by Donna Milner
“Oh, yeah,” Julie agrees, as the procession winds up the hill above the river. “She puts on a good show for the cheap seats, but those of us who paid the price know what a great actress she really is.”
Jessie laughs out loud at the analogy. After she regains control she pours coffee into the Thermos lid and offers it to Julie, who shakes her head in answer.
“Anyhow, it’s a good thing she’s not here.” Jessie leans back in her seat. She takes a sip of coffee then turns her head toward Julie. “Jules?” she asks. “Are you and Ian okay?”
“Okay?” Julie replies. “What’s okay?”
“I don’t mean all this stuff… the moving. I mean you. Are the two of you okay?”
Julie swallows, then says, “That obvious, huh?”
“Anyone would have to be an idiot not to notice the guarded way you two treat each other now. I’d be less concerned if you were out and out bickering.”
Julie’s hands grip the steering wheel tighter.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Jessie asks.
Julie shakes her head.
“Well, when you do,” Jessie reaches over and squeezes her shoulder, “you know that I’m only a phone call away.”
Not trusting her own voice, Julie nods. After a few moments of silence she turns on the Sirius radio. She keeps her eyes on the road while a panel of CNN voices dissect Barack Obama’s Democratic Nomination Victory speech.
An hour and a half later the Jeep follows at a distance while the moving van crawls down the switch-back road leading to the ranch. Near the viewpoint where Ian and Julie had stopped with the realtor, Jessie rolls down the passenger window to peer down into the green valley. “God, what a view,” she exclaims.
“Yeah. It’s really something isn’t it?”
Suddenly a vehicle takes the corner ahead a little too fast and fishtails on the gravel. The pickup truck rights itself and continues up the road toward them. Julie recognizes the dusty old truck as the one that was parked behind the tenant’s cabin. A dog’s large grey head hangs out of the passenger window, his tongue flapping in the wind. Julie keeps her eye on the driver’s side of the cab as the truck approaches. It passes by, spewing dust in its wake, but not before she catches a glimpse of a shadowed figure wearing a cowboy hat—and the slight raising of the hand on the steering wheel in the universal country-road greeting.
“Who was that?” Jessie asks.
“Oh that’s the tenant we inherited with the ranch. I’ve never met him. According to the owner, the old guy doesn’t have much use for women.”
“Is he staying?”
“Looks that way. Ian’s decided that he’ll be a great help around the place.”
“So, Ian really intends to become a rancher?”
“Gentleman rancher is more like it. And I don’t really know how far even that will go. He’s already thinking of selling off the cattle in the fall. Doesn’t want to winter feed them. Everyone tells him though, that if he gives up the cows for too long he’ll lose the range permits. Who knows? This is a learn-as-you-go project for him.”
“What is it for you?”
Julie considers the question. After a moment she shakes her head, and says quietly, “I don’t know.”
As large as their home in town was, the ranch house swallows up their furniture, leaving the oversized rooms wanting more. Once the movers leave, Ian and Barry spend the rest of the day setting up Ian’s office and going over the solar system and back-up generator. Julie and Jessie unpack the linen boxes and make up the beds in the master bedroom and guest room. Leaving her sister to tackle the kitchen dishes, Julie starts on the boxes left in the foyer, which everyone else has skirted around all day. One by one she carries them upstairs and carefully stacks the boxes of Darla’s treasures, her doll collection, her favourite clothes, unopened, in the spare bedroom. Ian can insist on ‘letting go,’ making a clean break from the past all he likes, but there are some things she can’t leave behind.
After the sun goes down everyone sits exhausted in the midst of the remaining boxes in the dining room, their picnic dinner haphazardly spread out on the table before them.
Jessie and Barry carry the conversation, filling in the awkward silent spaces with the comfortable chatter of a happily married couple.
