Who Has Seen the Wind Page 2
“No,” Brian said.
“I’m Benny Banana.”
“Benny Banana — Benny Banana,” chanted Brian, “Banana-Benny-Banana.”
The boy sat down; he picked up a thin pebble from the sand. “What’s yours?”
Brian plumped himself down by the boy.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked again.
“Brian Sean MacMurray O’Connal,” said Brian.
“I’m Forbsie Hoffman.” The boy touched the tip of his tongue with the pebble he had picked up. The pebble hung. To Brian it was magic.
“I’m going to do that. I’m going to hang it to my tongue.” He tried it. “Mine won’t hang at all.”
“Naw ’hinny enouch,” said Forbsie with the pebble still clinging to the tip of his protruding tongue.
Brian found that a skinnier pebble hung.
Forbsie said, “Thpt.”
Brian said, “Thpt.”
“Do you know anything more?” asked Brian.
“I’m hungry. Maybe if you was to ask, your maw’d give us a piece.”
“The baby’s going to die. She won’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Going to Heaven,” explained Brian.
“My dad’s a conductor,” Forbsie said, “on the C.P.R. He has got silver buttons.”
“It’s where God stays,” said Brian. “Heaven.”
“No it ain’t,” said Forbsie.
“Yes — Heaven’s where He stays.”
“Heaven ain’t,” the boy persisted. “He stays here.”
“Uncle Sean says, ‘Good God in Heaven!’ He says it all the time. He’s always saying it. He knows Him. He’s all the time talking goddam.”
The boy lifted his arm and pointed. “God lives right in town. Over there.”
“I haven’t seen Him.”
“I’ve seen Him lots of times,” Forbsie informed him.
“Where?”
“At His House.”
“You have not!”
“Oh, yes! He’s all grapes and bloody. He carries around a lamb with its legs dangling down.”
“Does He?”
“Wouldn’t she give us a piece if you was to ask?”
“What’s a lamb like?”
“Like a sheep pup.”
“Uncle Sean has calfs.”
“Could we get something to eat at your uncle’s?”
“He lives out of town a long ways. He’s Dad’s brother. He’s on prairie. He has calfs and makes wheat, only there’s a lot of goddam-drought. Has God calfs too?”
“Oh, yes. He has calfs, I guess.”
Brian got up. “Let’s us go over to His place.”
“It’s a long ways aways.”
“We could get a piece there.”
“No,” said Forbsie positively, “we wouldn’t get anything there.”
“Yes, we would,” Brian insisted. “Let’s go anyways.”
Forbsie got up. “I guess I’ll go home.”
“It’s in Heaven like I said.”
“Oh, no, it ain’t. I don’t feel so much like going.”
“I’ve got something to say to Him. I’m going to get Him after people. I’m going to get Him after my gramma, and it’ll serve her right.”
“He isn’t so much good for getting after people.”
“You show me where He lives,” Brian said.
“All right,” said Forbsie.
The wind had strengthened; it had begun to snap the clothes on Sherry’s line, where Mrs. Sherry, a tall, spare woman, was in the act of hanging up her washing. She took a clothes-pin from her mouth. “How is the baby today, Brian?”
“He’s very sick,” Brian told her. “This is Forbsie. We’re going to see Someone.”
Mrs. Sherry straightened up with limp underwear in her hands; she stared after the boys as they walked toward the front of the house.
Past hollyhocks’ tall spires swaying in the light wind with clock faces tilted towards them, the boys went to the front of the Sherry house. They walked down the boulevard through dry and rustling grass. At MacTaggart’s corner a tall man in shirt-sleeves greeted them, Mr. Digby, Principal of the town’s public school. He walked a block west with them from the corner. Digby could not be called a handsome man, largely because of the angularity of his face. One thought of field stone; his skin had the weathered look of split rock that has lain long under the sun and wind. His eyebrows, sandy in colour, were unruly over eyes of startling blueness; his hair lay in one fair shock over his forehead.
“We’re going to see Somebody,” Brian told him.
“Are you?” said Digby.
“Yes,” said Brian. “God.”
The schoolmaster showed no surprise. “I’d like to come with you, but I have a previous engagement.”
“What’s that?” asked Brian.
“It means that I can’t go,” said Digby. “Give Him my regards — tell Him I couldn’t come.”
“Who?” asked Brian. “Who shall we say couldn’t come?”
“Just a schoolmaster,” said Digby.
When the boys had turned off Bison Avenue and left the Principal, they walked in silence over the cement walks. Once they bent down to watch a bee crawl over a Canadian thistle’s royal hair, his licorice all-sorts stripes showing through the cellophane of folded wings. Down the road from time to time a dust devil spun, snatching up papers, dust, and debris, lifting them up, carrying them high into the air and leaving them finally to sink slowly down again.
“Step on a crack,” Forbsie sang, “break your mother’s back.”
Brian sang, “Step on a crack — break my gramma’s back.” He did not miss stepping upon a single crack for the three blocks that took them to the corner from which rose a great, grey, sandstone church, “Knox Presbyterian — 1902.”
“Is this it?” asked Brian.
Forbsie said that it was.
