Peace Shall Destroy Many (24 page)

“Let me take your parka.” She moved towards him. He twisted out of the sheep-skin lined coat and the thick sweater underneath. “I’ve often wondered,” she said, marvelling fingers on the bead-work, “where did you get this? And the fur around the hood!”

“It’s fox fur—Old Two Poles, an Indian on the Reserve, north of the river, his wife makes these sometimes. I got it late last winter. Warmest—and fanciest—coat I ever had.”

She folded the parka and sweater on the bed and returned. “I’ve never seen such a beautiful bead-pattern. Do you think she’d make one for me?”

“Sure—she’d want to do that. I see Two Poles sometimes when I go hunting. I’ll tell him to come and see you. You can draw your own design if you want, and she’ll work it in beads on the coat.”

He sat down at the table, and she wondered again at his poise. So different from Pete! The blue-plaid shirt hung beautifully on his wide shoulders. It was better than the shiny suit on Sunday. He said, lifting his head, the hair glued down by the rim of the ski-cap he had worn under the hood, “English
and Social Studies aren’t bad, but Mathematics is tough—for me, anyway.”

She picked up the text-book he had laid beside his pencil scribbler on the table. “I always found math r
ough too, but I should know how to do this.” She sat down, drawing her chair closer to his.

Razia’s golden head bending to Thom’s black one, they worked. She was amazed at his perceptiveness. After some time she rose to place the coffee-pot on the heater while he worked on, quite oblivious of her movement. A huge man bending over the schoolwork of a child. But for all his inadequate schooling, he could certainly impress the children with his Bible-story telling: the older girls talked among themselves about King David last week. And even his strange, impossible-of-explanation emphasis that Jesus was God somehow gained a sort of credence from his tremendous conviction. To try to teach children something at which men staggered! She glanced at him again, in his hunch of concentration, and his appearance intruded on her thoughts. She jammed a piece of wood into the heater. He smells clean, like frost on a window-pane. And his fingernails are scrubbed, not like that pig Herb.

Her thoughts about Herb blackened as she measured coffee into the pot. To think that he could suddenly, on the night the blizzard blew out of the north like fiends fleeing, come stumbling in and assume he could stay the night without ever having done more than sit there once a week and drink her coffee! As if all that was required was four evenings squatters’ rights!

But she had at first pitied him that night as he sat near the heater after rubbing his white-blotched face with ice-water, rolling his cigarette with hands shakily dribbling tobaccocrumbs
to the floor. “Gad, it was terrible. I thought it would snow a bit, yuh know, but all of a sudden t
he wind just come with a roar—I was about a quarter mile down the road, and Grease, he just stopped movin’ and I kicked him, but he wouldn’t budge an’ the wind tore under my clothes, up high on the horse, so I slid off and led him. Couldn’t see a damn thing for snow. All I knew was, stay on the hard road an’ you’ll come to the school corner. Gadfry, what a wind! About seventy miles an hour an’ straight in my face.” He finally got his cigarette, his grimed hands cupped as if he were still in the storm that howled outside.

As the evening dragged on she had begun to hate him intensely, for there was nothing to talk about but the storm and how tough it would be on the stock! The wind whined about the corners of the teacherage. Once he staggered out for wood, and almost floundered coming through the drift by the corner in the ferocious darkness. It was all very well for a girl to play Lady Brett Ashley when she was in Paris with a dozen men flowing about, panting, or in Saskatoon on a Saturday night with the airmen on leave from their base, but to be caught in a blizzard with a brute left the bile on her tongue. She should have rapped him into place the first night he ventured out, but she was sure she had met his brother Hank in Saskatoon, and after asking Block, once, about having a dance—Heaven knows nothing ever happened in Wapiti. But the better-than-nothing diversion had recoiled. He had never had a cleanly amusing thought in his head! Listening to his usual spill of hatred against the Wapiti Mennonite community, she said,

“What’s the matter with them?”

“Who?”

“The Mennonites you always yell about every time you’re here. You’re one too, just like your father and mother.”

His face convulsed. “I’m no Mennonite! Think I’d sit around and pray and read the Bible like a dumb Mennonite? That’s why they can’t stand me, all those pure churchgoers, because when I was old enough so my Mennonite old man didn’t dare clobber me into readin’ the Bible and goin’ to church, I went fishin’ on Sunday.”

