by Fred Stenson
“You’d give him to me?” Donna asked. “For free?”
The calf and the feed would be free, he told her. He would help her put the sale money into a Canada Savings Bond. That could be for university or whatever kind of schooling she wanted after high school.
“It’s good advertising for the farm. If you beat out calves from local farms and ranches, that would tickle me. But the learning is the most important thing.”
“Is that really why?” she asked.
“I couldn’t have got through calving half this well without your help. It’s a reward.”
“What about Jeannie?”
“Jeannie didn’t help much.”
“She’ll still be jealous.”
“Well, then she will be.”
Tom could not think why Ella would be against a club calf for Donna, but he was certain of it anyway. His instinct was to say nothing, but the longer he delayed, the more likely it was that Ella would hear from Donna, or Donna would brag to Jeannie and Jeannie would tell her mother. So he waited for the afternoon of a school day and declared his plan.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why? Because Jeannie will be jealous?”
Ella took off her apron and threw it on the counter. She was already at the level of anger she’d reached the last time they’d discussed Donna.
“You know I don’t agree with Donna helping you so much. It takes her away from her school studies and it’s hard on her physically. But I’ve let it go because I knew calving would end. But now that the end is near, you come up with this. Give her a calf as a pet.”
“They’re not pets. They teach kids how to care for a steer.”
“It just happens it will keep her in the barn, working like a man, until it’s time to calve again.”
Tom could have let it go—would later wish he had—but his temper had been reached. “Goddamnit, Ella! It’s like you don’t want my children to be mine!”
“You don’t own them!”
This made him boil. Of any father in this community, he was the least disposed to work his children hard. Ella knew that because her own parents had worked her like a slave, an only child who had to be her father’s and her mother’s helper, both.
He took a step back and, in the widest corner of his vision, he saw Billy. All through this bitter exchange, the raising of voices, the boy had been in the shadow beyond the kitchen door.
Tom fled into open air. The 4-H calf for Donna must stand. A deal with one of your children is no less of a deal.
Looking for something useful to do on a hot day in early April, Ella took the feather ticks off all the beds and carried them outside one at a time. She had seen people hang rugs and quilts over the clothesline and go at them with a broom, but the cloth of these feather ticks was old and almost rotten. The best she could do was hang each one over chairs on the lawn, flip it gently in the breeze.
Billy was outside with her. He was happy to be out but annoyed that she’d made him wear a coat. The anemia made him prone to colds.
Often these days, she seemed to be arguing with someone in her head. If forced to picture her antagonist, it was always Tom. She had thought a lot about this and knew it had something to do with love. When people are in love, they give lists of reasons why, but even when Ella was in her teen years listening to her girlfriends talk about the men they’d picked to marry, she never believed in recited virtues as the cause of love. Love didn’t happen because a man was smart, strong, or handsome; it was simply there, like this sunny day.
It had taken the last year of her marriage to learn that the opposite could also be true. When love was gone, it was also like weather. Endless cloud; occasional storm.
The hottest point of difference these days was Donna. A year ago, Donna had seemed barely to notice her father, but now she stood by him in everything, fiercely. If it wasn’t Tom coming in the house to brag of Donna’s cleverness or strength, it was Donna praising her dad for a farming trick or, recently, for his “colourful language.” Where she got “colourful language” Ella didn’t know, probably out of a book at school. Donna was so proud of her father’s cursing she’d taken to copying it, as any fool could predict.
The day before, Donna had come racing into the house, full of giggles.
“The sprockle-face took a kick at Dad. He called her a cross-eyed whore and said she’d drive Christ off the cross!”
“That’s not funny, Donna.”
“Oh, Mom! It is too.”
“I suspect Jesus doesn’t find it amusing.”
“Jesus shouldn’t be thinking about Dad. He should be thinking about the atom bomb.”
“That’s hardly for you to say.”
In bed that night, she told Tom he had to stop using words like whore in front of his daughter. He was silent. Ella knew he thought that made him the more reasonable one. Since he was choosing not to speak, she decided to give vent to other frustrations.
“As for 4-H, you should let the subject drop until fall. Chances are Donna will have moved on to some other interest by then. If you keep pushing, she’ll feel trapped into it, whether she has any interest left or not.”
“I’m not worried about that,” he said, “I’m worried about the plant. I’m not sure a club calf will do well in this yard.”
“I am so sick of the plant,” she said. “This barely feels like home anymore.”
“Does that mean you’d consider leaving?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Now, tired of flipping the feather tick, she pulled a chair out from under it and sat. The sunlight was hottest here, on the south side of the house. The sun’s rays reached her both directly and reflected off the wall. Billy was crawling around the peony chasing a cat.
“Billy, don’t. You’ll get ants on you.”
For months now, Ella had been evaluating her days by how much or how little she thought about Lance. She was always thinking about him to some degree. However rude he’d been to leave the way he had, she could not be angry with him, not really.
