anything. He was always laying down the law as to how men ought to act, despite the impossibility of them performing any of the remarkable feats he called upon them to perform. Alec had always believed in working with what you were given, and human nature was a given. It was where he would begin.
“I don’t know any polite way of saying this, and the only way I’ve got of saying it is straight out. A boy gets to your age, or somewhere close to it, and something happens – that thing of his starts provoking and tormenting him continual. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will shortly. There’s no getting around it, that pecker of yours isn’t going to give you hardly a moment’s peace. Which leads me to what I’m going to say to you now. Which is about playing with yourself. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not recommending it, I’m just saying that more than one has taken it for the solution of a predicament. There’s boys your age that suffer terrible worries from that. If it’s a sin, it’s got to be a small one. As to whatever rumours you may have heard about the results – about going blind or mental – I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense. How’s a pecker to know the difference between a woman and a hand? A pecker doesn’t have a brain, or eyes. It’s just a story, like a horsehair in a water barrel turns into a worm. What I’m saying is let it alone if you can but, if you can’t, remember you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last.” Monkman paused and waited. Daniel said nothing. All his attention was fastened on a spear of grass he spun in his fingers.
“You know what we’re talking about, don’t you?” asked the old man sharply.
Daniel nodded his head without looking up from the stalk of grass.
At least that was over. He hoped the boy had understood. “I won’t say nothing now about women,” said the old man brusquely. “I’ll save that one for when you’re older.” He took a deep breath of relief, felt himself on firmer ground. “Now drinking,” he said happily. “Stutz doesn’t have a single good word for it. He just goes on about how it has been the downfall of thousands. I won’t argue with him. I know myself the trouble it caused me at one time. If I learned one thing from my trouble it was this: there’s no point in drinking if you aren’t happy. The thing about liquor is that it’s an encourager. It encourages happiness in a happy man and sadness in a sad one. It encourages whatever else you happen to be feeling. The young bucks fight when they’re drunk because booze adds oil to the fire young men carry around burning in their bellies. Now I’m not saying any of this to you now because I expect you to follow my advice straight off. I’m saying it so that when you come to make your own mistakes you can think back and test what’s happening to you against what I said was true. It might bring you to reason sooner. There’s nothing like a second pair of eyes for help. It’s what Mr. Stutz did for me when he pointed out certain things about my drinking when I was bad into it. You see, I couldn’t see the start of my misery because I was too deep into it. Now it’s true I still take a drink – mostly when Stutz is around – but that’s just to prove to him I’ve got my own will. I won’t be a slave to it or a slave to avoiding it. Besides, if you keep company with men you’re bound to keep company with liquor. Particularly around here. It won’t be long before you’ll be drinking beer out behind the dance hall to work up enough courage to speak to a girl inside. There’s no point if the courage isn’t inside you. When you’re puking in the bushes, ask yourself then if what your grandfather said wasn’t right.”
“My friend Lyle and me drank some of the gin his mother kept hid under the kitchen sink,” volunteered Daniel, encouraged by what he took to be his grandfather’s tolerant attitude to drinking.
“Thief’s pride is pitiable pride. I wouldn’t brag on that, if I was you,” said his grandfather sternly, “hooking some lady’s gin the way you hook your mother’s smokes.” Then, noticing Daniel’s obvious alarm, he added, “Don’t worry. I haven’t said nothing to your mother about the cigarettes. But if I was you, I’d think twice about laying hands on her property. The consequences aren’t likely to be worth it. You need a cigarette that bad, lift it from my pack. Who do I have to complain to but myself?”
Daniel could feel his face flush and his ears burn. When had he seen? For a moment he considered denying the accusation but the calm, steady inspection that the old man was making of him helped Daniel recognize the futility of lying. It might, he thought, have been better to have been caught by his mother after all.
“Anybody ever teach you how to fight?” asked the old man.
The question was so unexpected, so unrelated to what had immediately gone before that Daniel was at a loss for an answer. “Pardon?”
“Can you fight?”
“Fight?”
“Yeah, fight. Anybody ever teach you to take care of yourself?”
As a matter of fact, nobody ever had. But he wasn’t about to admit it. “Yeah.”
