When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  At home that afternoon, he got a call from Elmer. “I think I may have found someone you’ll want to talk to. A woman named Raina Thorstenson. You’ll have to drive to Grand Forks, though. She’s in a seniors home there, she’s about ninety-one.”

  “Elmer, that’s brilliant. How’d you find her?”

  “Because of you, actually. A fellow was in here the other day asking about your research, mentioned his grandmother had lived in Lambert. Don’t think he quite understood what you’re studying.”

  “How so?”

  “She’d already left the valley a long time before the flood, just after the Second World War.”

  “Doesn’t really fit the research then,” Paul said, disappointed. “Still tempting, but . . .”

  “Well, once I had her maiden name, I dug around and found a couple of references. Her father was a foreman at the packing sheds—you know, loading the crates onto the steamship and so on. So they probably knew Donald Wallace quite well. Here’s the clincher: her mother was a nurse.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “A nurse—you remember you wanted someone with the scoop on Donald’s war wounds?”

  “Sure. I’m surprised you remembered.”

  Elmer laughed. “Oh, I’ve got a knack for sleuthing—it’s all that reservoir noir.”

  Grand Forks had a wide open sky compared with Shellycoat. Around the town, a large expanse of fields—not quite green, but no longer dormant—hovered on the verge of spring. The air was warm and smelled of soil and rain. All this made the Twin Willows Assisted Living Village seem like a lively place. Residents took themselves downtown using their walkers or electric scooters or congregated at picnic tables and benches along the lawns and sidewalks. At the far end of the Village, a sign on a set of metal gates designated the enclosed building as a “neighbourhood for the memory-impaired.” He double-checked to make sure Raina lived on the right side of the gate.

  She was a short woman with a slight tremble, alert and talkative. Her room was tidy, decorated with framed watercolours and wooden spoons hanging on the walls. She still took a long walk each day, she told him, and was quite independent—she cleaned her own apartment and cooked her own meals, eschewing the nursing staff and communal dining area as much as possible. She only had a bit of time to talk—there was a senior’s yoga class at eleven and a crib tournament with friends after lunch.

  Her memories of Lambert were vivid and elegiac: cherry trees flowering in the spring, the crates of apples loaded on the Westminster—Winesaps, Golden Russets, autumn-red Gravensteins. And pears—Anjoulems, Flemish Beauties. Recollections of swimming and rowboat expeditions along the lake, fishing and looking for petroglyphs on rockfaces. They spent nearly an hour steeped in nostalgia before Paul got to the real questions.

  “Your mother—a nurse, yes?—she must have known everyone,” Paul said.

  “Everyone knew everyone.”

  “Saw a lot of births?”

  “And deaths.”

  “Obviously, you must remember Donald and Belinda Wallace,” Paul said. “Did your mother help deliver their son, Hardy?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said without hesitation.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely,” Raina said, sounding slightly annoyed that a stranger was questioning her memory. “We were close family friends.”

  “So Mr. Wallace knew he could trust your parents, your mother especially,” Paul said.

  She looked confused. “With what—Hardy’s delivery, do you mean?”

  “With other things. I know Donald had been badly wounded in the war.”

  She chuckled suddenly at a thought. “He couldn’t bend or kneel down properly. So he never did anything that would draw attention to it—he was an absurdly proud man. It meant a lot of standing and pointing and ordering people about.”

  “Did you ever hear anyone say—did Donald or Belinda ever tell your mother—that because of that injury he was unable to have children of his own?”

  She squinted cautiously at Paul and smacked her lips once, false teeth slipping and wedging back into place. The question had either surprised her so much she’d forgotten to be indignant for Wallace’s sake or else she was weighing her words carefully.

  “No one would ever have asked, or brought it up in public. It’s like talking about the Queen’s underwear.” Raina paused, clouded eyes wandering. “It was unexpected when Mrs. Wallace became pregnant, that was all. Everyone just assumed there would be no children.”

  “Did you know Marcus Soules?”

