Who Has Seen the Wind Read online

“They’re in the loft. They —”

  “Don’t give him a big bone. He’s just a pup. Don’t give him a big bone. He’ll choke.”

  “I won’t,” promised Forbsie as they turned into his yard. “Let’s go look at the eggs. Let’s see if the baby —”

  “No.”

  “Now — can I carry him?”

  “No.”

  Mrs. Hoffman, when he had taken the puppy into the house, promised him that it would be allowed to sleep by the stove in the kitchen. It would not have to sleep alone out in the barn.

  All morning Brian played with the puppy.

  All afternoon he played with the puppy.

  After dinner he missed the dog badly. He went down to the coal room in the cellar and sat on a chunk of wood there. When he was through, he went up to bed.

  * * *

  About an hour after Brian O’Connal had gone to bed, Mr. Hislop received “Judge” Mortimer and five elders into his study. “Judge” Mortimer, district agent for the MacDougall Implement Company and police magistrate for the district; Mr. Funder, father of eight children, and owner of the butcher shop; Mr. Nightingale, retired farmer; Mr. Thorborn, owner of the livery stable behind the church and also chairman of the school board; Mr. Jaques, the undertaker for the town; Mr. Jenkins, who owned the dairy: these were the men who listened gravely as Mr. Hislop read them Mrs. Abercrombie’s letter.

  A stiff and uncomfortable silence had descended on the room as Hislop put down the letter. He looked to his elders questioningly. “Judge” Mortimer stepped forward slightly from the rest, a broad, greymoustached man with the impressive dignity that came of presiding in court, and of being sublimely ignorant. He felt the same as Mrs. Abercrombie about the candle-light service. In turn, the other elders expressed their agreement with the sentiment of the letter; only Mr. Nightingale, who was slightly deaf and had not heard enough of the letter to trust himself to a statement, failed to support Mrs. Abercrombie and the Ladies’ Auxiliary.

  Rather dazedly Mr. Hislop bid his elders good-night.

  * * *

  In the days that followed, Brian O’Connal came to accept his dog’s exile, after he found that he could see him daily. He spent his entire mornings and afternoons over at Hoffmans’. It was a week later that he and Forbsie first saw the baby pigeons.

  The hay in Hoffmans’ loft was piled up at one end; the sunlight slanting down from a window high in the peak, was almost solid with dust. Upon their stomachs, their chins in their hands, Forbsie and Brian gazed from the top of the hay hill and into the nest on one of the two-by-fours between the barn wall studding.

  In the nest were open mouths, eager and unsteady upon worm-like necks.

  “They came out of the eggs,” Forbsie said with a proprietary ring in his voice.

  “Will their mother sit on them like she did on the eggs?”

  “I wonder how they got in there in the first place?” said Forbsie. “There weren’t any holes for them to crawl into that I could see.”

  “They were inside.”

  “Maw says they grew up in there. Then they got out.”

  “Then they were inside then,” said Brian.

  “How did they do it?”

  “I’ll ask my dad. Your porridge is ready.”

  Brian did not climb through the hole in the loft floor when Forbsie left. He watched the baby pigeons for a long time. He was still there when Forbsie returned. Throughout the morning while he played with the dog and paid numerous visits to the pigeons, he pondered the question of their origin.

  He was still considering it as he walked home to lunch. The morning which had been a bright one, had now turned dull with the sky dark to the south west, the sun overhead almost completely obscured. The wind had risen earlier than usual and had an unusual coolness about it. Brian met his father returning from work, just as he came to MacTaggart’s corner.

  “Dad,” he said as he walked by his side, “I want to ask you about some pigeons. How did they get in there?”

  “Where, Spalpeen?”

  “Those eggs. How did they get in there in the first place?”

  “The father pigeon put them there.”

  “How?”

  “Well, at first there wasn’t any egg. Then the mother pigeon put the shell around it.”

  “She built it?”

  “Yes, she built it.”

  “I guess that’s right,” said Brian. “I’m going to tell Forbsie.”

