Road Ends (11 page)

The Giles’s hay barn burned down last night. There were no livestock in it but they lost all the hay, which means that in addition to rebuilding the barn they will have to buy in winter feed for their cattle for at least the next three months—a significant cost in itself. And of course they had no insurance. If I had a nickel
for every un- or under-insured business in this town, I’d be a wealthy man.

So this morning, in comes Archie Giles needing to borrow a significant sum. He says he cannot figure out how the fire started—he never leaves anything flammable about and there is no electricity in the barn. I could tell he was worrying away at the question while we were talking about the loan. He is a good farmer and the farm is surety, so I had no hesitation in advancing him the money, but taking him through the terms of the repayment took a long time and clearly made him anxious. Like many people up here Archie has very little formal education. “Formal” is the key word there—apart from the all-too-common stupidity of being uninsured he is by no means an unintelligent man. Still, it took a good while to reassure him that the repayments would be manageable. Normally his wife, Norah, comes in with him—she’s more comfortable with figures—but she’s in bed with flu.

The truth is, I don’t have all that much formal education myself. I wanted very much to go to university but it was out of the question. I was lucky to be allowed to finish grade twelve—of the ten of us I’m the only one who did. People assume I’m better educated than I am. As with everything else, I have my mother to thank for that: she taught us all to speak properly and insisted that we do so. My father used to sneer about it. He overheard her correcting my grammar one day and I remember him saying, “That’s right, bring ’em up to talk all fancy-dancy, see how much good it does ’em.”

In fact it did me a great deal of good. I would never have made bank manager otherwise. You need a certain authority in a job like this and the fact is, people tend to respect you more if you speak properly. Maybe it shouldn’t make a difference but it does.

My mother didn’t get to finish high school herself. She told me once that she’d wanted to be a teacher but her father didn’t believe in educating girls, which is a pity because she would have been a good teacher. She was very patient, very good at explaining things. She taught me fractions by cutting up an apple. She cut it into sixteenths, then showed me how two sixteenths were the same as one eighth, that sort of thing. At the end of the lesson I was allowed to eat all sixteen sixteenths, which seemed a fitting reward.

Megan could have had any education she wanted but she showed no interest in such things. None of them did except Tom. Though it’s possible that Adam will turn out to have some academic ability. And the baby, I suppose. An unknown quantity at this stage. He could be another Einstein.

Dominic is his name. Dominic John Cartwright. So I’m told by his mother. She named all the children as they arrived in this world. I had no objection; they were all perfectly acceptable names. Dominic makes him sound like a monk but it won’t do him any harm.

No doubt she will want him christened. I will go, of course—I’ve gone to all the children’s christenings. It would offend half the town and humiliate Emily if I did not. God will not be offended by my hypocrisy as He does not exist. Reverend Thomas (although he’s no longer reverend, I keep forgetting that) won’t be there to take offence. He has been replaced temporarily by Reverend Gordon, who has come out of retirement to fill in until the church can persuade someone to come to this (I nearly wrote “godforsaken”) place. Reverend Gordon was an army chaplain during the war and was with us in Italy. An intelligent man and a courageous one, he was with us every step of the way. He knows I’m not a believer but he won’t be offended by my presence because he has too much sense.

Another bad night—a dreadful night, in fact. I dreamed about the fire. Our fire—the forest fire—not the Giles’s, but no doubt that was the trigger. Though it could have been my mother’s diaries, now that I think of it. For years I had recurring nightmares about it but I thought they were over. I have never known terror like it; the bombardments in Italy didn’t come close.

In the dream my father was standing on the roof of the farmhouse, silhouetted against the approaching wall of flame, arms raised, shaking his fists at the sky. The grand, defiant gesture. Man against Fate. He was a big believer in Fate. In its malevolence where he was concerned.

He was up on the roof trying to soak the shingles in order to prevent the fire catching hold. I was at the pump, pumping as if our lives depended on it, whereas in fact they depended on us getting to the lake before our retreat was cut off. But my father, being my father, was determined to save the farmhouse. No little forest fire was going to get
his
house, no
sir
. My mother and those of my siblings who were big enough were passing the buckets of water up to him and he was flinging them over the shingles and passing them back down. As if a wet roof would have stopped that inferno. As if anything could have stopped it by that stage. It filled the whole horizon and the wind was blowing the flames straight towards us.

I woke up soaked with sweat. My pyjamas were wringing wet so I took them off. There were no clean ones in the drawer so I put on my long johns and my dressing gown and went down to the kitchen. By good fortune Tom wasn’t there. I had a bowl of cornflakes and sat for a while, trying to read about Rome, until I was driven back to bed by the cold. No more sleep, though. In fact, I was afraid to go to sleep for fear I’d slide back into the dream. The look on my father’s face, at the end.

I got up early and slogged through the snow to the bank—Tom and his snowplough had cleared the road less than an hour earlier but already it was filling in again—and started working through the pile of paperwork on my desk, glad to have something to occupy my mind. Then, at nine o’clock sharp, in lumbered Sergeant Gerry Moynihan, Struan’s one and only officer of the law, shedding snow in all directions and eating a doughnut.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” I said. “How are you?”

He mumbled something and waved the doughnut apologetically.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Take your time. Have a seat.” If he’d wanted to talk about his finances, such as they are, he’d have made an appointment, so I was curious to know the reason for his visit.

He sat down heavily in the chair opposite my desk, swallowed a couple of times, licked the sugar off his fingers and said, “Archie Giles.”

“Oh yes?”

“You know ’bout his barn burnin’ down?”

“Yes, he came in to see me yesterday.”

“Know of anyone who might have a grudge against him?”

I was taken aback. “You think it was arson?” I said. I recalled that Archie had seemed uneasy when I asked about the cause of the fire.

