“Look, Daddy,” Daisy says.
He still doesn’t look. He takes the box of bullets out of his pocket and lays it on the table in front of him, and then he takes off his cap and lays that on the table too, and exhales a sigh that, to Vicki’s mind, goes on forever, as though he’s completely emptying his lungs of air. She’d been expecting anger, planning for it all day, ever since she loaded the kids in the car and went to town, but this is not anger, it’s something else altogether, something more frightening. She doesn’t like the way he’s leaned the gun against the wall, so casually. Blaine is always careful with the guns, so careful to keep them in the locked cabinet.
“What is it, Blaine?” she asks. She can hear the caution in her voice. She doesn’t like that either, caution in her own house. She’s been feeling it for days, ever since she picked the beans. The beans that are now missing. She’d thought maybe Blaine had come home from work early and done them himself, but when she checked the freezer they weren’t there. It was a ridiculous thought anyway. Blaine wouldn’t know how to process beans.
“Look, Daddy,” Daisy says again, this time getting off the couch and approaching Blaine, holding her arm with its white plaster casing out in front of her.
Blaine puts his index finger through the opening in the band of his cap and twirls it on the table. The peak spins around and around like a ceiling fan.
“Why won’t Daddy look at my cast?” Daisy asks her mother, and Vicki shushes her.
She can’t be sure what to do or say until she gets a better reading of Blaine and what is going through his mind. There’s something in the drone of Shiloh’s music that reminds her of the sound of a small plane spinning out of control toward the earth.
“Go sit on the couch for a minute,” Vicki says to Daisy. “Let Daddy rest. He just got home.”
“But I broke my arm,” Daisy whines.
“I know,” Vicki says. “We’ll tell Daddy all about it. Just give him a minute.”
Daisy returns to the couch, putting on her best pout. The other kids, all but Shiloh, have appeared from down the hall, having heard Blaine and Shiloh come in. Lucille, with her lopsided haircut, wraps herself around Vicki’s leg. Of all the kids, Vicki thinks, she is the most sensitive to adult moods, gets upset when adult voices are raised. The kids wait to see what will happen. They want to know what Blaine will think about Daisy’s broken arm, but they know better than to interrupt whatever is going on. They wait for Vicki’s lead.
Blaine finally acknowledges that Vicki is looking at him.
She takes a first stab. “I’m sorry about the day, honey,” she says. “Things started out so well, then one thing led to another.”
Blaine still doesn’t speak, just stares at her as though she’s a stranger in his house, and the silence is so unnerving that she looks away.
“Well,” she says, “I guess you two must be hungry.”
She goes to the kitchen, which is open to the dining room, and takes the remaining Pizza Pops out of the freezer and finds a clean baking sheet. She keeps her eye on the situation and every once in a while she shoots the kids a look that says, Wait. Be good. Just wait. She puts the Pizza Pops in the oven and then she carefully breaks up the boxes they came in and sets them aside for recycling. She feels Blaine watching her. Shiloh shuts his droning music off, and then Vicki hears his footsteps coming up the stairs.
Finally, when she can stand Blaine’s silence no longer, she asks, “What’s wrong, Blaine? You’d better tell me.” Even if the answer would best be spoken behind closed doors, without all the kids listening, she has to ask.
Blaine stops spinning his cap and says, “How did you pay for those Pizza Pops?”
Vicki opens the cutlery drawer and retrieves knives and forks for Blaine and Shiloh. “I wrote a cheque,” she says, her back to him. She can smell the Pizza Pops now, their tomato sauce unlike anything she can create herself on the stove. She expects the anger will come soon, about the cheque, Daisy’s arm, the Pizza Pops smell. And the beans, of course, although she has no idea what she’ll say about that because she doesn’t know where they are.
She tenses, gets ready, and then Blaine says, “This is not my fault, Vicki. I hope you know this is not my fault.”
She turns around and the look on his face scares her half to death. There’s not a trace of anger, just a terrible, terrible sadness. She remembers the long sigh when he first sat down at the table, like a dying man’s last breath.
Shiloh appears on the landing from the basement.
