Peace Shall Destroy Many (26 page)

“No! No! It won’t be. She’s dead—she—” and terror gripped Louis quite as he stared white-eyed around the barn, over the shaggy backs of the animals as if an apparition were wreathing there. Pigs grunted in their sleep beyond a wall. Then Louis’s cough broke again, and when the spasm was over, the fear was bent aside.

“No, Block,” the bare name hardly deliberate. On the fringe of his consciousness Block knew Louis would never again hunt alone. But it was not now enough to hold him, and the Deacon was driven by his necessity. The gaunt face fronting him like a knife, he took one step forward in the narrow aisle, his shadow cast by the lantern hugely ominous over the other. His voice was barely audible.

“All right.” Breaths hoar between them, Block’s glance held Louis in bind. “If I had ever once had an inkling what you were doing, I would have taken you and with my two bare hands killed you.” His glare unearthly now, the scar pale at his temple, he deliberately pulled off each heavy wool-and-leather mitten and dropped it on th
e floor. “There’s always time. You’ll never touch another woman.” He took the next step, but the other faded back.

“No!” It was a cry; the long hand flashed to the hunting-belt. Block’s pressure held him as his foot flashed out at the motion and the half-drawn knife clunked on the frozen aisle.

“Now, with your own knife, Louis.” Voice and steps were nemesis, foot abrupt on the fallen knife. Louis’s heels caught on the hay mounded against the back wall and he tilted backward, horror blanching his face.

“Mr. Block! No!”

“You did it!” the scream torn as from a compelling madness, their faces a foot apart, the horses plunging in their stalls. It spilled then, stark terror banning lies:

“Mr. Block! It wasn’t my fault. By the sainted Mother of God! She came to me once at night—last spring. She cried at my bed—she had to have a man—she could not live—she had to have a man—”

“She
came?”

“Yes, she—”

“Once?” The face pushed nearer, the long arm groping for the knife.

“Only once—I swear! She wouldn’t ever even look at me—but that night she cried she had—”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Hoarsely, despair echoed in the barn, despair of ever ramming those self-forced words back down that dark throat.

Block jerked back, not a line to indicate him stripped. His hand fumbled in the mackinaw pocket and flipp
ed a paper package on the litter. “There’s your money. You’ve relatives on that reserve in Alberta. Go there—or anywhere—but if I see you around Wapiti one more day, I’ll—” and he kicked the knife, glinting, into a broken calf-pen. “Tell your Pa to come to the store tomorrow. They’re all leaving here by spring—your whole breed-brood.”

His glance flashed down at Louis, still hunched against the wall where fear had pegged him, and then he turned, picked up his mittens and strode to the door. A thin laugh broke behind him.

“When I talk about this—”

The Deacon spun around, his glare in the yellow light
spiking the other against the logs again. “No. You won’t. Just get to Alberta.” He motioned once with his hand, turned and pushed open the door. The frozen air wiped away the fetid barn. A cough followed faintly after him.

He strode to his team, untied it, slid the blankets off and stepped over the edge of the box into the bob-sled. He wheeled the horses sharply and, with the dogs loud about him, drove across the clearing. Erect in the withering cold of the radiant night, he did not care, in his numbness, that he had, by every standard he ever believed, damned his own soul eternally. Wapiti was clean for his son.

The horses trotted briskly into the shadow of the bush; he slumped to the bench. He prayed, Now, alone, at last, let me cry.

But he could not.

W
HOA!”
T
HOM EASED
N
ANCE
to a stop where the deep sleigh-tracks to Franz Reimer’s wound from the main road into poplars stu
ck paling-gaunt in the snow. Jake and John Rempel scrambled up from where they had squatted against the cutter-dash and, standing in the snow, shook themselves free from hay-wisps. Thom looked at them. “I’d drive you to the door but the road—”

John laughed, “I know. Four men in one small cutter on the main road is bad enough, what with all the snow. We don’t want to kill your good horse. How would you get home?”

Thom grinned. “Oh, she can take it—it’s you guys who don’t do anything all winter and are lazy enough to need a bit of walking that—”

Jake, kicking profoundly at a snow-ridge, glanced up at Thom and Pete, blanket-wrapped on the cutter-bench, and interrupted with great seriousness, “Not only is he,” with a shrug towards John, “lazy, he’s also fat!” With a quick stiff-armed
ram, he sprawled John in the soft drift and trotted down the sleigh-track towards Reimer’s, his laughter echoing on the frigid air.

