by Fred Stenson
“Feedlot’s fenced out. Calves drink from a well.”
Donna walked away, stiffly. When she got through the gates, she started to run, a careless, flinging gait as if her body had forgotten how.
Doc Moore sighed. “Now I’ve done it. She thinks she killed it.”
“She’s tough,” Tom said, more in hope than certainty. “She’ll get over it.”
Tom did not get into bed but sat on the edge of the mattress. He must be cold, Ella thought, staring at his back, but he did not move for the longest time.
Tom had phoned her at her parents’, told her about the calf but also that the stink had passed and they could come home. When they entered the house, Tom was in the kitchen. He started explaining what Doc Moore’s autopsy had shown, but Ella ran past him. She found poor Donna upstairs, under the covers, staring at the wall. Ella assumed she wouldn’t talk but might accept some comfort at least. She reached and rubbed her back.
Donna bolted upright and started chattering. She let her mother hug her and stroke her hair as she described over and over what the calf looked like when she found it, what the autopsy had been like, how Tom had asked Doc Moore to write down what he had found in the innards.
Ella kept thinking that her daughter was released. Something had been holding her. Now she was free of it.
“Why did you ask Doc Moore to write everything down?” Ella asked Tom now, while he continued to sit on the edge of the bed in the deepening cold. “Are you going to show it to the company?” Without turning, he said, “I will show it to no one at that company. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust the government either.”
“What’s it for then?”
“That’s what I’m thinking about.”
Given their talking habits of late, Ella assumed he was finished. She rolled away and into her own thoughts. But Tom stood up and began pacing the little distance from the night table to the dresser.
“I told Doc that Donna would get over it. It’s true. She will. We all will. If we just let everything be, it will all go away. The kids will go away. You and me will go away. We’ll disperse is what we’ll do, like Alf says gas does. Go away from each other and pretend we’re people who never had this in our lives.”
“Is that what should happen?” she asked.
“Some might say so. I don’t think so.”
“But how can you prevent it?”
“That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking there has to be a way. They can’t come in here and wreck our farm and our family. I have to find a way to stop them and make them pay.”
“Do you think there might be something in the health study?”
“That’ll be the day, Ella,” he said, and the back of her head prickled at the rare sound of her name. “There will be nothing in that study that does us any good. But we can’t be the only ones. Everywhere these plants are, there must be people like us. I’m going to find them and I’m going to talk to them. That’s who I’m going to show Doc Moore’s autopsy to. I’m going to show it to them.”
4
Waddens Lake
BILL SAT OUTSIDE THEO’S OFFICE, pretending to read an industry magazine. Paula hammered away at her computer. He had tried to restart the Ryder-Walker joke, but she would not bite. A bad sign. You don’t make jokes with the condemned.
While he waited, he rehearsed. First, he would say he was sorry about Dennis Whitcomb. After that, the apologizing must stop. “The rule for days off is to be reachable by phone,” he would say. “I was.”
When Dennis had his accident, Henry Shields was at home with the flu. Clayton Brock was shift boss and he phoned Bill’s cell. It must have been when Bill was in the casino. He hadn’t heard the ring or felt the buzz. Instead of trying to phone later, Clayton texted Bill twice, then gave up.
“I didn’t know my phone did texts,” Bill planned to tell Houle. It was a questionable tactic—an engineer pleading ignorance of technology to save his job—but Bill had gone over the alternatives, and it was the only one that might not lead to further questioning of his whereabouts.
Dennis Whitcomb had been knocked down by gas in the sulphur unit on Saturday night. In the days before, a maintenance crew had opened and closed a sour pipe. Any crew rebuttoning a pipe connection had strict rules to follow about how tight to cinch the nuts, and because the wrenches showed the pounds of torque, it was hard to screw up. Despite all these rules and precautions, maintenance had managed to leave a couple of nuts loose enough to leak.
During Dennis’s rounds, he’d smelled sour gas. Everything he did beyond that point was wrong. He was supposed to leave the area; he didn’t. He was supposed to get help; he didn’t. Acting on a potential gas leak without backup, he had also failed to mask up. He went sniffing around the vessels and pipes like a dog, until he finally arrived at the leaking bolts. The hydrogen sulphide nailed him.
In Bill’s forty-year career, he had never seen anyone go to so much trouble to get his little bell rung. Dennis had breathed in just enough to make himself fall over, to have to crawl for his life out of the building. The Waddens Lake sulphur unit’s perfect record for lost-time accidents was kaput.
The rest of the crew were furious with Whitcomb, whom they had long ago renamed Menace Fuckwit. They had been proud of their safety record, to the point of arrogance, and the ones Bill had talked to so far wanted Dennis fired. No one seemed to blame Bill—or rather, no one except Theo Houle.
The wait in Theo’s anteroom continued. The fact that even Paula was ignoring him made him think his getting canned was a real possibility this time.
Paula’s phone buzzed. She picked up, listened, redocked the handset, and looked at him sorrowfully.
“Mr. Houle will see you now.”
Theo was sitting with closed fists on his desk calendar. Bill imagined a knife and fork sticking out of them.
