The Wanton Troopers

Critical Acclaim for
The Wanton Troopers

“The posthumous publication of this novel, which was rejected by one major publisher in 1960 and never resubmitted, is an event to be welcomed for the additional insight it provides into the life and work of one of Canada's most distinctive writers.” —
Canadian Literature

“A significant piece of work by a man who was one of the country's most powerful writers. Those who are collectors will certainly want this one.” —
The Daily Gleaner

“
The Wanton Troopers
is a remarkable book, which will remain in the reader's memory long after it is read. The characters of the mother and father are brilliantly drawn and cause a deep sympathy, as lasting as any.” — David Adams Richards

“A powerful novel.” —
Dimensions

“Nowlan touches some deep truths about what it means to be an abused, bewildered, terrified child.” —
Books in Canada

“The assurance of the prose reminds us of the adolescent world portrayed by the great masters — Proust, Joyce and Lawrence — and nowhere is this more evident than in Nowlan's capturing of the boy's first awareness of sexuality, his first adolescent love.” —
The Halifax Mail Star

“Impressive and memorable.” —
The Kingston Whig-Standard

“Well worth reading.” —
The Vancouver Sun

“A mature work heralding the poetic voice that is Nowlan's claim to an enduring place in the annals of Canadian literature.” —
CM Magazine

Poetry by Alden Nowlan

The Rose and the Puritan,
1958

A Darkness in the Earth
, 1959

Wind in a Rocky Country
, 1960

Under the Ice
, 1961

The Things Which Are
, 1962

Bread, Wine and Salt
, 1967

The Mysterious Naked Man
, 1969

Playing the Jesus Game: Selected Poems
, 1970

Between Tears and Laughter
, 1971

I'm a Stranger Here Myself
, 1974

Shaped by This Land
(with Tom Forrestall), 1974

Smoked Glass
, 1977

I Might Not Tell Everybody This
, 1982

Early Poems
, 1983

An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected
, 1985

What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread
, 1993

The Best of Alden Nowlan
, 1993

Alden Nowlan: Selected Poems
, 1996

Alden Nowlan and Illness
, [2005]

Fiction by Alden Nowlan

Miracle at Indian River
, 1968

Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien
, 1973

Will Ye Let the Mummers In
, 1984

The Wanton Troopers
, 1988

ALDEN NOWLAN

The Wanton Troopers
With an afterword by David Adams Richards

The Wanton Troopers
copyright © 1988, 2009 by the Estate of Alden Nowlan. Afterword copyright © 2009 by David Adams Richards.
Excerpts from the transcripts of
Alden Nowlan: An Introduction
reprinted by permission of the National Film Board of Canada.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Laurel Boone.
Cover image detailed from a photograph by Charles Scriver.
Cover and interior page design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada on paper containing 100% post-consumer fibre.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Nowlan, Alden, 1933-1983
     The wanton troopers / Alden Nowlan; with an afterword by David Adams Richards. — Reader's guide ed.

ISBN 978-0-86492-546-6

I. Title.

PS8527.O798W3 2009     C813'.54     C2009-903135-3

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture, and Sport for its publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions
Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com

To my mother and my father
in forgiveness

Table of Contents

Notes to the First Edition

Notes to the Second Edition

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Afterword

About the Author

An Interview with Alden Nowlan

Notes to the First Edition

Alden Nowlan wrote his first novel in 1960, when a Canada Council grant allowed him to take a leave of absence as a reporter for the
Hartland Observer.
A year later, he published
Under the
Ice,
while two other collections of poetry,
The Rose and the
Puritan
(1958) and
A Darkness in the Earth
(1959), had already appeared. So
The Wanton Troopers
came from an especially creative period which would extend to the poems of
Wind in a
Rocky Country
(1960) and
The Things Which Are
(1962).

Nowlan hoped that a success with this novel would free him from the drudgery of work on a small-town newspaper. Yet it seems he submitted the manuscript to only a single publisher. His motives for holding back were not simple — for while he used elements of
The Wanton Troopers
in later prose writings and even the name of its hero for
Various Persons Named Kevin
O'Brien
(1973), the novel is emphatically not a piece of juvenilia or the sort of failure writers prefer to forget.

D. Peter Thomas
Publisher, Goose Lane Editions
1988

Notes to the Second Edition

As Peter Thomas foresaw,
The Wanton Troopers
was well received, and its continuing popularity has made a new edition imperative. Various minor changes and one major change have been made to the text. A few small grammar and transcription errors have been corrected, and spelling and punctuation have been made as internally consistent as possible without intrusiveness. Dialect has remained as Nowlan imagined it, except that accepted spellings have been used when feasible (
wanna
, for instance), and elisions have been moved from verbs to auxiliaries (
could a-done
has become
coulda done
).