Ian reaches over and refills Julie’s wineglass. He raises his own in a toast, “To our new home,” he says. “Here, here,” Jessie and Barry join in, clicking their glasses against his, then Julie’s. She takes a long sip of the soothing red liquid, watching the implausible candlelit scene play out in the floor to ceiling windows in the living room. Beyond their reflections, the darkness outside is complete until suddenly the rising moon casts its long reflection across the lake. She leans back and watches the stark display while the alcohol’s lulling effect allows the whispers to seep into her unguarded mind. What have I done? How did I allow it to go this far?
She squeezes her eyes shut, refusing to allow the doubts to take hold. One year. One year, she repeats the silent mantra. One year. She has committed to one year. She can do anything for a year, can’t she? Then she will see.
In the morning, her head pounds with an after-wine ache as she hugs Jessie goodbye. She wants to tell her to come back up when the girls are out of school for the summer. She wants to say that she misses her nieces, and ask her to bring them for a visit soon. But she finds no voice for the words.
After she and Ian wave them off, when their tail lights disappear around the corner, he asks, “Would you like to go for a walk? See if the land looks any different now that we own it.”
She turns and forces a smile to her lips. “Yes, that would be nice.” It will be good to do something physical together. Ian is right, let this be a fresh start. One day at a time. She changes into her hiking boots in the mudroom then goes outside and joins him on the back porch. Closing the door behind her, she asks Ian for the key.
“Don’t bother,” he says offhandedly. “You don’t have to lock out anyone here.”
Julie’s hand freezes on the doorknob. Her heart thudding in her chest, she turns to meet his eyes. She can see that his remark was not malicious, that it was just a thoughtless slip, and meant nothing, yet even Ian recoils at his careless statement. The words in themselves are harmless, but the underlying significance is pitiless enough to wrench apart her fragile heart.
6
The Chilcotin summer wears on as Chilcotin summers do, without the promise of freedom from overnight frosts, or relief from a scorching noonday sun. Throughout the Cariboo, suppression crews and water bombers fight raging wildfires. The constant winds keep the valley free of smoke for the most part, but whenever they let up, an acrid burnt smell hangs heavy in the air. On many days the sun is nothing more than a large red ball behind a yellow-grey haze. Julie keeps a nervous eye on the western ridge, half expecting a wall of flame to appear at any moment and race down into the valley. Ian assures her that it isn’t likely since there is nothing on the plateau above the ranch to feed the fires except miles of sparse grassland and volcanic rock.
In the valley, meadow grass grows knee high, waist high, shoulder high. The haying crew shows up during the last week of July, parking their trucks and vans over at the tenant’s cabin. Julie steers clear of the fields and meadows while they work.
The crew, mostly local Natives, are anxious to leave, according to Ian. There is far greater money to be made fighting forest fires. “They’re only here thanks to Virgil,” he informs her. In an effort to be done quickly they work every day, from first light until darkness, which, although the days are already growing shorter, is still well after nine at night. To Julie’s surprise Ian works in the fields with them. She isn’t certain whether he is a help or a hindrance out there, but he returns home each evening—smelling of freshly cut meadow grass and sweat—with a satisfied look on his dust-streaked face.
The haying is finished in record time and the crew pulls out in the middle of August. One morning not long after they leave,
Julie finds herself kneeling in the potato patch outside of Ian’s office. Keeping a garden is a first for her. If only her mother could see her now. She would either be horrified or impressed.
While Julie works, the morning mist rises like steam from the lake’s rippling surface. The only sound is the water lapping against the stones near shore and the drone of mosquitoes and black flies. The sky is clear and the smell of smoke no longer fills the air, so that the insistent insects are back in full force. Julie alternates between waving them away and attacking the weeds with her hand trowel. As the morning wears on, the sun’s rays warm her back and the mosquitoes dissipate in the heat. Rooting around in the freshly turned earth beneath a drooping plant, Julie retrieves a handful of nugget-sized potatoes. She rubs them between her gloved hands then drops them into the basket at her side. Her bounty smells of warm soil and the promise of a hot summer afternoon.