“You wait, you so-and-so!” Bellowing impossible threats, John floundered to his feet and roared after his tormentor, shedding snow with each lumbering step.
But the narrow track defied racing; his perilously maintained balance escaped him near the gate and he plunged face-first into the three-foot snow. As he rolled, blinded, Jake yelled from far up the trail,

“Don’t worry, fatso! I’m getting the team any
way. I’ll drag you out!” and he doubled over in hysteria.

Thom, laughing with Pete until the raw air rasped their throats, held Nance in check till at last John again staggered up. As the cutter drew away Jake was shouting to
the now deliberate John, “Not so slow, pokey. The folks will be waiting to go home—it’s time for chores.”

Thom’s laughter eased, “Those twins!”

“Jake isn’t exactly as thin as a spring steer either,” Pete chuckled.

“Yah. Looks like he’s been fed more grain than John.”

John’s voice drifted after them, “Just wait till I get you, Jake! We’ll see who has to be hauled out of where!”

The sun was about to resign the brief winter day to clouded darkness. Nance trotted briskly homeward. Thom, washed clean for a moment by carefree laughter, glanced at Pete, whose eyes were tracing a rabbit-run into the willows of the creek-bed they were passing. He looked non-committal, at any rate, just as he had looked throughout the lesson in the Mackenzie cabin that afternoon, watching the grimy children without stirring, moving only when another song was announced and then his warm baritone, as always, rolling
clear and strong. Thom wondered again, momentarily, if he should have hesitated so long in asking his quartet to come and sing: the children had so
evidently enjoyed the songs. But there were so many things—and people—to consider when you—

“You should have had today’s meeting here in school,” Pete’s statement broke Thom’s thought. The school they were passing pushed into Thom’s consciousness. He studied the curl of smoke over the teacherage chimney as he replied,

“I guess so. It was a fairly decent day after all. But I arranged with the Mackenzies last Sunday because it was so bad then and coming to their place saves most of the children a mile hiking. It’s hard to tell how cold it will be a week ahead. Mrs. Mackenzie was very nice about it all, I thought.”

“Yah.” Pete’s inflection seemed thoughtless, and Thom saw him glance momentarily, almost furtively, at the teacherage as they passed in the swaying cutter. Thom’s wonder had barely time to stir when Pete’s voice interrupted again, “Must be hard for her—living there all alone in that teacherage and no one ever visiting her, snowed in and all.”

Thom, recalling the teacher’s cheery face and warm welcome just two evenings before, said, “She seems to be happy enough. Anyway, Margret’s been to see her twice and they have a great time. She never complains.”

Pete asked, rather reluctantly, “Does she come to your classes sometimes?”

“She’s been twice. Hal says she’s such a good teacher, I wonder how she can put up with my story-telling. It should do her good—she doesn’t know much about the Bibl
e. Anyway she’s friendly enough—” he laughed in a cloud of breath, selfconsciously. “Asked me for coffee e
ven.” He added quickly,
“Of course, having to do the chores gives me a good excuse not to on Sundays.”

Thom, eyes on the rhythm of Nance’s thigh’s, felt Pete glance at him swiftly then look away into the road-side shrubbery. He felt compelled, by the other’s silence, to continue, “But I suppose, after years of living in the city, she does find it lonesome here. I guess you’re right.”

Pete said nothing further. Waiting, Thom puzzled, Why does our talk, when we’re alone, lose itself where there is nothing to say? I wanted to ask him what he thought of the class. But now Pete’s distant look repulsed such a question. As Nance turned into the short-cut towards home across the Martens’ quarter, Thom, rubbing his face against the cold with his coat-sleeve, tried to re-balance his thoughts.

Oddly, in the one-room cabin crowded with children and grown-ups and a crying baby, he had felt freer in teaching the lesson than ever before. He stood backed against the chipped iron bed-stand in the cabin thick with the smell of drying furs and unwashed children and spoke of the man who had been born to prepare the way for Christ. But the story of John the Baptist seemed to interest the children very little. As he was drawing near the close, nearly discouraged, some strange biblical detail caught at small Judy Mackenzie and she, tongue loosened apparently by the home surroundings, for she had never before spoken even when questioned directly, asked with wide eyes, “Mr. Wiens, you ever eat grasshoppers?”

