For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (8 page)

Nevin had wanted to change his visiting date, but Vera said that wouldn’t be possible. Nor was Hadley any longer allowed to visit his apartment.

So, finally he went to visit her. All the way there he was trying to think of what to say to her. “I know you’re a good person – a kind person – and everything like that – but I can’t change her name.”

He walked to her house. It was after 7:00 at night. The river stretched out beneath him and the wind snapped the trees. The grey night seemed heavy, and scuds of snow unravelled on the frozen earth.

Nevin had come up from the street below, which was almost bare and smelled of supper. His feet were cold,
and his eyes stung. Suddenly he stopped, not knowing what to do.

Jerry Bines’ truck was in the yard.

It was as if he was seeing a crude joke at his expense. In fact he did not at first realize it was Bines’ truck. Snow began to fall down from the sky over the heavy branches. A cat scurried and stopped to notice him, wind blowing its fur so it seemed as if it had a hole in its back.

Hadley wasn’t allowed pets of any kind because of her allergies. She wasn’t allowed anything. She went to school and came home, and Nevin remembered that the only time she ever tattled at school seemed worse simply because of her nature.

And thinking of this as he saw the cat, he walked across the street, and went into the house.

Bines was sitting in a chair with his arms crossed and two huge rings on his fingers – rings that could slash Nevin’s face in a second.

“What are you doing here?” Nevin said. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and held it in his hand. Bines looked over at Vera and then looked away – as if something had distracted him and Nevin was not important.

Vera said nothing. But at this moment Hadley became her major concern and she ran to get her – as if something horrible might happen. And at this moment Nevin smiled weakly, because he was unsure why she
did that. Later he realized that this was the worst part – but that it also was orchestrated. That by doing this she had cast a calculated moral judgement – and part of her enjoyed it.

Bines glanced at him. “Be here if I want.” He said this very calmly – as utterly calm as a man could possibly say it.

“You have your own wife and son. Why don’t you go there?” Nevin said.

Bines said nothing.

“I’m not frightened of you,” Nevin said.

“No one asking you to be frightened of me,” Bines said.

“Then what are you doing here?

Bines looked at Vera. Nevin remembered that at this point Vera shook her head for some reason, and was hugging Hadley.

Again Nevin remembered that he said something he felt was horrible but he couldn’t stop himself. “What in hell did you ever learn? You can’t even read very well – that’s what Ralphie told me. He laughs about it at his shop – all the time.”

“No one’s asking you to be frightened a me,” Bines said again. He was hurt by the remark about Ralphie and didn’t know how else to answer.

“Can’t even read,” Nevin said. “So Vera feels sorry for you – just like she feels sorry for Lucy – and all those people.”

“No one told you to be frightened of me,” Bines said.

“Well, I’m not,” Nevin said. “And you got a sick little boy – what are you doing here? You should be home with him. At least I don’t have a sick little boy.”

Bines again looked at him, more puzzled than before.

“My boy’ll do all right,” Bines said. He turned away from him, like you would turn away from someone who is sick, and then he stood and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water.

Nevin was still talking away in the other room. And then he started to complain. He was saying that all he wanted to do was to visit with Hadley and no one would let him. That all he wanted to do was hug his child.

When Bines came back Nevin was sitting there as if everything had been drained out of him. He went to reach out for Bines’ hand and shake it. And then he began to follow him about the room with his hand out. “Here we go, brother – here we go. Little mixup. Here we go.”

Bines, who had not paid attention to him while he was doing this, turned to him while he was putting his parka on. “Go sit down,” he said calmly. “Sit down.”

And Nevin did actually go and sit down. “Hadley,” Nevin spoke. “Hadley, you understand.”

And as Bines was leaving Nevin said: “Jerry – I’m sorry about your son.”

Damp snowflakes fell out of the sky, and birds flitted in the crevices of half-empty doorways below Nevin’s room. There was a smell of cold harsh salt and bread.

