When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  “He stole half your crew?”

  Cyril shrugged sourly. “He had deeper pockets. And the kind of work that didn’t break your balls.”

  “The land agent,” Paul said. “Do you mean Caleb Ready?”

  Cyril squinted at him for a moment, then slowly nodded. “That’s the one. Caleb Ready. Boy, haven’t heard that name in a while.”

  Paul didn’t buy that. “You didn’t hear what happened to Ready?”

  “Nope. Who gives a fuck about him?” Cyril stumbled off to the bathroom, and Daryl, who’d been slouching in his chair, hiding behind his beer, took the opportunity to slip away. “Think I’ll play some VLTs,” he muttered, then beelined for the exit.

  Billy had not stopped trying to stare down Paul. “Gina ain’t told me squat about you,” he said, a gravelly drawl. The two old men snickered and mumbled.

  “No?”

  “No, and I don’t think she likes you bothering her. I don’t like it.”

  Paul, hating Daryl in that moment, didn’t match Billy’s stare but looked at his shoulder, which he’d heard was a good tactic when confronted by a wild animal. She must have seen something in him, some redeeming quality. Maybe the surly temper manifested itself differently in the outdoors, when the work was hard-going. And when he wasn’t half-drunk in the afternoon, he was probably a handy and capable guy. Strong, obviously. He wished the word virile didn’t come to mind, but it did.

  Billy tried again. “Harassing people.”

  “All right,” Paul said.

  “Leave him be,” Cyril said, returning. “I just wanted to get some facts straight, not stir up shit.” He wiped a puddle of spilled beer from Paul’s map, then stopped and tapped at the spot he’d cleaned with his sleeve. “That’s the old family lot, with waterfront. That acreage was Billy’s inheritance. It’d be worth a million by now—vacation rentals, maybe a vineyard. But no point bitching about it now, is there?”

  “Did you ever try suing the government, like other residents did? To get fair compensation?”

  “Lawsuits. Tie your whole life up that way. What you do, you work your ass off and get something back. You compensate yourself.”

  Paul was exhausted, holding his own against these gruff, reticent men. Cyril was starting to look bored. If he had any good questions, he’d better throw them out there now. “Were you there on Lambert’s final day? I haven’t found anyone who was.”

  “Most people were gone by then, that’s why. I was there. There was a squad of us, burning whatever buildings hadn’t been torched already, either by Monashee or the owners.”

  “What about the Wallaces?”

  “Hardy was in the squad too. We still had the company for the time being. The Wallaces moved into a cabin on the river we’d used as a bunkhouse for our crew. I think Hardy still lives there. After Donald died and our mill folded, I lost touch with Hardy.”

  “Really?” Paul frowned.

  “Guess I’ve seen him about. We were never friends, exactly.”

  “Well, it seems kind of—anyways, all right.”

  Cyril raised an eyebrow. Paul backed off and took a deep breath. “Okay. What about your own father, Cyril? What did he make of all those changes?”

  Cyril looked stunned, absolutely floored. Paul was confused—it was a logical question, it should have been expected. Cyril’s jaw twitched soundlessly as he shook his head with a flat, flinty stare.

  One of the old men beside him cleared his throat. “He hung himself, you dumb son of a bitch. Frederic Wentz did himself in.”

  Paul grabbed the digital recorder a split second before Billy swatted it across the room. He jumped to his feet. The room had gone silent. Paul looked over at the bartender, who nodded toward the door, his expression carefully neutral.

  Billy was rising from his chair—Cyril briefly put his hand on his son’s arm to stop him. Then he folded his arms across his chest and said, “Time to get the fuck out of here, bud.”

  A week went by without a word from Gina. Letters and pamphlets began to appear in his mail, all from the Friends of Spry Creek, a local environmental group. The stack of literature connected the proposed run-of-river project with past events—the McCulloch Dam, the displacement of Immitoin Valley citizens—although in this case no one would be relocated and the reservoir levels would be minimally affected. The group made dire predictions, though, about the appropriation of public land, the trampling of community values (whatever that meant), and the further destruction of fish habitat and wildlife corridors by construction and power line right-of-ways.

