Who by Fire

by Fred Stenson

  When he got to the office, the waiting room was nearly full, but it was not long before his name was called. He was directed into a small room. Three chairs, a low table, a tissue box. The psychologist entered and sat in the chair opposite. He was a younger, chubbier man than Bill was expecting, and he lost faith accordingly. He could not imagine this fellow understanding his problems.

  The psychologist looked no more pleased with Bill.

  “When you called our receptionist, she listed some categories. You said your problem was addiction. Is it a drug problem?”

  “I’m not a crackhead.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you are, then?”

  “My problem is gambling.”

  The psychologist sat forward with his pen poised over a writing pad on the table.

  “And alcohol,” Bill added.

  “How often do you drink?”

  “Couple of times a week. My days off.”

  “A twenty-six per sitting? Or more?”

  “A bottle or two of wine usually. A twenty-six of anything hard would make me sick.”

  “Let’s look at the gambling. Do you lose a thousand a week?”

  Bill calculated.

  “Let me rephrase that. You look like you have a professional job. Does more than forty per cent of your net income go to gambling every month?”

  “Maybe a thousand a week if I’m gambling. But I don’t gamble every week.”

  The psychologist set his pen down. He pushed his chair back from the table and let his chubby hands hang down between his knees.

  “Are you suicidal?”

  “I think about it. I assume everyone over thirty-five does from time to time.”

  “How often do you think about it?”

  When he saw Bill struggling with the question, the psychologist thumped back in his chair. “How often did you think about suicide last week?”

  “Couple of times. It was a bad week.”

  “And what made it bad?”

  “I blew four thousand dollars on a VLT in one session.”

  “How about in the month before that week? I’m still talking about suicide, not your wins or losses.”

  “Hardly at all except for last week.”

  The psychologist bent forward and picked up the pen, clicked the point back into the body, clipped it in his shirt pocket.

  “I’m going to level with you. There are not nearly enough psychologists in this town. To say we’re overloaded is a hilarious understatement. You got in because you used a phrase that is a red flag for potential suicide.”

  He paused to see if Bill would comment, then went on. “I treat meth addicts, crackheads, alcoholics who beat their wives and children so badly ambulances have to be called. Guys going home to their wives in Newfoundland carrying STIs from camp whores. Pedophiles who work in daycares. A woman who cooks in a camp and has fantasies of mass murder. There are many rapes in this town, and sometimes the rapists and their victims both come to me as patients. A lot of people who come here kill themselves anyway.”

  Bill slapped his hands down on his knees and rose. “You’ve been a great help.”

  “I don’t need your sarcasm.”

  “Do you generally send people away feeling worse than when they came in?”

  “I’m asking you to leave. I have a button under my desk. If I push it, a cop comes. I’m serious. Go right now, or you’ll wind up with a criminal record. As for your problem, if you feel it’s that serious, call the ‘When It’s Not A Game’ helpline. There are therapy groups and counsellors who deal with your type of problem.”

  3

  Ryder Farm, 1962

  COMSTOCK’S REFUSAL to buy the farm hit Tom and Ella hard. For Ella it was like the Bible story where God asks for a sacrifice. After she had suffered over the decision and agreed to it, God changed His mind. She could have been relieved except for the way it left her: vulnerable and full of guilt.

  The effect on Tom was hard to gauge except that it drove him even further away. The refusal caused something like a blind to draw partway down behind Tom’s eyes. Week by week, it dropped the rest of the way. Together in the house or car, they spoke so little it was barely human.

  “The milk cow is drying up.”

  “Billy needs bigger shoes.”

  “Some of the hay bales are frozen to the ground.”

