Who by Fire (14 page)

Why Waddens Lake was a better question. The older megaprojects, closer to Fort Mac and the airport, were better equipped for political bum shows. More roadside attractions, like buffalo munching on a meadow that used to be a strip mine.

Bill’s computer beeped as a message from Dion Elliott arrived.

“THIS AFTERNOON, BETWEEN 4 AND 6 PM: OPEN HOUSE AT THE WADDENS VILLAGE COMMUNITY CENTRE!!! YOUR ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED!!!”

Henry entered without knocking. “The way I hear it, the federal resources minister and some high-up federal American were in Edmonton for an oil sands meeting with the premier. No tour had been asked for, but the American said he couldn’t report on what he hadn’t seen. He wouldn’t settle for a fly-over.”

“Why us, though? They never come here.”

Henry had a weird facial habit when he descended into deepest thought. His whole face looked like it was extracting a bull sinew from between molars.

“Here’s what I think. Our plant is fairly new, and we’re not on the Athabasca River. Our strip mine and tailings pond aren’t enormous. The community isn’t pissed off.”

“Yet,” Bill and Henry said in unison like a vaudeville team.

The hottest environmental issue of late was water use: how much water withdrawal the Athabasca River could take before it crapped out as a living ecosystem. Even though Waddens Lake drew on Athabasca tributaries for its make-up water, the optics here were better.

“How did you find out it was an American and the rest?” Bill asked.

“Can’t reveal,” Henry said. “What I can tell you is that Houle has cancelled his golf holiday. Kazcir is flying up on the company jet. Dion’s over in Waddens Village bribing locals to come to the open house. He’s trying to find a freshly killed moose.”

“I suppose he’ll show that stupid film again.”

“
Beading Our Future
? I don’t think so. The American says he wants to meet local people.”

Bill was thinking of Marie Calfoux. “I hope a local person takes a strip off them.”

Henry did not share this enthusiasm. He was doing the bull sinew thing again. Whatever else the oil sands were, they were Henry’s ticket to a good life. Snow-white fishing boat, twin Evinrudes blasting him across Georgia Strait.

“Don’t worry, Henry. Even if the Americans wean off our oil, you’ll be retired when it happens.”

“You too,” he said.

“Nope. I’ll be dead. There won’t be enough organic matter left in me to grow a daisy.”

Bill went for a walk around the unit. He was looking for oily rags, safety signs hanging by a corner, wet spots, jokes; places where sweepers had shoved dirt into a shadow. But the unit was pristine.

Back in the control room, he looked over the crew. Whitcomb’s shirt was untucked; most of the men hadn’t shaved. He went back to his desk and counted out the needed disposable razors. He handed
them around. Predictably, Clayton made an unfunny remark about giving one to Marion.

The day was beginning to fall into perspective. Bill’s role at Waddens Lake was modest. These tour things were also like football; most things were. Even though the other side seldom ran the ball at the sulphur unit, you still had to have a guy filling the sulphur hole in case they did.

At the last minute, he brushed his teeth and took his sports jacket out of its bag behind the door.

Bill and Henry had a pact; if either one gave signs of falling asleep, the other was to dig him hard with an elbow. Henry had elbowed Bill twice already, though Bill was having no trouble staying awake. It was because Bill wasn’t watching the speakers so much as the Waddens Village crowd where Marie sat.

Robert Kazcir was talking, New Aladdin’s Canadian CEO. He took turns pitching woo to the Natives and to the table of politicians where the American sat. New Aladdin operations guys like Bill were grouped on the far side of the room, where Kazcir never looked. Bill could see that Theo Houle and the Canadian politicians he was with were listening to Kazcir, but that the American visitor was not. Supporting his chin with one hand, the American made occasional notes on a tablet.

Not long ago—a mere couple of decades—men in Kazcir’s and Houle’s positions were stout. The American visitor would have been a heavy guy too. Business and political leaders back then packed the bulk that good suits are designed to hide. But Kazcir, Houle, and the American were part of the new breed who did their thinking on a treadmill and bragged of being able to bench-press their weight.

