A Good Man (19 page)

Wesley Case

P.S. I was disappointed that Rampton and Charles brought me no communication from you. You may have nothing yet of consequence to pass on, but I still believe it is important that you remain in touch with me so that I can provide Ilges with assurances that you are living up to your end of the bargain.

NINE

TIME HANGS HEAVY
on Ada Tarr’s hands; she feels her home has become a penitentiary. Her daily chores completed, she has nothing to do but fill the interminable hours with her thoughts and
Daniel Deronda
. Yesterday she came across a passage in the novel that she underlined with a sense of savage vindication. Miss Eliot had written, “Some of them were a very common sort of men. And the only point of resemblance among them all was a strong determination to have what was pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves disagreeable or dangerous when they did not get it.” Randolph described perfectly.

But then she fell on what Miss Eliot had to say about Gwendolen Harleth, a most exasperating, arrogant, preening female character. “Whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant to her fancy.”

Ada has to ask herself if that wasn’t exactly what she had done during Mr. Case’s visit. Hadn’t she attempted to impress him with her intelligence, her love of literature, her enthusiasm for things intellectual? Hadn’t she wanted to receive the admiration of a cultivated man, so as to stoke her own
more ardent sense of living?
What else was that but a coy opening gambit, to ask him if one could not know a person best by studying their library? Hadn’t she hoped to be extolled for reading Bentham and Mill by someone Hathaway had described as a “university man”? Her face goes hot to think of it.

Peregrine Hathaway’s praise of his friend had led her to believe Mr. Case and she would have much in common; she had made the assumption he would be just as eager as she to discuss
something
, that an educated gentleman would be pleased to have a little enlightened conversation. So she had proceeded with headlong self-confidence. She had
darted
at him, which is a habit of hers, giving way to her impulses because they too encourage
a more ardent sense of living
.

She admits she created an awkward situation, but Mr. Case hadn’t eased it by greeting friendly overtures in such a chilly and superior fashion. Pleading that he was stupid hadn’t fooled her. That was pure condescension, his way of saying: Permit me to be gallant. Permit me to pretend to be just as empty-headed as you undoubtedly are. It’s only good form.

But when she had continued – maybe pushed him is nearer the truth – in a direction he did not wish to go, he had reacted as Miss Eliot said most men did when displeased; he had turned disagreeable. Distinctly disagreeable. True, it was hardly her place to accuse him of not being very forgiving towards his friend Hathaway. That was impertinent. Another reminder not to
dart
at people, people she hardly knew, with her opinions.

Laying down her novel, Ada glances out the window and sees Dunne staring out across the prairie. He looks utterly absorbed. What, she thinks, can he find in a blanket of brown grass, a cloudless sky, to hold his interest?

The answer to Ada Tarr’s question is nothing. Nothing in the landscape interests Dunne. What interests him is the contemplation of a sensation new and utterly foreign to him, a vast, oceanic contentedness. Hour after hour, day after day, his mind fondles those small favours dear Mrs. Tarr so generously bestows on him, those little gestures of esteem and affection that speak more loudly and truly than words ever could. He dwells on angel food received from the hands of an angel, on the way she hovers about him, fluttering like a butterfly around a flower. Are you thirsty, Mr. Dunne? Is there anything I could bring you to eat? He has heard her try to persuade her husband to let him take his suppers inside with the family. It doesn’t matter to him that the argument was lost. It’s enough that Mrs. Tarr wants him close to her.

Her regard for him is the sweetest victory he can imagine over all those – like Randolph Tarr – who believe he can be used for their purposes then dropped down the privy hole like the corn husks they wipe their arses with. Lately, he had sensed that Tarr was about to do just that, that he had convinced himself that the threat from Gobbler Johnson had passed and he had no more need of a guard. But Tarr had been very wrong on that score because one morning he discovered Gobbler had killed a dog and dropped it on the threshold of his office. After that scare, cowardly Randolph had come home in a panic and ordered him to redouble his vigilance. As if a man like him needed to be told how to protect the ladies of the household. Did Tarr think Michael Dunne would ever let any harm come to that dear lady? Did he take him for a feckless idiot?

He has compiled a long list of such people who had treated him as though he didn’t own a thought of his own, beginning with his father, who had thought him no better than a dumb beast of burden. “Strong back, weak mind. It’s a waste of money trying to teach him anything” was his father’s explanation when he dragged him out of school at the age of eleven. The elderly, doddering schoolmaster, Mr. MacIntyre, had attempted to convince his father he was making a mistake. As young Michael looked on from a corner by the stove, MacIntyre and his father had debated his future as if he were no more capable of understanding what hung in the balance than the three-legged stool on which he was perched.

MacIntyre had said, “You must understand, sir, your boy has a most remarkable mind. Let me give you a proof. One afternoon I showed him a chronology of the kings and queens of Engand. He looked at it for only the briefest of moments, turned it over on its face, and repeated them letter perfect, names and spans of reigns exact! I tested him again with an ornithological album of South American fowl – birds he could not possibly be familiar with. I gave him an instant to study each page, closed the book, and asked him to give the name of each bird. He did so without hesitation, omitting none!”

