a homemade pieced-to-gether tractor — cutting, hauling, blasting, burning, planting — he looked after the animals that kept them in meat and milk and eggs, and he fixed machinery in the little workshop behind the garage. If he did anything else at all, if he even left the place, it was only to help a neighbour to do the same kind of thing.

Wade’s mother cooked, baked, housecleaned the high old bay-windowed house (“when you live in a community of Finns you can’t have the only floor people couldn’t eat off”), drove her Hudson in to town for shopping, drove neighbour women who’d never learned to drive down to Netty Miller’s shop for their hair permanents, and bottled the fruit and vegetables out of their own orchard and garden. When the supper dishes were done she threw herself into an armchair, stuck her legs out onto a stool in front of her to rest them, and read the newspaper through from beginning to end, every column. Then a huge sigh and up again to run baths, iron, bake some more, make lunches, and write letters to relatives in Ontario. He had the impression that she leapt out of bed in the mornings already in high gear — the house woke when her heels hit the floor, there was no need for alarm clocks — and went full-tilt at everything in sight until she flung herself back onto the bed at night and instantly died, as she put it, to sleep the sleep of the just.

Life is too short, there’s too much to do, they told him, life is for living, standing still is dying. But Wade Powers, who arrived after a series of three boys and two girls who’d already thrown themselves into their parents’ activities as if caught up in a whirlwind they couldn’t control, only watched and wondered at their madness. Everyone smelled of sweat.

“You have to put effort into life, you can’t just sit,” his father said.

“Wade thinks all he had to do was get himself born,” his mother said. “He thinks once he put out that little bit of energy he shouldn’t have to do anything else except ride on the coattails of other people’s work.” She had a way of saying things as if it were the ceiling, and not he, that could be interested.

There was nowhere else to look for different models. Uncles and aunts were as bad, worse. Besides holding down full-time jobs in the logging camps or in construction, and pushing back the borders of their own stump ranches dotted all around the valley, they found time to squeeze in leisure activities that seemed to take up even more energy than their work — mountain climbing, hunting for grouse, deer, elk, and moose, to keep them in gamey meat throughout the winter, weekend matches of football or baseball or basketball.

For a while he thought he had found a few neighbours whose lives were more consistent with his instincts. The settlement had originally been surveyed into sections by the government and sold cheaply to returned veterans after the First World War, as a reward for their efforts on behalf of their country, and at the same time as an incentive to get that rocky part of the island settled. It seemed for a while to Wade, when he discovered who these people were, that they must have all decided once they’d done their bit for the country that they didn’t intend to do another thing with their lives but sit on their rewards and attend Legion functions. Ageing men, slow men, serious men, they had time to smoke their pipes and talk. From the stories they told him he could see they’d worked so hard during those war years that they deserved a lifelong rest. And worse, on looking closer, he discovered they had hobbies that kept them more than busy: wood carving, gardening, hog-raising, fox-breeding. Some of them had turned their land into full-time farms. They, too, had let him down.

Nowhere in the adult world was there anyone he could identify with.

“Well what do you expect?” his father said, sucking on a toothpick. “People have to take what they want out of life.”

“And we’re very sorry,” his mother said, “that we couldn’t arrange for you to be born into a royal family. If you were a prince, maybe, you could have servants to do everything for you, even wipe your bum.”

It was a hard lesson to learn, that you had to wipe your own bum in this world, and he fought it. Mahatma Gandhi was his hero, but only symbolically; he liked the idea of just sitting tight until eventually you got your own way. If he took a passive-resistance attitude to life maybe the world would eventually give in and deliver itself into his hands.

But teachers, apparently, had never heard of Gandhi, or misinterpreted. “You’ve got to try, you’ve got to try, you’ve got to try!” they screamed at him. Not one of them even gave a reason. “You’ve got to try!” They jabbed fingers into his books, as if all he had to do was roll up his sleeves and go at it the way his father went at a new field he was clearing. Even the teachers smelled of sweat. “I hate to use this word about anyone,” they told his mother, “but he’s just plain lazy.”

“Bone lazy,” his mother said, and tightened her lips. “He would be still in his crib if we hadn’t burned it.” She tried to help out by inviting his teachers to Sunday supper or to tea, and by joining the PTA, but it didn’t do him any good. Wade has more than enough ability, they wrote on his report card year after year, but he won’t apply it.

