Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  I didn’t want to tell my news over the phone and apparently neither did Dale. Because we’re sitting in the truck on the way home from the airport and I’m just about to mention about the pregnancy when he says he got laid off. Turning up the long exit ramp with a pair of bastard-bright halogens in my rear-view and Dale blurts that he’s out of work. His voice pale and wounded and I look over for his eyes but can’t find them in the vehicular dark.

  He tells me he’s been laid off and he’s not sure what he’ll do but somebody knows somebody at the new shipyard and I say it’s okay. I say it’s not the time, hoping he’ll think I mean not the time to worry about money or employment when really I mean not the time to say about the child. A new child and its father out of work and he always said I was supposed to stay home and help Dad chip away at his debt while Dale made the money and now what?

  When we get home Dad’s already in bed which means Dale has one beer and a quick shot of whiskey while I nurse a peppermint tea. Dale tells me he thinks they were stupid, those Limousines. He thinks they were stupid for huddling together under a tree where they’re basically begging to be hit by lightning. I know he loves the cattle, too, but I have to wonder how a man could spend so many years with these creatures and think them stupid. I tell him I think there’s something awful and lovely in this kind of death—cattle lying together under a tree and the lightning coming down and all of them going at once. He shrugs, unconvinced, and says he’s tired.

  In bed, Dale stays up watching American Horror Story on his laptop and I lie next to him pretending to sleep, thinking about the man in the scree dune. The smell of the ocean and the gentle rub of the plaid blanket under my hips. I think of the whish of the ocean and the seagulls barking their tuneless dirge and the man panting and panting until his breath became the ocean and the ocean was entering me.

  I keep thinking I should turn over and tell Dale I’m pregnant but I don’t. Instead, I fall asleep thinking about the dead Limousin cattle. I see the nine of them prancing on the walls of the Great Hall of the Bulls, which I saw recently in that Herzog movie. They’re on the wall of the cave but they aren’t all coarse and ochre-coloured like the petroglyphs. They’re more like how they are in real life—boxy frames and pale brown coats, the strange moss where their horns were cut off and cauterized. And they’re dancing. Swaying gently back and forth on the wall, one of them with a leg cut off cleanly above the knee.

  About a year ago Dale and I were walking out to observe a rare nacreous cloud formation and a few minutes after we’d been walking along the rim of a cornfield this man appeared holding a shotgun. A bearded man wearing cut-off jean-shorts, his shins stark white. Usually we stayed on our side of the river but on this day we’d decided to cross and we were just ambling along the edge of the field staring up at the honey pouring through those strange flat clouds when there was a sawed-off twenty feet from us and behind it a man in garrison boots and ragged jean-shorts, his whole body a growl.

  “The fuck out of here,” he said. His beard gaped open, his mouth perverse in its wetness.

  Dale said okay, take it easy, we’re going. Took my arm and led me away. Dale squeezed my hand almost viciously and I was thinking but not wanting to say goodbye. The distant shish of the starlings and the creek’s soft gush and we were almost home before my heart settled somewhat, before I stopped thinking with every step that my back or brain might be suddenly opened by a rage of buckshot.

  We never saw any pot plants but what else could it have been? After that, Dale and I headed in the other direction when we took our walks along the creek, but things were never the same. I never told Dad because he wouldn’t like it, might even try to get involved. But for me it was crazy to think about your neighbours out there, ready to pull a shotgun on you. Awful to think that if they wanted to they could cross the creek and come down here at night. But mostly it was just terrible to think, to really think about what a shotgun blast would do to your body, how it could instantly trade the fragile fiction of form for the honest muck of flesh.

  Twice a year or so Dad fills up a trailer with the Limousines that are ready for the abattoir, the fats. We don’t see the actual death, which is good but also weird. Weird because afterwards the farm seems far more quiet than the missing bovine voices should leave it. Weird because Dad sometimes recycles the fats’ Star Trek names when new calves are born. Weird because if you know anything about slaughterhouses you can’t help picturing and maybe dreaming about these companions being skinned, eviscerated, and sawed in two lengthwise. Weird because cows form profound emotional bonds, particularly among females, and so the new quietude around the farm after the fats have been sent to the abattoir feels a lot like a big bruise purpling in the mammatus clouds that loom over the farm.

