by Patrick Lane
Art said he’d help if he could, but he didn’t know how. Molly told Art the village wasn’t some place down south in the States. Alice wasn’t a Negro from a century ago. She said Alice was the same as anyone except maybe she was an Indian. And who gave the Rotmensens the right to lock her up just because of that?
What was Art to say to Molly or anyone? Like most things he was asked to confront, it made him feel useless.
Claude was the one watching over Alice while the Rotmensens were away this weekend. There was talk Claude was going to let her go to the dance. The Rotmensens had never done that. One thing Art knew, if she was allowed to go to the dance tomorrow night there’d most likely be trouble.
What young Joel would do about Myrna and Alice if they both showed up was anyone’s guess. The kid was besotted by both of them. He spent half his weekend hours up at the Turfoot farm with Myrna and half his nights standing on a cedar round peeping through the lean-to window at Alice sleeping.
Joel.
The kid Art had saved from freezing to death in a gondola car the winter past during a blizzard. The shift at the mill was ending and after Joel had finished sweeping up he’d hotfoot it up to the store so he could sit with his bottle of Coke and moon over Alice as she worked behind the counter. It was all too painful to think about.
Art tried to remember when he’d been that crazy over a girl. The only one he could remember when he was that young was Margie Sandovitch. There was a night long ago when he’d dared to touch her breast after their kissing and she started to cry. She’d looked so frightened, her hands covering her face. He had fled from the alley behind her house thinking it was his fault, that he’d hurt her somehow. It was only months later he found out her father had been raping her most nights since she was a little girl. Margie and her little sister Joyce. Some of the men around Pender and Keefer found out about it from one of the wives, the mother’s face cut and bruised from being hit too often, Joyce hidden away sick too long, too many times. One night a few of the men took Margie’s father into an alley off Water Street and beat him blind and broken with boots and two-by-twos. He didn’t need a white cane after that. There was no need. He never walked again, the family gone when he got out of St. Paul’s Hospital.
Art slipped the mickey out of his pocket and took a quiet drink. He looked at the tracks running north and south, stepped away from the station, and headed back toward the village. He passed the cookhouse and the bunkhouse where Joel lived, the one he’d taken him to after Claude had Bill Samuels haul him out of the gondola car last winter. Art had worried at first about the kid bunking with the older men, but Joseph told Art he’d keep an eye on the boy. There were men like Ernie Reiner who would bully the kid if they could. He knew Joseph wouldn’t stand for that. Most of the other men wouldn’t either. Still, Joel had to learn to look after himself.
Just up the road from the store he could see the single clapboard schoolhouse and beside it what remained of the old church on the corner, both of them empty. The schoolhouse wasn’t much bigger than half a boxcar. It had been abandoned for a couple of years now because there weren’t enough children to allow for a government-paid teacher. They needed twenty kids and the village and hills could only come up with eighteen. And there was Claude’s house just below the store, the Rotmensens’ across the road from his. The rest of the village was what it’d been when Art came up from Vancouver, a few small houses, the bunkhouses, rundown shacks, trailers, and cabins.
Piet and Imma’s house had a covered front porch with a couch on it. Claude’s house was larger than theirs. The last mill boss had a family, according to Claude. The old boss had tried to fix the house up before Claude came up from Kamloops, but the job was done badly, the paint he brushed on peeling, the windows swollen shut. He’d told Art enough times how his job was to run the mill into the ground, the last good timber dwindling in the cut blocks. The bribe money the mill had paid to the Forest Service guys had dried up along with the fir and hemlock in the valley bottoms. In the end none of it would matter. In a few more years the bosses down at the coast would have taken everything of value from the river valley. After that they’d likely torch the mill in hopes of getting what insurance they had on equipment, the building itself worthless.
This was where he lived, this half-assed village, this almost-town where he was the first-aid man for a sawmill on its last legs. He scuffed his heels in the cinders and gravel under his boots.