“First off, Theo, I’m sorry about Dennis Whitcomb. I’m sorry he got hurt. I’m glad he’s okay. But the rule about days off—”
Theo lifted his fists and thumped them down. Bill shut up.
“That’s not what I want to talk to you about. I’ve seen the accident report. I’d fire the stupid prick, but I can’t. Head office has told me to hang on to everyone. They think there’s going to be another manpower panic.”
“A firing freeze?”
On any other day, Houle might have laughed. Since he had no response, Bill said, “I’ll talk to our safety man, Gid Couture, and have him do some refresher training. I don’t know what to do about the idiots who under-torqued the nuts.”
“Bill, I’m not going to beat around the bush. There were New Aladdin people at the technical meeting in Calgary. Not one remembers seeing you. Apparently you never picked up your welcome package or name tag. The main desk says you never asked for the key to your room.”
“I don’t wear name tags.”
“And you don’t sleep in your room?”
“I can explain this if I have to. I was at the conference.”
They stared at each other. It was Houle’s turn but he wasn’t speaking; he waited for more from Bill.
“So some young puppy who doesn’t know me says I wasn’t there. I don’t give a fuck what your spies say. I’m telling you I was there. I expect to be believed.”
“They’re hardly my spies.”
“You make them that when you ask them to spy on me.”
“You should calm down.”
“Do I get to explain, or is this a straight-up lynching?”
Houle sat back and stared at him.
Bill explained about the snowstorm and having to overnight in Red Deer. “By the time I got to the hotel, the panel I wanted to attend was over.”
“Apparently you didn’t go to anything else.”
“At coffee break, one of the old guys told me Lance Evert was dying of cancer.”
“If I’m supposed to know who that is, I don’t.”
“He was my mentor in gas processing. When I heard he was sick, I left the m
eeting.”
“So instead of attending the technical meeting, you went to see your friend. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I didn’t go see him.”
Houle looked embarrassed. He did not want these confidences. They had taken some of the edge off him, and he resented it. “What you did or didn’t do about your friend is not for me to judge. But taking a day off to attend a technical meeting that you don’t attend is a piss-poor example.”
“I was there.”
“For a coffee break? Even if the rest of the meeting wasn’t of interest to you, you were there on behalf of New Aladdin and the Waddens Lake Project, on company time. You could have found things out that guys in our other units need to know. More and more, I get the sense that you’re a solo player here. A free agent.”
Houle had been rehearsing too.
“That last part is probably true. Is that it, then? I’m out?”
“You’re doing it again. Talking like you don’t give a shit if you’re here or gone.”
“I do care, but I won’t beg for my job.”
“I’m not asking you to beg. I’m not firing you either. I just want you to act like a New Aladdin unit manager. Ducking out of a technical meeting is kid stuff. I’m not telling you to love the company, but there’s a code of conduct, isn’t there?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying. I should pretend to love the company?”
“Damn it, Bill, that’s exactly what I’m saying. If I left New Aladdin for a better offer across the street, I’d be one hundred per cent loyal to this company until I walked out that door, and I’d be one hundred per cent loyal to the other company the minute I sat down. That’s part of any management job. It should go without saying.”
“Okay, I’ve got it. Are we done?”
There were three messages on his office phone, all from Marie Calfoux. In the first one, she asked him to give her a call. In the second, she asked about snowshoeing and what he was doing Friday. The final one said, “You better be away, because if you’re not, and you don’t call me soon, I’m chucking your number.”
Then he phoned Dennis Whitcomb at his apartment in McMurray. Dennis didn’t have the sense to turn down the blaring television before he answered. A golf announcer in Arizona said Henrik Stenson was leading by three strokes heading into the final nine.
“So what do you think, Dennis? Will Stenson win it?”
“I wasn’t really watching.”
“You can watch what you like. But could you turn it down while we talk?”
The volume came down and Dennis returned. “You’re phoning to fire me, right?”
“I can see why you’d think so, but you’ve lucked out. I’m phoning to ask how you’re feeling.”
“I’m not fired? Wow. Then I guess I feel pretty good.”
“Good enough to come back to work tomorrow?”
“You bet. I’ll be there.”
Bill worked late that night, then drove home to McMurray. He had calls to make and didn’t want to use his office phone. If Houle really didn’t trust him anymore, it was possible that the office was bugged. Being a post-9/11 facility, Waddens Lake had that kind of equipment.
In his condo, Bill opened a bottle of wine and threw a dozen frozen wings in the oven. At nine o’clock, he was sitting in front of a plate of bones and realized he’d been staring at the phone for an hour.
From the sheet of phone numbers in front of him, he finally dialed Lance Evert in Calgary. He was assuming Judy would answer. He was prepared for her to put the receiver to her chest and yell, “Lance! You’ll never guess!” But it was Lance himself who picked up. When Lance tried to speak, his voice came apart. He covered the phone and coughed.
“Sorry,” he said when he came back. “Now who is this?”
“It’s Bill Ryder. Should I call you back?”
“Believe it or not, this is a good time. I’ll probably have to stop now and then, but we can talk. It’s good to hear your voice, Billy.”
“I ran into Don Giotto at a meeting.”
