Dance of the Happy Shades

forgot what it’s like. You want a drink, Ben?”
    “Not knowing where you got that. I don’t have a stomach like your cat.”
    The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch.
    “Joe, you keep that up, you’re not going to have a cat.”
    “It don’t hurt him, he enjoys it. Let’s see, what’ve we got for the little girl to eat?” Nothing, I hoped, but be brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the coloured stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.
    “It’s them Silases botherin me, Ben. They come by day and by night. People won’t ever quit botherin me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waitin for them.” He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. “Got a shotgun too.”
    “Maybe they won’t come and bother you no more, Joe.”
    The man groaned and shook his head. “They never will stop. No. They never will stop.”
    “Just try not paying any attention to them, they’ll tire out and go away.”
    “They’ll burn me in my bed. They tried to before.”
    My father said nothing, but tested the axe blade with his finger. Under the couch, the cat pawed and meowed in more and more feeble spasms of delusion. Overcome with tiredness, with warmth after cold, with bewilderment quite past bearing, I was falling asleep with my eyes open.My father set me down. “You’re woken up now. Stand up. See. I can’t carry you and this sack full of rats both.”
    We had come to the top of a long hill and that is where I woke. It was getting dark. The whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us—greenish brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw-brown fields and the others, darker from last year’s plowing, with scales of snow faintly striping them (like the field we had walked across hours, hours earlier in the day) and the tiny fences and colonies of grey barns, and houses set apart, looking squat and small.
    “Whose house is that?” my father said, pointing.
    It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come around in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind.
    “That’s no more’n half a mile away and downhill. You can easy walk home. Soon we’ll see the light in the dining room where your Momma is.”
    On the way I said, “Why did he have an axe?”
    “Now listen,” my father said. “Are you listening to me? He don’t mean any harm with that axe. It’s just his habit, carrying it around. But don’t say anything about it at home. Don’t mention it to your Momma or Mary, either one. Because they might be scared about it. You and me aren’t, but they might be. And there is no use of that.”
    After a while he said, “What are you not going to mention about?” and I said, “The axe.”
    “You weren’t scared, were you?”
    “No,” I said hopefully. “Who is going to burn him and his bed?”
    “Nobody. Less he manages it himself like he did last time.”
    “Who is the Silases?”
    “Nobody,” my father said. “Just nobody.”
    “We found the one for you today, Mary. Oh, I wisht we could’ve brought him home.”
    “We thought you’d fell in the Wawanash River,” said Mary McQuade furiously, ungently pulling off my boots and my wet socks.
    “Old Joe Phippen that lives up in no man’s land beyond the bush.”
    “Him!” said Mary like an explosion. “He’s the one burned his house down, I know him!”
    “That’s right, and now he gets along fine without it. Lives in a hole in the ground. You’d be as cosy as a groundhog, Mary.”
    “I bet he lives in his own dirt, all right.” She served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat. For Mary, that was enough.
    “A man that’d do a thing like that ought to be locked up.”
    “Maybe so,” my father said. “Just the same I hope they don’t get him for a while yet. Old