  But Brian was not able to go over to Forbsie’s after lunch; it began to rain. It began furiously, a breathtaking downpour at first that settled down to the monotonous, business-like rain that farmers had looked for ever since spring seeding. At no time during the rest of the day did it look as though it intended clearing up.

  When Brian awoke the next morning, it was still raining. His mother insisted that he stay in the house for the rest of the day. And the rain was still falling the next afternoon as he sat disconsolately at the living-room window. It was a long, bay window with a built-in seat, facing Artie Sherry’s house to the south.

  Brian watched the drops gather and slide, slowly at first, then faster, down the pane. The sky over Sherry’s low house was the colour of lead; the sodden leaves of the hedge, dripping. He felt inexplicably sad. The pictures in the Family Bible and the Book of Knowledge no longer held any interest for him. He had not seen his dog for three days.

  He had asked his mother time and again if he could go over to Forbsie’s to see the puppy and the baby pigeons; he had been told just as often that he could not go out until the rain had stopped. He hated the rain.

  His eyes rested on the leaves of the shamrock plant in its red clay pot on the window-sill, the one his mother had given his father for the seventeenth of Ireland. He didn’t see why he couldn’t go over to see his pup. He didn’t see why he couldn’t see the pigeons. Baby pigeons were all right. Perhaps if he had a baby pigeon at home, he wouldn’t miss his pup so much; baby pigeons didn’t chew things. His grandmother couldn’t kick up a fuss about a little baby pigeon. He wished that his mother would let him go over to Forbsie’s so he could bring back a baby pigeon until it had stopped raining.

  He got up and went through the archway and into the living-room, where the baby stood in his playpen.

  “B’ian,” his brother said and held out his arms to be picked up.

  Brian turned away from him. The baby began to cry. His mother came out of the breakfast-room.

  “Leave the baby alone, Son.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him.”

  “Well, stay in the den, or the dining-room, so that he won’t cry. You can come into the breakfast-room with me if you want to.”

  He shook his head. He felt as though he were going to burst into tears at any minute. He went back to the dining-room window and looked out at the rain again.

  * * *

  In the Presbyterian manse study, Mr. Hislop turned away from the window. “There’s nothing else I can do,” he said to Digby.

  “It’s a damn shame!” said the school teacher. “You don’t make it any better — you should have ignored the letter.”

  “You can’t,” said Hislop. “You can’t ignore a thing like that. It’s not just the letter — it’s what’s behind it — I couldn’t get up each Sunday and preach to them, knowing they — that they all felt as she did —”

  “The trouble with you,” said Digby, “is that you’re too thin-skinned. You’re tender. That’s no good if you’re a minister — or a school teacher. You’ve got to be tough — good and tough. I’m tough. You’re not.”

  “And my elders — I never thought for a minute they’d take the stand they did. I’ll have to resign.”

  “Fight ’em,” said Digby. “Get up there and give it to them. You’re lucky; you’ve got them where you want them. How I’d like to have my school board in front of me once a week — unable to talk back.”

  “If it only hadn’t happened,” said Hislop. “It makes me feel like a fool — stupid
— blind — gullible fool! I knew they thought I was impractical — you can always expect a certain amused patronizing from your congregation — but —”

  “I’d still fight,” said Digby.

  “No,” said Hislop. “I can’t.”

  He went to the window again. “Right now,” he said with his back to Digby, “I can think of only one believer in the town.”

  “How about me?”

  “I don’t — I’m not so sure about you.”

  Digby got up from his chair; he went over to Hislop and put his arm over the minister’s shoulder.

  “The one I have in mind,” said Hislop, “is very young.”

  The two stood silently side by side looking out at the rain.

  * * *

  On Hoffman’s barn roof, the rain was loud; the hayloft was dim. Brian had not called in at Forbsie’s house. No one knew that he was up there. In the dusk of the loft he could just see the heads of the baby pigeons. They were partly feathered, their eyes opened. The mother pigeon had left the nest, slapping her wings frantically at Brian’s approach. She walked back and forth now, cooing anxiously on a rafter at the other end of the loft.