It was the nearest he had ever come to self-revelation. Interested, she said, in her clear uninflected voice,

“What did that prove?”

“Prove? It showed ’em that I could do as I damn well pleased. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do. I’m my own boss.”

She did not hide the tinge of disgust in her voice. “So you can do as you please—and live by yourself—without a friend to your name. Don’t you think that someone like Thom Wiens has—”

He swore across her sentence. “Thom Wiens! That ratty coward claiming ‘holy love’ as an excuse for hidin’ at home during a war—you been listenin’ to him preach to those kids? He’ll stuff you full of dish-rag Christianity. I’ll tell you what—”

Angered, she cut his speech sarcastically, “You’ll tell me nothing. Why—” she hesitated momentarily, glancing at his lour, catching the very understandable jealousy on his homely features, and flicked her question away from Thom, “Why don’t you get out then, if you hate everyone so much. I wouldn’t stay.”

He looked up, startled. Baldly stated, it sounded childishly simple, and it seemed for a moment that he could not scrape
together a mutterable reason why he had never considered it. She calmly checked through grade-two drawings. He shrugged, “Well, I get to Battleford once in a while, but if a guy has a farm started you just don’t up and take off—”

She faced him squarely. “Why not?”

“I’ve a lotta money tied up in things—”

His scowl soured, almost as if he needed to remain in a place, among people he hated, to give some meaning to his existence. Merciless, she flayed him quite. “That place? You could earn it back in two months working in a factory! The army won’t bother you, even if you leave the farm!”

Shuffling his feet, he cursed the Services, the Mennonites: viciously, as she had not heard him. She pushed into his oaths, swiftly, “Don’t you swear in here! Get out—beat it to your precious farm.” She swept his coffee-cup from the table beside him in one wipe of her arm. He rose, but otherwise remained motionless, and she knew with a heart-trip that her first impression of him had been only too correct. She should not have enraged him. His face turned toward her, eyes agleam.

“I was kinda plannin’ to stay the night.”

She ignored it, conceding, “The storm sounds bad—I’ll give you two blankets and you can go into the school. There’s a fire and plenty of wood.” But, staring down the line of her body as if she were a mare he was about to buy, he growled,

“Don’t act like you didn’t know what I mean. You think I came that stretch into the wind’s teeth just to drink coffee and be laughed at? We’ve taken it easy, kiddo, but this is a cozy night.”

She fell back before his slow, confident step. She felt the corner of the wood-box in her back, and for an instant terror gripped her: she had always been in control and abruptly she
realized what could happen to her in this wilderness. Then rage swept her—to be terrified by a brute! Her hand found the heavy poker behind her; she swung it in a blinding arc that caught him across the temple as he grinned at her, hand reaching, and with a bitten curse he reeled aside. She was past him in the second and slammed the bedroom door as he pulled himself erect by the table.

The dark bedroom with its pale-frozen window was a cell she could not escape. A rude door of half-inch boards: he would walk through it as if it were not there. She wedged herself against the door-diagonal, panting in her humiliation and rage. He did not even deign to batter at the door.

“Listen, you slut, I know you, floutin’ your trim rear around for everyone to ogle at and then prancin’ off like a high-steppin’ dame. You can fool these other simpletons, but not me. I know you. Do I break the door down? You can scream till you’re dead, or—” his laugh was coarser than any word he could have spoken. “Not a soul on earth to hear you—the storm outside. Listen.”

He paused, exultant in what he must know was her silent terror inches from him beyond the flimsy door. She forced her thoughts. Suddenly, her mind gripped and immediately she leaned away to jerk the door wide i
n his face. His grin spread at her surrender as his hand lifted at her, but she rapped, “Don’t touch me!” For a second her superiority held him, and she continued swiftly, “If you lay one finger on me, I’ll go to Mr. Block the instant the storm is blown!”

The very name stalled him a moment, then, “Haha—what could he do, after?”

“Bring the Mounties. You’d get jailed at least ten years.”

“Your word against mine!”

“What kind of a word have you!” His glance wavered and triumph stirred faintly within her.

“He’s a Mennonite—they never go to the cops.”

