–I’m going to try and catch some sleep, he said, and tipped the rest of the pasta in the garbage.
He’d read about firefighters who deliberately started fires. Not that the Wildfire Service ever said as much. It got classified under Cause: Person. He understood it, in a strange way. Firefighters and fire were locked together in an embrace, a chokehold, and who were you if you didn’t have fires to fight? Better than sitting at home waiting for a call-out, pacing. Funny how easy it would be to start one, how difficult to control. They started deliberate fires all the time to create a line of fire as a firebreak. The modern-day version of the fire god wore a Nomex suit, held a driptorch in one hand and a pulaski in the other. You fought and pulled back, created and destroyed.
It was still only 20 percent contained when he was pulled off after a nineteen-day stint of thirty-six-hour shifts and sent home. He needed a break, even he knew that, and Parveen was back, and he wanted to see her. She picked him up at the airport, Stella bouncing with delirium in the back seat. He left a smudge on Parveen’s cheek from the grime still under his fingernails. As always she was the one talking on the way home; he stared out the window at the green lawns, the drizzle spotting the windshield.
–I’ve got a surprise for you, she told him as they pulled into the driveway. Stella, barking, leapt out and chased a robin across the grass.
–My favourite dinner?
That would be murg makkai with Parveen’s special filled naan, and basmati rice, and mango ice cream for dessert.
–I’m pregnant.
He couldn’t have heard right. The flames still roared in his ears. But Parveen’s tremulous smile, shy and startled and overcome —
–Really, Ty. I went to the doctor yesterday. Mami said she thought I was and the doctor confirmed it.
As in a dream he put his arms around her and she collapsed in tears against his shoulder, then pulled back and brushed them away, half-laughing. –So silly of me, I don’t know what is the matter. She was falling back into the Punjabi syntax he’d found so charming when they were dating. –And you’ve only just arrived and look, I just dump this news on you. Let’s go in, darling, you’re exhausted.
–When — when’s he — ?
–Late July, the doctor says. Around the twenty-fifth or so, but of course it’s not exact. And it could be a girl, you know. They can’t do an ultrasound before the twelfth week.
He watched Parveen moving around the kitchen, talking about a nursery, about telling his parents, and felt a sudden bloom of protectiveness, a fierce need to shelter her. This wasn’t supposed to happen, but it had. He supposed they’d been careless. Overconfident. Like him with the fire a few days ago.
–This is — you’re okay with this? she said suddenly, the rice cooker paused in midair. –I didn’t ask about — you know, at the doctor’s. I couldn’t. Not when Mami knew.
She was looking down at the pot in her hands, not at him. It had all been decided without him, for him. In the last couple of months there’d been four deaths on her pediatric unit, four children under ten. Something in her had wanted balance, restoration. And maybe the spruce sapling…? But that was crazy. He was just tired. Overwhelmed.
His first night home it was, apparently, the turn of a lodgepole pine to come to him. Unusually tall, singed by an old lightning strike, with missing branches on its lower half and near the top a burst of the witches’ broom caused by rust fungus. It was old, this tree, old and slow and full of wisdom — appropriate for a species that had been around for millions of years. He touched the cone buds at the tips of the branches and felt a shock of electricity, and then a knowing. Nothing he could put into words, but a freeing, a lightness, an opening up in his chest. First Nations people had used pine needle tea against colds and sore throats, he remembered from somewhere. The conelet — in the way of dreams he had swallowed it — expanded and opened in the heat of his own body, and for the first time in years he woke without a headache.
He was called back on a relief crew a week later, working again with Reid and a Vulcan team. The fire was contained on its eastern flank but not the west, where spot fires had started. Temperatures in the area had gone up to thirty-two degrees Celsius. In early January. He didn’t startle, as he once would have, when an olive-sided flycatcher flew overhead as he was washing up in camp the first evening. So many birds that used to migrate in winters no longer did. In the kitchen he ate mechanically, thinking of Parveen, of the baby — the size of a sweet pea, so the doctor said.
–How’s Sweet Pea? he said when he called.
–Not very sweet. Still making me sick in the mornings.
