Speak to the Earth

by William Bell

  Putting down her beer, she repeated, “I’ve got to make some calls,” and rushed into the family room.

  Bryan sat at the kitchen table, staring at three plates of cold, untouched stew.

  SEVEN

  Mr Calder, whom his students called Nose Hairs because of the untrimmed sprouts that poked from his nostrils like reeds through the surface of a pond, told Bryan’s Science class one day about Isaac Newton. That physicist, famous for allowing an apple to fall on his head and thus demonstrate the immutable law of gravity, had announced to the world that time always flows by at the same rate. On the other hand, lectured Nose Hairs, Einstein argued that time passes at differing rates, depending on a number of factors that Brian, numb with boredom, promptly forgot.

  All in all, Bryan allowed that he had to side with Einstein, because he knew for a fact that when he was with Ellen, the hours flashed by. But in certain other places, like Talbot Inlet Junior High, time passed with the rapidity of a slug travelling uphill.

  Norm’s B&B provided excitement, but not the kind Bryan would go out of his way to find. Between his mother and his uncle, things were tense. Iris and Jimmy weren’t trashing each other — their family love and loyalty was far too strong — but the line they had drawn between them was broad and clear. They conversed in toneless one-word sentences. They were silent at meals. For Bryan, living in his house was like walking barefoot through briars. So he spent a lot of his time at Ellen’s and, when her parents set her to one of the many jobs they always seemed to find for her, he went to see Elias, whose parents left him pretty much alone. Bryan also helped Walter out on a few more whale-watching trips and, when the migrations had passed by, Walter hinted around a few times and Bryan helped him crabbing. Walter was not one to fall into a routine, so Bryan concluded that here again Einstein’s theory of time won out.

  Bryan’s mother was driving herself frantic, working crazy hours at the supermarket — what her boss called open shifts, which allowed him to classify her as part-time and therefore not entitled to benefits — and agitating against the government’s Orca Sound Ecological Preservation Plan. On street corners and outside the liquor store she could be found, in her sloppy pink track suit and green raincoat, handing out pamphlets. When she was at home she usually had the phone clamped between shoulder and jaw as she talked and made notes. It did not surprise Bryan that she was voted unanimously to be the chair of the SOS (Save Orca Sound) Committee. She went out and bought a fax machine, along with a dozen bundles of recycled paper, and it wasn’t long before the committee was in contact with Greenpeace and other sympathizers all over B.C., the rest of Canada, the States and Europe.

  Under normal circumstances Bryan might have been proud of her. But he had to admit to himself that he resented the unwelcome changes in his daily routine and the strained relationship among the three of them. He was irritated by the artificial silence of his home and embarrassed by Iris’s activism in the community. Around Jimmy he felt guilty because his mother was, in a sense, trying to take his uncle’s job away. Around his mother he felt culpable because he got on so well with Jimmy the tree-raper — and because, deep down, he thought his mother was going too far.

  The logging was scheduled to begin in June. Meanwhile, Jimmy worked on a crew pushing roads into the Big Bear and Salmon peninsulas so the heavy equipment and lumber trucks could get to the stands of old-growth forest that MFI wanted to cut down. In the late spring, Greenpeace and some other groups challenged the logging decision in court, but they lost. Iris said that she was not at all surprised: MFI owned the courts as well as far too many politicians. Jimmy countered with the opinion that she was paranoid, that soon she’d claim there were MFI agents in the mailbox and under her bed.

  Bryan tried to ignore the increasing tension at home and in the community as he began a new experience. With Ellen’s help he actually studied for exams. And he discovered, when reading the stack of whale books Ellen had lent him, that when he was interested in a topic, the facts and theories connected with it stuck in his mind like burrs on wool, and when he talked about these theories and facts, he actually felt smart. But information in school books had an irritating habit of staying in the books: only seldom did it take up residence in Bryan’s memory.

