Speak to the Earth

by William Bell

  Copyright © William Bell 1994

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the publisher.

  Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  SPEAK TO THE EARTH

  Seal Books/published by arrangement with Doubleday Canada

  Doubleday Canada edition published 1994

  Seal Books edition published 1996

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67410-2

  Although this book was inspired by actual events, it is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between my characters and real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Seal Books are published by

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  “Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my uncle

  Thomas Spowart

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One - Spring Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two - Summer Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgements

  Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.

  — Job 12:8

  OVERTURE:

  The

  Badlands

  He was born in a ditch, and he spent the first ten years of his life among secrets and bones.

  In the tourist brochures the land is described differently. An hour and a half northeast of Calgary, Highway 9 pushes across the rolling Alberta prairie under a phenomenon of sky. The green expanse on either side of the two-lane blacktop is patched with immense and dazzling oblongs of brilliant yellow rapeseed or purple-blue alfalfa. In that place, an eternity of wind presides.

  Suddenly, there opens before the eye a deep canyon. A sharp descent between ramparts of grey-brown earth cuts off the horizon and leads to one of the most fascinating geological formations in the great plains of North America. Bryan called it a ditch.

  Long ago, as countless centuries crept by, the Alberta Badlands were gouged into the prairie by retreating ice fields, scraped by punishing winds and eroded by the swift current of the Red Deer River. The steep irregular walls of the canyon, gutted and creased, are composed of rock, clay and sand that crumble to the touch; and in their slow decay they yield a treasure of fossils unequalled anywhere on earth. A lot of people, Bryan often mused, seemed excited by this fact.

  His home town, Drumheller, Alberta, was famous for two things, both of them related to fossils. The rich seams of coal that had appeared inexhaustible to generations of miners and their families had played out long before Bryan was born, leaving slag heaps and burned-out caverns. More dramatic were the remains of numerous species of dinosaurs that had disappeared under mysterious and hotly debated circumstances. Whatever the secret of their extinction, they must in the days when they lumbered, slithered and ran through what were then tropical swamps and grasslands, have seemed masters of a world that would continue forever.

  To Bryan, it seemed that every building in his home town and along the Dinosaur Highway sported the image of a saurian: the T-Rex Café, the Brontosaurus Motel, the Dinosaur Children’s Park. He lived, with his mother and father, above the Albertosaurus Stop ‘n Shop, a convenience store attached to a discount gas station. While the other kids searched pointlessly for something interesting to do in Drumheller, Bryan pumped gas, cleaned windshields, gave directions to tourists and wished he didn’t live in a community where all the interesting things had occurred millions of years ago.

  The Troupe family business made money in the summer — when the valley was flooded with waves of tourists gawking at the “hoo-doos” down the road or crowding into the Royal Tyrell Dinosaur Museum up the road — and lost it all again in the winter, when the waves became barely noticeable ripples. So, while Iris managed the store and the gas pumps, Norm, a resourceful mechanic, found work in the oil fields. Bryan was under strict instructions to keep quiet about his mother’s ongoing battles with creditors and suppliers. “Your dad’s got enough to worry about,” she would say. When Norm was home he and Bryan put in many happy greasy hours assembling an old Harley-Davidson Electra Glide that Norm had bought in a box when Bryan started first grade.

  One spring, when Bryan was ten, Iris got a phone call from northern Alberta. Norm had been working on a donkey rig when a cable snapped and struck him, splitting his safety helmet with the force of the recoil. Iris had to go up north and bring her husband back home in a plywood coffin. Two days later Norm’s bones were laid beside his parents’ in the Baptist cemetery in Drumheller.

  Not long afterwards, Bryan came home from school to find his mother sitting behind the counter in the store, crying, an open letter in her trembling hands. Gently, Bryan pried the page from her fingers and read that his dad had left him and his mother two hundred thousand dollars from an insurance policy.

  “No wonder the crazy bugger never had any money,” she wept. “He was saving it all for us.”

  On his last day of school that year Iris told her son that she wanted to go back to British Columbia. She couldn’t stand Drumheller without Norm, she said. She wanted to sell out and go home. Her brother Jimmy would take them in. What did Bryan think?

  “Do they have trees there?” he asked.

  Iris laughed for the first time since the funeral. “I’m pretty sure they do.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Three weeks later Bryan and his mother loaded up the Harley and pointed it west.

  Bryan enjoyed riding pillion behind his mother, watching the prairie roll by as the Harley purred along the blacktop. Once past Calgary and the foothills, they were embraced by the shadows and mists of the Rockies. They rumbled through passes, along the banks of foaming rivers, powered up slopes streaked and patched by sun, twisted through Rogers Pass and made a camp outside of Kamloops.

