Who Has Seen the Wind Page 4

  He knew that it went back to the business of the Christmas before, the difference of opinion over Romona. A slightly fey derelict, Romona had resided in a grey shack at the end of Main Street, next to the Times building and near the railroad tracks and the river. She spent most of her time wandering down back alleys in search of whatever town shopkeepers might have left out for her. At Wong’s Bluebird Café she often found vegetables, sliced bread left over by café diners; at Funder’s Meat Market, slightly tainted meat. Her shack was the mecca for the lean and hungry alley-cat men who swung down from the long grain freights. Romona fed them; she did their washing for them so that her line was continuously masculine. The Christmas in question, Romona in a burst of festive spirit, had covered her window with red tissue paper picked up at the back of O’Connal’s Drug Store. The light of her shack had showed through for all to see, a rich and glowing red. An immoral red, Mrs. Abercrombie had decided. Straightway she had gone to Romona’s shack, knocked on the door, and told her to take the paper down. “You,” Romona had told her, “kin go plump to hell.”

  That Christmas, as every Christmas, Mrs. Abercrombie was head of the church hamper committee. She had told the other members that unless Romona took down the offending paper, her name must be struck from the list. Mr. Hislop had suggested that he might call on Romona.

  The scarlet woman, her henna-ed hair glinting mahogany in its heatkilled coils, had told Mr. Hislop that she was not taking down the paper, hamper or no hamper. Mr. Hislop had asked her if she wouldn’t consider green tissue paper.

  “Green,” said Romona, “jist ain’t Criss-muss to me. I’m fussy about red, so green don’t mean a good goddam, Rev-rund.”

  The next night at the hamper meeting, the minister had insisted that Romona’s name stay on the list. For one of the very few times in her life, Mrs. Abercrombie had to admit herself beaten. The red glow had stayed on in Romona’s window long after New Year’s; the fact that she had left the town that spring, had not been enough to remove the sting of defeat from Mrs. Abercrombie’s soul.

  Still, thought Hislop in his back yard, the place must be unpleasant in the sight of the Lord. Certainly it made him feel uncomfortable, made him extremely conscious of what it was and what he would like it to be.

  Self and not-self; what was the relationship? He had separated himself from the phenomena of his experience. He could say to himself, “I see the yard — John Hislop sees the yard and the lawn-mower.” But — who was John Hislop? What was seeing? Was the chipped greenness of the mower a quality inherent in the mower, or was it only an element tied up with others that went to make up John Hislop? Was there a lawn-mower independent of his consciousness? And if there was, could his senses make the jump to it? Could there be an external world if there wasn’t something of the stuff John Hislop was made of, already in that outer world? Suppose there wasn’t — no lawn-mower — no yard — no mowing — no Mrs. Abercrombies. Lovely!

  The screen door slapped the stillness. He saw his wife standing on the back porch. He got up and began to push.

  * * *

  At MacTaggart’s corner several blocks away from the Presbyterian manse, Brian and Forbsie Hoffman sat on the top rail of the fence upon which Art Sherry had left part of his tongue the winter before. “I wish I knew where we could get some feathers from,” Brian was saying.

  “I busted a pillow once.”

  “We could start from the garage and get there quick.”

  “Get there — get there,” said Forbsie, “quick there — quick there — quick.”

  “We could bounce on the clouds.”

  “Pillows’ stummicks is full of feathers,” said Forbsie. “Little curly ones.”

  Brian got down from the fence. “With string we could make them.”

  Forbsie jumped down, his fat cheeks jouncing as he landed. “They snowed all over my room.”

  “Put them to our shoulders and fly away.”

  “Real pretty,” said Forbsie. “I got the slipper.”

  “We’ll just tie them together,” explained Brian with excitement, “and that’ll be wings for us. You can have wings too — string and feather wings. I’ll get some string. You get the pillow —”

  “I ain’t getting any pillow.”

  “Yes. You get the pillow. How do you get the feathers out of it?”

  “You better get the pillow too,” said Forbsie as they turned into the O’Connal yard. “I’d get licked.”

  “How do you get their feathers out?”

