For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (9 page)

He told Jerry he went on protest marches, and burned the American flag – well, he did all the things the American children did.

But Bines had not heard of this. And it did not matter to him at all what people did. He simply shrugged. His face had a tanned look, his eyes were bolt-black and each pupil seemed to shine in more than one place.

Suddenly Nevin said: “Dr. Leach has me on a bunch of pills.”

And he took out these pills – his blue ones and his yellow ones and laid the bottles on the table.

Nevin paused and lit a cigarette and looked around the room. A fierce wind blew across the street over the blue ice, which at twilight had turned deep violet. The shades of night were in the store windows.

Then he smiled uncertainly and looked down at his blue pills and his yellow ones, the butt end of a knife sticking out of his coat pocket.

Bines got up and left the table and he did it so abruptly that Nevin thought he was going to hit him. And he closed his eyes as if waiting to be punched.

But Bines went out of the tavern to his truck and
came back before Nevin had his pills put away. “Read this here,” he said, and he left a book on the table. “It might help ya. It’s what Joe Walsh gave me when I was in jail – I don’t know, I never read it – never read it – but a lad in jail like you read it – as far as I know about it – and he is working over at Canadian Tire and doing okay – okay as far as I can tell –”

It was called
Sobriety Without End
.

Nevin looked at it. Bines had placed it down near the bottle of yellow pills.

When he looked up Bines had gone.

It was about 6:00 at night on November 19 when Lucy came to the door. She hardly glanced at Ralphie Pillar, just now and then looked up under an old cap as she spoke. “Jerry wants to see you,” she said.

“Jerry Bines – where is he?” Ralphie said.

“He’s in the hospital – so you have to come.”

The house was five or six blocks from the hospital. The trees were naked and a hard wind blew against their faces.

“What happened?” Ralphie asked.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. Her jacket was short and thin and her arms were folded. Her boots scraped the pavement in time to the hurried motion of her hips.

Ralphie had not seen him in a while. Bines had never phoned him, had only once been to the house. Bines was not a friend of his in the ordinary sense.

When he and Lucy got to the hospital, he did not know what to expect or how to enter the room. That is, in the most basic way he did not know whether to look sad or smile, and he suddenly realized he had the same feeling when he had gone to visit his father years ago.

Bines was not in bed. That was the first thing that Ralphie had not expected. He was sitting in a wheelchair, side on, with the window slightly open – the window opened from the top – trying to get some air. The sky and earth were frozen solid now.

The nurse was trying to get Bines to go back to bed. Bines was listening to her, without speaking himself. Then Ralphie noticed, when Bines tilted his head, that his eyes were wrapped.

“You have to get back into bed, Jerry,” the nurse was saying.

“No, no – going home.”

“Oh dear – you can’t go home tonight.”

But Bines paid no attention to her.

“God, Ralphie,” she said, “what are we going to do with him?”

And she said this as if everyone knew Bines and was at a loss as to how to handle him because he was so wild, and that somehow this was wonderful.

But Bines paid no attention to her.

“What happened to you?” Ralphie said. He looked at
the wrapping and he went to touch Bines on the shoulder but didn’t.

“Camp blew up,” Bines said.

“What?”

“Camp – blew me right through the door – the door,” Bines said.

“How are you?” Ralphie said.

“None too pleased about it,” Bines said.

Everyone was amazed that he had lived. Not only lived but that he’d only suffered a broken rib and a flash to his eyes.

“It’s a miracle he’s alive at all,” the nurse said.

Bines said nothing. He didn’t even seem to notice what people said about him, or that people were gushing over him or that people were amazed by him.

He told Ralphie that there was nothing left of the camp, except the door.

Bines kept touching the wrapping about his eyes, almost in slow motion, with the tip of his fingers, and turning his head slightly when Lucy spoke, or Ralphie. Lucy sat at the edge of the bed, looking at everyone with a cautious inquiring gaze.

Then the nurse told him that Dr. Freeman was coming in to see him.

“We can’t be responsible for you,” the doctor said when Bines insisted he was going, “if you don’t stay for more observation.”

“You should stay,” Ralphie said.

“No, no – don’t want you to be responsible for me – responsible for me – responsible for meself.”

And he would answer no more questions, say nothing else.

Bines didn’t stay in the wheelchair but got up and asked Ralphie to help him. It was strange to see that he was vulnerable.