“Parlour tricks,” Dunne senior grumbled, glaring at his son, who was making himself as small in his corner as he possibly could. “On all other counts, the boy’s a simpleton.”

“Yes, yes,” agreed MacIntyre, “young Michael is a little tone deaf to other subjects, no feel for higher literature, or poetry, perhaps –”

Dunne’s father leaned over, spat into the tobacco can between his feet. “That ain’t what I mean. Left him to rig a pulley the other day. He couldn’t figure it out. Came back and it was a cat’s cradle. The lad is a dolt.”

“But Mr. Dunne, the narrow mind is frequently a concentrated mind. One might say it specializes. Now your son’s attention to detail, his remarkable memory, these are qualities that go to make a prodigious clerk. Give him a little more schooling, then you might put him in a bank.”

“Where I’ll put him is betwixt plough handles. One thing I’ll give him, for his age he’s strong as a ox, but no more suited to thinking than one. What he’s fit for is swinging a axe, a mattock, a scythe. I know what that boy’s good for, and I won’t waste him on what he ain’t.”

And that was that. For the next twelve years Dunne wasn’t wasted. The yoke settled on the ox’s shoulders. He pulled stumps, picked rocks, shucked corn, ploughed, reaped, and sweated. What no one realized was that the ox was growing horns. No one suspected its fury. One day, glancing up from hoeing the corn patch, his father saw smoke writhing up between the shingles of the barn. Flames were shaking a red rooster comb along the roof by the time he reached the farmyard, bellowing for every Dunne on the property to form a bucket brigade. When Michael did not turn out to sling water on the flames his father assumed the worst, ran circles around the barn, howling and beating his temples, calling, “My boy! Michael! Michael!”

But Dunne was not inside the barn; after leaving the candle burning in the manger straw, he went into the house and calmly chopped his father’s strongbox to pieces with a hatchet. From its splinters he scooped up two dollars in paper banknotes, thirty-seven cents in American coin, and a single English shilling. By the time his father gave up shouting his name into the conflagration, Dunne was nothing but a silhouette stamped at the end of a country lane.

Heading southwest, the ox plodded down the Ottawa Valley. For the first week, fearing an arrest warrant might have been issued for him, he travelled only by night, under cover of darkness. When day broke, he wormed his way into thorny thickets, haystacks, whatever hidey-hole he could find. He made no attempt to buy supplies at country stores, but provisioned himself by foraging in gardens and orchards and raiding chicken coops for eggs. Once he got well down the road from the scene of his crime, he breathed a little easier and ate a little better. It was harvst time and farmers were willing to exchange a bed in a barn and three square meals for a day’s labour. This made for a long, slow journey but it left the money from the strongbox untouched.

It was early October before Dunne reached his destination. Following the long, sloping artery of Yonge, he walked down into the heart of Toronto, a country boy dazed by the city. Everywhere pedestrians were sprinting recklessly in and out of traffic, risking life and limb in daring street crossings. Vans, wagons, carriages, cabs racketed by, iron-rimmed wheels shrieking on cobblestones, their chassis rattling like a load of bouncing planks. Even though the sky was serene, clear of clouds, Dunne heard a low, ominous rumble of thunder gather behind him. Perplexed, he turned, and scarcely had time to spring out of the way of two men rolling empty beer casks down the edge of the street.

Newsboys on every corner brandished papers in his face, gleefully announcing famine and epidemics in places he had never heard of, battles lost and won in the War Between the States, stupendous loss of life in train wrecks and ship sinkings. A man, his beard clotted with egg yolk, stood on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of time in a spray of spittle. A drunk was yelling at him, “Shut it! Shut it! Or it’ll be the end of
your
time! I’ll see to it!” Passersby scurried by without giving them a second glance. Farther up the street, two goods wagons blocked an intersection. The drivers were up on their feet in their vehicles, shaking their fists at one another, hollering, “Give way, damn you! Give way!”

The roadway was a relief map of cobbles, yellow lagoons of horse piss, slippery hillocks of manure flapping canopies of iridescent bluebottles. The whirling flies made Dunne’s brain swim as he stared down at them. He had come to the city imagining he would find streets paved with gold that would lead him
somewhere
. Instead, beset by noise, havoc, confusion, he had no idea where to turn. In a panic he stumbled down Yonge until he found his way blocked by the lake. He gave it the briefest of glances, turned and tramped back uphill, desperately sucking air. His feet hurt and a headache was pummelling his temples. In front of a tailor’s shop, he squatted down on his hams to take stock of things, but the pawky-faced owner came out and ordered him off. The man had a tape measure hung around his neck. Dunne was tempted to strangle him with it.

All afternoon, he trudged the streets trying to find some peaceful spot where it would be possible to connect two thoughts together. Only when a coal-smoke Toronto dusk began to darken the thoroughfares did he find it, the shadowy grounds of a massive red-brick Methodist church. Leaning an elbow on a tombstone in its graveyard, Dunne counted his money into his palm, a pitiful amount when weighed against the extravagant rates for accommodation he had seen posted outside fleabag hotels and dusty-windowed rooming houses. Life in a city was dearer than he had ever dreamed. As he closed his fist on his few coins and crumpled paper money, he saw that the evening service had concluded, and the congregation was filing sedately down the steps of the church.