“Where were you all day anyway?” Vicki asks Shiloh, fear creeping into her voice, disguising itself as annoyance.
“While you were looking for some stupid kitchen pot, I was looking for something else. What’s wrong with that?”
“Just leave him be,” says Blaine to Vicki.
“Buck’s dead,” Shiloh says to Vicki. “Did you know that?”
“What do you mean?” Vicki asks. “Bucko’s out in the pen.”
“No, he’s not,” Shiloh says. “He’s dead. He colicked and died.”
“Is this true, Blaine?” Vicki asks.
Shiloh says, “It’s because of you, you know.” He’s in the room now, moving closer to the kitchen and Vicki.
“Me? How is it because of me?” Vicki is remembering the horse and the way he looked in the morning, how he was standing in the pen staring at his flank and she thought it was the flies bothering him.
“If you’d stayed home like Dad told you, we would have noticed.”
“Never mind,” Blaine says to him. “What’s done is done.”
“That was Dad’s horse, the last one, the only damn horse left on the place.” He is standing right next to Blaine now, waiting for him to tell Vicki she’s useless. But he doesn’t. He’s too upset about the horse to talk, Shiloh thinks, and so he speaks for him, says what he knows Blaine wants to say. “It’s all your fault that we’re in this whole mess,” Shiloh says to Vicki, “because you’re so bloody useless.” He lifts his chin, triumphant, and looks at his father.
Blaine stands up, towers over Shiloh. Shiloh hears his mother say, “Don’t, Blaine. He doesn’t mean it.”
Don’t, Blaine? What’s she telling him not to do? Shiloh looks at his father’s face and is confused when he sees that Blaine is not even looking at Vicki; he’s looking at him. He grabs Shiloh by the shoulders as though he’s going to shake him, and Shiloh has no idea what is going on. He shrinks back, tries to turn and run, but Blaine’s grip is too solid, he can’t get loose.
“Don’t,” he hears his mother say again, more quietly this time.
“Daddy,” Lucille says with worry in her voice, and Vicki picks her up.
“Shush, baby,” Shiloh hears Vicki say. “It’s okay.”
And then he feels his father’s arms around him, and he struggles to get away, tries to push himself back, but he can’t, he has to stand there because Blaine is holding him so tight. One of Blaine’s big hands is on the back of Shiloh’s head now, pressing his face into his chest, and Shiloh doesn’t know what to do. He can see the kids and Vicki watching, their eyes wide. Vicki is smoothing Lucille’s hair, that stupid haircut, and he can see that she is picking at something, a little piece of gum that Karla Norman missed. Then Shiloh closes his eyes and stops struggling to get away, and he lets himself sink into his father’s chest and he’s afraid he’s going to cry, he won’t be able to stop himself, and he leaves his face in Blaine’s T-shirt so no one will notice if he cries. Leaves it there until the feeling goes away and he’s sure he won’t cry.
And then Blaine’s arms loosen their grip and Shiloh steps back, and Blaine says to him, “It’s not Vicki’s fault, Shiloh. It’s nobody’s fault. Things happen. Don’t ever call your mother useless again. I don’t want to hear that. Not ever.”
Then he feels ashamed, more ashamed now than he would have felt had his father yelled at him, smacked him even. His face burns with shame, but his father says, “Put that rifle away for me, will you
. You know where the key is. Just make sure none of these kids sees where it’s hidden.” He remembers when Blaine showed him where the key was and said, You’re old enough to be responsible.
Shiloh picks up the rifle from where it’s leaning against the wall and asks, “The bullets too?”
Blaine nods and says, “You know where they go.”
After Shiloh has gone down the hall to where the gun cabinet is, Vicki says, “I don’t want to be too hard on him, but we have to say something about today. About him being gone all day.”
Blaine thinks for a minute, and then he says, “Mostly I think you baby these kids, Vicki. But forget about today. Let’s pretend today didn’t happen. Let’s pretend that it’s yesterday. I’ll eat the damned Pizza Pops and pretend they taste like food. How about that.”
Daisy gets off the couch and holds out her cast. “But I really did break my arm,” she says. “See?”
