Homesick (18 page)

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.

Directly outside the mangled fence, in front of the front door, Monkman’s tenant had parked his farm machinery, presumably for convenience sake. However, to speak of the machinery as Marker’s was not strictly correct. Many of the implements had been bought for Earl and later loaned to Marker so that he could farm more efficiently. Regardless of ownership, all the pieces of machinery were in the same state of poor repair. At the moment, a hay rake, a disker, a tractor, and a hay baler were drawn up outside the house. All the tires on the hay baler were flat and chickens were nesting in the drop chute. Several of these fluttered awkwardly up when Daniel eased the truck beside the baler and cut the motor.

Mrs. Marker bustled on to the porch, squinting. She was thin as a rake and her skinny white legs seemed to stab out of a billowing, faded housedress and into a pair of broken-down men’s oxfords, as if they were trying to nail the shoes to the porch floor. Looking the way she did, she always put Monkman in mind of some stray bitch sucked too hard by too many greedy pups. He saw that they’d interrupted the setting of her hair; one half was lank, wet, and stringy, the other half, tight curls and bobby pins.

“It’s you,” she called out as Monkman grappled his way out of the truck. “When I heard the truck I wondered who could be company. We don’t expect you except water days, Tuesday and Friday.”

That’s what I’m counting on, thought Monkman grimly. His salute, however, was cheerful and hearty. “Good day, missus. Is the boss around?”

The rest of the Markers, the pups who had sucked her skinny, began to show themselves. The second oldest boy crept on to the porch. When he had identified the visitors as familiar he pulled open the screen door and shouted back into the house, “It’s nobody. Just Monkman.”

With this reassurance the rest trooped out: the five-year-old twin boys, the two girls, the oldest with her baby brother in her arms. The twins sprang off the steps, hurled themselves onto the yard gate and began to swing ferociously back and forth on it. The remainder of the Markers aligned themselves on the porch in a fashion that suggested they were readying themselves to repulse attack.

“No, Alfred’s not here,” answered Mrs. Marker. “Him and Dwayne took a part to town for welding.”

“Don’t matter,” said Monkman. “I was just going to ask him how’s tricks. What about you, Etta? How you been keeping?”

“I’d keep better without the baby’s eczema. I’d keep better with the electricity or if I had one of them gas washing machines. Otherwise – I got no complaints. Yourself?”

“Not bad, Etta.”

“If we ain’t bad, we must be good.”

“If you say so, Etta,” said the old man agreeably. He swept his eyes around the yard. “I was wondering if you could do something for me?” he asked. “I want to leave the truck parked here and I was wondering if you could keep the twins from crawling all over it?”

“Did you hear that, twins?” said Mrs. Marker, raising her voice. “The man wants you to stay off of his truck. You do it!”

The boys reacted to this by ducking their heads, sticking out their rear ends and swinging the gate even more violently, as if they intended to tear it off its hinges.

“I mean it!” warned Mrs. Marker. “You keep yourselves and your boots off the hood of that truck or I’ll brain the both of you! No more Freshie, either,” she added ominously, “if I catch you.” She turned her attention back to Monkman. “What do you want to leave it here for?” she inquired. “You walking somewheres?”

“Oh, we thought we’d go scouting for saskatoons. They ought to be getting ripe by now.”

“Saskatoons don’t amount to much this year,” offered Mrs. Marker, seizing a handful of her skirt. “And the wood ticks are awful bad. I’d stay out of the bush if I was you. I pick the kids over
every night. Every night they’re thick with them. For the amount of saskatoons you find the ticks don’t make it pay.”

“Ticks don’t have a taste for bloodless old buggers like me,” said Monkman, smiling. “They’re for the young ones like Daniel here. The sweet ones.”

“Berries don’t amount to much this year. Hardly worth your while to look.”

“When you’re my age you find you fill your time with any kind of foolishness. I get a couple of cupfuls, I’ll be happy. It passes the time.”

Mrs. Marker crooked her finger at the biggest boy on the porch. “Doyle here knows all the best places to look. Doyle, you take Mr. Monkman and show him where to look. He’s the wanderer,” she explained. “Knows every inch of the place, Doyle does. I’d appoint him guide, if I was you.”

“No, don’t bother,” said Monkman, holding up a hand to ward off Doyle. “Where’s the fun if you don’t find them yourself?”

“South,” urged Mrs. Marker desperately as the old man and boy began to move off. “South’s your best bet. They ripen south first,” she called, pointing.

“South, my ass,” muttered Monkman under his breath. “North it is.” The old man led the way. A few minutes’ walking brought them to four ramshackle granaries. A flock of blackbirds exploded out of the shadows cast by the buildings where they had been feeding on oats and barley leaked onto the ground. The sudden flight, the whir of wings, the indignant cries of
chek! chek!
gave Monkman a start and shook him out of an absorbing rehearsal of what exactly he would say to Alfred Marker when he confronted him with the steer that had supposedly been dispatched by a bolt from heaven. It was then it struck him what going north meant. There were only two clumps of bush big enough to hide a steer in to the north. One ran along the fence line separating quarters and the other was a five- or six-acre patch of uncleared poplar, birch, and scrub oak standing in the midst of the field.

The field. Thinking of it made him apprehensive, made him step more quickly, made his chest tighten. They were crossing summerfallow now, heading toward the distant fence line where the tops of the poplars flickered silver in the sun and wind. The old man found it heavy going. His boots sank to the laces in the loose powdery soil as if it were new snow and the black earth radiated a fierce, dusty heat up into his reddening face. He wished he could turn back. A visit to the field was a visit to bad luck. For twelve years he had superstitiously avoided it whenever possible.

“When I reach those trees I’m going to find a spot of shade and cool myself out,” he declared, trying to initiate conversation. Talking would prevent thinking.

Daniel plodded along beside him without a trace of enthusiasm. Halfway up his shins his trousers were grey with dust. “Yeah, it’s pretty hot, all right,” was all the response Monkman could get.

“It’s hotter than the hubs of hell. A man could take a heart attack on a day like this. Plenty have.”

“My Dad died from heart trouble,” said Daniel. “He was forty-eight. That isn’t very old.”

Monkman threw the boy an appraising glance. Daniel’s expression was guarded, set. “You don’t remember him, do you?” asked Monkman.

The question provoked no change in the boy’s face. “No,” he said.

Monkman let the matter drop. They went on in silence until they reached the wood where a narrow strip of grass separated the tilled ground from the grove. Groaning theatrically, the old man shuffled over to the shade spread by the trees and lowered himself stiffly, in stages, down into the brome grass tassels. There he lay, the crushed stems prickling the skin of his back through his shirt and the pollen and dust he had disturbed settling on him. He had placed his hat squarely in the centre of his chest. Twice he sneezed violently.

“If you’re too tired to walk back, I’ll fetch the truck for you,” the boy offered, hovering over him.

“No, I’m fine. But what you can do is take a prowl in the bush and see if that bastard’s tied my steer up in there.”

Daniel wasn’t eager to take up the suggestion. “She said there’s ticks in the bush.”

The old man laughed.

“What’s so funny? You think it’s so funny, why don’t you go look yourself?”

“Played-out, fat old men aren’t built for bush. They’re not built for climbing over deadfalls and squeezing through all that kind of shit.”