Who by Fire (15 page)

Donna said she would set her alarm too, so she could share the night work. If a cow was calving or had calved, all she had to do was run to the house and get her dad. Tom agreed, and then Ella insisted on misunderstanding. She would not believe that Donna had asked to do this; she accused Tom of coaxing the girl.

When Tom first noticed that some of the calves were sick, he feared it was from gas, but he was soon relieved to see the familiar sign of scours. The violent diarrhea was far from a joke, and contagious, and it ran wild through the crop of young calves, but it was something he had dealt with often before. Again, whenever she wasn’t in school, Donna was with him. Bouncing along in the one-ton, she’d yell, “There’s one,” pointing at a yellow hind end. He taught her to rope a calf’s running legs; how to reach over and grab a rear flank and use her knee to flip it. They forced open the calf’s mouth, ladled the purple powder onto the tongue, held and worked the jaws until the medicine was too sticky to spit out.

It was a farmer’s dream to have a kid grow up interested in the farm. Tom had assumed he would have to wait until Billy was a teenager to find out if that was going to happen. But here was Donna, as good a hand as he could have foreseen. Far from anxious about the season, he was delighted now. No calves were dying, and he had begun to consider the possibility of a hundred per cent calf crop. He told Donna this, and she became excited too. If they could
accomplish it, it would be a victory over the gas plant. They’d have kept the bastards from killing even one.

What Donna reminded Tom of most was Ella in their early days. Back then, before Jeannie was born, they never wanted to be apart and were free to share the entire day. In calving season, when they were chasing scoured calves, Ella could make a loop roll in front of a calf’s legs. She had a way of throwing a calf that was all balance and took her no effort at all. He could close his eyes right now and see the smile she flashed when she had him dazzled.

But now she disagreed completely with Donna working so hard with him. Not long ago, she had been criticizing him for being more interested in Billy than he was in the girls; she’d claimed he was just waiting for Billy to mature into a hired man. Now that he was spending part of every day with Donna, he was
too
interested.

Finally, one afternoon when the girls were at school, Ella said, “You’re using Donna like a hired man. When she’s helping pull a calf, or catching and throwing calves, that’s not good for her stomach. That work’s too heavy for a girl her age.”

“You don’t realize how strong she is. She gets stronger every day.”

“And I can’t believe you let her get up in the night on school days. I’ve asked you to see about another hired man but you do nothing.”

“I can’t
get
a hired man! They can work places where there’s no stink. It’s a waste of time to bring one here.”

“So you won’t even try!”

He had taken down the ad at the Greyhound. This was what she meant.

All Tom could think to do was leave the house, go to his shop where he’d be left alone.

When most of the calves were on the ground, a wild chinook blew in and ate the snow. The coulees boomed with runoff. The warmth
made the calves robust and playful, and on such an optimistic day, Tom was leaning on the sunny side of his truck, smoking and watching Donna coax a calf to bunt her fist.

He asked if she knew what 4-H was. She said she’d heard about it from kids on the bus, the ones who were in the clubs.

“What do you think? Do you want to be in the 4-H beef club?”

“I don’t know.”

Tom said she could pick the best bull calf in the herd. After they’d weaned in the fall, she would be responsible for feeding and caring for the steer across winter and spring. Come July, there’d be an “Achievement Day” at the auction mart, where ribbons were awarded. That same day the calves would be sold.

“You’d give him to me?” Donna asked. “For free?”

The calf and the feed would be free, he told her. He would help her put the sale money into a Canada Savings Bond. That could be for university or whatever kind of schooling she wanted after high school.

“It’s good advertising for the farm. If you beat out calves from local farms and ranches, that would tickle me. But the learning is the most important thing.”

“Is that really why?” she asked.

“I couldn’t have got through calving half this well without your help. It’s a reward.”

“What about Jeannie?”

“Jeannie didn’t help much.”

“She’ll still be jealous.”

“Well, then she will be.”

