“Thirty years of correspondence.”
Paul grabbed sheets at random and skimmed through them. Letters, each one similar to the one he’d read at Gina’s camp. The sheer number was remarkable.
“I’m slowing down with age. I hit my peak in the eighties. Gerry Lang was editor. I buried him in letters.”
“Trying to stir the hornet’s nest.” Flattery was sometimes a good technique in drawing a participant out. “Did you get that from your father?”
“He was a real politician—I’m just an old shit disturber. The Fruit Growers’ Association was as good as government in the valley.” Hardy looked to the ceiling, licking his lips. “July 22, 1940: two thousand crates of cherries, seven thousand boxes of strawberry, cherry, and raspberry jam. Of those boxes, six thousand to the prairies, three overseas.”
“Sorry?”
“Those are poor numbers, by the way. That’s the industry in decline. Jam for the war effort kept Lambert going in those years.”
“Did your father keep journals?” Paul asked, suddenly hopeful.
“No. I was quoting the association’s records—purchases and whatnot. Read them so many times I’ve memorized most of the entries.”
“Why do you read them?” Paul asked, disappointed. The archives held the same sets of records, and they didn’t tell him anything about the relocation or Caleb Ready.
“The numbers somehow stir things up, they bring to mind days growing up around the ships and ferries, the packing sheds, our trees and garden. Mostly, they remind me of how rich the valley was before I was born. I was not born into an easy age.” Hardy paused, lost in some memory. “He had real power, my father. He made himself heard.”
Paul said, maybe condescendingly, “In a way you did as well, I guess. With your letters.”
Hardy gave a low, disdainful hiss. “Sure, I made some real progress with Monashee and their goons. Still waiting for answers.”
“And what have you done, while you’ve been waiting?”
Hardy shrugged. “This and that. I travelled during summers. Logged in Horsefly, cut cedar shakes near Armstrong.” He challenged Paul with a look. “1987, I was a tree planter.”
“Really?” Paul’s voice cracked, half-amused, half-incredulous, but Hardy looked more pleased than insulted. He tried to imagine a middle-aged version of Hardy on a company like Gina’s: a dour and tired man shouldering a surly pride, alone on the far side of the mess tent while scruffy college students and lanky highballers yukked it up.
“Was it bad?”
“Work is never bad. Just the constant scrounging for it. But I’m on the pension now.”
Strange how Hardy and Cyril, for all their shared history, had ended up on such divergent paths. “But you always had this place to come back to.”
“I cling here, yes. It’s thin soil.”
“Not like Lambert, you mean. You can’t farm.”
“I’ve trapped and shot animals for food. I catch trout.”
He remembered watching Hardy fish, or not fish, at the Flumes. The aimless drifting of the line.
Hardy said, “I should have gone to that, that thing they held. In Castlegar, way back fifteen years or so.”
“The Kootenay Symposium?” Yes, he could imagine Hardy with his list of grievances clutched in his hand, queuing up for his chance to speak, like the other farmers in the video.
“Maybe that was my chance.” The old man shifted in his chair. “It’s the knowing and the waiting . . . and the not doing that makes you a bit crazy.”
Paul’s vehicle looked like something abandoned all winter. It sat keeled over to one side and buried under snow, and when he opened the door to grab his shovel, snow slid off the roof, onto the seats, and down the back of his neck. He scooped a few shovelfuls around the front tires and knew he was overmatched. The bleak afternoon light was waning. It would take an hour, more, and then he’d have to brave the road in the dark. He’d end up stuck in the middle of nowhere, worse than now. The road was a whitewashed plain. Not a single snowplow had driven by all day. Behind him, Hardy stood with his arms at his sides.
“You picked a fine day to visit.”
“What should I do?”
“Come back to the house.”
A deep cold swept up from the river and stirred the falling snow into spinning figures. “Christ,” Paul muttered. He tried to think, but the air nipped at his face and limbs, herding him back down the driveway. Hardy picked his way over the ice with untroubled patience, his arms still hanging loosely by his hips.
Back in the kitchen, Hardy dumped a Tupperware container full of beef stew into a pot and heated it up. In between stirs, he took a loaf of dark rye bread, cut thick slices, and buttered them. After he set down the food, he pulled out a bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured them each a glass.
“You can ask questions while we eat, if you like.”
