And there was the weather, impervious to people’s will. Winter and summer failed to obey even the most basic rules of their respective seasons. In the Eastern Slopes, some of the most vicious storms happened late in the spring, on the solstice’s door step, dumping a foot of snow or more as the winds shifted and twisted and curled. These storms didn’t come from the west as winter weather did, but from the south, and from the east. As high-pressure systems formed in the Rockies and on the Great Plains south of the Medicine Line, they pushed moist Pacific air back toward the eastern edge of the mountains. These “up slope” storms could make May feel like January, and June feel like March.
Then in November and December, summer often found its redemption, as autumn ushered in days so sunny, and skies so blue, that a walk in the woods, with the golden leaves crisp underfoot from a light frost the night before, seemed like heaven on earth.
It could break your heart.
Cole Blackwater dreamed of such things. He dreamed of a twisted patch of aspen tucked in along the banks of a tiny creek that emerged from the eastern side of the Porcupine Hills. It was a place he knew well, not far from the family ranch, but far enough that he could pretend not to hear his father’s angry yelling or his mother’s invitation to dinner. In the shortening days of autumn he could run along an ancient trail that wove through those trees, their grey bark dull against the copper-coloured ground. He could run until his legs gave up as he reached the top of the rise, find a place alone on the crown of the hill, and rest against a twisted pine to watch the final rays of sunlight be eclipsed by the Rocky Mountains. The sky would fade from blue to indigo, and finally grey, like the aspens. In that half-light of autumn he would make his way home.
He opened his eyes slowly. The room was dim, but even the soft light hurt so he closed his eyes again.
“Cole?”
He opened his eyes more slowly. They adjusted to the light and he blinked several times and drew the room into focus.
“Hi Cole.”
He tried to turn his head to see who was speaking. But his neck and shoulders ached and he closed his eyes instead.
“Cole, it’s Nancy.”
He opened his eyes for a third time. “I’m in the hospital?” he croaked.
“Yes,” she said, and reached for a bottle of water with a bent straw and handed it to him.
He took it and sipped. The water was cool in his throat, and the image of water tumbling from a glacier onto sun-parched rock came to his mind. “What day is it?”
“Sunday.”
Two weeks. A lifetime.
“How do I look?” he asked, remembering the accident.
“Like shit,” she said. “But the doctor says it won’t be any worse than you normally look in a couple of weeks.”
He smiled thinly. His lips felt dry. “That’s a relief.”
“David Smith is dead,” she said.
His brow furrowed, trying to remember. He remembered climbing down the crevice of rock, but couldn’t remember climbing back out.
“Sergeant Reimer and one of her constables shot him. Four times.”
Pop, pop, pop, pop, he remembered, the individual sounds merging into one.
“I remember now,” he said, then, “You called me?”
“Yeah, I called you,” she smiled. “I called you from Anne’s place. Right after I found Mike Barnes’ appointment book. After Peggy gave me the name of the people you figured to be moles and their stories, I went to Anne’s apartment and confronted her, you know, just hoping for the story. Totally self-serving. But she cracked and said she didn’t know what her uncle was up to.”
“Uncle.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yeah, David Smith’s sister is Anne’s mother. Anyway, she just cracked, told me that she didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt. She was just trying to help her uncle save the town. She cried and cried. I called the RCMP but by the time they got to the Chamber, Smith was gone. I guess he was headed back to the mine to destroy evidence or something. We’ll never know. I found the Day-Timer in Anne’s recycling. She said she’d found it in the trash one night after her uncle had been over and thinking that it must have been a mistake, put it in her blue box.”
“I can’t believe how ironic that is,” said Cole, smiling.
“Recycling really does pay,” said Nancy.
They sat in silence for a moment, then Cole asked, “What happened to Dale?”
“He’s been released. I got a front-page story with him saying he planned to sue the RCMP and the town and the mine and anybody else he could think of. He came by yesterday to see you, but you were asleep. Peggy McSorlie has been here a few times, and so has Perry Gilbert.”
“That’s nice, isn’t it?” asked Cole.
“It is,” she said. She put her hand on his, and he held her fingers.
“What about Sarah?”
“Peggy called her. Talked to your ex. They know you’re fine. Sarah called here yesterday evening, and I told her you would call her when you were awake.”
“Sounds like you’ve been here a lot.”
“I’ve left to sleep,” she said, “but otherwise, someone’s got to be here to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”
Cole smiled. “Thank you,” he said. He managed to turn his
head to look at her. She smiled at him.
“It’s OK,” she finally said, her smile wide, showing her lovely teeth. “But you better start talking, buddy. I’m just waiting around here to get a story out of this.”
Epilogue
They rode together across the open meadows, the first wildflowers of summer touching the bellies of the horses. The May blizzard had dumped more than a foot of wet snow all up and down the foothills, and that moisture, when the sun finally emerged at the beginning of June, created a riot of colour. From the meadow at the crest of the gently sloping hill, Cole pointed the nose of his horse west and the other followed, so they could sit side by side and look out over the vast sweep of hills and valleys.
