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Authors: Guy Vanderhaeghe

BOOK: The Last Crossing
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Father was in a rage. “I want you to find a school that will take my son Addington, Mr. Fry! Let ’em beat him, starve him, whatever it takes! I want him well and truly corrected!”

Mr. Fry’s quiet reply was unintelligible, but the tone of it was temporizing and placating. Whatever the solicitor said prompted Father to lower his voice. Nonetheless, he could still be heard through the heavy oak door. Father can always be heard; not to share his verdicts with the household is beyond him. “Ah, perhaps you are correct, Mr. Fry,” he said. “Perhaps his mother’s death did work a change in the boy. Addington worshipped and adored her. When my Eunice died giving birth to the twins, it must have put the worm in the apple.”

For the first time, I understood the reason for Addington’s hatred of us. Because Simon and I were twins, inseparable, connected by a bond he recognized but could not share. More important, because, with the unswervable conviction of a child, Addington could never forgive us the death of his mother. For years, I turned this over in my mind. Addington hated us, but could he not see how we, too, longed for a mother to warm that cold house? And if Simon and I were equally guilty of murder, why was it only me that Addington relentlessly persecuted? That he mercilessly cuffed, pinched, frog-marched headlong into walls?

Simon he never dared touch, not from fear of Father, but because of something in my twin that stayed Addington’s hand. What’s more, if Addington happened on us, the “cursed twins” together, he never harmed me, simply stalked off muttering threats of future assaults. If Simon was near me, I was safe. In some way I could not fathom, Simon, weak as he was, was my protector. His spirit affected all of us in a mysterious fashion: in Father, awakening a passionate love; in
me, a conscience, however sporadically. In Addington, a check for his savagery. To put a word to Simon’s power, to define it, is impossible. But I think Simon
saw
more in us than we realized. We all felt it.

How laughable that Addington should be curbed by the angel of the house, the pet of all the servants, the friend of all. How strange that Simon should be the darling of Father, a man for whom nothing exists if it cannot be measured, while Simon has no interest in calculation, was seven before he could count, ten before he could tell time. A boy content to let his nerves and heart chart the world for him.

Never the least drop of hurry in Simon’s soul, his slow way of speaking, a faint, lingering smile on his lips as he wandered about the house. A child who would wind his arms around the leg of a servant, stand rapt, rubbing his face against a skirt. Even indomitable Miss Dowell, the governess, allowed him this intimacy. Often we would find him sound asleep in the hallway with the mastiffs, William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great, his white-blond head pillowed on the gently heaving flank of a dozing dog, lamb lying down with the lions.

And there was his button collection. Father did not approve, not when he spent good money providing suitable toys for the amusement of his boys – a jolly Noah’s Ark, tops, hoops and sticks, lead soldiers, a train. Father afraid an eight-year-old’s preference for buttons would leave the impression he was a simpleton. Henry Gaunt could not have an idiot son. He confiscated them.

Simon raised no hue and cry, simply started another collection abetted by Mrs. Bullfinch, the housekeeper, who doted on him so much she was willing to run the risk of Father’s ire. Soon, Simon had another set of buttons rattling in his pockets. If it were me, I would have hid this from Father, but not Simon. He spread them on the carpet in Father’s sight like a jeweller displaying precious gems. And it worked. Father overlooked the flouting of his authority, retreated before Simon’s fascination with bits of glass, ivory, jet, bone, mother-of-pearl, wood. Buttons, buttons, ordinary buttons. He spent hours tracing their shapes with his fingers, staring at them, sometimes even popping them into his mouth and sucking them as avidly as he would lemon drops.

One afternoon in the library, he lifted a button of blue glass to the summer light cascading through the tall windows. I heard him murmur two words, “How bright!” and, as he did, a spot of unutterable brilliance, a tiny patch of shimmering, blue, celestial fire winked on his face as he waggled his button in the sunshine.