“It’s only an ugly mask you’re wearing just to spite me,” his mother said. “And some day I’ll find a way of zipping it off you.” But she became so involved again in the whirlwind of work which had spun her and his father and the other children and everyone else they knew into a frantic pace, that she soon changed her attitude and only stopped once in a while to remind him that people usually got what they had earned in this world and not a single drop more. If it was a mask, truly, then she’d never managed to get a single glimpse behind it.

People were a lot of fools, he decided early. Slaving their butts off like worker bees, and what did it get them?

One thing it got was a roof over their heads, they told him, and food in their bellies. Where would they be without those, Mr. Smart? Would he rather they were all living out on the road somewhere? His father had an image of the road as a no man’s land, a narrow strip of world that was reserved for all the people who weren’t willing to break their backs carving out their pieces of the wilderness or who didn’t care enough about their families to put food in their stomachs. He was never comfortable driving, as if he were afraid that others would suspect him of being “out on the road”; he used the highway and the backroads only for travelling to and from work, and never once took his family on anything so useless as a Sunday drive.

“You’ll be the first Powers ever to be out on the road. Living hand to mouth.”

A Powers was someone who would give the shirt off his back, a Powers was the salt of the earth, a Powers was someone who worked his fingers to the bone, a Powers was someone who wasn’t afraid to shed a little sweat, a Powers was someone who wasn’t scared to get his hands dirty.

A Powers, the youngest of them said, was a sap.

For a while there was Grandpa Barclay, who was not a sap. He worked as hard as anyone else, but he wasn’t afraid to stop and talk; he could talk with a boy without having that “got to get back to it” panicky look in his eyes. Wade’s own grandparents had been dead since before he was born, so he had no compunctions about adopting Jackson Barclay when he found him, or about spending all the time he could down on the dairy farm where the big house sat under giant maples and a creek ran twisting in and out among the sheds.

Mr. and Mrs. Barclay had raised seven daughters who’d grown up and married loggers and mill workers and truck drivers and moved off in every direction, leaving the two of them alone on their farm where the island highway was met by a road that came up from the beach. He raised Jersey cows, which he milked in the big old half-empty barn and pastured out in the square green fields whose borders were blurred by the alders that had grown up along fences and in the drainage ditches. He was a white-haired man with veins close to the surfaces of his nose and stubby hands already freckled with brown ageing spots. He’d never miss a chance to tell a harmless joke on someone else, then hunch-up and give a big wink that pulled his whole face out of shape.

Sometimes he took Wade on his horse-pulled wagon back down a lane past the hay fields and the stump pastures to the woods where he was cutting alder. In the little grove, thick with the smell of blackberries ripening beneath the grass, Wade watched him throw his plaid shirt over a stump, swing the double-bitted axe in strokes that sent pink-white chips as big as books flying across the clearing, stop to wipe his arms across his mouth and take a drink from a lukewarm jar of water he’d propped up in the shade of a maple tree. When the blackberry smell had been replaced by the sharp sweet scent of the bleeding alder Wade couldn’t resist helping a little, by stacking the lengths of wood, slowly, without rush, onto the wagon to be hauled back to the buzz saw behind the barn.

And the old man would stop, and help him, just to be able to talk. He’d come out to this place from the prairies in nineteen twenty-four, he told him more than once, from Alberta. He left a poor farm behind, after a long hard winter that had killed horses, killed cattle. He came west just to take a look, he said, just to look the place over, and then he’d gone back full of excitement with his suitcase jammed with giant maple leaves and pine cones to surprise his daughters. He was tired of breaking his back for nothing; this was the land for him, where nature gave you a little help. “Kate and the girls came out on the passenger coach, but me, I earned my way,” he said. “I rode on a freight train, they gave me my fare for looking after a trainload of hogs. I slept right in with them, earned my way west to this place, where a man could earn a decent life, I thought, without breaking his back.”

This, Wade thought, was his true grandfather. When they paused like two runaway kids to rest under an alder tree, sometimes the old man would put his hand on his neck, lightly, and know that that was enough.

But there were others, Wade discovered, with prior claim. Those invisible daughters, off living their separate lives, had produced real grandchildren for him, who weren’t above showing up to claim him, and to put Wade in his place. One of them was a skinny blonde named Maggie Maclean, a year or two older than he was. She’d be seven then, or eight, when he first saw her. “I bet I know what you want,” she said. “I bet you want to steal my grampa’s horse.”