“I want you to see if anyone is out by my truck,” he said.

Bines waited near the door. Ralphie came in and told him that there was no one around his truck.

“You sure?” Bines said, and Lucy ran herself to check.

“No one’s there,” she said, coming back a moment later.

Bines nodded.

They started out across the parking lot, with Lucy rushing ahead to open the door and then coming back to help him to it.

“It’s a miracle you’re alive,” Lucy kept saying, her face dazzling. “It’s a miracle is all I can say.”

Bines lay on the couch, and kept listening to the wind, with a cup of tea poured into an old mug resting on his lap.

“What time is it?” he said.

“Quarter to two,” Ralphie said.

“Quarter to two,” he repeated. His mouth looked
pensive now that his eyes were wrapped, and the wrapping was so spotless it looked out of place resting against Bines’ hair.

“Quarter to two,” he repeated again.

Ralphie went and looked out the window. The sky was clear. The stars dotted the sky and made a great canopy over the soundless trees and uprooted stumps of the clearcut. Some snow lay against these stumps, a fine clean powdered snow. A way around the bend the river was silent and the dark shape of the island Ralphie owned was just visible. He had been left the island by his father, and he had always thought that he would build a camp on it, but there was a dispute with the Indian reserve over fishing rights, and though Ralphie had hardly stepped on it he’d never considered selling it.

Bines touched the wrapping and turned his head as if to look Ralphie’s way.

“How do you like William?” Bines said.

“Oh – I like him very much,” Ralphie said, smiling innocently, the way he always did when he was genuine and wanted to show affection.

“Like him, do ya – don’t think he’s spoiled – spoiled, is he?”

“No,” Ralphie said.

“I already got him to half-tie his own fly,” Bines said. “That’s not so bad, is it?”

“That’s great,” Ralphie said.

“I never touch him,” Bines said, pointing a finger out
of the darkness. “You know, hit him or nothin – spose you thought I hit him?”

“No, of course not,” Ralphie said.

“You didn’t think that there?”

“No.”

“Oh – well anyways – I was thinking about it, and thought you might have,” Bines said.

It seemed that this was something which had worried Bines a good deal and now he was relieved. He reflected about something a moment.

“Don’t treat him like my old man treated me,” he said.

Ralphie couldn’t answer. He only nodded silently.

“Tea’s cold,” Jerry said.

When Jerry was young, wearing mittens and Humphry pants, his father used to take him down to the old rink to get him to fight with boys from the rapids and elsewhere, boys sometimes four or five years older than he, for a quart of wine.

“Move under him – you’re smaller than he is – when he throws a right go inside and counter with your left – that little cocksucker won’t get ya – won’t get ya – you hit like a mule,” his father would say, maniacal in his own detachment from his son’s plight, his half-bared head catching the stiff breezes and being pelted by sharp falling rain, mixed with snow.

“Won’t get ya,” Bines would nod, his lips trembling in the freezing rain, sliding on his rubber boots, “Won’t get ya,” his small hands flailing away, and yet like something natural to his nature his punches short and hard under the dim light from the crooked shed, where men who had wanted to intervene but were frightened in some way stayed inside, the quart of wine Digger had bet on being held in someone else’s hand, and the sound of a truck throttling.

But no matter – no matter. It never mattered. He could not take the fear away. It was always there. Somewhere, like he had been hurt and lost a long time ago. As if a long time ago he wanted his father to hug him, and to say: “It’s all right, Jerry – all right. You know what I’m going to do for you? You know where we’re going to go? I betcha ya don’t know – I betcha you don’t.”

And his mother would laugh and they would all laugh, and his mother would go too.

At 3:00 in the morning, Bines unwrapped his eyes in the back porch of his house. By that afternoon, the pain along his left side, and particularly in his left arm, had grown worse. Still he went into town. He parked his truck and moved slowly down the street to a small store, where he bought a copy of the local paper.

“Man Escapes Blast,” he read.

He read the story about himself with difficulty, and felt good that people would say those things about him; that there was going to be a book on him as well. But then people had always said he was exceptional and Bines had always taken himself to be, and as with most
men and women who have the belief that they are exceptional there is a certain inability to feel as much for others as they do for themselves.

