Let's Kill Uncle (5 page)

Without a word the goat-lady arose and cooked another breakfast. Christie ate until her shrunken stomach was tight and she felt almost ill, then she sighed.

‘I can’t finish it.’

‘Give it to Shep. Maybe you can do better tomorrow.’

Again she put cookies in a bag and handed them to Barnaby.

‘Now divide those evenly. And no quarrelling today. Go and play and have a good time. I’ve got a lot of work to do, so don’t bother me for the next couple of hours.’

At the door Barnaby turned.

‘Thanks,’ he said. He and the goat-lady smiled at each other.

When Christie reached the bottom of the stairs, she paused and stared back at the goat-lady.

‘You can curl my hair tonight,’ she announced.

The two children followed the path they had taken the day before. They climbed the cedar fence and waved to the tall woman plowing, and again they stared fascinated at the bull, who surveyed his domain with murderous eyes.

He was grand champion and he knew it. For all the loving attention lavished on him, he remained, at the bottom of his mean heart, a sullen brute. A brute who ruminated by the hour, wondering how he could, with his polished black horns, impale his patron, Mr Duncan.

Once a year, at the end of August, sleek, shining and burnished like a pagan bull-god, he was shipped to the Exhibition. During his absence, the Islanders hung anxiously over their battery radios until reassured that he had won again. He was their one claim to fame.

Agnes Duncan stopped, tied the reins to the handle of the plow and walked over to the children. Red-haired, six feet tall and as strong as a man, she was held in eternal bondage by her father who had no intention of paying wages to a labourer as long as Agnes could put in an honest day’s work.

‘Hello,’ she said shyly to the children. ‘I heard you were here. How do you like the Island?’

‘Fine, thank you,’ said Christie. Both children smiled at her.

‘I hope you won’t be lonely.’

‘I won’t,’ said Barnaby. He pointed to the bull. ‘What’s his name?’

‘The Duke of Wellington, but everyone calls him the Iron Duke.’

‘He’s big, isn’t he?’

Agnes Duncan nodded and smiled, then turned to look at the bull. The smile faded from her face. With the possible exception of her father, she hated the bull more than anything in the world.

‘Would he hurt somebody if he got off that chain?’ asked Christie.

Agnes looked over her shoulder, to her father, who was still painting the barn. She turned and leaned toward the children.

‘Mark my words,’ she whispered, ‘mark my words, that bull will turn on him someday. He’s vicious!’

‘Agnes!’ roared her father from the barn, ‘get back to your plowing.’

‘Yes, Father,’ she called meekly. She nodded to the children and returned to the Clydesdales and the plow. Following the furrow, she looked longingly over her shoulder at the two children.

If
he
had not driven her only suitor, Per Nielsen, away, she might have two flaxen-haired children like that.

The big easygoing farm horses suddenly snorted and tossed their heads. Agnes spoke to them and they plodded on obediently, but their eyes rolled and their nostrils quivered.

Unlike Agnes, they were aware that a pair of eyes, the colour of grass under ice, were watching from a clump of bushes only ten feet away.

One-ear, the outlaw, was crouching in the undergrowth. He slavered and licked his chops as he looked past Agnes to the bull. He had killed a cow once and he very much preferred beef to venison, but he knew that unless he killed in his first spring, the bull would put up a savage fight. And furthermore, the crosseted Iron Duke was watched over as if he were a visiting diplomat.

One-ear sighed. There was already a price on his head;
they
had an unwritten law that cougars, hungry or otherwise, guilty or not, were fair game.

He lay like a huge house cat, his cool green eyes resting balefully on the quiet rural scene before him. Two children. He hadn’t seen any on the Island before.

The Clydesdales began to tremble in real alarm, so, slinking on his belly, One-ear crawled deeper into the bushes until he came to a game path that led to the forest.

He flung himself down in his shady nook, a sob-like cough escaping him, and self-pity dimmed his frosted mint eyes as he brooded on his terrible history.

Wherever he went, persecuted. He placed his big head on his outstretched paws and blinked.

