by Krista Foss
Las is sitting on the front step. He is sitting on the step and looking at things as if for the first time, as if he hasn’t lived on this property for his whole life.
For instance, on the step a planter spills with mutinous growth. Las hears his mother reciting her springtime mantra – thrills, fills, and spills! – and telling him, as if he cared, that she’s planted canna, petunias, and sweet potato vine for their blend of colours. It is too much, he thinks, too much of everything.
He stares down at his feet, a flip-flop on one and on the other a bulk of bandages, covered with a sock. And he thinks, Holy shit, I love flip-flops. They’ve been a constant, a comfort, for most of his life. At age six his toes and arches were already strengthening around the flip-flop gait. There must be dozens of them he’s outgrown or broken, still degrading in the municipal dump. When the thong ripped clean out of the cheap foam Spider Man flip-flops he had at age ten, he burst into sobs in the hallway of his elementary school and had to be taken home. It’s a story his father still brings up during family dinners.
He shudders. He is never going to wear a pair of flip-flops again. Ever. He wonders why it has taken him until now to realize this. A toe beside the big one is absolutely necessary, and he’s missing all three in the middle of his foot. He’d trade both his baby toes for any one of them, but he can’t. And it’s hard to believe, hard to accept, because there isn’t much else left to look forward to. His throat gets tight and tears stream down his face, and of course the police car pulls into his driveway now – Oh Jesus, there are two of them – and this is not how he imagined it going when he called, insisting they come and get him, not how he wants to be taken in, crying, holding a girly gift bag, and with a whole life before him where not just the obvious things will change, but the things he has always counted on – such as wearing flip-flops – will be gone forever too.
Ella hears the departing cars but she doesn’t run to the window. She walks to the basement, silently passes her husband asleep on the couch, finds a stack of empty cardboard boxes, and carries them up to Mitch’s office. She starts in the east corner, the one farthest from the windows, and begins to pack away his things. She feels differently about the room right away. She wonders if it’s too bold to call out to Stephanie, ask her to brew up a fresh pot of coffee, come and help. Not yet, she tells herself. First she’ll make such a change here that there’ll be no turning back.
CHAPTER 26
I’d like a pie, Ruby. Can you make me a peach pie? Cherisse asked, standing in the hole of the kitchen doorway, soaking wet in a ripped nightie, blood streaming from her forehead. Ruby wrapped her in blankets, dressed the wound, put her to bed. And now Helen is picking peaches, the memory of her grandniece’s face making a lump in her throat. Enough peaches for Cherisse’s pie and dessert for Coulson’s primers, and enough to can or freeze so the taste of summer can soften a mean January night.
She stands under a tree, cups a hanging fruit, tests it for the slightest give in its skin, then twists it from its stem, places it in the basket. Ruby says she has the touch for picking. A peach can disappoint if it is taken too early or if it has ripened too quickly. And Helen loves the feel and smell of peach trees, the vulnerability of young fruit, the heft of a full basket as she places it on the earth, the hopeful weightlessness of the empty basket she carries up the stepladder. She tires more easily, aches sooner than a few years earlier, but still the repetition, the stretch of her limbs, and the fragrance under a tree’s canopy allow reverie to creep in.
There’s a snapping turtle that lives in the reedy pond behind the snack shack. Every spring that turtle moves up into the sandy drive to lay her eggs. Helen protects the nest from cars and people with chicken wire and scrap dowel rods. But every year, in the jet of spring nights, a mother raccoon plunders the turtle’s nest to feed her own young. The turtle keeps trying again, spring after spring, waiting for the universe to make amends. Helen prays for a goshawk or a coyote to deliver the justice – take to the air or the woods with the soft neck of a raccoon pup snapped in its jaw. She has to believe the universe is so ordered. Even if she waits another season for justice.
Shayna called, Ruby said this morning. Can you fetch her after you’re done picking? She wants to make a run to the grocery store. It wasn’t even six a.m. Ruby lowered her voice. She was up all night, finalizing an agreement to dismantle the blockade. I guess she needs to feed them, make a party of it.
