When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  Peter: I came to the Immitoin Valley for the orchards. For me, it was either falling trees or picking fruit . . . I knew some veterans who’d been given land grants under the Soldier Settlement Act. A beautiful place . . .

  I worked for Donald Wallace—well, I worked under his head arborist, Marcus Soules, but it was Wallace’s orchards. Soules was a magician at pruning and grafting, getting the trees through a rough winter. Good man, good teacher too. I still use all his techniques on my trees in the backyard.

  Fruit industry went downhill by the end of the Second World War. So I stuck to logging and the like . . . Lambert had its own crew after the war, and they were an ornery bunch. Frederic Wentz ran the operation, then he and Wallace partnered up.

  They started off horse logging in the lower elevations for Monashee Power, which was just a small lighting and power utility company at the time. They also built flumes so whatever they didn’t mill on site they could run as raw logs down the Immitoin. It was a damned impressive set-up.

  Interviewer: Did you work for them at all?

  P: Never did, no. There was unrest between them and the community. Once whispers about the dam started, people got worried about their future. Neighbours in Lambert started fighting each other, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in any of that.

  Halloween night, while typing out his notes on Woodbury, he was interrupted by a knock on the back door. He found himself wandering downtown with a couple of zombies, a bloodied and unidentifiable superhero, a nun with a rather revealing habit, and a bare-chested devil—Jory with his hairless, buff torso covered in red paint. The nun was Sonya, Jory’s girlfriend.

  Paul had only seen her once since he’d moved in. When he’d finished unloading his vehicle and piled his few belongings outside on the porch, she’d come downstairs with Jory to help. Her natural dull blond hair was streaked with black and a faded electric blue, cut just short enough to reveal the series of piercings in both ears. She’d worn a tight-fitting but unremarkable grey T-shirt underneath an unzipped black hoodie, both tops covered in the logos of a snowboard company. She and Jory almost could have been brother and sister. Unlike him, though, her smile was forced, a brief creasing of alabaster cheeks.

  “Don’t mind all the crap,” she’d mumbled in a low voice and shoved aside a garbage bag full of empty beer cans.

  “The last guy was never here,” Jory apologized, “so we kind of took over.”

  “I don’t have much,” Paul said. Sonya gave his duffle bags a wary look, perhaps disturbed by his lack of possessions.

  “Aren’t you, like, a university professor?” she asked.

  “My dad’s shipping the rest of my stuff,” he said and watched as the last hint of respect or interest vanished from her eyes.

  They wandered into a nightclub, confronted by a grab-bag of aliens, undead, superheroes, and devils crowding the dance floor. Here and there he saw grey ponytails and weathered faces, aging hippies oblivious to anything but the music, which was tribal, all afro-Cuban percussion and robotically incessant synths. The people his own age were invariably couples, and carried the look of careless affluence, throwing their summers’ earnings into pitchers of beer and oversized martinis. Big, hip fish in a little pond. Sonya had dressed conservatively next to the sea of lingerie, bondage gear, and angel wings that drifted past their table. He sipped his gin and tonic, his first drink in months—he wasn’t wearing a pad—and wondered when he could slip out of here without offending his new friend.

  Jory leaned over to Paul’s ear. “Analyzing the situation?”

  “In a way,” he said.

  “We’re going to pop some E,” Jory said. “You want half a hit?”

  Paul laughed incredulously. “No. No. It’s been a while.” He’d gone through his own party phase, a pretty tame one in comparison, and was finished with it. Of course, some of the greybeards out there on the dance floor would have gone through the disco days, bluegrass and jam band revivals, the roots of the rave scene, and danced their way through all of it, picking up on the new sounds, switching to the latest drug du jour. The idea of that continuity made him nostalgic for a life he’d never had. Flares of energy charged the room, while his own spark sputtered and faltered.

  “The old guys on the dance floor are impressive,” he said to Jory.

  Jory laughed. “Thank Christ my dad’s not out there. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

  “They’re locals, huh?”

