A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  Simon said Uncle Max was “between jobs.” He used to be a miner. He worked at some place kind of far away, mining coal. I think that he liked doing it, too. He told me that before I was born he had mined diamonds out and polished them up for the Queen of England, but I didn’t believe him. I think he was just pretending. I pictured Max in some dark tunnel thousands of kilometres under the earth, all covered in black dust with a flashlight-hat on, swinging at walls with a metal pick. I sometimes couldn’t believe that that’s what his job used to be, with all his fears, and with how silly he was. I had heard stories about canaries dying in mines, and people too, but Max never talked about being afraid of his job. He didn’t talk about his job at all, actually. I always had to ask Simon about it. Simon said Max’s job was like another life to him, buried underneath his main life. But that was weird too ’cause I always thought when you grew up it was the other way around, and you had to dig really hard to mine out your real life. Max was looking for a new job, but I don’t think he was looking very hard.

  Public school teachers didn’t exactly have money-vault rooms filled with hundred-dollar bills they went skinny-dipping in, and Uncle Max didn’t make any cash at all, so anyway the point is that Max and Maxine’s car listened to tapes instead of CDs.)

  We were still driving, and Max was doing impressions of Maxine’s driving, and that lady on the tape was still chirping away and plucking her wobbly banjo. I thought it would be neat, maybe, to pop in the tape I had recorded of the Brenda Beckham interview, not that I had brought it with me or anything. I just liked picturing us driving around in a car on the speeding highway, and everyone listening to me talk and interview people. It would be like I had my very own radio show called Why Did I Have to Find a Book About a Guy Who Died in the Woods by My House? Anyone who listened to the radio would have to listen to me. Then I remembered how many interesting and useful things I’d actually learned from the Brenda interview—zero—and I knew that no one would tune in to my radio show except me and I would lose my job. Maybe I could ask Uncle Max to help me out with the investigation, since he had so much free time and since I was in way over my brain. I wouldn’t tell him about Page 43, because I wouldn’t want to scare him or anything—plus what if he did an impression—but maybe he could still help without knowing that part.

  The banjoing lady’s saddish song faded out and then she started playing a quick happy one. It was a good song. It was getting even sunnier outside the window. The car zoomed along this skinny highway along this big hill, and I just watched everything out the window and hoped the long drive would end soon. Out the right side of the car—my side—was a big steep drop-off of forest and after that, way far down, was this kind of meadowy area with light brown and gold diamond-shaped fields dotted with snow leftovers and some farmhouses with pointy roofs, and barns. On the left side of the car—Uncle Max’s side—was a wall of orange rock that had been exploded with dynamite because the road had to be there instead. The rock had all these lines in it, diagonal slanting layers of white and orange, like the kind of rock called “shale” that grenades apart when you throw it, except orangey instead of grey. There were probably so many fossils in there.

  A fossil is a thing, like an animal or something, that gets killed and then trapped in rock, or it becomes rock, I guess, and leaves a statue of itself inside the rock forever, so that later on someone can find it, like a palaeontologist, which is one of the things I will someday be. The palaeontologist will know so much about the rock and the history of the place where it was, and about everything in general, that he or she will know exactly when and where the fossilized animal came from, and maybe even why it became a fossil. Someday when I was older I figured I’d have a car, or probably a bike because bikes don’t use “fossil fuels,” which are bad, and are different than what I am talking about, and I would ride my bike way back out there to the orange rock and collect fossils. Plus, by that time I would have actually invented a type of engine that goes on the back of my bike and runs on another kind of fossil fuels, which would be an engine with a glass box in it that you put a fossil into and lasers scan it and learn everything about it, and the bike wheels are turned by all the wisdom that the bike learns. I would fill my bike up with the fossil fuel and do wheelies back to the laboratory.

  “Are we there yet?” Uncle Max said.