They were quiet. I wasn’t there, thought Helen. She did this without me.
You’re staring into space again, Ruby said. You need to get out of here. She handed Helen a list.
After three hours of picking, Helen stops at the blockade with ten six-quart baskets in the truck bed. She’s overheated, her skin tacky with fuzz and punctured fruit. Shayna piles into the front seat.
“I had to do it,” she says immediately, as if Helen’s silence is judgment. “Otherwise they wouldn’t negotiate. Today’s the deadline.”
Biting her lip, Helen looks in her rear-view mirror, sees the peaches lined up in the back of the truck. Every struggle for justice has its compromises. That is why she has been left out. One of the Warriors, a large man with an open face, is ambling towards the truck.
“He argued with me last night. Kept at me for hours – didn’t want the blockade to come down,” Shayna says, watching him. “Now he insists on helping pay for the food.”
Louis Greene opens the back door, folds his big body into the small seat, and nods to Helen, who starts the truck. Shayna says nothing to him, just slumps against the passenger-side door. The route to the grocery store takes them back through the reserve to its far western boundary, where a new bridge spans the Smoke and connects the reserve to Doreville’s outskirts and a gleaming big-box store anchoring a massive parking lot. To relieve her own unease, Helen turns on the radio and hums along to the local station’s tinny pop music.
A few blocks from the grocery store, the music stops for an hourly news report. Suddenly Shayna’s fingers wheel frantically across the dials and she loses the station. The truck hiccups. “What? What the fuck? Turn it up!”
Helen slows the truck, slaps Shayna’s hands away from the radio, adjusts the tuning dial and volume.
“A spokesman for the minister responsible could not be reached, but developer Mitch Bain confirmed by phone that he’s accepted an offer from the federal government for his land. Asked if this means the development is cancelled, Mr. Bain said, ‘Yes, until the government sells the land, nobody can develop it.’ Anyone who bought a lot in the development will be fully compensated, he said. Meanwhile, federal negotiator Antonia Taylor has issued a statement saying the blockade will come down today.”
“My job is done here,” a chipper-sounding Antonia tells the radio reporter. “Now that the blockade is coming down and development of the land is a non-issue, the need for formal negotiations, their urgency, is moot. The protestors can deal exclusively with government lawyers and the whole process will move to the courts.”
“Stop the truck! Stop it!” Shayna shouts. She jumps out and bends her small body over the gravel shoulder. Helen watches the shuddering figure. Among the women of her family, morning sickness was rare; Bertie shone like a polished apple when carrying her two daughters. Helen hears sobs. She opens the truck’s glove compartment, searches for a tissue, and turns to Louis, who looks uncomfortable and sweaty compressed in the back seat. The expression on his face tells her she has missed something. “What’s going on?” she says.
He looks at her as if she, of all people, should know. “They did an end-run on us.”
Shayna gets back into the truck, slams the door. Her face is ashen, grimy with tears. Helen reaches with a tissue, but Shayna swats her hand away. “Food. We still need food,” she says. Her voice is a croak.
Helen puts the truck in gear. She turns towards the bridge that leads to the grocery store entrance and comes to a full stop. Other cars have stopped and pulled off to the side of the road. A small
, wiry man stands in front of about twenty townspeople who have lined up lawn chairs to block the bridge. A straggle of bystanders and gawkers gathers behind. Helen recognizes the pub owner, Will, in a lawn chair sandwiched next to the nervous woman who runs the junk shop. It’s such a perfect August day. Why aren’t they on their back decks or walking by the river?
The activist is yelling orders through his bullhorn, his face a rictus of outrage. “Turn your cars around and go home. This is a blockade, folks. Natives keep us off the highway, so we are keeping you out of our grocery store.”
There is a cheer from the assembled group that sounds tentative. With a show of effort, the townspeople hoist their signs and begin to circle their lawn chairs, chanting their slogan: “Rule of law is the rule for all.” Cars with non-native drivers approach the bridge from beyond the reserve’s western edge and are waved through with high fives and applause. A van – Helen catches Bobby Horse’s unmistakable profile behind the wheel – tries to barrel through, but the crowd cinches up, beats it back with their signs and sticks. This energizes them and they chant louder. Helen notices a dozen shaved heads bobbing like peeled potatoes among the townspeople, their pale arms raised. She gets out of the truck. Shayna and Louis follow.