  In the house Tom did not volunteer anything but would answer any question from Billy or Donna. Billy’s were the scattershot questions of an inquisitive child. Donna’s were mostly about her club calf. Jeannie had no questions for Tom, nor he for her. But there was something about Tom’s look that made Ella think he was no longer comfortable with himself. Everyone left the kitchen after dinner, children first, then Ella, leaving Tom alone at the table. That was not new. But when Ella passed through the kitchen, Tom never seemed to be doing anything. His Christmas books sat closed beside him, the newspapers were by the radio, his pencil and scrap paper were in a drawer. All he did was stare at the table or scratch at it with his fingernails—and smoke; he always smoked.

  The look on his face was not anger or worry, but something less, she thought, something like embarrassment or confusion. Whatever it was, he hung on it, like a sack from a hook. She longed for the days when they had sniped at each other. At least there’d been life in that.

  Ella had thought the club calf a stupid project, but now she felt relief when Tom and Donna went to look at the animal. The steer’s shed had previously been used for young calves, a place to warm them during a blizzard. In the summer, Tom had cut the door larger and strengthened the fence, lashed in a water barrel. When Donna lured him down there, he would lean over the fence while she fooled with the calf. She led the steer around on a halter, in circles and figure eights, and this brought a wan smile to her father’s face. She brushed the steer until he shone.

  When neighbours dropped by, Tom held up his end of the conversation. As Vic Sebald and he drank coffee one day, Tom let slip something he had not told Ella. Vic asked how the 4-H calf was coming along, and Tom said with sudden anger, “It’s no damn good. It was the best one in the bunch as a calf, but it should be a third bigger by now.”

  “Why would that be?” Vic asked.

  Ella turned so she could see. Tom said nothing, only jutted his chin at the window, at the plant.

  Ella felt for Donna. She did not want her girl to be humiliated by the judges in front of the other kids and parents, come July. But she was pleased to see Tom’s brief fury.

  During that winter, Ella felt lonelier than at any time in her adult life, an echo of the loneliness she’d felt when she was a girl and an only child. She still missed Lance, but now she missed Tom too. Her girls were mostly lost to her: Jeannie with her boyfriend and Donna with her preference for her father. Ella could have visited Dora Bauer or picked up the phone any time, but she didn’t, because the things that bothered her could not be said. Instead, she spent her time imagining what went on in Tom’s head. Was he blaming her for their situation? Thinking they could have been gone on the heels of the Bauers, except for her feelings about home?

  She found herself arguing back. What about your stupid horse-trading? That was why Comstock had punished them. If Tom hadn’t been so determined to get the better of the deal, there might have been a deal today.

  At times, when she was feeling angry, she imagined Tom that way too. She imagined them roaring in each other’s faces like bears. In reality, the only thing she found to do with her emotions was to go to her sewing room and cry. When the sobbing stopped, stone-cold thoughts remained like gravel on a floor. There is no court, she said to herself, no judge. There is just Tom and Ella trapped in silence.

  As that winter deepened, Ella’s thoughts became more refined. Comstock’s refusal to buy them out, Tom’s and her rejection of the half-deal, meant they had chosen to stay. It was a choice to go on imperilling their children. That was what they could not say to one another, and any conversation lacking that statement was n
ot worth having.

  They were waiting, and the only thing they could be waiting for was disaster.

  Billy took to arithmetic. He had started school in September, and by February was adding and subtracting like nobody’s business. He never had enough work from school to satisfy him and was always plaguing his mother to write down more problems. “No, Mom. Harder.”

  Lately, he was drawing pictures too, and it was both happiness and heartbreak to see him hunched over the paper with his pencil clutched.

  At the end of February, the health study started. A government man brought a wooden box twice the size of a dog house into their yard. Billy was beside himself. He spent that day standing in front of it in his hooded parka and scarf, staring through its one glass side at the coloured pens that drew lines on a circle of cardboard.

  “It’s a clock, Mom.”

  “No, Billy. The man said it was a Titrilog.”

  “It’s still a clock.”

  “He’s right,” said Tom, who had wandered up. “The cardboard circle is geared to a clock.”

  “Fine,” she said. “It’s a clock.” And left.

