9
After a week of working straight through cold, early mornings that turned into damp and windy days, Tom wanted to give his planters a day off. He announced this at dinner and was given a rough hug by the person sitting next to him. Someone else got up from the table and slapped him on the back. Two planters from Matt’s crew were elected to drive the two-hour round trip, south along the lake, to the Takla Landing outpost to buy beer.
After he finished eating, Tom headed to the showers with his tool kit. People had been complaining about water pressure. Even in the bush, they said, they expected more than this sad trickle. He checked the connections at the pump and the cables to the nozzles. He was in one of the cubicles when Nix approached him. She lifted the canvas flap, kicked the toe of his boot.
“Do you ever stop working?” she asked.
“Eh?”
“All we ever see of you is the bottom half. Your top bits are always hidden under a hood or behind a tire or something.”
Tom shrugged, turned his wrench against the nozzle fitting.
“Will you join the party tonight?”
He lowered his wrench from the nozzle and looked at her. She had her towel over her shoulder and gripped a plastic soap container in one hand, toothbrush and toothpaste in the other.
“If I get this done,” he said.
Two fires burned on the beach as the sky above the Skeenas softened to pink and orange, the clouds breaking for the first time in a week. Three people floated in a canoe in the middle of the lake, and from the beach their silhouettes grew darker and darker until they and the canoe were one perfect black form, drifting on the water. Depending on the direction of the wind, every now and then their voices and their laughter echoed through the air, like birds. Tom sat on a flat rock at one of the fires next to Penny with the pink hair. She spit sunflower seeds into the flames and said to no one in particular that after this week, her cold bones ached and she felt like an old woman. Someone else complained that the blisters on his heels were the size of apples. Amy announced that her chafing was already so bad that halfway through the day she’d ripped off her underwear in the middle of the block and wasn’t going to wear any for the rest of the season. They all agreed, though, that for tonight, things were looking up. They had beer and dope and a good fire; the weather was turning and maybe the sun would come out for their day off. Three guys deftly kicked a hacky sack, tossing the dusty bag from the toes of their shoes, the sides of their shoes, their knees, chests. A red Frisbee cruised a smooth and lazy arc against the backdrop of the lake.
Sweet’s voice carried over from the other fire. He was holding court, telling a story he’d recounted so many times that it was now becoming mythical. And even though pretty much everyone in the circle had heard it before, they sat with their firelit faces toward him. The year before, there had been a heat wave that persisted for close to a month. The dust hung heavy those long weeks and everyone’s throats and noses were full of it, and the land was as dry and brittle as the fur of a long-dead animal. The company was working fire hours, from two in the morning until nine, to avoid the hottest, most hazardous part of the day. One morning, as everyone was packing up to go back to camp, Tom got a call on the radio about a brush fire on Sweet’s land. No one knew or was willing to admit knowing how it started—it could have been a cigarette butt flicked to the ground or it could have been a spark from a shovel hitting rock—but by the time Tom reached the site of the fire, there was nothing more than a sky full of smoke and a carpet of wet, black brush. Sweet had been quick with the fire box, pumping water from a nearby creek and arming each of his crew with a shovel big enough to dig a trench. If there had been any wind that day, the story would have been different.
“I saved the chief’s ass,” Sweet said now. “Isn’t that right, boss?” he called across to Tom. “Everything you see here would have gone up in flames if I weren’t the fastest-acting motherfucker this side of the Rockies.”
Though they had put out the fire, they still had to call in the ministry guys to make sure there was nothing smoldering deep in the brush. Fires in the bush could last for months underground if they weren’t extinguished right, living off dry roots and buried stumps. The sleeping, subterranean burn could one day creep up the inside of a hollow tree and rage into the forest.
Now the smoke from the fire shifted direction and settled over Tom, in his eyes. He squeezed them shut against the sting, dug his knuckles into his eye sockets, and waited for the smoke to shift again.
“‘I hate white rabbits,’ chief! Say it!” This came from either Amy or Penny.
“Folklore,” said Tom. “Does nothing.” He waved the smoke from his face and coughed, his eyes still shut.
“You’ve got to have a little faith.” This came from a voice closer to him, almost in his ear. He opened his eyes and there was Nix, sitting next to him, just clear of the smoke. He was about to get up to move but the smoke shifted again, rising up the center of the circle, and he could breathe.
“See?” she said. “The magic words work.”
“But I didn’t say them.” He wiped his wet eyes.
She swayed into him, pressing her shoulder against his. “I said them for you.”
Guitars came out, and drums. Somebody produced a flute. Tom got up from the fire and walked across the cold clearing, drawn to the punk music coming from an old ambulance painted midnight blue. The ambulance belonged to Luis, who was skinny and long-limbed, wore thick glasses, and was never without a wool toque. Tom didn’t know a lot about him—only that he was a fast planter and hoarded a supply of Coca-Cola, which he shared with no one, in the depths of his ambulance.
Luis sat at the back of the ambulance, dangling his legs over the tailgate. The two swinging doors were open, and inside was a dark nest of blankets and clothes. He held up the oily joint he’d been smoking in a half wave, offering it to Tom.