But some women got worse morning sickness than Parveen did, so he’d been told. One of the older crew members said his wife had spent much of the first eight weeks of each pregnancy in bed. His mother-in-law claimed it was a good omen; the baby was full of vigour. Parveen herself said the baby would be a Leo, one of the fire signs. –So it must be all your fault! she’d said, pinching his chin.
Half the crew were fighting colds. Reid was living, so he said, on oil of oregano. –My girlfriend’s into all these health things, he said, and swallowed a slug of the oil, grimacing. –She says it’s a natural antibiotic. Good for my gut, too.
–In my day it was beer. Ty shoulder-punched him, gently.
–Weren’t you telling me just the other day not to trash myself? Reid punched back, grinning. –This way we’re gonna live forever, you know that? Meanwhile his dad was still raring to go, if they let him. –I swear he’s got a bag packed ready and waiting. Mom’s choked, she doesn’t want two of us fighting fires.
It wasn’t fighting anymore so much as living with. Ty had understood that much, at least, from the pine. Fire was an ally, not an enemy. It could never be fully contained. You danced with it up the mountain and down again. More and more fires were allowed to burn now; there simply weren’t the resources to fight them. This one, the Binder Creek fire, was threatening several small communities, and the air quality health index was off the scale.
On the fifth day he was working downslope, building yet another firebreak to prevent the fire jumping the creek. It had consumed over a hundred thousand hectares now, engulfing an abandoned gold and copper mine known to be leaking toxins. They had to wear face masks, though Ty hated them; they made it difficult to breathe. Ahead of him, upslope, Gord was working with the chainsaw, falling insect-deadened pine, with Reid and Jai following behind with their pulaskis, digging down to mineral soil. Using hand signals to communicate because radio didn’t always work in this terrain. An extended horizontal thumb meant go back, two fingers in a horizontal V meant keep your eyes on the green.
Ty had his head down, hacking with his own tool, when he heard shouts above the roar of the fire. One of the crew had five fingers flashing open and shut: an accident. Farther up the hill other crew were hosing down a burning tree that lay horizontal. Ty started up toward it at an awkward run. Now he could see a streak of yellow jacket underneath it, and Gord with his chainsaw bucking the top of the tree. His heart cratered into his stomach. Dear god, let it not be Reid. Already he saw himself on the phone, having to tell his old friend Graham…
But it was Reid, the blackened trunk diagonal across his chest and shoulder, eyes glassy with pain. Breathing, thank god, still breathing as Ty and the others worked to free him. Deanna, the line medic, brought up a traverse rescue stretcher and stabilized his upper body before they moved him.
–Fast as a lightning bolt, that top snapping out.
They stood watching, Ty and Gord, as the stretcher was carried downhill to the evacuation site. Gord pressed his fingers in his eye sockets, face white under the dirt layer.
–I shoulda seen him. He was in the danger zone under the lean.
Ty rested a hand on Gord’s shoulder, half-turned to look back up the slope at the fallen tree. He’d just been through a safety review with the crew about burning snags. Lots of times you never saw them coming. Every tree was different. How
rotten, how much of it was burning, how long it had burned. You never knew.
He worked the rest of the day with a sharp pain in his chest that wasn’t from the smoke. That evening his radio crackled in its holster. Reid had broken an arm and his collarbone and punctured a lung, but he was stable, in intensive care in Vancouver. His parents and younger sister had flown over from the Island. Reid had asked a buddy at Vulcan to be sure and call Ty.
He felt the tears come then. Had to sit, or rather give way, onto a nearby stump, pull his mask off and squeeze the liquid out of his eyes. Getting soft, old man. Get a grip for christ sake. He pulled his mask back down shakily and stood, leaning on his trenching tool until he got his breath back.
Reid was back at work within three months, or so Ty heard. Telling people he’d nearly bought it and that the best thing was to get back in the saddle. Had he learned anything at all? Only that he’d survived through blind, dumb luck. You couldn’t plan for it, couldn’t alter what you did, except develop that sixth sense Ty himself now had. It had saved him from death more than once. That and being humble in the face of a devouring beast that showed no mercy. The beast itself would teach him, in the end. Nothing else.