Others who’ve come from the reserve empty out from their vehicles and stand watching. A few men, some teenagers. All clutching handwritten lists, eager for items they’ve been doing without: light bulbs and plastic wrap, a can of coffee, bacon and hot dog buns. And for Helen, sugar, pastry flour, freezer bags. The grocery store has been their Switzerland, a place the politics of the blockade couldn’t spoil. Everyone understands the need to feed a family, especially the big-box store’s managers, who rely on the reserve for business.
Two cyclists arrive in front of the bridge. Helen recognizes Coulson’s primers, James and Diego. There is some conversation she cannot hear.
“Natives on bikes are still natives!” a young man from the bridge yells at them. There’s a cheer from the crowd. James and Diego look confused. They remain standing before the chain of townsfolk blocking their way until somebody yells, “Go back to where you came from! You’re not getting through.” James shrugs his shoulders and whispers into Diego’s ear; then they both walk their bikes towards the others who have been kept from entering.
Louis Greene marches up to the activist, so they are face to chest. A truck screeches in behind the scene and a TV cameraman jumps out. Not again, thinks Helen.
“It’s over. Don’t you listen to the news?” Louis tells them. “You should let people through. Children going hungry doesn’t dignify this protest.”
The activist, his face flushed carmine, pulls up his bullhorn, turns to the crowd, and addresses them. “It’s not over,” he screams. “They take land that isn’t theirs. Block roads that aren’t theirs. Terrorize our neighbourhoods. Then they saunter in for bread and cheese as if we’re on the same team.” His righteousness sprays out of the bullhorn, casts a driftnet of spit over the crowd. There is a chorus of hurrahs in response.
Louis says nothing. He doesn’t move. The bullhorn swings around, and now the activist is yelling directly into Louis’s unflinching face. “Police won’t enforce all the laws you break. So I’m making one, buddy. You don’t get to come here anymore. Got it?”
His words hang in the air for half a minute. The cameraman moves in closer. There’s a twitch in Louis’s jaw. He simply takes a step forward, a big man using up all the activist’s space, forcing him to stumble backwards with a yelp. Louis stretches his legs wide, folds his bare, tattooed arms so that their muscles clench. The crowd goes quiet.
And then a rock comes sailing out from behind the townspeople on the bridge. Helen lifts her eyes to see the shadowy path, curved as a swift’s flight. All the attention is on the two men facing off in front of them. And that is where the rock strikes, missing its intended target, hitting another.
Helen thinks how summer squash cracks under a sharp knife. The thin man’s head splits open at the top. His blood is thin and fast, and red drips from his chin like berry juice. He drops to his knees and Louis bends to help him, but the cameraman is there, moving in. He has stumbled onto great footage. Helen sees how awful it will look, how the picture will tell the wrong story.
Louis grabs the camera and levers it with his weight. The expensive piece of equipment falls to the ground, the cameraman stumbles after it, and then the Warrior has his foot on the cameraman’s back. He stomps.
“No! No!” Helen shouts.
A group of young men rush forward from the bridge and pile on Louis as if it’s a down in a football game. And Helen, who is tired of injustices, of waiting for the truth to alight from the sky like a bird with sharp talons, surprises herself by plucking a peach from one of the baskets in the back of her truck. She throws it. A soft orb of fruit, the colour of an Interlake sunset, hits one of the young men square on his shaven head. Orange-yellow viscera stream down his face and stick to his T-shirt collar. Helen rolls up her sleeve, picks up another. Shayna joins her. The families behind her are clapping and whistling now, and then James and Diego are at the back of her truck, and she nods her head in permission. The morning sky fills with rosy trajectories. The peaches fall and split against the townspeople’s signs, slime their faces in a baptismal of flung fruit. A few land in the river. The sirens get louder.