An old scar, as large as a man’s fist, was just above the joint of his massive shoulder. People.
They
had done that. Next to dogs, he hated people more than anything in the world. Rotten to the core, all of them! Did cougars go after men with guns and dogs? Did forty cougars tree a man, wound him, and tear him to bits if they could?

He had committed the unpardonable crime and they had hunted him for four days, no food, no water and on the run. They trapped him up a tree on the edge of a ravine, and the dogs were waiting at the foot of the tree, barking, barking, barking.

His eyes became stony as he mused. After they had shot him, he fell a hundred feet into the ravine, on branches and rocks. Over and over he tumbled. The ravine was so steep that even the dogs could not climb down, and thinking they had finished him, they left him.

For three days he lay there, and if it had not been for a trickle of water near him, he would have died. He’d broken most of the ribs on his left side, and of course, he’d been shot as well. How he had suffered, every breath a torment. And then he got that awful cold in his lungs. It was, he reflected, a miracle that he had survived. On the fourth day he had managed to crawl out, but he could not hunt. After two weeks he was a hundred pounds lighter and every bone in his pain-ridden body could be counted. Even now, his ribs ached when it was damp.

It had been in January, with two feet of snow on the ground, and he had been dying of hunger. He hadn’t eaten in three weeks.

There was a logging camp near by, so he went there at night, to the cookhouse, to see if there were any scraps
about. Something hot and steaming was hanging on the porch rail, and, starving, he gulped it down. It was a dishcloth. A wet dishcloth.

When the cook came out carrying a shotgun, One-ear was so weak the cook nearly outran him. The cook shot off his ear.

He stretched his right front foot before him. From that huge velvet paw sprang talons, two inches long and as sharp as razors. One was missing, caught in one of
their
traps. He’d had to bite it off at the root to free himself.

A piteous life, he thought moodily, blameless and piteous. Indignation choked him as he rose from his forest bower and lashed his long, black-tipped tail. Like an enchanted beast, he sprang into the bushes, looking for a nice plump deer.

L
ADY SYDDYNS
left a message at the store for Sergeant Coulter to call at her home at his earliest convenience.

He found her in her storybook garden, where the scent of dianthus hung heavy and roses ruled. Though the air was languid with the pulse of bees, a hummingbird darted about in rapier haste, fearful of missing one blossom.

Surrounded by nymphs and plaster gnomes, Lady Syddyns was pruning her prize bushes. She took off her floppy-brimmed leghorn hat and switched on her hearing aid when she saw Sergeant Coulter approach.

‘Albert, how nice to see you. My, it’s warm today. You must stop for tea. How is your father, dear?’

Albert smiled.

‘He passed away some time ago, Lady Syddyns. You wanted to see me?’

‘Why, Albert, I’m always happy to see you.’

She handed him her pruning shears and began brushing leaves from the faded velvet dressing gown that was her usual gardening costume.

‘Where’s my cane, dear?’

Seeing it hooked over the extended arm of a marble maiden, Albert handed it to her.

‘My Bertha Alexanders are riddled, completely riddled. They won’t win this year.’

She had not summoned him to discuss insects.

‘You left a message at the store?’ Albert repeated.

‘Did I? Oh, so I did, so I did. It’s my greenhouse, dear.’

She pointed with her cane.

‘Two little children came into the garden yesterday. I didn’t know there were any children on the Island, Albert. To whom do they belong? One had a catapult. My, my, they are high-spirited.’

Sixteen shattered panes of the greenhouse bore mute testimony to the nature of their spirits. Master Gaunt, Albert deduced, had recently passed by.

He sighed as he took out his notebook.

‘I’ll look after this.’ He had a protective, proprietary feeling for his old Islanders, and Lady Syddyns was his favourite.

‘I knew you would, dear.’ She clicked off her hearing aid, smiled courteously, and went back to her pruning.

When he reached the gate, she called him.

‘Oh, you mustn’t go without one of my Star of Hollands. Such a year for aphides, but fortunately these have come through unscathed.’