The fire was contained by then only because of heavy wet snow. With the crews pulled off he was in waiting mode again, sitting at home, teaching Stella the stay position, to come when called. Sweet Pea had turned visible, an egglike bulge in Parveen’s stomach, pressing insistently against the waistband of her nursing outfit. They hadn’t wanted to know the gender after the ultrasound.
–Mami says I shouldn’t wear white anymore, Parveen told him. She stood in the kitchen stirring turmeric and chiles into sizzling onion. He brushed by Sweet Pea — the face? a leg? — as he took knives and forks to the table.
–It’s the colour of mourning in India, you know, only widows wear white. Silly, isn’t it. Anyway I said I’d go shopping with her. Blue or pink, what do you think?
She was teasing, her eyes sparking. Waving the chef’s knife around as she began dancing bhangra fashion. Stella, always wanting to be part of everything, made little rushes at Parveen’s bare feet. Parveen pulled Ty back into the kitchen to dance with her until the shrilling smoke alarm told them the onions were burning.
He was home for five weeks, the longest break he’d had for reasons other than injury in years. They cleaned out what had been, variously, an office, a den, a sewing room. Repainted, installed a crib, a comfortable armchair, a changing table. There was no need to shop for baby clothes; his mother-in-law was round every week with new items. He read articles online about bringing a new baby home to a house with a dog. There could be jealousy issues. Introduce your dog to smells like baby lotion and powder. Bring an item from the hospital that contains your baby’s scent before the homecoming.
They talked about names. Stewart Amar, after his grandfather and Parveen’s; Brighid, after the Celtic goddess of fire and poetry (Ty’s mother’s suggestion) and Simran, after Parveen’s mother. Simran meant remembrance or meditation. Parveen was carrying a girl, so her mother insisted; she’d consulted an astrologer. Really, the child should be named based on her jyotiṣa chart, which could not be cast until the exact date and time of birth.
A few days later, out with Stella in the park, Ty threw a stick that arced into a bush next to a pine tree. As Stella wrestled with retrieval, he stared at the pine with the shock of familiarity. The same lightning singe as the one in his dream, the same missing branches, the burst of fungus. The conelet in his chest expanded again, making it difficult to breathe. The scent of pine was overwhelming. He had to lock his knees to stop them trembling. His mind groped for logic. He must, surely, have seen the pine before the dream. But the trail he was on was new to him, recently cut and cedar-chipped.
Perhaps five weeks off wasn’t long enough after all. The arrival of the child, this world-changing event… And all those injuries over the years, what they’d done to his body. And his mind.
He whistled Stella back, turned away.
But when the call-out came Ty went, of course. That was what you did. This time in the southeast of the province, mercifully not near assets. Late March and bone-dry, what with the drought of the last two years. The fire was in a valley, working its way upslope. They’d dropped in smokejumpers earlier; he was in a mop-up crew. He wondered, briefly, why they hadn’t called him sooner. He hadn’t jumped in years, but surely he could have been on a ground team or at base camp. Though really he didn’t want that. He wanted to be at the fire face, studying what he now thought of not as an enemy but a teacher. Some ancient and relentless teacher who gave no quarter. Just as in martial arts, you had to use the fire’s own strength against it.
He was summoned back to base late one afternoon. No reason given, just a terse radio call. –Fill you in when you get here, his supervisor said. Some new task, some new set of operational commands. Sometimes they made sense, but more often he chafed, knowing he’d mainly rely on his gut to keep him and his crew safe. He didn’t cut corners, he wasn’t a risk taker that way, but you had to let your body, with its knowledge that was now second nature, lead.
His wife’s brother had phoned; he was to call right away. His heart did a backflip into the gut he’d been exalting. It took nearly three hours to get a signal. He sat praying — to what he didn’t know — for only the second time in his life.
–I am so sorry, Ty, Dhanu said, close to tears, when Ty finally got hold of him. –It is Parveen, she is — how do I say this? —
–What? She’s — what? He was almost incoherent with terror.
–The baby, it is the baby. Dhanu choked on a sob. –She lost the baby.