What had not changed was the speaking style. Like their predecessors, they were at home at the podium and masters of the
microphone. Their pearly tones were reassuring, even more so if you blurred out the words. As for content, Bill always knew what was coming. He knew when Kazcir would say “team of top professionals” and “safety awards for every unit.” “We are meeting or exceeding the toughest environmental standards in the world.”

Somewhere ahead there would be a shift from advocacy to humility. Kazcir would note “the concentration of industrial facilities” and “the pressure on the water resource.” This would lead to “cumulative effects.” Having bravely admitted the most pressing problems, he would swap ends and refute his own charges.

“We understand the challenges better than anyone. I can tell you honestly that we intend to run the best facility, according to the best operating practices and safety procedures, possible on this oil frontier at this time.”

It was hard, even for Bill, not to capitulate. It was the brand and style of forthright gravitas the western world had been voting into power for Bill’s entire life. Even Native leaders had it nowadays, though they were expected to tell more jokes.

Bill checked Marie again. Her hair was up, caught at the back in a curve of leather. She wore a fitted jacket, floral design on the lapels and cuffs; turquoise pendant at her throat. Her eyes were sparking with indignation, and she probably posed the biggest threat to Kazcir’s slick performance—if he had the eyes to see it.

When the CEO was done, he introduced the federal resources minister, a tall, skinny man whose talk was vague and brief. Then came Alberta’s resources minister, who managed to sound both uninformed and patronizing.

The final spot on the agenda was the place of honour, and this belonged to the American. He stood at the lectern in silence, surveying the crowd. When he started talking, he was at once more polished and charming than all the rest put together. While the
others had directed their talk to the politicians, Natives, and oil bigwigs in about equal measure, the American made eye contact only with the Native audience. He spoke of enduring friendship, not just with Canada and Alberta but with the communities of this region. If Bill were Marie Calfoux, he would have had a sinking sensation. “Enduring friendship” meant status quo. He suspected Marie had come here hoping the American would blister the Canadians about dirty oil, suggesting his president was determined to reduce American reliance on Canadian bitumen. But it wasn’t there, not even close.

“While America develops its shale oil resource and makes the transition into the alternate fuels of the future, it is a great comfort to know our best ally is here, to the north of us, with a solid and expanding supply of needed petroleum energy.”

For a couple of minutes near the end, the American did address pollution. These issues must be met with better technology and regulation, he said, not just with defensive posturing. But it was an afterthought. The real message was that the world’s biggest consumer of oil planned to go on bellying up to Canada’s all-you-can-burn buffet for the foreseeable future.

When the Washington man sat down, the business of the evening was over. No showing of
Beading Our Future
, thank God. Dion popped up to thank everyone for coming. He pointed to a crockpot of moose stew and thanked a lady in the front row for providing this fine wholesome local food. She had also baked bannock for the occasion. Tea, coffee, juice, please help yourselves.

Bill went into line quickly and got a small paper bowl of stew, a hunk of buttered bannock, and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee. He carried the grub to the room’s far end and put his back in a corner. As he ate, he watched the American giving two-handed handshakes, his perfect teeth gleaming. He was probably a smart guy, well read in philosophy and history; an authority on international oil and free
trade agreements. If he were in the next hammock at a beach, he would be charming company. But here, his charisma could not hide that he was a shill. Pumping a message.

From Bill’s gunfighter position, he saw Marie approaching. She walked over with the man she’d sat beside during the speeches, a thin, handsome Native in a black leather jacket. She introduced him as James Beaudry. Bill had both hands occupied with the coffee and plate. “No worries,” said Beaudry, unsmiling.

“This is the one I’ve been telling you about,” she told James. “He either tells the truth or won’t talk. He’s quiet most of the time.” This made Beaudry laugh.

Bill was flustered, jealous.

“Cat got your tongue?” Marie said. She nodded to where the company brass and the politicians were clustered. “Several cats?”

James said he needed a smoke and headed for the exit.

“Aren’t you having anything to eat?” Bill asked Marie.

“That moose stew was frozen solid in Irene’s freezer this morning. Hard to get rid of two-year-old stew.”

