Veneer

David William Price

Late in the humid afternoon, our tired steamer wheezed alongside the docks in Ottawa and I wondered what possessed the Queen to make this filthy lumber town the capital city of the Dominion of Canada.

I rescued my meager belongings, and Poulin announced that he would adopt me because I was an imbecile and a danger to myself. He might have added "a danger to others" had he known they wanted me in England for butchering that nurse.

He gathered his friends and took me up into the city as if I were his new dog, eager to show me off and watch how I coped in the new environment. I don't think I disappointed anyone in regard to entertainment, but more of that later.

They took me up to Major's Hill and I struggled to keep pace as I had baggage and they had none. I asked where Poulin made his home but he said he hadn't found rooms yet, having ridden the raft directly from the upriver shanty down to Quebec. I asked if he'd left what he owned at the shanty. He gave me a sad smile that made me wonder if he had nothing to show for the years of work he'd described on our steam boat trip.

We looked west to Barracks Hill where Colonel By had once stationed his men while fighting off mosquitoes and digging a canal to outwit the dangerous republicans to the south. The gothic towers of Parliament around the old parade ground were a lonely symbol of the city's new capital status. In direct contrast was the grimy canal and its water staircase of locks filled with puffing steamers and barges of wood from the lumber slaughterhouse below the Chaudière Rapids.

The smell of wood scented every breeze: fresh wood, drying wood, burning wood. The mills chewed through thousands of trees every day and the sawdust ran thick into the river like oatmeal.

On the islands near the roaring Chaudière Falls, I mistook towers of drying wood sheets as buildings and shook my head when Poulin described how quickly the mills, dwarfed by their own production, churned through logs. They ran all day and by gaslight at night, manned with shift after shift of workers which, I was happy to think, meant opportunity for me.

Poulin jabbed me and pointed to the narrow waterway between the shoreline and the mills. A timber crib came down the water chute, men wrenching long oars reaching out the front and back. The crib frothed into the river below Barracks Hill where men leaned from pointer boats and jammed their pikes against the crib to join it with the village-sized raft they were building to sail downriver to Quebec. Poulin said that before the chute was built, they used to push cribs over the falls and let them dash to pieces on the rocks where they'd pick up the pieces and put them together again.

From Major's Hill, Poulin took me into what he called Lower Town and we made our way along the muddy stretch of Sussex in search of supper and rooms for the night. We stepped over a drunk snoozing in the mud and Poulin kicked at a scamp rifling the man's purse. A few paces later, another drunk laid in his own vomit and Poulin tipped him over with the toe of his boot and bent to see if the man was breathing.

He said, “That's Parker and he's lost his shanty pay already, poor bastard. He'll have to start at the mills on the morrow.”

I bent closer but Poulin gripped my shoulder and said I should keep my distance in case the man brought dessert up after the main course.

A horrible cry stopped me and I strained to find the woman who was wailing, “Johnny! Johnny!”

Poulin grabbed my arm and said, “It's only old Mag.”

I pulled away because only a murderer would have shrugged and gone along with Poulin to fill his stomach while a woman cried out in distress. I knew I should keep myself scarce and avoid recognition and the long sea trip back to England and the noose. But in that moment, the risk made me feel all the more determined: how could I be a vicious murderer if I acted like a hero?

I splashed up the muddy street with my possessions and found a meaty, cow-faced woman in a tattered, sea-green dress swaying in the middle of Sussex. Her mooing mouth wailed at the dark upper windows of a blockish stone building on the corner. Just as they ignored the drunks in the street, passers-by ignored this frantic creature except for brief glances and derisive laughs.

When I drew close enough to smell the liquor on her I stopped, but her panicked brown eyes seized on me. She clenched my arm and jerked me closer to her damp, disheveled bosom and staggering odour.

She shouted in my ear, “Tell my Johnny I'm waiting!”

When I only gaped at the echoing pain from her bellowing, she thundered, “You must know my Johnny, get me my Johnny!”

I must have added something interesting to this apparently-common spectacle, because people stopped to point and shout that Old Mag had got herself a new lover. I tugged my arm, but her grip crushed my wrist. I looked for Poulin or any sign of help, but the woman grabbed my face, squishing my cheeks, and begged me to go in to the "barracks" and fetch her Johnny.

To my horror someone shouted, “Make way for the coppers!”

A pair of blue helmets bobbed behind the crowd. I should have broken free from this deranged female who seemed a fine example of Mr. Darwin's theories. But I could not raise my fist at her without thinking that's just what a murderer would do without a twinge to his conscience. So I flailed in her grip and begged the creature to let me go.

