The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. “People was looking and it puts them off their feed.” He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn’t been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Française outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. “Sure thing,” the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. “We’re gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it’s gonna read ‘De Tirsty Boot’.” After that he could do no wrong.
Behind The Caboose there was a gravel pit and a fished-out pond and beyond that the mountains that had been lumbered twice too often, the cherry and ash and butternut long gone. Bunk, who also trapped during the winter, had a shack somewhere up there. He took the odd fisher, some fox and racoons and beaver. The deer were everywhere.
Moses had stopped at The Caboose in the first place by accident. Late one afternoon six years earlier, having spent two days sifting through historical society files in Sherbrooke, searching for references to Brother Ephraim, he went out for a drive and got lost in the back roads. Desperate for a drink, he pulled in at The Caboose and considered not getting out of his Toyota because two men, Strawberry and Bunk, were fighting in the parking lot. Then he grasped that they were both so blind drunk that none of their punches were landing. Finally Strawberry reached back and put all he had into a roundhouse, sliding, collapsing in a mud puddle, and just lying there. A gleeful Bunk reeled over to his pickup, climbed in, the piglets in the back squealing as he gunned his motor, aiming himself at the prone Strawberry.
“Hey,” Moses yelled, leaping out of his car, “what in the hell are you trying to do?”
“Run the fucker over.”
“He’ll bite a hole in your tires.”
Bunk pondered. He scratched his jaw. “Good thinking,” he said, reversing into a cedar, jolting the protesting piglets, then charging forward, swerving into the 243.
Moses helped Strawberry to his feet and led him back into The Caboose.
“Whatever you’re drinking will be good enough for me, Mister Man.”
Strawberry, blue-eyed, tall and stringy, all jutting angles, was missing two fingers, a souvenir of his days in the bobbin mill, and had no upper teeth. Moses drank with him and the others until two A.M. Then Strawberry, insisting that Moses was now too drunk to drive, settled him into his Ford pickup and took him to his house on the hill to spend the night on the sofa. No sooner had they staggered inside than Strawberry dug out his shotgun, rolled back out on to his rotting porch and fired a couple of rounds into the air.
“What are you shooting at?” Moses asked, startled.
“If I lived in some big-shot apartment building in the city like you probably do, Mister Man, all I’d have to do is drop my boots on the floor and the neighbours would know I was home safe. Here I fire my shotgun so’s they know I’m back and they don’t need to worry no more. I may be stupid, but I ain’t crazy.”
The next morning Strawberry’s wife made them bacon and eggs and then they moved on to Chez Bobby, having agreed to have just one for the ditch before Moses proceeded to Montreal. Three hours passed before Strawberry suddenly leaped to his feet. “Shit,” he said, “we got to get to Cowansville.”
Strawberry, charged with drunken driving a month earlier, was due to appear in court that afternoon. First, however, he took Moses to The Snakepit, a bar around the corner from the courthouse, where Bunk, Sneaker, Rabbit, Legion Hall, and some of the others were already waiting. By the time Strawberry’s supporters, Moses still among them, drifted into the courtroom, they were quarrelsome drunk. They waved and whistled and hollered imprecations at the first sight of Strawberry standing there, grinning.
“Order, order in the court,” the judge called out.
“I’ll have a hamburger,” Strawberry said.
“I could give you ninety days for that.”
“That’s nothing.”
“How about a hundred and twenty?”
Fortunately, Strawberry’s lawyer intervened at this point. He was the judge’s nephew and the local Liberal party bagman. Strawberry got off with a suspended sentence and everybody repaired to Gilmore’s Corner to celebrate. They made three more pit stops before they ended up at The Beaver Lodge in Magog. “My great-grandaddy Ebenezer used to drink here,” Strawberry told Moses, pointing out a sign over the bar that had been salvaged from the original hotel, destroyed by fire in 1912.
WM. CROSBY’S HOTEL
The undersigned, thankful for past favours
bestowed upon this
LONG-ESTABLISHED HOTEL
is determined to conduct this establishment in a
manner that will meet the approbation of the public,
and therefore begs a continuance of Public Patronage.
REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT ANY HOUR
OF DAY OR NIGHT
Wm. Crosby
Proprietor
The next afternoon Moses phoned Henry Gursky, in the Arctic, and borrowed enough money to buy the cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog.
Strawberry, Moses discovered, painted houses between drinks. He could also be driven to cut wood or plough snow. But, for the most part, he was content to hibernate through the winter on the fat of his welfare cheque. “Hey, I coulda been rich, a big landowner,” Strawberry once said, “if not for what my crazy great-grandaddy done. Old Ebenezer Watson gave up the bottle for God, a big mistake, joining up with a bunch of religious nuts called the Millenarians. Eb lost just about everything, his life included. All that was left was some ninety acres of the old family farm. It went to Abner, my grandaddy.”
Strawberry failed to turn up the next afternoon. Moses was seated alone when one of the rich cottagers stumbled into The Caboose. Clearly distressed, he held a slip of paper before him like a shield to guard against contagious diseases. “Pardonnez moi,” he said, “mais je cherche—”
“We speak English here,” Bunk said.
“I’m looking for Mr. Strawberry Watson, the house painter. I was told he lived up on the hill, just past Maltby’s Pond, but the only house I could see there is obviously abandoned. It’s unpainted, the grass hasn’t been cut, and the yard is full of rusting automobile parts.”
“You found it, mister.”
THE DAY MOSES DROVE IN from the clinic in New Hampshire, Gord, who owned The Caboose, was tending bar. He wore a black T-shirt embossed with a multi-coloured dawn. A slogan was stencilled over it: