The Americans Are Coming Page 3

  Dryfly hated school, hated books and teachers. Thoughts of the future went no further than this afternoon or tomorrow.

  “I hope,” thought Shirley, “he will not be afraid of hard work.”

  When Dryfly disappeared from her view, Shirley sighed and went to the cupboard. She knew there was nothing in it to eat, but she wanted to take inventory anyway. She pulled back the curtains and scanned the shelves.

  No bread and no flour to make any.

  No molasses.

  No potatoes.

  No brown sugar.

  No milk.

  No beans.

  No tobacco.

  Shirley Ramsey sighed as she picked up the empty yellow and red Vogue tobacco package. She shook the package over the palm of her hand and a few dried, almost sand-like grains of tobacco fell from it. She tore the package apart and in the folds of the foil liner, she came up with a few more grains. She spied a butt lying on the rim of a dish. The butt was only a half-inch long, but there was tobacco in it. Shirley tore the butt apart and added the contents to the grains she’d collected from the package. She closed her fist around the tobacco and blew gently into it to moisten it. She then rolled a cigarette the size of a wooden match into a Vogue cigarette paper. She sighed again as she went to the stove for a light. She lifted the cover and added a stick of alder to the fire. “Alder burns too quick,” she thought. “Should have maple, or beech.” She broke off a splinter from a second piece of alder and set it afire. With this she lit her tiny cigarette.

  She pulled up a rickety, backless chair and sat by the table to smoke and to think.

  “No money, no food, no credit left at Hanley’s store . . .” She could charge a few things to her father’s bill, but that was doubtful. The fact of the matter was, her father hadn’t any money either.

  “If it was a month later, the ice in the river’d be out and the boys could ketch a salmon, or maybe some trout . . . even chubs would be better than nothin’.”

  She contemplated setting a snare for a rabbit, but quickly brushed the thought aside.

  “That could take days.”

  “I’ll go to the store and lie,” she thought. “I’ll tell Bernie Hanley that me cheque’s comin’ tomorrow and that I’ll be right up to pay ’im as soon’s it comes. Surely the Blessed Virgin wouldn’ mind such a little lie.”

  She arose and went to the bedroom and grabbed her coat from Dry’s bed. The coat was green and old and smelled; it had a frayed collar and cuffs, the pockets were torn and it had but one button. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had for protection against the cold March wind. She put it on and went back to the kitchen to size herself up in the piece of mirror that hung on the wall above the water bucket. She removed what was left of the tiny cigarette from her mouth and dropped it in the slop pail and smiled into the mirror. Most of her teeth were missing, the remaining few decayed and dirty. “They won’t matter. I’ve got no reason to smile anyway.” She washed her face in the same dirty, soapy water the children had used earlier, ran a piece of comb through her greasy, straight brown hair and sized up the finished product. “I’m a hard lookin’ ticket,” she muttered.

  *

  Ten minutes later, Shirley Ramsey was at the store pleading her case.

  “I git me cheque tomorrow, Bernie, and me allowance cheque should be here in a week or two, so’s I kin pay ya more. I thought maybe you . . .”

  “Shirley, I know as good as you do, your cheque don’t come till the end of the month! This is only the eighteenth. You owe me over a hundred dollars already and you didn’ pay me nothin’ last month. Everybody in the settlement owes me! Who ya think I am, Santa Claus? I can’t afford to pay me own bills anymore! I’m gonna have to close down, if somebody don’t soon pay up.”

  Bernie was a big, good-looking Baptist with good teeth and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore leather-topped gumshoes, heavy woollen pants, a plaid shirt and a hat. Bernie was never without his hat.

  Shirley hadn’t wanted to say it and she had no intention of saying it, but she found herself confused and lost for words. “Then, how’s about chargin’ a package o’ tobacco and a book of papers to Daddy?” she blurted.

  “Tobacco and papers? Tobacco and papers!”

  “And a box o’ asberns! Dryfly’s sick!” she quickly added. She was frightened and humiliated. She recognized her mistake. She should never have given tobacco priority to a Baptist. Tobacco had been the last thing on her list.

