The Americans Are Coming Page 2

  “Sure, what game?” asked Max.

  “Let’s see who can open his mouth the farthest,” said Shadrack. “I bet I can.”

  “How much ya wanna bet?” asked Dryfly, feeling confident.

  “I bet ya this marble,” said Shad.

  “Let me see the marble,” said Dry.

  “Nope. You have to take me word fer it. I’ll give this marble to the one with the biggest mouth.”

  A marble was a rare thing in Brennen Siding, but the boys all knew that Shadrack Nash was the most likely one to have one, and he definitely seemed to be hiding something in his hand.

  “Okay,” said Max, “I’ll give it a go.”

  “Me too,” said George.

  “Count me in,” said Dryfly, “I could do with a marble.”

  “Okay,” said Shad, “we’ll judge each other. I’ll count to three, then everyone gape as wide as they can. Ready? One, two, three.”

  Max, George and Dryfly all opened wide, revealing their cookie-coated tongues and teeth. Shad started to do likewise,but instead, he took careful aim and tossed the marble into Dryfly’s mouth.

  The marble was not a marble, however, but one of the dung-balls the rabbit had left behind.

  When he saw that his aim had been perfect, Shad snorted with laughter, spraying tea and cookie crumbs all over the blue-checked hunting jacket of Max Kaston.

  The first thing Dryfly did was swallow.

  Secondly, he gagged.

  Thirdly, he ran home crying.

  Dryfly could still hear the boys laughing when he crossed the railroad tracks. He felt he would never be able to face his friends again.

  In his bed of old coats and rags, Dryfly could still hear them laughing. “I’ll hear them laughing,” he thought, “for the rest of my life.” Dryfly sighed. “I’m a hermit already.”

  “If you don’t git out here and go to school, I’m gonna go out and cut a switch!” yelled Shirley from the kitchen.

  Dry relaxed a bit. Shirley’s threat was idle, had lost its spark. “Her tail’s probably waggin’,” thought Dryfly and began to plan his day of freedom.

  *

  Dryfly was right about the spark. Shirley had lost it, but her tail was not wagging. Shirley had lost her spark the last time that Buck came home. In a manner of speaking, Buck’s last visit was the last time she had wagged her tail to any degree.

  “It’s been” – Shirley counted – “five, six. Dryfly’s eleven. Must be twelve years since Buck was here. No letters, no money. What’s become of him, I wonder?”

  Although Shirley was not aware of the anniversary, Buck had landed twelve years ago to the very day. Palidin was the baby, Junior was twelve . . . Bonzie was still alive.

  Buck had taken her to the Legion in his old Ford. She drank three beers and Buck had a half dozen or more. They danced. She remembered he smelled of aftershave and his hair had been slicked back with that fancy grease stuff. When the Legion closed, they went to Bob Nash’s and drank rye until four in the morning. Bob played the banjo and Buck played the guitar and sang Hank Snow and Doc Williams songs. Buck had been the hit of the night and Shirley had never been happier in her life.

  Later they drove around to the pit and parked. Buck put his hand on her knee and told her how pretty she was; then he said he loved her and then he got serious.

  “I suppose you’re wonderin’ why I never send you any money?” he asked.

  “No, Buck, I know you ain’t got any.”

  “Had me a job as a janitor for awhile. Good job, too. Only had to clean the ground floor.”

  “What happened, Buck?”

  “Got caught stealin’. Took some old jeezer’s pipe and it fell right out of me pocket in front of the boss. Fired me on the spot. Livin’ in Fredericton now. Workin’ at the bottle exchange and junk yard. Breakin’ batteries mostly. No money in it though. How you gittin’ long?”

  “Gladys sent me a bag o’ clothes and Dad sent me a bag o’ potatoes. Know what I’m thinkin’ bout doin’?”

  “Gettin’ in the back seat?” Buck slid his hand up her thigh.

  “Don’t be foolish! No, I’m thinkin’ ’bout takin’ over old Maud’s post office.”

  “Kin you do that?”

  “Sure kin. All you have to do is collect the mailbag at the Siding, bring it home and give it out, stamp a few letters – anyone kin do it and Bert said he’d like me to do it. Thirty dollars a month.”