The mill whistle sounded to end the shift. The saws stopped their screams. There was only the clanking of the chains as they hauled refuse up the flume into the burner. Art didn’t think he’d go to dinner. He couldn’t eat, his belly grinding on glass. He put his hands together and made one fist. The sawmill chains kept banging, louder now the mill was quiet, Joel and the rest of the cleanup crew loading chips and bark to be carried up to the burner’s gaping mouth. Caen, Moerbrugge, the Scheldt. The only thing that never stopped was the great fire, the smoke boiling from the beehive cone drifting south into the canyon along the river, a grey swath eating into the forest along the river’s hard banks.
REINER WAS ALWAYS AT THE CAFRÉ before Joel got there, no matter Joel’s struggle to get the last cleanup under the trim saws done faster. Joel would arrive draped in a veil of sawdust stuck to the oil on his clothes, his hands and face. Dust stubble stuttered on his cheeks, a slick festoon in his hair, his boots streaked with grease and oil from slogging through and around and under machines, the trim saws, the edger, the gang and head saws, the belts and conveyors, and the floor that needed endless sweeping, shovelling, and scraping, the foreman keeping a close eye on him, making sure he did his job right even as he knew all Joel wanted was to be get gone.
Joel straightened his stetson and brushed at his canvas pants and wool shirt. The door slammed behind him as he went past the till where Imma Rotmensen sat on her padded chair, her heavy blond head angled down to the side as she jotted the sums paid against what was owed by Oroville Cranmer, his whip-thin wife, Gladys, beside him counting out her four dollars onto the counter and Imma picking up the two bills and pushing at the coins with her stubby forefinger, counting herself the silver and coppers carefully, dragging the metal across the scarred wood into the tacked-on kitchen drawer she called her till. Imma told the two of them then exactly how much they still owed from the spring when the mill was shut down for breakup, the bush roads impassable because of the snowmelt, and their pogey ran out, welfare nowhere near enough to feed their brood.
Joel both saw and didn’t see them, heard and didn’t hear as he sidled past and down the aisle where the canned goods were stacked, tomatoes, corn, green beans and pork and beans, peas, canned peaches and pears, scabbed labels scratched and stained, the bins where the weevil-soured flour and sugar, the mottled rice and cereals were kept below the flats of withered week-old vegetables, carrots with hair roots flaring and potatoes gone soft, stained with black eruptions, pale turnips, onions and cabbages gone to brown and grey reek. He passed all of such sundry and went on down the aisle to the counter at the back where he took off his hat and sat down on the stool he always took.
He looked around but Alice wasn’t there. He thought he could hear someone rummaging in the storeroom and thought she might be in the back getting something. He glanced at Ernie Reiner sitting at the end of the counter and looked away when he heard Molly Samuels talking to Natalka Danko. Natalka was a woman like the ones he’d known back on the Arrow Lakes, sometimes poor, sometimes not, but mostly angry, mostly miserable. Molly was different. She had been kind to him ever since the night last winter when Art Kenning rescued him from the gondola car in the blizzard. Art had taken him to the cookhouse where Wang Po fed him and then he took him to Molly’s house. It was a freezing cold winter night and Joel had never forgotten her kindness. She gave him a hot cup of tea and asked him where he’d come from and what his life had been before he jumped the gondola in Edmonton, the blizzard swirling all the way through the Rockies and down the North Thompson Ri
ver.
Molly had checked his teeth and feet and asked him if he’d kept himself clean. Even half frozen, he knew what she meant and told her he did. Joel had trusted her that night in a way he’d never trusted anyone before. He wondered sometimes if it was just because he was so weak right then, but he knew it wasn’t only that. Molly was someone who just took charge of things. She was what his own mother would have called firm. There wasn’t anyone in the village who didn’t respect her and her husband Bill too, the foreman. When there was trouble people turned to them for help. When Art took him to the bunkhouse after Molly was finished Art told Joel he’d be okay. He said too if Joel was ever in trouble and he wasn’t around then Molly and Bill Samuels were two people he could count on. Joseph too.