  And so the Einstein spring dragged on into June, and the first summer tourists trickled onto Vancouver Island. Strange camper-vans and RVs appeared on the streets; the restaurants bustled; the supermarket’s aisles seemed perpetually jammed. Elias got a part-time job at Pacific Sands Provincial Park, just down the highway between Nootka Harbour and Talbot Inlet, filling out camping permits and doing light maintenance — a job Bryan would have loved, but he was the chief housekeeper and breakfast cooker at Norm’s B&B.

  Bryan, Ellen and Elias celebrated the last day of school by going out for burgers and making a nuisance of themselves in the restaurant — Elias like to chew his ice cubes, slurp his cola and perform other feats that threw Ellen into hysterics. Bryan, feeling the icy stares of the diners around them, figured that Ellen’s high-pitched giggles were the most irritating of all the unwelcome sounds emanating from their table. After the meal, the three friends went over to Elias’s house for a video binge: three horror movies in a row, all chosen by Ellen.

  “What a rebel you are,” Elias told her.

  While Bryan, his mother and uncle were having one of their silent suppers the next day, the phone rang. Bryan heard the switcher transfer the call to the fax machine in the family room. Iris rose and went to her little SOS command post by the bay window that looked out over Osprey Cove. Bryan and his uncle continued to attack their bowls of spaghetti. Iris returned to the table, a piece of flimsy paper in her hand and a happy look on her face.

  “It’s all set. We’re going to blockade the bridge across the Big Bear River starting July first, Canada Day.” She sat down and twirled spaghetti around her fork. “I’m going to be there,” she said, “on the line.”

  A deep silence followed. Bryan’s forkful of spaghetti remained halfway to his mouth. He looked at his mother, then at his uncle, not surprised to see Jimmy’s face flush and his jaw muscles flexing. Jimmy quietly laid his fork and spoon across his dish.

  “Well, Iris, I guess I’ll see you there. Only, I’ll be on the other side.”

  Bryan sat between them, immobilized by their determined stares, trapped in their silence.

  PART TWO:

  Summer

  ONE

  Painting a fence was not Bryan’s idea of a patriotic act, but Canada Day found him on his knees at the edge of the driveway, resentfully slapping his brush against the first of 179 pickets that stretched away to the mailbox at the roadside. He had put off the job for weeks, and today Iris had put her foot down.

  “It’s been dry and sunny for two days,” she had pointed out. “So today you get the job done before it rains again.”

  First he had had to scrape the loose and flaking paint from the fence, a messy and cosmically boring job, not quite as tedious or messy as the actual painting, which he had just begun when the batteries on his portable radio had died.

  “Damn!” he said, whacking the picket before him with a full brush that sent a spiteful shower of white paint splashing across his face. He jammed the brush into the paint can and wiped his cheek with a rag, smearing the greasy liquid all over his face.

  “Damn!”

  “Hey, son. Is this Norm’s B&B?”

  Bryan turned, rag in hand, to the van at the end of the drive. There were two men in the cab. He nodded, getting to his feet.

  The stranger drove up the driveway and parked at the house. Ontario plates, Bryan noted, watching the men step onto the porch at the kitchen door, knock and enter. These must be the tree-huggers Mom told me about — the ones who contacted her through Greenpeace, looking for a place to stay, close to the action. More work for me, making beds, vacuuming, doing laundry. Oh, well, we can sure use the money. He went back to his Canada Day job.

  A few minutes later the
men came out of the house and started unpacking the van. “Got a second to help us out?” one of them called.

  He was a friendly-looking, muscular guy. His companion was tall and dark.

  “You must be Bryan,” he said, shaking hands. “Iris told us about you. I’m Kevin Campbell, and this is Otto.”

  “Hi,” Bryan said.

  “Nice to see you,” Otto said, then slung a pack on his back and picked up a large rucksack.

  “I’ll show you the way,” Bryan offered. “The door to the basement is around the other side. You have your own entrance.”

  “Nice,” Kevin commented after Bryan had shown them the two rooms. “This will be great.”

  “You’re from Ontario, eh?” Bryan asked.

  “Yep. Drove all the way from Toronto. We wanted to come out and do our bit. You know, protest the logging. We’re glad to hear your mom is on the right side. We think it’s a crime, what they’re doing to the forests. Right, Otto?”