  A line from a pamphlet jumped out at him: “Even after decades of court cases, belated compensation packages, and limp public apologies from government and Monashee Power officials, stories of past atrocities are still being discovered by academics and historians and are being brought to light.”

  Academics—were they talking about him? On a hunch, he examined the letterhead of one pamphlet and saw that Elsie Hubert was listed as the secretary for the non-profit group.

  So this is why she’d suddenly been so keen to be interviewed. He’d been under an invisible microscope this whole time. People were talking about him and, worse, twisting his intentions.

  He phoned Elsie but didn’t have the nerve to confront her directly about the pamphlets. “Why didn’t you tell me about Frederic Wentz killing himself?”

  “It wasn’t my business to say,” she said. “I don’t want to exploit anybody.”

  Except me, he thought. “You might have saved me some trouble with Cyril. Anyway, I went to the graveyard yesterday and saw for myself.”

  “It’s a memorial,” she said stiffly. “For Lambert’s dead. Not a graveyard.”

  “Still. I got the sense he wasn’t the only one.”

  “There were rumours of others,” Elsie said reluctantly. “Someone would die cleaning their gun, that sort of thing. A lot of old-timers, especially veterans, they lived alone, with no close neighbours. Probably couldn’t imagine themselves being shuffled off to an old folks home. But, like I said, it’s only rumours.”

  Elmer had been the one to tell him about the memorial, but it had been a trick getting the archivist to come along—he’d hadn’t been in years, and never in winter. Constable Lazeroff, surprisingly, had been eager to join them and wasn’t worried about finding the place. Jory had supplied the snowmobiles, borrowing two spanking new Polaris sleds from a friend. Jory stunk of alcohol and after they’d found the memorial site, he mostly wandered around trying not to throw up.

  They parked near the dam, where a set of transmission line towers climbed the hills and disappeared into the mountains. The four of them doubled up on the two sleds—Paul riding behind Lazeroff—taking the sleds up a service road that would eventually end at Fiddler’s Bowl, the local paradise for sledders and backcountry fanatics. The road was hard-packed by dozens of other snowmobiles. After the first hill, though, Lazeroff led them across a rolling meadow, heading for a copse of aspen and pine. Piles of hay and salt licks soiled the pristine whiteness, the snow trampled and stained by animal tracks and droppings.

  “Hay’s for elk,” Lazeroff shouted over his shoulder to Paul. “Rod and Gun Club does a few drops each winter. On Monashee’s dime. To make up for lost habitat.”

  At the woods they dismounted, and Lazeroff walked them through the knee-deep snow to a boulder as high as Paul’s chest. It stood between two pines like a menhir, the side facing them flat and engraved with large square letters. People had kept the inscription clean of lichen and moss. From where he stood, Paul could see straight across the lake to where Lambert used to be. He read the stone:

  IN MEMORY OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT PEOPLE BURIED IN THE LAMBERT CEMETERY, 1899–1969.

  There were different ways of handling the dead of a drowned town, Elmer explained. On the Arrow Lakes, the government had covered Renata’s cemetery with a big concrete pad to seal the graves before the flood. In other places, other countries, bodies were repatriated and moved. In Lamber
t, they had merely piled fill and boulders over the cemetery. Valley folk built the monument in 1970. Twenty years later, the government finally erected its own official memorial next to the dam.

  The four of them fanned out and waded ankle-deep through the woods, walking in an outward spiral from the monument. Near a birch, Paul’s toe caught against something hard, and he scraped the snow away until he found a square of granite. The lettering on the stone was faded, blackened with lichens. He found two more markers a few metres away. The names etched on the stones weren’t familiar, and he added them to his notes. Underneath a clump of ash, where the snow was thin, he spotted the top of a slab with tracks leading up to it: someone had tended the stone recently. “Here we go,” he called out. The others trudged over, Jory wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand.

  FREDERIC WENTZ. 1901–1967. HUNG HIMSELF IN LAMBERT. THERE ARE SOME WHO WON’T BE MOVED.

  Paul stood close to Lazeroff. “So?” he asked quietly. “What do you think?” The other night over the phone he’d played Lazeroff some of the recording from the Barber Chair.