The one major change occurs at the end of the book. The copy text for this edition is the typed manuscript in the Alden Nowlan Papers at the University of Calgary Library; it is a carbon copy, corrected in pencil in Nowlan's hand. It is one page longer than the copy text used for the 1988 edition, which had lost its last page. The final words of the 1988 edition, “Please God,” occur at the end of the last line at the bottom of the second-last page of the Calgary manuscript, and it is easy to see why no one perceived that a page was missing. However, as readers of this edition will see, there can be no mistake: at last
The Wanton
Troopers
has its true ending.

Susanne Alexander
Publisher, Goose Lane Editions
2009

The wanton troopers, riding by,
Have shot my faun and it will die.

— Andrew Marvell

One

It was raining so hard that Kevin thought God must have torn a hole in the sky and let all of the rivers of heaven spill upon earth. The cold spring rain hit the roof with the force of gravel, rattled down the walls, and splashed black and silver against the tawny window panes. It felt good to be in the house, safe in the sleepy warmth and lamp-glow of the kitchen, breathing the soporific aromas of smouldering millwood and burning kerosene.

A clock ticked on the shelf above the pantry door, scarcely audible above the strident clatter of the storm. The kerosene lamps, one on the table by the window and the other on a shelf above the cot, threw out inverted cones of orange-yellow light that shimmered until they were dissolved by the shadows in the corners of the room. On the ceiling above each lamp, there whirled a golden halo.

His mother had set the wash tub in front of the stove. She took buckets of cold water from under the sink and emptied them into the tub, then added hot water from a pan boiling on the stove. Steam rose in sibilant clouds, glistening ghostly as it was absorbed by the dry air.

“Come, Scampi,” his mother said.

This was her private name for him. He stood on a towel while she undressed him. His body relaxed into will-lessness, went limp as she removed the shirt his grandmother had made for him from bleached-out flour bags. He liked the way in which the room became a violent ferment of darkness and light while the shirt was being pulled over his eyes. And he liked her hands, their deft union of firmness and gentleness.

His father dozed on the cot. His grandmother had long since gone to bed. This was a private moment, shared only by him and his mother. He never loved her so much as when she bathed him and readied him for bed.

Outside, over the oozing, dun-coloured fields, down the overflowing creek, through the gurgling swamps, and across the cedared hills, the wind howled like a drowning beast. Inside, there was warmth and light and the music of his mother's hands on his body.

She undid buckles and buttons and let his denim shorts slide down his legs. From May to November, he never wore underwear. He stepped out of the ring of cloth around his ankles and into the tub, recoiling as the cold rim touched his back. He leaned forward, away from the ring of cold.

Now, there was the clean, acid smell of soap in his nostrils, the foam and film of soap in his hair and across his shoulders and down his back. He closed his eyes and sank into little-boy inertia, every muscle dormant, every cell in his brain passive and inert.

Around his thighs, hips, and belly, the water's warmth coaxed the energy out of his every pore. His knees and chest were prickled by the sharper heat of the stove, little slivers of heat shooting into his flesh.

She rubbed a washcloth over his face. He drew back a little as the soap bit his eyes and nostrils. She put her hand against the back of his head and made him keep still — and he liked the peremptoriness of her gestures. Like the stinging needles from the stove, this mild discomfort accentuated their intimacy, made it more sweet.

He might have been a part of her body. She washed him as she washed her own hands. He was, all of him, hers: not the smallest part of him belonged any longer to himself. And in this surrender, there was a pervasive peace, an ecstasy of negation.

She kneaded suds into the soft fat of his belly, and he sank into the weightless dimension between wakefulness and sleep. When she made him stand up, it was as though he were coming awake.

Wind still pounded the house; rain was a rumbling landslide on the roof. With each gust, the lamp by the window flickered and the door shook on its rusty hinges. But he was only dimly aware of these things. She scrubbed his legs, rubbing his knees until they stung, the pressure of her hands softening as they ran up and down his thighs, tickling him so that he writhed and giggled. On the cot, his father — that man of ironwood and axe blades — continued to sleep. Upstairs, his grandmother was dreaming of crowns and trumpets and of the golden streets of Jerusalem. When his mother dried him with a towel made from a flour bag, she stroked him so briskly his body glowed as though it had become phosphorescent with sensuous fire.