“Why—no—I—” nonplussed.

Proudly, “I did one, last summer. Phooey! They’re terrible salty!”

It was then that the twins, who at her question had ducked their heads hastily, snorted and roared. The older children had
been smiling in their restrained way and Mrs. Mackenzie, by the kitchen stove nursing her youngest to quiet him, was just reaching over to slap her daughter to silence when the mirth broke and convulsed them all. Thom, knowing the twins, had previously warned them to control themselves, but as the infectious laughter beat at him in the gloomy cabin and even Pete joined, Thom was pushed into it too, albeit with a sinking feeling regarding the story he must continue. But strangely, when the laughter eased and he explained that Palestinian locusts were quite different from Canadian grasshoppers and that the diet of “locusts and honey” meant that John, living in the wilderness, ate only such food as the region naturally provided, Jackie Labret asked quietly,

“Did he live like us when we go huntin’ in summer—berries and fish and stuff?”

The unexpected parallel amazed Thom. “Why yes, Jackie. John the Baptist lived like that, simply, eating what God provided. He was too busy doing his job to be concerned with nicely cooked meals.”

As he spoke, Thom sensed a new element of contact with the children which he had not brushed before. He could explain John’s great urgency as he waited and taught in the Jordanian wilderness, preparing the way for the Redeemer, and the children found a kernel of truth in his story. Thom could but marvel at the attention on the faces before him, and the strange path by which it had arrived there.

Then the story was over and he, Pete and the twins sang a final song. He reminded them all to come next Sunday to practise for the Christmas program and the afternoon was gone. As he moved towards Mrs. Mackenzie, careful of the children twisting into their worn coats and parkas, she glanced
up shyly and said, “You sing nice. Could maybe some grownups come and listen in the school sometime—with the kids?”

Thom’s heart leaped “Why of course. And your husband and older sons come too—especially two weeks from today. The children will have a Christmas program then. Next Sunday will be mostly practice, but on Christmas Sunday you come—with the whole family. All right?”

She looked away from his friendly glance, holding the baby’s tiny body tight against her. “Yes. Maybe he’ll come too—maybe.”

“I want to thank you very much for letting us have the class here today. But when I asked, I didn’t mean that your husband and the boys should stay out. They could have listened too and—”

“Oh, they’re workin’ lots with the traps. They’re never home in the day. If traps good, skin all evening,” and she gestured into the gloom above the stove where rows of raw furs hung on their stretchers from the peeled rafter-poles.

He said, “You get him to bring your whole family. He can leave the traps to themselves on Christmas Day at least, eh?” He added, about to turn, “You don’t know why none of the Moosomin children came today, do you?”

“Not been here. I don’t know,” her frank eyes faced him fleetingly.

He murmured, “The oldest girl has a big part in the program—hope they come next Sunday. Well, good-bye, and thanks again.” She smiled briefly as he turned to the children surging out. He followed in their stream, patting a few heads, dropping an occasional word. They attended with amazing regularity and seemed to enjoy most of the stories, but their silence in his presence always depressed him somewhat. They
so rarely spoke. He had tried every way he could imagine to understand them since they began with the classes again in November, but somehow his resources for coming near them were so inadequate. As he looked about at them, Jackie Labret, in the act of prodding his two smaller brothers towards home, turned and smiled up at him. “Mr. Wiens, maybe Hal could come to our class too?”

Hal! Why had he not considered him before? Perhaps it would work. Neither Hal nor Mom would require much persuasion. “Would you like that, Jackie?”

“Sure. We have fun in school.”

As Jackie trotted away Thom thought, Probably I’ve been too serious with them. They’re not used to our ways of teaching Bible stories. The grasshoppers had begun to crack their tacit reserve. Mrs. Mackenzie’s words and Jackie’s smile warmed him to his very depths, beyond the concern at the Moosomins’ absence. He’d tell Hal to remind Marie in school. And Hal could come to the class Christmas program, then continue coming after New Year’s. Response would come. He breathed deeply in the frozen air that cut away the smells of the crowded cabin. Joseph and his tremendous ideas! Then he walked out into the yard where Pete, silen
t and sober, was leading Nance from the barn. The children had all scattered.