Who by Fire

by Fred Stenson

  “He’s gone. Back to Mac.”

  “Does that mean the fire’s out?”

  “Contained.”

  “What about the insulation crew?”

  “John Bertram phoned at three to say his truck broke down.”

  “Whew. That’s a relief. So who signed in at the gate?”

  “Some prick fessed up he’d done it as a joke. He saw the gate guard sleeping, so he took the work permit off his desk and scribbled something unreadable in the book.”

  “Good news all around, then.”

  “Not really. Did you get your village moved to safety?” Kruger changed voice for the last part. Singsong. Fruity.

  “We did.”

  “You planning on returning the crew bus? Some men would like to go home.”

  “Shortly.”

  “Something else. Houle wants you to phone him first thing. Phone him at home at seven, is what he said. He’s pissed.”

  Bill looked at his watch. It was nearly six a.m. “What’s his problem?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Any further instructions?”

  “Just the crew bus. No, wait. Mr. Houle said you’re not to talk to reporters.”

  Bill looked for the off button. Marie reached and took the phone.

  “It sounds like it’s safe for you to stay here,” Bill told her. “Fire’s under control. Nobody died.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Return the bus, then phone my annoyed boss at seven. Guess I’ll go to the camp and try to sleep for an hour.”

  “You can come back here. I’ll make breakfast.”

  “That would be great.”

  They didn’t eat. They went to bed. She was beautiful and smooth, and moved with grace. She rolled on top of him and rode him to the end of both of them. They were lying together under the warm duvet when Bill bounced up and cursed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot to phone Houle.”

  She felt for her phone on the bedside table and gave it to him. When he got through, Houle was mad about the lateness of the call—and everything else. He didn’t specifically mention the evacuation of the village. He said he was coming back to the plant and wanted Bill in his office at two sharp.

  “What was that about?”

  “Not sure. Boss wants me in his office at ten.”

  “That’s hours from now,” she said and drew him down to her.

  Bill was still feeling dazzled when he entered the anteroom of Houle’s office.

  “Someone looks happy,” said Paula, and he adjusted his face before going in.

  A half-hour later, when he returned to the icy, smoke-smelling morning, he was dazzled in a different way. He was unemployed.

  In the control room, he told Henry that he was in charge until further notice. He went to his office to collect some things. He had to come out and ask for a box. When Henry gave him one, he happened to look up and see Clayton’s thyroid eyes boring at him.

  The picture of his sisters. The picture of his kids. They could keep his consolation golf trophy and the mail in his inbox. He zipped the computer and its cords into the travel bag. What was left on his desk was the corrosion maintenance plan. Fuck it. He put his keys and ID on top of it. There was a knock on his door. The SS-looking security man was waiting.

  “Do you need your keys, Mr. Ryder?”

  “They’re on my desk.”

  “I’m thinking I should take your computer.”

  “You’re a little ahead of yourself, Hansen.”

  In his car, he phoned Marie.

  “Leave with pay until further notice,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means they’re on their way to firing me. I’ll tell you more later.”

  “Why not come now? Sounds like you have the time.”

  “I’d be poor company.”

  “I can live with a bit of that.”

  Marie was making the breakfast they hadn’t had earlier. She was dressed formally, which he did not understand.

  “Thought they couldn’t do without you,” she said from the stove. “Apparently, they think they can.”

  “Who’s taking your place?”

  “Guy named Henry Shields. My junior engineer.”

  “Caesar is dead; long live Caesar?”

  “Henry’s a good guy.”

  “Really?”

  “They’re not all assholes.”

  “What reason did they give for putting you on leave?” she asked.

  “Evacuating the village.”

  Marie looked surprised. He hadn’t told her before that he was the one who called it.

  He told her the rest of the story, starting with Houle on the phone telling him he was to guide Kruger. But when Bill had sat down with Houle, they’d immediately argued about what “guiding Kruger” meant.

  “I did not give you carte blanche. You know that.”