Joel looked over and said hi to Molly. She smiled at him and then turned to Natalka who was going through bolts of cloth, unrolling each one a little ways and holding it up to see the patterns. As Joel watched, Molly pointed out one she thought Natalka’s daughter would like. She told her to buy it, but Natalka said it was too expensive, saying her daughter didn’t need fancy.
“But I know Kateryna wants something nice to go to the dance with,” said Molly.
“She can wear ordinary,” said Natalka. “It’s not like it’s any different than this here cloth.” She held up a plain white cotton. It looked to Joel like it had sat on the shelf for years, a cloth like what dish towels were made from.
“Kateryna shouldn’t get any ideas about who she is or where she’s going to end up,” said Natalka.
“She’s a good girl,” Molly said. “Why don’t you spoil her a little bit this one time.”
“The time for spoiling is when a man can give her the money to buy her own. When Kateryna’s under my roof she can do with less. Besides it’s me has to keep an eye on her when she’s cutting out the pattern tonight, me who’s got to keep a lookout when she’s sewing it up all the way into tomorrow for the dance. Plain is easy to work with. Why buy her good cloth just to ruin it.”
“She’ll be so disappointed,” said Molly.
“She might as well get used to disappointment when she’s young,” said Natalka. “It’s a woman’s lot, no matter who.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” said Molly. She reached for a roll of pale blue ribbon on a shelf and took it down. “Why don’t you let me buy two yards of this ribbon here for her. You could get Kateryna to sew it into the bodice. It would make it look so nice.”
“So you say. You’ll buy it for her?”
“Yes,” said Molly. “I’d like to do it. A little gift.”
“Blue ribbon, yes,” said Natalka. “Not too much,” she added, tucking the roll of white cotton under her arm. “I don’t need her getting big ideas.”
As they turned to go, Molly lifted a hand. “Hey,” she said. “You all right, Joel?”
“Yup,” said Joel, not turning now, his eyes on Alice as she passed in front of him with a bucket of ice. Joel was going to say how he’d have helped her get it, but she was pouring it into the cooler by then. Joel sat there wiping the bits of sawdust off the counter that fell from his hair, waiting for Alice to take a bottle of Coke out of the cooler and bring it down to him. It’s what he always got.
Alice went over to Reiner’s end of the counter, setting down in front of him a curled baloney sandwich on a chipped saucer. Reiner picked up the soft pickle and wobbled it at her, a grin on his face like a wrong blossom. His Browning .308 was leaning against the counter beside him.
Joel watched Alice’s back as she went along the counter, heard the jangled wet sound of dead ice dragging, a bottle opening with a sudden whimper of air, and then he dropped his eyes again to see only her small hand as she put the Coke down in front of him. No glass, no straw. He watched her slide his quarter across the scarred wood, her hand taking the coin between her fingers and then stopping a moment and looking at his bent head and hat before going to the cardboard cash box and making change, giving him a nickel and dime back. He dropped his head lower as she placed the coins into his palm, not wanting to know what it was she might be seeing in him.
He stared instead at the cotton string cinched at her middle to hold her stained white apron, fold creased upon fold to fit her narrow waist. He watched her back as she went down the counter. Thin beads of water ran down the sides of his bottle and pooled on the pine boards. He wanted to say her name out loud, Alice, but couldn’t think of a reason. He looked at his clutched hands and wondered how anyone could be as wretched as he was. He sneaked a look at her face and saw a smile that was almost there, her lips moving, saying nothing he could hear, the blood sloshing loud in his ears, his head drowning.
It was the same each afternoon at the end of his shift at the mill, his quarter, his change, her hand with the bottle of Coca-Cola she lifted from the wheezing cooler and him afraid to look directly into her face. Whenever she seemed like she might start talking to him he’d turn away or stare down into his hands, anything not to look at her when she was looking at him. One thing was for sure, she wasn’t afraid of him. He’d seen her be different with other men, more careful. He’d watched her serve the mill guys, saw her eyes go thin as she looked at some of them warily. Ernie Reiner was the worst.