Blaine looks at the cast, then says, “Well, I guess you did. You’d better bring me a pen, then.”
Daisy finds a pen by the phone and takes it to him and holds up her cast, and he writes something. Daisy can’t read what it says, the writing is too messy.
“It says, ‘Today you’re the winner of the best kid contest,’” Blaine says. “Don’t you know about that contest?”
Daisy shakes her head.
“Well, it’s a contest, and today you won.”
When Shiloh comes back, Vicki says to him, “You’re off the hook. We’ve all got amnesia about the whole day.”
Shiloh isn’t sure what she means, but it’s good enough. He can smell the Pizza Pops and realizes he’s starving. Although this is something Vicki will not allow the kids to say—I’m starving—not as long as there really are starving kids in the world.
I’m hungry is the proper way to say it.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
He goes to the fridge, looking for milk to go with the Pizza Pops, and there’s Karla Norman’s chocolate birthday cake sitting on a shelf under its plastic cover, only he doesn’t know it’s Karla’s cake.
“Who’s the cake for?” he asks.
Vicki looks at the kids, at Martin who held the cake on his lap most of the day. “We can’t remember,” she says. “I guess it must be for us.”
Fire in the Hole
With the day’s last light on the horizon and a can of no-name cola in his hand, Hank stands next to the buffalo stone— his buffalo stone, he thinks—and stares at the beer box of empties and the container of insect repellent that someone left behind. The same damned someone who left the gate open. Maybe even the same someone who covered the rock, once again, with graffiti and made him susceptible, once again, to the presence of the historical society and an art restorer in his pasture. Luckily, at this time of the evening his calves are by the slough to the west. It had been the last straw, though, the gate again, and then the beer box and his discovery of the new graffiti, the outlines of hands in pink and green and yellow as though his pasture were a public park. Hank had loaded into his truck box what he figured he needed to solve the problem once and for all, but now he scratches his head and stares at the stone and doesn’t know what to do next. What seemed like a good idea an hour ago is starting to look like less of a good idea, due to his lack of expertise about what could be a hazardous venture. There’s only one person Hank can think of who knows anything about blasting and that’s old TNT Norman. He lives with his daughter now, Karla, and Hank figures he can’t be calling her house at this hour, at least not without knowing that she stays up past ten.
He decides there’s no harm in driving by the house to see if there’s a light on since he can’t very well just guess at this, and when he gets there the older daughter—Lou, the one who is so hard to get along with—is sitting out front in her car reading a magazine under the dome light with old man Norman in the back seat. Hank parks his truck behind the car and he can see Lou looking in the rear-view mirror to see who’s pulling up behind her. Hank steps out of the truck and walks over to her open window.
“Howdy,” he says. “Nice night. Hey there, Wally. How’re you doing?”
“Nice night for sitting out here wasting time, waiting on that inconsiderate sister of mine,” says Lou. “I missed a perfectly good candle party because of her. She’s selfish, that’s what she is.”
Hank wonders why they’re waiting in the car, but he doesn’t ask. “Funny thing,” he says, “but I need some advice. Mind if I climb in the back seat and ask your dad a few questions?”
“Go ahead,” says Lou. “As you can see, we’re not going anywhere.”
Hank opens the back door and gets in. He’s still carrying his can of cola, which he drains, and then he isn’t sure what to do with the can. If he were in his own vehicle he’d drop it on the floor. Old TNT is slumped against the far door, the ravages of the stroke showing in his flaccid face and the way his body looks loose, like he has no bones. Why Lou hasn’t taken him in the house is beyond him, but then Lou has a reputation for being ornery. She had a husband once and it was no surprise to anyone when he took off with another woman.
“So, Wally,” Hank says, “I seem to recall that you did a little blasting back in your pipeline days.”
TNT Norman perks up considerably when he hears the word blasting, and shifts his weight awkwardly so that he’s leaning toward Hank instead of against the car door.
“I was wondering if you could give me a few instructions on how to blast that old buffalo stone out of my pasture,” Hank says. “Damned tired of the kids leaving the gate open and letting my cows out.”
