A Good Man (29 page)

When they dismounted from the vehicle Billy found the stupendous din of the wharves terrifying. Tucking his picture securely into one armpit, he clamped his hands to his ears to hold out the shriek of tugboat whistles, pulleys, and winches, the hiss of donkey engines, the shouts of sailors and dock men. Dunne took him by the shoulders and manoeuvred his goggle-eyed charge past all the hazards, the cranes and chugging steam engines, the files of sweating longshoremen who came staggering down the gangplanks bent double under their loads and threatened to trample the frightened boy underfoot.

When he got him into the area of warehouses, clear of the worst of the noise and the frenzied activity, Billy calmed down. Dunne steered him to a building that had once housed a sailmaking concern but was now unoccupied and in a very bad state of repair, the majority of its windows boarded up, its roof shedding shingles, its walls sprinkling paint flakes around the footings. Dunne knew it well. Eight months before, he had negotiated with the widow of the former owner for its rental. Several firms had made the widow offers of purchase, but she had refused them all because she had delusions about the value of the property. While waiting for the right price, she was willing to let it to the athletic club that Dunne represented. These supposedly ardent boxers and gymnasts were all members of an Irish Republican Army cell. The warehouse provided them a place to bayonet sacks of oats and to hack away at one another with wooden swords, safe from prying eyes.

Dunne, having selflessly volunteered to open the building on cold winter mornings and fire up the stove to warm the place before the others arrived for training, had the key to the turnip-sized lock. He let Billy and himself in.

The interior was musty, damp, and dismal. The windows had been set high on the walls, just below the roof, to catch all the sunshine possible to light the sail-stitchers’ work. But stone-chucking vandals had broken many of the panes in the deserted building and they had had to be planked up to keep out snow and rain. It was a dim, shadowy place.

Billy asked, “Where is the picture taker at?”

“I’m the picture taker,” said Dunne, pointing to the thickest crop of shadows. “I set up my camera there.”

Billy blinked owlishly, then maof the panmove to investigate, but Dunne caught him by the collar of his shirt, swung him around, and marched him to a chair set before a sheet of sail canvas that had been tacked to the wall. The oddments that hadn’t been cleared from the building when the business had closed had supplied everything required for the picture taking: a spool of waxed cord, remnants of canvas, sailmaker’s needles. All he had needed to provide were six whiskey jugs filled with water and stopped with corks, which rested on the floor a few paces from the chair where he was busying himself posing Billy. He had delivered the jugs the day before.

When he got the boy squared away, Dunne checked the light. He had selected the spot because the casements above the chair still held glass and admitted daylight. Despite the grey day, he was satisfied they provided enough illumination.

He made a few more fussy adjustments to the boy’s position, lifted his chin with his finger, turned his shoulders a little more to the left. When he was satisfied with his composition he knelt down so the boy’s eyes were level with his own and said, “You must keep very still. If you move, you will spoil the picture. Do you understand?”

Apparently Billy did. He didn’t dare nod an answer to the question; he held himself rigid, motionless. Dunne left him there and strode towards the spot where he had told the boy the camera waited. Yesterday he had measured the distance to where the deepest darkness began – fifteen paces. He counted them off, turned to face the boy.

It seemed to Dunne that Billy’s pale features and white-blond hair were attracting every gleam of light that penetrated the sooty windows, were reflecting it back to him like a smooth and radiant moon. He cocked his ear to the racket coming from the docks. It was loud enough; it would serve. Beneath the squeaks and squeals, the steady pounding of steam engines, he could detect something else, a brisk pattering on the roof, a growl of thunder, then a full-throated roar of wind. The clouds that had threatened rain earlier were unleashing a downpour.

Billy, tense with anticipation, sat frozen in place. The windows above his head were instantly convulsed with streaming water. The precious light glowing on the boy’s face began to wane, he was fading from sight, darkening and receding, like the features in the little portrait he held on his knees. Billy was becoming indistinct, his countenance blurring and swimming as the rain snaked down the windows. Just as the boy hovered on the point of disappearing entirely, Dunne raised his arm, aimed, and snapped Billy’s picture with a muzzle flash.