  “Why don’t Bert do it?”

  “Can’t read. Maud did it all. I’m gonna set it up in the livin’ room.”

  “I’d ask you to come to Fredericton with me, but there’d be no room for the kids.”

  “I know, Buck. I know you mean well. What d’ya think o’ me runnin’ the post office?”

  “You’ll have to do it, I guess. It’ll be good for ya.”

  “You could come home and help me, Buck. I’d run the post office and you could go to work.”

  “Who for?”

  “You could talk to Frank Layton. He might give you a job at the club.”

  “I ain’t workin’ for Frank Layton!”

  “Why? Frank’s a fair man!”

  “I’d rather break batteries.”

  “You got another woman in Fredericton, Buck?”

  “You know I ain’t got no other woman, Shirley. You know I ain’t that kind of man!”

  “Then why won’t you come home?”

  “Let’s not talk about that now. Let’s get in the back seat.”

  “You’re crazy, Buck.”

  “If I do come home, I’ll have to go back and get me clothes and me radio.”

  “You got a radio?”

  “Yep. Heard the last Joe Louis fight, settin’ right back in Fredericton. Ever hear of Hank Williams?”

  The conversation continued. Shirley fell in love again and Buck negotiated seduction with promises and lies. Shirley was never happier. Buck was leaving and hadn’t asked for her family allowance check.

  They climbed into the back seat and Shirley wagged her tail to Buck’s delight. Nine months later Shirley added another point to Buck’s antlers and called it Dryfly.

  *

  Dryfly figured the time was getting on to nine o’clock. The rest of the children had already left for school and Dryfly was left to himself to enjoy the little room.

  Dryfly shared his bed with Palidin and Bean. Jug and Oogan slept in the bed across the room. Naggy slept in Shirley’s room and Neeny and Bossy slept in the room next door. Junior was married to Mary Stuart and lived with Mary’s father, Silas. Digger, as usual, was tramping the road somewhere. Skippy, the oldest girl, wasn’t married, but was shacked up with Joe Moon in Quarryville. Joe Moon had a dog that occupied more of his time than Skippy. Skippy was the homeliest one of the family and considered herself lucky to be living with a bootlegger. Bonzie, of course, was dead.

  It happened on a Sunday. The family was having a picnic back of the big hollow. Some of them were fishing in the nearby brook, others sat in the shade discussing members of the opposite sex and some picked flowers. Palidin, Bonzie and Dryfly were pretending they were moose.

  “I need to have a dump,” said Bonzie and hurried into the woods in search of a roost.

  Bonzie Ramsey found his roost, a broken down birch tree, and dropped his pants, sat and found relief. He was just pulling up his suspenders when he heard the sound of rustling leaves and the crackle of a dead alder bush giving way to a passerby.

  The sound was nearby, but it was only a sound; he could see nothing but the trees and underbrush of the forest.

  “Who’s there?” he called.

  No answer. Bonzie waited and listened.

  “Who’s there?” he called again.

  “It would be just like Palidin and Dryfly to be watchin’ a lad havin’ a dump,” he thought. “They’re prob’ly tryin’ to scare me.”

  “All right boys, come out! I know you’re there!”

  He heard the sound again, but this time it had moved – it wa
s more to the left.

  Without giving what he thought was Palidin and Dryfly any chance to flee, he dashed into the bush, thinking he would take them by surprise.

  There was nobody there.

  He listened once more. “Palidin? Dryfly?”

  The song of a bird came up from the brook. He could not identify it.

  “When I get my hands on you lads, I’m gonna introduce you to the rough and tumble!” he shouted. He hoped he sounded like the Lone Ranger.

  There was a bit of a clearing ahead of him, where the sun

  had nourished the ferns to waist height. He thought he saw an unusual movement in their midst. He went to check it out.

  Nothing.

  “Must’ve been a bird,” he thought.

  “The hell with yas!” he yelled, turned and headed back to where he thought the family would be.

  He walked for half an hour, realized they couldn’t be that far away, turned and walked for an hour, came to a barren and realized he was very lost.

  He zigzagged back and forth for several more hours, calling, “Mom! Palidin! Dryfly! Naggie!”