“Shut up,” he said. “You’re a girl.”

“I bet you just hang around to get some of their homemade ice cream. You’re not a cousin. You’re not even related.”

In her family, as in his, being related was a fence: all the good-guys were in, all the bad-guys were out.

“Look,” he said, and undid his pants.

“Blaagh,” she said, sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes. He might have been offering a bowl of fish innards. Yet she didn’t run away, she stared at him until he buttoned up, feeling foolish, and got on his bicycle to start for home. The maple-cooled feel of the yard had been spoiled.

“How long are you staying?” he’d said. There was still the chance that this was a one-day affair, she could leave again just as suddenly as she’d appeared.

But “All summer” was her answer. And “Next summer too, my parents want to get rid of me as much as they can.”

So she became a fact of life. Maggie Maclean was installed, queen, at the Barclay farm, from the first of July every year until the beginning of September. Dominion Day to Labour Day, from Parade to Fair. There was no escaping her. Maggie’s mother, the only Barclay girl who hadn’t married salt of the earth, liked to accompany her husband on beachcombing trips up the west coast and right on up to the Charlottes. There was no room on the boat for a long-legged blonde-haired girl.

Grampa Barclay, Wade was glad to discover, hadn’t known what to make of her either. She was just as foreign to him. “If I threw her in the creek,” he said, “she’d be still talking a blue streak when she came out at the beach, that one.” He crunched down a wink that united them both in their uncharitableness. “You don’t know what life is, my boy, until you’ve lived it in a house full of eight women.” Though it was clear, from his tone, that he wouldn’t trade, not for a dozen boys.

“You’re a weird one,” Maggie had told him once. They were sitting on the back step of the cream-coloured farmhouse, beside the climbing rose, while she podded peas. Mrs. Barclay came out and set the bowl down between them and said, “There, that ought to keep you two out of mischief for a while. Earn your supper.”

“You’re a weird one,” Maggie told him. “You never lift a finger, you never help. In all the summers I’ve come here I never once seen you lift a finger to help anybody but my grampa. How come?”

Already the sharp bones were shaping the face that would make her some day a beauty. She scooped up a handful of fallen rose petals, bruised them with her thumb, and inhaled their odour.

“How come what? Why should I help? I wouldn’t think you’d want help from a person that wasn’t related.”

“I mean how come my grampa? How come you’ll help him?”

He didn’t know, he told her. How was he supposed to know? Maybe it was because the old man didn’t expect it. Maybe it was because the old man was really a kid, too, and managed somehow to make his work seem like a game, like playing.

“Your grampa slept with the hogs once, on a train. He slept with a bunch of snorting old dirty hogs.”

“He did not,” she said. “You’re just saying that.”

“He did too, stupid. You don’t know anything, you don’t even know your own family.”

“He didn’t sleep with hogs.”

“He slept with a train load of hogs, that’s how he moved out here, sleeping with the hogs. That’s how bad he wanted to move out here.”

“Well I wish he never moved,” she said, and slapped at his fingers that were sliding down into the bowl of shelled peas. “If he’d never moved out here, I wouldn’t be living here either, and we’d never have met you.”

One summer she showed up changed. She was a head taller than he was and had sprouted bumps inside her shirt. She didn’t want to play any more, she didn’t want to help around the farm. “Well, what do you want to do then, besides curl up and die?” he said, and she said “Oh nothing.”

In the next few summers “Oh nothing” usually turned out to be one of two things: talk or walk. If it was talk, it meant she wanted to spend the day telling him about boys this and boys that, how Billy So-and-So was so immature but he was cute, and Jimmy So-and-So would be a good-looking guy if he’d only shave off that fuzz. She told about the silliness of the boys in her school, a little two-room place somewhere deep in the bush, and how Marlene her friend had vowed to be the first one in the class to see Paris. That kind of talk made him sick, he told her, didn’t she know anything that wasn’t silly?

If it was walk, it meant strolling up the narrow gravel shoulder of the island highway, squeezed between traffic and a ditch clogged full of yellow-flowered broom. He hated the walks because he didn’t know how to react to her. He didn’t know where to look when she pranced herself out onto the highway, swinging her hips so that cars had to go swerving around her, honking their horns. And he didn’t know what to say when cars she waved at screeched to a stop and older boys hung out the window to ask her if she wanted to go for a ride. “Oh I can’t,” she told them, and rolled her eyes. “I have to babysit my cousin!” The boys always laughed and told her to dump him in the ditch and come along anyway, but eventually they gave up and drove off.

