Murther and Walking Spirits

  “Any idea how far that was, Gil? No, and I haven’t either, but it was five hundred miles if it was an ell, as the crow flies, and they weren’t crows. Do you suppose they made twenty-five miles a day, through the wilderness, and getting over rivers somehow, and creatures they’d never seen busting through the undergrowth and staring at them? Indians, too, I reckon, and they’d have taken the Indians for enemies, though I don’t suppose they were. Indians are mischievious, and I’ve no doubt at all they played them some tricks. But the ones with the Devil in them made it, and my Devils made it to not far from here. And they worked! How they worked! But it was Heaven for them, because every family had its Location, as it was called, free and clear. No laird to turn them off it at his pleasure. So after some farming my grandparents set up a tavern, and the woman kept the tavern while the man worked the farm. Hard, hard work, but to them it was thriving, after the awfulness of Baldoon.

  “It was in that tavern, Gil, that I played when I was a little shaver, and it was from my grandmother’s tavern slate, where they kept score, that I learned to reckon, and reckoning come so easy to me that I’ve lived by reckoning pretty much ever since. I got to be a Devil at reckoning. A lot of the scores were paid off in barter, so you had to have a good notion of values.”

  I see the tavern, and the plain dull room that is the bar. Every wall is lined with cupboards, and little William – as he then was – plays at crawling among the cupboards, to see how far he can go from one side of the room to the other, without being baulked by the cases of liquor. There are not many of these, for the whisky and the rum stand in barrels behind the bar, and it is from them that the grandmother – who keeps a very strict barroom and permits no smutty stories or swearing – serves generous measures at a penny a glass. As the whisky is purchased at twenty-five cents a gallon, such a price for a dram yields a good profit. There are jugs of spring water on the tables, but few men want water. The liquor is good, of its kind, but its kind is not the modern kind, for the whisky is given colour and savour by generous additions of tobacco leaf and salt. There are low taverns where whisky contains a little opium, as well, but Mrs. McOmish will have none of that, and “McOmishes” is known to be a decent place. Decent or not, a great deal of whisky is consumed, for the men who come here are farmers who could drink lye without taking much harm, and the travellers in the uncomfortable, bone-racking stagecoaches, who want a potent drink to warm them. But drunkards are warned off, and Mrs. McOmish sears them with biblical admonitions that wine is a mocker, and strong drink is raging. Not whisky, of course. A few drams after a day’s work is no more than a man needs, for his comfort, but orray-eyed drunkards are not tolerated.

  (4)

  THUS MR. MCOMISH continues, delighting in detail and scraps of minute information that would have been golden to the young listener if he had been an historian, but he is impatient and his attention wanders. What was this long, rambling chronicle like in his experience? In substance, if not in high-flown language, it was like the poems of Ossian, which his dear mother used to read to her children at bedtime. Yes; Ossian, whose tales of long ago and far away had held him spellbound as a child. Ossian, probably a fake, though his mother knew nothing of that, and she loved those fine tales as the great Emperor Napoleon had loved them; the poems of Ossian were what he took with him on his campaigns, and Ossian inspired him to splendid enterprise. But Gil, who has had a difficult day with Mrs. McOmish and the girls, falls asleep, until he almost falls off his hard chair, and starts into wakefulness, to hear what, in Ossian’s bardic vein, would have been a tale of love.

  “You’d never believe it, Gil, to look at her now, but when first I set eyes on Virgie she was the loveliest little thing you ever saw. Slim and supple as a willow, and the lightest step – ! Saw her in church, of course. Where else would I meet anybody of her stamp? Old Loyalist family and such? But I’d seen her before church, when she didn’t know it, and I saw her bare foot and it nearly finished me, it was so slim and white.

  “You see, we all walked to church – never travel on Sunday except on foot and to worship – and I was making my way along Fairchild’s Creek, because that was the shortest from the farmhouse where I boarded, and I came on a bunch of five or six girls sitting on the bank of the creek, pulling on their stockings. They walked barefoot until they were almost at the church, y’see, then they washed their feet in the stream and pulled on their shoes and stockings, so they’d not be dusty when they met the congregation. Oh, there was vanity, even among Wesleyan Methodists, let me tell you! You can’t quell vanity, because the Devil won’t have it, that’s why. I heard them laughing, and I didn’t show myself among the bushes, and I peeked. The Devil, you see. I didn’t know what they might be up to, but I wanted to see it. And Virgie was in the midst of the group, waving her bare feet to dry ’em, and chewing something. And do you know what it was? A ribbon. A pink ribbon and she was chewing it to make it wet and then she was dabbing her mouth with it, to make her lips a pretty pink! The Devil! And I thought that’s the one for me, the girl with the Devil in her! She was sixteen, but she was developed. You know what I mean? Developed, but not over-developed like some of those girls that had breasts like four-quart pails. And that was it. I was a goner.

