Robert regained his feet and lunged, butting his head like a battering ram between the giant’s shoulder blades. Teddy only knew that he was being attacked. He couldn’t see who by and he couldn’t imagine why. His reaction was immediate and sensible, under the circumstances. He reached up over his head and grasped the only thing that came to hand. One of Robert’s Indian clubs. With this he struck out blindly at the figure in the overcoat, whose face he could not see.
Well. The soldier and the father and the brother pulled the rock embracer away and prevented human murder. They carried Robert into the house—(more or less carried him: his feet were dragged along the ground) and at the door the father turned back and gave the man in the stable the signal to proceed with the business for which he had been summoned.
All these actors were obeying some kind of fate we call ‘revenge.’ Because a girl had died—and her rabbits had survived her.
10 That night Robert was lying in the bathtub, soothing his aches and bruises with water that was almost scalding hot. He’d rubbed wherever he could reach on his back with eucalyptus oil. His mother knocked at the door and before he could say: ‘Who’s there?’ she had entered and closed the door behind her.
The room was full of steam. Mrs Ross was wearing a pale opal dress and long black mourning beads. On one side, her hair had loosened and it hung down in loops across her cheek. The other side was perfectly coiffed and pinned. She was smoking a cigarette and carrying an empty glass. For a moment she stood there, holding her hands in tight against her body as if for some reason Robert might take these possessions away from her. The glass and the cigarette were perhaps some sort of tangible evidence she was alive. Robert watched her with his arms hanging over the sides of the tub and the only sound was the dripping of the taps and the plash of a washcloth sliding into the water like something from the sea—afraid.
Mrs Ross—closing the toilet seat—sat down. She used the sink as an ashtray, carefully rolling the ashes off along its edge and watching them fall down the porcelain slopes like mountain climbers tumbling to their death. She shivered.
Robert looked away. His thoughts—that had seemed so consecutive and wise a moment before—began to stutter and shuffle to a halt. He sat there blank.
Mrs Ross said: ‘Did he hurt you very badly?’
Robert said ‘No.’
‘There’s such a large blue mark just above your shoulder blades,’ she said with a smile. ‘You look as if you’d gone to sea and had yourself tattooed.’
‘Yes. I could see it in the mirror.’
‘Do you want me to…help in any way?’
‘No.’ Beat. ‘Thank you.’
Mrs Ross tumbled another climber down the slope. ‘Once,’ she said, ‘when you were just a child…’
Robert closed his eyes. He hated the way she used his childhood—everyone’s childhood as a weapon.
‘You fell down. Skating.’
‘I fell down a lot.’
‘Yes. But this time you were skating. You bruised so easily. Your elbows and your knees swelled up—worse than Uncle Harry with the gout!’ She laughed. ‘And your arms and thighs and your shins were simply black with bruises. Black and blue and yellow. Just like a savage painted for the wars. How alarmed we always were—every time you fell…’
‘Yes.’
Suddenly Mrs Ross threw her head back and laughed. Robert looked at her to see what might be wrong. She laughed and laughed and laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks and the cigarette fell from her fingers and she had to bend to pick it up. But the laughter was not hysterical, as Robert had feared. He waited for it to stop—and, finally, she explained.
‘If only you’d seen yourself. Wearing those crazy skates!’ she said. ‘You were such a serious child. Everything was done with such great concentration.’ Laughter. ‘Thump! Thump! Thump! You were coming up the walk. I don’t know where you’d been—but you were walking on your ankles. Absolutely right down flat on your ankles wearing those crazy skates! And you had this great big stick in your hand. You were wearing a sweater—god knows whose it was!—but it was twice your size and the sleeves hung down like the arms of an ape and the waist came down to your knees! You were five years old and your hat had fallen off. Your hair was standing straight on end.’