“That’s stupid,” he said. “You could get into trouble.”

“What a sissy,” she said, nudging him with her hip. “And besides, haven’t I got you to protect me? If I need it?”

“Sure,” he said. Though he thought, sometimes, that she could go to hell for all he cared, before he’d do a thing to stop her.

A mile or so up the highway, at a crossroads, there was a little wooden shack built years ago as a school-bus shelter. Boards had been torn off, shakes had blown off the roof, words had been knife-carved into the walls. “Let’s go in,” she said, once, that final summer, “I bet it stinks in there.”

Wade knew the corner. The school bus stopped here for someone, a boy, he didn’t know his name. Someone with long legs and a big red face, thumping down that gravel road, jacket flying out behind him while the bus driver hammered on his horn. Whoever he was, that panting boy, he’d pretended every morning that he was not late, that the bus had come too early. No one had used the shed as a bus shelter for years.

Still, nothing had grown up inside. The ground was packed solid as cement, littered with Orange Crush bottles and old cigarette packages. There was almost no roof left, except slats and a few shakes, between them and sky. A long-stemmed dandelion, its furry leaves in a gap under the wall, came up the inside of the two-by-four plate and stuck its flower head outside through a large knothole. There were other knotholes too, higher up, with elaborate drawings built around them.

“Look,” she said, “I bet they peed out of this one.”

He was more interested in another, a great fat naked woman that grew out in rolls and creases from around a long iron-shaped knothole. She was humped over, as if she were trying to see back in through the gap that had been knocked out of her body’s centre.

“And that one,” she said, “reminds me of home.”

She was a foreigner, she’d gone over into another country without him. She smelled strange. She was even, he saw, wearing false eyelashes and make-up that looked ridiculous on her face. She was no longer just the girl, the yappy brat who spoiled the summer. There was a danger in her, something had happened; there was something in her now that made the inside of his mouth go dry. He didn’t know whether he wanted to touch the pale skin of those long bare legs, or to run.

She slid a hand down under the waistband of her white shorts and pulled out a Players package. Lighting a cigarette she narrowed her eyes, hunched over her cupped hands as if there might be a wind. And when she stood upright and tossed the match out onto the middle of the floor to die its own death, she blew smoke down her nostrils, two perfect white streams.

“You could’ve offered me one.”

She looked at him, surprised perhaps that he hadn’t slunk away, or evaporated in the foul air. “Christ,” she said. “Don’t you have your own?”

Of course he didn’t. Because of course he didn’t smoke. He’d thought that she didn’t, either, that she’d bought that package so they could try it together. But he could see now, it was obvious, that she was practised at it. She held the thing as if she’d smoked all her life. His face burned. She made him feel like a little boy.

She crouched down in one corner, her back up against the boards of the wall, her white thighs widening out under the pressure. Wade sat down on the ground, against the wall opposite her. “Your parents,” he said, “do they still go away every summer? All summer?”

“Those shitheads?” she said, and blew smoke out between her knees. “Who cares what they do?”

“Don’t they ever plan to take you with them?”

She looked at him as if he’d suggested something obscene. “Who wants to go with them?”

“But it isn’t fun any more for you, staying with grandparents all by yourself.”

She slid a look at the door, blew smoke down her nostrils, and picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue between two painted fingernails. “I can hardly wait,” she said, “to be different.”

“Different from what?”

“Different,” she said. “Different from them. Different from me. Different.”

There didn’t seem to be anything he could say to that, so he picked at a piece of cracked board until he was able to tear a long thin strip away from the wall.

Suddenly she tossed the cigarette out onto the floor, to die beside the match, and stood up. She shifted from foot to foot, pulling down the legs of her shorts. “Let’s make a pact.”

His chest tightened.

He was sure he knew what she was going to say.

But she said, “We’re not cousins, we’re something better than cousins. Let’s say we’ll always tell each other everything.”

He could only look. What was there he could tell this girl, this woman? What “everything” did he have that he could tell? She was a foreigner, something different, she was going to be beautiful. She was already almost beautiful. What could he tell her that she wouldn’t laugh at?

“We don’t really matter to each other,” she said. “Not like real relatives. So let’s say I can tell you everything and you can tell me everything, and I can ask you anything and you can ask me anything.”

