Season of Storm

by Alexandra Sellers

  "Valerie?" she pushed the button for Talk, and then Listen.

  "Shulamith?" said the voice she hadn't heard for too long. Smith gasped, took a slug of wine and felt her heart set up a pounding that would deafen her.

  "Johnny. What is it? What do you want?" she demanded hoarsely, then laughed helplessly, moved her finger onto the Talk button and asked again.

  "Just you," said Johnny's deep voice. "To see you." More than anything in the world at that moment she wished she had the power to say no. But her finger had already moved over to the button marked Door.

  She opened her the apartment door a little, then moved into the room and sat down on the piano bench, staring at the doorway. By the time his tap sounded she was stiff, trapped between hope and fear. "Come in," she called, when she could make her mouth move, and then he was there, as dark and beloved as ever. He stared across the room at her, but she could not read the message in his eyes.

  "How did you find me?" she asked in a voice that seemed rusty with disuse.

  "Your father," said Johnny. "I called and he gave me your address."

  "When did you get back?"

  "An hour ago." He closed the door and leaned on it wearily. "I've just come from the airport."

  Suddenly she understood. It was his first time home since the Cartier recommendations, and after all this time, he had come to her for comfort.

  Thirty-four

  "Beautiful place you found yourself," he said, flicking a glance around the softly-lighted room as though grateful that a safe topic presented itself.

  "Thanks, yeah, I really like it. Nothing like as beautiful as....How are you, Johnny?" she asked, still in the same level voice, still sitting there with the piano between them like a shield.

  Amusement glimmered for a moment behind his eyes. "Did you know that damned song of yours is even playing on the inflight music channel?"

  She laughed over the lump in her throat. "Is it? Oh, well, it's all money in the till. We're making a deal with CBS now."

  "You're doing well, then." He moved away from the door towards her and belatedly she waved him to sit. "Congratulations."

  "Thank you. You realize I have you to thank for it?"

  He sank back in the chair and shot her a look. "Do you? Why?"

  "Isn't it obvious? What you did just—shook me up so much, derailed me, I think, that I had to look at my life from a completely different angle. And once I'd done that—" Not the time to tell him how his reaction to her first attempts at poetry had boosted her confidence in her writing. "If you hadn't kidnapped me I might never have got that other view."

  He moved his head. "You don't think it was waiting to happen?"

  Nor the time to describe how love had powered through her life, a river in flood, changing the landscape, tearing down dams, bringing green life to barren fields—and the only price a heart so broken she couldn't even find the pieces.

  "How's the hotel going?" she asked instead. She wondered suddenly, with a sinking heart, if she was wrong, if he had come to discuss divorce proceedings.

  "We've had a bit of a problem with the contractors—we've had to develop some new methods and—" He broke off, as though surprised to hear himself talking. "Old dogs don't like new tricks," he finished briefly.

  Silence fell.

  Smith jumped up guiltily. "What can I get you to drink, Johnny?"

  He was rubbing his head as though his scalp were too tight. "Got any scotch?" he asked gratefully. "My body thinks it's three in the morning."

  She moved into the kitchen, grateful for the excuse to turn on lights, chatting with him over the eating bar while she laid a tray with snacks, scotch, ice and glasses. After a few minutes she heard the sounds of Lew's music as the volume went up.

  "What's this?" called Johnny. "The same tune keeps repeating."

  Smith picked up the tray and returned to the living room.

  "Lew's latest. I have to write some lyrics for it," she told him. "It's not coming easy." She set the tray down beside him and he lifted the decanter as Lew's music finished and started again.

  "Seems a little saccharine," Johnny said, without judgement. "Ice?" and at her nod he fixed a drink and handed her the glass.

  "Yeah—well, that's what's needed," she said, bending down to switch the machine from tape to radio where music was playing. "It's supposed to put me in a more upbeat mood."

  "You're kidding," said Johnny. He dropped ice into his own glass, lifted it, saluted her and drank gratefully.