Bill mopped his mouth, put his paper bowl on the nearest table. Marie’s eyes were squinted as she looked again at the dignitaries.

“The power of suction in this room. If I only had it to vacuum my house.”

They had a good laugh at this. Then Marie said, “By the way, James is my cousin.”

“I’ve been doing research,” Bill said. “You’re right on all your complaints.”

“Which are specifically what?”

“Tailings ponds, lumpfish, water monitoring.”

She took a look at him. “If you weren’t such an honest guy, I’d think you were shining up to me.”

“It’s possible I did the research
and
I’m shining up to you.”

She smiled across the room.

“What about snowshoeing? You going to have time for that one of these days?”

“I’m going south for the weekend. What about next week?”

“You call me,” she said.

That night, Bill lay sleepless in his Chateau king bed. Conversations with Marie Calfoux rattled through his brain but weren’t the sort he wanted.

“Why can’t the oil sands be slowed down?”

“Because we’re the biggest supplier of the biggest consumer on earth.”

“I thought the U.S. was finding its own oil. Frack oil.”

“That makes governments and companies up here want to go twice as fast. Build pipelines to the west coast. Sell to China.”

“Then there’s no hope.”

“Hope’s not my department.”

Ryder Farm, 1961

BY LATE MARCH
, the cows were slow and sway-bellied as they walked among the shrinking drifts and tore at last year’s grass. Tom started his final preparations for calving. He bought scour powder, penicillin, and the hormone that prompted cattle to clean their afterbirth. He plugged gaps in the slab fence that the cows and newborn calves would shelter behind. He filled the barn loft with straw bales and the driest box stall with hay.

Calving normally excited him—fresh calf crop, the promise of spring—but this year he was anxious. When he and Ella were first married, when the girls had been babies, he had thought he could deal with calving alone, and lost newborns at an alarming rate. Since then, he’d made sure to have a hired man for the season.

Now it seemed like Kees might be the last of those. Since the Dutchman, there had only been two responses to the ad at the Greyhound stop. First, a guy had come out for one day. He did not even spend the night. Then came a pair of jailbirds in a smoking car. Tom had taken one and sent the other to Johnny Court, who also needed help. After three stinking days, the one who worked for Court drove over to Ryders’. The pair of them told Tom they were going to town for a beer, and they never came back.

Having seen the plant kill the better part of two litters of pigs,
Tom had been worrying about calves. Calves had bigger lungs, but whether that would safeguard them he could not know. Lately, the barbed wire had been breaking along the fence that separated the plant from the farm. When he tried to stretch it, to fix it, it broke again. Gas that could eat wire could probably do most anything to flesh.

At night, over supper, and again at breakfast, Tom would speak about his worries. He did not really expect anyone to listen, but he started to notice that Donna was, and that she did not go to the living room as soon as the others did. The night Tom announced the birth of the first calf, Donna went with him after supper to look at it. She helped him coax two cows with swelling bags into the corral beside the barn. Every night after that, and during the day on weekends, Donna came and helped, without once being asked.

When things picked up, there was no time to consider whether the grislier aspects of calving would be a problem for the girl. That Donna was bombproof was proven on the second weekend. Right after a nice bull calf came the afterbirth and uterus, a shocking sight even to Tom, who had seen it half a dozen times. He sent Donna to the house to phone Doc Moore.

“What do I say?”

“Just tell him prolapse and who you are.”

Meanwhile, Tom roped and tied the cow’s legs to keep her from getting up. When Donna returned, he was squatted on his haunches against the wall. Donna settled down in the clean straw beside him, staring at the purplish mass on the floor. Tom told her she did not have to stick around. He and the doc could handle this. But Donna said she wanted to see.

Doc Moore sped into the yard and trundled his equipment bag into the barn. He unrolled a rubber sheet and asked that they bring several buckets of water that he could use to clean the uterus.
Then he stuffed it back in. Donna did not flinch, even during the sewing up.

Normally, Tom only set his alarm clock in the night if a cow was close to calving. Now, he set it on any night when there was the smell of gas. He explained his plan to Donna. If a calf was born on one of the bad nights and showed any sign of distress, he would carry it to the truck and drive to clean air.