  Occasionally he got an echo, but that was all.

  He grew warm and panicky; his pace quickened; he scratched his arms and legs on dead limbs and brush. The flies found him.

  At dusk, he found himself at the barren’s edge once again. He didn’t know if he was on the near or the homeward side of it.

  When you step into a barren, your foot sinks ankle-deep into a wet, moss-like vegetation. When you wander into a barren, you’d better mark your point of entry, for once you get in a few hundred yards, everything starts to look the same – look down, look up and you’re lost.

  Bonzie thought he saw something on the barren. Bonzie was already lost and had nothing to lose – he headed towards the something.

  It took him a half hour to get to what he was looking at, and it turned out to be a huge boulder. Exhausted, he sat on the boulder to watch the stars as, one by one, they appeared. He cried for a long while, slept for a little while, then cried some more.

  He heard something walking, splush, splush, splush, off to his right. He held his breath, for better hearing. He prayed a silent Hail Mary.

  Splush . . . splush . . . splush – whatever it was, was passing him by.

  At first he thought it might be a bear, or a moose, but he wasn’t sure.

  “It could be a man. It could be a man looking for me. I got nothin’ to lose,” he thought.

  “Whoop! Over here!”

  A game warden found the fly-bitten, crow-pecked body of Bonzie a month later, back of the barren.

  As a result of Bonzie getting lost, Dryfly feared getting lost more than anything else in the world. The thought of being alone in the woods to battle the flies horrified him. He even had nightmares about it. The flies – the more you battled, the more you attracted – would be the worst thing of all. And to die and have your body exposed to the woods . . .

  Years later when Dryfly was asked the whereabouts of Bonzie by an elderly, absent-minded teacher, he replied, “He went for a shit and the crows got him.

  *

  Dryfly was giving way to slumber when Shirley passed through the curtain that served as the bedroom door to stand before him at the foot of the bed.

  “I’ve made up your lunch, Dry,” said Shirley, “and wrote an excuse to the teacher fer ya. I’m gonna need you home tomorrow, Dry, so’s I want ya to go to school today. I got yer lunch all packed.”

  The emotional cloud over Shirley was thick and black and it spread over Dryfly as if instructed by a magic wand. His heart quickened, his stomach fluttered and tears of defeat commenced to flow.

  “But I can’t, Mom!” he sobbed.

  “You might have to stay home tomorrow, Dry. We’ve run out of grub, so’s I want you to go today.”

  “But I’m sick, Mom!” Tears, tears, tears.

  “I’m gonna write yer father askin’ him to send me enough money for that cap gun you like in the catalogue. C’mon, Dry darlin’, be a good boy and go to school. I’m not gettin’ any younger, you know. One day I won’t be around to look after you and you’ll need lotsa schoolin’ so’s you kin git a job.”

  “Ah, Mom!” Still more tears.

  “You kin stay home tomorrow, Dry, cause I ain’t got the heart to send you to school on an empty stomach, but you have to go today. C’mon Dryfly darlin’, git dressed, ya still have time.”

  “But I don,’t want to go!”

  “Poor Ninnie didn’t take nothin’ to eat wit’ her. Said you could have it, Dry. Poor little thing was thinking of you and how you’d like a good sandwich. So, c’mon, Dry.”

  Dryfly knew he was defeated, and to make sure that Shirley’s victory would be a difficult one, he cried all the time he was getting dressed. He cried in the kitchen and refused to eat his biscuit and molasses. He was still crying when he crossed the tracks.

  When Hilda Porter opened Shirley Ramsey’s excuse note for Dryfly’s absence on the previous afternoon, it read:

  Deer Mrs. Porter.

  Dryfly stayed home in the afternoon yesterday, for he was sick from rabbit dung poisoning.

  Yours truly,

  Shirley

  Hilda Porter already knew.

  Shadrack Nash was not laughing as he watched Dryfly Ramsey enter the school, deposit his excuse on the teacher’s desk and make his way to his seat; the memory of Hilda’s twoinch-wide, foot-long piece of woodcutter strap on his stinging hands took care of that little pleasure.

  Nothing was ever kept secret in Brennen Siding.

  two

  Shirley watched Dryfly until she was sure he would not run off into the woods.