  She laughed. "Once the band gets hold of it, it'll change. Who knows, if I can come up with the lyrics, Lew may...anyway, with Cimarron's voice...but I can't seem to get to anything."

  "Light-hearted joy seems a bit of a reach for everybody at the moment," Johnny said.

  "I heard about the Cartier decision," Smith said. "I'm sorry."

  He rubbed a hand over his hair. He was wearing a beautifully cut grey silk suit, a little the worse for his long hours in the plane. He had unbuttoned his shirt collar, and the strong column of his bronze throat glowed in the lamplight. His tie was missing.

  "Thanks. It was a foregone conclusion. Depressing, but predictable." He didn't sound as bitter or angry as she had expected him to be. Maybe he had vented his anger already, when the decision was handed down.

  She let one beat go by, took a sip for courage and then said hesitantly, ''Is it...are you...how's the divorce thing coming? I'm afraid I haven't—"

  ''Neither have I," said Johnny. "I'm sorry. I've been too busy."

  Smith leaned her head back against the upholstery, swung her legs up and rested her glass on her stomach. "Weird how it happened, isn't it?" she said softly. "Hard to explain that to anybody. But I don't...I don't believe it was Stockholm Syndrome, you know."

  A love song played softly into the silence. Mood music. She should have switched to a classical station. Too obvious now.

  "No?" asked Johnny.

  "You know what I think it was? I think I wanted a man to love me so desperately—after my father, I mean—that I just fell for you because...because I thought you really loved me. I'd probably have fallen for anyone who acted as though he was that crazy about me."

  His dark eyes were hooded. "I'm the first man who's ever acted as though he was crazy about you?" he asked in disbelief.

  "No— " She thought suddenly, I am trying to keep you at bay. I am lying to save myself the hurt that tonight will inflict on me if you stay and love me the way you want to, the way I want you to.... "But there was a man in Milan last year. He seemed to be really smitten. I—" She broke off. Not a pleasant memory, but Johnny had taken the pain away long ago. He had shown her how womanly she was, and the memory of Carlo had lost its power over her. A pity Johnny had substituted a far greater pain.

  "I realized afterward that he wasn't a nice man at all—but somehow I couldn't see that as long as he was telling me he was crazy about me."

  "There are men who don't show their true colours until they've been rejected," Johnny observed dispassionately.

  "I didn't reject him," Smith said with wry humour. "That's what I mean. I haven't any judgement. Other women my age know all about the Carlos of the world."

  His face looked bleak. "And all about the Johnny Winterhawks?"

  Oh, God, as quickly as that he could tear her heart out. As quickly as that she had to bite back the words that had been so safely locked away, the loving words, the begging words.

  "Johnny," she began helplessly, "I...I..."

  "We didn't wait to fall in love." Cimarron's voice was suddenly rising from the radio on the floor between them. Smith swung her feet off the chair arm with such clumsy haste she kicked the radio and set it flying. "...And then we met."

  She shot out of her chair to her knees beside the machine, scrabbling with nervous hands to turn it off. "...And no room for regr—"

  She managed to shut it off, and then Johnny was bending over her, helping her up, close to her, so close her throat closed and her breathing st
opped.

  She stood motionless in his embrace, feeling the warmth of his hands on her, feeling his tender mouth bend closer and closer.

  Oh, it had been long, so long. Her pulse thudded in her temples and body, her blood flooding out from her heart to meet his touch; her body ached, and her throat ached with unshed tears and the need to tell him....

  "Shulamith," he whispered. "Shulamith." There was no fury in him now, only need.

  "I can't, Johnny," she whispered brokenly. "Please don't, please don't ask me. I can't anymore. I can't. Johnny. Oh, God—" the tears were starting out of her eyes "—please go away! Please let go of me and go away!"

  His hands released her instantly. "Sorry." He swallowed. "I'm sorry, I...uh...." His eyes were hooded. He did not look at her as he stepped back away. He turned and went to the door.

