Speak to the Earth

by William Bell

  “I see what you mean,” Jimmy said.

  So do I, thought Bryan, although he wondered, if his mother wasn’t an ordinary citizen, who was?

  “Don’t get me wrong, Jimmy,” Weatherby continued, as if reading Bryan’s thoughts, “I’m not bad-mouthing people like Iris. I disagree with her, of course, and to tell you the gods’ honest truth I wish her and her group would cease and desist, but she’s got a right to her opinion. It’s just that us people, you and me, who work in the bush and make our living from the bush, we don’t have nobody speaking for us. See what I mean?”

  Jimmy nodded. “That’s for damn sure.”

  “SAVE organized the counter-demonstration out at the Big Bear not long ago.” Weatherby said, beaming.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yup, came up with the yellow ribbon idea, too.” He grinned. “We even got a theme song.”

  Bryan now felt like a spy. His throat went dry and his interest in the four sandwiches remaining on his plate suddenly evaporated. Did Scotty know that Bryan had been at the demonstration, when Iris had been arrested that day? He gulped down some of his cola and began to edge away.

  “Come on,” Weatherby said cheerfully, “there’s somebody I want you to meet. You come, too, Bryan. You’ll both like this guy.”

  He led them across the room to a small group of men gathered around one of the beer kegs.

  “Charlie,” Weatherby addressed a man who, dressed in a suit and tie, looked out of place in the group. “Meet a good friend of mine. Charlie Tanaka, Jimmy Lormer and Bryan Troupe.”

  Good friend? wondered Bryan. Tanaka’s hand was smooth as he shook with Bryan. He hasn’t cut too many trees lately, Bryan thought.

  “Hello, Jimmy. How’s the arm?” Tanaka said.

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” Jimmy asked.

  “Born in Delta. My parents still operate a small farm there. Scotty here has told me a lot about you.”

  “He has?”

  Bryan wondered how Weatherby could have told Tanaka much, since he hardly knew his uncle. He looked at Jimmy and decided his uncle was riding this out to see where it would lead.

  “Did Scotty fill you in on what’s happening here tonight?” Tanaka asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, a number of communities here on the island — Port Albert and Nanaimo, to name two — have established SAVE chapters so that citizens who depend on the forestry for their livelihood have a voice. We know that on this side of the island there are a few communities that are beset by the activists, and nobody is asking their opinion. Right now, the noise is all coming from one place. We want to, as it were, even the scales, to make sure the public gets a balanced view. That’s the key word here,” Tanaka emphasized, smiling. “Balance.”

  “I see.”

  Tanaka’s calm voice was convincing. He’s right, Bryan thought, but things are sort of “balanced” at Norm’s B&B too, and it still isn’t a lot of fun living there right now.

  “Uh-huh,” Jimmy said. “You’re right. Nothing wrong with balance. I mean, everybody ought to be heard, I guess.”

  “Scotty here suggested, and I wholeheartedly agree,” Tanaka went on, “that you’d be the perfect man to head up the Talbot Inlet chapter of SAVE.”

  Jimmy flushed. “Me?”

  “Who’s better qualified?” Scotty spoke up. “You’ve worked in the bush all your life. You were injured in the line of duty.”

  The line of duty? Bryan thought.

  Jimmy looked down into his cup of beer. “Well … I don’t know if I’d have the time. I could help out, sure, I could give you an hour or so a day, but …”

  Bryan knew that his uncle was a man who felt at home in his own sphere. Give him a job to do with his hands and he was full of confidence and purpose. But outside his realm, he lost all composure. Confronted by a person with education or wealth or power, Jimmy headed the other way.

  “Oh,” Tanaka said almost casually, “this would take a bit more of your time than that.” He smiled again. Bryan realized Tanaka could turn the smile on and off at will.

  “Then I don’t see …,” Jimmy stumbled. “I mean, I gotta look for work. If I can’t find anything here, I figured I’d try Nanaimo, so —”

  “That’s just it,” Scotty said. “You get a salary, Jimmy. You wouldn’t have to look for work no more. Which, if you don’t mind my saying, you might have some trouble getting a job, what with your arm and all.”