The stew tasted homemade, bright with fresh bell peppers and carrots, the beef and potatoes neatly cubed. The bread was speckled and scented with caraway. It all seemed too good for Hardy to have made himself. If he didn’t drive into town, who brought him food? Paul eyed the whisky with some trepidation. “So what happened to the rest of the crew?”
Such poor discipline: he couldn’t resist dredging the past, even though Hardy was the ideal research subject, one who perfectly illustrated the worst consequences of displacement. This could more than make up for the disastrous Wentz interview. But no, he still wanted to be led to the drowned man.
Hardy took a noisy sip from his glass and shrugged. “Some did quite well.”
Here we go, Paul thought. “Do you mean the ones who worked for Caleb Ready?”
Hardy barely flinched at the mention of Ready’s name. “Young bucks always want to pick the winning side. Not like the greybeards on our crew. Men from the orchards. Old farmers becoming chokermen, fallers. No money saved for retirement is why. Loyal and desperate.”
Paul took a breath. “But what about men like Marcus Soules, your father’s arborist? I mean, wasn’t he the first to sell to Monashee?”
Hardy’s face bunched up as though he’d been spit on. You picked a bad place to finally ask the tough questions, Paul thought.
“Marcus had no choice. He was in bad shape, mind and body. He didn’t have much fight in him. His son, Arthur, ran their household.”
“So it was Arthur who sold?”
“Never was an orchardist—no money in it. He’d worked as an engineer for the trains, up around Chase and Kamloops, out to the prairies. Spent most months gone from Lambert. He saw things different. Had a certain respect for progress. Call it that.”
“He opened the door for Monashee Power.”
Hardy shrugged, shot back his drink. It caught in the old man’s throat, and he gargled and sighed, a long soft groan. The stove made a slight rushing noise, air down the chimney. The fire flared and snapped inside the stove.
Paul tried another angle. “Cyril Wentz—I’m sure you remember him—mentioned that your company’s contracts began to dry up when Monashee began expropriations. Was that just a coincidence, you think?”
“Not at all,” Hardy laughed. “It was because we said no to selling the Dalton Creek mill.”
“Dalton Creek? I thought they were just after your homes.”
“Oh, our homes were a foregone conclusion.”
“How was the sawmill connected to land acquisition?”
Hardy irritably flapped his hand in the air, like someone hounded by black flies. “Beats the bloody hell out of me. Had nothing to do with the dam. Caleb Ready wanted us to sell the lease for the mill site. Then later he sicced his goons on the valley, the big companies from outside got Monashee’s lumber and pole contracts, and we went bankrupt a few years after the flood. Sold the chutes and saws off for scrap.”
Paul dared once more. “And then Caleb Ready ends up dead in the river, some forty years later.”
“Yes, well.” The old man wiped around his mouth, then rub
bed his eyes. “Never really understood the Immitoin, that one. Thought he did. Figured since he wore the cap, the river was his to command.”
“Did you recognize him when they pulled him from the water that day?”
“They look much the same when they’ve drowned.” He grabbed the bottle and put back another shot. Paul opened his mouth and hesitated. A man at his host’s mercy, without a means of leaving, wouldn’t be wise to force the issue any more than he had.
Hardy chuckled suddenly, as though he’d read Paul’s mind. “It’s good for you to record all this. One day soon I’ll succumb to old-timer’s disease, and there’ll be few left to tell the truth of things.” He coughed whisky spittle onto his beard. “Monashee’ll like that. I waited all these years for their goons to come shut me up, put me down like a dog.”
“Most I’ve met seem nice,” Paul offered.
“The new breed,” he scoffed. “Polite young gentlemen apologizing about the past and doing nothing about it. Bunch of softies waffling about downstream benefits, so-called compensation—putting in a few parks and rest stops. And their goddamned garbage fish.” He fluttered his hands overhead like an ardent preacher. “Protect the garbage fish. Save the garbage fish.”
The bathroom was spare, the walls undecorated except for a tarnished mirror above the sink. Not even a shower curtain to pull around the clawfoot tub. A window looked out toward the forest, the panes old and warped. Like the rest of the house, though, the floors, windowframe, and door trim were dark and solid, and the heat from the woodstove warmed every corner. If this were another person’s house, another time, he might have been immensely grateful to be sheltered in such a place. His reflection in the mirror was slightly warped. The whisky was going to hit him hard if he didn’t slow down.