  “We’re about ten minutes away,” said Aunt Maxine, and about ten minutes later, we were there. We saw a sign that was wood-coloured with old-fashioned white writing on the front; I couldn’t read it ’cause Maxine speeded by, but it was The Something Family Maple Sugar Farm. We turned off the highway and onto a long curvy driveway.

  Aunt Maxine slammed on the brakes and we stopped at the end of the snowy driveway in front of a log-cabin type house up on a tiny hill, and another barn type thing not much bigger than the house. The two buildings were close together, like the two parts of my old treehouse, except they didn’t have a bridge in between them. There was kind of a circle of nothing around the small buildings, and then after that was trees. Different ones than at our house: skinnier and straighter and darker and taller ones. Through the space between the two buildings I could see a faraway group of people, maybe six or seven of them wearing bright-coloured winter and spring coats, wandering into the woods. Most of them turned their heads around to look at us speeding up in our car.

  The four of us got out of the car at pretty much the same time. The people in the woods were still staring at us but eventually they stopped. Aunt Maxine looked through her purse for something, leaning with her back against the car. Simon took his glasses off his face and wiped them on the bottom of his black coat, squinting. Max stretched his mouth wide open and made the loudest yawn ever. My legs were just waking up, so I jiggled them, and I reached my arms way up over my head to stretch myself out. Then we all walked to the smaller building, Aunt Maxine in front, because she was kind of being the teacher on our field trip.

  I shut the red door behind us. The house was weird inside: it had a tiny front room first with a desk and lots of windows, and then in behind it down a hall were other rooms, like bedrooms and kitchens and bathrooms and things. It was like a family house with an office just nailed onto the front. At the desk there was a girl with shiny brown hair probably in grade nine, leaning over a magazine and chewing. She looked up at us and blew a bubble gum bubble and it popped. She didn’t say anything, as if that bubble was supposed to talk for her.

  So Maxine said, “We’re here for—”

  “—The tour. What’s your name?” The girl moved her magazine over to look at a notebook underneath, with things scribbled in it. I thought that she had no idea how lucky she was because her notebook probably didn’t have any excruciatingly scary or weird or sad things to find inside.

  “I think I put it under ‘Arthur,’” Maxine said.

  “Aren’t you special,” Max whispered to me.

  The girl looked in her book and wrote something down. “You’re late,” she said.

  I checked my watch and it said 11:39 AM.

  “Okay Mrs. Arthur,” the girl said, “just sign here, and then you can go catch up I guess. Hurry up though.”

  Aunt Maxine scribbled on the paper and we went back out the front door.

  “You didn’t sign as that, I hope,” Max said when we were back outside.

  Maxine laughed. “I didn’t want to correct her.”

  “Mrs. Arthur,” Max said, “can you believe that?” He punched my shoulder amazingly gentle. “You trying to steal my woman?” he yelled. He picked me up off the ground and swung me around like we were the weirdest helicopter. “YOU TRYING TO STEAL MY WOMAN?”

  The people on the tour were little lines of bright colours between the trees, and from where we were they looked kind of like those yellow and orange barcodes that the postal service prints on your envelopes when you mail them. We headed towards them, trying to walk up quietly
because a man was speaking, but little twigs and bits of snow snapped and crunched under our boots as we got close to the crowd. The talking man was kind of old, older than Simon, but not as old as an old man. He had curly reddish hair poking out the bottom of his hat with earflaps, and a black and white plaid shirt on underneath an orange vest. He looked like a picnic blanket going hunting. His outfit was kind of funny to me because it somehow showed that he looked funny, but was obviously in charge.

  The man-in-charge pulled a metal bucket off a tap in a tree and showed it to the people standing nearby. I squeezed my head through a couple of jackets so I could get a closer look. He held the bucket out in front of him and walked along for each person to get a peek. When he got to me I stuck my head almost inside the bucket. It was filled with clear liquid with some dirt floating in it. Maple sap. It smelled like soaking wet wood. I lifted my head up and the man-in-charge smiled and moved along to the next people. Another boy about my age was there with his little sister. They didn’t even look at the sap; they were too busy pushing each other around and stepping on each other’s boots.