  They rode into Vancouver the following afternoon and caught the ferry to Vancouver Island. About twenty minutes outside Port Albert, the highway took a long curving climb up the side of a mountain. At the summit, Iris kicked down through the gears and pulled off the road. Bryan dismounted and shook the stiffness out of his legs as his mother leaned the cycle on its stand, shut it down and climbed off.

  Before them lay a valley and the mountains beyond, a rolling sea of green, patched with moving shadows cast by clouds that sailed peacefully across the blue sky. The light breeze carried the scent of the forest. From the bush along the road, birdsong trickled. It was, Bryan thought, nice. As different from the arid Badlands as it could possibly be. The scene calmed him, and for the first time since he had left home he felt glad that he was going to live here.

  Iris groaned. “Look what they
’ve done.”

  “What? What’s the matter, Mom?”

  Iris pointed across the valley. “The loggers.”

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  Then Bryan realized what she meant, and his exhilaration crashed. What he had thought were shadows on the mountains were gigantic treeless scars, some of them hundreds of hectares in size, as if some malignant disease had stripped the slopes to the bone. The loggers had left nothing standing. The ground was choked with branches, snags and bark, pierced by thousands of blackened, skeletal trunks.

  “That’s clear-cut logging,” Iris said. “It wrecks the ecosystem. See that road?”

  Through one of the blank areas a road had been cut into the side of the hill, and from it irregular trenches snaked down the hillside, gouged into the mountain by wind and rain.

  “Yeah.”

  “Because there’s no vegetation left to hold the soil, erosion and mud slides carry the topsoil down to the foot of the mountain and clog the streams. That destroys the spawning beds.” She sighed. “Jimmy told me in his letter that things would look different from the way they did when I left the island, but I didn’t imagine this. He said that near Quesnel there’s a clear-cut that’s fifty kilometres long. It’s a bloody abomination, isn’t it?”

  “You mean the whole island is like this?”

  “No, thank God. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  It was evening when Bryan and his mother pulled into Nootka Harbour, the fishing village on the Pacific coast where Iris had grown up. They found Jimmy’s house easily — a bungalow perched on the rocky shore well above the surf. Silence rushed in around them when the Harley’s motor died, and the air was heavy with a delicious brew of strange odours. Bryan would someday be able to identify: fragrances of the sea, the forests and time. They dismounted, stiff and sore. Jimmy wasn’t at home, but he had left the door unlocked and a welcome note on the kitchen table, printed in pencil on a piece torn from a paper bag. Bryan helped his mother unpack the Harley and push it out of the way under the car port.

  The next day Bryan drained the oil, replaced it, bled the gas tank and fuel lines, threw a tarp over the Harley, and never looked at it again.

  PART ONE:

  Spring

  ONE

  After she had passed out the tests, Mrs Richmond sat at her desk and crossed her arms over her bony chest. “All right,” she cackled cheerily, “you may begin.”

  Bryan took a look at the test paper. Oh, oh. She couldn’t have, he thought. The witch.

  The night before, Elias had come over to study, bringing a few CDs, a bag of corn chips, but no books. Typical. “We’ll use yours,” he had told Bryan. The two of them had watched TV for an hour or so, until Iris chased them to Bryan’s room. He had made the mistake of telling his mother about the big test coming up.

  “Richmond gave us three questions a week ago. One of them will be the test, and we don’t find out which one until tomorrow.”

  “In other words, she wants you to prepare three good answers.”

  “Right,” Elias put in. “She figures to get three for the price of one. But Bry and I are going to fool her.”

  Iris stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. She curled her hair around the end of one finger as she spoke. “Let’s see the questions.”

  Bryan handed her the question sheet. “It’ll be number one,” she said after she had perused the paper. “Take my word for it. But, to be sure, you should get ready for all of them.”

  “Nah,” Bryan said. “She’ll want to squeeze us on something new. There’s no way she’ll give us the first question. We already did a project on it.”

  “You mean the one you failed,” Elias added from Bryan’s bed, where he sprawled comfortably, two pillows behind his head and the bag of corn chips open on his chest. Bryan was Elias’s best friend, but that didn’t spare him from the sarcasm for which Elias was famous. Elias was the same age as Bryan — fifteen — and the two had been friends since Bryan and Iris had come to Nootka Harbour. His dad was a Coast Salish artist who operated a gallery in their home, and his Anglo mom was a writer whose poems were often printed in the local paper. Elias himself liked to write songs and pick out tunes for them on his old Yamaha guitar.

  “Yeah,” Bryan admitted, “the one I failed. Let’s get to work on two and three, if you can tear yourself away from those corn chips.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Iris warned as she walked down the hall to the kitchen.

  Bryan hated it when his mother was right. Now, here on the exam paper, was the question he and Elias had confidently decided not to prepare. In a two-page essay, campare the importance of the forestry industry to the fishery with respect to the economy of British Columbia. He caught sight of Elias, two rows over, giving Bryan his famous I-told-you-so look. Bryan shrugged and rolled his eyes. Elias pantomimed a strangulation.