She supposed, if she forced herself, she could remember times when she’d been angry at Lance Evert, when he’d stared at her at the meeting, and later when his plant had made her children sick. But absence had sainted him. She pictured his clean-shaven face, his perfect nose, the softness of his cheeks and lips. It made her smile, even if, at the same time, she was swept with pain.
She did not know what to call the thing that had happened. It wasn’t an affair. But if she couldn’t name it, she was fairly sure why it had happened. Lance was just old enough to find older women interesting and she was just young enough that her face contained the prettiness of her younger self. When she crossed the yard carrying buckets of swill, she imagined Lance then too; imagined him looking at her, astonished. “Oh yes,” she told him. “This is me too.”
When she was thinking of Lance, she hated the intrusion of Tom or thoughts of Tom. She did not want to think of when or why things with Tom had soured, or even if there had been very little wrong except that the marriage had cooled. The plant had come and made every disagreement abrasive. Ironically, the plant had also provided the one thing that made things better.
But Lance Evert was gone, and with no farewell. He had been replaced by an older man who was not nice at all. On her angriest days—and this was fast becoming one—Ella believed Tom might have driven Lance away. It was a fact that six newborn pigs had died during the night before she was supposed to meet Lance that second time. Lance had come to the farm that morning. Tom bragged that he had sent him packing, but maybe it wasn’t just a saying. Maybe he knew something, or had put two and two together, and there’d been a fight.
Old King came running across the south field. He came to her wet with sweat and with his tongue out, forced his muzzle under her hand. The vehicle she had heard passing must have been Tom. In a minute the old truck would rumble into the yard. Four o’clock.
A week into April. A school morning.
The night before, Donna and Tom had come back from the barn in high spirits. The last cow had given birth—to twins! The living twins meant they had a hundred per cent calf crop; only the second time this had happened since Tom and Ella were married.
“If you count the twins,” said Jeannie, “it’s more than one hundred per cent.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Tom. “Jeannie’s right. It is a record, then.”
It was almost fate that a happy time would rouse the plant’s ire. The volume of sound seemed to double in the night. The gas seeped in and woke them. Ella got up and wet some towels. She put the big ones across the bottoms of the two doors that led outside, smaller ones across the window ledges where the old putty was letting in night air.
This morning was a school morning. Jeannie was in the bathroom curling her eyelashes. Donna had gone to the barn with her father to see how the twins were doing. As bus time approached, Ella went to the door and looked toward the barn. You could not yell across that distance. With five minutes to go, she instructed Jeannie to go to the road and ask Mr. Snow to wait. Jeannie snapped back some contrary thing but Ella was already running down the path in her dress and gumboots. It made her so angry when Tom and Donna did this, forced her to pry Donna away—as if the only person responsible for Donna’s schooling was Ella.
As soon as she passed the coal shed, she saw them come out of the barn, and knew something was wrong. Donna liked to run around her slow-walking father, punching and picking at him, but there was none of that this morning. As they came closer, Donna started running. Ella called to her but the girl shook her head and passed by.
“Did one of them die?” she asked Tom when he reached her.
“Both.”
“What?”
“Sonofabitching plant killed both of them.”
Ella went to the barn to see for herself. In the dim light, she saw two barn cats tearing at the afterbirth. Tom had set a sheet of plywood to close off the far corner of the room, and behind it was where she found the calves, side by side on the straw. Their front hooves were touching and the eyes, the two she could see, were open and sightless.
She didn’t hear Tom enter. When he spoke, she jumped.
“Christ,” he said. “It’s me.”
“Should I call the plant?”
“I will,” he said. “Or I won’t. Bastards don’t do anything.”
“I wish you didn’t have to curse everything.”
“We’ve got dead calves, and you’re correcting my language.”
She wanted away from him. He did not touch her but stood in her way.
“We’ve got to talk about this,” he said. “It’s one thing for newborn pigs to die. They’re like—”
“Canaries in a coal mine. You don’t have to tell me everything a dozen times.”
“But a calf has lungs the size of a child’s.”
Ella could not stop the rush of tears. “Let me go. I’ve got to go to Billy.”
“It doesn’t matter a damn anymore that you were born on this farm. We have to get the hell out of here.”
“All right. Now, please, get out of my way.”
“I know what you’re thinking …”
“You do not know what I’m thinking!”
She shoved his chest and he stepped back. He said something else but she did not listen or care.
Late that night, Tom sat at the kitchen table trying to write. Against a heavy drift of fatigue, he tried over and over to explain their problems on paper to Ormond Cardwell. The failures lay in little balls around him on the floor.
When Ormond had offered his assistance at Kresge’s lunch counter, Tom had appreciated it but thought he didn’t need him. If Tom had a beef, he’d talk to his own MLA. But writing to Ormond tonight had to do with their childhoods. He needed someone who knew who he was.
“We have been losing half our pig litters. The piglets are barely born and smother. Last night it was stinking and two calves died, twins.” When he read it back, it sounded like a child’s writing.
He wanted Ormond to know, not just about the dead animals, but about how sick Billy got on those nights. How he puked until he was as bent and stiff as a hay hook. How it exhausted him. How his blood was no good.
