“Straight whisky,” my father said.
“I bet that’s a sight you ain’t seen before. And you ain’t likely to see it again. That cat’d take whisky ahead of milk any day. A matter of fact he don’t get no milk, he’s forgot what it’s like. You want a drink, Ben?”
“Not knowing where you got that. I don’t have a stomach like your cat.”
The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch.
“Joe, you keep that up, you’re not going to have a cat.”
“It don’t hurt him, he enjoys it. Let’s see, what’ve we got for the little girl to eat?” Nothing, I hoped, but be brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the coloured stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.
“It’s them Silases botherin me, Ben. They come by day and by night. People won’t ever quit botherin me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waitin for them.” He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. “Got a shotgun too.”
“Maybe they won’t come and bother you no more, Joe.”
The man groaned and shook his head. “They never will stop. No. They never will stop.”
“Just try not paying any attention to them, they’ll tire out and go away.”
“They’ll burn me in my bed. They tried to before.”
My father said nothing, but tested the axe blade with his finger. Under the couch, the cat pawed and meowed in more and more feeble spasms of delusion. Overcome with tiredness, with warmth after cold, with bewilderment quite past bearing, I was falling asleep with my eyes open. My father set me down. “You’re woken up now. Stand up. See. I can’t carry you and this sack full of rats both.”
We had come to the top of a long hill and that is where I woke. It was getting dark. The whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us—greenish brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw-brown fields and the others, darker from last year’s plowing, with scales of snow faintly striping them (like the field we had walked across hours, hours earlier in the day) and the tiny fences and colonies of grey barns, and houses set apart, looking squat and small.
“Whose house is that?” my father said, pointing.
It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come around in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind.
“That’s no more’n half a mile away and downhill. You can easy walk home. Soon we’ll see the light in the dining room where your Momma is.”
On the way I said, “Why did he have an axe?”
“Now listen,” my father said. “Are you listening to me? He don’t mean any harm with that axe. It’s just his habit, carrying it around. But don’t say anything about it at home. Don’t mention it to your Momma or Mary, either one. Because they might be scared about it. You and me aren’t, but they might be. And there is no use of that.”
After a while he said, “What are you not going to mention about?” and I said, “The axe.”
“You weren’t scared, were you?”
“No,” I said hopefully. “Who is going to burn him and his bed?”
“Nobody. Less he manages it himself like he did last time.”
“Who is the Silases?”
“Nobody,” my father said. “Just nobody.”
“We found the one for you today, Mary. Oh, I wisht we could’ve brought him home.”
“We thought you’d fell in the Wawanash River,” said Mary McQuade furiously, ungently pulling off my boots and my wet socks.
“Old Joe Phippen that lives up in no man’s land beyond the bush.”
“Him!” said Mary like an explosion. “He’s the one burned his house down, I know him!”
“That’s right, and now he gets along fine without it. Lives in a hole in the ground. You’d be as cosy as a groundhog, Mary.”
“I bet he lives in his own dirt, all right.” She served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat. For Mary, that was enough.
“A man that’d do a thing like that ought to be locked up.”
“Maybe so,” my father said. “Just the same I hope they don’t get him for a while yet. Old Joe.”
“Eat your supper,” Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. “Look at her,” she said. “Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she’s been and seen. Was he feeding the whisky to her too?”
“Not a drop,” said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.
THANKS FOR THE RIDE
My cousin George and I were sitting in a restaurant called Pop’s Cafe, in a little town close to the Lake. It was getting dark in there, and they had not turned the lights on, but you could still read the signs plastered against the mirror between the fly-speckled and slightly yellowed cutouts of strawberry sundaes and tomato sandwiches.
“Don’t ask for information,” George read. “If we knew anything we wouldn’t be here” and “If you’ve got nothing to do, you picked a hell of a good place to do it in.” George always read everything out loud—posters, billboards, Burma-Shave signs, “Mission Creek. Population 1700. Gateway to the Bruce. We love our children.”
I was wondering whose sense of humour provided us with the signs. I thought it would be the man behind the cash register. Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply, deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark.
There was only the one waitress, a pudgy girl who leaned over the counter and scraped at the polish on her fingernails. When she had flaked most of the polish off her thumbnail she put the thumb against her teeth and rubbed the nail back and forth absorbedly. We asked her what her name was and she didn’t answer. Two or three minutes later the thumb came out of her mouth and she said, inspecting it: “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“All right,” George said. “Okay if I call you Mickey?”
“I don’t care.”
“Because you remind me of Mickey Rooney,” George said. “Hey, where’s everybody go in this town? Where’s everybody go?” Mickey had turned her back and begun to drain out the coffee. It looked as if she didn’t mean to talk any more, so George got a little jumpy, as he did when he was threatened with having to be quiet or be by himself. “Hey, aren’t there any girls in this town?” he said almost plaintively. “Aren’t there any girls or dances or anything? We’re strangers in town,” he said. “Don’t you want to help us out?”