by Jack Hodgins
And yet in Saskatoon, in Florence, and in Oslo, they wrench up whatever roots they have and join the converging exodus around the world towards this place. Word has gone out on some invisible global network that the September rains have come to this part of the world, the magic mushrooms are pushing their way through the ground in record numbers, and a fortune is waiting to be made by those who get here first. Bring your family, bring your friends, bring anyone with a pair of hands and a pair of legs for running away from the law. Fresh air, fresh fruit, and plenty of gardens to raid; a hefty profit and a month of incredible highs.
Dennis Macken sees them first. They lean their bicycles into the ditch outside his field, hide their motorbikes in the bush, and hop off hitchhiked rides onto the gravel shoulder of the highway. Then they climb over, under, through his strands of barbed-wire fence. They stretch it, twist it, leave bits of their own patched sweaters snagged on it. One fat bearded man in leather shorts grabs a cedar post and levers it back and forth until it breaks off beneath the ground like a rotten tooth. Now he and his long-skirted woman and their four small children can walk unmolested onto Dennis Macken’s nearest pasture and start their bent-over search in the damp September grass.
Dennis Macken watches with a hand on the telephone, his tongue exploring a cavity. Unlike his brother and sister-in-law he’s done nothing at all to avoid this confrontation. Perhaps he even welcomes it. At any rate he doesn’t stop himself from grinning. When it appears that no more of them will be coming this morning he calls the police, then moves out onto the step to watch. A woman with a baby strapped to her back pauses to wave, and smile. There is no one out there who is even half his age.
When the police arrive, he laughs out loud at the sight of that pack breaking up and scattering like panicked cattle — pails emptied, skirts hoisted, long hair flying, children screaming. Through his second fence, or over it, into the bush. By the time the Mounties have crossed the ditch and entered the field there’s no one left in sight. The two of them stomp bravely towards the woods and disappear in alder. They come out again pulling a girl who kicks and screams and finally goes limp while they drag her back to their car. At the car she turns and shouts out something, a curse perhaps, at Dennis Macken, at those invisible pickers, at the world. Her words, of course, are in a language he cannot understand.
When the rest have come back to spread out over his field again, Macken moves inside his house and watches from a window. He knows that something is happening here but he doesn’t know what it is. He only hopes they will have left for the day by the time he goes out for his evening chores. At sixty-three years old, Dennis Macken still believes in the law. These people are trespassing on private property. They’re tromping on the field he cleared himself with his home-made tractor. They’re breaking down fences he worked hard weeks to build. He imagines himself with a rifle, picking them off from his window; he imagines his pasture a battlefield strewn with bodies; but he still believes in the law. He will phone the police every hour through the rest of this day. And tomorrow. And the day after that. Those young buggers may get their mushrooms in the end, but they’ll get plenty of exercise, too.
His neighbour Angel Hopper doesn’t believe in waiting for the law, he believes in fighting his battles himself. The sight of the second-day wave of pickers upsets his stomach, gives him migraines, sets his teeth on edge, but he doesn’t phone the police. What Dennis Macken has is foolish faith, he says, what Angel Hopper has is a Hereford bull — a thick-necked, thick-shouldered, thick-legged miserable son-of-a-bitch that even Angel Hopper is scared of. A people-hater from birth. He rolls his bulging eyes and swings his head and paws at the ground at even a glimpse of something human, no matter how far away. In a small high-fenced corral behind the barn, he stands up to his knees in muck and swings his tail at flies while he munches hay and dreams of destroying the two-legged race. Sometimes just the sound of Angel Hopper moving around inside the barn is enough to make him circle his pen, work up some speed, and smash his head into the wall.