Far below, to the west, ran Highway 22. Every now and again a truck was heard labouring up the grade heading south, but aside from that intrusion there was no sound save the wind, the cacophony of bird song, and the buzzing of the season’s first insects.
In the late afternoon light the row upon row of hills that climbed and fell between their perch on top of the Porcupine Hills and the great, breaking wave of stone that formed the eastern wall of the Rocky Mountains were painted in receding tones of green and blue. Then at the base of the great mountains grey, and finally black. A cloud scudded overhead and its shadow followed it, as if pulled by a string, slipping easy across the folded earth below.
“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” said Sarah, her eyes wide.
“It is God’s country,” agreed Cole.
“I can’t believe you’ve never taken me here!”
“We’re here now. Enjoy it.”
“You grew up here,” she said, as if that somehow that made him different than everybody else.
“I did,” he said, knowing that even this place couldn’t mask the other forces that shaped his life.
“It’s so beautiful.”
“It’s so beautiful,” he said, turning from the vista to look at his daughter, “that it breaks my heart.”
“I won’t let that happen,” she said.
Cole turned away and pushed the tears across his cheek with his knuckles.
They turned their horses and Cole led her down through the aspens and picked their way along the faint trail of his youthful exploits. The new leaves unfurled, so green and so fragrant, that the eyes ached for seeing them and the mind reeled to know that the fight between winter and spring had finally been settled.
Cole had stayed in the hospital for three more days. He had suffered a serious concussion and a host of other maladies that required medical attention, including a broken ankle, a sprained wrist and a cracked bone in his cheek. When he was finally released, Peggy
McSorlie wheeled him to her car and drove him to her ranch, where he spent another two weeks nursing his wounds, and once again wrapping up loose ends.
There were many to be wrapped.
Perry Gilbert came to the McSorlie Ranch one afternoon. Cole sat on a lawn chair with his foot resting on a pillow on a stump under a cottonwood when Gilbert drove up. He motioned him over.
“How’s the foot?” Gilbert asked. He pulled up another stump and sat down on it.
“Doc says I’ll be back walking in another week. But I won’t be able to pole vault anymore.”
“Life’s tough.”
“Yeah, but I never was good at it anyway. Kept spearing myself with the pole.”
Gilbert told him that Dale had been cleared of all charges and the RCMP had issued an apology. “He’s still going to sue,” said Gilbert.
“Does he have a chance?”
“Who knows? But when was the last time Dale did anything because he thought he could win?”
Cole nodded.
“So they found the murder weapon in the back of Smith’s truck,” Gilbert said flatly.
Cole raised an eyebrow. His face still had a number of small bandages on it, and it was pocked with tiny cuts from the shattered glass. One longer cut dissected his left eyebrow. He had been lucky not to lose that eye, the doctor told him. He raised it now.
“Pipe wrench. Orange. About two feet long. He had washed it, but the forensics people can pick up even the faintest traces of blood. It was a match with Mike Barnes.”
Cole exhaled slowly. “What about the story that Dale’s truck was seen at the mine?” he asked.
Perry shrugged. “Now that Dale’s been cleared, we’ll never know. There are three or four similar vehicles registered to men who work at the mine.” The two men watched a woodpecker at work on a tree at the edge of the farm. Then Perry said, “I looked into Hank Henderson’s whereabouts on the night of the murder like you asked. Boy, he was pretty sour about you messing around at his place. He nearly turfed me on my butt when I went there to talk with him. But I told him it was official business and he told me where he had been at. Made a trip to Red Deer that night to meet with a dude named Jeremy Moon. You know him?”
Cole nodded.
“So he and Moon finished up the final version of the Environmental Assessment that night. Henderson didn’t get back ’til after midnight.”
“I wonder why Emma Henderson lied to me?”
“I think you must have spooked her. She panicked. It happens. We’re under pressure, someone we love is being threatened. We do stupid things. We lie.”
Cole took a deep breath and let it out. He understood.
“And one last thing,” Perry Gilbert said. “I ran into your friend Nancy this morning. She had just checked out of the Rim Rock and was on her way back to Edmonton. She said that she asked Deborah Cody about her hand. I guess she hit that gorilla George and busted a couple of bones. Nancy said that they were ‘making up’ after their big fight and that’s why George wasn’t at the bar that night.”
“All neat and tidy.”
“Seems like.”
Cole stayed with the McSorlies for another week after that. He tried to write a strategy for saving the Cardinal Divide, but in the end it seemed futile. Finally, one night, he, Gord and Peggy McSorlie, and a couple of others from the East Slopes Conservation Group were having dinner at the McSorlie place when Peggy said, “I think we’ve got to change course entirely. We’ve got to win over this community. They don’t trust us. We don’t trust them. We’re at each other’s throats. We say we’re doing this to save this town, and to save Cardinal Divide, but we’re hardly even a part of this community.”
“What do you propose, darling?” asked Gord.