  “Mr. Soules once showed me how to graft a Cox’s Pippin branch onto a crabapple tree. I was probably there to play with Arthur at the time, we were close to the same age.”

  “Do you think Donald would have told Marcus? About the nature of his injury?”

  “Maybe . . . yes, him, if anybody.” Her eyes brightened with interest—she saw where Paul was going. “If it was true about Donald, not sure how he could keep that kind of thing from Marcus.”

  “And of course, Marcus already had a son,” Paul said. “I wonder if that was hard for Donald to take, being so proud.”

  She nodded, giving him a shrewd look. When is a secret ever really a secret, he thought, and not just a mutual agreement to look the other way?

  Paul pictured Donald Wallace at the peak of the Great Depression. The markets for his fruit were disappearing, he had land and moderate wealth but no sons or daughters. A future without orchards wouldn’t have seemed likely—everyone in Lambert probably assumed this was a temporary dip in fortune, that there would be new markets, better rail service for shipping. Despite the decline of the fruit industry, and without foreseeing the inevitability of the dam, Donald would have believed he was still key to Lambert’s survival. But not to have an heir, to know his name would last only as long as his uncertain health—that must have been truly unthinkable.

  Here was the kind of conjecture Elmer hated: that Donald talked Marcus into it as a business deal, a simple matter of propagation, of progeny. No different than grafting scion to rootstock. The Wallaces probably had money set aside for a nest egg, an inheritance. A portion of it could be given over to Marcus, a payment to give the Wallace orchards—and the Wallace name—a future, whatever that future might be. There must have been a strong friendship between the two men or, at the very least, the sense of a shared life, shared dreams, and shared risks.

  So they took another gamble—Donald Wallace staked the last of his pride on the future—and from that came Hardy. A son for the Wallaces. The risk must have felt worth it at the time.

  Perhaps Marcus had his own hidden motives—all those years tending the orchards with Belinda while Donald was overseas at war or away on association business. Perhaps, by making Marcus his instrument, Wallace took away the man’s agency, rendered any secret feelings Marcus had for his wife moot, useless.

  And how had Belinda felt about all this? Paul had a hunch that nothing of Belinda survived the burning of Lambert or the floodwaters, save the odd trinket and photo that Hardy kept (and probably hid from Donald, who would have been very old when they relocated). Unlike in Elmer’s novels, no secret diaries would suddenly appear to magically and romantically resurrect her. No voice from the past would rescue Paul from speculation. And what was the point of all this speculating? He wasn’t sure—it didn’t seem to answer anything, except to show how some people in the valley, Donald Wallace in particular, were caught in a spiral of helplessness, of impotence in every sense.

  Raina interrupted his thoughts. “Marcus’s son, Arthur—he was a handsome boy but bookish. Very different from people like the Wallaces or the Wentzes.”

  “He had a son, Kai, who died.”

  “Oh, yes, dreadful. There was hardly anything in the paper, but I’d known because we kept in touch with the Souleses. His wife wrote the Christmas letter each year.”

  “Arthur had already moved away from Lambert when that happened.”

  “Yes, he worked with—”
She stopped, straining to remember. “Well, he did something for the railroads in Kamloops. Anyway, it was all a terrible shame. Arthur was very proud of Kai because he’d taken a job with the hydroelectric company in the valley.”

  “I thought Kai worked at the Dalton Creek mill? With Hardy Wallace and the Wentzes.”

  “Arthur was hoping Monashee Power would point Kai toward an engineering degree or a government job on the coast—anything that wasn’t farming or logging.”

  “Strange, when you think of it,” Paul said. “By the time Hardy was born, it was already too late for him to become the person Donald wanted him to be—someone to take over the orchards, run the packing sheds and jam factory. There must have been a lot of shared disappointment between them.”

  Raina nodded. “That’s why Arthur wanted to get Kai away. That valley was no place for young people.” She thought for a moment. “It still isn’t—don’t tell me you haven’t had a rough go of things there.”

  He smiled, taken aback. “Things are starting to look promising.”