  “But how would a young sprig like me, just out of apprenticeship to a carpenter, get to know a girl like that? She was a Vanderlip, and that meant a lot in those days and in that place.

  “Oh, I found out about her, you can bet. Asked everybody, and I thought I was cute and nobody’d guess, but I suppose they did. Love and a cough can’t be hid, as they say. The Vanderlips were part of the Vermuelen and Gage tribe, and they were the biggest people in the district. Old Gus Vermuelen was dead, but he’d made a pile, let me tell you, as a land agent. His sister Anna had died not too long ago, a very old woman, and by Gum she was a tough old party! By the Eternal, she was! Escaped from the Yankees after the Revolution in the States, and licked it up here with her children in a canoe – think of it, in a canoe – and got her Loyalist’s rights in money, and cracked it all into a general store. And she throve, boy, she throve! Richer than Gus, even. Her daughter Elizabeth was Virgie’s grandmother and Elizabeth married Justus Vanderlip – the Dutch stick to their own, you bet – and Elizabeth had eleven children: seven boys and four girls, and every one of the boys got to be a rich farmer, or a lawyer, or a doctor, and all with solid money. Even the girls had money promised, when they married. One of the farmer sons, Nelson it was, was my Virgie’s father, and had his own money as well as whatever old Justus might leave him. So who was I to dangle after an heiress? Eh? A young carpenter, just out of apprenticeship? Eh? What was I?

  “I’ll tell you what I was, Gil. I had the Devil in me as big as theirs. I could reckon. Not much education, but I made the most of what I had, and I was lucky to have one good schoolteacher, a young feller named Douglas; he was teaching for a year or two to get some money to go to college, as they all did then, and he was a bear for reckoning, and he saw the promise in me and he taught me all he knew. Ordinary reckoning, of course – storekeeper’s stuff – but beyond that he taught me algebra and Euclid. That name mean anything to you?”

  Oh yes indeed. Gil had heard of Euclid, the father of geometry. It was at that moment I was certain that Gil was my grandfather. So Mr. McOmish must be my great-grandfather, the family scandal.

  “Yes, I had Euclid behind me, and I was all set to be a builder. Not just one of your hammer-and-saw carpenters, framing barns and hen-houses and putting up little square hutches for humble people. I burned with ambition, boy, and I wanted that girl, Vanderlip though she might be. But how?

  “Get her attention, that’s how. So I joined the church choir. Not much of a voice, but loud and shrewd. After I got to know her she told me I could be heard way above the rest. She said that when it was that old Methodist favourite

  Oh for a thousand tongues to sing

  My dear Redeemer’s praise,

  everybody gave thanks that Will M
cOmish had just the one tongue. She was a wit, that girl. We didn’t sing difficult music, like the Anglicans; they sang in parts; Tonic Sol-Fa they called it, or some such nonsense. We just sang the tunes, as loud as we could, to pull the others after us. I could see her, down in the church, laughing at me while I strained and hollered. But I got to be a figure in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Loudest voice and pious. I didn’t think much of Reverend Cattermole, the preacher, but I put on a serious face and never missed a word he said, and that counted with her parents. So one day after church Mrs. Alma, Nelson’s wife – very fine woman, always had a fine silk dress – asked me home to Sunday dinner, at the family place, old Justus’s house, the palace of the dynasty.

  “I went, and I minded my manners. Didn’t eat like a wolf, though the food was way above the level of my boarding-house. Always said ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you kindly ma’am’ and ‘Splendid victuals these are’ and ‘No more thanks, I couldn’t eat another bite,’ and listened respectfully to the old folks. Old Elizabeth sat at one end of the table and Old Justus sat at the other and all the kin and in-laws on each side. I was the only stranger and I declare I felt I’d been singled out. These were silver-fork people and I minded my p’s and q’s. Never cast a glance at Virginia, down the long table. But before I went home, as soon as I’d et, I shook hands all round, and when I took her hand it was like the handle of one of those electric batteries. So I was emboldened to ask Mrs. Alma if I might call again, and she said of course.