Why did he leave his first wife? It was at university. Of course, he didn’t give a damn for divorce or marriage. But there was something else. She had waited for him at home all one night in January of 1971. It was his birthday. And the next morning when he came in, the cake was covered and left on the table in the kitchen.

“I’ve met someone – Vera Pillar – so you should know,” he said. And he couldn’t help feeling vindictive. “She is a woman with her own mind about things – not like you.”

He remembered her smiling at him timidly, as if he were joking, and then she lowered her eyes and sat on the bed clutching her left thumb with her right hand.

“So I thought you should know,” he said to her angrily, blaming her for things she had not done.

Now he remembered another incident painfully. It was Hallowe’en and Vera and he were living with a group of friends on University Avenue.

Instead of giving a group of little boys and girls treats they brought them into the house and scared them. Of course, this was a long time ago, and Nevin was only young. But what was supposed to be a joke turned mean.

And what he most remembered about that night was a little boy trying bravely to protect his sister when she started to cry.

Twenty years had passed and he had not forgotten a moment of that terrible encounter.

Can you imagine growing up like Jerry?
he thought suddenly. He’d heard of Jerry’s father, who’d had a plate in his head, and had beat him unconscious “whenever there was a full moon,” Nevin had heard.

But, of course, there really was no way to help him. And every time he saw him, it always seemed to startle him, and he looked away in fear.

And he knew that Jerry disliked him.

And his little boy was sick. Which was awful. Especially now coming on to Christmas. How could a man as powerful as Jerry have a child who was sick?

This is what bothered Nevin. Secretly he had, in a way – as most men in town – admired Jerry Bines. And yet when he saw his powerful body striding up to the house he realized what he should have realized years ago – that nothing Jerry did or said, or how he acted, could make any difference, in ways which were real.

For twenty years Nevin had remembered the little boy hugging his sister. For twenty years he remembered his first wife holding her thumb and smiling, first timidly and then peevishly, at the corner of the room. And both these recollections could assault him in a second more powerfully than any Jerry Bines or Vera Pillar. Because he had not been kind, when some law greater than his required him to be.

It happened at the schoolhouse Hadley went to. All the children had been warned about Nevin numerous times. It was like a great treat for them to see him, and to tell the teacher.

“There he is,” they would say, “over by the pole.”

And the teacher would go to the window and look out. Nevin would be looking across the street towards them. Then he would turn and walk back down the hill.

This had gone on most of the fall. All the children were now conscious of who he was and why he was there and, though they were told not to speak to him, sometimes they would yell at him at recess.

“Na na, na na na – na na, na na na,” they would chant. And then they would all run over near the empty swing and look back at him.

“Don’t say na na, na na na,” Nevin would say.

“Come and get us,” the children would yell. “Na na, na na, na na. Come and get us.”

“I don’t want to come and get you,” Nevin would answer. “Who told you that?

“Ah, go ’way,” the children would yell. “Na na, na na na.”

One day when he walked up the street to stand near the pole he suddenly saw a man come out of the bushes on one side and a woman walk across the lawn towards him. Both exits had been cut off, and he was not allowed to go on to the school property. He walked out into the middle of the street.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked. He was
younger than Nevin – much younger – and the principal of the school.

Nevin reached in his pocket to haul out his
ID
and show it to him. He smiled at the man as if he could clear all of this up.

“I don’t want to see your
ID
,” the man said.

“We have one hundred twenty children to look after,” the woman said to him. “If you come back here again we’ll call the police – make no mistake.”

Nevin was wearing huge mittens and an old hat with kamikaze-style earflaps. His hair waved in the wind under it, and his checked woods jacket was opened, with a vest underneath.

“I can come here if I want – I want to see my daughter.”

“Ms. Pillar has made it quite clear that you are not allowed to see your daughter.”

“But she’s a goofball,” Nevin said, because he did not know what else to say. “She’s made everything up.”

The woman looked up at him with such clear hatred, such a testimony of dislike, that he felt she had been informed about him in some vast and terrible way.