Tom could not think why Ella would be against a club calf for Donna, but he was certain of it anyway. His instinct was to say nothing, but the longer he delayed, the more likely it was that Ella would
hear from Donna, or Donna would brag to Jeannie and Jeannie would tell her mother. So he waited for the afternoon of a school day and declared his plan.

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Why? Because Jeannie will be jealous?”

Ella took off her apron and threw it on the counter. She was already at the level of anger she’d reached the last time they’d discussed Donna.

“You know I don’t agree with Donna helping you so much. It takes her away from her school studies and it’s hard on her physically. But I’ve let it go because I knew calving would end. But now that the end is near, you come up with this. Give her a calf as a pet.”

“They’re not pets. They teach kids how to care for a steer.”

“It just happens it will keep her in the barn, working like a man, until it’s time to calve again.”

Tom could have let it go—would later wish he had—but his temper had been reached. “Goddamnit, Ella! It’s like you don’t want my children to be mine!”

“You don’t own them!”

This made him boil. Of any father in this community, he was the least disposed to work his children hard. Ella knew that because her own parents had worked her like a slave, an only child who had to be her father’s and her mother’s helper, both.

He took a step back and, in the widest corner of his vision, he saw Billy. All through this bitter exchange, the raising of voices, the boy had been in the shadow beyond the kitchen door.

Tom fled into open air. The 4-H calf for Donna must stand. A deal with one of your children is no less of a deal.

Looking for something useful to do on a hot day in early April, Ella took the feather ticks off all the beds and carried them outside one
at a time. She had seen people hang rugs and quilts over the clothesline and go at them with a broom, but the cloth of these feather ticks was old and almost rotten. The best she could do was hang each one over chairs on the lawn, flip it gently in the breeze.

Billy was outside with her. He was happy to be out but annoyed that she’d made him wear a coat. The anemia made him prone to colds.

Often these days, she seemed to be arguing with someone in her head. If forced to picture her antagonist, it was always Tom. She had thought a lot about this and knew it had something to do with love. When people are in love, they give lists of reasons why, but even when Ella was in her teen years listening to her girlfriends talk about the men they’d picked to marry, she never believed in recited virtues as the cause of love. Love didn’t happen because a man was smart, strong, or handsome; it was simply there, like this sunny day.

It had taken the last year of her marriage to learn that the opposite could also be true. When love was gone, it was also like weather. Endless cloud; occasional storm.

The hottest point of difference these days was Donna. A year ago, Donna had seemed barely to notice her father, but now she stood by him in everything, fiercely. If it wasn’t Tom coming in the house to brag of Donna’s cleverness or strength, it was Donna praising her dad for a farming trick or, recently, for his “colourful language.” Where she got “colourful language” Ella didn’t know, probably out of a book at school. Donna was so proud of her father’s cursing she’d taken to copying it, as any fool could predict.

The day before, Donna had come racing into the house, full of giggles.

“The sprockle-face took a kick at Dad. He called her a cross-eyed whore and said she’d drive Christ off the cross!”

“That’s not funny, Donna.”

“Oh, Mom! It is too.”

“I suspect Jesus doesn’t find it amusing.”

“Jesus shouldn’t be thinking about Dad. He should be thinking about the atom bomb.”

“That’s hardly for you to say.”

In bed that night, she told Tom he had to stop using words like whore in front of his daughter. He was silent. Ella knew he thought that made him the more reasonable one. Since he was choosing not to speak, she decided to give vent to other frustrations.

“As for 4-H, you should let the subject drop until fall. Chances are Donna will have moved on to some other interest by then. If you keep pushing, she’ll feel trapped into it, whether she has any interest left or not.”

“I’m not worried about that,” he said, “I’m worried about the plant. I’m not sure a club calf will do well in this yard.”

“I am so sick of the plant,” she said. “This barely feels like home anymore.”

“Does that mean you’d consider leaving?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Now, tired of flipping the feather tick, she pulled a chair out from under it and sat. The sunlight was hottest here, on the south side of the house. The sun’s rays reached her both directly and reflected off the wall. Billy was crawling around the peony chasing a cat.