  Wearing full rubber suits and white disposable masks, Dad, Dale, and Uncle Stan pick up the piglets and smash their heads into the concrete floor before toeing them to make sure they’re dead. Slamming their skulls into the concrete and trampling through the gore to toss the little ragdoll corpses into barrels to become slop. The smell is an enormity of rot—fecund and noxious. Stan called the house after waking up this morning to find his ninety-three piglets puking and spasming in the dirt, their mothers walking around milk-swelled and groaning. We got the vet over and learned that the mothers and babies all had some kind of stomach infection and that the only way to cure it was to cull the piglets and feed them back to their mothers.

  I said I’d come down to help with the cleanup and I want to help because all of us know it is awful but it needs to be done. But I can’t help. Can’t even watch and yet I am watching. Watching brains lather concrete and my father and Uncle Stan looking focused, set on the task. They are not enjoying it but they seem to take a certain satisfaction in doing it right.

  Dale does not look focused. Dale looks wrecked. Dale stands there holding one spasming baby pig by the legs and raising it up and just looking at it rapt, as if he could will it to heal. He looks like he would like to take it into his arms, to cradle it like a human infant.

  Dad and Stan trade a glance and everyone feels their meaning.

  “Dale,” Dad says. “Either do it or get out of here.”

  So Dale raises the piglet slowly. Raises it and holds it high and then brings it down. Dale swings the piglet hard and fast but wavers halfway. Slows the swing so that the piglet doesn’t die, only lies there still spasming with a dent in its head.

  Dale looks at me then. Meets my eyes as he stands uselessly over the still shuddering baby pig and I choose this time to say that I’m pregnant. Dale is the only one who hears. My father standing behind him holding two freshly killed baby pigs and Dale quivering as I repeat that I’m pregnant. Stan walks over and picks up the dented pig and does what needs to be done, blood splatting onto my pant leg. Dale walks forward holding out his blood-browned arms as if to hug me, his face an agony of joy.

  Before cattle are slaughtered for beef they go into something called a squeeze chute, part of a system pioneered by behaviourist Temple Grandin. Cattle are prey animals and they don’t like loud noises or carnivores like humans standing where they can’t see them. The squeeze chute closes in around them and hugs them, making them feel safe while they ride down the conveyor towards their electric demise. A similar machine can be used to calm hypersensitive people, but when used on humans it’s called a “hug machine.” And isn’t there something nice in that, something sweet in the thought that in their last moments cattle are taken into a set of great metallic arms and hugged to death?

  In bed that night Dale seems to have forgotten all about the pigs. He keeps patting my belly and trying to see if I’m showing yet and I tell him no way. I tell him it’ll be another eight weeks before anything like that and there’s still a fifty percent chance of miscarriage but none of it darkens his bliss. We look at a pregnancy app together and it shows us an image of the fetus at five weeks, looking like a little tadpole feedi
ng on a yolk sac twice its size. It has translucent skin and looks strangely reptilian. Dale leans down and whispers into my belly, calling the baby “Taddy” and “Radpole” and “Lizzy the Wizard.”

  After Dale falls asleep I stand up and walk to the window, look out over the pasture where the Holsteins are passing the night. I can’t see them clearly but I can sense their black, hulking forms and I think about pastures, think about the new slick monopoly operation down the road. Me and Dad were driving yesterday and we saw that they’d finished the construction and looked to be starting business. I stared at that roofed aluminum city thinking something was strange with it. We were three clicks away before I blurted, “Where were the pastures?”