  Bernie, too, was lost for words. He was amazed at the request. “Her kids are prob’ly starvin’ to death, she hasn’t got a stitch o’ clothes worth puttin’ on, and she asks for tobacco!” he thought. He grabbed a package of Players tobacco (not even her brand) and practically threw it at her. The papers and aspirins followed in much the same way.

  “There!” he snapped. “That’s the last thing yer gettin’ till I git me pay! Don’t come back till ya got some cash!”

  Shirley was about to cry and she knew it. To save perhaps a shred of dignity, she grabbed the items and left. “Thanks Bernie,” she said.

  Through the window, Bernie could see her walking, too fast for a woman, too masculine, towards the road.

  “She smells like a rag barrel,” mumbled Bernie. “God only knows why I’m so generous.”

  Bernie Hanley popped a peppermint into his mouth, sighed and added tobacco, papers and aspirins to Daddy’s bill.

  *

  Shirley cried, but not for long. It was not the time for crying. It was the time for action. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. She wiped her nose on the green, tattered cuff of her coat.

  “Includin’ me, there’s one, two . . . nine mouths to feed and there’s nothin’ to eat,” she thought. She would not get a cheque for as long as two weeks. She could not starve her children for two weeks.

  The north wind sweeping up Gordon Road was so strong that at times Shirley had to turn away from it and walk backwards in order to breathe.

  A pair of men’s long underwear hanging on Bernie Hanley’s clothesline danced and flapped as if the spirit of their owner remained in them. The trees, too, bent and sighed in the howling wind as if possessed by some forbidding and tormented spirit.

  With some difficulty – she was walking backwards – Shirley quickened her pace. She was determined to win the struggle against this devilish wind so set on holding her back, its cold breath its greatest persuasion.

  “The line gales,” she thought, “they come every spring, just like Buck use to. The whole world is gettin’ screwed. What’s the sense in having young lads, if they all gotta suffer and die?”

  She turned and faced the wind once again and suddenly, eerily, she had the strange feeling the underwear was following her. She quickened her pace again and found herself nearly running towards the safety of her home.

  “The whole damned country’s full o’ ghosts,” she thought. “It’s like that strange bird that keeps singin’, but ya kin never see; and what do the dogs bark at at night?”

  It had taken her ten minutes to go to the store; it took her five minutes to return home. Home – the grey, weathered shingles, the tarpaper patches, the stovepipe with its wafts of smoke so quickly consumed by the wind. On a warmer day, the March sun had melted and deformed the dirty snowbanks lining the path to the door; today the pools, some foot-sized, some larger, were frozen so that Shirley half ran, half skated to the door.

  Before entering the house, she glanced over her shoulder. “I must be going crazy,” she thought, but was thankful the underwear hadn’t followed her.

  Back in her kitchen, she went to the stove and placed a couple of sticks on the fire. The wind was rising with the sun and it slapped the plastic, threatening to tear it from the kitchen window. She sat by the table and opened the new package of tobacco, wondering who she might turn to for help.

  She thought of the priest twelve miles away. It was very cold, the wind too strong.

  “Perhaps tomorrow, though.”

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p; She thought of the neighbors. “Damn near as poor as me.”

  She thought of prostitution, but dropped the thought with the recollection of the morning’s portrait in the mirror.

  She thought of Nutbeam, the mystery man who lived in the woods, seen so seldom, always hidden behind his collar, or hood. Nobody in Brennen Siding could say for sure what he looked like.

  Everyone had a different opinion of Nutbeam. Dan Brennen thought he might be the mad trapper from the Yukon, “Albert

  Johnson, or whatever his name is.” Dan Brennen did not know that Albert Johnson had laid his last Mountie low and had been resting in the Yukon permafrost for many years.

  Lindon Tucker thought Nutbeam might be a ghost, “or even the devil, yeah, yeah, yeah. The devil, yeah. Oh yeah.”

  Stan Tuney claimed to know Nutbeam. Said he was a fine gentleman with lots of money. “Money to burn, so he does!” Nobody ever believed a word Stan Tuney said.

  Whoever Nutbeam was, Shirley Ramsey knew she could not turn to him. Besides, she didn’t even know where he lived. Nutbeam, to Shirley, was all of the above.