  “Born and raised. Except if they’re draft dodgers. But that’s as good as being born here. Like my dad’s friends. They run the tree-planting companies, the health food stores. Shellycoat wouldn’t be what it is without the dodgers.” The music was pounding now, and Jory’s breath condensed against Paul’s ear as he leaned in to talk. Sonya looked bored and twitchy.

  “Shellycoat wouldn’t be anything without the orchardists and miners,” Paul said.

  “That’s way too far back for me.” Jory slipped a few pills out of a small tin of mints and pressed one between Sonya’s lips. They nursed their drinks in silence, eyes on the crowd. Minutes passed, and then Sonya whispered something to Jory and they stood up and wandered away. She danced with her eyes closed, with modest, subtle motions—she had a sensuality some of the more daring girls lacked. Or maybe their eroticism was too overwhelming, white noise to his long-deprived senses, and Sonya’s operated at a level he could handle. She danced for herself, while Jory bounced up and down, conscious of others, inviting them in. High-fives over people’s heads, a pause for a quick, sweaty hug with a bro.

  The music dropped to something low and throbbing. He heard a faint click and realized he was tapping his finger on the table, keeping time. He wondered what effect the drug would have had on him but brushed the idea aside. He’d stay another minute. This wasn’t a total waste of time. Surely somewhere in the throng of sexy nurses and robot vampires were the grandsons and granddaughters of Lambert. Everything he did from now on was research.

  Sheets in the wash because he’d wet himself after two gins. After his shower, he went out to the covered porch, cleared the table of its empty beer bottles and full ashtray, and set down a French press filled with coffee. Snow fell but melted instantly on the sidewalks and road. He wore a heavy flannel coat he’d found at a church thrift store for three dollars. The coat had the woody, dusty smell of mudrooms and woodsheds, of firewood and chainsaw oil. It was a relic, something outside its time.

  Sonya stepped onto the porch, wearing her usual black hoodie. She was more pale than usual, her cheeks lined from a pillowcase or patterned couch cushion. “Hope we didn’t wake you when we staggered home,” she said, clearing her throat.

  “Didn’t hear a thing. Coffee?”

  She gave him a slow nod. “Thanks.”

  Paul went inside for two more mugs, and when he came back out, she had a cigarette burning in her hand as she stared out over the valley.

  “Hope you don’t mind I’m on the porch,” he said.

  “You were here first.” She squinted at him, then looked away.

  They sat in silence until Jory stumbled down to the porch, bare-chested, still smeared with red paint. He shivered, wild-haired. “Fuck, yeah,” he said as he poured himself a coffee. He squeezed in behind Sonya, wrapping his arms around her as he braced against the post.

  “So, the night went well?”

  Jory laughed, his voice burbling up through gravel. “Some guy in a gorilla suit grabbed her ass outside the bar.”

  “Jory lost his mind,” Sonya said dryly. “So that was fun.”

  Paul whistled. He didn’t see any sign of a beating on Jory’s face or knuckles. “Anyone get hurt?”

  “Aw, it’s all good. We worked it out,” Jory said.

  “I had to tear them off each other.”

  “I thought everyone was in love on Ecstasy,” Paul said.

  “Jory can be overprotective sometimes.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “I was being a gentleman. That fucking clown.
” Jory chuckled, his chin on Sonya’s shoulder, but Paul could see her face darken underneath her hood.

  “What do you think, babe, should we make some breakfast?” Jory mumbled. His face disappeared into the folds of her hoodie. “Or go back to bed?”

  She closed her eyes as he nuzzled her through the heavy cotton, and when she opened them, her face had softened, the events of last night pushed aside. Paul couldn’t help watching them. He felt an upwelling of sadness almost pleasurable in its intensity. A memory of his own past, seeing the two twining into each other, amused by their own exhaustion, their bodies resilient, the deep, full well of their libido.

  Paul remembered being in love like that at Jory’s age—he recalled only fragments of his time with the girl, but it didn’t matter. There really was nothing quite like being in love at twenty. It was unstable and volcanic. It shook the earth, then dispersed like a breeze. So elemental and simple. It was not vegetative, developing cell by cell, sending branches up and taproots down. A boy’s love didn’t anchor itself. It fought, as likely to linger when it lost as vanish when it conquered. Would he ever return to that again? Was that even possible?