  “A salary? This is a paying position?”

  Bryan could guess at what was going on in his uncle’s head. His humiliation at being out of work once more — even if it was an injury that caused his unemployment — struggling with his self-consciousness about accepting a job that might require paperwork, talking to people on the phone, organizing.

  Turning on the smile once again, Tanaka put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “Yes, it is, Jimmy. You’d be the chairman. You’d be in charge.”

  Jimmy was silent He tipped up his cup and drained it, wiping the wisp of foam from his upper lip.

  “Here, let me fill that up for you, Mr Chairman,” Scotty said, taking the cup.

  “Do you mind if I ask how much you were earning before you got hurt?” Tanaka asked.

  Bryan could see the invisible weight rising from Jimmy’s shoulders. A job. No more depending on his sister. Maybe turn that damn truck in on a newer model, one with an engine that didn’t sound like someone was shaking a can of nails. His uncle told Tanaka his wage.

  “I daresay we could match that.”

  “That’s very generous.” Bryan could hear the surprise in Jimmy’s voice.

  “Not at all. We need someone like you. What do you say? Willing to give it a try?”

  “Yeah, I … uh, I could try it. See if I could manage.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Scotty handed Jimmy a brimming cup.

  “There’s just one thing, Jimmy,” Tanaka said. “If you were to take this job on, would you be living in the same place?”

  “The same place?” Jimmy looked at Scotty, then back to Tanaka. The two men waited.

  “He means,” Bryan said stiffly, “would you still be living with Mom.”

  “You understand,”Scotty said hastily, scowling at Bryan, “it’s nothing against Iris, Jimmy. Like I said earlier, I — we — respect her point of view and all —”

  “Of course we do,” Tanaka said smoothly.

  “Well,” Jimmy faltered. “I was sort of planning to get a place of my own, anyway, soon as I could put some cash together.”

  “If you need a little advance, that’s no problem,” Tanaka said. “We’ll supply any office equipment you might need, secretarial assistance, and of course we’d cover your phone bill.”

  “Well … I guess … sure, that sounds great.”

  “Fine, fine,” Tanaka urged. “I’m delighted you’ll be joining us. The more men like you, the better the Talbot Inlet chapter of SAVE will be.”

  Scotty patted Jimmy on the back. “Good man, Jimmy. This is great. Isn’t this great, Charlie?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Tanaka. I really appreciate this,” Jimmy said with more feeling than Bryan had heard in his voice for a long time.

  Smiling one last time, Tanaka looked at his gold watch. “And now, if you’ll forgive me, gentlemen, I’ve got to be on my way. Promises to keep, and all that.” He shook Jimmy’s hand, then Scotty’s, then Bryan’s. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll be in touch, Jimmy. Oh, by the way, we’ll start your pay as of last Monday, if that’s all right.”

  On the way home, Jimmy whistled country-western tunes and banged rhythmically on the ancient steering wheel. Beside him, Bryan stared ahead into the intersecting yellow circles cast by the headlights. He didn’t know what to make of what had transpired at the Talbot Inlet Community Centre, but he knew that whatever it was, it was taking someone else away from him.

 
At the dinner table the next day, Jimmy said with what Bryan knew was false cheer, “Iris, it’s time for me to move out.”

  Iris’s jaw dropped.

  “Got a flat over on Anne Street,” Jimmy went on, looking sheepish. “You know that big two-storey, couple named Smolka own it?”

  “Yes, I know it. Jimmy, why not stay here? You don’t have to move out.”

  Bryan remained silent. He had promised his uncle he would not tell Iris that Jimmy had a new job until he had moved. “It’ll hurt her feelings if she thinks I’m leaving because of her and her committee,” he had said. “I’ll tell her a few days after I’m set up.”