“Yup, yup,” Walter Norman says, and Hank wonders if maybe his mind is too far gone for him to remember what Hank needs to know.
But then the old man asks what Hank has for blasting powder. Hank can’t understand him at first, his voice is so quiet, and he leans closer and asks Walter to repeat what he said. This time Hank understands and he tells him dynamite. He’s had it out in his shed for a while—thought he might need it for the new well, but then he didn’t after all and it’s been sitting around in the shed, probably should have found a safer place but no harm done. Hank lists what else he has in the truck, and Walter says quietly, “Good, good, good, that ought to do ’er.”
Then Lou puts down her magazine and turns around and says, “I have a dandy idea.”
And that’s how Hank ends up heading back toward the pasture with old man Norman in his truck, his wheelchair in the box with the blasting supplies. Lou’s instructions are to take him home to Karla when they’re done, and if Karla isn’t home, to deliver him to Lou’s house. She’d asked the old man if he needed to go to the bathroom and he’d said no, and Hank hoped that he knew what he was saying.
When they get back to the pasture Hank opens the gate and drives the truck up to the stone and then he gets the old man out and into his wheelchair. The mosquitoes are bad, so Hank sprays himself and Walter with the can of repellent that’s sitting on the stone’s flat surface. The old man’s eyes light up when he sees the box of beer on the stone but Hank disappoints him by telling him it’s full of empties.
“Anyway,” Hank says, “we’re both as dried out as Methuselah these days and that’s likely a good thing, eh.”
The old man still looks disappointed.
With Walter Norman giving instructions, Hank grips the auger’s handle and begins to twist it into the ground, leaning on it with his weight. Three blasting holes, the old man advises, six feet deep if Hank can manage that. His auger won’t go down that far, but Hank figures he can go four and a bit. Good enough. He gets as close to the stone as he can, angles under as much as possible. The daylight is completely gone but the moon is bright and Hank can see what he’s doing. A light breeze comes up, which makes things easier. It blows the mosquitoes off and cools Hank down. As he digs, old man Norman relates the story about blasting the dugout and the barn being blown all over the country. The old man speaks so softly that Hank has to listen hard to hear, but it do
esn’t matter because he’s heard the story at least a dozen times before. It was one of the old man’s favourite bar tales when he was still drinking. Hank was still drinking back then too, so he’d been in the Juliet Hotel bar on several occasions when it was told. Tonight, old TNT adds a part about the wife’s laundry ending up full of holes and Hank hadn’t heard that before.
Because the soil is so sandy, it takes Hank less than an hour to get the three holes dug, and then he lays the dynamite and lead-in line according to TNT’s instructions and fills in the holes with gravel and soil and tamps it down. Once that’s done, he loads his shovel and auger into the truck box and moves the truck back to the approach, and then he moves the old man, pushing him in the wheelchair across the rough pasture trail. He runs lead-in line from the blasting holes over to the truck and attaches the detonators. When Hank has everything ready he looks at old TNT in his wheelchair and sees that he can hardly contain his excitement. He’s practically bouncing in his chair in spite of his paralysis, as though this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to him in ages. Hank doesn’t doubt that it is.
“Are we ready?” Hank asks.
“We sure as hell are,” the old man says, and then he shouts something as loudly as he can, which isn’t very loud. It comes out as an elongated grunt and Hank can’t make out the words.
“What was that?” Hank asks, and this time he gets it. “Fire in the hole,” the old man is saying, and Hank thinks that’s so funny he laughs and then he shouts it himself, “Fire in the hole!” and Hank’s voice is a good deal louder than old man Norman’s. Then he detonates the blasts, one at a time.
Nothing much happens. They can hear the blasts all right, and dirt and gravel fly up out of the holes in the moonlight. But no big pieces of rock arc through the air, and once the dirt settles, the dark shape of the stone remains unchanged as far as Hank can see. The two men stare at the silhouette as though something might yet happen, another blast might rocket the whole massive stone, but it sits where it is and the night grows quiet again except for the mosquitoes and Hank’s cows bawling off to the west.
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