  Lazeroff wiped frost off his moustache. “Everyone hated Caleb. We already knew that. And now we know Billy and Cyril hate you. Not much I can do there. Except tell you to choose your women better.”

  “Thanks. So you’re not looking into Caleb’s case?”

  The constable grimaced. “There is no case. Closed. Done.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “Me? I’m just some old bastard goofing around on his day off.” He gave Paul a quick wink, and that ended the conversation.

  Over the phone, Elsie sighed. “Anyhow, that’s nice of you to call. I meant to ask if you’d be interested in going to a meeting. Won’t be until after the new year.”

  “About Spry Creek, you mean?” he said. She acted surprised he’d heard of it, a deceit that reminded him of his own mother, and he smiled despite himself. “I’ll mark it on my calendar.”

  “If you could just observe. Wouldn’t necessarily have to say anything.”

  Jesus, he thought. I should hope not. He paused. “How’s Gina?”

  “Oh,” she sighed. “Same as ever. Heard about Billy.”

  “I was just trying to interview Daryl Pilcher.” He was still beating himself up over his colossal failure. Not just his unfinished interview with Daryl, but Cyril and Billy—the last man born in Lambert, how great would that have looked in his dissertation?—and, really, an entire roomful of potential research participants. All wasted opportunities.

  Elsie said, “I’ve known the Wentzes for a long time. Doesn’t mean we see eye to eye, or deal with things the same way.”

  “Ms. Hubert, there’s nothing between me and your daughter.”

  “Billy would still tell you to stay away from her.”

  “Oh, he did. Quite emphatically. But what do you think?”

  “About?”

  “Gina. And me. Not that there’s anything . . .”

  “I know you could use a friend. But I wonder what’s best for my grandson—maybe simpler is better. Then again, I’m not sure what ‘simpler’ means either. I let Gina run her life,” she finished brusquely. “If you can think of some people at your university that might be interested in what’s happening at Spry Creek, I don’t know if you have the ear of an ecologist or biologist . . .”

  He waffled, made some vague promises, and hung up.

  The next morning, after his workout, he hired Sonya to transcribe his interviews, starting with Cyril and Billy’s. He knew she needed the money and something to do. He’d assumed she’d be at the ski hill every day, but discovered—Jory had never told him, which maybe said something about the young man’s self-absorption—that she’d injured herself at a mountain bike race that summer, and had an operation on her right knee in September. She spent most days pacing restlessly upstairs. Still, typing out interviews was a terrible cure for boredom, and when she quickly agreed to do it he wondered if he’d misjudged her sullen nature.

  The next afternoon she phoned to say she couldn’t understand half of what was being said. He went upstairs and saw the digital recorder and her laptop on the coffee table in the living room. A Christmas tree stood in the corner, the strings of light glowing softly, reflecting off the strands of silver tinsel and dangling ornaments. Sonya appeared from the kitchen, holding two cups of coffee. She shrugged an apology for her flannel pyjamas. “I haven’t left the house today.”

  He gestured at the tree. “Surprisingly old-fashioned.”

  She gave him a self-deprecating smirk. “I like the holidays. Jory got me the Santa skulls.”

  They sat at opposite ends of the couch—its familiar creak briefly embarrassed him—and listened to the moments where ambient pub noise muffled Cyril’s voice. Paul closed his eyes, trying to use his memory to fill in the blanks. At his prompt, Sonya played back each muffled section. “Widow-maker,” he said. “Another logging story.” She typed and they moved on to the next problem.

  “Jory at the shop today?” he asked.

  “No. Backcountry trip with his friends. There’s this ridge behind the ski hill, Teddy’s Lemon Drop.”

  “They take some big risks?”

  “Just being on the ridge is dangerous. Let alone the shit they’ll try to pull off. People die every year up there. This one girl, Yolanda? Took a tumble off a cliff band.”

  “I saw the bench in the park. Her name on it.”

  She snorted. “A fucking bench. They named the whole ridge after Teddy.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Hot-shit skier back in the nineties. You know, corporate sponsors, starred in films. Like Jory.”

  “He died on the ridge?”

  “Car crash. Coming home from a party. But he’s still the town legend. Live fast, die young, and all that.”

  They sat in silence for a while. “Let’s play that one part again,” he said.