Unconcerned with R.C.M.P. regulations, she pushed the rose through the button-hole of his tunic.

What a delightful old oddity she was, thought Albert, and he waited until he was around the bend of the road before removing the rose. He sniffed it wearily as he made his way home.

The old Sergeant-Major’s cottage stood only a stone’s throw from the high-tide line, with a short, overgrown
path leading from the log-strewn beach almost directly to its door.

Grey shingles, weathered by the salt winds gave the two-roomed cottage a shabby air that was partly relieved by a scarlet trumpet honeysuckle vine.

Despite its worn appearance, the house was soundly built, for the old Sergeant-Major had raised it with his own hands, and like his son, he had been thorough.

It was a house with a face: two windows with the door between gave it the appearance of a pair of unblinking eyes separated by a nose. A dull, plain face and the only frivolous aspect of the whole scene was the gay honeysuckle, which held the little cottage in an embrace of jaunty green tendrils. Albert’s mother had planted it when she came to the Island as a bride, and Albert watered it, pruned it, fed it and tied it with a secret tenderness.

Albert retired early, and at seven the next morning, his day off, he was awakened by a heavy pounding on the door. Still in his pyjamas, he opened it to find Mr Duncan.

Sergeant Coulter gazed at him in alarm, for, with his ginger handlebar moustaches quivering and his fists clenching and unclenching, the old man looked like a Viking berserker.

‘Come with me!’ he roared.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’ asked Albert, throwing on his clothes.

Mr Duncan only sputtered and cursed, so Albert followed him silently. The old man sprinted with such agility that Albert, for all his youth, was breathless by the time they reached Mr Duncan’s farm.

Pointing a finger at the Iron Duke, the old man wheeled on Albert.

‘What are you going to do about this?’

Sergeant Coulter looked, closed his eyes and looked again. No, it was not some hitherto unknown bovine disorder.

The Iron Duke’s sacred coat was covered with heliotrope-blue polka dots, the identical colour of Mr Duncan’s barn.

‘Well?’ bellowed Mr Duncan, ‘you know who did it, don’t you?’

Sergeant Coulter’s imagination did not have far to soar.

‘I’ll go down to the store immediately,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Where was the paint? Did you leave it outside?’

Mr Duncan pointed. The brush and paint were beside the barn door.

Sergeant Coulter walked over and looked in the doorway. Inside, Agnes Duncan was convulsed in happy, hysterical giggles.

‘Isn’t it the funniest thing you ever saw?’ she gasped.

Albert wanted at least to smile, but he was too awed by the old man. He jerked his head warningly in the direction of her father. Agnes nodded, and still giggling, fled to the house.

Sergeant Coulter walked back to her father.

‘I’ll look after it, Mr Duncan. I’ll call in later.’

Under interrogation, Barnaby denied knowledge of either the broken windows or the sullied Iron Duke.

‘I see,’ said Sergeant Coulter. ‘Perhaps your little friend knows. I stopped in at Mrs Nielsen’s on my way here, but there was no one home.’

‘She’s out, they’re delivering the bread,’ said Barnaby.

‘I see. Well, I’ll speak to her later. You run along now, I want to speak to Mr and Mrs Brooks.’

Barnaby got as far as the door, stopped and turned.

‘Changed your mind?’ said Sergeant Coulter. ‘Care to tell me what you know?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Barnaby. And then, with an insolent grin, ‘You wouldn’t want me to say I did it, if I didn’t, would you?’

‘I wouldn’t like you to tell a lie, Barnaby.’ Sergeant Coulter leaned against the counter and lit a cigarette. ‘Still, you should know that Lady Syddyns saw you breaking the windows.’

‘Maybe she’s a liar.’

‘Maybe. And,’ Sergeant Coulter blew a smoke ring and gazed at it meditatively, ‘and maybe there is blue paint on your hands.’

Barnaby raised his hands, stared and ran from the store.

When Sergeant Coulter rang the bell on the counter Mr Brooks, looking more than ever like Alice’s rabbit, poked his white head through the beaded curtains.