“Although Mr. Bines is no stranger to us …,” he read, and then he read the story about how his father had made him fight in the pulpyard against men when he was thirteen, and how he was not a stranger to his share of trouble. And the story finished up: perhaps he was “more sinned against than sinning.” An expression Bines had never heard before, but he nodded with conviction and satisfaction when he read this, the same way he had when he was acquitted at his trial.

Now it was growing dark, and he waited to see his son whom he knew his mother had brought to town. When he saw the boy he moved across the street and into the park.

“Where you goin, Willie?” he asked.

“Meet mom,” the boy said. And in fact Bines saw his ex-wife walking towards them at that moment.

She walked up to them and nodded. Her hair was red, and she had eyes that were pale blue. She wore a fawn-coloured kerchief that smelled of evening. In all ways she looked like a country girl in town.

“Look,” Bines said, showing them the article.

“Yes,” she smiled slightly, as if she were afraid. “I read it.”

For some reason he was slightly disappointed in this. There was a picture of the camp on page two and he showed it to William.

“Come through the door, Willie,” he said. “Through the door, almost blew my ears off.”

Again his ex-wife smiled as if she were frightened, and looked at her son. Her face was covered in small transparent freckles. He was trying to make something up to her by showing her this article on him.

“What does this mean here?” he said, pointing to the quote.

“‘More sinned against than sinning,’” she said, looking up at him again in consternation, and puzzlement, as the evening now smelled of snow and brown mud. It was as if she didn’t want to tell him. He looked at her and smiled.

“What does it mean?”

In fact, he found out it meant exactly what she would want for herself, and what everyone seemed to want – even what Joe Walsh had seemed to want. To be more sinned against than sinning.

He shrugged when she told him.

“Is yer minister more sinned against than sinning?” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“But they would never say that about him – in fact, before he dies they will say just the opposite –”

He said this very calmly, but she knew he was upset with her for not liking this article. He took the paper suddenly and threw it in the garbage barrel a few feet away as if it were nothing important. He shrugged. “Don’t matter anyways,” he said. “Don’t matter –
anyway just go to the drugstore for me – before it closes – just go over – eye drops – got a sore eye –”

His son looked up at him and then went cautiously over to the barrel to retrieve the article.

“Leave it be, Willie,” he said. “Leave it be.”

Bines wanted to give his boy a benefit. And in December – about the eighth – he went to Ralphie to ask him to help out.

Ralphie told him that they should try to have the benefit after Christmas – for it was too close to the season, and people were very busy – but that he could try to organize it through the Kinsmen some time in January.

“But you don’t understand,” Bines said, “I already told his mom we would have one – have one – already said he would. Maybe Adele could help out or something – Adele help out.”

“I know she would,” Ralphie said. “She’d help out in a minute – I know she would.”

“I want to have him a benefit,” Jerry said, and then he paused. “I want people to know I had him one – had him one. I want his mom to know it too –”

Jerry had told his wife and little boy about the benefit he and Ralphie were planning. Why he did this as early as November 18, before he had even asked Ralphie, and a day before his camp blew up, no one was certain. But then other things happened to take him away from it.

“What kind of benefit will it be?” his wife had asked.

“A big one,” Jerry said, “I’ll only have a big one – right, Willie?”

The little boy looked at him, his eyes as big as saucers, and smiled faintly holding a toy truck in his hand. His lips were pale blue, and there was a slight bluish tinge to his forehead. But Bines looked at this death in life very strangely – that is, almost hopefully.

“Here,” he said, suddenly, hauling out a receipt from his parka. “I ordered you a book – a book – I went to the store and ordered you it. I asked the girl – girl at the store and she says ‘order him a book on dinosaurs – kids love dinosaurs’ – so I did. Getting ya a book on dinosaurs – they lived a long time ago – right here in the back yard maybe, though I don’t know. Maybe you and I could go dig for some dinosaur bones some day – in the back yard there maybe – I don’t know.”

Ralphie however could not get people interested in the benefit on so short notice – not before January 17.

He told Bines to wait, and that in January he would make sure he had everything organized. He would have the Kinsmen’s hall or the Lions Club, and they would have a fundraising benefit as Bines had seen them do for other children.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine.”

He shrugged and smiled, and took some Aspirin, just as his father had done twenty years before, for the pain.

He said nothing else about it again.

Some nights his wife would wake and Bines would be sitting in a chair in the other bedroom, with his boy.

She would wake up and feel his presence in the house.