Joel hated it when he saw Reiner whisper things to her. Joel would see the nervous look on her face as he beckoned her close and her having to bend forward to hear him. It was then she seemed to Joel to be confused, Reiner’s lips sliding across whatever it was he was saying, Alice leaning against the counter across from him, hands flat on the scarred pine, then turning away and wiping a stray hair from her dark cheek, jewels of sweat on her forehead.
Joel hunched deeper over his Coke and stared into the puddle on the counter. The grin on Reiner’s face made Joel bite at his lip until it bled. He turned at the sound of boots clacking on the worn linoleum and saw Cliff Waters leaning against the shelf of canned goods.
“Ain’t she something else,” Reiner said, just loud enough for Joel to hear and Cliff too.
“Leave off talking like that about her, Ernie,” Cliff said.
Joel had heard Cliff straighten Reiner out a few times, but he didn’t know what was going to happen this time. Cliff teased Alice too, but he wasn’t mean like Ernie. Cliff’s teasing was liking her, not hurting her.
“Hey Alice,” Ernie said with a grin, ignoring Cliff. “You oughta come to the dance tomorrow night. I could show you a good time.”
“I don’t know how to dance,” she said softly, turning her head a little and looking at Cliff, not Ernie.
Joel marvelled at the quietness of her. She seemed to be speaking from far away, a small voice sent out from the lighted end of a tunnel. For a moment he imagined her speaking like that to him, maybe saying she liked him.
“Hey,” Ernie said. “Don’t know how or don’t want to?”
Joel’s head sank a little more, his hat blocking his eyes of everything but his hand and the Coke bottle.
“I can show you some steps if you don’t know how,” said Ernie, his fingers tippity-tapping his spoon, his coffee cup jiggling in its cracked saucer.
“I can’t go,” she replied. She walked along the counter past Joel to where Cliff was standing. “They won’t let me,” she said to Cliff. He nodded, her smile in return a whisper. “You know that,” she said.
“Who? Piet and Imma?” called Ernie, his coffee cup still, his spoon gone quiet. “There’s ways around them.”
“She’s not talking to you,” said Cliff. He didn’t look at Ernie. “She’s talking to me.”
“I wouldn’t let her go anywhere if it was me in charge.”
“Imma and Piet are going away tomorrow,” said Cliff, ignoring Ernie again. “Down to Kamloops.” As he spoke he moved around the end of the shelf to the counter and leaned across the counter toward Alice.
She didn’t speak and Cliff smiled at her. “Who says you can’t dance?” Cliff said softly.
Joel cut his eyes down the counter to her and tr
ied to hear what she said back to him, but Alice’s face was turned away, her words even more of a whisper.
“…and you know they lock my door,” she said at the end of what she was saying, Joel catching at the last words.
There was a silence along the counter.
“There’s no such thing as a locked door that a man can’t open,” Ernie said. He got up, cradling his rifle under his arm.
Cliff leaned away from Alice and turned to Ernie standing by his stool. “What the hell you doing with a rifle in here?” he asked.
“Nothing you should worry yourself about,” said Ernie, shaking the rifle into the crook of his elbow. He slipped his finger into his watch pocket and slid out a dime, placing it on the counter by his coffee cup. “There’s supposed to be a big bear coming through here nights, Cliff,” he said. “Thought I’d go down and hunt a bit along the river. Might be that bear holed up there for the day. Want to come along?”
“Bears go high to sleep,” Cliff said. “And that rifle of yours should be in the rack in your truck. Not here in the café.”
“Yeah, well, what I carry and where I take it is none of your business.”
“It’s my business if I make it mine,” said Cliff.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Reiner.
“Well, you’re done here today, don’t you think?” Cliff said, stepping back and making elaborate room for Reiner to pass by.
Reiner took a long look at Alice but she was at the sink again, her back to him, her hands deep in soapy water.
“I’ll be back for coffee later,” Ernie said to her, the rifle snug under his arm. As he went by Joel, Reiner flipped the back of Joel’s hat, the brim falling hard onto Joel’s nose. “How’s it going, kid,” he said over his shoulder.