  Then, Shirley thought of the post office. There was maybe as much as ten dollars in the post office float. She could borrow the ten dollars and manage until her cheque came and then pay the money back. But the stamps were due to arrive and she needed the stamps to keep the post office operating. If she took the money, she would not be able to pay for the stamps. Her supply would run out and people would want to know why they couldn’t mail a letter. They’d report her. The head post master from Blackville would pay her a visit and there’d be nothing for Shirley to do but tell the truth.

  “Something came over me. I don’t know what it was. I stole the money.”

  She’d be taken off to jail and maybe fined, the children trotted off to orphanages.

  But the money was there. Handy. Accessible. Twelve dollars maybe, if she took the change, too. And nobody would know unless she ran out of stamps. If nobody mailed any parcels or letters for a couple of weeks, until she got her cheque, nobody would ever know. She fought back the temptation. “What’s happenin’ to me?” she asked herself. “Why am I settin’ here thinkin’ of stealin’, when I should be on my knees prayin’?”

  Then, as if to answer her questions, she heard the lonesome, distant whistle of the train. It was not the train they called the Whooper. The Whooper had been replaced by a diesel years before. This was only the Express, the train that brought the mail every morning; the train that picked up and dropped off a few passengers going to and from villages and towns; the train whose whistle now seemed like a mournful cry from the forest, causing a chill to course its way down Shirley’s back. The whistle seemed too timely, as if it had heard her, as if it was showing its approval or disapproval of her thoughts of stealing, its voice enhanced and amplified by the wind.

  Shirley stood. “It’s no time to be settin’ around,” she thought. “An idle brain is the devil’s workshop, Daddy use to say.” She went to the post office, retrieved the mailbag with the two letters locked inside, donned her coat once again and headed for the siding, the weight of poverty heavy on her shoulders, the winds no less haunting, no less cold.

  When she arrived at the kempt little red building with the veranda that stood no more than a couple of feet from the tracks, she found she was right on time. The Express – a diesel engine, one passenger car and a caboose – pulled to a squeaking, grinding ten-second halt.

  There were several people aboard, some of whom gazed down at her as though with pity; sad, unsmiling eyes, staring at her as if she was an animal in a zoo.

  Shirley drew back her shoulders a bit, feigning dignity. But the attempt was feeble; she was too aware of herself; her ragged old coat; her fear. She looked away.

  “Ya’d think they never saw a poor woman before in their lives,” she thought. “Am I the only one? Why am I the only poor woman in the world?”

  A tall, thin man dismounted from the train.

  Shirley experienced a twinge of fear at the sight of him. She couldn’t believe that so many things could be haunting her on the same morning. “What’s goin’ on here?” she thought, and “speak of the devil.” The man was wearing a parka with an oversized hood. The hood was furry and hung low enough to hide his face, but she knew it was Nutbeam. She had never seen him before, but she knew.

  “Lovely day,” she said.

  Nutbeam did not speak to her, did not nod his hooded head, did not even look at her. He strode swiftly away, carrying a black case under his arm.

  Shirley traded mailbags with the porter and the train moved on toward its destination, Boiestown.

  When she got back to the house, Bert Todder, John Kaston, Lindon Tucker and Dan Brennen were waiting for her. They stood in the sun, on the south side of the house away from the wind.

  Shirley led them inside and unlocked the mailbag. The men waited. Dan Brennen eyed the untidiness of Shirley’s house with disgust.

  John Kaston got a copy of Decision Magazine, Bert Todder a letter from Linda who lived in Fredericton. Lindon Tucker, as usual, got no mail at all. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, no mail’s good mail, yeah, yes sir, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Dan Brennen got a bill from Lounsbury’s in Newcastle. Dan Brennen owed for the battery radio he listened to every night.

  The men left and when they were a step further than an earshot away, Dan Brennen said, “Boy, she’s a hard lookin’ ticket, ain’t she?”

  “Hard lookin’ ticket, yeah. Oh yeah, that’s right, Dan old boy, old chummy pard, yeah, hard lookin’ ticket, yeah.” Lindon Tucker agreed with everything anybody said.

  Back in the post office, Shirley sorted the rest of the mail: a letter for Helen MacDonald, a bill for Bob Nash, the Family Herald for Bernie Hanley and a bill for Lester Burns. She placed the mail in their rightful compartments, then opened the cash box and commenced counting the money inside. Twelve dollars and sixty cents.