  Dad told me they didn’t have pastures, the new dairy farms. Pastures weren’t efficient so the animals simply stayed inside. Stayed in ten-by-six stalls with milk machine robots travelling between them and just pumping, pumping. I think of that strange giant barn all full of cows being suckled by machines, their calves sent off for veal and their milk being sucked, and my breasts start to throb. There’s been some pain from contact but nothing like this—a huge and unprovoked ache. As if my breasts were trapped souls, howling.

  Below, the Holsteins plod through their private, outdoor lives. Some of them loafing about, some of them eating, most lying down to sleep. One of them groans and I wonder what she’s saying. Is she lost or lonely, does she miss her calf? Or is she just saying hello, just sending her voice into the world? Whatever she’s saying, I can’t imagine not hearing it. Can’t imagine looking out this window and not seeing cows in the pasture. Can’t and don’t want to imagine growing up on a farm with no hulking shadows loafing through the dark.

  I sit at the edge of the mattress and graze my knuckles across Dale’s forehead. I don’t say it aloud but just sort of think towards him that I’m glad he couldn’t do it, happy he couldn’t kill those baby pigs. He twitches and sleep-wheezes. Mutters something incoherent, something I can’t quite understand. Something verging on word in the tenderest of tones.

  DRIFT

  Julie is standing in the Queen Street Sobeys when the announcement comes over the PA. She’s receiving a slab of pork from the avuncular red-nosed butcher and she suddenly becomes aware that she is holding a hunk of dead animal body. Flesh that was recently growing, twitching. Flesh that had been weary, sated, sore. The Sobeys regional whatever clears his throat and says East Rock, says methane, says rescue effort, and she can feel the coldness of the pork tenderloin through its clay-red jacket. She is thinking no, thinking fucksakes, thinking not now. Recalling Lorne at six, his hockey goon grin as she helped him write his name again and again on the back cover of their father’s yachting magazine. Showing her that he could do it himself and yes he could do it perfectly except he made the capital “L” backwards every time. She conjures the scrawl of his reverted “L,” perturbed shoppers drifting by like receipts in a subway station.

  And then she is home. She is in her home on Victoria Road, walking up to Franz, feeling less like a person or a body than a shuddering field of static and nerve. Franz is eating olives and holding a rolled-up newspaper and he hugs her without needing to ask why and it’s only then that she realizes she did not pay for the tenderloin. She stole that cut of meat and she is squeezing it now, squeezing as if death were not a question, as if the warmth of her hands could reanimate that flesh, squeezing heedless of the blood seeping through the butcher’s paper, pocking the white tiles of her kitchen floor.

  She tells Franz what she heard at Sobeys and he gently pulls the tenderloin out of her hand, places it in the sink. He helps her over to the couch and pours a glass of Perrier that she doesn’t lift from the walnut coffee table. She watches a ring form. She stares and stares at that ghost-white halo and thinks of her brother getting his front teeth pulled. Remembers how she and her mother had sat together in the dentist’s office clutching magazines and listening to his screams blaring through the dentist’s door. The sound of the drill and her brother screaming and there was nothing she could do. He came out with a black square in the front of his face and he had no recollection of the pain. Did not remember screaming and was happy to bring his tongue up into that new slimy cavity and stare at himself in the elevator mirror.

  “Should we go?” Franz asks.

  “No,” she says. “He’s fine. I’m sure he’s fine.”

  She heads to the phone and calls her brother’s home number and of course he doesn’t answer—she spoke to him last night and knows he was on shift this morning. But she calls again just to listen to his voice on the answering machine, asking her to please leave a message.

  They are biking up Chebucto Road beneath a blaring sun. They are climbing the hill on their way to Chocolate Lake and it has always been an unspoken pact that they pedal as fast as they can, that they arrive at the lake sweaty and panting and race straight into the water, let it shock them into mute euphoria.

  Her calves stiffen and she digs harder, churning the pedals, but the hill does not mellow. She feels the pavement soften in the heat, her tires slugging through the gummy black. The sun fierce on her shoulders and she longs for water, yearns to watch the trees hang over the shore, green and gentle in the light lake breeze.