  “Paring knife. They don’t bust so easy. I’m not getting any pillow!”

  “Wait here,” Brian told him. “I’m going into the house. You wait here.”

  His grandmother was ironing in the breakfast-room; he saw only her erect back as he went silently through the smell of newly-ironed clothes and into the living-room. He did not stop to see her spit a live bubble on the iron’s smooth bottom, to watch it jump lively there as it always did when she tested it. From the living-room couch he took a pillow with raised orange flowers, then went out through the front door and around to the back where Forbsie waited.

  He made two more trips into the house without his grandmother’s knowing it, once for the paring knife, again for string.

  The feathers, as Forbsie had told him, were very tiny, hundreds of them spreading themselves over the sand, stirring to the slightest breeze, lifting and drifting over the yard. Several clung to Brian’s dark hair; one, sucked in by Forbsie’s breath, went up his nose, and made him sneeze three times.

  As they tied, the pigeons strutting along the edge of the back verandah roof said, “ticket-a-roo, ticket-a-roo.” Grasshoppers, hidden in the deep grass along the side of the garage, went over and over again their rasping sound. The late morning sun limned the swaying heads of fox-tails with light, and gave to the ribboning grasses a watering glint. It lay warm on the bent necks of the two boys engrossed in their task.

  “What yuh doin’?”

  Arthur Sherry, a six-year-old cynic in overall pants and sleeveless, faded blue shirt, looked down at them. As though in irritation at the thick-lensed glasses which blew up his eyes remarkably, his face convulsed from time to time in sudden, twitching grimaces.

  “Making wings,” Brian told him. “We’re going to fly.”

  A sound of disgust issued from Arthur’s lips at about the same moment that his face decided to twitch. “Anybody knows you can’t make wings to fly.”

  “Yes, we can,” said Brian. “We can if we want to.”

  “Nah, you can’t.” The glasses jumped slightly on the bridge of his nose. “It’s dumb to think that.”

  “It is not,” Brian insisted. “Go on and tie,” he advised Forbsie who stared up to Arthur with his mouth ajar in his fat face. “Don’t listen to Artie — to what he says. He doesn’t know!”

  “Maybe they won’t work,” said Forbsie.

  “Yes, they will,” Brian said with fervour. “They will so work.” Even as he said it he was aware of a sinking feeling in his stomach, a sudden and very physical loss as though a great hole had opened within him and was emptying him against his will.

  Arthur made a snorting noise; he kicked lazily at the spread feathers, and the air current stirred thereby, lifted them and let them sink slowly back to the ground. “Just with airplanes — that’s all.”

  “And wings! Angels got wings! They fly too!”

  “Not made outa string — with feathers. Pillow feathers,” he added as he saw the deflated pillow on the sand. “They grow ’em.”

  Brian was silent. He had not thought of that. Sensing the telling effect of his remark, Arthur went on. “Outa their shoulders. They always had ’em — like a sparrow — not outa chicken feathers tied with string. Some store string,” he added disgustedly.

  Brian faced Arthur. “Well, I’m going to Heaven!”

  “Dinner — Artie!” called Mrs. Sherry across the hedge.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw that his mother had gone back into the hous
e. He pushed Brian in the chest with both hands so that he sat down. “No, you ain’t. Not with string an’ feathers.”

  And Brian staring down at the pitifully few feathers they had tied, knew that Arthur was perfectly right.

  THREE

  * * *

  Under the manse poplars it was moderately cool for the first day of July. With his friend, Hislop, Digby sprawled on the grass near the lawn-mower with its waiting handle held at an expectant angle. Digby was a contented man; his end-of-term forms had been completed and found correct by the school board; he could look forward now to a summer holiday two months long. It was true that he drew no salary for that time, that he had made no provision for living expenses during the previous term, and that it would take him till next Christmas to get out of debt with Mrs. Geddes with whom he boarded; but as long as he was regularly supplied with the plug tobacco that he smoked in his curve-stemmed pipe, and had the leisure to talk with men like Hislop, he was contented.