  “That was how it began. Before autumn I was walking out with Virginia. Telling her about my ambition, and boasting, I guess, as young fellers do with a girl. Those were glory-days, Gil. I don’t imagine you ever felt anything like that. It was unique, as we say of a particular architectural problem.”

  Mr. McOmish, in his arrogance and egotism, underestimated Gil. Underestimated every young man who has ever been in love. Gil could hear his mother’s voice, raised in the words of Ossian:

  Fair rose the breasts of the maid, white as the bosom of a swan, rising graceful on swift-rolling waves. It was Colna-dona of harps, the daughter of the king! Her blue eyes had rolled on Toscar, and her love arose!

  “So at last it come to the point where I had to speak to Nelson Vanderlip and ask for Virginia. By the Eternal, Gil, but I was scared! I don’t suppose anybody in all history has been so scared. He had a black silk waistcoat, and a watch with a fob with a good many seals on it, and old-fashioned whiskers; not a beard but big fuzzy things growing out of the side of his face. What sailors call bugger-grips, whatever that means. And he sat there after a Sunday dinner, in the parlour, just looking at me with his eyes half-shut.”

  Yes, thinks Gil, just the way you looked at me when I asked for Malvina. And you told me not to think above my station, you – you failure!

  “It worked out, though. He said I’d have to wait. Prove myself. Serve seven years for Rachel, he said; he was full of Bible sayings. But that was all I needed. He hadn’t said No. I suppose he saw the good stuff in me. Knew I was a sure thing.

  “Soon it was all round the family, and they were nice about it, except for Cynthia, who was the only girl still not married, and with a game leg, and a disposition like a box of broken bottles. And I set out to prove myself. And by the Eternal, I did!

  “Had to get away, of course. I’d learned everything that could be learned there. Went to Hamilton, and got myself taken on by a really big builder, one of the Depews. And there I learned not only joinery but a lot of the cabinet-work and the real heart of building. And everything I did profited by the reckoning I could do, because many a good workman can’t reckon for sour apples. Haven’t got the head for it. Because it’s a gift, you see. Any fool can learn the basics, but they can’t apply them. Can’t see where they fit into a piece of work. And I did some very sweet work for the Depews, till I knew the time had come to go and claim my bride from Nelson Vanderlip. I’d saved. Scrimped and denied myself, and in that whole five years I only got to see Virginia five times, but she was true to me. Pretty true, I suppose I should say.

  “Not that she strayed. Not a particle. But she was young and lovely and young fellows hung around, and there was one schoolteacher wrote her some poetry, and she showed it to me and we laughed over it. I should have heeded that, Gil. What kind of woman laughs at a man’s heart, however rotten his poetry is? I found out, later on, when it was too late. But I laughed with her. ‘He may be a half-cut schoolteacher, but he’s a flat-cut poet,’ I said, and I thought I was pretty smart. Lucky devil, he was, though he moped a good deal when she gave him the gate.

  “Not that he ever got near her. It wasn’t the fashion of the day. I was her accepted sweetheart, but I hardly dared put my arm around her, and as for the kissing – I tried that once but she jumped away mad, and said, ‘You mustn’t kiss me without you ask me first, because I mightn’t want it.’ Jackass that I was, it never occurred to me that if she loved me the way I loved her, she darned well ought to want it. We had great ideas about the purity of girls in those days. They didn’t want it and they didn’t want it after marriage, a lot of them, and how they ever had babies I couldn’t figure, but I found out later.

  “So at last I had a few hundred dollars, and Virgie and I were married in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and there was a big supper at the Vanderlips’, and I was astonished to find how many relatives I had all of a sudden, and how kind of few-in-the-pod my parents looked as they sat at that table, which had been moved out into the yard for the occasion. I made a speech that I’d sweated over, about how good it was of the Vanderlips to let their last daughter go to a poor feller like me, but how I’d try to be worthy of her. For our honeymoon we went to Buffalo on the old stern-wheeler Red Jacket. I don’t recommend a stern-wheeler or Buffalo for a honeymoon.”