She set the empty glass on the floor and re-assembled herself—using toilet paper to wipe her eyes. After this, she sighed and crossed her legs—looking as if she always came and sat in the bathroom with her son while he bathed. ‘You must’ve come a long, long way,’ she said. ‘That day. Your expression was so intent. And the ankles of your skates were almost worn right through. Do you remember that? I can even hear the sound of the blades as you scraped them over the bricks. Like someone sharpening knives.’ She blinked. ‘Still you persevered—and later you were captain of the Team.’
Robert moved his legs around and the water lapped at the edges of the tub. His mother watched him—all the laughter fading from her eyes. If Robert had turned to look, the expression on her face might have frightened him. Yet people tend to look most often like themselves when no one else is watching. Her lips, at the corners, drew back involuntarily. Her mouth was dry. Her eyelids drooped. She watched her son with Delphic concentration while the smoke from her cigarette looped up and curled across her face. ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘how most people fall down and nothing happens. Some people bruise like apples. But most people—nothing.’
‘Yes.’
While others die.
After a long, long silence Mrs Ross dropped the cigarette and used her toe to squash it out—grinding and twisting it into the tiles until it was just a mess of juice and paper, torn beyond recognition. For a moment she looked at what she’d done and then, without looking up, she spoke in a voice as passionless as sleep: ‘You think Rowena belonged to you. Well I’m here to tell you, Robert, no one belongs to anyone. We’re all cut off at birth with a knife and left at the mercy of strangers. You hear that? Strangers. I know what you want to do. I know you’re going to go away and be a soldier. Well—you can go to hell. I’m not responsible. I’m just another stranger. Birth I can give you—but life I cannot. I can’t keep anyone alive. Not any more.’
Robert sat frozen.
Mrs Ross stared at her empty glass. How long had it been empty? Hours? Minutes? Years? She stood up. She sat down. Nothing more was said. Each one faded from the other through the steam. This was the last time they breathed in one another’s presence. In the morning he was gone before she woke.
11 So Robert Ross was admitted to the army, 2nd of April, 1915.
Almost at once he was dispatched to join the 30th Battery, C.F.A. in training at Lethbridge, Alberta. He was studious and careful: exact. He watched the men around him from a distance. Some of them were friends from school. To these he was polite but he found excuses to keep them at bay. He wanted no attachments yet. What he wanted was a model. Someone who could teach him, by example, how to kill. Robert had never aimed a gun at anything. It was a foreign state of mind. So what he wanted was someone else who had acquired that state of mind: who killed as an exercise of the will.
The days were made of maps and horses: of stable drill and artillery range. They drilled from dawn to suppertime—wagons and limbers—rigs and harnesses—mountings and emplacements—dress parades and lines of fire. It was much like school: roll call and messhall. Even the pranks were the same—applepie beds and water bombs. Anyone who’d been to boarding school was well conditioned to rank. Someone shouted at you and you jumped. The difference was that, as you rose towards your commission, you were given a good deal more opportunity to shout back. Robert had been a cadet at St Andrew’s but he’d never enjoyed being an officer there. It offended him to raise his voice. Telling other people what to do made him laugh. Just as being told what to do made him angry. Consequently, on parade he was prone to a lot of blushing. For awhile he was known as ‘Red.’ This was the source, perhaps, of Robert’s popularity. In spite of his aloofness—no o
ne could dislike a man who blushed.
Evenings, Robert would sit on the stoop at the rear of the barracks’ kitchen, wearing an old torn pair of flannels and a white shirt with a frayed collar and he would stare at the prairie, deciding which direction to run in. He knew if he stood on the roof he could turn 360 degrees sighting nothing but a distant barn or a dark green bluff of trees. These might be his destination on some of the runs—but he most often made for the horizon.
He would put on his shoes with the rubber soles—(he never wore socks to run in)—tie his cardigan around his waist and start out walking. He didn’t like to run inside the compound. It seemed undignified—perhaps it was too much like being told to run around the quad at school. But walking was an impediment. By the time he reached the gates he was already loping and beyond the gates the lope became the long, instinctive stride that was his natural gait. He kept his eyes cast down. He never watched the sky. He lost all sense of time. There was nothing to be won but distance.
