Shepherd's Watch

by Angie Counios

  Barry notices us. “Stay clear, boys. Katheryn is my dance partner.”

  “Actually, Barry, they’re here to see you.”

  “Really?” His face lights up at the possibility of visitors.

  “They heard you used to be a forest ranger. Would you like to visit with them?”

  “Well, indeed.” He gestures to the door. “Boys, why don’t we step into my office.”

  chapter 86

  Barry’s office is a sunroom at the end of the hall. It’s filled with shelves of books and magazines. Two women work together, sewing a patchwork blanket.

  The nurse sets Barry up at a table in the corner with a couple of romance novels sitting on top. He helps her pull up two more chairs for us, and as she leaves, he calls out, “Katheryn, please come back for us in an hour.”

  Since we need to leave town before then, I catch up to her. “Excuse me, Katheryn, we only need about fifteen minutes with him.”

  She smiles, but there’s pity for her patient in her eyes. “He thinks I just dropped you off at the fire tower.”

  “What?”

  “When he said come back in an hour, he thinks I’m bringing the boat back.”

  Seems like Barry’s not fully out of the woods himself.

  “And my name’s Susan. I’m not sure who Katheryn is, but he’s been calling me that since the day he arrived.”

  I sit down beside Charlie, not sure how to explain to him that this may not go the way we planned, but Barry kicks things off right away. “So you boys want a tour of the tower?”

  I catch Charlie’s look and shrug.

  Barry taps the table between us. “This here is the Fire Finder. We use it to identify the precise location of a fire.” He stands the romance novels on their ends and turns them so that he can peer along their spines. “We look through the apertures to sight the fire and read the degrees off the compass. But you notice these notches?” He points to the lettering on the spine of the book. “These work like an alidade to give us a rough distance of the fire. Ideally, I’d work with Roy to find the intersection.” He pauses, pleased with this explanation.

  Charlie’s curiosity gets the best of him. “Roy?”

  Barry looks out the window beside him, squinting at the light. “Over at Flame Creek Fire Tower.” He waves.

  I don’t know what he’s looking at, but all Charlie and I can see is a maintenance worker riding a lawnmower across Spruce Vista’s lawn.

  “Barry, how long have you worked at the fire tower?” Charlie asks.

  This stumps him. “Five… five years…? Fifty…?” He looks down at the table.

  Since Gladys already told us he’d worked there thirty years, we know he’s way off. Charlie takes a different approach. “Is it true they’re thinking of shutting the towers down?”

  Barry’s brow creases and his eyes mist up. “That’s what they’re saying. Already closed down a bunch in Ontario. Fear they’re going to come this way soon.”

  He must be thinking it’s sometime before 1978.

  “Must’ve been quiet out there?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but you keep yourself busy. Lots to do. Hauling water, getting food, cleaning and maintaining the tower, the instruments, the radio—”

  “Do you go into the woods much?”

  “I go all the time. Just north of here is a nice patch of blueberries and down by the water you can find saskatoons—”

  “Anything to see out there?”

  “Oh, sure. Moose, deer, bear, fox, coyotes. I got a couple of squirrels to come all the way up to the deck outside. You want a tour? It’s beautiful. Especially this time of year.”

  It’s becoming apparent just how disconnected Barry is from the present.

  “Anything else?”

  He thinks for a minute longer than he should. “Nope.”

  Charlie pushes a bit. “I hear people are always seeing ufos out here.”

  Barry scoffs at the idea. “Hell, people get their heads full of the craziest ideas. I’ve been here for ages and all I’ve seen are some weather balloons. Half these folks probably see a falling star and think it’s aliens.”

  By now the sewing ladies have tired of our talk. They get up and leave the sunroom.

  I decide to change the direction of the questions. “What happens when you spot a fire?”

  “Well, Roy and I position it, then we call it in.”

  “You don’t go and fight it?”

  “No way. We call in the fire fellas to deal with it and we offer radio support to the water bombers.”

  “You see many bad fires?”

  “Not during my time but there was that one a few years back,” Barry says. It dawns of me that we’ve skipped ahead in time as he continues, “I always said if we’d been on the ground instead of trusting a bunch of machines in the sky, we’d have caught that sooner.”

  “Were you in the office back then?”

  “Ah, no. Retired from that job in ’90 before it happened.”

  So he was out of the service for four years when the fire hit.

  “I saw the pictures,” Charlie says, “it was pretty big.”

  “Oh yeah, it was scary. Really worried about them.”

  We both catch it, but I let Charlie take the lead. “Who? The firefighters?”

  Barry pauses, the switches in his brain firing, trying to figure out what he’s just said and what we know. He doesn’t answer.

  Charlie asks again, “Which folks were you worried about, Barry?”

  He looks around and seems to realize he’s not in the fire tower anymore. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, studying us. “Who you boys again?”

  I lean forward. “Barry, do you know about someone out in the woods by the fire tower?”

  He breathes out slowly. “I said I’d never tell anyone.”

  “I think it might be time you did.” This is bold of me, but I think it’s time to step things up.