“You piss a lot,” said Hardy when Paul returned to his seat at the table. “Who’s the old man here?”
Paul chuckled nervously. Hardy was wearing him down, had somehow put him on the wrong track, had him asking the wrong questions.
Outside, snow gathered in drifts below the porch light, and the darkness squeezed the cabin from all sides. Drunk, Hardy began to mutter to himself, a winter’s conversation with his father’s house, whispering and then railing against the wooden creaks and groans that answered. The kitchen light flickered, surged, and steadied. On the counter, an oil lantern and a stack of candles stood at the ready. Hardy’s eyes had lost all sense of acuity and gave way to confusion, despair. Finally Paul saw the man who had pointed a rifle at him.
“Kai,” Hardy began. “No good in the bush, that one. His father had him daydreaming about university, building bridges and highways, making it big off real estate. Meanwhile, Arthur had run off and taken Marcus away to die in some city somewhere.”
“Kai,” interjected Paul, trying to steer the conversation.
“Kai Soules, goddamn you. I promised I’d take care of him the way his grandfather Marcus looked out for me when I was a boy. But he couldn’t drop a ten-foot lodgepole without nearly killing himself. So we put him to work with a peavey, down from where the log chute met the river.”
Paul’s digital recorder blinked numbers—four hours, twelve minutes. At least something could keep pace with Hardy, because he was lost.
“We got back to headquarters about five o’clock. We said to my dad, He went into the rapids. He’s fucking gone. We’re sorry as hell. And he says to us, Did you try to save him at least? We tried, we tell him, We did everything but jump in after him. And he says, Well, bully for you cocksuckers.”
The kitchen and porch lights flickered again, and Hardy wiped at his eyes and then fumbled for the oil lantern. He had it lit a few seconds before the lights finally went out. Paul grabbed a candle and looked for a holder. Hardy gestured toward a drawer and went to throw more wood in the stove. “There.”
In the drawer lay an assortment of metal and clay candleholders, dented or chipped and covered in wax. Some must have been more than fifty years old. One was a fine piece of pottery, heavy in the hand, the glaze spider-webbed from age. Someone had painted tiny cherries around the edges. He imagined dozens of identical candleholders at the bottom of the reservoir. Within a few minutes, he and Hardy had placed candles around the house.
Hardy put his face against the window. “Look. You can see it better now.”
Paul stood beside him and smelled old sweat trapped in wool. Outside, a blanket of white among shadowy tree trunks and then the dark gap where the pool swirled.
“My father, you see, had already known about Kai—the body had showed up in the pool that afternoon, then kept drifting by, he told us.”
Outside, the river took shape, a negative space in the white landscape except where crests of water caught a minute source of light. Hardy was mumbling now, his eyelids drooping. “Cyril always says this pool’s as good as a grave, and when you go, we’ll bury you there if you like.”
Paul, groggy and leaning against the cold windowpane, jolted upright. Cyril had told him he hadn’t talked to Hardy since the mill had folded, decades ago. Either Hardy’s sense of time had slipped, or Cyril had lied to Paul.
“I told him I might,” Hardy said. “I might like that.”
Steady, gurgling breaths came from the bedroom where Hardy had passed out. Paul opened the woodstove and rustled the coals with a poker until they flared, then added a piece of birch. The fire kept the small house warm, but he needed blankets. The shelves and windowsills were filled with books and artifacts—old belt buckles, tins, and coloured medicine bottles, an empty bottle of Mitchell’s Old Heatherdew Whiskey. A rusted harmonica, a penknife, a yellowed doily beneath a scattering of wooden buttons. Leather-bound encyclopedias dating back to the 1940s or earlier. On another shelf, a stack of dog-eared mystery novels and penny westerns, thrift-store books.
A large chest made of dark, oiled wood, girded by bands of riveted metal and two heavy brass handles, took up one corner of the living room. He set aside the jumble of old trousers and flannel work shirts piled on top and lifted the lid. Inside lay a jumble of objects: a leather caulk boot, a set of pruning shears with its wooden handles pale and cracked like driftwood, a few empty burlap sacks with “Wallace Ranch Apples” printed in bold red letters. Beneath the lettering, in faded yellows, greens, and blues, were houses, fields of apple trees and open skies, the fruit-seller’s promise.