“I’ve given up everything,” Nevin said, in a voice that seemed to come from some faraway part of himself – and he remembered as a little boy at school being punched in the stomach by an older boy. He had not thought of this in forty years. But now it seemed to come so vividly clear to him – the boy’s fist and the smile on his face when Nevin fell down, and the dark
stone of the old brown school, and the wet pebbles he fell on.

“I’m coming to get her tomorrow and we are going to Woodstock.” He did not know why he said this, and he did not know whether he meant Woodstock, New Brunswick, or Woodstock, New York.

“Fine,” the principal said. “You’ve been warned.”

Nevin did not go back the next day. Nor the day after. But three days later he returned and stood at the pole. He had a suitcase in his hand. He had nothing inside of it, but he thought he should bring along a suitcase. He stood there for about ten minutes and looked towards the white building and then up towards the train station.

Suddenly, in back of him, a police car pulled over. Nevin went to step out of the way, and he was thinking: “They are coming too close to that pole.” He made a gesture as if to wave the car on when he saw another police car turn off the town hill and come towards him. He began to back away but suddenly one car drove right up to him, and the other car pulled over.

In two seconds Nevin was wrestled to the ground, turned over on his back, and handcuffs placed on him. All the while he made a great effort to explain things and kept trying to clutch the suitcase in his hand.

The next day Nevin carried a knife when he went to the tavern. Everyone knew he was carrying this knife.
Because Nevin said he was going to kill himself as soon as he had a beer. “Maybe two beer – and then I’ll do it.”

He wore his old boots and his coat. The sky was bright blue that afternoon but a few stars could be seen by 2:00. The air smelled of wood smoke.

Jerry had heard all about the knife. And Nevin having it on him.

Jerry came into the tavern at 4:00. He looked at Nevin, saw his old coat and hat and turned-up salted boots, and looked away.

He went to the back so that, because of the wall, Nevin could not see him, and ordered a beer.

But five minutes later, rising from his seat twice, then hesitating, Nevin came over to his table.

Jerry looked at the knife sticking out of Nevin’s pocket and picked up his beer slowly and drank, just a sip, and put the glass down.

But suddenly Nevin trembled, and had the strange desire to confess things. He wanted to tell Jerry about his past, about what he had done at university – that Hallowe’en night when the little boy came to the door and he had tormented him. So Bines would understand him better. And he began talking to him. “Vera has given a sworn statement.”

“Oh – about what?” Jerry said.

“About Hadley being terrified of me,” Nevin said, “and about my attempted suicide.”

Bines didn’t speak. He shrugged and looked out the
window. There were too many other things on his mind at the moment.

“I’ve never touched Hadley, but Vera is so certain of it – I don’t know, she almost has me convinced. It all comes from her past. I go there and Hadley hides behind a chair – she is only a little girl. I say to her: ‘Hadley, do you want your name to be a nice name like White, or a silly name like Pillar?’ And she shouts out ‘Pillar’ and runs down the hall. All the children call her Pillar, and everything –”

“Well – that’s too bad – too bad,” Jerry said. He didn’t know what else to say.

“I come from Massachusetts,” Nevin said. “I was at Woodstock – a lot of people only talk about Woodstock but I was actually there.”

But Jerry knew nothing about this. Or why it would be important. He shrugged. Some snow lay on the barrel outside and birds pecked at crusts of bread while water dripped in the middle of the afternoon.

Nevin told the story about all the trials he had had with his father, who had bullied him and had made him stay in on Friday night and made him get his hair cut and wouldn’t give him the car for the prom, and Jerry listened. Finally his dad and he had a fight over Vietnam and he came to Canada – where he first enrolled in Business Administration at the University of New Brunswick. But then he met this tall young woman. He told Jerry how he had tormented his first wife – and belittled her.

“I got mixed up in the Strax affair,” Nevin said, “Vera and I.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Bines said.

“It was a movement in the sixties at the university,” Nevin said, and, screwing up his eyes and trying to think, he continued: “It was positive – it was a positive thing.”