Hopper isn’t half so mean as his bull but he can’t help chuckling over what he knows will happen. A treat like this is worth a day off work — no logging company ever went belly-up just because one second-loader stayed home to protect his land. It is also worth the effort of doing it right — which means giving that ragged pack of youths some warning. He waits until all the young men in their crotch-patched overalls and pony-tails and the women in their ankle-length flowered skirts and the children with their pails and paper bags of lunch have crossed the ditch, have cut the strands of his fence and spread out over the field. Then he swaggers down into their midst with his twenty-two in his arms and approaches the only person who looks up, a girl in a purple velvet coat who reminds him of the runaway daughter of Frieda and Eddie Macken. “This is my property you’re on,” he says, as pleasantly as he knows how, “and I’d like to see you people off of here right away.” He pauses and looks at the others, who don’t even know he is there. “Please.”
The girl frowns into his face as if she sees something at the back of his eyeballs that even he doesn’t know is there. “Haven’t you heard?” she says. “Nobody owns the earth. You got no business putting up fences and trying to keep us out.”
“Thank you,” Hopper says and heads for the barn. When the bull has been released to the field Hopper stands on the rusty seat of an abandoned hayfork to watch. Faced with so much humanity all at once, the bull hardly knows where to start. He bawls, drools, trots forward. He lowers his head and flings up dirt with his hoof and trots in a wide curve around the edge of the crowd. At last he charges. He seems to have chosen someone right in the middle. People scatter in all directions, screaming. Angel Hopper hoots and slaps his leg. No one would ever call him a sadist, but he is having a wonderful time. “Scare the hell out of them all, old Bull!” But Bull is intent on only the one original target, a youth with a rusty beard and a sweat-band who refuses to move. From this distance, Hopper thinks it may be the marathon youth. But marathon youth or whoever he is, this fellow has only to lift his arms and the bull nearly breaks his neck trying to put on the brakes. When he comes to a stiff-legged halt, his head lowered, he appears for a moment to be bowing to the youth. From their positions on top of fence posts and in the lower limbs of trees, the scattered pickers laugh. A few applaud.
The bull backs away from the youth and swings his head as if in apology. Then catching sight of Hopper on the seat of that rusty hayfork, he snorts and tosses his head and starts to run again. This time there’s no indecision, the curve in his route is simply because his target is moving, is running towards the house. The bull cuts right through the fence like someone going through spider web, drags wire and broken post and several strands of honeysuckle vine behind him across the yard. Unhampered by so many accessories, Hopper is the first to get to the house. He even, for some reason or other, locks the door. While Hopper turns his basement upside down looking for strong enough rope to do something about that bull, the bull discovers a strong desire to travel. Out on the yellow centre line of the highway, he trots northward with his tail switching at flies. Perhaps he has an appointment he wants to keep in someone else’s field. Perhaps he has simply developed an ambition to run the length of the Island.
Now all the world is draining into Waterville, it seems. There are people here from Taiwan, Turkey, and Tibet. There are people off the plane from New South Wales, from Ecuador, from Greece. Families of Alabamans. Couples from Japan. Four youths on motorbikes from California, migrant workers on the look-out for a crop more profitable and fun than grapes or beets or oranges. The fields are crowded. The woods are full. No one can escape them now. They hide behind the cattle in the pasture. They camp in the bush and sneak out after dark with miners’ lamps beaming from their foreheads. Alan Powers finds a family sleeping in his hayloft. Osier Greenfield discovers a naked couple making love in the attic of his house. All night long Grandma Barclay listens to the sounds of running footsteps, whisperin
g voices, bodies brushing one another outside her bedroom walls. Strangers sleep in tractor sheds and pickup cabs and cellars, children’s voices cry from under trucks, the air at night is alive with whispers like the rustling sounds of rats.
Dennis Macken wakes at dawn and knows that someone else has slept beside him in his bed. The colour of his dreams has changed and the sheets are strangely warm and limp. Some of his forty-seven hats hanging around the wall are rearranged. He believes it is the marathon youth himself, who intends to push him off his place and use it as a headquarters for his operation. Being a long-time bachelor, Dennis Macken has the neatest house in the district, the most expensive furniture, the newest truck, the cleanest barn, and by far the biggest garden. Naturally, that rusty-bearded runner would choose it for his own. Macken is used to people wanting what he’s got.