A crowd grew around our spectacle, laughing at my yanking in the grip of this woman and prying at her crushing fingers. The policemen broke through the crowd, the taller one showing a sergeant's triple-chevron on his sleeve and pushing a farmer's wheelbarrow crusted with mud. They've come for me at last, I thought, and my knees nearly gave out. I was sure it was only a short wheelbarrow ride to the gallows. If only the stupid woman would let go I might run down to the river... but then what?

The sergeant thunked down the wheelbarrow and, with an embarrassed cough and rubbing of his brass buttons, addressed a surprising Scottish brogue at us, saying, “Now, Miss Doherty, ma'am, would you be so kind as to accompany us to the station?” The crowd murmured, laughing, shoving and pointing. It was a moment before I appreciated the air of nightly performance and realized the police were here to collect the woman from this show in which she starred.

The woman dropped my wrist and reached for the constable who shrank back and triggered a tittering and hawing in the crowd. She bellowed, “My Johnny, find my Johnny!”
The sergeant muttered, “Look sharp constable.”

The constable grabbed the woman's beefy arm and pushed, and the sergeant tipped the wheelbarrow to catch the falling woman. She clawed at them, wailing caustic oaths, and the constable held her down whilst the sergeant turned the squealing wheelbarrow around and headed for the station. The crowd let out a cheer for Good Old Mag and I turned away, stunned and relieved.

No sooner had the police packed the flopping Mag Doherty into their wheelbarrow than Poulin had suffered an insolent jab from the Irish rafter who'd been so disagreeable on the steamer ride from Quebec. The rafter was hollering that he'd show this Frenchman who was the real nigger in this country. The policemen stopped as the crowd drifted to the new diversion. Poulin and the rafter rolled up their sleeves, nodding and winking at the faces around them. The crowd cheered and hollered bets and waved their hats. An Irish woman bellowed that she'd beat any leek-eating French woman if the Irish rafter lost.

The sergeant barked, “About face!” and he and the constable pushed the wheelbarrow with the flailing Mag Doherty around in a circle and wedged into the crowd, hollering, “Disperse or face the consequences!”

I suppose I expected the shouting and bet-making to cool off, but I was mistaken. The constable elbowed through the crowd and grabbed the Irish rafter by the arm and informed him loudly that he was under arrest. The rafter yanked his arm free and told the constable to go to the devil. The crowd shouted at the constable to get lost and they crouched to scoop up stones.

The sergeant surged from the wheelbarrow to help his colleague, but Mag Doherty clamped his arm with a squeal of glee and she rocked in the wheelbarrow whilst he yanked at his captured wrist.

The constable again took the rafter by the arm and said he was under arrest. At this point, the crowd grabbed the sweating rafter's other arm and pulled him hollering incoherently in the centre of a tug-o'-war. A stone bounced off the constable's helmet and he let go of the rafter who surged into his arm-tugging rescuers and elbowed through the crowd to get away. As quickly as the constable produced his baton, some knave snatched it from his hand.

The crowd knitted round the sergeant and the constable and their tossing elbows and fists. Rocks bounced off their shoulders and smacked their sweating foreheads, drawing dribbles of blood. The rafter slipped away, past even the French Canadians who'd called for his blood only moments before. Whatever ill-feeling existed between the French and the Irish, their common disdain for the Scottish sergeant and his man was enough to temporarily banish their differences, much as the terrible storm during my Atlantic crossing had united me with the sadistic sailors. Irish and French alike waved their fists at the policemen and found larger rocks, whereupon the constable clawed through the crowd to plunge through the front doors of a hotel on the corner. The crowd shouted after him and pounded on the glass.

Through the windows, we could see the sweating, bloodied constable straining back on the door handles. The crowd stopped its pounding and proceeded to add their own barricade of flour barrels on the outside, deciding that if they couldn't get the constable out, they would trap him instead.

Then they turned on the sergeant and, dumping Mag Doherty out of the wheelbarrow onto her feet, they stuffed him in her place. They grasped the handles and broke into a run, the sergeant gaping and gripping the edges of his speeding conveyance, the crowd hooting and cheering as he rolled, bumping down Sussex toward the Ottawa River.

I noticed the street sign at the next intersection and suddenly understood what the steamer captain had meant when he'd broken up a fight on the river and said "save it for Clarence Street."