  Jimmy mopped up some gravy with a piece of roll and popped it into his mouth. “You know I never planned to stay here, Iris. I just needed a place until I got my feet back under me. Anyway,” he said, rising, “I’m gonna do some packing up. I’ll take my stuff over there tomorrow.”

  Bryan followed Jimmy to his room and sat on the bed while Jimmy transferred clothes from the closet to a beat-up suitcase resting on a chair. His battered face seemed tight and drawn.

  “Do you have to go?” Bryan finally said. “Won’t they let you take the job anyway?”

  Jimmy stopped, a few worn shirts clutched in his rough hand. The collars were frayed and the pocket had been torn off one of the shirts, leaving a dark patch on the faded cloth.

  “We’ll still see each other a lot, don’t worry.”

  “Yeah, but it won’t be the same.”

  Jimmy lay the shirts in the suitcase, then began pulling rolled-up socks from his dresser. “We’ll have some good times, don’t you worry. I’m only across town.”

  “It’s Mom, isn’t it?” Bryan asked him. “It’s her and her stupid committee of tree-huggers. That’s why Tanaka wants you to move.”

  “It’s more like I don’t want to be a burden, Bryan. I’m workin’ again, so I can afford to have my own place. I want to get back on my feet, like I told your mom. I would have moved anyway if I didn’t get hurt. I don’t like to be a burden.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “That’s real nice of you to say —”

  “But it’s true.”

  “But I feel like I am, I guess. I just feel better on my own. More independent.”

  “Well, I think you’re being stupid!” Bryan shouted and ran out of the room.

  “Bryan!” his mother called from the kitchen. “Time to do the dishes.”

  “Do them yourself!” he yelled back, and slammed his bedroom door.

  “What was that all about?” Iris asked a while later. She had knocked on his door and wouldn’t go away when Bryan told her to.

  When she came in he was lying on his bed with the pillow over his head.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “What?”

  Exasperated, Bryan threw off the pillow and sat up, jammed into the corner where his bed met the wall. “I said I didn’t say anything.”

  His mother was sitting in his desk chair. “Gotcha!” She smiled. She had on one of her track suits that Bryan hated. They made her look dumpy. And poor.

  “Very funny, Mom.”

  “So what’s the reason for the rudeness? That’s not like you.”

  “Jimmy’s leaving because of you,” he almost shouted. “You and that stupid damn committee.”

  She ran his fingers through her hair. “I don’t think so, Bryan. Of course, I know he doesn’t agree with what I’m doing —”

  “That’s for sure!”

  “Is that what Jimmy told you? That he’s moving out because of me?”

  “No, he said that wasn’t the reason. But I don’t believe him. I happen to know it’s true.” Bryan could not bring himself to tell his mother that Jimmy had a job with a very big string attached.

  “Believe him, son. Jimmy doesn’t hold back on things. He’ll always tell you the truth, even if it hurts you. That’s the kind of man he is. It’s one of the things I admire about him.”

  Bryan remembered a time a year or so back when Iris was going out to some church meeting. She had come into the kitchen and asked Jimmy and her son how she looked. Bryan told her she looked fine in her jeans and bush shirt. She looked like she always looked, as far as he was concerned. Jimmy had said, “You look like you just walked out of the bush. Wear a dress, Iris. You’re a nice-lookin’ woman. Show it off a little.” Iris had been angry and pleased at the same time.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said, knowing that, this one time, Jimmy had not told his sister everything. No matter how much he disliked what Iris was doing about the logging issue, he would not hurt her.

  “I wish he wasn’t going, though,” Bryan said.

  After his mother left him alone, he wondered how many more people he cared about would be pushed out of his life because of a bunch of old trees.

  EIGHT

  Bryan hopped on his bike and headed south on the shore road, pedalling fast down the tunnel of shade cast by the conifers that lined the blacktop. When the road veered sharply west, he turned in the opposite direction into the trees, along a path that soon took him to the beach. He dismounted and shoved his bike into a copse of young hemlock, out of sight. Only a few paces farther on, he broke from the cool of the trees and into the sunlight. He waded through waist-high grass and onto the open sand.