To Dunne, the walk back to the body felt a great deal longer than fifteen paces. Most of the blood and grey brain matter had struck the canvas backdrop, just as he had calculated it would. Billy was still in the chair, but his body was grotesquely contorted, the head thrown back over the chair back. Dunne pulled the sheet of canvas down from the wall, spread it on the floor, lifted Billy and placed him on it. To weight the burial shroud, he laid five whiskey jugs alongside the body. Then he began to sew up the canvas with a long, rusty sailmaker’s needle. That task completed, he used the water in the one remaining jug to scrub away whatever blood had splashed to the floor. The spots couldn’t be completely eradicated, but forty years of spilled tea, melted wax, and tar drippings had stained the floor so much they would hardly be noticed.

There was nothng left to do but wait for full dark. He sat down beside the body, wrapped his arms around his knees, remembering what that man had said to him in the shooting gallery. Until he had started to practise there, the fellow had been acknowledged the best shot in the borough and he hadn’t liked having his reputation challenged by a newcomer. One afternoon, after having watched Dunne stitch a tight pattern on a target, the gentleman in question had said to him, “The eye in a bull’s eye is only paper. It’s a different matter when what you are aiming at can look back at you. I know that. I was in the war.”

He had pondered that remark for some time, regarded it up and down and from every side until he thought he understood what had been said to him. He had been told that a gun was only a tool. He used it well enough on paper, but that wasn’t what it was meant for. The question was: When the time comes that you need to use it to kill, will you be able to?

In Dunne’s opinion, most people did not look far enough into the future. The day might come when he would be discovered as a spy, and his life would depend on proving to himself that whether it was a bull’s eye or a human face before him, it made no difference to Michael Dunne, he would not hesitate to discharge his weapon into either.

He knew now he was capable.

When Dunne could no longer see his own hand held up before his face, he hoisted Billy over his shoulder and walked out into the night. There were fewer people about on the docks, mostly drunken merchant seamen returning from a spree on the town, and a few gangs of longshoremen unloading urgent cargo by lamp- and torchlight. They took no notice of a man toting a roll of sailcloth. At a spot on a deserted wharf shielded by a stack of timber, Dunne paused, looked about him, and tipped the bundle off his shoulders into the river. For a moment, it bobbed and floated, then the jugs did their work, slowly dragged it down into the depths.

Dunne turns on his side and, as he always does when he wants to be most lucid, speaks aloud in pure numbers, in the language of the Polybius square.

“22,11,55,55,14 12,11,33,52,45,45,42,52,23,42,12.”

Billy disappeared
.

For a time when the voice had said to him that someone was following he had thought the voice might be referring to Billy. That instead of drawing back into the shadows of the picture, Billy was emerging from them. But now Dunne sees how absolutely wrong he had been. There is no doubt.
Billy disappeared
.

Today it became obvious to him that the someone who is following can be none other than Mrs. Tarr. She is coming to him. That voice he had once thought sounded as flat as the tapping of a telegraph key had been a fault in his hearing. He is sure that the next time it speaks to him it will be in Mrs. Tarr’s warm tones, will be coloured by her loving character. And that hazy form will assume a definite, happy shape, grow ever more recognizably
her
with every step it takes towards him. And that slow, cloudy billowing about the knees that might have been anything – Billy wading up out of the river, a man tramping through snowdrifts – will sharpen until it becomes that particular skirt, the one he so admirs on Mrs. Tarr. And those bright, hovering flecks about her head and shoulders will grow ever stronger and light her face ever more clearly. He is certain of it. It is only a matter of time.

THIRTEEN

December 8, 1876

AFTER NEARLY THREE MONTHS
, I have received Father’s response to my news that I am proprietor of a ranch and have no intention of standing for Parliament. His style of communication is, as ever, sharp and to the point. He says my ingratitude has given ample proof that the raising and educating of me has been a waste of time and money, and that trying to talk sense into me is pointless.