One of the things that people used to want was Dennis Macken himself. He had his turn as heart-throb for the entire district, years ago. Nearly every woman in Waterville once dreamed of catching him. Star pitcher for the valley baseball team, a heavy drinker, and a player of practical jokes. He also played the field since the field was so willing to be played, then in time chose Frieda Barclay out of all the rest. Amongst other things, he liked her turned-up nose. Frieda, however, liked the stronger, thicker nose of Eddie Macken and gave Dennis back his ring. Her choice was to be his sister-in-law instead of wife. His choice was to make no second choice at all from the well-played field but to travel twice around the world and hope to forget her. By the time he stopped his running she was pregnant and he settled into bachelorhood to watch her raise a family. Even after forty years of watching, her nose still drives him crazy. He keeps his place so spick and span not only because it is where she grew up, the Barclay dairy farm he bought from her widowed mother, but also because he knows she despises dirt. He’s the only man in the community who can match the floors and windows of her spotless home.
But it isn’t Frieda Macken’s home that he feels is most at stake. It’s his own. If he doesn’t do something soon to stop that plague of mushroom-pickers from overrunning the settlement they’ll soon be crowding him off this earth.
Yet it appears that nothing can stop them now. Everyone knows that police arrests are a joke. These people are happy to forfeit their airline tickets to Norway or Egypt and hightail it back to the fields. Someone is making a fortune and it isn’t the Waterville farmer. His cattle huddle in corners. His garden is picked nearly bare. His wife is afraid to step outside her own house. Coming from town with her station wagon full of groceries, Lenora Desmond finds her house overrun; people in every room. Something they ate has gone bad in their stomachs and they’ve converted her house to a hospital: people are in her beds, people are throwing up in her toilet, people are wrapped in blankets they’ve hauled from her closet. The whole house stinks of some foul concoction of weeds a girl is boiling on her stove. “Who is the doctor here?” she says. “Why are you in my house?” But they turn up their sad forgiving eyes and pity her for this bitter uncharity and refuse to move.
Aside from Eddie and Frieda Macken’s silent farm, the general store and post office is the only part of the community not alive with strangers. By the fourth day of the siege it is full of residents who’ve come in for the mail and won’t go home. They buy groceries to justify a few more minutes of talk, then stand at the door until Em Madill brings out more chairs from her kitchen. Display shelves are shifted to one end of the room. Counters are cleared. Lenora Desmond moves every loaf of bread to the top of the meat counter so that Angel Hopper can perch to smoke his pipe and Em Madill has somewhere to set up her coffee pot and cups. Women’s jaws are set. Men’s eyes refuse to see the eyes of other men. They prefer to read the tiny print on the labels of the canned tomatoes.
“It’s really very simple,” Frieda Macken says. “Nobody picks on our property. Nobody tramples our fences. Nobody scares our cows. You spread lime and the mushrooms don’t grow.”
“Not that you’re gloating,” they say.
And she isn’t gloating, she understands that no one has followed her lead simply because they can’t believe this thing until it’s already started to happen. She smiles at a time like this, and almost sings, as if what she’s got to offer is astonishing news. “If you gave all of your fields a good dose of it now, would those people still want the mushrooms?”
“Probably yes.”
“Those people are crazy, Frieda. They’ll find some way of hallucinating on a mixture of mushrooms and lime. They’re very young, they’re capable of everything.”
“The police are trying but they haven’t got a hope. That helicopter of theirs nearly scared my pants off, they thought I was one of them and chased me right across my own field. I thought that noisy rig was going to land on my head.”
Ernie Butcher tells everyone he fixed up a forty-five gallon drum of liquid manure on his tractor and chased these long-legged freaks all over the field, spraying them. “I even sprayed their car, but damn if they didn’t come back the next day and I had to do it again.” He’s getting his field fertilized, he says, but he isn’t doing anything else at all.
