Short story from short story book published 1980s ?

THE BOY ON THE ROAD by Doris Ray

Dave rolled down his side window and relaxed back behind the wheel of his dust-spattered pickup truck. “This has to be the strangest November weather I’ve ever seen…” he thought with mild amazement. “No frost, not a flake of snow on the ground and it’s as warm as summertime.”

He was a big, burly man in his early forties who had resided for most of his life in the hilly, thickly wooded Cariboo Region of the BC Interior. Dave and his wife, Hazel, had been working hard for the past three and a half years to clear out a farm from the stubborn alder and spruce wilderness. So far the thin virgin soil had yielded just enough hay to winter a few cows, and the pony Dave brought home the day Hazel announced they were expecting a child.

The rays of the late afternoon sun shone obliquely across the wooded hills, brightly accentuating the tops of the tallest trees. Their fading warmth lingered on the high slopes of the open fields. A few golden threads sifted through the underbrush that bordered the road. These were quickly dispersed in the dust billowing up behind a labouring logging truck.

“Must be someone ahead of me by the looks of that dust on the corner? Probably a logging truck…” Dave worked part-time, felling trees, for the company that was presently hauling logs out of the bush to the sawmill at the end of the road.

“It’s a good thing the company straightened out and gravelled our crooked old cow-path,” he thought. “Otherwise, I might have had trouble getting Hazel to the hospital on time…especially if it was raining.” Hazel was due to have the baby in a few weeks time. “Maybe sooner” the doctor had said. A small frown creased his forehead and his foot tightened up slightly on the accelerator pedal.

The gawky figure of a young man materialised suddenly on the road just ahead. Braking frantically Dave managed to stop the truck in a swirl of loose gravel and dust. “Jeez,” he growled to himself, “That kid must be in a daze or something…” Leaning out the window, he hollered: “Hey kid, you know I almost ran you over?” His voice softened, “Guess I was travelling a bit fast. I must be losing my grip. It was almost as if you appeared out of nowhere – right in the middle of the road!”

He peered into the youth’s expressionless blue eyes. “It’s been a long time since I saw a young fellow with hair that short.” he thought. The boy wore a cotton shirt and denim overalls. No coat. He was carrying books – must have missed the schoolbus…?

“Want a ride home? How far you got to go?” Dave noticed a faint light dawning in the boy’s eyes. Almost like an awakening. Could the youngster be mentally retarded? he wondered.

“Just to Harrison’s, please sir,” The boy spoke in a low, hesitant voice. “It’s… I guess it is… ’bout a mile down the road.” He sounded confused. Slowly and almost reluctantly he climbed into the truck. “I’m sure it is,” he added, as if to himself.

“Nobody around here by that name,” Dave stated positively. “Unless you mean – you don’t mean the old Harrison place past the big slough, do you?” The boy nodded. “Nobody lives there,” Dave discouraged. “Not since them hippies left a year ago. They had a greenhouse set up. Grew their own marijuana plants. Think they got busted… Hey, you’re not one of them, are you?”

The boy didn’t answer. “Back in his own little world again,” Dave decided. He mentally pictured the log shack that once was home to the people named Harrison: broken windows, decaying floorboards, sagging roof. “Probably caved in by now,” he concluded.

He brought the truck to a halt near the grassy outline of a narrow road that led deep into the bush. A few strands of barbed wire dangling between rotted fence posts marked the roadside perimeter of the old homestead. “I guess this is where you get off,” Dave informed his passenger. “That is, unless you want to come home with me?”

The boy smiled and shook his head. After a short struggle with the latch, he managed to open the door and step out of the truck with a polite “Thank you”.

“Don’t start worrying about that kid,” Dave advised himself as he watched the youth stroll into the woods. “He probably only wants a place to smoke his pot, and you’ve got cows to milk at home before you can even have supper.”

Dave finished his coffee and pushed his chair back from the kitchen table. “I don’t know why,” he spoke to his wife, “but that kid I picked up – the one I told you about – preys on my mind. I think he was only about fourteen. Big for his age, though… He didn’t look like a hippie. I wish I could get him off my mind.”

Hazel yawned and stretched in her chair. She was a tiny, small-boned woman with a mass of dark curly hair and huge blue eyes. “I don’t know what it is with some of these parents,” she retorted. “Now this little guy here,” she patted her rounded abdomen, “is going to have so much love he won’t think of leaving home until he’s twenty-one!”

“I think I’ll drive up and talk to Bob Donovan for a bit. That is, if you don’t need me?” Dave questioned. “Bob said something about wanting a milk cow and we sure don’t need¬ two. At least not yet, anyway.”

“Go ahead,” Hazel smiled. “Maybe some cow talk will take your mind off that boy.” “Maybe Bob knows something about him,” she added.

“That’s possible,” Dave agreed. “The old trail where I dropped the kid off is just below his fence line. You know, Bob mentioned something once about the Harrison place. He talks so much- especially since his wife died- that I don’t pay attention to everything he says. I think some kind of tragedy happened there years ago…?” He impulsively reached for an extra jacket as he went out the door. “Just in case I see that boy on the road,” he
explained.