  “Sounds like you’re past the worst of it, then,” she said.

  6

  He and Gina left Shane with Billy for the week and drove south past Grand Forks and then east. At Castlegar, they left the main highway and followed the road through town to the Hugh Keenleyside Dam on the Columbia River. There was a narrow lane across the dam’s crest where they could drive over the navigation lock to the other side and a viewpoint overlooking the generating station and powerhouse and the man-made wetlands behind the dam. They circled back through the benchland communities of Robson and Brilliant and returned to the highway at the rest stop overlooking the Brilliant Dam on the Kootenay River. The spillway below them thundered, early spring runoff churning in a polished granite mortar, funnelled into a canyon and passing beneath the old Doukhobor suspension bridge.

  They continued driving up a long valley where the river ran unencumbered, and the road wound through dark forests that would suddenly open onto fields and farms, gas stations and roadside coffee shops. There was a pristine and rustic quality here, a sense of something preserved. The river was braided and meandering, the banks weedy and wild. This place was, in essence, what the Immitoin Valley might have been without the dam.

  Paul recognized the valley from coffee table books and travel magazines. He tried to imagine a new hydro project drowning this highway and farmland. The outrage, the mass protests, would be enough to bring down a government—it simply wouldn’t happen in the present day. But then again, there was Site C on the Peace, as Tamba had mentioned. He’d also read about a recent American proposal to flood nine thousand acres of grasslands, sloughs, and a First Nations reserve in the Similkameen Valley. He remembered that place too—he’d driven through part of it last summer on his way to Shellycoat and stopped by the side of the road to suffer through his incontinence.

  They’d booked a cabin at a resort with hot springs set among the trees. He and Gina soaked in the hottest of the two pools, immersed to their necks and wreathed in steam. It was early afternoon on a Monday, and the pools were nearly deserted. Snow fell briefly and froze in their damp hair, then turned to a light rain. Gina drifted away, eyes closed, limp body nudged by jets.

  Overheated, Paul lifted himself onto the concrete edge and dangled his legs in the water. Rain fell on his head and back, steam billowing off his flushed skin. Weeks of skiing had brought changes—his frame smaller, slimmer, his limbs more fit and toned—refining and completing, in a way, the transformation that the cancer and surgery had begun. He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath of cool air. A raven called from a tree overhead. Wing beats, water sluicing off someone rising from the pool. An age passed. Gina returned, silently, and touched his leg with her hand.

  When they returned to their simple one-room cabin, Paul showered to wash off the spring’s sulphur smell. When he got out, Gina had pulled the curtains shut and waited for him on the bed, naked and reclining on pillows she’d stacked against the headboard. “Take off your towel,” she said. “Sit across from me.” He did as he was told.

  “I think you put too much pressure on yourself. Maybe I do too,” she said. No, he began to say, but she stopped him. “Not on purpose, but you’re quick to give up, take yourself out of the equation. Then you put all the attention on me, to compensate.”

  He shifted cautiously. “I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here.”

  “To relax.” From under the covers, she brought out a curved, silicon phallus, pastel red with strange, floral ridges and folds. Her smile was both mischievous and embarrassed. She pressed the bottom of the toy, and it hummed to life. “Is this too weird?” she asked.

  “Did you just buy that?” he asked, stunned.

  “An old friend. Is it too weird?” she asked again. “Or threatening?”

  He tried for a joke. “Not as threatening as Billy.”

  Sadness flickered briefly across her face. “Don’t ever feel threatened by him.”

  “All right.”

  “I thought, even if things have to be different—they can also be normal.”

  “This isn’t normal,” he reminded her.

  She shrugged and parted her legs. “We can take all day. Maybe you could just watch me. Or do whatever you want.”

  She closed her eyes, put her hand between her legs, and began, but he couldn’t follow suit. She was too obviously performing. Her eyes would flicker open and closed as if she were checking on him. He remembered how comfortable he and Christine had been in front of each other—or not comfortable, just possessed of an arrogance that was necessary and self-preserving, because they did not really love, did not connect.