Do not think that in defying me you do me an injury. No, you only harm yourself. I am done attempting to save you. If the Prodigal Son is bound and determined to end his days as a swineherd (or in your case a cowherd) so be it. For years you have been shooting yourself in the foot and I should not be surprised if, sooner or later, you do not put the pistol squarely to your head and pull the trigger. You have shown a foolhardy tendency to do harm to yourself before. I am referring of course to the statement you were asked to prepare for my solicitors when it looked as if you would soon be facing public disgrace. All that was required was a simple outline of your actions, “I did this and then I did that.” But you had to beat your breast in a frenzy, indulge yourself in weepy self-recrimination. My advice to destroy that nonsense was the last time I can recall you ever listening to me. So for your own good, heed me one last time. Rid yourself of that ranch like you rid yourself of that foolish document. Do not squander the money your mother left you because I assure there will be nothing coming your way from me if you persist in your recklessness. Be assured, I will wash my hands of you.

It comes as a great relief to me to be finally disowned. Father always believed that making me his heir gave him an incontestable right to meddle in my affairs. He let himself think that the threat to disinherit me was a sword held over my head. He has let it descend now, to no effect.

If the Lumber Baron knew that “statement of fact” still existed, he would question my sanity even more than he does now. I still have not been able to cast it aside, still wrestle with the memory of the Battle of Ridgeway as Jacob wrestled with the angel. Like Jacob, who put the thigh of the angel out of joint with a touch, that day has the same power over me; the faintest recollection of it can leave my mind limping.

I always knew what Father’s purpose was in having me write that account – to give his lawyers a document they could examine so as to decide which “facts” should be emphasized, which expunged. He wanted a dress rehearsal of evidence so his solicitors could coach me on how to present what had occurred, if a trial could not be avoided. My day in court never came, but I continue scouring those pages, trying and retrying myself. Yesterday, I took them out and reviewed my actions as I have done so many times before. The judgment is the same as always. So why do I pursue it, over and over again? Because it seems that sometimes even the convicted man is uncertain of the real motives of his crime.

On the morning of December 29 a chinook arch appears in the western sky, a shelf of red-and-yellow cloud that is a presage of the warm wind that soon comes spilling down the slopes of the Rockies and roaring across the plains. In a matter of hours, the temperature rises forty degrees. Snowdrifts slump; icicles rain a quick, steady drip down on the heads of pedestrians, and Fort Benton’s streets turn to muddy paste. Heavy winter coats are cast aside and men stroll around in their shirtsleeves. By the second day of the “snow-eater,” the ground lies brown and bare, but on the thirty-first the mercury plummets as quickly as it shot up, turning cold enough that Case dons his buffalo coat to ride into Fort Benton for Major Ilges’s New Year’s party. Joe had spurned the invitation, saying, “I ain’t one of the quality. Their occasions ain’t for the likes of me. Tonight, I’ll bay at the moon with my own kind. From a saloon.”

After stabling his horse at the Benton livery, Case strikes off for the post, footsteps ringing on a roadway hard as iron, frozen puddles crackling under his heels. There are carriages parked outside the garrison, their teams blanketed against the cold, noses buried in feed bags. Soldiers loiter near the gate, passing a bottle back and forth, faces lit in the ruddy glow of pipe bowls. From inside the mess there comes the prodigious tootling and thumping of a military band. Case mounts the steps, gives the door a push, and enters a room already so crammed with guests he has difficulty finding a peg on the wall on which to hang his coat. A covey of ladies has taken roost near a spindly, now desiccated Christmas tree hung with forlorn strings of popcorn and decorated with tiny candles whose flames flap and hover on the point of extinction every time the door opens or closes. The greatest social event of the year has brought out the competitive instincts in all the women, even the dowagers, who have decked themselves out in satin and taffeta and loaded themselves down with all the jewellery their necks and ears can support. Expansive tracts of bosom are on display, and a constant, coquettish fluttering of painted fans agitates the air. The blaze in the fireplace, the exertions of the dance, the densely packed crowd lend a tropical atmosphere to the mess. The band is flirting with heat prostration, mopping their faces and swigging from tankards of beer as they take a break from playing.