  No matter how many times she came to pull Billy away from the Titrilog, to get him to come in to eat or sleep, he would unfailingly tell her, “Blue is hydrogen sulphide. Red is sulphur dioxide.”

  How could something moving so slowly excite a boy? To please him, or try to, she bent over and looked at the two lines creeping and jiggling along.

  Another crew from the plant put a “birdhouse” on one of their fence posts. People called them birdhouses because they were about that size and had louvred sides that let the wind through. Again Billy watched the installation and came back to the house knowing everything. It wasn’t a birdhouse; it was a Stevenson Screen, he told them. There were two jars inside, wrapped in two cloths, each dipped in different stuff.

  “They turn a colour if gas gets on them. One’s for hydrogen sulphide, the other’s for sulphur dioxide—just like the Titrilog.” It did amaze her how much he could learn and how precisely he could repeat it all.

  In mid-March, a government air pollution trailer arrived. They set it down in a field fifty yards west of the house. While a couple of men worked at setting it up, Billy stood outside the door peppering them with questions. That night he sat across from his father and drew a picture of a wind-speed gauge, putting curves like eyebrows beside the cups to show that they were twirling.

  Then came a Saturday when Tom and the girls were in town. Tom had offered to take Billy too, but the boy said he couldn’t go. He considered watching the Titrilog his duty. Because the rotten-egg smell had been bad all night and was still awful when Ella went out to milk that morning, she kept Billy in the house until they’d had lunch. The smell was still bad then, but he was desperate to go. He ran to the Titrilog and came straight back, running even harder.

  “Billy, what on earth?”

  He yanked on her dress. “It’s the Titrilog, Mom! It’s broken!”

  As Billy ran ahead and Ella walked behind, she felt as if she was parting invisible clouds of stink. How typical, she thought, that the machine would break when most needed.

  “We have to do something, Mom!”

  The boy’s face was greenish. She felt woozy herself. It was warm but there was almost no wind and the sun was brilliant on the wet snow. It was hard to see into the Titrilog’s window. But finally she saw what Billy was telling her. Both pens had drifted off the edge of the cardboard circle. They sat there jerking, like dying insects.

  “The cardboard is still going around,” Billy said. “That’s why the pens aren’t at the end of the lines they made to the edge.”

  “What do you think it means, Billy?”

  “Something bad,” he said. “The lines go out if there’s more gas. If they go right off, that’s really bad.”

  “Could it be broken? Could the clock have come unwound?”

  “I just told you,” he said, “the clock’s still going.”

  Fear rose through her. She was dizzy and had to grab the box to steady herself.

  “Billy, we have to go.”

  “We have to tell the plant.”

  “That’s what we’ll do. Get your pyjamas, your toothbrush, and two pairs of underpants, really quick! We’ll go to the plant and then to town.”

  Tom was in the Co-op warehouse when Billy came running and wrapped himself around his leg. The warehouse was an old grain elevator. Pallets of bagged fertilizer, weed killer, and seed rose into the darkness. Billy was chattering about the Titrilog. He loved saying the word and always punched the “tit” part.

  “So what’s wrong with the Titrilog, Billy?”

  “It went right off the cardboard! Both pens!”

  The image settled into Tom’s neck.

  “We told the plant. Mom and me.”

  Ella was there now. She nodded.

  “Did you talk to Dietz?” Tom asked her.

  “He wasn’t there. I spoke to Bert Traynor.”

  Traynor had told her the technician who looked after the Titrilog worked out of Calgary. They shouldn’t expect anything to happen today, nor tomorrow since it was Sunday.

  “That sonofabitch,” Tom muttered. Ella turned away and looked into shadow. But, really, who was Traynor to talk as if the Titrilog belonged to the Ryders? As if fixing it was a favour to them?

  Tom had told the girls to meet him at the drugstore at two. It was almost that time now. Ella told him she had brought overnight things for the girls and Billy—and herself; she thought she should stay too. They did not need to say that Tom would go back and look after the animals. That was understood.