  She stopped and opened her eyes. “Promise me you won’t think about time.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Did you want me to turn over? So I can’t see you?”

  Paul thought a moment, nodded. She flipped onto her knees, arching her back and burying her face into the blankets, and began again. She went quiet, except the working of her wrist, said nothing, did not signal. He took a deep, shaking breath. He felt, for too long, disembodied, distanced from everything except the tightness in his chest, as though he were watching the absurd, arousing scene from the far corner of the room. As time went by and she made sounds to herself into the pillow, he began to feel, mercifully, like she’d forgotten about him. She would keep going if he left the room. He sank into his being a ghost, hovering silently behind her. Waiting for something to break through, to fill cell after cell.

  After, they both lay on their stomachs. She ran her hand over her lower back in search of his ejaculate, the mess couples made intimate jokes about. “Oh. But I thought I heard you . . .”

  “I did. I know.” He stroked the back of her neck, the first time he’d let himself touch her. “Extreme case of shooting blanks.”

  “It must feel so bizarre.”

  “Very.” Bizarre enough to be disheartening if he let it. What was that all about, anyway, a man’s emotional attachment to semen—his most cherished icon of physical release, that crude, ecstatic signifier of being purged, emptied? Was it an act of marking someone and laying claim to them, a symbolic transfer of one’s essence to another? “Lacking the stuff of life,” he said.

  “Trust me, that life soon becomes someone else’s. Shane is very much his own little man,” she said. “How do you feel?” Something in her tone said she wouldn’t brook self-pity—and fair enough. After all, she’d risked as much here as he had, they were both equally exposed and vulnerable.

  “Chafed, thanks,” he said. At least there hadn’t been pain this time. “It’s a step closer, I guess.”

  “Closer to what?”

  “Real sex.”

  “That was real sex,” she said. “I had fun.”

  “Maybe next time we’ll try—anyway, you were right, you know. It’s all in my mind. Or mostly.” He looked at the clock. “Took some effort.” She’d granted him time enough for his body to slowly work
its response. It felt like an act of forgiveness.

  They lay in silence for a while. “It was your mother who gave that food to Cyril Wentz, wasn’t it?” he asked. “And then he delivered it to Hardy.”

  “Yes.” Her brow furrowed. “I should have figured that out the night we argued, but I was too angry.” She went to rinse the toy in the bathroom sink.

  “I wonder how long they’ve done that for him.” He sat at the edge of the bed, stretching his legs.

  “Years, I’ll bet.”

  “I didn’t think they were all friends.”

  She returned, placed the toy on the bedside table, and stood in front of him. “They’re not. Mom doesn’t like either Cyril or Hardy. Who does? But they’re all bound together like unhappy, distant relatives.”

  He lay his cheek against her bare flank. “Let’s have another soak before dinner.”

  “We’re becoming amphibious,” she said happily. “A real pair of newts.”

  The reopening of the mill made the front page of the local paper, and though the article warned that operations might not last through the summer, that the hours and the number of positions had been reduced, Shellycoat hummed with a quiet relief as loggers and mill workers returned to work. From the porch, Paul could see a steady column of smoke from the burners. Trucks and crew cabs filled the parking spaces outside the coffee shops in the early morning and then disappeared until evening.

  Tanner had phoned earlier to pass along some news: the environmental assessment for the Spry Creek Hydroelectric Project had been given the go-ahead, which meant the run-of-river dam was one step closer to becoming reality. Once the public learned of the assessment, the protests would begin. Tanner had offered to be the spokesman for the local Streamkeepers Association. “Not going to tie myself to a fucking tree or anything,” he told Paul. “But we’ll have some input.”

  The five members of the house—Jory and Sonya, Paul, Gina, and Shane—shared a late breakfast of pancakes, waffles, and bacon on the back porch to celebrate Paul’s new research grant. He had funding now to live, very cheaply, for several months. They toasted his grant with mimosas—Sonya, unexpectedly, had been the one who bought the champagne.