This is the love part of the love-hate relationship she has developed with this inherited garden. The hate part is the commitment to someone else’s project. So in retaliation, all summer she has weeded and hoed Elke Woell’s forsaken garden on her own terms, which is giving it as little time as necessary. And it shows. Today, guilt has forced Julie to pay attention to the neglected plants. Still, a part of her resents it. Now that she’s free to, now that the sky is clear of smoke and the crews are gone, she would rather be hiking, following the serpentine creek that winds through the empty meadows or exploring the forests. She has to admit though, that the garden serves the same purpose. It forces her outdoors in spite of herself. It would be too easy to hide inside the house, too easy to get lost in it. It certainly is large enough. Large enough that she and Ian can keep their distance.
She glances over her shoulder at the French doors. Inside Ian’s office, the top of his silver head is bent over the computer screen; files are piled high on either side of his desk. For a man who was so anxious to ‘go back to the land’ he spends very little time enjoying it.
When they first moved out here, he often joined her on her daily hikes. Before long he started begging off, claiming he was snowed under with paperwork. After a while he stopped altogether. Now, the furthest he ventures from the house is over to the tenant’s cabin to collect the rent and have a cup of coffee. Coffee, which she notices, takes him a while to drink. After the first month, Ian had decided not to charge Virgil Blue rent, given all the work he did around the ranch. His offer was refused. The tenant insisted that, as with the previous owners, he would continue to pay the two hundred dollars a month rent as well as helping around the ranch. In return he expects unrestricted use of the ranch draft horses to log his woodlot. It’s a fair exchange, according to him. More than fair, according to Ian. All this negotiation, Julie has learned second-hand from the scrawled notes she sometimes finds tacked to their back door. Here it is almost mid-August and she has yet to meet their elusive tenant. The only proof of his existence has been his shadowed outline behind the wheel of his pickup, and the distant figure she saw guiding the massive team of Clydesdales through the chest-high meadow grass during the haying season.
The hired crew had worked with the machinery, the mowers and rakes, which had come with the ranch. But just as Elke Woell said, it appears Virgil trusts no one with the horses, not even their rightful owner. Ian’s only too happy to keep things this way. Haying for him has been a novelty, a diversion from accounting. Now that it’s done, Julie worries that he’ll go back to sitting in his office getting lost in his numbers. She fears that the only physical exercise he’ll have now is walking as far as the old cabin.
She attacks the roots of another plant, wondered what her husband and their tenant can possibly find in common to talk about. Whatever it is, every time Ian returns from the cabin his step seems lighter, as if a burden has been shed on the short journey. Perhaps it’s just that the old guy is so completely removed from their former life. It must be a relief to spend time with someone who knows nothing of their past, their circumstances, and who expects nothing except to share a cup of coffee.
Maybe she’ll invite him over for dinner one night. She smiles at the thought of trying to win over the old curmudgeon. There are signs, after all, that Virgil Blue is aware of her existence. The first week he sent two hand-carved walking sticks home with Ian. Later, after her excursions became solo, she discovered a pocket book, Identifying Animal Tracks of British Columbia, out on the back porch railing one morning. Not long after there was an information pamphlet on how to react to wild animal encounters.
Last month, when Ian came back from collecting the rent he told her, “Virgil thinks you need a dog.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” she had replied bemused. “I think I’ll pass on that.”
Then, last week, Ian had returned from one of his bi-weekly trips into Waverley Creek and handed her a black leather case. “What’s this?” she’d asked. Ian was not one for unannounced gifts.
“Bear spray,” he said. “Obviously Virgil is trying to tell you something.”
“I’ve never seen any bears,” she said, sliding the can out of the case and inspecting it.
“Yeah, well I guess Virgil thinks that they see you.”
Now, during her hikes, Julie feels the eyes of the forest following her, and sometimes wonders if those eyes belong to their tenant.
Secretly, she can’t imagine having the presence of mind to remove the can from the leather case, pull out the little red tag and point the nozzle the right way, if a bear were to actually get close enough to her to spray. Yet to reassure Ian, and perhaps Virgil, she tries to remember to strap the bear spray to her waist whenever she goes hiking.