  He was a man of singularly crooked will, prompting him to think a great deal about things that could not make him money or bring him the teapot fame relished by so many people in the town. And like Hislop he understood children; perhaps it was because he had never completely lost that impulsive child personality that is unaware of itself and of anybody outside itself. This psychological contradiction of selflessness and selfishness might have explained his success as a teacher.

  A gentle wind stirred the leaves on the poplars slightly, setting discs of shadow dancing over Hislop’s earnest face. “They were no different from men today,” he was saying. “Just as imaginative — as sensitive. There hasn’t been any advance in the things that count — not in generalizations — it was all there with Plato — with Christ.”

  “Mmh,” said Digby.

  “Men look a little closer — that’s all. They’ve narrowed it down — and — and it’s that the cause and effect relationship isn’t quite so shaky. But in the field of moral values —”

  “Blocks.” Digby sat up with the quickness so characteristic of him. “Just blocks.”

  “Blocks!”

  “According to my friend, Milt Palmer.” Digby was speaking of the town’s shoe- and harness-maker. “He says it’s just playing with blocks — moral law — convention.”

  “But — it isn’t!” said Hislop. “Righteousness, goodness, truth — beauty and — and truth — they all have their prototypes in God! God is — the world is of God — they’ve got to have some foundation —”

  “You hope,” said Digby. He pulled a blade of grass, chewed on the tender end of it a moment. “Funny fellows — shoemakers — lots of salt. No volunteer values in the Bens.”

  “I know,” said Hislop.

  “Looks as though the seed fell on stony ground.” Digby knew what he was talking about; for the past year he’d had the Young Ben in his school. The boy was the son of a spare, grey bird of a man, surrounded always by the sour-sweet aroma of brew tanged with a gallop of manure and spiced with natural leaf tobacco. The Ben had about as much moral conscience as the prairie wind that lifted over the edge of the prairie world to sing mortality to every living thing. “In the Young Ben too,” Digby pointed out.

  The Young Ben’s pre-school environment had not been fertile for the social graces; until he had come to school a year late, forced to do so by the school board’s insistence, he had never entered the town, though he had often accompanied his father from Haggerty’s coulée where they lived, to the town’s eastern edge where the prairie swelled gently. There he would sit watching, his chin in his hands, his elbows on his knees. At other times before he had come in to school, he had been observed, as Joe Pivott, drayman for Sherry’s mill, had put it, “a-runnin’ acrosst the bald-headed prairie with no more clo’es than tuh wad a four-ten shotgun.”

  “I think,” said Hislop, “we’d better get to this lawn. I started it last Monday — it’s got to be done before I meet Mrs. Abercrombie at the door tomorrow.”

  As he walked to the lawn-mower he was not thinking of the Bens; he was remembering the visit from the O’Connal boy with the dark and serious eyes. He found that memory comforting.

  * * *

  Some time, Brian was thinking, he would like to ride a vacuum cleaner; they went much better than sewing-machines — more noise — faster. He stared reflectively at the layers of blue smoke hung over his father’s chair, winding slowly through the den that opened off the living-room. At noon his father always left smoke behind him when he had gone to the store.

  He was wishing, too, that Forbsie didn’t have the mumps. Without Forbsie he was alone; he couldn’t play with Arthur Sherry, since Arthur was at that moment waiting in the next yard to wrestle him down. He wished that he could get on their vacuum cleaner, ride it out of the front door, down the steps and along the street. Artie would run after him, but he wouldn’t let him on. He’d lie back and up he’d go past the telephone wires. He would lie back more still and ride all the way past the poplars to the clouds — God’s clouds where it was blue and sunshiny.

  If he felt like it, he would point down and dive at Artie’s head. Artie would be so scared he would run home. He’d kick Artie’s cap off for putting him down. It would be fun.

  It seemed that everybody was doing something, except him. In the dining-room he could hear the sewing-machine running along the edge of the stillness; the flat sounds of dishes being washed, came to him from the kitchen where his mother was. After they were done, she would be house cleaning again; the vacuum cleaner would go; the oily tartness of furniture oil would be through the house.