“And he’d never get another teacher here! Think he’d do that for you? Don’t be absolutely stupid!” For some reason she could not quite fathom, the Deacon’s name squelched him. She said nothing to break the spell, hanging like a thin membrane between them, but stepped swiftly past to the chair and flung him his parka. Blackly silent now, he jerked into it. She said, in careful calm, “You can sleep on the school-floor or drift home before the wind. You said you could never get lost on Grease.” He opened the inside door, and the wind-moan wallowed into the teacherage. Her voice tensed, “Don’t dare to come here again.”

He glared at her a moment, then, flinging a tearing insult, he slammed the door and was gone. “You filthy ignorant blockhead,” she screamed hysterically against the door and the whining storm. Abruptly she rushed to hook the outside door, heaved the inner tight and feverishly braced a chair under the knob. Holding to the wall, she tilted into the chair where he had sat, her head collapsing into her hands.
Sobs of humiliation racked her. Such an absolute pig! It was only after some time that she realized her pointed pumps were in the muck that had melted from his boots.

“Well, that’s that. I should be able to do the rest at home.” Thom’s voice broke the thoughts she would have gladly done without. She turned to get the cups, her rigid features relaxing into a smile at his huge form comfortable in the chair. If he had, by accident, come that night, he would have tossed Herb out by the scruff—and then she remembered that Thom was
probably “non-resistant”—which was a great deal better than being like that beast. She said, placing the two cups on the table beside his books,

“I’ve made coffee. Do have a cup before you go.”

He protested politely, but did not insist. As she poured she said casually, remembering Pete Block three months before, “How does a great healthy man like you stay out of fighting the Germans?”

He said, studying the curl of steam, “My call hasn’t come yet—should be here any day.” Not another of those, she despaired, but he continued, “Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. If I really felt I should go, I’d join up without the call. But I don’t think that a Christian can go out and kill his fellow man, even if the government says he should. And I’m a Christian.”

She was nonplussed for a moment, the simplicity of it dropping a wall before her thoughts. At Normal School they had sometimes discussed the “problem” of the conscientious objector, but this directness was odd. She said,
groping for the arguments she could remember, “But mustn’t everyone do his share? Is it fair to believe that, when soldiers are dying for you?”

“I’ve thought about that.” His frankness cut. “It’s not fair that I sit here comfortably and drink coffee with you while men are under gunfire across the ocean.” He thought for a moment, and she, watching, saw his face freshen as if a new idea had found him. “Look at it this way: we’re very conscious of the misery of the Canadian soldier right now fighting the ‘Battle of Freedom’ for us, as the radio insists. What about the time when there was no shooting war and all those soldiers were here with us in Canada having a, comparatively speaking,
comfortable time, like us now. There were still millions of this world’s people dying miserably, for no other reason than that they happened to be born in the wrong country. Did we, who on the whole had enough—and some too much—to eat, feel any concern for them? My folks can tell a few things about Russia they lived through. Are we merely concerned now that some other Canadians are having a rough time? They at least have plenty to eat, which is more than most of the people of the world know about now, or will when this war’s over.” He scratched his black head. “Do you get what I mean? I’m a bit mixed up—I’ve never thought of this exactly before either. I don’t think there was much talk about our way of life not being fair until our boys got into it and found out what misery is like. From what Pa says, death by hunger is quite a bit worse than by bullet, though it doesn’t sound as spectacular to us, sitting about a full table. I should think more people die of the first, even now.”

“Isn’t there a difference between men dying so that you don’t have to, and men dying because of the accident of their birth?”

“Probably.” He concentrated momentarily. “But what I want to get at is this idea of fairness. Life on earth is not fair—ever. Advantage for one is always balanced by disadvantage to another. Canada can only hold so many people. If I—and you—live and eat here, in a sense that fact makes it impossible for someone else to live and eat here. The way people behave, there is not enough either of food or space for all to live comfortably. Joseph—last year’s teacher here—he gave me a book written about World War One. It was to be ‘the war to end war.’ But look at the one raging on now. Man is always fighting such a war to end war, and the next generation has to fight
it over again. The Bible says there is this lack of unity, space, food in the world because man has sinned. He is now sinful. I suppose this sin—this unfairness—becomes most obvious in time of war and that’s why so many begin to act very nobly and want to kill off the tyrant of the moment to prove that they, at least, don’t take part in this rashly open unfairness.”