I edged closer. Simon exchanged a bone button for the glass one. Squeezing it tightly, he exclaimed ecstatically, “How warm it is!” and passed it to me. I felt an animal heat burn in my palm, felt that old, dry piece of bone pulse with living blood and marrow. I hurled the button to the carpet, frightened by Simon’s powers of suggestion.

I was not the only one susceptible. Without Simon, Mr. Balducci would never have come to Sythe Grange as drawing master. All my pleas for lessons in art Father rebuffed, scornfully dismissed. He scoffed at the notion that one of his sons could possibly be interested in “daubing paint.” Seeing me so crestfallen, Simon intervened on my behalf. Every morning at breakfast he importuned Father. “Please, sir, Charles and I wish to learn to draw.”

Father said nothing, dove behind his paper, but in a few weeks, to my astonishment, fat Mr. Balducci came bouncing up the drive on an estate cart stacked with his luggage. When his presence was explained, when I realized the miracle Simon had wrought, I burst into tears. After all, he had no interest in drawing, a boy so awkward his printing could scarcely be read, a boy who covered his shirts in inky blots whenever he touched a pen. And yet he had done this for me. For my sake done the unthinkable. Told a lie.

During Mr. Balducci’s tenure at Sythe Grange, Simon always haunted the “studio,” encouraging my first crude efforts, declaring them wonderful. And Simon’s enthusiasm ignited Mr. Balducci’s. The Italian would rub his hands gleefully together and parrot my brother’s judgment. “Yes, excellent! Most excellent!” It was not excellent, but it was the first approval I had received from anyone other than Simon for what Father described as “Charles’s doodles.” My wilted heart drank it in thirstily.

Father attempted to raise all his sons to fully appreciate the advantages which accrue to men with a respect for numbers, for bald
information, for hard facts. But facts did not take with Simon. I cannot imagine he would ever be capable of recording the nonsense I see before me, something Father has such a taste for, and which I have only recently begun to post to him daily, yielding to his orders. An account, in his words, “Of weather, temperature, geography, business conducted, occurrences ordinary or unusual pertaining to the enterprise.”

Today’s letter, on the table, reads,
“Temperature as of seven a.m., sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Sky clear, cloudless.”
It is as far as I have got. What else to say? Business conducted. What business conducted? And then I dredge up the one decision Addington has taken and cavalierly turned over to me to implement. I begin to write.

“Brief confab with Addington after breakfast yesterday. He wishes to engage scout familiar with topography and tribes of Upper Missouri and North-West Territory. Old frontier hands met by Addington on journey upriver recommend Mr. Jerry Potts, a Scottish half-breed and highly regarded guide, as the man to hire
.

“It has fallen to me to locate Mr. Potts, and strike terms with him. Mr. Ayto, a fellow whom Addington met on the steamer to Fort Benton, has volunteered to help us in the search for Simon. Addington has accepted his offer, and agreed to pay Mr. Ayto’s expenses. It is Mr. Ayto’s advice that on no account should remuneration in excess of fifty dollars a month be offered to a half-breed. They may be had cheap. I shall take Mr. Ayto at his word.”

What more can be said?

“Temperature as of midday, eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Strong wind all afternoon, dying away shortly before six o’clock. Sixteenth consecutive day with no precipitation. Drouth threatening Fort Benton. No news pertaining to Simon. I press Addington to leave Fort Benton and journey north with all dispatch. If he agrees, this may be the last letter you shall receive in some time. No regular post will be available after we depart. Yours sincerely, Charles Gaunt”

Simon Father loves. Addington he respects because he admires ruthlessness. At his warmest, Father ignores me. So I was surprised when he asked me to paint him a room. Filled with momentary
elation, I believed it an opportunity to win a tiny bit of his esteem.

Perhaps he has already examined my effort, opened the room which I locked, carrying the key away with me in my pocket. Despite his solemn oath not to inspect the murals until I was finished, Father would not hesitate to have the servants force the door if curiosity got the better of him.