  At the door he paused. "I'll get the divorce going," he said. "My lawyer will let you know."

  Her heart was being ripped apart. Oh, God, just one more word before he closed the door! She stepped forward.

  "Isn't it funny?" she said brightly. "We were so concerned about the world tearing us apart, taking us away from each other. That's why we got married so quickly, remember?" She laughed a little. "Well, that's what you said. Oh, well, I only meant...the world didn't have to do anything—we did it ourselves."

  In the open doorway Johnny paused. "Yes," he said quietly. "We did it ourselves."

  ***

  On December first, Concord Corporation sold all the timber rights in the Cat Bite Valley area to the Chopa Indian band for one dollar. The province nearly dropped into the Pacific in shock. For a week Jake Conrad was on every talk and news show going, both radio and television.

  "I admit to curiosity," he said, and it was quoted everywhere. "It's fairly obvious that the people protecting the environment are the ones who don't stand to profit directly from the polluting or despoiling. For example, the Chopa band stood to benefit only if the trees were not chopped in Cat Bite Valley. Now, they can benefit either way—if they choose to despoil their own environment and destroy the hunting and fishing grounds, they stand to make a hefty profit. There are a few dreams the Chopa nation could realize with sufficient cash. If I want to see how honourable our environmental moralists are, well, in this case I can afford to indulge my curiosity. Besides, I needed a tax write-off."

  There might be some question about that, it transpired. Although Concord Corporation lawyers had managed the sale in a way that ought to have guaranteed tax-write-off status, the federal government was making noises about disallowing the deduction.

  "Can he afford to indulge his curiosity if that happens?" Smith asked her father.

  Cord St. John shrugged. "Well, it would be expensive, but not as expensive as it would have been for St. John Forest Products alone."

  Her father had at first been merely resigned to his relative inactivity since the merger of the two companies, but now he seemed to be positively enjoying it. He had taken up art again and set up his easel in the same bright room Smith had used as a studio.

  "There must be something about this room," said Smith, breathing in the atmosphere of oil paint and turpentine with a sweet nostalgia.

  "Lots of north light," said her father succinctly. Shulamith laughed. After sixteen years it still seemed strange to see her father as anything but a hard-driving businessman.

  "And no broadloom." This room, unlike most of the others in the house, had a hardwood floor that until recently had been covered with a Persian carpet. Her father had had it taken up, and now oil paint spattered the floor's warm shine. "It reminds me of the flat in Paris a little."

  Her father looked around. "Does it? Yes, I suppose it does—on a somewhat grander scale. I had a skylight in Paris—that gave a better light."

  She had learned more about her father and his early life in the past few months than she had done in all her previous life. At the age of twenty-two he had left a disapproving family to follow an artist's life. He had travelled Europe and ended up in Paris, where he met and married her Israeli mother, who was studying at the Sorbonne.

  Smith had not imagined the happiness in that little flat. Those years had been the happiest in her father's life, too. And then her mother had gone—against all his pleading, and his presentiments of disaster—back to Israel to be at her brother's funeral.

  He heard the noise of the bomb blast in a dream, and then silence. The silence of perpetual loneliness. He had given up the flat and his artistic life and returned home to Vancouver, where his parents had left him a small inheritance.

  He had thought he loved his small daughter as much as ever, but his grief had made him silent and unreachable, and he forgot how much he had given her in the golden time. It had never occurred to him that he had stopped holding her—and that therefore no one held her; that he had stopped listening to her dreams, had stopped praising her. He had been as proud of his bright little daughter as ever; he had not noticed that he did not tell her so.

  "What sort of man is your husband?" he asked her that evening as they sat and looked out at a soft sunset. "Is he proud of you? What does he say about your new work—this song of yours?"

  She took a deep breath. "But I don't see him."

  "What about the other week there? Wasn't that Johnny who called me?"

  "Yes. And I think you should have asked me before—"

  "He's your husband, Shulamith."

  "Father, don't tell—"

  "Is he proud of you?"

