The Island Walkers (64 page)

The foreman stood a few feet off. His eyes, shadowed with fatigue, took in Alf’s weapon.

Ford’s goon had stopped a couple of steps away from his boss. He was well over six feet, too heavy for his height, with a look in his eyes of lazy contempt. Held loosely in his left hand was a tire iron.

“You guys got a flat tire?” Alf said.

A strange coolness had invaded him. He was ready to fight, but at the same time, he almost didn’t care what happened. There was something absurd about them all standing there like schoolboys getting ready to brawl. He wondered if this was Ford’s idea of revenge. He’d considered his fight with the foreman to be pretty much of a saw-off, but maybe Ford himself didn’t see it that way. Alf waited, with the river at his back, feeling no need to talk. But he did not take his gaze from Ford’s staring eyes.

There was an evasion there, a refusal to see. Ford’s shrunken pupils had found their focus somewhere just in front of his face. Alf was put out by this. For God’s sake, he thought, at least look at me.

He sensed the goon shift his weight, getting ready.

“Alfie,” Ford said, and his voice was more strangulated than usual, “I want you to stay away from our people. Anybody who works for Bannerman’s, I don’t want you near them. You got that? Or do we have to teach it to you?”

Alf chortled. Ford was sounding an awful lot like some movie cowboy.

“What’s so funny, asshole? Stay away from our people.”

“Is this how you want to spend your life?” Alf said quietly.

Ford’s head jerked, almost imperceptibly, as if he’d been struck, and for a moment, a moment only, he looked directly at Alf. Alf saw, not for the first time, the boy in Ford, the lost, plaintive boy at the centre of all that hardness. Alf, too, was affected, at the unexpected contact. A kind of electric shock went through him.

Tossing down his weapon, he kept looking steadily at Ford.

“You just watch it,” Ford said. But his voice was hoarse now, without authority; in his eyes was a watery sheen.

He walked quickly away, towards the Chevelle.

“Watchit,” the goon told Alf, pointing at him with the iron. Scowling, he turned to trek away across the sand.

Alf watched the red car bump its way up the pasture road. Turning to the water, he found himself swept by unexpected emotion. It was as if some old grief had been exposed in him — a heaviness that verged on sorrow. It saturated everything around him — the warm air smelling of sand and willows, the implacably moving water, carrying along bits of grass and weed, funnelling under the ruined bridge. He had no idea of what had just happened between him and Ford, but the world had changed, he could feel it: the world had grown sadder and heavier and more itself. The very light seemed to lie on the land with a slow, viscous, golden weight. He watched two swallows skim the river, twisting and dodging with breath-taking alacrity, rising on wings so quick they seemed aflame.

57

THAT NIGHT
, he made four visits and picked up as many cards, including one from Carl Schmidt. “I guess I’m just sick of being afraid,” the spinner told him as he signed a card at his kitchen table.

When Alf got back to the Vimy House, he discovered that the other organizers had been successful too. In fact, they had put the union over the top, in fine style. They’d signed up almost fifty-seven per cent of the workforce, two per cent higher than was needed to achieve automatic certification. People who had held back for weeks had suddenly found reason or courage or weariness or anger enough to sign a card. It was as if there had been some change in the atmosphere that had tipped the mysterious mechanism that releases a decision. Doyle couldn’t explain it, though he said he’d seen the
phenomenon once or twice before. “An earthquake in China,” he said, shrugging, “who the hell knows?” As the organizers celebrated in the Vimy House, Alf felt oddly distant, though he had a pleasant shock when Shirley, her head snaking forward almost apologetically, planted a long, dry kiss on his mouth.

The following week two union negotiators arrived from Toronto to hammer out a first contract. They asked Alf for the names of people who been laid off or fired over the past year as a punishment for supporting the union. The idea was to lever these people back into Bannerman’s as part of the collective agreement. Alf put his own name on the list. He told the negotiators he didn’t want to go back to knitting, he couldn’t stomach the idea of working again under Ford, but anything else would be fine. A few days later, he was offered — and accepted — a job on Bannerman’s maintenance crew.