Father denied me nothing to accomplish my commission. Immense trestle tables, quantities of paint, brushes, dozens of lamps equipped with reflectors, hundreds of beeswax candles to make night bright as day. At first, I worked like a demon. All those exact geometrical calculations, the ruling off of grids on the plaster for my cartoons, grids drawn to scale from those superimposed on preliminary sketches. And yet, the whole project was compromised from the beginning. In my heart, I knew he would never be satisfied, could hear him comparing my work unfavourably to those wall paintings that he saw in that restaurant twenty years ago and that he believes the height of artistic expression. “Well, my boy, it may be ‘interesting,’ but it is no Polar Latitudes. There was a fellow who could paint!”

No sooner did I begin than I sensed defeat. I would fail Father. From Mr. Balducci’s tuition I knew that a mural must be done
buon fresco
to last, painted on a wet, freshly prepared lime-plaster wall. Nevertheless, I applied my oils to a dry wall, not even bothering to size the surface with casein or glue.

From the beginning, I condemned Father’s mural to fade, flake, eventually disappear. The certainty of my pictures undergoing such a fate pleases me. Emperor Addington, who refused to sit for me and whom I had to draw from a photograph, the servants who were the models for slaves, praetorian guards, degenerate Roman senators, posterity shall never gaze upon them.

I could not bring myself to paint Father what he wanted, a Soyer’s Symposium, a mere entertainment, an amusement. Since I could not hope to please him, I pleased myself. I placed Father on the ceiling as Jove, with fluffy, white side-whiskers, clutching his thunderbolts, sentenced to watch Rome corrode, turn to motes of dusty paint under his very eyes.

I sweep the port from the table for the pleasure of hearing it shatter on the floor. A horde of disturbed flies buzzes angrily on the windowpane, dances ferociously there. This room smells of dust and an unemptied chamber pot. Because Addington wanted it does not mean it is not a horrid place, a cell filled with heat, flies, dust, stinks.

I go to the window. No relief there, just a view of a sun-stunned, deserted road. Like all roads in this Ultima Thule, it runs straight as a die, no cozy twists or eccentric turns which acknowledge human history. A direct route to nowhere. I want Simon.

Down below, a drunken Indian reels out of an alley, holding a barrel stave like a sceptre. I have yet to see the “noble savage” of literature, only what the locals call “post Indians,” wretches who hang about the fort begging, slatterns and their debauched consorts in the castoff rags of the white man: frock coats with a single sleeve, rotting hats, tattered trousers. They plead for pennies, or offer their wives to passersby for the price of a glass of whisky.

Though inebriated, this man is better dressed, a primitive Beau Brummel in fringed buckskin trousers and a beaded jacket which flashes in the sunlight like a peacock’s tail. European haberdashery, stridently checked shirt, and shiny, high-crowned hat.

Unsteadily, he deposits his buttocks upon the ground, crosses his bandy legs, lifts the barrel stave high above his head. It hangs there suspended, then the Indian slams it down on the roadway, begins to sing. To howl. Yip like a dog run over by a wagon in a London street. In time to his unearthly ululations, he drums the hard, packed earth. A performance of despair, of animal agony – all these things at once. His head rolls slackly back and forth as his raw mouth beseeches the sky, face horribly swollen from drink or a beating, the features so puffy, so bloated he appears to have been born without eyes.

At the sight of the flashing stick a memory rises in me. Shooting season at Sythe Grange. Birds flushed from their coverts by the beaters, the whirl of them in the sky, the bark of guns. All those pheasant chicks Father’s gamekeeper hand-raised, coddled with hard-boiled egg and mash only to be driven from the bushes, made to pay the price of their careful nurturing.

That barrel stave slashing the earth and the beater’s shrill cry seem meant to drive me into the open. I must take immediate steps to find Potts. I must urge, wheedle, Addington into action. If I do not place our feet upon the road, it will not be done.

Palms flat to the windowpane, I stare down at the Indian eyeless in Gaza, the Indian who sports a bedraggled, wispy moustache above a siren mouth summoning me to be my brother’s keeper.

6

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