Who by Fire

by Fred Stenson

  Ella had not intended to talk about her own problems, but, later that night, something about sharing her daughter’s bed caused it to begin. After she’d admitted she was not happy at all with her marriage with Tom, Jeannie said she had guessed some of it over the years.

  “But it seemed like you were getting on better. Back when Dad was building onto the house?”

  “It was better then,” she admitted.

  “Is it about the plant?” Jeannie asked.

  Ella stayed silent for a moment, to make sure she knew the answer.

  “I’m not sure it will make sense to you, but it is about the plant, even though your dad seldom talks to me about that. It keeps going on and on inside him. He fiddles with the Dry Fork lawsuit, though it can’t do us any good. He won’t let it go, and he blames everybody for the fact that he has no lawsuit himself.”

  “He blames you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why you?”

  Ella found she could not say it. “He blames everyone. I just happen to be the one who lives there.”

  “Does he get mad at you?”

  “No. But he’s always mad about it in some way. Cursing away to himself.”

  The plant had changed him, she said, had made him lose faith in himself. The lawsuit was his attempt to get his dignity back. When he couldn’t start a suit, he’d become worse. As she explained it to Jeannie, Ella felt a sympathy for Tom she had not felt in a long time. She also felt guilt, for not telling what else lay behind it, the part that was her doing.

  “What are you going to do? Will you leave Dad?”

  “I don’t see how I can go on. But I don’t think I’ll leave right away.”

  Saying that made Ella shudder. She imagined Tom standing on a street corner with a suitcase. Where on earth would he go? Where would he live? He wasn’t even a drinker, and what did single men do at night if they didn’t go to a tavern?

  The thought came back to her that Tom, handsome for his age, would attract a woman. At that moment, her only thought was that she hoped he would find someone nice.

  “You don’t have to decide everything this minute, Mom,” Jeannie said, squeezing her hand.

  “Maybe I won’t go anywhere,” said Ella.

  Jeannie turned on the light and took a tissue out of the box on the night table. She held it out to Ella and pulled another to wipe her own eyes.

  “Look at the two of us,” Ella said.

  “Maybe I’ll tell Hal I can’t stand to be without my mother,” said Jeannie, with a wet smile. “We’ll move in together, you and me. Dad can come for supper.”

  “He’d like that,” said Ella, and they laughed hard at the sad absurdity of it all.

  3

  Fort McMurray

  THE PHONE IN HIS CONDO was ringing when he entered. He wanted to let it go but feared it could be trouble: his sisters, his children, Marie. He was too sick to talk after so many hours on the machines, but he picked up anyway.

  “You cared, Billy.”

  “What?”

  “You cared that I might be dead. Burned to a cinder.”

  He recognized Johnny’s voice.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I’m touched. I really am. And you got canned.”

  Bill tried to reply and nothing came out.

  “It’s big news, Billy. Thousands come and go in the tar sands but it’s still news when a big boss gets the frozen boot.”

  “They’re calling it leave with pay.”

  “That’s a nice way of putting it. Caring and gentle.”

  “You phoned to cheer me up. I appreciate it. But I don’t think it’s possible right now.”

  “Okay, Billy. You’ve got my number.”

  It felt like three in the morning but was nine at night. Six hours in the casino proved Einstein’s theory. Time could bend. In a casino, it almost ran backward.

  “What can I do now?” he asked himself, and the options spun and made an electric sizzle as they rolled to a halt.

  TV. I don’t think so.

  They rolled again.

  Book. He was sure he could not make his eyes do that. It would look like there were ceiling fans spinning between his head and the page.

  Eat. Something else he could not do.

  Alcohol. He splashed some whisky in a glass and sucked it through his teeth.

  A Pollyanna in his brain was advocating that he call Marie. That would be lovely.

  Why do you sound like that?

  Like what?

  Like your teeth are chattering? Like you have malaria. Like a zombie is eating your head.

  The phone rang again. He picked it up and said hello a couple of times. There was nothing there but breathing. He was about to hang up when a grinding cough blasted his ear. More coughing followed, but the sound was muffled.

  Lance Evert asked, “Were you there when it blew?”

  “Close. Arrived half an hour after.”

  “Paper said. Only one man hurt. That true?”

  “I believe so. Fellow was knocked off a catwalk and broke his shoulder. How are you?”

  “Let’s not talk. About that.” Lance cleared a strangle. “Been doing research. Refinery accidents.”

  The voice sounded like the creaking of an old saddle. Bill tried to understand the rhythm.

  “You on oxygen?”

  “You want to hear?”

  “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

  “Found twenty. Accidents. On the internet. Fires and explosions. Usually the. Hydrotreater. I’ve got to rest. Don’t hang up.”

  The line was quiet. The sound of air sucking in, wheezing out.

  “Billy?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Two safety guys. In the States. Call it an epidemic. The oil’s worse now. Heavy and sour. Using H2S. To make hydrogen. Call it hydrogen attack.”

  The long string of talk had to be paid for with coughing. Then came not silence or breathing but something like surf in a bathtub.

  “I’ll send it. Sorry.” The line went dead.