He was soon spending his days patching and painting, often working alone, and often out of doors, which suited him well enough, though it all seemed a bit tame after the drama of organizing. One of his first tasks was on the roof of Number Six, his old mill, repairing some leaks around a ventilation shaft. He worked at his own pace — it was a relief not to be hurried along by machines — and from time to time, with a melancholy sense of freedom, paused to gaze across the roofs of the town towards the humped hills of Wiley’s farm, cutting the fresh sky of early summer.

In late July, the workers approved their first contract, and the union held a victory party in Lions Park. All afternoon, tall clouds drifted from the west, casting a double mood of sun and shadow over the thousand or so people who spread their blankets on the parched grass, in the shade of maples and willows. Taking a chance, Alf asked Margaret to come with him. She was speaking to him again, but she said she had a choir rehearsal at the church. Jamie and Penny came gladly, though, excited by the promise of hot dogs and prizes.

Doyle had returned to town for the celebrations. Dressed in Bermuda shorts even redder than his face, he insisted on making the rounds with Alf. “It wouldn’t have happened without this guy,”

the organizer told people in his gruff way, while planting his large, moist hand between Alf’s shoulder blades. Alf was chagrined by the attention — Doyle’s praise seemed exaggerated, to him — but, also, he was secretly pleased. Everywhere, he met approving faces: that look of admiration and hopefulness he’d first encountered on the fire escape. It had unsettled him then, and it unsettled him a little now, this discovery of something in himself people seemed drawn to. When the time came for speeches from the bandshell, Doyle barked into the microphone that Alf should stand. He got up warily from the picnic blanket he was sharing with Jamie and Penny to the largest ovation anyone got all afternoon. Then, sitting down, he found himself gazing at Pete’s house, on its hillside above the park. The garage door was open. Pete’s Sarasota was there, facing outwards, its windshield dark.

Later, he stood talking to Doyle by the river. Below them, the shallow current collared rocks with foam. Alf felt a certain poignancy. Something was coming to an end. After this picnic, Doyle would get in his dusty car, and he might never see him again, though they had promised to get together.

“So I can’t persuade you to change your mind, you bastard,” Doyle said. Despite Alf’s lack of interest, the organizer had kept pestering him to join him as a staff organizer for the
UKW
.

Alf grinned at his friend’s persistence.

“I don’t think organizing’s for me,” he said. “I never got over the feeling I was just bothering people.”

“Pah! People need to be bothered.
Someone
has to wake them up.”

Linda Connaught, the new secretary of the local, called Doyle away. He was to be starter and general announcer for the races. Jamie ran up to Alf with Billy Boileau. Billy’s dark eyes fixed on Alf’s chest.

“There’s a father-and-sons three-legged race!” Jamie said.

“You think we can win, eh?”

“Sure!”

Alf looked at Billy. “Shall we get you a partner then?”

Billy glared into the air, at nothing. “C’mon, I bet we could get Dick Harmer to run with you.”

“Nope,” Billy said in that trapped, hard voice of his. With his fists jammed and working in his pockets, he seemed to be expecting something that had not been offered, demanding it.

Over at the course, Alf tied Jamie’s leg to his. There wasn’t much time to practise. The mothers-and-daughters race was already being run. Penny had found a partner in Alf’s old school chum Annie Stone, they stumbled their way along in the middle of the pack, and soon the fathers and sons were ready to start. Bellowing, “Go, Brothers!” Malachi Doyle dropped his big arm and the horde of men and boys hopped over the grass, towards the strand of red yarn held taut by Mary Carr’s twin daughters. Alf and Jamie finished fourth or fifth, Alf laughing so hard he nearly fell over, while Jamie kept yelling at him, put out at his lack of seriousness. For prizes, all the children received mechanical crickets that soon filled the park with their clicking.