There was no night flight crew available to fly him home. And it wasn’t a matter of life and death — not his own, at least. Parveen was okay, Dhanu said — sedated, in a private room, her mother or one of her nursing friends with her. The hospital had offered grief counselling. Ty heard and didn’t hear. She was safe, Parveen, as long as she was safe… But out of the roil in his mind, in his body, toward morning Sweet Pea floated clear. She had her mother’s small flared nose and his own mother’s bowlike mouth. Her eyes were closed, her fist against her cheek. In the smoky air of the tent he might have reached out and touched her.
We travel with you, the pine said. We have entered you.
–But Parveen, he said, swallowing a sob. –If I’d been home more — I was away so much…
You were called away. You obeyed the call. What has happened is not in your power to alter.
He must have slept after all, because when he opened his eyes it was the grey-dark of imminent day. The dawn chorus was starting — a couple of varied thrushes, a ruby-crowned kinglet. He rolled over and stood, his hand going automatically to the deep spasms in his lower back. In the pain he felt a kind of ridiculous comradeship with Parveen. More birds now, joining up, dropping in and out, swelling into throbbing intolerable life. Shut up, shut up, he thought, and wept, softly. He found he was cradling his arms for the child, and he held her until the sun rose, through the morning singing, until he couldn’t any longer.
HOLDING
PATTERNS
THE CALLIGRAPHER’S DAUGHTER
It was the fourth day of Ramadan and the calligrapher’s daughter sat, as she always did, with her qalams of sharpened reed, her inks of soot and copper sulphate bound with wine, her burnished paper. From the kitchen came her sisters’ chatter and the smell of harira, the dish that would break their fast that evening. As the youngest she ought to be among them, chopping and stirring, measuring and tasting, but the calligrapher’s daughter was exempt from such chores. From the age of two, when she had traced, with her finger, the whorls and flourishes of her father’s manuscripts, he had treated her as his apprentice. He taught her how to hold the pen, gave her scraps of paper on which to practise. –Look! he had said then. –She is in love, as I was! Her sisters muttered to each other about sorcery, enchantment, other dark spells. –She is the pearl of my old age, thei
r father answered. And when people said –Lesou alhaz, what a misfortune, the calligrapher has only daughters, he replied –Allah, praise be unto Him, has consoled me with a daughter with talent.
At seven the calligrapher’s daughter was writing letters for her neighbours. At twelve she began transcribing her first Qur’an. At fourteen she received her first commission: a suite of poems by the magnificent fourteenth-century Grenadine poet Ibn al-Khatib, to be transcribed on gazelle’s vellum and presented as a wedding gift from a Fez princeling to his bride. When not working she spent hours in her father’s library, which held a Qur’an that was said to have once belonged to the great Baghdad scholar Ya’qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī. Its pages were stained with salt and ocean spray, its binding frayed, but merely to hold it, or so the calligrapher’s daughter believed, was to feel inspiration from the Divine Radiance flowing into one’s fingers. Its anonymous creator, whoever she was — for the calligrapher’s daughter was certain it was a woman — deserved, of course, no credit, as her father had long ago taught her. All credit belonged to Allah, who had sent the Qur’an to humankind as a talisman of the Hidden Book known only to the Lord of the Worlds Himself. For, as the Qur’an said –If all the trees in the earth were pens, and if the sea eked out by seven seas more were ink, the Words of God could not be written out to the end.
Now, on the fourth day of Ramadan, the calligrapher’s daughter was beginning the most important commission she had ever undertaken — that of a Qur’an for the sultan himself. It was to be a gift from the grand vizier of the court, to be presented three months hence on the fifth anniversary of the sultan’s victory over the Portuguese at the battle of Ksar el-Kebir, when he had vanquished five hundred ships and eighteen thousand men, with nine thousand dead and the rest taken prisoner. An almost impossible period of time in which to complete the work, yet it was difficult to concentrate with her stomach gurgling from hunger. The calligrapher’s daughter picked up one of her pens, dipped it into the pot of powdered gold ink, and began drawing an arabesque within one of the shamsahs, the little suns that illuminated the margins. While she worked it was as though her father sat beside her, guiding her hand, murmuring instructions about the pressure of the pen, the angle of the nib, the purity of the letters.
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