“This is sheer stupidity!” Dave berated himself. In the distance he could see Bob Donovan’s back porchlight shining like a beacon through the trees. “What’s got into me anyway? Winding my way through the bush with a flashlight at nine o’clock at night, just to check on a kid I don’t even know!”

It was just that the youngster had seemed so … what was the word..? Vulnerable. That was it! Mentally retarded maybe or, more likely, just a dreamer. But innocent and vulnerable as a new-born babe.

His reverie was rudely shattered when he stumbled and almost fell over a small log, half-hidden in the swamp grass that bordered the big slough. His flashlight picked up the barely discernible path ahead. Windfalls! And the tangled results of years of indiscriminate logging by beavers. He would have to move up into the timber if he wanted to get through sometime tonight. The moon was up already. “Quite a few clouds up there,” he mused. “Maybe we’ll get some snow after all.” “No”, he corrected himself. “Too warm for that.”

The moon peeked indifferently through the gathering clouds that almost shrouded the western sky. It faintly illuminated the swamp, the slough and a collection of fifty-year-old buildings. It’s weak rays barely penetrated the outskirts of the heavily wooded forest.

“Damn!” Dave swore out loud. “It’s been years but I know the old homestead is around here somewhere…?” He tripped over yet another small log as he emerged from the bush and entered a clearing.

Yes, there was the old house just ahead. And a light shone in one of the windows…?

The grass felt suddenly shorter underfoot. The old buildings should be surrounded by hip-high wild hay this time of year? The silhouette of the log house seemed straighter, sturdier… “I am losing my mind,” Dave concluded. He could hear a radio playing, chickens, a cow.. voices!

A door opened and he heard a woman call, “That you, Dan? Can you bring in some wood? The fire’s low…”

Dave turned off his flashlight just as a man’s deep, irritated voice sounded out from behind the house. He detected a dark form approaching the doorway. The man carried a lamp; a dimly lit coal-oil lantern.

“For Gawd’s sake, woman! Can’t you get that kid to do anything? I work all day at the sawmill and he can’t even milk the cow properly. I got another quart out of Brownie! I suppose he’s got his nose in one of those war stories and one ear glued to the radio listening to the baloney about war heroes!”

“Don’t be too hard on the boy,” the woman’s voice cautioned. “Just be thankful he’s too young for the draft.” Her voice rose and a note of passionate hysteria crept into it.

“We got a letter from Vancouver today, Dan. Minerva Donovan picked it up at the post office. Mother wrote that my cousin Mary’s youngest son isn’t coming back. That makes two they have lost. I don’t know how Mary can stand it! I couldn’t… I know I couldn’t!!”

Dave’s breath felt thick in his throat. The loud staccato beating of his heart sounded in his ears. The woman had clearly said ‘Minerva Donovan’ had picked up her letter..? Bob Donovan’s wife had died almost two years ago!

He stumbled into the security of the bushes, the beam from his flashlight bobbing ahead. Panic stricken Dave began ploughing through the thick underbrush, zigzagging around stumps and fallen trees. A packrat scurried underfoot, nearly tripping him. The new quick stab of fear turned to warm sympathy when he spotted the rodent crouched within the small circle of light. Packrats were real. Maybe he had imagined those people back at the old Harrison place…?

Anyway, there was Bob Donovan’s porch light shining in the distance. “I’m almost at the big slough already,” Dave thought. “Guess I travel a lot faster when I’m scared right out of my mind!”

“Dave, what are you doing here this time of night?” Bob Donovan looked worried. “Hazel’s not having the baby early is she…? You’re as pale as a ghost.”

“No Bob, Hazel’s fine.” Dave’s voice was composed. “Can I use your phone to let her know I’ll be home soon?”

Bob Donovan’s eyes shone reflectively under bushy Gary eyebrows. He filled his pipe slowly and carefully with tobacco. “It’s funny that you should ask about the Harrison’s, Dave. I was thinking about them today. Always do around the eleventh of November. We were their nearest neighbours- the wife and I. Dan Harrison was a worker. The kind of fellow who considered hard work to be the greatest of virtues. His wife was quite a bit younger than he was. A city gal. Pretty little thing.”

“You know, it doesn’t seem that long ago.” Bob paused to light his pipe. “The Second World War I mean. Missed both of them myself. Too young for the first and too old for the second… Anyway, the Harrison’s had a son – apple of his mother’s eye. The kid ran away to war. Lied about his age. It was too much for his mother…”

He paused again, puffing hard on his pipe. “I’ll never forget that year. No snow at all until after Christmas. And warm! But it was snowing the day I found them. She’d taken the 30 – 30 off the wall. Harrison always kept it loaded in case he seen a deer. She’d shot him first and then herself.”

Dave shivered, “What happened to the boy?”

“Well, I guess that’s what set her off. You see he was with one of them groups of our Canadian boys that was sent to Dieppe. The telegram was there on the kitchen table.”

The midnight sky blended with the earth below in darkened harmony. A sudden, icy wind heralded the approaching winter. In the swamp a dead tree toppled to the ground. Snow would soon fall upon the unsheltered living and blanket the unburied dead. In the old tumbledown log house a packrat, its belly filled from foraging, reunited with its young.