  “Since when do we need permission to keep communities from getting gassed?”

  “That assessment of risk is your opinion. Shared by no one.”

  “There was lots of H2S in those lines. You don’t know what left that area when it exploded.”

  “Neither do you.”

  Back and forth. There was no wind. There was a bit of wind. It was blowing in the direction of the village. It probably missed the village. Somewhere in the middle it got nasty. Houle said Bill was taking sides against the company, as usual. Bill called him gutless.

  “I’m not going to argue with someone who’s lost his temper—and his objectivity,” Houle said after that.

  “You’re objective? Don’t make me laugh.”

  In the story, as told to Marie, Bill left a part out: where Houle had said, “I can hardly ignore that the same woman’s name comes up every time we have this discussion about company loyalty.”

  Houle had noticed—or someone had—that Bill’s phone call to the plant after the evacuation was made from Marie’s phone.

  “I did not choose Marie Calfoux to be the emergency contact at the village.”

  That was when Houle told Bill he was on leave, effective immediately. He paused before adding, “With pay,” so Bill would know what a thin string he was dangling from.

  “And if I don’t accept?”

  “We’ll dismiss you for cause.”

  “They’re trying to keep you quiet,” Marie said when he finished.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “And will you?”

  “I’m not giving a good demonstration right now.”

  She laughed. “Will you go to the media, though?”

  “I don’t even know if they’d be interested. But I won’t take the company’s money and talk to the press too.”

  She might have been disappointed. In any case, she let the subject drop. They ate the big breakfast she had prepared: fried eggs, thick bacon, toast and honey.

  When they were finished eating, she asked, “Is it likely to happen again? That explosion?”

  “I don’t know. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that they need to do a kind of maintenance they’re not doing now. A continuous search for changes at possible corrosion points. Hydrogen got out of the pipes somewhere and caused an explosion. That’s a fact. They have to investigate how.”

  “So is it safe for me to live here or not?”

  “A week ago, I’d have said it was. Now, not so much.”

  She checked her watch. “I have to be somewhere at one-thirty. I job-share as a teacher at an elementary school in McKay. It’s someone else’s day but she has a dental appointment this afternoon.”

  “I didn’t even know you had a job.”

  “Thought I was a shiftless Indian, I guess.”

  “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “I have a few jobs. I do a newsletter.” She nodded at the bank of computer equipment.

  “What sort of newsletter?”

  She laughed. “Think you’ve been under surveill
ance? Don’t worry. It’s for an association of Native-owned companies in the oil sands. They’re so pro-industry, it’s sickening.”

  Bill was finding it impossible to be here, to even keep it in his mind that they had made love all morning. He attempted an apology.

  “I’m guessing you’re not used to being fired. How about you come out again for dinner on Friday. You can phone me if you don’t feel like it. I’m hoping we have lots of time.”

  She got up and gathered the dishes. When she came back, she ran her hand through his hair.

  “I like you, Bill Ryder.” She hurried to the bathroom. Yelled back, “Go now, okay?”

  On Highway 63, he could not breathe to the bottom of his lungs. When Marie appeared in his mind, he shook his head to dislodge her. She’s fine, she’s lovely. He wanted to be in her bed again—but not now. Something unidentified was pouring down his throat, fanning to his fingers.

  By the time he crossed the bridge into the city, it was like an iron loop was being pulled out of his chest. Late afternoon, still daylight. A spot in the casino parking lot stood waiting.

  2

  Ryder Farm, 1972

  AT THE END OF AUGUST, Ella and Tom drove Billy to Calgary to begin university. Billy spent the trip pointlessly arguing with his father about the pickup truck. Since he would be living in residence, Tom said he didn’t need it. They could talk about it again at Christmas.

  The sight of the residence room that Billy would be sharing with a stranger made Ella cry. So small and odd smelling. Once they had all his things inside, Billy kept looking out the window and out the door; it was clear he wanted them to go. The drive back to the farm in the dark was silent and eternal. Nothing but the highway lines and the two funnels of yellow beating back the darkness. Ella was faint with hunger but let the service stations loom up and slide by.