  Fish, rocks and trees. That’s B.C., Bryan mused, at least here on Vancouver Island. Thank goodness I don’t have to write about mining. Trees and fish. Okay, trees and fish.

  He looked out the window, which was, as usual, being hosed down by spring rain, then at Mrs Richmond, whom Bryan wished he could have hosed down with sulphuric acid until she dissolved into a thin column of smoke and a pile of empty clothing, like the Wicked Witch of the West. She sat unperturbed behind her desk, scanning the room for cheaters.

  Staring at the empty foolscap where his answer should have been forming itself by now, Bryan clicked his ballpoint a couple of times. He inked in the o in “forestry” and the e in “fishery.” No profound thoughts came to mind. He sighed and began to write in large round letters.

  British Columbia is a beautiful province and since my mother and I moved here about five years ago, it has been my home. We are lucky to live in such a beautiful place.

  He paused and looked at the ceiling for inspiration, then balled up the paper, earning a scowl from Mrs Richmond for shattering the scholarly silence of the room. It’s a good name for you, you old bat, he thought. W-cubed. The Wicked Witch of the West.

  All around him kids scribbled industriously. Question Number One, he printed on the top of a new sheet of foolscap — a pretty redundant move, since the exam had only one question. Leaving two empty lines, he began in the same oversized writing. Some say the forestry is the most important industry in British Columbia. It’s true that trees are really really important to the people and the economy of our beautiful province He paused and looked out at the rain again. After all, where would we be without them? Reading over this brilliant introduction, he added, The trees, that is, not the people. Although people are certainly really really important too. With a half-line indentation he began a new paragraph.

  Others, however, hold the opinion that the fishery is the main industry, because we have so many fish here, all over the place, and so many kinds. Like salmon and mackerel, to name only two. Of many. There is absolutely no question, that the fishery is really really crucial to the economy of our wonderful province of British Columbia, Canada. After all, where would we be without all those really really nice fish?

  Bryan had now completed slightly more than half a page of monster writing. He clicked his pen some more. The question is, who is right? The forestry people or the fishery people? I’ll be damned if I know, he thought, wondering how he was going to fill two whole pages.

  No amount of fertilizer shovelled onto the page would induce W-cubed to cough up marks unless there were a few facts mixed in. Richmond was a “counter”: she hunted for facts she had taught the class and, when she ran into one, flagged it with a red check mark. Bryan searched his limited memory for anything Iris or Jimmy might have said that W-cubed might consider worthy of a red mark.

  His uncle had laboured all his life as a logger, wherever he could find work. In Oregon, the interior of B.C. and here on the island he had felled trees. Iris’s knowledge about resource industries was less direct: nevertheless, she clung tenaciously to many opinions about fishing and logging
— often much to her brother’s annoyance. She complained regularly that the fishery would eventually die out, just as the cod stocks had on the East Coast. “And they’ve polluted the ocean so badly that the fish will all be poisoned to death if we — or the Japanese trawlers — don’t net them first. With Vancouver dumping minimally treated sewage into the gulf, it’s a wonder the bloody salmon can make it to the Fraser, let alone up the Fraser. They had to shut down the shellfish industry last year because the stuff isn’t fit to eat. And the forests,” she railed, “don’t even talk to me about the clear-cuts.”

  “I won’t, don’t worry,” Jimmy had put in. “I’d hate to slow down your tirade with a bunch of facts.”

  Undeterred, Iris had finished up with a monologue about the depleted ozone layer.

  But Bryan couldn’t remember anything from his mother’s rants or his uncle’s arguments that would help him now. He fixed his eyes on the source of his pains. To Bryan she resembled a bespectacled stick wrapped in brown tweed. He wondered how on earth she had ever become a Mrs. Then, inspiration struck He remembered that Mr Richmond was a local manager for MFI — Mackenzie Forest Industries.

  Quickly, in almost normal-sized writing, he scribbled, In the economy of British Columbia, the forest industry is our best friend….

  Bryan could not remember when his biological alarm clock had jangled his hormones awake and sent them singing through his blood. As he stumbled through puberty they crooned secret messages, then shrieked abrupt and startling commands, and finally staged a full-scale demented opera in his body that often left him exhausted and confused.

  The Health classes at school, with their clinical talk about gonads, body hair and breasts, offered explanations but little understanding or comfort. All Bryan knew for sure was that somewhere between grade five and now, girls had miraculously transformed themselves from boring, noisy and essentially stupid creatures to graceful and alluring beings whose clothing fit them a lot better than it used to. And since her arrival at Talbot Inlet Junior High last September, the female who most commanded his attention was Ellen Thomson.