  When they got to the drugstore, only Donna was there. As soon as she heard her mother’s plan, she said she would not stay in town. She had her calf to look after.

  Tom could see that Ella wanted his help. “You better stay,” he told her.

  Donna turned her hard look on him. “I’m going with.”

  Tom shrugged, and Ella’s face grew darker. He could not think of what else he was supposed to do. “We’ll be careful,” he said, but could not tell if Ella was listening.

  When Tom and Donna were in the truck, ready to leave for the farm, Billy ran out of the house. He was crying. Tom told Donna to roll down her window.

  “I want to go too!” the boy yelled.

  “Titrilog’s locked tight, Billy. There’s nothing you can do but look at it.”

  “That’s what I want! I want to look at it!”

  “Sorry, buddy. Step back now. You’re staying here.”

  The boy crumpled to his knees. He was punching his fists into an old snowbank as they drove away.

  Tom and Donna were quiet during the drive. They talked when they were at ease, kept quiet when they had things to think about. He remembered the look she had given him when he said she should stay in town. He supposed she felt betrayed; that the two of them should be more of a team.

  “I’m going to halter my calf and lead him around. Give him lots of water,” she said when they were closer to home.

  “Why?”

  “If something makes you sick, you should move around. Drink lots. Wash it out.”

  “Why are you sure he’s sick?”

  “When I fed him this morning, he didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to be scratched.”

  At the farm, Donna did not come in to change her clothes. She put on gumboots and ran for the corrals. Tom went into the bedroom to change and was still there when he heard her. It was a strange sound. A scream. A yell. She smacked the porch door open.

  He met her in the kitchen. Floods of tears were pouring down her scarlet face.

  “What the hell, Donna?”

  “Goddamn fucking sonofabitch is dead!”

  “Hey, now. Sit down. Sit here.” He pointed to her seat at the table. She threw herself onto it, buried her face in her folded arms.

  Tom went and looked at the steer. It had bloated so high its legs jutted out. Back at the house, Donna
was not in the kitchen. She had gone upstairs.

  He phoned Doc Moore’s office but no one answered. He tried him at home and got him. When Tom had explained things, Doc asked if he had phoned the plant. Or maybe they should try to get the government vet to come.

  “I don’t want a company man or a government man on the place,” Tom said. “I’ll pay you to cut the animal open.”

  Doc tried again to make the point that, without a company or government witness, an autopsy wouldn’t be official.

  “I don’t care if it counts with them. I want to know for myself.”

  Tom and Donna were back at the calf pen when Doc flew into the yard. He came with his heavy canvas bag.

  “You better go to the house now,” Tom told Donna.

  Her tears had dried to salt on her cheeks. She would not meet her father’s eyes. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  Doc went to work. First he stabbed the bloat with a nail, stood back while the rank gas blew out. From the first slice through the hide, and right on down to when he was cutting out and removing the lungs, Donna stood stiff as a statue. She did not take her eyes off the bloody blade as it danced in the black-purple of the calf. When Doc hauled out a length of intestine, slit a length of it, and washed away the stinking contents, she was with him then too.

  Once in a while, Doc set down his knife and signalled them closer, pointed his flashlight at something. He remarked on the swelling of tissues in the lungs. He shifted the light into the stomach and asked what the calf had been drinking.

  “Water from our well,” said Tom. “Same as we drink.”

  “No,” said Donna, the first time she’d spoken. “I’ve been taking him to the field. I let him drink at the coulee.”

  Doc pointed the flashlight into the calf’s gut. “I expected the lungs to be like they are. Inflamed, full of fluid. Pulmonary edema. It’s probably what killed him. But the gut and intestines are inflamed too, like he was getting poisoned at the same time. Where does that runoff come from?”

  “Coulee starts just below the plant.” Tom swept his arm along the coulee’s path.

  “Christ, man. That goes right to your feedlot.”