By the time the police cars arrive at both ends of the bridge, the peaches have been answered with rocks and eggs, pop bottles, a Thermos, dismembered lawn chairs. Two lines of officers form quickly. One pushes the townspeople off the bridge, the other compresses them in one quadrant of the parking lot. The air grows tight with angry jeers. Louis and the activist are handcuffed, taken away in separate squad cars.
When it’s over and the crowd begins to fall away, they remain sitting in the front seat of Helen’s truck, Shayna’s head hanging. Helen surveys the peach-dotted pavement and remembers her mother’s hair curling in the steam of jam-making. In the back of her truck, one basket of fruit remains, every one of its peaches singularly perfect and untouched amid the waste. The way is clear to enter the grocery store, but neither woman has the heart. There are enough peaches to make a pie, perhaps two. She’ll borrow the rest of the ingredients and pay back her benefactors with a tithe of sweet pastry.
News of the government’s purchase of the o’tá:ra spreads around the blockade like rumours of an audacious theft, the dignity of disassembling it voluntarily, being the ones to announce it, stolen from them. Food tables are cleaned; plates, cups, utensils are thrown into plastic hampers. Some of the protestors drift off, and the remaining Warriors roll their sleeping bags and tie them, toss their tents and duffle bags into the backs of vans. They are gone within an hour, the white vehicles like sun flares on the asphalt horizon.
By late afternoon the police cars arrive. The officers are friendly but firm. It is time for the blockade to come down. “It’s your land now,” they’re told.
They all know that’s neither true nor untrue – impossible to decipher which.
“Give us a few hours,” Shayna tells the police. “It will be down before dark.”
The elders confer and organize a thanksgiving ceremony for those who have stayed, a sacred address normally used as an opening ritual. “There’s a beginning here too,” Linda Goodleaf says to Shayna.
Al Miller makes the address in the old language. Shayna has a stitch in her side that clangs with pain, but she holds herself still. “Etho niyohtonhak ne onkwa’nikonra – so now let our minds be as one on this matter,” the old man intones.
When it is finished, she slips away across the street to Coulson’s fields. The day hangs with heat, the air as heavy-sweet as newly picked mint. A deerfly bobs around her head, and Shayna waves her hand, ducks. The fly intensifies its interest. It dives, swoops up, and dives again. She escapes deeper into the tobacco, unsettled by the biting insect, determined to outlast it, using both hands to flap at the space above her head. And because of the deerfly sh
e does not notice right away the gathering of cars at the galvanized steel and wooden post barrier between the dead end of the asphalt and the beginning of a south field row.
She deciphers the motion of a swing, an arcing sledgehammer that knocks the posts out of their concrete casings as if they were teeth, leaving a ragged gap. Metal clatters as it hits the asphalt, sounds that crack open the quiet suburban twilight with a gleeful violence. There’s a hurrah and she sees a half-dozen figures run back to their trucks parked on the side of the road, and hears the engines turn on. The trucks plough right into the tobacco plants.
It seems to Shayna, as she runs through the east field, her arms waving, her screams of “Stop!” unheeded, that the tobacco puts up a fight. The plants cling to truck grilles, tangle themselves in rusted axles, rebound from the first flattening blow of rubber tires with their limbs snapped or crooked. For a moment they are shabby scarecrows. Then they are no more. The trucks are followed by a few cars and SUVS.
“Wait! Wait! The blockade’s coming down! You don’t need to. It’s coming down!”
The cars don’t follow each other in single file. Instead they spray like rifle shot, dirty and damaging. The south field, the largest acreage, which Shayna remembers from earlier that week as a low tent of summer yellow, is a holocaust of leaves and stalks. The vehicles career wildly into part of the east field, its nicotine-rich mid-leaves and tips still unpicked, plundering half of it as well, as quickly.
Three months of sunshine, rainfall, cool nights, morning heat. Ninety days of out-thinking weeds and birds and fungus, worrying about late frosts, rogue hail, dry spells. The bank loans secured by a future crop. The pleasures deferred.