  He looked down at the white paper on the rug before him. He didn’t want to draw men; he wanted to ride a vacuum cleaner up into the sky where it was blue — blue like — On the paper he made blue with his crayon. And God was there. He made a yellow God, yellow for the round part, and green legs, and purple eyes, and red arms, and that was God. He made another God and another and another till there were Gods all over the paper. He added arms and more arms, legs and more legs; those were spider Gods, of course.

  As he drew, the curtains on the open window bellied gently out; from the high den window dropped staining light, the bevelled glass breaking it up into violet, greening orange, blue and red. Brian laid down his crayons and stared at the coloured patch on the rug; the more he stared, the brighter it seemed to get; the sound of the sewing-machine strengthened and weakened.

  The man standing in the centre of the light colours, decided Brian, was about as high as a person’s knee, his own knee. He wore a hat like Uncle Sean, uncreased just as it had come from the store shelf — a blue gum-drop hat. He wore white rubber boots, and He held a very small, very white lamb in His arms. Brian said,

  “I am pleased to meet you.”

  The man wiggled the black string that hung down from his glasses. “You are welcome,” He said. “I am God. I am Mr. R.W. God B.V.D. You call me R.W.”

  “I knew you were. Why did you leave Heaven for?”

  “I am going to get after Artie Sherry for you,” God said. “I am going to get after him and I will get after your grandmother too.”

  “No,” Brian said. “You can let her alone now. She is all right now. She isn’t so bossy now the baby is better.”

  “Has the baby been sick?”

  “Oh, yes, but he has had his crissmuss, so he is almost all right again. What will you do to him?”

  “It will be awful,” said God. “I will get Artie to look through a hole in a fence, and then I will kick him real hard, and I will drownd him too, and that will serve him right, and then I’ll get him to look through another hole in a fence, and I will kick him again.”

  “Thank you very much for what you will do to Artie. When? When are you going to get him to look through a hole in a fence and kick him real hard?”

  “Soon. I am busy now. I will fix up Artie later on.”

  “You won’t kick him a little?” said Brian anxiously.

  “I will give him thousands
of kicks. I will give him hundreds.”

  “Good. What do you do when you aren’t kicking people looking through fences and carrying lambs?”

  “Bounce. I’m a very good bouncer. I use clouds, and I bounce from one cloud to another cloud. They’re mine.”

  “What do you do when you’ve bounced on all the clouds?”

  “I go bounce on the ones I already bounced on before again.”

  “What if there aren’t any clouds at all?”

  “I go on the prairie if I feel like it. I gave it to the boy. It is windy. Sometimes I ride my vacuum cleaner.”

  “Did you come on your vacuum cleaner?”

  “An angel — piggy back.”

  Brian heard the sound of footsteps behind him. “Goodbye, R.W.,” he said.

  “I thought you’d gone out to play, Son.” His mother with a towel around her head, her face no longer strained as it had been when the baby was sick, looked down at him. The shadows of fatigue had not quite disappeared from under her eyes in the week since the sleepless nights with the baby.

  * * *

  Maggie O’Connal had been one of the prettiest things to come to the town after she had married Gerald O’Connal in the early twenties. She had met him in the Ontario town where she had been visiting her mother, and where Gerald had come for his apprenticeship after a pharmacy course at University and three years overseas in the War. Maggie was not an Eastern girl; she had been born on her father’s and mother’s home-stead in Saskatchewan, and had been homesick for the West during her two years’ stay with her mother in the East. One year after the O’Connals had come out to the district in which Sean was farming, Mrs. MacMurray had come to stay with them. The West to which she had come with her husband in the nineties, and which she had left after his death in nineteen-nineteen, seemed more like home to her than the East now.

  Maggie O’Connal was still pretty; dark of hair and of eyes, slight and small-boned, she had the same dignity of posture that was both her older son’s and her mother’s. Her speech was quick, definite and sure too, with now and again a hint of Scotch accent showing itself, sometimes in a slight lift at the ends of sentences, often in a deepening of the flatter vowel sounds and a lingering over the “i’s.” From her Brian had inherited his dark eyes and hair, his careful enunciation.