“A calf’s lungs are the same size as a boy’s lungs.”
Tom’s hand shook as he wrote it. He had begun to fear his son would die.
Things were not getting better. That’s what he had to get across to Ormond. All spring, the smell had been hellish. Every damn thing was worse.
Tom set the pen down. He combed the fingers of both hands back through his hair. There was something else on his mind, something he could not tell Ormond or anyone. A few weeks back, he had gone to the Lower Place to fence. When he was driving home after dark, vehicle lights popped on and off ahead of him at the school. In the flashes he recognized Hughie McGrady’s Ford.
Hughie was an old cowboy from Wyoming who had arrived in the country half a century ago with a wife and brother. Now he was over seventy and alone. Tom stopped and got out. The two men leaned against the fender of Hughie’s truck and smoked. Hughie asked how things were. Tom knew there must be some pressing reason the old fellow had flagged him, but such were Hughie’s manners he had to hear Tom out first. It was not long after the two litters of pigs had died, so Tom told him that, then about Billy’s illness.
“How is it with you, Hughie? The gas must be bad at your place too.”
The bit of orange light from Hughie’s pipe lit his face and the underside of his floppy hat brim. Tom saw the old fellow’s lips draw back, the teeth clench hard on the pipestem.
“That slough west of my house? I checked that one morning and seen some woollies lying by the dugout. I come closer and by God they were dead—three ewes. I started down and got dizzy as hell. I figured it was gas so I ran back up. My legs turned to punk and I fell down. I was out cold but maybe the wind blew it off. I woke up anyway.”
“Did you phone the plant?”
“Nah. I phoned that buzzard Dietz a couple of times early on. All he ever did was offer to visit. I told him I wasn’t looking for company.”
Tom had begun to understand that the story about the sheep dying was not why Hughie was here waiting.
“You got something on your mind, Hughie?”
“I do, Tom, and it ain’t easy.”
“Go on.”
“You know I rented some Bauer land for pasture?”
“I do.”
“I was riding there, to see if there was enough grass for my woollies. It was afternoon, and I saw your car parked where Bauer’s house used to be. I thought that was strange so I come closer.”
Hughie stopped. Tom told him to keep going.
“I’da said sooner but I couldn’t make up my mind. I saw you go by earlier, and I thought, I got to tell him. Thing is, Tommy, I saw your wife and she was with that young fella works with Dietz at the plant. It was probably nothing.”
“What were they doing?”
“They were standing. They had hold of each other. I turned my horse and got the hell out. I don’t want to cause trouble, but it didn’t feel right not to say.”
Tom’s cigarette was dead. He plucked it from the corner of his mouth and laid it in the can lid. He pulled another sheet of paper forward, picked up the pen and dipped it.
“What’s hard is how it gets to everybody. It’s family that pays. Besides my son being sick, no one in this family gets along like they used to. Not my daughters. Not me and my wife. I don’t even get along with myself. Don’t even recognize myself. I thought I was a good farmer, good trader, good husband, not a bad father. I counted on respect and had it. I don’t know what I’ve got now. Some days it doesn’t feel like much.”
Tom stared at these words and panic took him. He scrunched the sheet, squeezed it into a hard ball. He gathered everything from the floor, lifted the trash burner lid, and dropped the papers in. He stirred the coals until a flame appeared and the paper balls caught.
In a whisper, he said to Ella, “I do know what you’re thinking.”
7
Waddens Lake
BILL BOLTED OUT OF BED at Chateau Borealis, skipped breakfast, and drove to the plant. He was working out the details of his trip to Calgary when Henry opened the door.
“Houle wants to see you.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Who else is going to be there?”
“Just you, big guy.”
“I can’t phone him?”
“In his office first thing is what he said.”
Bill put his winter gear back on and walked fast through the plant. He could have called someone to drive him, in a quad or truck, but preferred, for the sake of wakefulness, to walk in the cold. He sucked the icy breaths in deep.
It was a poor time to run into Johnny Bertram—but, around a blind corner, there he was: he and Elmo flopping insulation bales off the truck.
“Johnny.”
“Hey, Billy-boy. Where you off to so early?”
“Called on the carpet by my boss.”
“Been screwing the pooch?”
Houle’s secretary was a stylish, sarcastic Native named Paula. In his crossings through this antechamber, Bill had learned to like her even though she reliably did not remember his name. Now she twisted her torso toward him while leaving her eyes glued to the computer screen. It looked like a yoga pose. She offered him a coffee and he accepted.
“Bill Ryder, correct?”
“Correct.”
“I don’t know why I can’t remember. Maybe you don’t look like your name.”
“You can call me Mr. Walker if that helps.”
“Okay, Mr. Walker. You can go in.”
Bill entered Houle’s sanctum. All the other working spaces at the project looked temporary, like trailers, but Houle’s was a reasonable facsimile of a Calgary executive office. Giant desk. Corner windows that framed a few trees.
Theo spun a coaster under Bill’s lowering cup.