“And he told you what I’ve got.”
“Not in detail.”
“Detail. I don’t think it matters where it started or where it went, or even what it is. It’s an opportunistic disease. As someone interested in science, I half admire it.”
“Don said you were battling it hard.”
“Donny hasn’t been in touch for a while. I’m not battling anything. You have to know when you’re beat. Fighting’s just a waste of time.”
“I’m sorry, Lance.”
“Me too. But how are you, Billy? You’re up north, right? Oil sands?”
“I work for New Aladdin, at the Waddens Lake upgrader. Sulphur unit.”
“Right, right. Is New Aladdin like our old Aladdin at all? Texans and that?”
“Not much, no. Different money. You know corporations nowadays.”
“Yeah. Same face on them all. Owned by people all over the planet. We used to think they had personalities, didn’t we? I doubt it was ever true. And you run their sulphur plant?”
Bill talked sulphur lingo for a while—modified Claus plant, closed-loop system, analyzers, scrubbers.
Lance had another coughing spell.
Coming out of it, he said, “You’re not married now?”
“No. Second marriage went the way of the first. I should stay single.”
“Ah, well. And Martha and Will?”
“Good. You must hear about them from Ginny.”
“We do. Good kids.”
“Maybe I should go, Lance. I’ll call again.”
“Always good to hear from you, Billy. You were always a good engineer. I often think that.”
“That was long ago.”
“You still have a good reputation.”
“You know what that means.”
“What?”
“I haven’t killed a village or poisoned a major river.”
Lance laughed, coughed. “Just a minute,” he said. He finished coughing and came back exhausted. “Oh, never mind. The thing I was going to say was stupid.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m so foggy with drugs, I almost asked how your mother was. Sorry. I guess I should have kept that to myself.”
“That’s okay. It’s kind of nice somebody was thinking of Ella as alive.”
“A fine woman, Billy. Your dad was a lucky man.”
After the conversation with Lance, Bill could not imagine talking to anyone else. He took a pill, went to bed, and waited for the drug to take command.
“I am stuck,” he said to himself.
5
Ryder Farm, 1962
CALVING SEASON SEEMED TO COME out of nowhere that year, and when it did, Tom knew he would have no family helper. So suddenly and cleanly had the death of the calf severed the bond of work between Donna and himself, Tom sometimes felt it had never existed. Ella had put up a new ad for a hired man in the Greyhound station, and Tom barely had time to say it was a waste of time before the phone rang. Like a crusty angel, Hercules Bernier drove into the yard in a wartime truck and proceeded to work for the Ryders for exactly the length of calving season. Hercules was old and not particularly strong, so Tom did not require him to get up in the night. They did all right anyway. A couple of calves died that more night-watching would not have saved. One of those deaths was on a bad gas night, and Tom wrote it in the diary that he and Ella still kept.
Hercules drew his pay and left the day the last calf was born. He had given no reason for coming and gave no reason when he left. He drove off in a glower of black smoke.
Only then was Tom able to turn his thoughts to finding other communities and farmers whose lives were affected by sour gas plants. The first thing he discovered was that he wouldn’t find them in Haultain’s public library. The embarrassed librarian explained that her budget did not stretch to regional newspaper subscriptions. He would have to go to Lethbridge.
Tom made a plan to go the following Saturday a
nd to take Donna with him. The girl had been keeping away since the death of her calf. She almost never spoke to him unless he pushed her. It did not seem fair that the calf’s death should stick to Tom, that she should avoid her father as part of shedding her pain. Emotions weren’t about fairness; he also knew that.
He went ahead and asked her anyway. Donna had her school-work spread on the table. He could tell her instinct was to say no, before examining what it was she was refusing.
“I need to go to their library,” Tom told her.
The word sparked her but she remained cagey. She asked what he would be doing there.
“I want to look at newspapers to see if there’s anything about people in other communities with sulphur plant problems.”
“Can I go to the library if I don’t help you?”
“Of course,” he said brightly, quickly, though his wish had been exactly that.
This was in May, in the spring of Jeannie’s final year of high school, and Tom considered asking his oldest girl along as well. But at the exact moment he would have asked, an argument erupted between Jeannie and her mother over whether Jeannie could stay in Haultain on Friday after school and spend the whole weekend there. Ella was saying she couldn’t stay over Friday, but that Gerry could come early Saturday to pick her up.
Billy got wind of Lethbridge and was determined to go too. Men had come and taken his Titrilog the month before, right after that the government trailer was removed. Only the Stevenson Screen, the birdhouse, remained after the health study ended. Billy had been weirdly attached to the Titrilog and weather trailer, and their loss created a desire to go farther afield in search of wonders like them. A big building full of books held the right kind of promise. Before the boy started crying, Tom said he could come.
He should have asked Ella too—that is, he should have asked her first. Tom had his doubts if Ella would have gone to Lethbridge in any case, but, having been asked last, she coldly refused. More grit between their edges.
Tom took Billy to the children’s section and found some books of the kind he wanted. Then he got stern with him.
“Now, buddy, I’ve got things to do here, so after you finish with those, you look at the shelf and find more yourself.”