A few stragglers poked at my baggage and seemed torn, when I loudly protested, between chasing their comrades or beating me to death. Fortunately, more constables shouted from the next block, and I was left to reassemble my things and work out what might be missing.

The constables rolled away the flour barrels to free their man trapped in the hotel. They gathered around me with reddened faces, and the injured constable argued I was no innocent victim of Mag Doherty but the mastermind of a riotous diversion from the raftsmen's fight and thus guilty of a conspiracy. He seemed desperate to have a prisoner to show for his embarrassment. If they were to drag me off to the police station, it would not be long before they found the dangling noose waiting in England.

I gaped and blinked, struggling with utter panic.

I said, “God save the Queen and I ain't no Irish bugger or no Toad neither. I'm an innocent victim like yourself, bless your soul. I was brought up to assist a lady in danger, as are all good Englishmen, and this Mag Doherty took shameful advantage.”

One of the constables announced he was an Irish bugger himself and perhaps I could benefit from special punishment for my insult, but the others said they looked foolish enough letting their sergeant get run off in a wheelbarrow, and maybe they should go rescue him from the cold torrents of the Ottawa River.

The men trotted off down muddy Sussex waving their batons and I picked up my things. Someone surged from the shadows and grabbed my arm, but it was only Poulin who shushed me and dragged me off the street and through the doors of the hotel.

To save money, we shared a room and a couple of army cots rescued from the days of Colonel By. We joined Poulin's friends at the closest innkeeper's where they spilled their winter's pay on the bar and thumped the wood until the steward filled their glasses. They laughed over my misadventure with Mag Doherty and the police.

Poulin insisted I be rewarded for my unwitting entertainment. He pushed a full glass at my face, and I took it lest he try to pour it into me himself. But when I lifted the glass, I gasped at the odour, remembering the drink from the night of the murder, remembering waking in the bordello with Thomas thrusting my bloodied clothes into my hands and urging me to run because the police were coming. I dropped the glass to the counter, splashing liquor over the rim. Over Poulin's loud protests, I hunched over the bar and laid my head in my arms. Did I kill that young nurse? Had I drunk so much that I'd lost my memory? Why could I only remember the first glass and Thomas pushing it at me and urging me on? How could a single glass have wiped my memory clear?

I disappointed Poulin, and he demanded I make it up to him. He held his liquor well enough to stumble out of the bar, though the steward seemed determined to over-charge. It was only my sober mind for numbers, honed at Uncle's bookshop, and the consequent indignant fury of Poulin and his friends that convinced the steward to charge them fairly, perhaps from the steward's petulant manner, for the first time in history.

I followed them onto muddy Sussex and it was announced that we must shop for clothes. It seemed a surprising choice for such a rough set of men, but they would not be denied. We passed rogues idling on the boardwalk who spat tobacco juice and cursed anyone who wouldn't give them money, sticking out their ratty boots and forcing women into the street to soil the hems of their dresses. There was no time to address their poor manners, however, as Poulin and his friends pulled me into a shop and thundered at the clerk to show me his best cloth for a full gentleman's suit.

I protested that I had no need of a suit, but Poulin and the others had already doffed their own weathered hats and demanded to see the best pipes, kerchiefs, and boots. I could not miss the sly gleam in the shopkeeper's eyes, but Poulin was grinning at me and saying we'd have a proper shave and haircut at the most expensive salon (he drew it out as sah-LOHHH) in Lower Town, and his compatriots nodded and elbowed each other.

I don't suppose my current rough appearance would allow any shopkeeper to discern my experience with clothiers in London while I'd "played at being a gentleman," as Father used to call it. Thomas had purchased the finest even when his father's allowance wouldn't permit it, which resulted in plenty of outstanding bills and angry letters to his family. Those days gave me some sense of value, and even accounting for the costs of shipping across the Atlantic, there seemed no justification for the luxury prices demanded by this shopkeeper for the most poorly-made articles he displayed.

There were no prices indicated, the amounts named by the clerk coming only from the gaping hole where a good man keeps his conscience. With every effusive nod from Poulin, every try of a boot, a kerchief, or a pipe, the price on the next article ascended to ever-more outrageous heights.

I grabbed Poulin's arm but he shook me off saying, “Wait 'til you been living in the stinking shanty through autumn, winter, and spring, where the only thing female is a pair of ugly horses. You'll be riding the timber to Quebec for extra pay and wanting the best clothes and shave you can buy. What good is money if no woman wants you?”