“I grew it myself,” he said, his eyelids waxy. His face was red and swollen, as if he’d been punched. “I’ve got a whole closet full of mother plants, a water table. You can smoke this without any repercussions.” He chuckled, held out his pinched fingers: “Here.”
“What happened to your face?” Tom asked, refusing the joint.
“Fucking allergic to blackflies.” Luis twisted back into his ambulance and shuffled through a pile of clothes. He sat back up holding a paper bag, soft with wrinkles. Pulled out a string of black licorice and dangled it.
“I’ll take one of those, though,” said Tom.
“You mind if I give you a red one? Black is my favorite.”
Tom took the candy and chewed on the end as if it were a piece of grass, and looked out toward the lake. A few stars had come out, people danced, and the fires bent in the wind. Nix walked across the clearing toward her cook van with Sweet just behind her. He stopped her, said something, and she laughed, put her hand on his chest, and shoved him away.
“Why buy red if you prefer black?” Tom asked Luis.
“Hm?”
“Never mind.” Tom grinned at him and moved on.
He decided to pack it in just the other side of midnight. Everyone was still up, either at the fires or the vestibules of their tents, drinking beer or red wine or mugs of tea. They would stay up all night and sleep, unburdened, all the next day. They deserved it. He would get up early in the morning, take advantage of the peace, and get on with his work. When he got to the door of his trailer he felt a light touch on his back, between his shoulder blades.
“You okay?” It was Nix, with a wool blanket over her shoulders.
“Going to bed,” he said. He could barely see her face in the dark, only the hint of her features; when she turned her head, her profile was backlit from the fires.
“No, I know. Me too. I just wanted to say good night.”
He pulled open the door and put one foot on the step and looked back at her. “Good night, then.”
“Can I come in for a bit?” She said this as she shook the blanket from
her shoulders and unfolded it and wrapped it around her body, so that her head was down and her words difficult to hear.
“Sorry?”
“Are you going to make me say it again?” She hopped a few times and hugged the blanket tightly around herself. “I want to come in with you. Can I?”
He looked at her dark shape, considering. He did want to bring her inside; there was something about this time of night that made him feel as though he could. Somehow the lateness of the hour and the dark meant that it wouldn’t count—he couldn’t even see her face. And he had thought about her, about touching her. Over the past week he’d thought about it plenty of times.
Somebody dumped a big log onto the fire, and a clap of sparks rose into the night and hung there spiraling, and then extinguished. And he had enough sense to think beyond this hour, this dark, and to how this would all look to him when the sun rose.
He wanted to be kind, but he was no good at flirting. He smiled, hoped that she could see it in the dark. “No. You can’t come in.”
“But you thought about it,” she said.
10
Elka died four years after she left. News reached Tom via a brief letter from Bobbie, who still lived on Aguanish, in the same run-down cottage where Elka had grown up. By that time, Tom and Curtis and Erin were doing pretty good. House was clean; they ate the food he cooked. Curtis was starting to win trail races on his bike, and Erin could climb the neighbor’s maple tree to the top. At the bottom of Bobbie’s letter was a plea for him to come to the island, and if there was no other option, he could bring the children.
So he packed a small bag and left Curtis and Erin with Samantha. Crawling in first gear behind a laboring truck on the switchbacks before Pemberton, a black Lab panting out the truck’s back window, Tom thought about the only other time he’d been to Aguanish Island. That first trip down, he had bruised the heel of his hand from hitting the wheel. On the narrow road that cut into the side of the mountain just north of Horseshoe Bay, he’d wanted to launch over the sea to the west; he couldn’t get there fast enough. This time, at least, it didn’t matter how long it took.
He slept on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island and then drove unimpeded the short distance to Nanoose, where he could catch a smaller, foot-passenger ferry to Aguanish. The last scheduled crossing of the day was canceled due to high winds, and he was obliged to stay the night in a motel. The weather hadn’t improved much by the next morning, so he sat down to a late breakfast in the marina pub and watched the cruisers swing on their moorings and waited for the wind to die down, as the man at the ferry terminal said it would.
It was just after 3 p.m. when he stood on the wet ferry deck, the flat-nosed boat plowing through the chop of the Georgia Strait. The clouds were low and heavy and scraped across the rocky hills of Aguanish. All the letter had said was that Elka had been found dead in Alberta. It wasn’t news that he was surprised to get, but listening to Bobbie tell it was going to be hard, like lifting a bandage to see a wound.
From Owl Bay, Tom caught a ride to Bobbie’s place with an elf-like woman in a yellow van. A trinket of beads swung from the rearview mirror as she turned south onto the main island road.
“You visiting someone?” she asked.
“My mother-in-law.”
The road moved gently through dense Douglas fir flossed with hairy grandfather’s-beard and mist. Something heavy rolled in the back of the van. Up ahead, two men in raincoats walked by the side of the road, and when she was level with them she slowed the van and leaned out the window. She asked if they needed a lift. Smiling, they waved her off, and she told them she’d see them later.