  Brian reached out and touched the head of one of the baby pigeons; it was blood warm. He stroked the weaving head with his finger. He slid his hand under the pigeon and took it from the nest, cheeping loudly.

  He held it to his chest, his head bent over it. He put it into his shirt, then buttoned up his coat. A baby pigeon was almost as good as a pup.

  SIX

  * * *

  The rain had stopped, and the air had the clear coolness that belongs to it after rain. Over the prairie, shallow sloughs were filled to their edges with water; the thirsty earth had drunk up the moisture and left much of it to lie in clear puddles between the hummocks; summer-fallow fields were welters of gumbo mud; clear drops beaded fox-tail, wild oats and buck brush; they sparkled diamond-like from the lupin that spread a purple shadow over the prairie; they gleamed from Sean O’Connal’s wheat, brown and wilted, five miles south of the town. Sean, with his weathered hat sodden and his fierce red moustaches dripping, stared down at the crop soaked with moisture that had come too late to do it any good.

  “Goddam them!” he cried. “Goddam their souls as green and hard as God’s little green apples! Goddam their goddam souls!”

  In town the air had a fresh and sparkling quality; eaves dripped steadily into rain barrels overflowing. In the running gutters could be seen the reflection of the sun, now a clean, whole disk, now a broken, quick-silver thing that joined, then broke again into rippling bars. Water lay in a wide sheet on the road before the Presbyterian manse.

  Within the study, Mr. Hislop looked over the letter of resignation he had written for his elders.

  * * *

  Rain still streaked the windows of the O’Connal back porch, where Brian O’Connal sat on the floor, staring down at the baby pigeon in his hand. His father stood tall above him. The bird’s skin lids were closed over its eyes; the bald head with its tiny ploughshare beak edged with yellow, hung down.

  The little sack of a body was not warm.

  “It’s dead, Spalpeen,” Brian’s father said gently.

  “Why?”

  “It happens to things,” his father said.

  “Why does it happen to things?” He turned his face to his father, his cheeks stained with drying tears.

  “That’s the way they end up.”

  Brian looked down again at the baby pigeon in his hand.

  “It was in an egg. Now it’s stopped.”

  “Yes, Spalpeen, it’s stopped.”

  “I want my pup.”

  “All right. We’ll bring him back.”

  “Why did it —”

  “Let me have it, Spalpeen.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll bury it for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dig a hole for it. Cover it with earth.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what you do when things die. They call it burying.”

  “Where will you do it?”

  “Where do you want me to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The back garden?”

  “I guess so.” He looked down at the baby pigeon’s limp body again; it was just like dirt, he thought, like prairie dirt that wasn’t alive at all. He looked up to his father again. “I know where. The prairie — dig a hole for it in the prairie.”

  “All right,” his father said.

  “Where the boy is,” said Brian. “There is where — not with houses.” He was aware of a sudden relief; the sadness over the death of the baby pigeon lifted from him.

  “After dinner, then, Spalpeen,” his father promised.

  The late evening sun lay dilute on the flat fronts of the houses along Sixth Street as Brian and his father walked out to the prairie. They felt the washed coolness of the air against their skin; they saw summer lightning far off on the horizon, bright against the dark purple of clouds banked there.

  By a coning pile of field stone just outside the town’s edge, the father turned to the boy. The son lifted his arm with the bird’s neck lank from his small fist. The father knelt, placed the dead pigeon on the sod beside him, and began to dig with the small green garden trowel he had brought out.

  He stood up, brushed the dirt from his hands, looked into his son’s face. As he did, he caught a flicker of movement in a clump of buck brush to the left. He walked toward it, his son beside him. He bent down and carefully parted the bushes.

  Crouched there, looking up, was the boy that Brian had met out on the prairie earlier in the summer. His eyes were wild.

  The father let the branches go back together.

  “He was watching,” said the son as they walked back to the town. “He does that all the time.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I knew him a long time ago.”

  “But when have you ever known — you’ve never seen him in town, have you?”

