Monkman knew it was not his eyes that were to blame; it was his mind. When it wandered the vehicle wandered with it. The young weren’t prey to this particular misfortune. Look at Daniel. All attention, he was trying his damnedest to do it right, to please. Not once had his eyes left the road, his speed remained cautious and steady, both hands were quick and diligent on the wheel. He glowed with importance. Well, it never hurt to give a boy a job that puffed his chest out a little. Everybody needed to matter. That was the reason he discussed his business with the boy, just as if Daniel had a clue as to what he was talking about or owned an opinion worth listening to. Respect was not ever wasted, not even on a twelve-year-old kid. If he had finally learned anything from living, it was that.
So he had explained to Daniel at great length what they were doing today and why they were doing it the way they were. He hoped it would be a lesson in how complicated life could be, a demonstration that nothing was ever as simple and straightforward as it might look. Not even catching a thief.
For five years running the old man had been after his tenant, Marker, to break a pasture on the farm and seed it to flax. Every year Marker promised he would, but never got around to it. When he neglected again that spring to turn sod, Monkman, disgusted that land should stand idle and unproductive, bought twenty head of cattle to graze it. Now one of them was missing. Marker claimed it had been killed by lightning.
On Tuesday, when Alec and Daniel had come to pump a tank of water for the garden from the creek, Marker had been too insistent on showing them where he had supposedly disposed of the animal’s carcass. He led them to the cellar hole of the original homesteader’s shack. It was filled with rocks carried from a stone pile at the edge of a nearby field. Marker had asserted that the missing steer lay buried under the boulders. Alec didn’t believe it for a second. First of all, there were no drag marks on the ground near the cellar hole and such marks would have been clearly visible if the steer had been pulled there with a tractor as his tenant claimed. Second, it was entirely out of character for Marker to go to all the trouble and effort of burying a dead animal, particularly one he didn’t own. Over the years, to his grief, Alec had learned that Marker was as lazy as a spotted dog. He would be much more inclined to let a carcass rot and breed flies than haul boulders to cover it.
However, Alec didn’t question or confront Marker with his suspicions. He held his peace. Later, when he told Daniel of his suspicions the boy had been incensed. He had said that if it were up to him, he’d make Marker prove that the steer was under those stones, even if that meant making him hoist every last one of those rocks out of the cellar hole, stone by stone.
“Not practical,” his grandfather had said, shaking his head. “It’d be impossible to lift some of those stones out of that hole and Marker knows it. He knows I’ll never know what’s really under there. Remember, it’s a hell of a lot easier to roll a stone into a hole than out of it. Besides, before you call a man a liar and a thief you better know you’re right. I only suspect I am.”
“What difference does it make if you’re right this time or not?” Daniel had wanted to know. “You say he’s been stealing from you for years. Serve him right.”
Monkman had said that. Yet deep in his heart he recognized that he had some responsibility to bear for the thefts. Somehow he had allowed the line between sharp dealing and outright dishonesty to grow fuzzy in Marker’s mind. He hadn’t checked the man at the very beginning when it would have counted. When he had detected Marker in certain blatant fiddles – underestimating the wheat yield to reduce his landlord’s share of the grain – Marker had never been shamefaced when discovered cheating. His most common reaction was to become aggrieved. By his standards his landlord was a rich man and rich men ought to expect to be taken advantage of. What was he complaining about? Caught in a lie he was apt to say disdainfully, “Well, if you say it’s yours – take it. I ain’t in a position to stop you. Your word’s pretty close to law around here, I suppose.”
Daniel thought the no-good sonofabitch should be pitched out on his ear. The young were always bloodthirsty. It was difficult for Monkman to explain why he couldn’t do that. He had to think of more than one Marker, after all. There were seven other little Markers ranging in age from thirteen years to six months and a Mrs. Marker, a hard-working, long-suffering woman whom he secretly pitied. If he kicked Marker off the place a family would lose a livelihood and a house. He wasn’t sure his conscience was up to that.
Whenever he thought of the Markers, Alec was reminded of rats. Alfred Marker was the very image of a rat with his slightly bucked big front teeth speckled with snuff so that he looked like he’d been chewing chop in a farmer’s bin and his long, fat rat’s nose keeping his dark, beady eyes from rolling up against one another. All his children took after the father in appearance and temperament.
What Alec had to accept under the circumstances was the impossibility of totally eradicating rats once they had become established as this nest had. The best he could aim at was control, at keeping their depredations within bounds. Helping themselves to a steer was definitely out of bounds. If the steer hadn’t yet been disposed of – sold or butchered – Alec wanted to find it. And if he succeeded in finding it, he would give Daddy Rat such a godawful scare that for years hence he would shit yellow at the mere mention of the name Alec Monkman.
Monkman guessed that the steer might be haltered to a tree deep in bush, hidden there on the assumption that even if an old man had his suspicions he couldn’t go acting on them, couldn’t go beating the thickets, scrambling over deadfalls, bulling his way through willows and rose thorns looking for a steer. But what Marker had forgotten was that he had a pair of young legs to do his bidding.
The truck had come to the crest of hills which overlooked a broad, deep valley nine miles south of Connaught. Alec’s farm was just the other side of this valley, situated on a plateau which drew a straight line between sky and round-shouldered, wooded slopes. From this height, Daniel and Alec could gaze out over long prospects. Above, a bleached-denim sky and flying cloud. Below, the valley bottom, the quilt of crop and summerfallow darkening and lightening with shadow and sun as the clouds streamed overhead, the turtle-backed sandbars sunning themselves in the slow pulse of a drought-starved river. Across the way, the tops of the poplars shivered in unison as the road switched back and forth like a cat’s tail up the sides of the opposing hills.
Then all this was lost sight of in the descent. Hard to their left, cutbanks rose above the road, sheer clay cliffs pocked with swallows’ holes and sprouting hairy tree roots which groped and fumbled in the air. To the right, at every turning, Alec could peer over the edge of the road into a gash of coulee, a dark seam down the face of the slope, choked with berry and willow bushes. The truck twisted deliberately down on to the flats, rumbled hollowly over a bridge of planks, and then began to climb, Daniel gearing down under his grandfather’s direction, the sun beating on their faces through the tilted windshield whenever the trees that grew on the banks high above the road thinned and admitted a blaze of sky. Up top they rolled on for another half-mile before Daniel swung the truck into an approach, braked, and Alec got out and unhooked a barbed wire gate. They were at the farm.
The sight of the farmhouse never failed to fill Monkman with resentment and regret. It had been bought for Earl and Earl’s house was still how he thought of it. It was a bitter thing for him to contemplate the state it had fallen into. The lilac hedge was dead because Marker couldn’t be troubled to haul water for it. Alec couldn’t remember the last time the house had been painted, although he had on several occasions bought paint for that purpose. He had no idea where it had gone to, perhaps Marker had sold it. All he knew was that it hadn’t found its way onto his siding. Over the years the house had been almost completely reduced to the weary grey of weathered board, although patches of flaking paint still clung to the wood in places like stubborn lichen to rock. There was a grinning gap in the ornamental wire fence which surrounded the yard because Marker had cut it to allow the passage of his Ford tractor and cultivator to the back garden where one day he had harvested twenty hills of potatoes by tearing up the earth with cultivator shovels. Marker didn’t care for potato forks and digging.