“The medicine is making him sick,” he whispered one night. “He’s still got them bruises – and his hair isn’t growing back like they said.”

“That’s all right. Dr. Lem told me it’s only an antibiotic to clear up some infection; the chemotherapy is working. You have to go in January for that operation – so he wants everything cleared up.”

Bines had been tested for bone marrow in September and the operation was finally scheduled for just after Christmas. Always her voice was uncertain as if she was trying to explain something unfathomable to him and was worried that he would not understand and get angry. She also felt indebted to him because of the bone marrow. And he knew this and hated it. Did she not think he would do it in a heartbeat? This angered him as he looked at her.

“That’s just a little annoyance – you know they gave him a transfusion – the last time he was in. It’s just a little annoyance – Dr. Lem said.” He held his hand up.

And then, moving into the kitchen, he sat with his hands on his knees.

On the old oak table there was a Bible, and a vase of imitation daisies with huge plastic petals. Over in the
corner there was a group of sloganizing plaques on the wall.

His wife came out and sat in the chair near him with her head down, as if she were waiting to be lectured. He looked at her a moment, ready to say something, but then he stopped. He did not know what to say to her anymore. So he said: “Read me a part from the Bible.”

“The what?”

“Bible – read me a part –”

It was after 3:00 in the morning. The kitchen was dead quiet. The air was cold, and some snow had gathered about the outside window frame.

“Yer always telling me you’re good on the Bible.”

She picked the third marker from the back of the New Testament and looked down at it.

“Pick a part,” he said again.

She was shivering, her arms were bare, and her legs trembled. When she started reading her voice shook and broke and was lost because of the presence of the man sitting off to the side with his bolt-black eyes resting upon her.

“‘I am the true vine – and my Father is the husbandman; no one comes to the Father except by me.’”

She looked up. There were some cookies in the dish. He seemed distracted. He remembered how Willie liked those kind of cookies.

“Ya,” he said, and he nodded silently. “That’s good, though,” he said, smiling. “That’s good.”

Ralphie had not seen Bines in two or three days when he got a call at his shop.

“I shouldn’t tell you,” Adele said.

“Tell me what?”

“Jerry wants you to go and bail him out.”

“Of jail.”

“Well, not out of church, Ralphie-face.”

“What did he do?”

“Threw a table through a wall at the hospital.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask the turbulent mind of Mr. Jerry Bines,” Adele said. “Oh,” she said almost as an afterthought, “he wants you to bring money, so you’d better not disappoint him – his friends are not allowed to.”

Ralphie went to the police station and bailed Jerry out. And felt numb the whole time. It gave him a strange sensation that Jerry would ask this favour of him.

“I’ll pay you back,” Jerry said, as if he were worried that Ralphie would think badly of him.

“No – I mean don’t worry about it. What happened?”

Jerry told him that no doctor wanted to take responsibility for his boy, that he had finally been scheduled to go to Halifax for tests, but they were now postponed, which meant the operation wouldn’t take place until early February. He seemed to be very agitated about this.

“Well, I’m sure they are trying their best,” Ralphie said.

“They’re all frightened of taking responsibility for the boy. They didn’t ever consider it was leukemia. At first they just thought it must’ve been me beating him.”

Jerry said that all the doctors were frightened of the boy because of who he was.

“They all know who he is, and they’re all scared something will happen to him. I demanded that we go today – to Ronald McDonald house – to Ronald McDonald house – demanded we go there now. But it’s not scheduled up until the fourth of February – fourth – that’s too late.”

Ralphie again did not know what to say, so he only shrugged.

“They can mix my wife up with it – she puts her faith in things – in things,” Jerry said.

“In what things?”

“I don’t know – not the same things I do – different than me – than me.”

The doctor he had wanted to see had gone on vacation and his son had to wait in the outpatient ward for over two hours. Jerry already had the boy’s bag packed. No one had any idea why he was there and he became upset when they finally told him that Dr. Lem was not available, that there was no ambulance scheduled to take the boy to Halifax, and that Dr. Charing, who would perform the operation, was not available either.

“I’m sorry about it but I won’t be laid a hand on,” Jerry said.

“Well, who laid a hand on you?”

Jerry didn’t answer. Then he looked at Ralphie, as if trying to atone for something. “I don’t want to lose the boy,” he said. “He’s only small.” And he turned away.