“Yes,” he said, and stood up. He had no idea what she was talking about. It sounded like some kind of silly game. “Okay.”

“Good,” she said. “Now I can tell you this: I think I’m going to have a baby. I think I’m — you know — pregnant.”

The Barclays kept her through the winter until after the baby was born. Grampa Barclay, when Wade visited, could only wink and make jokes about it, as if to tell him Here’s one more thing you have to put up with when you have a house full of women. She took the baby back to Hed with her, back into the bush, where her disgusted parents had abandoned the house to her. When she returned, after that, it was for shorter visits, to share the baby she’d named Forbes with her grandparents, and sometimes to walk with Wade along the side of the highway, talking.

“If I called you,” she said. “If I suddenly phoned you from Hed to say I was in trouble, that I needed you, would you come?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“But we agreed,” she said. “That day, we agreed.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I would come.” Though he couldn’t recall that their agreement had had anything of the sort in it.

But she never called.

She visited. She grew older, more beautiful. She had more babies and hardly noticed them. She worked, sometimes, in the General Store. And did housekeeping. She was what his mother called cheap. “Not a bit like the Barclays, I knew the girls well, you could never accuse them of being cheap. I don’t know where that one came from, she must be a throwback.” There were people, she said, and he might as well learn it now as later, there were people who chose to live as if no one had invented civilization. There were people who chose to ignore everything that humanity had done to improve life over thousands of years. You couldn’t do anything about them, she said, except feel sorry.

But Wade Powers didn’t feel sorry for Maggie Maclean. If she’d called him, if she’d telephoned from Hed and told him something terrible was going to happen to her, he would be on the road in minutes, heading back in to the mountains. He didn’t feel sorry for her, he grew more and more fascinated, and said so.

“Of course a person who doesn’t think he needs to put any effort into life is bound to be fascinated by primitives,” his mother said. “Only you’re wrong, my young man, if you think that kind of life would be easy.”

Never mind that, he thought. Because I’ll show you. I’ll find out a way a person doesn’t have to break his neck to make a living.

But it hadn’t been so easy to find. When the school teachers decided there wasn’t any point in his wasting still more of their time, his father announced that anyone not going to school had to get out and earn his keep. Time, he said, to get a job.

“I’ll look,” Wade said. “I’ll start looking for a job.” It was something that could last for years if he handled it right.

“Don’t bother,” his father said. “Because I already found you one. Tomorrow morning you start your career as a logger.”

Though he worked for the logging company he was never a logger. He was helper to the company surveyor’s assistant, and spent two months with a little stone-nicked axe in his hand, holding the assistant’s steel tape, hacking small brush out of the way, and crayoning numbers onto stakes while they laid out the route for a new truck road around one of the mountain lakes. He fell into the lake more than once, lost his axe several times, chopped down a tree that nearly landed on the assistant’s head, and scrambled up the sequence of numbers so thoroughly that a whole section had to be re-mapped, but he stuck with the job to the far end of the road before quitting. It was all a waste of his time and his energy, he said. And as if to prove him right, when he drove back to the lake a few years later to see what kind of road had resulted, he found they’d changed their minds about it. That even his stakes were gone, and all the brush he’d chopped down to make a clear trail along that line had grown up as thick as it had been before. There was no sign, even, that he’d ever been there.

“Break your back,” he said, “and for what?”

He did not break his back at any of the other jobs which seemed to be forced on him by a world that couldn’t stand to see him idle. He might have gone on driving a school bus forever if he hadn’t discovered that when it broke down he was expected to fix it. The nicest thing about selling insurance, he discovered, was that he could take his time. No rush, he said, I’m my own boss. But as his own boss, he saw no point in holding down a job that brought no money in at the end of the month. Selling real estate, too, was like that. He could set his own pace. It was a job you could do with your eyes shut, you didn’t have to know anything, you didn’t have to lift a finger unless you wanted. But while his eyes were shut and his fingers idle, other greedier salesmen got busy and sold houses and land to the people who’d originally come to him. There was no point in even getting out of bed in the morning, he thought, if life was meant to be a competition, to see who could be the first to kill himself from overwork.