  “Damn right. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

  The last thing Bryan wanted was a conversation about trees, so he left his mother’s new supporters and got back to work on the fence. He had coated about a dozen more pickets when Iris came out of the house and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the job.

  Far too cheerily for Bryan’s mood she said, “Good work, Rembrandt. It has a sort of quiet intensity, a sort of —”

  “Bye, Mom. Have fun at the supermarket.”

  Iris laughed and walked on down the drive, waving as she turned onto the road leading into town.

  Not long after, Bryan’s labours were disturbed again.

  “Reminds me of Tom Sawyer.”

  Bryan looked up at Kevin, squinting against the sun high in the sky. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Looks like you could use a little help.”

  “No, it’s okay. Thanks anyway.”

  “Come on, where do you keep your paintbrushes? I feel like a little activity after all the driving me and Otto have been doing.”

  Bryan found another paintbrush and Kevin started at the far end of the fence. For an hour they slowly worked toward one another.

  “Your mom says you’re the chief cook and bottle-washer around here,” Kevin said when he had reached Bryan’s side.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” Bryan smiled, happy to be almost finished the job and grateful to their new guest.

  “You do the laundry, clean up the rooms, cook.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell you what. Otto and me, we’re not too fussy about starched sheets and dusted furniture, two bachelors like us. We both like our privacy. So let’s say we just forget about you cleaning up our rooms. And as for washing the sheets and pillowcases, we’ll just leave the linen in the hall outside our rooms once a week.”

  “Well …”

  “You’d be doing us a big favour.” Kevin smiled. “And naturally we’d keep it a secret between you and us. Okay?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  The big man winked and patted Bryan on the shoulder. “Good man, Bryan.” He handed Bryan the paintbrush.

  “Thanks for your help, Kevin.”

  “No sweat.”

  If Bryan had been slightly anxious that his mother would discover and disapprove of his arrangement with Kevin, his worries evaporated over the next few days. He hardly saw her. Instead, he would find notes on the kitchen table: I’ll be at work until five or I’ve got an SOS meeting ‘til late. Your supper’s in the oven or I’ll be at the peace camp all morning. I’ll go to work from there. See you tonight.

  The peace camp was the name the activists gave to their rallying point out by the Big Bear River bridge. What a laugh, Bryan thought. I don’t feel any peace.

  The anti-logging protests began early in July, just as Iris had predicted. The tree-huggers, as Jimmy called them, blocked the bridge when the lumber trucks, laden with fresh-cut timber, tried to cross the Big Bear River. A few days later MFI obtained, in what Iris bitterly termed “record time,” a court injunction that forbade blockage of the road or bridge. The court order did not exactly strike fear into the hearts of the protesters, she said. On the day that the injunction came into effect, fifty-five people were arrested.

  When Bryan dragged himself out of bed the next morning, later than usual, the house was quiet except for the hum of rain on the roof. He padded down the hall in his bare feet and found another of his mother’s notes. Knowing what it would say, he tossed it aside. He slipped down to the basement and listened for a moment. Kevin and Otto had left, probably to the peace camp.

  Alone in the house, feeling like the only sane person in the universe, he put the coffee on and phoned Ellen. They talked for an hour or so. She was not allowed out that day, she said. “It’s clean-the-basement day.”

  He was tearing into a plate of bacon, eggs and toast, reading a book on humpback whales, when the phone rang. Probably Elias, Bryan thought. His friend had the day off, and the two of them planned to go down to the tiny arcade near the government dock and play a few video games. If the place wasn’t crawling with tourists’ kids bored from the rain in the campsites.

  The male voice was businesslike. “Is this Norm’s B&B?”

  “Yes, it is. But we’re full up for the next —”

  “Does Jimmy Lormer live there?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Scott Weatherby. His foreman at MFI.”

  “He’s at work today. He left —”

  “Jimmy’s had an accident.”