“Let’s go see Him, then.”
“I’m going home, I think. It’s supper-time, and I better get home.”
“Not yet.” Brian started up the stone steps; when he turned at the top, he saw that Forbsie was half-way down the block, his head turned back over his shoulder.
He didn’t care, thought Brian; he’d go in alone to see God all by himself and to tell Him on his grandmother. He knocked on the church door. As he did, he felt the wind ruffling his hair; he was aware of its gentle pressure upon his body. Forbsie was down by the corner now.
A woman came out of the little, brown house next to the church. She shook a mop, then turned to re-enter the house. She stopped as she saw Brian, stood watching him.
He’d tell God everything they did, about how they spent all their time with the baby, about how they’d made a tent and none for him. A fervent whirlwind passed the brown house with the woman standing on the porch; at the trees before the church, it rose suddenly, setting every leaf in violent motion, as though an invisible hand had gripped the trunks and shaken them. Brian wondered why Forbsie had not wanted to come. There wasn’t anything bad about God, was there? He knocked again. God was good. It was simply that He was in the bathroom and couldn’t come right away.
As he turned away from the door, he saw the woman staring at him. She ought to know if God was in; living next to God’s she’d know. He went down the steps and to the opening in the caragana hedge next door.
“I guess God isn’t anywhere around.”
“Why — what do you mean?”
“That’s His House, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to see Him — if it’s all right to see Him.”
The woman stared at him silently a moment, and under the slightly grey hair pulled severely back, her face wore an intense look. “God isn’t — He isn’t the same as other people, you
know. He’s a spirit.”
“What’s that like?”
“It’s someone — something you can’t hear — or see, or touch.” Her grey eyes were steady upon his face; he noted that her teeth had pushed back her upper lip slightly, giving her a permanent and relentless smile.
“Does He smell?”
“No. He doesn’t. I think you’d better talk with my husband. He’s the minister and he could tell you much more about this than I could,” she said, with what was almost relief loosening the words.
“Does he know God pretty well?”
“Pretty well. He — he tells people about Him.”
“Better than you do? Does he know better than you do?”
“It’s — it’s his job to know God.”
“My dad is a druggist. He works for God, I guess.”
“He works for God,” the woman agreed.
“My Uncle Sean isn’t a sheep herder — neither is Ab. Ab’s got a thing on his foot, and one foot is shorter, so he goes up and down when he walks.”
“And who is Ab?” the woman asked him.
“Uncle Sean’s hired man that feeds the pigs and helps grow the wheat whenever there isn’t any goddam-drought.”
The woman looked startled.
“Has your husband got calfs?” Brian asked her.
“No — he hasn’t any calfs — calves.” She looked quickly back over her shoulder and into the open door of the house.
“He looks after the sheep and the sheep pups.”
“Looks after the — !”
“I’m going to get God after my gramma,” Brian confided. “She has a thing on her leg too. It is not the same as Ab’s. You only see it on the heel. She’s got room-a-ticks in a leg.”
The woman cast another anxious look over her shoulder.
“She belches,” said Brian, “a lot.”
“Perhaps your grandmother has stomach trouble,” the woman suggested.
“She does it because she likes to. If your husband works for God, then he could take me in His House for a while, couldn’t he?”
“Perhaps he could,” the woman promised. “Tomorrow.”
“Not now?”
“Tomorrow — in the morning — after breakfast.” She turned to the doorway.
“Does God like to be all grapes and bloody?”
“All what!”
“That’s what I want to see.”
“But what do you mean — !”
“Something’s burning,” said Brian. “I’ll come back.”
She hurried in to her burning dinner.
Half aware of the shuttering effect of trees’ shadows, Brian walked back towards his home, from bright sunlight to broken shadow and back to light again. He did not turn down Bison Avenue where it crossed the street upon which the church was, but continued on, a dark wishbone of a child wrapped in reflection.
The wind was persistent now, a steady urgency upon his straight back, smoking up the dust from the road along the walk, lifting it and carrying it out to the prairie beyond. Several times, Brian stopped; once to look up into the sun’s unbearable radiance and then away with the lingering glow stubborn in his eyes; another time when he came upon a fox-red caterpillar making a procession of itself over a crack that snaked along the walk. He squashed it with his foot. Farther on he paused at a spider that carried its bead of a body between hurrying thread legs. Death came for the spider too.
He looked up to find that the street had stopped. Ahead lay the sudden emptiness of the prairie. For the first time in his four years of life, other than on visits to his Uncle Sean’s farm, he was on the prairie.
He had seen it often, from the verandah of his uncle’s house, or at the end of a long street, but till now he had never heard it. The hollowing hum of telephone wires along the road, the ring of hidden crickets, the stitching sound of grasshoppers, the sudden relief of a meadow lark’s song, were deliciously strange to him.
Without hesitation he crossed the road and walked out through the hip-deep grass stirring in the steady wind; the grass clung at his legs; haloed fox-tails bowed before him; looping grasshoppers sprang from hidden places in the grass, clicketing ahead of him to disappear then lift again.