It wasn’t until he hit on the idea for the fake historic fort that he began to see that it was possible, after all, to live the kind of life he wanted. When several of his mother’s vertebrae were broken in the tractor accident that killed his father while they were clearing land together, he invited her down to sell tickets at the gate. She would do it, she said, but only if he allowed her to cook, sew, clean house, preserve, shop, wash, iron, keep the books, and pay the bills for him. If she had to be idle, she said, if she couldn’t go on working the way she always had, then she might as well have been finished off under that overturned tractor. People weren’t meant to sit around in wheelchairs, she said. She left him, often, in the long off-season, to visit his brothers and sisters and help them in their mad whirlwinds: spiralling up through careers, building families, building homes, throwing themselves into civic activities in order to catch other, lazier people up in the swirl too: but she always came back, content that they didn’t really need her and convinced that somehow her example, if demonstrated in front of Wade long enough, would eventually impress him, even — she hoped — become contagious. “You can’t imagine the contentment,” she said, “in throwing yourself into the bed at the end of the day, completely worn out, knowing that you’ve put in a good day’s work.”

He could imagine it all right, he thought, but by then he’d already spent thirty years trying to avoid it.

While he was still living on his parents’ farm, driving a school bus, he came very close to marrying a girl named Maryann Klassen, the daughter of leading members of the Mennonite community a few miles up the highway. They had something he wanted, a mystery. He’d met her at school, a small pretty girl with long hair, and she gave the impression that there was a secret she knew, a something no one else could take from her. He wanted it, whatever it was. “The religion of my family is called Work,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind trying something else.” She told him that was hardly a good enough reason for a proposal, and he said would it help if he told her he loved her, and she said that was a start at least. Eventually she agreed that though no one else in the community had ever married outside the faith, she couldn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be the first, considering things. She had a wide mouth, red without the aid of lipstick, and a pink spot that appeared on either cheek while she was talking to him. Not even her father, he discovered, was against the match. He’d had daughters, he said, instead of sons, and could do with the help of a strong young son-in-law, whatever his faith might be. An extra pair of shoulders around the place, he said, one more strong back, would be a welcome help. But when Wade saw what was expected of that extra pair of shoulders, that extra back — working like a Russian peasant on a “hobby” farm large enough to keep a dozen families busy — and when he considered the hard disapproving looks which were directed constantly at him by the mother, who spoke no English, he began to question seriously the nature of his feelings for the daughter. He was not, after all, in such an all-fired hurry to become a Mennonite as he’d thought, no matter what spiritual secrets would consequently be withheld from him forever.

He married, instead, an overdeveloped girl by the name of Laura Schmidt, the only daughter in a large family of drunken thieves. They lived in an old shack far up a dirt road, in a died-out orchard cluttered with car parts and broken iceboxes and bedsprings. Neither the old man nor any of the six brothers worked; they lived off the results of “trades” they were always making with people, exchanging one useless piece of machinery for another but always in such a way that they ended up with a little more than the trade-partner had intended them to have. It was what the old man called “stepping up in the world” and would eventually lead him, if he lived long enough and logic was something you could count on, to being the richest man in the district. Laura, too, was traded off to Wade, though not in any way quite so obvious as the bedsprings and car parts were traded. Without her, the old man said, there would be one less mouth to feed: that in itself was a profit. But in handing her over, he said, he expected to gain a son-in-law who would lend a helping hand now and then, when the volume of trade was too heavy for “the boys”, and who wouldn’t be above sharing some of his liquor supply when the police had been out in their yearly visit to smash up his still and break all the bottles in his stock. Wade agreed to everything, though he had no intention of doing any of it, because Laura had thrown herself at him, practically begged him to marry her, and he didn’t know how to pass up an opportunity like that. As soon as the wedding was over he moved south to build his fort and had no dealings at all with his in-laws.

“You’re a goddam fraud,” the old man said. “But you don’t need to think for a minute you’ll get away with it. Nobody outdeals Montgomery Schmidt. Nobody.”

There was hardly time for revenge. Within a month after the wedding Laura, the bride, having found her way out of that drunken family, decided to keep right on going. She disappeared with an American tourist who told her that in his California orange grove there was nothing to do but lie around all day getting a suntan and thinking of ways to spend his money. How could she refuse an offer like that, she wrote later. Surely Wade would understand why she couldn’t turn him down.

Oh, he understood all right, he wrote her. He understood only too well. But he couldn’t see why she hadn’t suggested taking him along too. Didn’t he enjoy sunshine every bit as much as she did?

But what did he really care about that? The thing that really mattered, the thing he’d waited for all his life had happened. He had The Fort. He had those tourists so eager to part with their money. He had Virginia. Things were perfect.