“Footprints ’round the barn,” Gerry said. “Two sets. They don’t match nobody in the house. It was snowin’ Tuesday night, so maybe they thought that would cover their tracks, but it quit ’round about midnight so they were just dusted over. Filled in now, of course. Just wondered if you’d heard any rumours about … anythin’. Anyone actin’ strange. Makin’ threats, maybe …”

“No,” I said slowly. “I haven’t heard anything of that kind.”

There were, of course, two obvious candidates and Gerry Moynihan knew it as well as I did. The previous fall Archie had taken on two of Joel Pickett’s boys to help with the harvest, which
was good of him considering the Picketts’ reputation as ne’er-do-wells, but after a week or so of the lads failing to turn up until noon Archie ran out of patience, paid them what they were due and told them not to come back. Apparently the boys were furious. They started shouting threats and Archie told them to get off his land. Hardly a rational excuse for burning down the barn, but then “rational” isn’t a word you’d associate with Joel Pickett, and his boys appear to take after him.

That’s the problem, of course—if something of a criminal nature takes place in this town, Joel or his sons are always the prime suspects. I could see that Gerry didn’t want to be too quick to point the finger for that very reason. Gerry’s a redneck and has some backward views but he takes his duties seriously and he’s not a fool.

“Archie’s a nice guy,” I said at last. “Hard to imagine anyone—” I nearly said “anyone
else
” but caught myself in time—“having it in for him.”

“Archie didn’t say anythin’ ’bout having suspicions?”

“No. I didn’t know he was thinking along those lines.”

Gerry nodded. We looked at each other in silence for a minute or two and then he sighed and got to his feet.

“I’ll let you know if anything comes to mind,” I said. I stood up and opened the door for him and he made a sort of salute and left.

After he’d gone I sat for some time thinking about Joel Pickett. He and I have a history, you might say. That’s why Gerry Moynihan came to see me, of course. He’s guessing that the affairs of the Pickett family are still of some interest to me and that I will have my ear to the ground where they are concerned.

In fact Joel’s and my history isn’t particularly long or complicated, although the repercussions were. A few years ago he applied
to the bank for a loan and I turned him down. That was all there was to it. In the course of my work I make such decisions all the time and no doubt I sometimes get it wrong, but in Joel Pickett’s case I was unquestionably right. He had a well-earned reputation as a drinker, a gambler and a fool. Even if his proposal had been a good one, no bank manager in the country would have felt confident about giving him a loan.

I’d had no direct dealings with Joel before that day but when he walked into my office I confess I disliked him on sight. There was something about him, a glibness, an oiliness in his smile. Nonetheless, it is in the bank’s interest as well as the town’s to encourage new business and investment in the area, so I invited Joel to take a chair and listened to what he had to say. Put simply, he wanted the bank to cover the cost of converting the old mill down at Beller’s Creek into a hunting lodge. Struan could do with another hotel, he said, something “swanky,” something with a little “class.”

As a matter of fact, he was right about that; our only hotel, Fitzpatrick’s, was, to put it kindly, a little rough, and we did need something to cater to the top end of the tourist market. That was why the building firm Waller and Sons was, even as Joel Pickett sat in my office smiling his oily smile, engaged in negotiations to buy a plot of land with lake frontage a mile or so north of the town. (Their bid was successful. The new lodge is scheduled to open this summer. It looks very nice and will provide a good deal of employment for the town.)

I mentioned this other proposal to Joel and although it was common knowledge it was clearly news to him. It didn’t faze him though. “Plenty of room for both,” he said, crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair. Something about his manner bothered me and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

I agreed that there might be room for both but said that in my opinion his plan had a serious weakness, namely that the Beller’s Creek site wasn’t on, or even near, the lake.

I should say here that the lake is our biggest asset—in fact, the lakes in general are the North’s biggest asset. They are beautiful and tranquil and clear as glass and full of fish; every year thousands of people come hundreds of miles to enjoy them. To build a hotel or hunting lodge up here and site it anywhere but on a lake is utter foolishness.

But Joel brushed that point aside too. The mill was a pretty spot, he said. There were some nice birches on the lot. People would love it. He’d talked about it with Reverend Thomas and Reverend Thomas thought it was a wonderful idea, so much so that he’d told Joel he’d vouch for him if I asked for a reference.

That took me aback, I have to say. If Reverend Thomas had wanted to ensure that I turned Joel Pickett down, he could hardly have thought of a better way. Still, I reminded myself that personal feelings have no place in professional decisions, and I carried on. I asked Joel why he was so set on the Beller’s Creek site and whether he would consider a lakeside property instead. At that he uncrossed his legs and sat forward in his chair. He’d won the property in a poker game, he said, and the moment he’d set eyes on it he’d known it was perfect for a lodge. He said it aggressively, as if challenging me to make something of it, and all of a sudden I realized what it was about him that made me uneasy: he reminded me of my father. My father had the same totally unjustified confidence in himself—not the confidence of a man well versed in his subject but the confidence of a man who has no idea how little he knows—and the same instant aggression towards anyone who challenged him.

Needless to say, the similarity wasn’t in Joel’s favour, but I am clear in my own mind that neither it nor the endorsement of Reverend Thomas influenced my decision. I told Joel, courteously, that I didn’t think his plan was viable in its present form and I brought the interview to a close. As far as I was concerned that was that.

It didn’t surprise me when I later learned that after he’d left the bank Joel Pickett got blind drunk and began spreading his version of the story around town. Everyone in Struan knew his word meant nothing. It didn’t even concern me unduly when a couple of nights later a rock was thrown through the bank’s window. Joel was seen by two people, one of whom happened to be Sergeant Moynihan.