“That’s good. Because you better be ready to handle yourself when school starts in September. A place like this, they’re not used to new boys. Anybody new is liable to catch it for a while until he teaches people to leave him alone.”
“My mother says she doesn’t believe in fighting. She says my father was a pacifist. So she is too.”
“If your mother’s a pacifist so’s Field Marshal Montgomery.”
“She says there’s better ways of settling an argument than with your fists.”
“No doubt there is – as long as you can find somebody to argue with who agrees on the procedures. I don’t think you’ll find many of those in Connaught.” The old man gave a sharp, foxy bark of laughter. “Imagine Vera talking that way. I can’t figure it. Maybe Earl but not your mother. I never came across anybody with more fight bred into them than she has. Not that she isn’t right in some ways. All my life I tried to avoid settling a disagreement with my boots and fists. That’s the truth. As God is my judge, I’ve walked away from more than one invitation to scuffle. When I was a young man I was a demon to dance and at every dance in those days there were always the cocks-of-the-walk who showed up to pick fights. They all acted as if fighting was some kind of sport, an amusement like baseball, or pool, or a game of horseshoes. Fighting was their way of attracting notice. You know how I handled them if they stepped on my toes? I took the notice away from them. I said, ‘If you want to fight, you sonofabitch, I’ll fight you. But a week from now, cold sober and alone. Just the two of us with nobody to watch and cheer and carry on. Just you and me, friend. Set the time and place and I’ll be there.’ I meant it, too. And they could see I meant it and their friends could see I meant it. You know how many takers I got?” Monkman formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Zero. None. You know why? Because even the ones who pretend to like to scrap really don’t. It’s the cheering they like, the clap on the back, the chance to strut. Take away the crowd and you take away the guts.
“And you know how I discovered that fact?” said the old man earnestly, bending towards Daniel. “Entirely by accident is how I discovered that fact. I had this female cousin – Rose her name was, she’s been dead for years now – who was the hired girl to the postmaster’s wife. Now Rose was a good-natured, plain, hard-working girl but she was also a little on the simple side, not so as she couldn’t do a job if it was all explained to her, she could do that, but she was still simple, what I’d call trusting-simple, and there was this young fellow who lived next door to the postmaster’s who used to tease her. Now he must’ve been ten years older than Rose – she was about fifteen then – and he ought to have known better but he didn’t. His name was Billy Atkins and he thought pretty highly of himself. I suppose people encouraged him in it. He was handsome, the kind that lounges about decorating street corners. All the girls thought he was the cat’s ass and most of the boys were afraid of him because he had a reputation for being wild and one way or another he had whipped every one of them either in school or after he got kicked out of it.
“Anyway, whenever he and his friends happened to be holding up a telephone pole and Rose chanced to go by, Billy Atkins couldn’t help but treat the boys to a laugh at her expense. It was an easy thing for him to do because Rose couldn’t hide the fact she thought Billy Atkins was pretty wonderful. So as she went by, watching her feet, he’d call out, ‘Am I on for Saturday night, Rosie?’
“And she’d stop dead in her tracks and say in her quiet voice, ‘Do you really mean it this time, Mr. Atkins?’
“And he’d say of course he meant it and she’d say, ‘Well then you’re on,’ and he’d wink at his friends and say, ‘On for how long, Rose?’ And one of his admirers would shout, ‘For as long as it takes!’ And they’d all laugh themselves sick and Rose, being slow-witted, would look from one face to another, trying to catch the joke and sometimes laughing herself, at what she didn’t know, just to please Billy Atkins.
“It was getting so bad that the only decent thing to do was to try and stop it because I was a relative and Rose didn’t have any brothers and her father lived out on the farm and didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to do it because I knew I was no match for Billy Atkins. He was older for one thing. Then I was about seventeen. I’d been working for almost three years on labouring jobs so I had some muscle on me, but Billy Atkins had more and knew how to use it better. Pride decided me to do it the way I did. If I was going to get my clock cleaned I preferred to have it done private rather than public.
“At the time I’m speaking of, Billy Atkins was working hauling gravel for the concrete foundations of the new