  "Yes, damn you! Yes, he's proud of me! He congratulates me, and he comes all the way from Amsterdam just to tell me he's heard them playing my song! All right?"

  Her father was nodding. "That's good, that's good. A woman like you doesn't want a man who's competitive. You need a man whose manhood won't be threatened by your talent. You're too bright to bury it all for such a reason."

  The idea of Johnny's manhood being threatened by anything she did was so ridiculous it nearly made her laugh. He had always expected the best from her—right from the beginning when he had expected her to know all about St. John's involvement in Cat Bite.

  "I have no intention of burying my talents for love or anything else," she said dryly, but her father was immune to sarcasm.

  "Good!" he said. "You'll go a long way, whatever you do. I've always thought so."

  Thirty-five

  Curiously, there began to be a kind of angry sentiment against Jake Conrad, especially in the lumber trade. Old friends of Cord St. John's called on him to try to enlist his aid in an effort to halt the assignment of the timber rights to the Chopa band. There was a sort of grass roots feeling against it, as though Jake Conrad had given the Indians a major victory in an undeclared war.

  If one group of natives had the control of their land returned to them, surely that would inspire other groups to greater efforts against government and industry? Besides—and this feeling was very strong—what did Indians know about running their own affairs? The Department of Indian Affairs controlled every day of their lives. They might use the advantage Jake Conrad had given them to cause boundless harm to themselves and the forestry industry and even, if some were to be believed, the whole Western way of life.

  Jake Conrad laughed and did more interviews. He sat on a panel and accused his opponents of being "backward, blind and balky." He said those who had to be forced into the future usually did not survive there and invited them to check the direction of the winds of change and put their sails up accordingly.

  Johnny Winterhawk did interviews, too. He was suddenly highly visible, being both successfully assimilated and a militant Indian. He was also an expert, it was shortly discovered, on the Indian Act, the Department of Indian Affairs and all its leaked memos and such things as the differences between treaty and status Indians, as well as their similarities—"the policy of suppress and destroy is applied indiscriminately to all." He kept a studio audience breathless one day while he listed all the minor decisions of a reserve Indian's daily lif
e that had to be submitted to Indian Affairs for approval.

  "Are you allowed to suck your thumbs on your own?" had asked the shocked television host faintly.

  "If we can find them under all the paperwork," Johnny said, and the studio audience had broken into laughing applause.

  In the meantime, the provincial attorney general stayed the charges Johnny had brought against the police for wrongful search, which meant his hands were tied; and the Crown declined to prosecute the officers involved in Wilfred Tall Tree's arrest and "alleged" beating. Wilf, Smith learned through the press, was back at home on the island, but after six months had still not fully recovered from the beating. But old men take a long time to recover, his doctor said, and Wilf's prognosis was good.

  No more canoeing trips over to Oyster Island, I fear, Smith thought when she read that, remembering with a pang of yearning Wilf's cabin and the afternoon she had spent watching him carve a ritual mask.

  Meanwhile, amid great jubilation among her collaborators and friends, Smith wrote 'Like a River in Flood'—upbeat and sweet, with just the right hint of nostalgia.

  ***

  "I've been wanting to meet you for ages,'' said Vanessa Conrad with a smile. "Thank you for inviting us. It's a lovely party."

  "We've had a staff Christmas party every year," Smith's father had said. "This year I don't have any staff anymore. But I'd like to have a few people here at the house. And I'd like you to be hostess again."

  Her father had never thrown that many big parties—one or two a year—but Smith had begun to attend them at fourteen and had become his hostess at sixteen.

  "I'd like it very much if you'd invite some of your new friends along," St. John had said. Smith laughed at a private vision of Cimarron mixing with her father's establishment cronies.

  "I think I'd better throw my own party," she said.

  "Now look," returned her father. "All my friends have known you since you were a child. They're all very interested in your new career. They'd like to meet these people, Shulamith. They probably aren't quite as shockable as you imagine. And I'd like to meet them, too."