  “Poor little lad, he’s different from Palidin. Pal’s only a year older, but he’s a lot wiser. Palidin’s smart, wants to be a somebody. Kinda fruity, I’ll admit, but he wants to be somebody. Kin read and write and do ’rithmetic better ’n me. It’s more important to keep Pal in school than Dryfly.”

  Shirley figured that Palidin would eventually get a job as a timekeeper or a store clerk in Newcastle or Chatham. To Shirley, being a timekeeper or a store clerk was having the ultimate good job. Anything more intellectual than these two occupations was beyond comprehension.

  That’s the way it was all over Brennen Siding.

  When Jack Allen went off to Hartford with Dr. MacDowell and eventually became a dentist himself, everybody in the settlement disowned him – disowned him not so much because they didn’t like him, but because Jack had become a different creature – looked different, spoke different, walked different and even smelled different.

  When he came to Brennen Siding and put the word out that he needed a guide to go fishing, none of the local men would guide him. When Stan Tuney took the job out of financial desperation, he found Jack as alien as any other American Sportsman. Jack Allen could have been Nelson Rockefeller sitting in the front of the canoe as far as Stan Tuney was concerned.

  The people of Brennen Siding couldn’t understand foreign places, wealth and formal education, and thought it pretentious to even try.

  When the Connecticut lawyer asked Dan Brennen if the boys fishing across the river were natives, he replied, “No, sir, jist some of us lads.”

  To Dan, a native was a black man from Africa.

  When the locals got together with the American sportsmen they were guiding, the common denominator was humour. Bert Todder did not know that all the food a salmon eats originates in photosynthesis. Bert Todder did not have a hunch that the life and death of algae depended on chlorophyll and its reactions to various colours of the spectrum.

  When the American sport asked Bert why the salmon would not bite while there were bubbles on the river, Bert did not think of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Had he known the existence of such words, he might have had a better answer to the American’s question . . . but probably not.

  “Why don’t the salmon bite while those bubbles are on the river?” asked the American.

&nb
sp; “They’re on the toilet,” said Bert. “Them bubbles are fish farts.” Stan Tuney had grown up with Jack Allen and had recognized the difference in him immediately. Stan couldn’t understand how money could change a man so much.

  “How’s she goin’, Jack?” asked Stan.

  “Great. What’s happening with you, Stan?”

  “Not too much. What are you doin’ these days?”

  Stan knew that Jack was a dentist. He didn’t know that Jack was earning a hundred thousand dollars a year, but he could tell that Jack seemed rich. Like all the people of Brennen Siding, Stan was pessimistic and egotistical. When asked, “How’s she goin’?” it was a rare occasion that one answered “Great.” “Not too good,” was the expected answer. Stan Tuney, like all the Brennen Siding dwellers, lived in isolation from the rest of the world. In Brennen Siding, life was difficult; being a timekeeper or a scaler was the ultimate success. Jack Allen was a Brennen Siding boy, but he had become a dentist. Stan couldn’t understand how anyone could “become” a dentist. To Stan, dentists were born in foreign places like Fredericton, Saint John and the United States. Dentists did not come from Brennen Siding. “Great” was not the way a man from Brennen Siding should be.

  “I’m still pulling teeth,” said Jack.

  “Doin’ pretty good, are ya?”

  Jack Allen had worked hard and was on a badly needed and well-deserved vacation. He did not see a difference in Stan Tuney. Stan would never change. Jack wanted to fish, drink scotch and relax. He had worked hard to become a dentist and was proud of his accomplishment. Confronted with Stan Tuney, Jack couldn’t understand why he was reluctant to admit he was a dentist. For some reason, he felt he might offend Stan by such an admission.

  “Oh, not too good,” Jack Allen, the dentist from Hartford, lied. “Just makin’ ends meet.” The lie eased the tension between them, but Jack could never call Brennen Siding home again.

  *

  Shirley hoped that Palidin would not become a lumberjack. She also hoped he would not become a dentist or a lawyer. A timekeeper at the mill in Blackville would be just right.

  Although Shirley was somewhat puzzled about the future of Palidin, she had no doubts about Dryfly.