  The man-in-charge walked over and poured the sap bucket into a way huger bucket thing on top of this wagon with really tall wheels.

  “How often do you collect it?” asked a short woman with a round belly and short black hair.

  “Every day till the buds come out,” the man-in-charge said. “Some places, they use a tube system these days, just run plastic hoses straight to the cabin, just collects itself and then you put it through the evaporator. We like doing it with the buckets. It’s how we’ve always done it.”

  I looked around the forest. The trees were spread out farther than the trees at home, and they were basically all maple trees. And every one of the trees had a tap stabbed into it, and a shiny grey bucket dangling. Every single tree was getting drained.

  “Listen everybody,” the man-in-charge said, and he put his pointer finger to his lips to mean “Shhh.” Everybody shut up after a second, even the fighting kids.

  I listened.

  When everything was quiet and the wind died down, I could hear the dripping. I could hear these plinking sounds, drips hitting bottoms of buckets or puddles of other sap drips. I could pick out the sounds one by one, but at the same time there were so many of them that they made music.

  plink plink plonk, plink plonk.

  plink plink plonk, plink plonk.

  It was one of the saddest songs I’d ever heard.

  “How long have you been doing it for?” the questioning lady asked.

  “Three generations now, roughly a hundred years.”

  My eyebrows frowned. A hundred years? They’d been sucking those poor trees dry for ten times as long as I had even been alive? I decided to ask a question.

  “Does it hurt the trees, you stabbing them with taps?”

  The man-in-charge smiled and I didn’t.

  “Nope,” he said. “It’s just like a blood test from a healthy person. Like going to the hospital and getting your blood work done. The trees’ll make more sap soon, and they’ll be fine. I’ll bet your dad’ll tell you what it’s like to get a blood test.” He looked at Uncle Max, for some reason.

  “Actually, my uncle said blood tests hurt like crazy. One time he had to get a blood test, and it hurt so bad he got confused and fainted and had a nightmare about falling off a cliff.”

  I looked at Max and he had shocked eyes and a serious face but he gave me a very small nod.

  “Well anyway,” the man-in-charge said, “it doesn’t hurt the trees.”

  I wasn’t convinced. Maybe it didn’t hurt the trees, like how scraping your knee hurts, but it definitely couldn’t do them any good. It wasn’t the right thing to do, to just be pouring the trees’ blood out like that. It didn’t matter that they were just trees, I mean, they didn’t even ask them. You can’t ask a tree if it wants to give a blood donation or not, so you can’t just go around taking it from them. This guy was a tree vampire, sucking the blood and then drinking it later on, and he pretended like he really loved the trees but he didn’t. He just wanted the sap. What about how big and how old the trees were? What about everything that had happened to them? And what about all the maple syrup I had eaten for my whole life because I didn’t know?

  Everyone turned around to walk back towards the buildings, but I stayed behind, looking at all the buckets hanging, trying to hear the song again. I stood there listening forever and making a sad list in my head.

  I Realized:

  –that the hundreds of silver buckets reflecting the sunlight looked really pretty, hanging there in rows, polka-dotting the woods.

  –that it was even worse that the buckets had to look so pretty, because of the thing that they were doing.

  –that what I should do was run through the place ripping all the taps out and then come back another day with band-aids and maybe an invention I’d have to invent that could inject the sap back into the trees so that they would all be OK.

  –that what I should do was ten times bigger than what I could do.

  Simon put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You alright, chief?”

  How could I expect him to understand? And plus had he been standing there the whole time?

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at my boots. “I’m fine.”

  “Let’s get going,” he said, and we walked out of the woods and into the second cabin and he tried to wrap his arm around my shoulders but I didn’t let him because I had to make him believe I was fine.

  Inside, the murderer-in-charge was showing everyone this big square metal machine called the evaporator that he used to boil the tree blood and get the water out so he could sell it to people to put on their pancakes. All the people, even Simon and Maxine and Max, were listening very closely.