“Billy, don’t. You’ll get ants on you.”

For months now, Ella had been evaluating her days by how much or how little she thought about Lance. She was always thinking about him to some degree. However rude he’d been to leave the way he had, she could not be angry with him, not really.

She supposed, if she forced herself, she could remember times when she’d been angry at Lance Evert, when he’d stared at her at the meeting, and later when his plant had made her children sick. But absence had sainted him. She pictured his clean-shaven face, his
perfect nose, the softness of his cheeks and lips. It made her smile, even if, at the same time, she was swept with pain.

She did not know what to call the thing that had happened. It wasn’t an affair. But if she couldn’t name it, she was fairly sure why it had happened. Lance was just old enough to find older women interesting and she was just young enough that her face contained the prettiness of her younger self. When she crossed the yard carrying buckets of swill, she imagined Lance then too; imagined him looking at her, astonished. “Oh yes,” she told him. “This is me too.”

When she was thinking of Lance, she hated the intrusion of Tom or thoughts of Tom. She did not want to think of when or why things with Tom had soured, or even if there had been very little wrong except that the marriage had cooled. The plant had come and made every disagreement abrasive. Ironically, the plant had also provided the one thing that made things better.

But Lance Evert was gone, and with no farewell. He had been replaced by an older man who was not nice at all. On her angriest days—and this was fast becoming one—Ella believed Tom might have driven Lance away. It was a fact that six newborn pigs had died during the night before she was supposed to meet Lance that second time. Lance had come to the farm that morning. Tom bragged that he had sent him packing, but maybe it wasn’t just a saying. Maybe he knew something, or had put two and two together, and there’d been a fight.

Old King came running across the south field. He came to her wet with sweat and with his tongue out, forced his muzzle under her hand. The vehicle she had heard passing must have been Tom. In a minute the old truck would rumble into the yard. Four o’clock.

A week into April. A school morning.

The night before, Donna and Tom had come back from the
barn in high spirits. The last cow had given birth—to twins! The living twins meant they had a hundred per cent calf crop; only the second time this had happened since Tom and Ella were married.

“If you count the twins,” said Jeannie, “it’s more than one hundred per cent.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Tom. “Jeannie’s right. It
is
a record, then.”

It was almost fate that a happy time would rouse the plant’s ire. The volume of sound seemed to double in the night. The gas seeped in and woke them. Ella got up and wet some towels. She put the big ones across the bottoms of the two doors that led outside, smaller ones across the window ledges where the old putty was letting in night air.

This morning was a school morning. Jeannie was in the bathroom curling her eyelashes. Donna had gone to the barn with her father to see how the twins were doing. As bus time approached, Ella went to the door and looked toward the barn. You could not yell across that distance. With five minutes to go, she instructed Jeannie to go to the road and ask Mr. Snow to wait. Jeannie snapped back some contrary thing but Ella was already running down the path in her dress and gumboots. It made her so angry when Tom and Donna did this, forced her to pry Donna away—as if the only person responsible for Donna’s schooling was Ella.

As soon as she passed the coal shed, she saw them come out of the barn, and knew something was wrong. Donna liked to run around her slow-walking father, punching and picking at him, but there was none of that this morning. As they came closer, Donna started running. Ella called to her but the girl shook her head and passed by.

“Did one of them die?” she asked Tom when he reached her.

“Both.”

“What?”

“Sonofabitching plant killed both of them.”

Ella went to the barn to see for herself. In the dim light, she saw two barn cats tearing at the afterbirth. Tom had set a sheet of plywood to close off the far corner of the room, and behind it was where she found the calves, side by side on the straw. Their front hooves were touching and the eyes, the two she could see, were open and sightless.

She didn’t hear Tom enter. When he spoke, she jumped.

“Christ,” he said. “It’s me.”

“Should I call the plant?”

“I will,” he said. “Or I won’t. Bastards don’t do anything.”