  Bill made coffee, and thought in blurts like Lance’s speech.

  He was glad Lance had hung up before he had to tell him about losing his job. But he was sorry not to have told him how right he’d been about hydrotreaters; right to warn Bill and to get their organization to spread the word. Amazing that he could do this when half dead.

  Bill fell down on the couch. He shifted around so the back of his head was on an armrest. He had a sudden chill and dragged the old afghan over his legs and up to his chin. He began to shake all over.

  “What in God’s name am I doing to myself? Why can’t I stop this?”

  He longed for anyone, even the Voice, to answer. But the Voice was never interested in him afterwards. Seduction, not pillow talk.

  While he whimpered and simpered, and wished himself dead, the self he would be tomorrow did not sympathize either. He wanted to be that person now, but many shitty hours had to be weathered first. Hours like this one that bent the other way, the seconds snapping off like matchsticks with time shivering in between.

  Somehow sleep found him, put him away for a few rounds of the clock. He woke in the night as he usually did after a gambling binge, wakefulness caused as if by stock prod, a four-alarm fire, a gas plant exploding. He walked the apartment in the dark, fast and crashing into things, talking to himself. Even at this stage he saw that he was better than before.

  When it was finally morning, the phone rang again. It was Jeannie. He’d been asleep on the couch and had to stop himself from asking her the date and time.

  “Did you tell your kids?”

  “What? That I’ve been fired?”

  “You’ve been fired?”

  “Oh. You don’t know.”

  “You can tell me, but first I want to know if you’ve phoned your kids and told them you didn’t die in the explosion.”

  “Isn’t that a bit like phoning to say I haven’t frozen to death over winter?”

  “It is not the same
. The accident is all over the news.”

  “What?”

  “Your plant blew up. A village had to be evacuated. I saw it on the CBC national news.”

  “Holy hell. What did they say?”

  “There were pictures of the plant, from a distance. You couldn’t see much. A government guy said it was all shut down pending investigation. They interviewed people from the Native village. The announcer said the company had been contacted but refused an interview.”

  “Do you remember who they interviewed in the village?”

  “There were two. An old man who said he was taken away in a bus, and a nice-looking woman.”

  “What did the woman say?”

  “That someone came to evacuate the village after the explosion because he thought hydrogen sulphide might reach there. She said someone else came later and said there was no danger.”

  “Did she name me?”

  “She didn’t name anyone. Which one were you?”

  “I decided they should evacuate and took a bus over.”

  “You got fired for that?”

  “The evacuation wasn’t authorized by anyone but me. Boss didn’t like it, so I’m on leave with pay.”

  “Those assholes. You said you were fired. Is that what leave with pay means?”

  “Leave with pay is to keep me quiet. I’ll be fired later.”

  “I don’t know what to think of that, but you have to phone your kids.”

  “Okay.”

  “You won’t do it, will you?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Are you on a binge or something?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You’re not twenty-five, you know. You could damage yourself. Donna said you’d met a woman. Are you in touch with her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t talk about it right now.”

  He made a pot of coffee and drank cup after cup. He slammed his eyes and tried to see black. What rose instead were the spinning wheels. Stars, cherries, peaches, plums, cartoon dogs, rhinos, six-guns, leprechauns, rockets, wildebeest, sports cars, harps, cartoon fish, cowboy boots, musical notes, sevens, sheriff’s stars, birds, wine glasses, camels, mansions, tigers, hookahs, snakes, palm trees, surfers, bowler hats, crowns, knives, cannons, roasts of beef, pirate trunks spilling gold.

  He looked at his watch. It was nearing ten. The casino would be open soon. He saw himself there. He would go out for breakfast first. Maybe read about himself in the paper over his bacon and eggs. He thought about Marie talking to reporters. He thought about his old ideas of her. The Mata Hari, milking him for info. That she was talking to national news reporters had to make his job situation worse—if it could be worse. But was that her problem? He thought not.

  He groped around for some kind of emotional response. Hurt. Anger. Love. There was nothing there but the desire to get back in front of a machine, pumping twenties, changing lines, hitting and hitting and hitting. Pigeon and disc.

  Another casino day, another bad night in which his gambler’s alarm went off at five. This was the hour of no defence, when his mind chopped excuses like Jackie Chan did bricks.

  He got up and, without thinking, fetched the binder from the storage closet, where he had put it after Donna left. He sat on the couch in his bathrobe, with the thing heavy on his knees.

  “I will not open it,” he said to the shadow-filled air, to the frost on the balcony door. “I don’t need to.”

  He didn’t need to because he could see it all in his head. He might even be able to recite some of it, especially episodes of the Stink Diary. There were letters received and carbons of letters sent, to and from the lawyer mostly. And mimeographs of research papers on sulphur pollution, wind plumes, weather inversions—and the long-term effects of sulphur dioxide on lungs and heart. These he knew doubly: from when he had been Dry Fork’s secret helper and later after Tom died and he was back living on the farm by himself.

  “I don’t need to read any of it,” he said again to the air, to Donna in absentia. “I don’t need to, and I don’t have to. And I will not.”