Ella Korhonen says she heard that flooding your field with sea water would solve the problem, too bad this place was too far inland and all uphill.
Uphill or not, a couple of miles of pipe would be worth it if it didn’t ruin the soil. Ernie Butcher says he’s keeping his own hands off from now on, he saw a bunch of the pickers on Alan Powers’ field yesterday and stopped to holler at them to get out of there. “They never paid me no attention so I starts out onto the field myself to give them a piece of my mind and then old Powers comes roaring out of his house with his shotgun in his hand and stops on the top of his well-head to fire. I yelled and waved my arms all over the place but he blasts off just the same and cripes, you shoulda seen me run! I heard some of that buckshot whining past my ear. Somebody’s going to get killed if we don’t do something quick.”
“It’s got so’s a person can’t even protect what he owns. Yesterday I heard that Grandma Barclay — Frieda’s mother, eh, and Lenora’s — how old is she now? I heard she . . .”
“Eighty-four,” Lenora says. “And I know what you’re going to say. Yesterday she came across one of them smoking in the doorway of our root cellar when she went past to get me some spuds and without even thinking she hauled off and hit him with the fork. This morning the guy comes around with the police and wants to charge her with assault! You can imagine how far they got with me in the door.”
Hell, Alan Powers says, he don’t have to worry about that any more himself, this big fat fellow moved onto his property and thinks he owns the place, him and his gang, they chase everybody else away with sticks and even get into fights. “That bozo had the bloody cheek to tell me he made sixty thousand dollars off my place last year and he don’t intend to share it with no one now! I told him, maybe him and that Back East Mafia is making a fortune off of this farm but they’re tramping down my winter silage as well, which is the same as taking the money right out of my pocket. He laughed in my face. You think I’m going to tangle with him? Forget it.”
“It isn’t just that we own this land,” says Ernie Butcher. “We put a lifetime of sweat into working it. Who do they think they are? If somebody shot just one . . .”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” Frieda says. “You’d go to jail and the rest would move into your house.”
At the age of sixty, with her white hair and determined jaw, she has the air about her of a woman judge. People will balk at everything she says, but in the end they listen. Her smiling eyes and singsong voice give her an added advantage: she can deliver a judge’s orders and pass a judge’s sentence as if she’s dispensing news that delights and surprises even herself. “We’ll go in to town and buy every sack of lime we can find,” she says. “Then we’ll spend tomorrow spoiling their obscene fun!”
At six o’clock Dennis Macken wakens and feels the heat of a second body in his bed.
He knows the heavy breathing isn’t his own. He knows the odour of unwashed feet is not his own. Beside him the marathon youth is laid out on his back, asleep. His hands are behind his neck. The hair in his armpits is as bushy as the rusted wire of the beard which rests on his skinny chest. Macken opens his mouth to holler. Then closes it. Who would he holler for? Instead he grunts, and moves to the edge of the bed, ready to leap. He wonders if he left his rifle loaded. He wonders, too, if he’s left his senses altogether and taken a step into madness. Who is to say at this time of the morning whether the youth or himself is the intruder? How does he know for sure that this is his house?
Something he knows for sure is that the language he hears is not something he understands. Thick, European, full of sounds in the throat. The youth is awake, grinning. Without taking his hands from behind his neck he stretches his long skinny body, arches it right up off the sheet like a footbridge, then lets it collapse. “Jesus, I overslept,” says the youth, in something a little closer to English. And sits up to swing his feet out onto the floor. While Macken still searches for words, the youth crosses the room, and bends to pick up his clothes from the rug.
“Just a minute,” Macken says.
The youth drops his flowery shirt down over his upstretched arms and pushes his head through the neck. He pulls the track pants up his muscled legs. He crouches to lace his shoes. Then, running on the spot, he takes the sweat-band off his head and begins to comb his hair.
“What are you doing here? How the hell’d you get in?”
The youth, still combing, laughs, then takes one of Macken’s forty-seven caps down off the wall and tries it on. It’s a little small for all that hair but he keeps it anyway.