  What if trees had souls just like animals and humans? I mean, I didn’t know if they did or not, but what if they did? If they drained the trees long enough, would their souls seep out too, and would their bark get lighter and lighter every day until one day they were transparent so you couldn’t even see them anymore, and there would be no forest, just a big space filled with nothing? Where did all the broken parts of their souls go once the sap got evaporated into syrup? Did they stay in the syrup, or did they maybe float in the steam up into the clouds, way up, and then did God have to look at them, and did he pull the water molecules into himself and piece them back together in the right order and then cry for the trees, and was that part of the reason why it rains?

  I almost wanted to punch the man-in-charge but punching is something I am not very good at, so I just made myself ignore everything, which is something I’m better at, and something I do all the time when there are big stacks of thoughts piling up in my brain and they are making walls and there is nowhere for me to go.

  (Meanwhile my real dad was relaxing in a rocking chair in his house on his pigeon farm. He was a pigeon breeder, but he didn’t do it to come up with mutated cool-looking ones. My real dad knew a way to breed pigeons that were normal looking, except they were almost as big as Great Danes, and they had strong biceps underneath all the feathers. They were farming pigeons.

  My real mom had helped develop the formula for it. Also, she was in charge of teaching the pigeons to speak English, so that they could understand the commands well. She had written a textbook on Englishing animals, especially pigeons, and it was a bestseller. The most interesting thing that her research found was that pigeons were extraordinarily good at learning English except that, for some reason, they had a huge amount of trouble with verbs and the order that stuff happened in. Her book was one of those really expiring books that people liked to read together in clubs, and this television lady liked to talk about.

  While my real mom was out of town to be on the television lady’s show, my real dad was rocking in his chair, thinking about ho
w easy life was for him. He was thinking about how all he had to do was make the pigeons do everything, and sit around and wait for the money to pour in. He was not thinking about me. He was also not lonely and wondering if I turned into an amazing drawer or not. Then one of the strongest and greyest pigeons flew in through the open window and landed in front of him.

  “We are sickening of the way you treated us,” the pigeon said. “We haven’t going to be taken it anymore.”

  Hundreds of other huge pigeons flew in through the window and made a crowd behind the first one.

  “We tire of watching you sitting in your about to be rocked chair while we slaved in the fields in the sun,” said another bird from the back row, and he swooped in with ropes and tied my real dad to the rocking chair.

  “Let’s see you having been relaxed now,” they all said, and pushed the chair way back and let it swing way forward. They rocked him back and forth, back and forth.

  “But I don’t understand,” said my dizzy dad, “I gave you everything you have! I put a roof over your heads, food on your tables, I give you plenty of vacation time!”

  “We have been pigeons,” the first pigeon said. “We are not needing roofs over our heads, we have needed to be flying. We will be able to have found our own food, with no tables, and our vacations will have lasted forever! We will have been—”)

  Then there was a loud popping sound and I was sitting at a big table with everyone in a dining room, getting served pancake breakfast. The bubble gum girl from the desk was coming towards the table with two plates stacked with pancakes that were almost as big as the plates. She dropped one off in front of me, and one in front of Simon, who was cleaning his glasses across the table from me. “Thank you very much,” Simon said, and the girl said nothing at all and walked back to the kitchen and came back with pancakes for Max and Maxine too. “Thank you,” said Aunt Maxine, and Uncle Max said, “Wow.” Simon pulled his black coat off his shoulders and hung it on the back of his seat. I watched him reach for the little jug of maple syrup and carefully pour it on top of his pancakes. He started with a big dot in the centre and then spiralled it outwards in a snail-shell pattern, almost as fast as a snail, too. “Please pass it after you’re done with it, Arthur,” Maxine said. Simon handed me the little jug and I didn’t use it, I just passed it sideways to Maxine. “You don’t want any?” she asked.