  It had to be near the weekend but he did not know the day. He’d come back from the casino after spending ten hours to break even. Maybe a hundred dollars lost but that was all. He had eaten a casino steak somewhere along the line. Wolfed it in fear that someone would take his machine.

  “What do I need?” he asked, now thoroughly used to talking to himself out loud. He was still trying to answer when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t the buzzer from the lobby but his actual doorbell. For a second he had the notion it was Donna.

  He could only see the back of a coat, a fur collar. The person turned, and it was Marie. Friday. He was supposed to be at her place for dinner. He snapped back the locks and pulled open the door.

  “Marie, I’m sorry. I should have phoned.”

  He stopped when he saw her cheeks were wet. He stood aside and let her in.

  “Do you want to sit in the living room?”

  “I don’t want to sit. I have something to say and I want to be quick.”

  She stayed standing in the front hall. Purple coat. White scarf. She brushed her eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief.

  “You and me,” she said. “I was enjoying it. But now I have to stop it. Neither of us has been honest. I don’t even mind that, it’s probably natural, but one of the things you didn’t tell me is something I can’t … I do have to sit down. This is making me sick.”

  She passed him and sat on the couch. He leaned against the wall.

  “Yesterday, James Beaudry came to my house. You met James at the community hall. I told a lie about him then. I said he was my cousin. He’s my ex-husband and friend. He told me he saw you in the casino every day this week, ever since you left my place. James is a gambling addict. He knows one when he sees one.

  “I’ve had two husbands. James is the second and my favourite. He was very nice to me. When he started gambling, I worried but I let it go. I figured he’d see the stupidity and waste of it and stop. But he kept on. It went out of control. We had a house in McMurray. I’d paid my half but it was in his name. More than half the mortgage was paid off when he took that deal where you borrow cash against home equity. Before I figured it out, he’d lost it all. That house was where all our savings were.

  “I left him. I had to. I had kids at home. It’s taken me ten years of working two jobs to get back to where I was before James took it away.”

  She stood up and rewrapped her scarf.

  “I’ll never go through that again. I’m thankful you’re not talking, giving me reasons or making light of it. And no promises. It doesn’t matter to me what you feel or how you rationalize this thing to yourself.”

  She walked past him and out the door. He closed it behind her.

  4

  Ryder Farm, 1973

  WINTER WAS FINALLY SURRENDERING its hold. When Tom awoke in Billy’s bed, he could hear Ella in the kitchen downstairs, shaking down the ashes, making a new fire in the trash burner. He got up and peeled his combinations down to the waist. In the dresser mirror, he posed like a weightlifter on the back of an old comic.

  “You are not old,” he whispered. “Whatever you are, old’s not it.”

  On his way out to his morning chores, he passed through Ella’s kitchen quickly. He said good morning but tried not to see her. Outside, he went behind the woodshed and had a piss. He could smell the plant right through the urine. It had started stinking again, not surprising considering the relic it had become. He tried never to talk about the plant to Ella, but she had stated an opinion recently. She believed it stank because Bert Traynor had retired. Unpleasant though he was, he’d had some magic that was missing since. But, though the plant smelled, Tom could not remember the last time it had made him dizzy or sick.

  He got on with his chores, shovelling chop into buckets, pumping water, carrying buckets. The work spread a paste of calm through him that was as good as the first smoke of
the day. In recent years, when farmers had bought tractors with enclosed cabs, Tom saw them in their fields behind plastic windows and knew he would never own such a thing. He wanted the wind and the sun burning through his shirt. He even took pleasure in the bite of cold.

  When Ella called him for breakfast, tension clamped in his chest right away. He’d been thinking of quitting tobacco, but he stood and rolled a smoke. He needed this one before he went in and probably another after he ate. Mealtimes were hard. Ella’s conversation was often about him digging at his shoulders and neck, rubbing his chest. She wanted him to tell her what it felt like, why he was doing it. He told her he was only working out some tightness, and he never said the discomfort came from how things stood. Whatever the feeling was, it was not anger. His anger was spent.

  When Ella and Jeannie had left for B.C. on New Year’s Day, Tom had stood in the yard, watching the car’s rear bumper with blurred eyes.

  “I have lost her,” he had said aloud, perhaps the first time he’d understood it was true.

  The attentive dog had pressed harder against his knee. For some time, Tom didn’t move, quiet on the outside but full of commotion. The arguments he’d had with Ella, the ones about the plant and Lance Evert, blew out of him. His craving for a lawsuit ran around inside his chest looking for an exit too. All kinds of things struggled out of him that day, and a hollow formed that felt bigger than the rest of him.

  After Ella had phoned to extend her time at Jeannie’s, Tom started writing letters to her. The first attempts were long-winded, heavy on explanation. Gradually they worked their way down to simpler pleadings.

  Dear Ella,

  I know you’re thinking about ending our marriage. I have thought of it as hopeless too. If we could go back where we were before the plant came, it was not perfect but it was good. There was love for sure. I don’t know where it went or why but I would like to try again. I have been hard to live with. I’m sorry I asked you for that letter.