  After twenty-five years of children, the emptiness in the house became worse as the weeks crept by. A cat’s yowl, a sudden wind gust—things like that grabbed Ella by the shoulders and twisted like God. Work was a blessing, but when the work stopped, the problems in the house quivered and strained, and the lack of conversation had no excuse. She crocheted, knitted, quilted, bought patterns and made the girls and herself dresses. The Singer electric sizzled miles of seams until it was too hot to touch. Hearing from Billy in a phone call that other students were wearing macramé belts, she found out what macramé was and knotted three of them, with embedded beads and dangly ends. It would go well with his Lauren Bacall hair. “Why three?” he’d asked her over the phone when he got them in the mail. “You can wear one,” she told him, “and sell the other two.”

  Ella preferred not to sit at the table with Tom as he rolled and smoked his cigarettes, read a page of his Christmas book and shut it again; doodled on the back of a Co-op flyer. She had come to detest the smell of cigarette smoke. Surely there was enough information nowadays about tobacco and cancer that she should not have to argue.

  Tom seldom talked to her about the plant. He behaved as if she had forbidden the topic. Things still came in the mail from Purcell, and Tom would write back immediately. If she asked him what was going on, as he typed or licked an envelope shut, he would say Dry Fork was close to its settlement. They had been close for years, and Ella doubted it would happen. Tom’s own lawsuit had died the night Purcell announced he would not work for them. What Tom had done since was help Dry Fork.

  Everything missing from their marriage seemed to reside in the letters Tom had wanted and that Ella had refused to write. It had begun to sicken her to be touched by him, even when he rolled toward her in the night and his heavy arm fell against her hip. The rare times when he tried to kiss her neck while she worked at the sink or counter, she always moved away. In those moments of revulsion, Lance’s image would flash.

  When she wrote to or phoned her children, these were the things she did not say. Donna and Billy were oblivious anyway. Donna was involved in her job and travels. She would ask about her father the way you’d ask about a dog. How’s Dad’s lawsuit? Does King still chase cars? Billy seemed to believe the purpose of a phone call home was to give a report: how school was going; what he did with his time. When she told her son about the farm work his father was doing, or his worsening smoker’s cough, Billy had no comment. If she were to say, “Dad and I had a nasty bout of cholera last week,” he might reply, “Oh yeah? And how was that?”

  But it was a good thing Billy and Donna were so interested in their lives—that they had lives to be interested in! Ella was happy for them and didn’t want the state of things at home to dampen their pleasure.

  Jeannie was not so easy to deceive. She taught school in a B.C. town. She was still engaged to Hal. Though they’d been in the same teaching program at university, Hal had found more lucrative work with the Department of Forestry. It was Hal’s hometown Jeannie taught in, and the family she boarded with were close friends of his parents. Jeannie might as well be married, except that she wasn’t and was in no hurry to be. The length of the engagement was already a topic of gossip, and not just in B.C. Concern about it had spread to Tom and Ella’s community.

  Sometimes Jeannie’s calls to Ella were only small talk, but when she called from the pay phone outside the hockey arena, that meant she was miserable. During those calls, she always cried. “It’s like my life is already over,” she would sob, and Ella would say, “The reason you’re having an engagement is so you can decide these things. You don’t have to marry Hal.” That would prompt Jeannie to list Hal’s good qualities. “It’s not his fault, Mom. It’s not him.” And Ella would say, “You have a life too. It’s just starting and it’s just as important as his. Don’t throw it away.”

  The new rotary phone in the Ryders’ house was on the wall beside the kitchen table, where Tom stayed sitting after supper. The hockey arena calls always came in the late evening, and Tom could not help but hear. After Ella hung up, she saw her husband’s ears flame. “I don’t know why you’d tell her that,” he said once.