“Quite a bossy old fellow,” she mutters. Yet here she is on her knees digging in the dirt all because of the advice of a complete stranger. The day after the hay was all in, she had found one of his yellow notes on the porch railing. She hadn’t needed Ian to decipher the scrawled message advising the harvesting of some of the potatoes now, while they were small and sweet tasting.
She tosses another handful of the baby spuds into her basket just as a shadow falls across it.
“Look at this, Ian,” she says raking her hand over the potatoes in the overflowing basket.
“This is only from a couple of plants. I can’t imagine why anyone would keep such a huge garden for just two people.”
When there is no response, she looks up, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare. Instead of her husband standing above her, Julie finds herself squinting into the shadowed form of a stranger.
“Oh,” she says pushing herself up, “you must be Virgil.”
The broad-shouldered man standing before her is not nearly as tall as Ian, but he still towers over her. He removes his dust-covered black cowboy hat, revealing the grey sheen of close-cropped hair in sharp contrast with his dark scalp. A wide-set face, neither smiling nor unsmiling, looks back at her with a neutral expression that she cannot interpret.
He’s not as old as she had imagined, perhaps only a few years older than Ian. It’s hard to tell. The crinkled crow’s feet around his dark eyes, the high cheekbones, the clean-shaven copper-hued skin, smooth except for a faint trace of ancient pockmarks, make for an ageless, surprisingly handsome, face. She has seen this face before; it is not a face you would forget, although she cannot remember where. Julie reaches out to take the hand being offered, but hers stops mid-air as her gaze travels from his expressionless eyes down to the red bandanna knotted at his throat—and to the carved pendant hanging below. The moment passes in frozen silence, in heartbeats that stretch time like taut elastic, which snaps as the French doors behind her swing open.
“Hey, Virgil,” Ian calls out. “It’s about time you met Julie.”
Julie’s arm drops to her side, the hand trowel falls to the ground with a soft thud. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice coming out a choked whisper. Willing herself to lift her leaded feet, she turns and walks out of the garden, each step a weighted trudge.
Ian reaches out to
her as she comes up the steps. “Julie, what…”
She shakes her head and pushes past him and hurries across the wraparound porch toward the back of the house. At the corner, she glances back to see Ian rush down to where their tenant remains standing, his hat in his hands, in the garden row. Without a word, Virgil reaches into his pocket, pulls out a roll of bills, and hands his rent money to Ian.
In the mudroom, Julie closes the door behind her and with shaking hands pulls off her garden gloves and tosses them on top of the washing machine. Dirt skitters across the smooth white metal and falls to the floor. She shakes off her rubber clogs and kicks them into the corner. The back door opens.
“Jesus, Julie, what the hell was that?” Ian demands.
She whirls around to face him. She does not want to have this conversation, but there is no avoiding it, no way not to break their unspoken truce. For the last nine months they have both become adept at the careful manoeuvring around the minefields of words. They have fallen into a polite routine in dealing with each other, any conversations between the two of them now about the housekeeping of life, about the day-to-day details of existence while skirting the edges of the reality. Well, reality has just exploded in her face and she can’t hold back.
“The pendant. Didn’t you notice his pendant?” The words sound so much harsher, more accusatory than she intends.
Ian shuts the mudroom door with a soft click as if suddenly aware of how loud their voices are, as if the subject of their first verbal conflict since moving here might hear them.
“Pendant? What pendant?” His expression changes from anger to confusion. “What are you talking about, Julie?”
“The crow! It’s exactly like the one...” she stops mid-sentence as the truth strikes her. Of course the pendant would mean nothing to Ian. He had no idea that Levi Johnny used to wear an identical carved crow—his spirit guide—around his neck.
Ian hadn’t seen him take it off that night and place it around Darla’s neck for good luck. Ian couldn’t have, because he wasn’t there the night Levi Johnny killed their daughter.