A gopher squeaked questioningly as Brian sat down upon a rock warm to the backs of his thighs. He picked a pale blue flax flower at his feet, stared long at the stripings in its shallow throat, then looked up to see a dragon-fly hanging on shimmering wings directly in front of him. The gopher squeaked again, and he saw it a few yards away, sitting up, watching him from its pulpit hole. A suave-winged hawk chose that moment to slip its shadow over the face of the prairie.
And all about him was the wind now, a pervasive sighing through great emptiness, as though the prairie itself was breathing in long, gusting breaths, unhampered by the buildings of the town, warm and living against his face and in his hair.
Then, for the second time that day he saw a strange boy, one who came from behind him soundlessly, who stood and stared at him with steady grey eyes in a face of noticeable broadness with cheekbones circling high under a dark and freckled skin. He saw that the boy’s hair, bleached as the dead prairie grass itself, lay across his forehead in an all-round cowlick curling under at its edge. Once new, now indescribably faded, his pants hung open in two tears just below the knees. He was bare-footed.
Brian was not startled; he simply accepted the boy’s presence out here as he had accepted that of the gopher and the hawk and the dragon-fly.
“This is the prairie,” Brian said.
The boy continued to stare at him.
“It’s your prairie,” Brian said, “isn’t it?”
The boy did not answer him. He turned and walked as silently as he had come, out over the prairie. His walk was smooth.
After the boy’s figure had become just a speck in the distance, Brian looked up into the sky now filled with a soft expanse of cloud, their higher edges luminous and startling against the blue. They stretched to the prairie’s rim. As he stared, the grey underside of one carded out and through the clouds’ softness was revealed a blue well shot through with sunlight. Almost as soon as it had cleared, a whisking of cloud stole over it.
For one moment no wind stirred. A butterfly went pelting past.
God, Brian decided, must be very fond of the boy’s prairie.
TWO
* * *
The clock in the O’Connal living room ticked on in the silence as Sean O’Connal sat uncomfortably in the presence of Brian’s grandmother. Against the dark brown drapes behind the chair, his hair and moustaches showed a flaming and carrot red. He was a large man in faded blue overalls and work smock with flat, brass buttons, his solid hands resting upon great knees.
“When do you figger he’ll be back?” he asked for the second time since coming to the house.
The grandmother looked up from her sewing. “He should be home any minute now. Ye could phone the store if ye like.”
“I’ll wait,” said Sean. From a pants pocket he pulled out a pipe. He sucked on the amber stem to find it plugged. His face reddened slightly. He took out a jack knife and opened it. The grandmother worked on with her head bent.
“Got no goddam ash trays around here?”
“Your elbow.”
“Huh!”
“Right behind your elbow,” said the grandmother.
Sean turned his head to the small octagonal table at his chair arm and deposited a tarry mess of dottle on the tray there. He drew a length of hay wire from his coat pocket and rammed it through the pipe several times. Relaxing with the first puff, he said, “And what would you be makin’?”
Mrs. MacMurray bent her head to her work and bit off a thread. “A middy.” She held it up.
Sean eyed the square, broad collar that was meant to hang down the wearer’s back. “Who’s to wear that?”
“Brian.”
“I like to see a kid in overalls.”
The grandmother wound thread deftly around her finger tip
and into a knot. She began to sew again. Sean cleared his throat loudly. “Where’s Maggie?”
“Upstairs. She’s steaming Bobbie.”
“How is he?”
“He’s a sick baby.” She looked up at Sean. “Dr. Svarich was here to see him yesterday and he thinks there’s the possibility of pneumonia.”
“The hell there is!” ejaculated Sean, who was almost as fond of his brother’s sons as he was of his brother. “How — what are you doin’ for him?”
“There isn’t so much can be done,” said the grandmother. “Steaming him.” She looked to the hallway door. “There’s someone now.”
Brian entered the room with his pants and jacket bristling spear grass. “Hello, Uncle Sean.”
Sean greeted the boy and turned back to the grandmother. “Anything I can do to help at all?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, then, “thanks.”
“Have you got any wheat, Uncle Sean?”
“Why, sure.” Sean put his hand into his pocket and brought out a few grains. “Chew it up good, and it’ll make wheat gum for you.”
Brian began dutifully to chew. His grandmother called him to her chair to try on the middy. She looked it over, took several tucks in with pins. Sean watched, then, Sean-like, suggested, “Little full under the armpits, ain’t it?”
The grandmother ignored the remark.
“Ain’t them cuffs tight fer the width a the sleeves?”
“I think I have an idea what the pattern calls for,” she said. “Don’t wriggle.”
“I’m not,” said Brian.
“All right,” said Sean. “I just thought it looked kind a funny the way she hung down like a puhtatuh sack from under his —”
“I don’t want to wear any potato sack, Gramma!”
“’Tisn’t!” said Mrs. MacMurray, twitching him around. “Pay no attention to what he says.”
“Now that’s not the sort of thing to be tellin’ me own nephew. Goddamdest —”
“And that’s not the sort of language to be using before your own nephew!”
“What’s wrong with my language!”
“It belongs to the bar room perhaps,” said the grandmother, stung by Sean’s criticism of her handiwork.
“It does not!”
“But it does, Mr. O’Connal.”