  In Tom’s estimation, Hal was the perfect husband for Jeannie: dependable, conservative, sturdily built. He had a good job that would make for a stable future. Hal was the kind of old-before-his-time hard worker that Tom’s generation of men could not help but admire.

  Ella said, “If we had a private phone, you wouldn’t know what I say to my daughter.”

  “Since it’s a party line,” he replied, “the neighbours know too.”

  Even more difficult was the fact that Jeannie, because of her own pain, was attuned to Ella’s.

  “Something’s wrong between you and Dad, isn’t it?”

  “Dad’s fine.” If Jeannie kept pressing, Ella would say, “Dad’s right here. Why don’t you talk to him?”

  As that Christmas approached, neither Donna nor Billy would confirm they were coming home. Finally, at the last minute, Donna phoned to say they were. They arrived in Donna’s Volkswagen on Christmas Eve. Jeannie and Hal went to midnight mass in B.C. before driving to Alberta on Christmas morning.

  The Ryders didn’t open their presents until late afternoon, after Jeannie and Hal had arrived and after Tom and Billy had fed the cattle. Then came the turkey dinner that the women worked on together. Even Donna, who claimed not to cook, had peeled and chopped.

  A smooth, nostalgic event, marred only by Hal’s repeating that the plant smell made his food taste like rotten eggs. He then apologized at length. “It’s just I know what a good cook you are, Ella. I feel I’m missing out.”

  On Boxing Day, Hal wanted to leave early so they could make the whole trip in daylight. Tom said that was good sense. Jeannie announced she wasn’t going back. Though Hal had to start work right away, she did not have to teach until after New Year’s. She’d like to spend a few days at home, she said.

  “I don’t get it,” said Hal. “You want me to come back and get you?”

  “No,” Jeannie said. “Mom can drive me.”

  That caused a look to shoot from Tom to Hal. They suspe
cted a women’s plot.

  Tom started objecting on the basis of safety.

  Finally Ella said, “Have you forgotten Jeannie and I can drive?”

  “If you have to put chains on …”

  “We’ll get somebody to help us.”

  “What about coming back? You’ll be alone.”

  “If there’s bad weather, I’ll stay longer.”

  The two men were on the couch, staring at the women. The similarity in their expressions made Ella and Jeannie laugh.

  Hal went back on Boxing Day. Next morning, Donna said it was time for them to go too. When she and Billy were ready, Tom suddenly said Billy could take the pickup truck.

  That left only Jeannie, who sat in the living room for two whole days, staring out the south window at the mountains. On the third day, Tom asked her if she would feed cows with him. She put on some old clothes and went. Ella worried that Tom would use the time to force the issue of Hal and break whatever peace Jeannie was finding. But when they came back, both looked happy. Tom was always pleased to have one of his children along when he worked. Jeannie was delighted by the crazy-eyed eagerness of the cows she’d dragged bales through. “They pressed in so close!” It was a detail she had forgotten.

  On New Year’s Eve, Tom asked if they would like to go to the dance at Hatfield Corners, but both women said no. Tom, who had always complained about the ritual of the New Year’s dance, looked disappointed. They watched New Year’s Eve on TV, each with a drink in hand. Though all three were yawning before midnight, they stuck it out. Ella’s and Tom’s New Year’s kiss, forced on them by Jeannie’s presence, was awkward. Ella had to steel herself not to shift away.

  The instant that Ella and Jeannie were alone in the car, Jeannie began to confide. Teaching in Hal’s hometown had made her beloved by practically everyone. To the children of the town, she was beautiful Miss Ryder who was going to marry the top scorer on the hockey team. The little girls all wanted to be Jeannie; the little boys loved her.

  Hardly anyone in town could see Jeannie without sentiment turning their faces to pudding. God, how she hated it! She wanted to curse like a sailor, to tell them she was joining a commune in the Slocan where clothing was optional. Whether Hal was a good man or a bad man had become beside the point. She needed to go as far away as she could imagine.