He lay down on the sofa, piling Hardy’s trousers and work shirts over himself. The couch’s loose springs pressed against the fraying material. Flames flickered in the woodstove’s vents, the muted roar of the fire akin to the sound of the river’s dark snaking beneath the ice.
Hardy’s earthy and sour breath woke him. The old man had him by the shoulder, shaking him. “Get up now. You’ve slept too late.”
The trees outside were faint purple shadows. Paul kicked off the pile of jackets and trousers. Hardy was pulling on his coat. “They’ll be coming by soon,” he growled.
“Who?”
“They plow the road themselves. Like to jump ahead of highway maintenance.”
“Maybe they’ll get my truck out.” Whoever they were.
Hardy grunted, his hand already on the door. “Maybe they’ll make things worse.”
Paul threw on his coat and backpack and followed the old man out into the cold. They waded through the fresh snow down the steps. The firs and spruces stood ghostly, bone-straight like white menhirs. Ahead of him, Hardy grabbed two shovels from the woodshed. Snow had erased all tracks and treads from the driveway, turned Hardy’s truck into a humble mound.
In the bleak light, they dug out the front wheels of Paul’s vehicle, their shovels meeting the resistance of the crusty bank underneath the fresh drifts. The old man attacked the snow with surprising ferocity. “Get some sand from the woodshed,” he said. “There’s bags. Go.” Paul heard the faint sound of an engine, a metallic scrape, a few kilometres away at most. He jogged down to the shed, wondering why they were racing against whoever was clearing the road. He found th
e sandbags, cradled two in his arms back up the drive, the weight sinking him past his ankles. Hardy crouched in front of the grill, poking the shovel underneath the bumper, opening up space for the tires. He rolled away and back to his feet, face in a ruddy sweat.
“Crack them open,” muttered Hardy, gasping and hawking phlegm. Paul gave him a questioning glance, and the old man winced as, closer now, the blade of an approaching plow struck frozen earth, ice, and steel on stone. “They won’t like that you were here,” Hardy said. Suddenly, Paul understood. He dropped the bags and then thrust his shovel down hard until the sand spilled. They scattered it under the tires like a hasty offering, swept the windshield free, and chipped the ice off the driver’s side. He yanked the door open and flung himself inside. The engine wouldn’t turn. If the cold had drained the battery—“Christ Almighty,” he hissed. The motor revved into life, and he flicked the windshield wipers to see Hardy waving him on. “Ease it forward, gentle, don’t gun it,” the old man shouted between breaths. He sounded like a grizzled foreman—the man was like a set of bagpipes, puffed up one moment, deflated the next.
The wheels spun, the vehicle swaying and foundering on the high drift until finally the right front tire caught a pocket of grit. The bumper lurched and dipped, and then he slid onto the solid road. Hardy shouted directions: come ahead a few feet at an angle, turn the wheel, back up, go forward then back again. The old man hopped from foot to foot impatiently. A twenty-point turn later, his rear wheels skidding and threatening to bog down in the drifts, Paul had the vehicle facing south. He leaned out the window again and could hear the other truck clearly now.
“Mr. Wallace,” he said.
“Ah.” Hardy looked too alert, too alive, eyebrows lifted to the edge of his toque. “Go, for the sweet love of fuck.”
Paul gunned it and almost put himself in the bank again, his back end nearly clipping Hardy—he checked the side mirror to see him gathering the shovels and lurching down the driveway. The front wheels searched for traction as snow sprayed over the bumper, and Paul jerked the steering wheel from left to right like some manic cartoon character. He’d only just eased into a steady glide when he came to the first corner and saw fog lights cut across the road. A moment later, a black pickup pushed its yellow plow straight at him, and he swung wide and let off the gas, grazing the high drifts. The two vehicles brushed past each other, less than a metre gap between them, and there was Billy behind the wheel, cap pulled low across his forehead, with Cyril in the passenger seat. Billy’s mouth dropped open as he met Paul’s gaze. Then the Pathfinder hit the cleared road, the tires chewing into the sudden firmness and rocketing him forward. He pressed down slow and sure on the accelerator, rolled up his window, and let out a long, shuddering breath.
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