  (5)

  ALL OF WHICH, as Mr. McOmish talked, was unfolded before me on the screen, so much more revealing than anything he said. Because he was the narrator, of course, I saw that the Vanderlips were glad enough to be quit of their sharp-tongued daughter, and now that Cynthia – not the most desirable of brides, because of that short leg she got when it was caught in the wheel of a hay-wagon – was married to Daniel Boutell, who was a showy fellow with a big moustache, who travelled in dry-goods – they had at last discharged their nineteenth-century parental duty to their children.

  Before the buggy with the ribbons tied around the whip took off for the steamboat wharf, Nelson Vanderlip handed William an envelope, with a richly paternal smile, for it contained Virginia’s marriage portion, a cheque for twenty-five hundred dollars, and not a trivial fortune in terms of the times and the bridegroom’s deserts.

  (6)

  Some grey warrior, half blind with age, sitting by night tells now his deeds to his son, and the fall of the dark Dunthalmo. The face of the youth bends sidelong toward his voice. Surprise and joy burns in his eyes! … I gave him the white-bosomed Colmal. They dwell in the halls of Teutha.

  Thus the words of Ossian rose, half-understood, into the memory of Gil. Were they apt to this wretched tale of a carpenter and a rich farmer’s girl? To his own situation, listening to Mr. McOmish? It depends, surely, on how you choose to see it.

  “Let’s forget the honeymoon and what came of it for a while.” Mr. McOmish is almost genial; the drug is making him expansive. But, oh! how cold the unfurnished room is, and how eerie the light from the lamp. Am I to be here all night, thinks the red-haired young man. He fears Mr. McOmish, and with reason, for his father-in-law has a reputation for violence that has ruined his marriage and terrorized his daughters. His servitude to morphia has devoured his substance. His family wish only to be quit of him, and Gil has been sent to get a legal assurance of that. It is plain that nothing will be signed until the tale has been told, and how long will that be? From time to time Gil nods off, to awake with a start to find himself once again facing the terrible old man – old? he is not so old; he is fifty-six or – seven – who has hitched his chair so near to Gil that now
they are sitting almost young knee to bony knee.

  “I was crowned with success, Gil. Success, that’s to say, in so far as it was open to a man of my talents, a builder who knew his work thoroughly, as few builders do, let me tell you. With Virginia’s marriage portion I was able to set up in business in a solid way. I could command the best workmen and the best materials, and I could get the best out of both. Whatever I built then is standing today, and will stand until some fool pulls it down. Do you know what they say, Gil? They say that a builder who builds houses to last is a traitor to his trade, but that’s scoundrel’s talk. Is there anybody who is anybody who does what he does less than the best he can? Where’s the morality in jerry-building? I was a moral builder, Gil. Always have been a moral man, whatever Virgie may say of me. Virgie was poisoned by old Cynthia Boutell. Virgie isn’t a bad woman, but she’s a sour one. Old Cynthy’s the bad one.

  “Right from the start, I was a success, and everybody who wanted good work wanted me. But my great send-off came about eighteen months after I started in business, and that was when I was given the job of building a mansion for Mrs. Julius Long-Pott-Ott.

  “That name makes your eyes bug, don’t it? But she was the great social leader of this place, and rich as they come. She’d been Louida Beemer, but she married Mr. Long, who was an old storekeeper with a pile of money, and he choked on a fishbone within a year of the marriage, and not long after she married Mr. Pott, who owned the big China Hall on Colborne Street. Louida was a pretty girl, and a nice girl, too, which doesn’t always follow, but she was either lucky or unlucky in her husbands whichever way you want to look at it. It wasn’t two years before Mr. Pott fell downstairs – he was a secret drinker – and broke his neck. So Louida didn’t even have to buy new weeds, because she could have her mourning for Mr. Long made over. And she looked so fetching in her weeds that the obligatory year was only just up when she married old Ott, who was a German with more money than you could shake a stick at, which he made out of hogs. And there was Louida, three times a widow, with three big fortunes, and not yet thirty when Ott died – died of too handsome a wife, people said, but that’s what they always say in such cases – she was such a nice woman that she didn’t drop a single one of her husbands’ names, and Mrs. Julius Long-Pott-Ott she was and still remains, and a real high-flyer with her own saloon.