“Go underground for a few months. Maybe a year. Build some bridges. Turn down the heat a little. Win some friends. Work on some things that the local community people want to see done, not just our own priorities, but the priorities of our neighbours. Show them that we’re real people, not zealots.”
“How’s that going to stop the McLeod River project?” asked Cole.
“Maybe it won’t. But what we’re doing now isn’t stopping it either. We need to get organized in this town so that it’s not just twenty of us opposing the mine because it’s bad for bears. It needs to be two hundred, or two thousand of us opposing it because it’s just plain bad, period. Bad for our future, bad for business, bad for our kids.”
Cole sat up all night that night, writing. In the morning he handed Peggy a fifteen-page strategy paper, and by the end of the next day they’d polished it.
“We might not win in the short-term with this strategy,” said Cole, “but we just might pull this off over the long-term.”
Peggy flipped through the pages and smiled. She looked up at him. “I like the fact that you said we.”
He saw Nancy again before he left. “Did you ever figure out who put the goons on you in the bar?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Likely never will, but my money is on Henderson.”
“Sounds like a good guess. You going to ask him?”
Cole just grinned.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Home,” he said, leaning against the bumper of a rental car he had been issued by his insurance company.
“Vancouver?” she asked.
He smiled. Where was home? “I’m going to Calgary first to pick up Sarah at the airport, and then I’m going to see my mom and my brother. What about you?”
“Back to Edmonton I guess.”
“You don’t sound too thrilled by the prospect.”
“It’s OK. The Journal isn’t really my cup of tea.”
“The Vancouver Sun is a much better paper.” Cole smirked through his bandages.
Cole and Sarah Blackwater reached the ranch just as Cole’s stomach began to rumble. He smiled. “You hungry?”
“Sure am!”
“Why don’t you go and wash up and help Grandma set the table while I brush Mac and Sally here?”
“That sounds good,” she said, pulling gently on the reins as they came to the barn.
He stepped from Mac and helped her down off Sally. “Off you go,” he said, patting her arm. She ran to the house. When the screen door had slammed shut behind her he turned to face the barn.
“OK, you two, time for a handful of oats and then some dinner.”
He led the two horses around the back of the barn and gave them each its oats and a pail of water. He unsaddled them and felt the hot, wet flesh under each saddle with his hands. Then he patted their withers and their muscles twitched. He brushed them down and scratched their ears and rubbed their forelocks and led them into the darkness under the barn. “Thanks for taking good care of Sarah,” he said to Sally as he stowed her in her stall. “And thanks for taking it easy on me, Mac,” he said when the other horse was stowed inside.
He put the saddles and tack away, washed his hands in a bucket of water, and stepped into the yard, breathing in the rich scent of the horses and of spring.
He didn’t plan to, but as he walked around the barn, he was drawn to its double front doors. Without thinking he walked up the grade toward them. When he stood before their weathered boards he reached up and flipped the latch and swung them both wide open. They creaked. The smell of hay flavoured the air. The barn was dark except for the sunlight that seeped through the big doors and found its way through the chinks in the walls. But there was enough illumination to see the boxing ring at the barn’s centre. The four lights still swayed overhead, moving slightly in the breeze that swept through the open doors. It looked so much smaller than when he was a child. So much smaller than just three years ago.
He could see in the middle of the ring the dark stain that reached back angrily toward the sagging hemp ropes. He could see the fingers of that stain reach out, red and unforgiving.
“Thinking about making a comeback?” The voice behind made him start. He turned slowly on hi
s sore ankle and saw his brother walk up the grade to the barn.
He grinned tightly. “I don’t think so,” he said and turned back to the ring.
Walter stood beside him. He was an inch shorter than Cole, his shoulders wide and body still muscular and compact. He was wearing his sweat-stained Stetson; the hat was an old Park Service issue, the badge removed from the leather strap that circled it. Cole looked at his brother. He wore a canvas coat and blue Wranglers and a pair of brown boots. He looked every bit the cowboy.
“When are you going to stop dressing like a cowpoke?” Cole asked.
“When I stop being one, I guess,” said Walter, and winked. Then, “This is where it happened, ain’t it?”
Cole caught his breath. He was silent for a full minute. “You know it is. We talked about it after the funeral.”
“I know,” said Walter, peering into the darkness of the barn. “Just never really had time to talk with you about it after that. You headed off to BC so quick afterwards. Like you were running from something or somebody. Thing is, Cole, nobody would blame you for it, if they knew what really went down here. As they say, the old man had it coming.”
Cole shrugged and was silent. Finally he said, “Yeah, they would. It’s not about blame. It’s not even about right or wrong. It’s about responsibility. He never took responsibility for what he did to me. To us. To mom.”
“So you’re going to fix that somehow? By taking responsibility yourself? How’s that going to help?”
Cole stood still for a long time, thinking of Sarah. Then he shook his head.
The two brothers stared at the ring.
“Maybe we should go a few rounds before we take this thing apart tomorrow. What do you say?” said Walter. He turned to Cole, put his hands in front of his face, and danced side to side in the dust.
The Cardinal Divide Page 36