  Time stopped for Bryan. He was standing beside his mother in their living room above the store in Drumheller. Her knuckles whitened as she clutched the telephone. Her face was pale. She asked, “Are you sure it’s him? Are you certain it’s Norm?” and then she sobbed, “No, no, no, no …” as Bryan was gripped tighter and tighter by a terror he had never imagined.

  The voice snatched him back. “Are you there?”

  “Is it bad?” he asked. He held his breath.

  “Pretty bad. You’d —”

  “Is he alive?”

  “He’s alive, yeah. But he’s pretty smashed up, looks like. We’re taking him to the hospital now. You better get his sister.”

  Bryan slammed down the phone and dashed next door. He pounded on the door, praying that Walter was home.

  TWO

  Walter’s ancient pick-up truck rattled down Highway 93, its bald tires hissing on the pavement, its wipers flapping ineffectually across the cracked windshield. Walter sat grim-faced at the wheel, peering ahead into the rain. Beside him on the torn seat, Bryan willed the truck to go faster.

  He was flung against the door when Walter swerved off 93, throwing the truck into a slide when it hit the gravel bush road. The thick conifers closed in around them. After a few moments jouncing along the narrow road, the truck broke out of the forest into an extensive and barren moonscape. The slopes on both sides of the road had been clear-cut and burned years before. Blackened stumps poked out of the denuded ground. Bryan remembered that Iris and her committee had dubbed this huge clear-cut “The Wasteland.” Large signs had been painted on plywood and nailed to posts held upright by piles of rocks: Orca Sound, Not Clear-Cut Sound and Vancouver Island, Brazil of the North.

  Walter steered the truck around a bend and suddenly the peace camp loomed ahead in the drizzle. Dozens of tents had been pitched in the flatter areas of the Wasteland, making blue, orange and red blotches in a landscape of muted greys and greens. Hundreds of men, women and children in ponchos or raincoats milled around.

  Walter brought the pick-up to a shuddering halt next to a huge tent with a poster, Rainforest Café, nailed to a stump beside the door. “Maybe she’s in there, your mother,” he said, uttering his first words since Bryan had banged on the screen door of his trailer.

  Bryan led the way into the tent. A few dozen people were seated at tables, spooning soup out of bowls, cups and tins. Behind a trestle table a woman in a food-stained apron served soup out of a cauldron to a line-up of
wet activists. Bryan asked her if his mother was around. The woman knew Iris but had not seen her that day. Bryan explained why he was looking for her.

  “Oh, God. Just a minute.” The woman threw down the ladle and hustled to the corner of the tent, where a man sat at a card table. Before him, a laptop computer, two portable FM radios and several cellular telephones were neatly arranged. The woman spoke to him briefly, then returned to tell Bryan that Iris was up the road at the bridge.

  Bryan and Walter jumped back into the truck. The road narrowed, dirt replacing the gravel. This must be the new section Jimmy helped build, Bryan thought with a deepening sense of foreboding. Naked stumps lined the track where trees had been felled, and piles of forest debris marked the work of the bulldozers.

  The road dipped and the truck rattled into an open area jammed with a chaotic array of people and vehicles, as if some madman had decided to set up a carnival in the middle of the forest. A yellow school bus, three RCMP cruisers and a police van with wire mesh on the windows were parked on both sides of the road. Walter parked behind the police van.

  Just ahead, a knot of protesters stood listening to a woman speaking through a megaphone.

  “Who is willing to be arrested?” Bryan heard as he approached.

  A few hands went up. A girl of about ten — Bryan had seen her around town — put up her hand. “I’ll have to ask my mother first,” she yelled, pushing damp bangs away from her eyes. No one laughed.

  “All right,” the woman continued, her voice metallic and impersonal as it squeezed through the megaphone. “Remember, when you join the people on the bridge, that we are totally committed to non-violence. When the process server reads the injunction, be silent: the judge will treat you more harshly if you do not show respect when the injunction is read. Do not resist the police. Let your body go limp and allow them to carry you to the bus. Don’t even hold on to them as they carry you away: if you do, they’ll charge you with resisting arrest. Good luck, and save Orca Sound!”