  Sonya stared at the ceiling, frowning, her ear toward the player as the interview rolled. “Took some balls, you know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The interview. Pretty tense, and the Barber Chair’s a rough place too. But you kept asking questions.”

  A giddy grin threatened to erupt from beneath his smile. “Too nervous to shut up, is all. Thanks, though.”

  She tucked her legs beneath her, and the flannel tightened against her thighs and hips. When she leaned forward to stop the recorder or type on the laptop, he glimpsed the pale tops of her breasts. His body did not respond, not in the usual way, but felt rejuvenated, infused with a brighter energy. It couldn’t be anything more, in his condition, than simply a keen appreciation of beauty. She had a wonderful body. He did, despite everything, remember how wonderful a body like that could be.

  Sometimes at night, on his way back from the bathroom, he would pop into his storage closet for a minute or two. If he was greeted with dead silence, he would return to the bedroom. If he heard any noise, even the low rumblings of music or conversation, he would linger to see where things were headed. It was juvenile and creepy, so utterly unlike anything he’d ever done that he found it easy to disassociate himself from the weird guy under the stairs and not feel guilty when he shared coffee with Jory and Sonya the next day. One night after he’d been upstairs working on transcriptions with Sonya, he was rewarded—if one could call it that—with the steadily increasing pulse of bedsprings and, afterwards, the padding of feet toward the bathroom and the running of water. Her voice had been largely absent except where Paul imagined it. Only Jory’s loud, enthusiastic gasps and exhortations made it into the mix. Paul scavenged on the auditory leftovers, the discarded sounds of their good sex.

  Maybe desire had been present all along, existing in different forms. How else to explain his vigour thumbing through documents and texts, the delight that thrummed through him after a decent interview? Or his sudden ability to bring people together, drag three men out to a snowy field to look at tombstones? This was nothing like last winter, when his
blood had stopped moving and his body became a stagnant, tepid pool where cancer quietly germinated.

  He was riding a buoyant surge of momentum, and a particular urgency. His research was rooted in the past, and the past was disappearing. An event occurred, formed a community, and then time worked to erase its every member. Most of his participants were aging. How much longer would Agnes Hutchinson live to remember long-vanished steamships and orchards, barn dances?

  Other things pushed him onward—disturbing dreams, lucid memories of Caleb Ready’s corpse, that brief glimpse of pallid flesh. Ready emerging as the valley’s sinister legend. Either his death was a bizarre, cosmic act of karma—or just irony—or someone was lying to Paul. There were voices missing from the tapestry. Like Hardy’s. There was no chance Cyril or Billy would talk to him again. That fact alone made Hardy Wallace essential, unavoidable.

  FIELD NOTES:

  The metropolitan creeps into Shellycoat. The ubiquitous iPods, Lululemon yoga pants, designer fleece tops, designer dogs (almost surreal next to the malamutes, shepherd-wolf crosses, and mountain dogs). Australian ski bums serving tables for a quick buck between backcountry trips. Real estate prices within town artificially inflated by wealthy Albertan oil and construction barons looking for vacation properties, former Torontonians who ski all morning and run their online enterprises by afternoon. “So why are you here, exactly?” they all ask me.

  It’s a paradise here, at least above the tree line. Below that, it gets a bit complicated.

  A chance encounter with Lucy Wendish downtown. She points out a yarn and crafts store that used to be a dry cleaner’s back in the seventies and eighties. No one from Bishop would take their clothes there, even though it was the only one in the valley: a rumour the owner, a former resident of Lambert, had received an “inexplicably large chunk of money for a scrappy piece of land.” But how many people from Bishop, I wonder, needed dry cleaning anyway?

  Back at the McCulloch Dam viewpoint today. Most female participants remember the ugly side of the dam’s construction. The hillsides and shoreline stripped of topsoil, ripped apart and compacted, bedrock blasted out, the constant sound of dynamite echoing up and down the valley. The fill piled in heaps, mercury and contaminants seeping into the river. Dangerous work, building the body of the dam. A wonder so few people died building it: six altogether, three from carbon monoxide poisoning, one from heat exhaustion, the others falling to their deaths during the installation of the penstocks.