12 One night, Robert ran with a coyote. At first he thought it was a dog until he realized no dog he’d ever seen had legs that long. It was running ahead of him when Robert first saw it—really little more than trotting. Its tail was down and its ears were laid back, which meant it had a destination. Robert had never seen an animal so thin. He wondered why it wasn’t hunting and he thought perhaps there must be a place it went to hunt—some valley or slough that Robert hadn’t yet discovered where there might be squirrels and rabbits. Robert decided to follow. He would not pick up his pace unless the distance between them was threatened. He recognized the coyote had no inkling of his presence simply because it made no attempt to alter its gait. They ran this way for almost half-an-hour.
Every once in a while the coyote would throw in an extra step—dancing to one side either around some hole in the ground or a stone. The holes in the ground didn’t seem to interest it. Perhaps it knew they were dead. Maybe it knew every hole in the prairie and which ones had already offered up their suppers and breakfasts of gophers and sand owls. This was Robert’s first thought—but then ahead of them he saw two gophers sitting upright—rising and falling—whistling to one another. The coyote must’ve seen them, too, but it didn’t vary its pace at all—it didn’t even come down off its toes. And when it came to the place where the gophers had been sitting, neither did it pause to scuffle the burrows or even to sniff at them. It just went right on trotting—forward towards its goal.
Soon after they’d passed the gopher holes the coyote broke from the trot to a canter. Robert adjusted his stride accordingly and, at first, he found there was little difficulty keeping pace. The previous pace had been so leisurely and steady that neither his lungs nor his legs were tired.
Since the race had begun to quicken, Robert imagined the coyote’s destination must be within striking distance and he began to scan the prairie for a likely landmark. There was nothing—not even a mound of stones.
Then suddenly—the coyote disappeared. Vanished. Robert—at the most—had blinked and the beast was gone. He slowed his pace, thinking perhaps the animal would reappear; that maybe there was sweat in his eyes—or a den so perfectly camouflaged that in seconds he would trip at its door. But there was nothing.
Robert ran faster.
His cardigan began to slip down over his thighs. He pulled it off and knotted the arms around his neck. In front of him, as if the world were tipping in his face, he saw the blue-green leaves of trees. The branches seemingly rose straight out of the ground. Robert had come to a valley—as sudden as a pit.
He stopped at the edge, looking down. The valley was neither wide nor long and was no more than forty or fifty feet deep at its centre. The sides dropped away in sharply incised runnels that indicated the ice age had played some part in forming it. The trees were gathered like whispering conspirators around the edges of a bright sheet of water. The coyote drank at the brink.
This was June and almost the summer solstice. The sun was still two hours from setting, though it was now about seven o’clock. The heat had deserted the day and the water sent a cool shock up the walls of the valley, striking at Robert as if a wind had risen. He put on his cardigan and hunkered down to watch the coyote drinking. It was below him, now—about sixty feet away with its back to him. This was why they’d come the distance. A rendezvous with water. Robert thought when the coyote had finished he would go down himself and maybe even swim. He hadn’t been swimming in such a long time he couldn’t remember when or where it had been, though it must have been last summer at Jackson’s Point. Mister Ross had bought them a cottage there in 1900. It had tall green sides, plank and batten, and its deep shady porches were hung with hammocks and screened with bamboo blinds you could raise and lower on strings. Meg had been brought from some cousins down the road and ridden round and round the yard while Rowena begged to be lifted up and given a ride…
Robert closed his eyes. The sound of the coyote lapping at the water crossed the distance between them and the sound seemed to satisfy his own thirst. He took a deep breath and sat like that, on his haunches, with his hands dangling down—fingertips brushing the raw blades of grass. The sun was shining on his face. He could feel that it was gold and red—just as he could feel that the grass was green. His face was a mirror to the sun.