  Until this moment, he’s been looking around the room, distracted by every shift of sunlight through the windows, every loose thread on his sweater, every speck of dust on the table, but now he looks me in the eye.

  “I suppose I’ve kept this secret long enough.”

  chapter 87

  “Back in ’74, these city folks came out to see me at the tower. Just showed up, didn’t call or nothing. One morning, I wake up and look down and see this mustard-coloured van outside my cabin. I didn’t know where it came from. When I go on out and look through the windows and curtains, I see this young couple sleeping butt-naked in the back.”

  He takes a moment, arranging the books, fiddling with the plastic bracelet that has his name stamped on it, before carrying on.

  “Now, I get couples coming around all the time, looking for some privacy in the woods or on the beach to make out, and I ain’t got no problem with what people do. In fact, I don’t even blame them for wanting to do it.” He looks past us at a nurse and gives her a wink, sharing an approving nod with us.

  “But I never had them pull right up to my door and do it. Well, I bang on the roof to wake this couple up so I can run them off, but after dressing and apologizing, they say they’re here to talk to me.

  “Turns out this couple came from out east. A couple of professors from a university out there. Making their way across the country, camping in their van, with one big plan. They dreamed of one day having themselves a family and decided that city life was no longer for them. Things were getting rough in the city, not only because of crime but because the police were even shooting unarmed folks.” He glances at me and unfortunately I understand what he means.

  “Anyways, before they leave the city, they open themselves an atlas, close their eyes, flip the pages, and end up sticking their finger down on my lake. In fact, they drop it right on my road and decide to drive all the way here. />
  “Now, out here, it’s just about me and no one else…” He gestures to the room and it’s evident he sees something different than we do. “Sure, there’s a few folks who built some places by the lake, but unless you know which old logging road to turn down, you’ll find yourself stucker than mud in the middle of nowhere.”

  Barry laughs. “My goodness these two don’t know what they got themselves into. Read a couple of books—you know the type, ‘I went to the woods one day because I wished to live deliberately’—thinking they’ll build themselves a home out of logs. They ended up selling most of their stuff to start new in the wilderness.”

  He goes back to studying his bracelet, eventually taking a novel from the pile and slipping a corner of the cover between the plastic band and his skin. He works the book back and forth like he’s trying to cut through it.

  “What did you tell them?” I ask, trying to keep him focused.

  “Well, the first thing I tell them is they’re on government land and they can do no such thing as live out here. They try to reason with me, ask me who they can talk to, what forms they can fill out, that sort of thing. They even offer money, hoping to talk me into their way of thinking, but I tell them I’m not the person to talk to. They yak themselves blue in the face and when I won’t give an inch, they pack themselves into their van and I think that’s that.”

  He shifts in his chair, stretching his back, taking a deep breath.

  “A few weeks ago, I see a little smoke rising above the trees from the west. Nothing big, but I can’t figure out where it’s coming from, so I haul myself out to see what’s what. Sure enough, I come through the woods and there’s the couple still living out of their van. The place is a real mess. They set themselves up a camp but are driving to town in their van for supplies. They’re buying all this canned stuff and dumping the remains. They’re smart enough not to keep things close and attract bears, but it don’t take long for wild animals to arrive and start sniffing around. The critters get so bad, the couple starts driving their van over to their dumping pile to get rid of the garbage.

  “Well, I say I’m going to report them to the local officers and they say they’ll drive away before I call. So I get them gone and figure that’s now the end of it, but sure enough a couple of months go by and I’m inspecting fire lines way out west and what do I come across but that mustard-coloured van. It’s far deep in the woods this time, along an old trapper’s line,and the tires are flat and there’s a layer of dirt and sap that’s thick as crust on this van, but no sight of them. I’m thinking maybe they left it there, but maybe they gave it one more try, despite my saying to leave.

  “I hunt around a bit, but I got a job to do and it doesn’t include chasing a couple of damn city folks, so I head back. But the whole thing works into my mind like a bug and I start searching the woods. I take out my map, break it into a grid, and every couple of days, go out and search a few miles. It takes me only a few weeks before I find them, not far from where they left the van, but you wouldn’t believe it—they’d gone and done it.”

  “What?” Charlie asks.

  “Built themselves a home. Now, I’m not saying it’s pretty—I think there are more holes in it than there is wood—but they put a roof over their heads. They got a little bed made of cloth and leaves, stumps for sitting and eating, and even a split log shelf on the wall to put their books. But they’re skinnier than homeless dogs because they barely caught themselves any food and are only living on a bit of fish and berries they scrounged up.

  “I tell them I’ve got to report them and they say please, please, please don’t, and I say they’re going to kill themselves out here and I can’t have that on my conscience, and they say they’re hurting no one but themselves.”

  Barry stares at us, looking tired.

  Charlie urges him on, “You didn’t report them, did you?”