  Then, she counted her stamp supply. Eight ten-centers, six five-centers and nineteen two-centers.

  She went into the kitchen, knelt before the only wall adornment in the house, the crucifix, and prayed. “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women . . .”

  That night the family ate baloney and potatoes for supper. No one questioned where the food had fallen from, and only Shirley knew for sure.

  *

  Thursday night, the twentieth of March, Bert Todder was watering his horse, Queen, by the light of a kerosene lantern, when he heard the strange cry from the forest. It was a lonesome call that resembled nothing he had ever heard. It sounded neither human nor animal and it couldn’t have been a train whistle; the railroad was in the opposite direction.

  He was about to shrug it off as a car horn, when it came again . . . again . . . and again.

  “It’s comin’ from back on Todder Brook,” he said to Queen. “No cars back on Todder Brook. It’s not a car horn anyway.”

  Queen didn’t answer, sighed contentedly and continued to drink.

  Lindon Tucker was seeing a man about a horse, which was his term for having a piss behind the shed, when he also heard the eerie call.

  Both Lindon and Bert, as well as John Kaston and Dan Brennen, heard it on Friday night. On Saturday night, because nothing is ever kept secret in Brennen Siding, everyone in the settlement was out beneath the stars listening to the still unidentified scream from the distant forest.

  Saturday night was the first night in Brennen Siding’s history that every door was locked.

  It was heard again on Sunday night, but only for a few moments.

  On Monday evening, fifteen men and boys stood around in Bernie Hanley’s store, eating oranges and drinking Sussex ginger ale.

  On Monday evening in Bernie Hanley’s store, the conversation was not about Joe Louis, the Saturday night jamboree, or the price of pulp wood. On Monday evening in Bernie Hanley’s store, the conversation was not about Shirley Ramsey and Ford cars; nor did the men dwell on gold in the Yukon, or horses. Monda
y evening, the conversation rambled around everything from rabbits crying to the eerie screams of the eastern cougar; from the strange and numerous variations in the fox’s bark, to ghosts and the devil.

  “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for goin’ into that woods over there tonight,” said Bob Nash. “Not even with me .303.”

  “No, sir! A panther kin climb and he’d git ya from a tree. Ya’d not know he was there till ’e was on top o’ ya,” put in Bert Todder. The panther was the cat that everyone decided upon. It somehow sounded better than cougar.

  “Me? I don’t think we’re dealin’ wit’ a pant’er at all,” began Stan Tuney. Stan Tuney always ate his oranges with the peel still on them. That’s how they ate them in the Yukon, he’d been told. “I was back Todder Brook last Tuesday and I must’ve seen a thousand moose tracks. The biggest moose tracks I ever seen!”

  “Are you sayin’ we got us a moose runnin’ round through the woods blattin’ his head off, Stan?” asked Bert.

  “I’d say t’was a panther, meself. Me father always said that the Dungarvon whooper was a panther!”

  “There ain’t been a panther in this woods for a hundred years!” said Dan Brennen with authority. “They never were panthers anyway. They were what you call eastern cougars.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ we’re hearin’ moose, or panthers,” said Stan. “What I’m sayin’ is, I saw tracks that I thought was made by a moose. Cloven hooves is what I saw, so I did, if ya know what I mean, like, see?”

  “What would the devil want back Todder Brook?” laughed Dan Brennen, as if the whole idea was stupid and nobody could possibly know anything about this except himself.

  But John Kaston was the true authority here. John had read the Bible, and only the Bible would have the answers to such a mystery. He demanded attention by thumping his fist on the counter in the way that Reverend Mather might thump the pulpit.

  “Don’t you know that the wilderness is the playground of Satan?” yelled John, as if frustrated with their stupidity. “Did he not tempt the Saviour in the woods? Wasn’t it in the woods where he tried to get the good Lord to turn the rocks into bread, and Jesus said that man can’t live on bread alone? I tell ya, that he walks the Dungarvon jist the same as he walked . . . the Jordan. It’s right there in the Bible! All ya gotta do is read yer Bible!” Later, walking home, Dryfly was thankful he had his gun-shaped stick in his pocket. Somehow, its presence made him feel more secure. He was also thankful Palidin was with him. Palidin did not seem to be afraid at all.