  She can sense her brother now, too close behind her. She pumps her thighs, racing less against him than against her own fear of being caught. He whizzes past on the outside, raises his middle finger and looks over his shoulder, a jagged thrill in his eyes. Which is when she learns there is another gear in her. She clamps down and the pedals lighten. Her tires dig and chuck and she is gone, past him again and this time he will not overtake her.

  Eventually Jack and Owen come inside panting from their street hockey game and sensing in their childish way that something is wrong. They are sweaty and beautiful, blue eyes gleaming out of their cinnamon skin and she is filled with a nausea of love. They sit down on the couch beside her. Sit in a perfect silence she would never be able to command.

  After a hushed explanation to the boys, Franz puts the radio on and they wait for news. They wait one hour, then two. They wait for names, long for names. Names of the missing, the rescued, the buried, the people who were down in the drifts when the methane swelled and surged and blasted. The reporters say “ambulances,” “rescue,” “draegermen.” But there are no names. No facts. No news. No mention of 1838, 1880, 1958—each endeavour ending in methane, in explosion.

  She calls her brother three more times, this time hanging up before the machine answers, riding the ring’s sonic purr as if that bleating song could lull the real. Owen ventures into the yard and returns with a bouquet of dandelions and how could she not turn to liquid, smile and start to weep as she oozes into her son’s arms?

  Franz overcooks the tenderloin and they eat dinner early, hunched around the television, still desperate for news and getting nothing. The meat is chewy with too much savoury glaze but Julie insists that they eat the whole thing. She and the boys sit wordless at the table listening to the radio, chewing slow and dutiful, jaws tired. She keeps chewing long after Franz and the boys have given up, their brows brailled with sweat. Julie eats that Sobeys pork like secular eucharist, eats as if all her love for her brother were bent into this task, eats until the plate is bare and pink and her husband’s eyes are a bluster of worry.

  Still no news from the radio. No names. No dead. No survivors.

  The pork in her mouth ceases to be meat, becomes flesh.

  Coal is sedimentary rock formed from peat that has been crushed and condensed over hundreds of millions of years. It is derived from plant matter that flourished about 325 million years ago during the carboniferous period and was subsequently covered by layers of sediment and cooked slowly through the ages. Though China is the world leader in coal extraction and production, many regions worldwide still mine coal and use it as part of their energy grids. Nova Scotia Power currently operates four facilities—Linga
n, Point Aconi, Point Tupper, and Trenton—that use coal or pet coke to generate electricity.

  Lorne shouts from behind her but she leans on the handlebars and keeps pedalling. The hill yields, curves, and begins to send her down, down towards the Rotary and the Northwest Arm. She pedals and pedals and stops, lets the bike tilt into the hill and carry her down. Sunlight winking off windshields and behind them the glimmer of the Northwest Arm, the blue sky blooming popcorn clouds.

  A sustained horn blares and Lorne shrieks again and this time there is a quaver in his voice. Something is wrong but she’s going too fast to look back. Brakes screeching and her brother crying out and she cannot stop the bicycle fast enough, finds herself jumping off. Rolling onto grass, then pavement.

  Julie rises and looks back up the hill to where her brother lies on the road next to two pickups with their four-ways on. Distress and burnt rubber shimmering in the sunlight. Lorne’s red Supercycle crumpled beneath a tire and Lorne on the ground, clinging to his leg and wailing.

  She sets off up the hill towards him.

  After dinner she rises wordlessly and heads upstairs to pack. She takes a quiet pleasure in the sound of the zipper of her toiletries case, in the sponge of her socks as she folds them into her suitcase. She senses herself trying to slow things down, to cultivate the drawl of ritual. When she comes downstairs with her bags, Franz asks where she’s going and she simply looks at him. He nods, rises, and begins to herd the boys and their overnight bags into the Camry. He calls work for her, says maybe a week, maybe more. Then he calls her parents in Vancouver and tells them to book a flight. He looks at her like “do you want to” and she shakes her head like “I just can’t.” Hanging up, he says her parents have booked a flight, they’ll be there by tomorrow night.