  “He’s a lot different. He said we could bring the pigeon out here.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. He told me to. That’s why I said. It’s his.”

  “What is, Spalpeen?”

  “The prairie is.”

  “How is it his?”

  “He lies down on top of it.”

  “But — how is it his prairie?”

  “I don’t know. It just is. What’s his name?”

  The father looked down at his son, a puzzled look upon his face. “That’s the Young Ben.”

  At the edge of the town, they turned and stood, looking out over the prairie, to its far line where sheet lightning, elusive as a butterfly, winked up the world’s dark rim. Here and there, low along the horizon, pigmy farm buildings stood out momentarily — were quickly blotted. The soft and distant explosions of light were accompanied by a sound as of lumber being carelessly dropped.

  The father and his son began to walk home.

  * * *

  Two days later, Brian lay under the hedge on the Sherry side of the house, his puppy in his arms. Sun streamed through the chinks in the caragana leaves; a light breeze stirred them; Brian could see part of the road in front of the house; he could see two butterflies in lifting falling flight over the lawn patched with shade, briefly together, briefly apart. He lost sight of them by the spirea at the verandah.

  The puppy whimpered slightly in its sleep; it nudged its head further into Brian’s neck. The boy was aware that the yard was not still. Every grass blade and leaf and flower seemed to be breathing, or perhaps, whispering — something to him — something for him. The puppy’s ear was inside out. Within himself, Brian felt a soft explosion of feeling. It was one of completion and of culmination.

  The poplars along the road shook light from their leaves. A tin can rolled down the street; a newspaper plastered itself against the base of a telephone pole; loose dust lifted. Dancing down the road appeared a dust-devil
. It stopped, took up again, and went whirling out to the prairie.

  In the summer sky there, stark blue, a lonely goshawk hung. It drifted low in lazing circles, slipping its dark shadow over stubble, summer fallow, baking wheat. A pause — one swoop — galvanic death to a tan burgher no more to sit amid his city’s grained heaps and squeak a question to the wind.

  * * *

  Shadows lengthen; the sunlight fades from cloud to cloud, kindling their torn edges as it dies from softness to softness down the prairie sky. A lone farmhouse window briefly blazes; the prairie bathes in mellower, yellower light, and the sinking sun becomes a low and golden glowing, splendid on the prairie’s edge.

  Leaning slightly backward against the reins looped round his waist, a man walks homeward from the fields. The horses’ heads move gently up and down; their hooves drop tired sound; the jingle of the traces swinging at their sides is clear against the evening hush. The stubble crackles; a killdeer calls. Stooks, fences, horses, man, have clarity that was not theirs throughout the day.

   PART  TWO

  SEVEN

  * * *

  Although two years of wind had piled the black dust even higher against the fences and farm buildings, and the yellow-stubbled fields were thinly stooked with the meagre stooks of lean times, the fall of 1931 still brought the excitement of harvest with it. The baize green of young wheat no longer spread over the flat expanse of prairie; the incessant winds rolled waves no longer through the darker green of June growth. For several weeks men had been busy in the fields, following the binders, stooping to pick up the sheaves and pile them into the stooks that thimbled the land.

  It was an urgent time of the year for the town, whose livelihood depended upon the prairie. Down the streets on both sides of the river, tractors hauled threshing machines with feeders turned back upon themselves, linked to cook cars and followed in turn by the wheeled half-cylinders of water wagons. Empty and full, high, spreading grain wagons passed through on grinding wheels; long caterpillars of grain freights often blocked Main Street with their slow passage for minutes at a time. Strange men swung down from the trains, their blanket rolls slung over one shoulder, bright flannel shirts open at the neck, their lean faces dark with coal dust. They stood before the beer parlour of the Royal Hotel, in front of Drew’s Pool Hall, or on the bank corner, waiting for the farmers who came into town, looking for bundle pitchers, spikers, and team skinners. There was harvest work for perhaps half the men who came to the town, at a dollar and a half a day, the day lasting from five in the morning to seven at night.