Afterwards, Jamie went off to the swings with a group of other boys. Alf noticed Billy sitting up on a picnic table by himself, intently watching the others. He brought him a cricket.

The boy looked at the toy in Alf’s outstretched hand but did not take it. Alf set the cricket on the table and climbed up beside him.

“There’s going to be regular races. You don’t need a partner for them.”

Billy made his trapped-in-the-throat sound:
Heh
.

“I’ll bet you’re pretty fast.”

It was like talking to a post. But again Alf found himself drawn, almost painfully, to this skinny little boy with the mop of luxuriant hair, sitting hunched beside him with his hands on his knees, and a faraway, slit-eyed look in which Alf glimpsed just the trace of a smile. Alf began to talk about the different kinds of runners: the sprinters, and the long-distance runners, the ones who could keep going all day, like Tom Longboat. Tom Longboat was an Indian, Alf dared to say, and caught for his reward a slight turn of Billy’s head. So he told him
about the great Tom Longboat, how he was from a reserve not far from here, how he’d beaten all the great marathoners of the day, including the Englishman Alf Shrubb, flying along in the tradition of the great Indian runners who in the old days had carried messages long distances between villages without stopping to eat and only drinking what they could scoop from streams as they splashed through them.

Once, twice, Billy glanced up at him, suspicious interest in his narrowed eyes. But a deeper gleam was there too, perhaps it was delight. Alf reached out and touched him affectionately on the back. It was like making contact with a little dynamo. The tension there was palpable, in the hard flesh.

“So maybe you could give it a try,” Alf said. “I think they’re almost ready.”

Doyle, holding up his clipboard, was calling out in his raw voice for runners. First, girls, eight to eleven. Then boys. Jamie and his friends were trooping back from the swings. Alf noticed his son eyeing him and Billy warily. Just then, Billy jumped off the table and walked rapidly towards the trees at the south end of the park. He was like a wild animal, bolting at God only knew what tremor of danger. In a few seconds he had disappeared into the trees that climbed the flank of Lookout Hill.

Jamie, who had turned nine that month, came second, despite being matched with older boys. The lad was obviously a sprinter, Alf thought, as his Uncle Joe had been. And for a moment, Alf saw his brother cross the finish line at the high-school track meet: his head tossed back, his mouth open in a crazy, tortured smile of triumph. Afterwards, he’d stuffed his red ribbons in a drawer as if they were nothing.

Jamie came over to the table, his face shining with pride.

“Ah, you’ll do better next time,” Alf told him, as if he’d failed by coming second — and felt his own heart sink as he saw the shadow cross his son’s face. Why had he said that, when in fact he was proud
of him? He tried to make it up, praising the boy, ruffling his hair. But the damage had been done. Alf watched him go off towards the crowd with his prize, a red balloon, bobbing behind him.

He sat on disconsolately. Why did he hurt people — his own family most of all? It was as if there was a blade in his hands that had a life of its own. He looked off towards the woods flowing up the side of Lookout Hill. He’d been kind to Billy Boileau, and cruel to his own son. What in hell was he trying to do? He thought of Billy in the woods — he imagined him walking hard up the narrow trails, or sulking on a rock. The image pierced him, but he suppressed it, feeling disloyal to Jamie.

Well, he would make it up to the boy. He looked around. The last race had just finished. The crowd was dissolving and Doyle was walking away in deep conversation with two other men, his voice growling under theirs. A cloud was just passing over the sun, the park had slipped into shadow. He was unable to pick out Jamie among all the people — it seemed as if he had made the boy vanish by his cruelty.

It was then he saw Lucille. He had not spoken to her for months, though in truth he’d never stopped thinking about her. And here she was, as if emerging from one of his own daydreams, striding towards him. He half-expected a rebuke. Unusually for her, she was wearing a dress: short, scoop-necked, her brown knees flashing as she walked.