  Molly (b. 1943, 66 yrs old) and Joseph (b. 1940, 69 yrs old) Kruse

  Partial transcript. Taped at their home, a few kilometres south of Bishop, Nov. 9, 2009.

  Joseph was born to a Lutheran family in Lambert, growing up at a time when neighbours worried about the dam, the future of the valley uncertain. Nonetheless, after he and Molly married, they decided to stay at his family’s acreage until Lambert’s final day of relocation in the late summer of 1969.

  Molly: Joe’s father made furniture. He found all his materials along the lake and river.

  Joseph: We’d canoe to the mouth of the Immitoin above Bishop and find pockets of birch, willow, and maple. Most of those groves are underwater now. He had an old lathe in the workshop . . .

  Paul: So the loss of those wetlands, that way of life—it must have had a disorienting effect on you. Confounded your sense of place.

  J: Well . . . I still miss gathering up the wood. If that’s what you mean.

  P: When did you know for sure you were going to be flooded out?

  M: I remember being surprised—you know, suddenly there’s this treaty. There was a town hall meeting at Lambert, where they had an engineer and someone from government explain what was going on. A lot of people were angry, very upset. Afterwards, I think this was in 1964, everyone got The Property Owner’s Guide.

  J: We lived above the flood line. Figured that meant we could stay. Of course, there’d be no more village, no cable ferry, no way of getting across except your own boat. I thought, Well, at least we’ll still have our home.

  P: So basically you’d accepted the inevitable.

  J: I don’t know that we accepted anything. Resigned is more like it. Young families were mostly on the dole, or they’d moved elsewhere for better work and education. Our neighbours were pensioners and war vets, mostly poor, and they just wanted peace and quiet.

  M: Most old folks didn’t want to leave. Fifty years in one place, you don’t feel like new beginnings. You aren’t going to start a farm from scratch at sixty-five.

  J: Maybe the dam killed Lambert before Father Time showed up to do the job.

  P: So why did you lose your property? Did the flood line change?

  J: Nope. Monashee Power decided they needed our land for construction access, or dump or fill sites. I never got the reasoning. The land is still sitting there. They never did a damned thing with it except cut down the trees.

  P: How much did you receive in compensation?

  J: The price started at about a hundred dollars an acre, one hundred and fifty an acre for cleared land and buildings. We hummed and hawed, and the price dropped to fifty dollars an acre.

  M: We said at that price, we’re not going anywhere. And we’d seen the lots in Bishop. Land was stony, needed clearing. A roof for a roof, that’s all we asked for. A roof for a roof.

  J: Different men showed up to negotiate. The first ones were friendly enough. They’d come in for tea and ask about the farm, our quality of life. A couple of them quit for the stress of it.

  M: It was tough, what they had to do. I mean, things came at you out of the blue, government edicts and whatnot, and you had no one to confront. The negotiators were flesh and blood, so people lashed out at them.

  J: Later on, this squat toad of a man kept coming by. Young too. That bothered me. I mean, he was about my age. What would he know about living here? He’d say, Mr. Kruse, I’ll offer you two thousand dollars for your place. I’d tell him to forget it. Finally he said, you do know that I can and will expropriate your property. Go ahead, try, I said. So we haggled back and forth, and a few months into the negotiations, guess what?

  M: Joe.

  J: A forest fire breaks out on my property. In late September. Burns down two outbuildings, some fencing. A few days later, the short guy shows up again with a few of his goons. “Lightning strike?” he says. I still remember that.

  M: Never knew his name. Don’t recall him ever saying it.

  J: Always gave his title—you know, he was “acting on behalf” of somebody. Monashee dug a deep dark hole, then turned over a slimy rock and found him underneath. I heard he burned people’s houses right in front of them, before they got compensation. Before they even got their belongings out. I hope he’s roasting in hell.

  M: Well, he could still be alive, of course.