When the coyote had drunk its fill it turned from the water and suddenly sat down, scratching violently behind its ear. Then it sat, panting and looking around the valley just like a thoroughly satisfied owner. It threw its nose to the air and snapped at some passing insect. It scratched its ear again but this time with the supreme indolence of a dog before a fire. It carefully tasted the tips of its blunted claws and licked them clean before it rose and trotted off through the trees. It had rested ten minutes.
Robert lost sight of it and was beginning to think perhaps its den was in the bluff when he saw it again, climbing the opposite bank of the valley. As it came to the edge it had to hoist itself over the top. This caused a bit of a scramble and the air filled up with dust. The coyote shook itself—turned around and Robert thought it was going to come back for some reason—that perhaps it had made a mistake traversing the whole of the valley and now it must return the way it had come. But instead—it stood on the opposite bank, threw back its head and howled. Then it looked directly at him—right at Robert, with its tail slightly lowered—and barked. Then the tail began to wag. The coyote had known he was there the whole time: maybe the whole of their run across the prairie. Now it was telling Robert the valley was vacant: safe—and that Robert could proceed to the water’s edge to drink. It barked three times—a precise announcement it was leaving. Then it turned around and trotted off towards the sun.
Robert was late that night for lights out. His punishment was that he was confined to barracks for two weeks. In the evenings, he sat on the roof and stared and stared and stared across the prairie—wishing that someone would howl.
13 It was because of the horses that Robert met Eugene Taffler.
They met on the prairie.
Robert had been assigned to a detail, earlier that day, whose job it had been to bring in some wild horses that had come down from Calgary. They were mustangs and later that week—destined as mounts for officers in France—they were to be broken one by one. They were magnificent horses with tremendous stamina—but they also had a lot of independent spirit. Getting them back to the Depot from the station was a job for cowboys, not for men whose only previous experience of riding had been around the circle of Queen’s Park Crescent. They took a wild and circuitous route—miles out into the prairie—and the exercise that had begun at 9 a.m. was not concluded till sometime after 4 p.m.
When all the horses had been corraled, it was discovered two of them were missing. Robert, being well acquainted now with the prairie (this was August), volunteered to ride out and see if he could find them. A boy who had gone to St Andrew’s with Robert—whose name was Clifford Purchas—volunteered to go out with him. After supper, they ventured in
the direction of the barn Robert had seen from the roof which was about a mile distant.
As they rode, Robert and Clifford sang old hymns they’d learned at school. They sang at the tops of their lungs and they sang the old hymns because they were the only songs they mutually knew. Clifford also knew an obscene version of ‘Oh, Susannah!’ which he sang in a high, clear tenor with exactly the same pitch of intensity he’d just applied to the Old Hundredth. When the song had reached its carnal peak—Robert suddenly said: ‘Be quiet!’ and reined in his horse.
‘What is it?’ Clifford asked.
‘That’s what I want to know,’ said Robert and nodded to one side where a figure could be seen throwing stones at a row of bottles lined up on a board. This person was about a hundred yards distant and was stripped to the waist, with his braces hanging down. A saddled horse was grazing about ten feet away from him and a dog was seated, with its ears erect, watching him. Every stone the man threw hit a bottle. He didn’t miss once.
As Robert and Clifford sat there watching the dog must have caught their scent, for it turned around and began to bark.
The man with the stones in his hand gave a friendly wave and called out: ‘Hallo!’ Then he threw another stone and broke another bottle.
Robert said: ‘Who is it?’
Clifford said: ‘That’s Eugene Taffler, you idiot.’
Robert said: ‘Oh.’ Subdued. Taffler was a hero. He’d already been to France—wounded and returned to Canada. Now he was fully recovered and sent West to look over the horse flesh prior to being reposted overseas. He had also been a Varsity all-round athlete, though this was before Robert’s time and therefore Taffler’s face was not familiar to him. His name, however, was credential enough.
‘Are we going over?’ Clifford asked.