Elka had asked him once or twice if he would consider moving there. Some aspects of the place would have suited him—subsistence farming, producing his own energy, and wasting nothing. But what he couldn’t fathom was the familiarity. All the people on the island knew each other. And the basket weaving, the spirituality, the self-centeredness. So much of Elka’s upbringing had been about seeking some kind of inner peace, and he sometimes thought that maybe after looking so hard at herself, she’d bored a hole right through her middle.
“So who’s your mother-in-law, then?”
“Roberta Sirota.”
“Bobbie?” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “No kidding.” She cupped the wheel loosely with the fingertips of her right hand and draped her left arm out the window. She cocked her head to the side. “You staying long?”
“Just down for the day.”
“You know, a bunch of us built her a cob hut last year, a place to make her brews and creams and stuff.”
He nodded. She turned onto a smaller, dirt road that cut into a seam of island bedrock. Patches of gray sea could be seen through the trees, and soon the road swung to the left and followed a cliff. There were glimpses of the coastline dipping in and out of rocky coves before the road turned in again. Tough pines and junipers accustomed to strong wind and saltwater spray. This was Bobbie’s island.
The woman stopped the van in front of a familiar wall of blackberry. She leaned over to turn off the ignition, and the edge of her ear poked through the straight fall of her hair, like a kitten’s tongue. “Tell Bobbie to come over and see me sometime,” she said.
It had been nine years since he’d been to Bobbie’s place, and nothing much had changed. There was the poorly built driftwood gate that needed to be coaxed open with a knee, which led to a path through salal and blackberry into the yard. The brick cottage, surrounded by fruit trees and overgrowth, hunched stubbornly at the top of a slope. Where the ground leveled out along the side of the house there was the pond, half hidden by the skirt of a large willow. This, Elka once told him, was where she used to hunt tadpoles. And beyond that, the vegetable garden.
Dirty smoke curled from the chimney into the overcast sky, and from somewhere behind the house came the rumble and chuck of a generator in need of a new exhaust. He looked up at the front of the house, preparing to go in.
Bobbie must have been watching for him from the window, because she opened the door before he made it to the porch steps. She stood in the doorway, as if she were unsure whether or not to let him past. Her hair was now more white than gray, and she wore it in a long, thick braid thrown over her shoulder. Her eyes, dark and heavy-lidded, had sunk a little farther into her face, the skin tanned and tagged and deeply lined.
“Letter said you’d be here yesterday.”
“Couldn’t be helped. They stopped the ferry because of the weather.”
“Bah.” She swatted the air.
He put one boot on the bottom step and crossed his arms casually over his knee. “Can I come in?”
“I didn’t think you were going to show up. I’m in the middle of something now.” She wiped her nose with the back of her finger and went into the house, leaving the door open.
Inside, the smell of something waxy—lanolin. And woodsmoke. A tepee of burning logs in the fireplace, pockmarks on the rug in front of the hearth. Watching her move about in her kitchen, setting a blackened copper kettle on the stove, spooning loose leaves into a mug, he’d forgotten how tall and broad she was. How she could fill a room entirely.
“It is good to see you, Tom.”
“Is it?”
“Let’s not start things off this way, eh?” She lifted the kettle with a rag and filled the mug. She handed it to him as she passed and headed for the stairs. After a few steps up, she stopped. “You coming?”
Elka’s old room. The walls were bare, the brown carpet grimy. Her bed was covered with clothes and cardboard boxes. More clothes, and dolls, and puzzle boxes split at the corners spilled out of the closet onto the floor. Bobbie sat heavily on the edge of the bed and exhaled what seemed to be her frustration with Tom, and with the whole world that stood against her. Tom, his hands firmly in the pockets of his jeans, leaned one shoulder against the wall by the window. In the backyard, one of the island’s wild sheep grazed, and where the shed used to be there was
some fool-looking mud hut in the shape of a mushroom. There were the salal and blackberry bushes that bordered the edge of the land, and beyond that the bedrock and Douglas fir that rolled away down to the strait, nothing more than a misty gray band between this place and the dark coastal mountains on the mainland. Bobbie selected something from the pile on the bed and held it up. A child’s t-shirt. Other clothes were shaken out for inspection. Denim overalls, a raincoat, leotards. “Why didn’t you bring the children?”
“Implication was I shouldn’t.”
“Well.” She flipped through a shoe box of cassette tapes, her mouth turned down rigidly.
“Come on, Bobbie. I’m sorry I was late. Nothing I could do about it.”
“There never is.” She held up a green dress by its sleeves. “You want to take some of this stuff home for your girl? How old is she?”
“Four.”
“Of course she is.”
“Bobbie, I’ve come all this way.”
“You’ve come all this way.”
“And I’d really like to know what happened.”
She sighed and looked up at the ceiling, and puffed out her cheeks.
“Did you know she was in Alberta?” he asked.
“She left me as she left you.”
“I guess I just thought in all this time she might have contacted you.”
“Don’t you think I would have told you if she had?”
He watched her fold and unfold a wool sweater. She tossed it aside and knelt on the floor, and pulled a wooden tray out from under the bed. It was full of shoes: one yellow rain boot, scuffed runners, leather sandals furry with dust.
The Mountain Can Wait Page 6