  Had he always been this awkward at conducting interviews? Had he always blundered along, leaving behind a trail of awkward silences, stuttering replies? Knock off the lofty theoretical questions, Dr. Tamba advised in an e-mail. You spent too much time with guys—nerds, if you’ll forgive me—like Nathan Cook.

  His dad, who’d worked with contractors and construction workers his whole life, said much the same thing over the phone. “These are blue-collar types, practical people. You gotta be honest and straightforward or they’ll tune you right out, believe me.”

  People didn’t want to talk about life after the flood. Or, rather, they didn’t want to compare the before and after of the valley. The rather ordinary things they had done out of necessity, getting on with their lives after the flood, hardly seemed the stuff of university research.

  The day after he’d talked to the Kruses, he interviewed Cal and Lucy Wendish. They’d lived up the road from the Huberts, raising livestock and chickens, and growing fruit and vegetables for market. The story of people’s homes, he realized, was always about things amassed, grown and built over time. Their properties had been hacked out of rough, wild land, worked and reworked from the turn of the century through both World Wars and the Depression, a long dialogue with soil, roots, and stone. And still, by time the valley was flooded, their farms had only begun to attain an air of permanence, of belonging.

  Cal (b. 1935, 74 yrs old)

  Cal: There was only ever a ribbon of good land here, along the valley bottom. Marshy along the river between the two lakes, but still decent for farming if you drained some land. We had one field for cold weather crops, another for early crops. Another where we kept cattle and some sheep. That was above the high water mark.

  Lucy (b. 1938, 71 yrs old)

  Lucy: Monashee Power expropriated it, though, because the road to Bishop was being rerouted.

  C: The original dirt road hugged the lakeshore. When the reservoir is low, there’s a long gravel bench—that’s the old route. Can’t see any trace of our house, or the outbuildings. We had a granary, hay sheds . . .

  L: Some of these things belonged to my parents. My father was a barkeep on the Westminster. Birch’s Black Bottle Scotch Whiskey. Label’s a bit faded. Hard to believe it lasted this long without the glass getting broke. That matchbox tin dates back to the twenties. Once it was decided you were being relocated, you had to get your stuff out of your house quick. Monashee men wouldn’t think twice about
torching your place with everything in it. Whether you’d gotten a cheque or not. That happened to a few folks.

  Paul: People have mentioned something about a short man . . .

  C: Wasn’t just him, mind you. He had help from Wallace’s logging crew. They were his gang.

  P: Donald Wallace was part of this?

  C: What they’d do is come around, asking questions. See where you stood—if you’d make much of a fuss about prices. Folks who were tired of the place, or had money, sold quick—the longer you waited, the worse the money got. After a few years, the whole valley was checkerboarded out. People on either side of you had sold—but you didn’t know for how much. That’s when the short guy, the crew leader, would really put the screws to you.

  P: You don’t remember his name?

  C: Always called himself by his title. Mr. Expropriations or whatever. He was a very arrogant fellow. He came by when I was away, trying to get Lucy to sign the papers.

  L: Followed me around the garden, into the barn. He wouldn’t leave. I herded him off the property with a pitchfork and our dog. Mr. Expropriations.

  C: If you were unemployed or widowed or just scraping by for whatever reason, they treated you even worse. Piss poor. They shuffled us off to Bishop on cheap promises of good land. There wasn’t any. They said there was decent farming and ranching above the flood line, but I never saw it. I’m not complaining. Just stating facts.

  L: No real infrastructure—Cal helped build the storm drains and sewer system in Bishop, and there was the school and whatnot. But God help you if you had a serious accident, the hospital in Shellycoat was nearly a two-hour drive in those days. And people there treated you like a hillbilly.

  C: I worked on the reservoir too. On tugs, clearing debris and deadheads. Basically cleaning up the mess they made. For years, the north end of the reservoir looked like a bomb went off—silt in the water, mudslides, dead trees. There were good folk in Bishop. But things weren’t the same. People, I mean, not just the valley. You always wondered how much your neighbour received in compensation. And wondering kept you from trusting.