He was rewarded with a chorus of amen from the others who were pulling on cheap boots, tying red kerchiefs to their waists and inspecting clay pipes and packets of tobacco. Poulin insisted that it was a question of what he deserved after spending three-quarters of the year in privation. If he didn't spend it on clothes and a haircut and food, what would he spend it on? He had no home to keep, no wife depending on him. He deserved a reward and would spend enough to feel happy; anything more than clothes would be wrecked or stolen at the shanties or lost in a mugging on the street.

The clerk took their money and we surged from the shop and the men strutted about muddy Sussex as young girls do in new pinafores and Easter bonnets.

Poulin announced, “Next, the barber shop. Then,” as if they too were available at a shop, “Women!”

Despite his grand boasts of attending "sah-lohs," Poulin took us to the nearest barber where yet another clerk waited to charge more than three of his regulars would pay. I declined to shave my recent whiskers, though Poulin confided that women preferred a man with a less-ticklish face. I couldn't tell him that I had a face wanted for murder back in England so, under his incessant prodding, I allowed a barber to trim the worst in a manner that would let me pass for one of the rafters should I ever develop their muscle and swagger.

Cleaned and properly dressed (though I declined to do more than change my shirt for one laundered at Grosse Ile), we made our way to purchase the final part of Poulin's reward. I admit a certain relief in throwing myself into the group. Having the distractions of men laughing and drinking around me brought a measure of life back to my hunted existence. But life doesn't allow for air-tight vaults where I can lock away the past. Life is a tunnel where history echoes time and again.

This was my second bordello, this one bearing little resemblance to the one where Thomas found me with bloodied clothes in the East End of London. I breathed the cheap perfume and the sweat, and the others sized up the women like horses for breeding while the women waited for them to make their choices and put down what remained of their shanty pay.

A brunette glanced at me in a certain way in the oil lights and I felt the chill of death stroke my neck. The body won't be deceived regardless of the efforts of the mind, and I blinked at this girl with the horrible certainty that she must be the twin of the butchered nurse. Why else should I have such a twinge inside as to stagger me?

To my horror, Poulin took my sagging as a sign of desire and he pushed me at her, laughing, and I stopped short from her shy face, unable to get words from my trembling mouth. Poulin and the others grabbed their choices from the rest and ascended the creaking steps to get what they'd paid for.

The girl asked if I was nervous, but I couldn't look at her face much less answer her question. I felt that if I were to utter a sound, she would know who I was and what I was wanted for. She left me and returned with a glass which she pressed into my hands. She urged me to drink and relax. Foolishly, I agreed to do the first and thus succumbed to the second.

I woke to frantic shouting and Poulin yanking on my arm and slapping my face, and the bitter choke of smoke and burning wood. Windows shattered and forms bolted through the haze, and Poulin hauled me through snapped table legs and torn cushions into the cool night, where the whores screeched and flailed at angry men who were dragging the bordello's broken chairs and tables into the throbbing street and hollering righteous words against harlots and devilry.

I gasped for air, retching the bitter smoke clogged deep in my chest, and stumbled, unable to control my leaden arms and legs whilst Poulin dragged me to the far boardwalk.

He muttered. “Hope the rest of the block don't go up.”

He rolled up his sleeves and shouted for water, and raftsmen went pelting down Sussex toward the canal and the river whilst the attackers screamed at the whores and I crumpled senseless to the ground.

•••

This morning, I woke in my bed at the inn and felt a thumping panic when I realized I had no idea how I'd got there. Had the murderous monster inside me escaped again? Had I committed some other horror? I rose from my bed, woozy, and realized my purse was gone. Who had taken it and what had I lost?

Poulin laid grimy in his cot and I remembered the fire. I shook him and he snapped at me to let him sleep, but I was desperate to know how I'd got there and what happened to my purse.

He said, “Drink with a whore and you wake without your purse.” Despite his annoyance he laughed at my angry face and said, “Don't blame them, you took the drink. They got big problems now their place is burned down. Before it was just their furniture thrown in the street and they could drag it back in again.”

I rubbed at the ache in my head and prayed that it was only the drug and not another murder that caused this suddenly-familiar fog and confusion.

I asked. “When can we get out to the shanties?” I was eager to work hidden from the rest of the world.

Poulin wagged his head and said, “Only mill work until autumn. One day at the mill will kill a pretty boy like you.” He grinned. “You're head is good with numbers. Why don't you sell hats in a ladies' shop?”

But my head is the problem. I must hide it or have it hanged.