  Barry shakes his head. “They were happy. Despite their skinniness and their awful home, they’d gone to the woods and done ‘lived deliberately.’ I can get it. I understand. The woods have a way about them, their own time, their own schedule, their own rules. I like going into town and listening to the bands play and dancing with the ladies, but I need to go home at the end of the night and look up at the stars and the northern lights and see a world all its own.”

  “What happened next?” Charlie asks.

  “I make an agreement with them. I won’t tell anyone, but they have to promise to take my help. I set up a drop box at the end of the road and dump food and supplies in it at the end of the month and they pick it up. Nothing too big. Some fruit and vegetables, a blanket or two, maybe some traps.” Barry shrugs. “Never saw them, never bothered them. I figured, out of sight, out of mind, right? Anyone asks, I can deny everything.

  “Well, for about six months, I’d go to the drop box, find it empty, and fill it up. Then one day, I come out, open it, and it’s still full. I get worried, so the next week, I check again. Still full. I think maybe they don’t need my help anymore. But I also think maybe they died, so the next week I go, I’m ready to head into the woods and look for them, but I decide to check the box one last time. I open it and it’s empty except for a book. That damn fool Thoreau book that sent them out there to begin with, and when I look it over, someone’s scratched with charcoal the word ‘Thanks’ on the inside cover.

  “Well, after that, I leave them alone. Every once and awhile I think about them, but the longer time goes by, the more they slip from my mind. It isn’t until this damn fire burns through the area that I think about them again. So after it’s done, I head out to look, but there’s no trace of them, not even of their cabin.”

  “Did you ever find out what happened to them?” Charlie asks.

  He shakes his head, looking sad. “I didn’t even know their names.”

  chapter 88

  Barry leans back and we know he’s done. He looks exhausted, like the secret has kept him running all these years. He doesn’t wait for the nurse and shuffles out of the sunroom to his room. We follow to make sure he gets there safely.

  “Do you believe him?” I whisper to Charlie as we trail behind.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “He barely knows what year it is now. Maybe it’s all in his head.”

  “Maybe. But time was his trouble, not the facts.”

  The nurse comes down the hall and she takes him by the arm. No more dancing for him. It appears he’s ready for bed.

  As we’re walking to the exit, Charlie says, “I don’t think he’s ever told that story before in his life.”

  “He’s never had to,” I agree. “No one knew they existed.”

  We step outside and go to the car. I can’t stop thinking about what Barry has told us. “If that couple was out there, maybe they’re still alive.”

  “Maybe they’re the ones that killed Terry and the photographer—”

  “Rita Dobson—”

  “Yeah, because they just wanted to be left alone.”

  As we climb inside the car, he looks at me. “Not just alone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They wanted a family.” He has a distant look in his eye before he comes back to the present and glances at me. “But right now you owe me doughnuts and Gladys a coffee!”

  “Fine, but only because you behaved.”

  “See, you can take me out around people every once in awhile.”

  “Just like Ollie,” I say with a grin.

  He smiles as he stares out the window. “Hey, just be happy I didn’t hump the furniture.”

  chapter 89

  We pull up to Cup of Joan’s. Charlie doesn’t move from his seat but pulls out his phone.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Nah. I’ll just siphon the Wi-Fi from here while you go in.” He peers up at me through his perpetually shaggy hair, “Besides, I don’t want t
o crowd your moves.”

  I shake my head and get out of the car. I can’t stop thinking about the college couple in the woods and I’m only half aware of my surroundings as I enter.

  Laurie’s at her usual spot behind the till and I head right to the counter.

  “Charlie not with you today?”

  My mind isn’t on the here and now and I am slow to nod to the window. “He’s out in the car. I owe him a half-dozen doughnuts—and can I get three coffees too?”

  “You’re becoming my best customer.” She pauses, coyly tucking her hair behind her ear. “Not that I mind.”

  By the time I register what she’s up to, I’ve waited too long—any response will be awkward. I make it worse by forcing a smile as I pay for the coffee and doughnuts and rush out of the cafe. I’m thankful Charlie is in the car and didn’t see my failure to flirt. Still, I’m not entirely bothered. Although Laurie is attractive, my heart’s not yet into it.

  Before I can even get my seatbelt on, Charlie’s taken the box of doughnuts out of my hand and cracked it open. He scans the options and decides on a cookies and cream. He takes a bite and I’ve never seen anyone enjoy a doughnut so much.

  “You good?” I ask.

  Charlie doesn’t answer immediately, chewing and clutching his phone tight.

  “Good Wi-Fi. Good doughnuts. Good times,” he cries out. I worry he’ll punch the roof he’s so enthusiastic.

  He takes another bite, swallows, and looks like a happy man. “All right, let’s take Gladys her coffee.”

  chapter 90

  Charlie isn’t in the library for long. In no time, he comes back out and hops in the car. I can tell by his face that something is up.

  “What?” I ask.

  He tosses a mint into his mouth—he must’ve snagged another from Gladys’s bowl—and crunches on it. “Just drive.”

  As I throw the car into gear and pull away from the curb, Charlie pulls out a small reel of film.

  “You stole a microfiche?”