  The beach ran untroubled for kilometres in each direction. To his left, the sand curved westerly, fringed with conifers that hid a few houses from view. Whitecapped breakers rolled in, crashing fifty metres from the strand. The colourful wetsuits of a few surfers winked in and out of sight. In the distance the surf thundered against grey-black cliffs, tossing clouds of spume into the sky. To Bryan’s right, the waves that curled into the bay were flatter and less powerful, their energy dissipated long before they hissed up the sand. Overhead an osprey wheeled, waiting.

  He sat down on a bleached log that had been embedded in the sand years before, and looked out to sea where, about three hundred metres off shore, a low rocky island sustained no more than a dozen wind-beaten pines. At low tide, Bryan would sometimes walk to the island and look out over the limitless expanse of the Pacific and feel the salt wind on his face. But now, when he could sit on his log and watch the tide coming in, now was the time he liked best. The spit of sand between him and the island gradually diminished as the sea swept in from both east and west, losing its power as it encircled the island to meet just in front of him. He didn’t know how the water could move from opposite directions to come together in this place and at the same time creep toward the shore. It fascinated him.

  Bryan was aware that, if he put the problem to Ellen, she would come here with a thick sheaf of tidal tables, wind and weather patterns, charts of the ocean bottom and textbooks about the sea. She would offer a neat explanation that would satisfy a scientist. Elias would give him a quizzical who-really-cares look. Walter, if he came here at all, would stand ankle-deep in the rising wavelets and say little or nothing because, to him, silence was the best answer and mysteries did not need to be explained.

  Bryan did not want to solve the mystery. He knew that many people had a place that they went to when they wanted to escape or think or grieve. This was his place. He had shared it with no one, not even Ellen, not because it was a secret — many people from town used this beach — but because he knew he could not begin to explain its attraction for him, no more than he could, years ago in Drumheller, explain why sometimes he would climb the crumbling banks of the Badlands just to feel the prairie breeze on his skin. In this place the wind, the sea and the land were always present and never the same. Sometimes in summer the sky was blue and porcelain hard, the sand blindingly white, the dark rocks etched against the waves, the wind sighing through the conifers. The next day might bring a scene of rain and muted greys, or a wind that drove thick mist shoreward.

  Beneath the constant diversity there was something eternal, something as inexplicable and yet as re
al as the sea moving in opposite directions before him. It was this permanence that moved him in a way he could not put into words. Bryan wished with his whole heart that there was a corresponding permanence in his own life, as he was gripped by the fear that his world was slipping away from him. The way it had once before.

  NINE

  Bryan slept fitfully all through that night — thinking about Ellen and trying to figure out a way to get her back — until he awoke to see 4:28 on his clock radio. He dove beneath his pillow but remained awake until he got out of bed around six, grumpy and tired. Iris had gone out right after breakfast, but not before giving Bryan his marching orders for the day: wash the kitchen floor, vacuum and dust the living room. She didn’t tell me when I had to start, Bryan thought as he turned on the TV and flicked from station to station, trying to find something un-stupid to watch.

  Kevin and Otto thumped upstairs for breakfast. They made short work of the sausages, eggs and hashbrowns Bryan fried up for them. While he cleared the dishes and the two men had their second cup of coffee, Kevin asked for a favour.

  “What is it?” Bryan asked over the rush of hot water into the sink.

  “Well, Otto and I have a bit of laundry to do and we wondered if you’d mind if we used your washer and dryer.”

  “I don’t think Mom would go for that,” he answered. “The B&B fee is for room and breakfast, that’s all. Sorry. There’s a twenty-four-hour laundromat pretty close to here,” he added.

  “We get along good with Iris, Bryan. I’m sure she’d agree. Besides, we’re really whacked, you know? Long day at the Wasteland yesterday, right, Otto?”

  Otto didn’t reply.

  “And besides, that laundromat is likely packed with tourists. From the campgrounds. It would really be a help if you could make an exception for this one time, Bryan. One hand washes the other, in a manner of speaking.” He winked.