Who by Fire (18 page)

What he did say to Ella was that Jeannie shouldn’t count on having the car. Because of the plant, Ella needed it. You never knew these days when she would have to grab Billy and run for it.

That didn’t matter, she said, because Jeannie’s intention was to board in town.

“The hell she will!”

Jeannie was outside, lying on a blanket in her swimsuit. Tom told her flatly it was out of the question. She was too young to live away from home.

“Your mother tells me that boyfriend of yours, who you never told me about, works at the plant for his father. He can come here and visit you after work. I imagine your mother will give him lunch now and then.”

Jeannie picked up a little bottle and poured oil in her hand. She sat there with it cupped on her palm. “You don’t like Gerry because Mr. Traynor’s at the plant,” she said.

“I just said he could come for lunch and visit after work. Does that sound like I’m against him? Anyway, how would I know if I like him? I don’t know him. That’s your choice, not mine.”

Jeannie never did bring the boyfriend for lunch, and their visits amounted to her walking up the road in the late afternoon when his shift was done and the two of them sitting in his car for an hour. “Listening to the radio,” she called it.

Tom started knocking down the alfalfa, and when some of it was ready, he taught Donna how to rake. The side rake was the easiest implement on the farm, an array of spoked wheels that whipped the mown hay into a swath; just the thing for training a kid to tractor work. Later, when she’d raked everything and he needed to run the baler, he taught her the side mower. The mower was trickier to operate and frustrating in heavy hay, but she picked it up quickly. A few times, when he wasn’t using the baler, and Donna was mowing, Tom put Jeannie on the rake.

When everyone was out in the field at once, maybe gathered around a lunch that Ella and Billy had brought, Tom tried to feel
good about the family pitching in together. But it was never a happy work bee. If it wasn’t Jeannie making it known she’d rather be in town, it was Donna and Jeannie exchanging barbs. Ella was sour too. She hardly ever had a smile for him.

While Tom was baling the last field, a stretch of the Lower Place close to the river, it started to stink. A ridge of high hills separated the field from the plant, and the smell was usually less there. He was trying to figure out why it it was different today when his breath caught in his chest. He stopped the tractor. As he was standing down from it, the world turned black and he hit the ground. His lungs were like boards, each breath a labour. He told himself to get up and run, to climb the nearest hill, get his head into higher air, but his legs would not answer. His head would not come away from the ground. He wondered if this was it, then. He thought of Ella, Donna, Billy, Jeannie; Ella again.

The day had been sultry, a near absence of wind. As hope and sense were leaving him, a few gusts combed down through the uncut hay. The next breath was less hard to pull in. When he had enough air to think, he thought the gas must be coming out of the river valley and the cleaner air from the west. His lungs softened enough so he could stand, though he swayed like a flag. As he began making stumbling steps, his head screamed in pain and he threw up into the hay stubble.

He had no idea how long it took him to walk from the tractor to the truck. Sometimes he had to crawl. On some higher ground in the middle, he slept in the dirt and woke up retching. He took a piss, and it came dark orange.

Going home, he passed Ella in her garden. She must have noticed he was driving like a drunk, for she met him in the yard and guided him into the house, onto their bed. She placed a bucket near his head, mopped sick sweat off his forehead with a wet face cloth.

“Leave the tractor and the baler where they are,” he commanded. “Don’t go near them. That gas came from the river.”

Ella left the room, and Billy, who must have been outside the door, slipped in. He looked at his father in amazement.

“Never saw me on a bed with clothes on, did you, buddy?”

Billy was shy, as if it might not be his father at all.

“Give me an hour, young fella. I’ll be better then.”

The boy came and rested his hand on Tom’s hairy arm below the rolled sleeve. Billy seemed to know how much good it did his father to have his hand there.

Day after day Tom stayed in bed. He could not remember any time like it. Even in the coal mine when a poorly set charge blew him against a rock wall and broke four ribs, he had been on his feet sooner than this. But every dawn when he snapped awake and tried to rise, an anvil bore him down.

Over and over, he came out of his doze worrying aloud that Donna was trying to finish the baling. Before he was gassed, she had asked if she could run the baler, and he’d said no. Those old round balers were dangerous. They had powerful twin rollers that snapped in the hay, and if they plugged and you forgot to disconnect the power takeoff, your whole arm could be sucked in.

Ella cut him off. “You’re not listening, Tom. I told you that Vic finished the baling.”

“Right, right,” he said, but it would not prevent him from forgetting again.

Throughout the day and night, he would wake in panic. A milk cow dead with her head in the milking stanchion. Ella and Billy collapsed between potato rows. Donna crawling and coughing. How had his and Ella’s failings combined to keep them here so long?

After a week, Ella took him to the doctor, though he protested against it. The doctor listened, a little too patiently, as Tom explained what had happened. The doctor put sticky pads attached to wires all over his bared chest. When he wanted to know what it was, the doc said, “ECG.”

“But that’s for the heart.”

“Middle-aged man falls down in a faint, I check his heart.”

“It wasn’t a faint. I told you, I was gassed.”

The doctor kept on with the electrocardiogram.

“He didn’t believe me,” Tom grumbled on the way home. “Bugger thinks I made it up.”

After two weeks in the house, Tom went back to work. His neighbours had most of their bales piled already. Usually he would have gone out with the tractor and hayrack, but that was impossible. He would never be able to throw bales that high. He and Donna took the pickup and put on small loads. But they were hardly making a dint.

After they’d finished the smallest field, Ella suggested they stop. She had remembered a time before her father retired when he had been in the same predicament—sick and with hay bales in the field that he could not stack. Knowing that hay kept well in round bales, her father left them on the ground. Each day of winter, he picked up enough to feed his cows.

At first Tom fought the idea. He did not like how it would look, the weakness of it as seen by his neighbours. But when September came and the girls were in school, he had no choice.

There was not a lot of grain to harvest, just enough oats and barley for the feedlot. Tom did the tractor work, and Ella drove the grain truck. Tom never admitted to his family how weak he felt, how often a clammy sweat forced him to stop and sit, or even to lie on the ground. After such a moment, he would always think of the
upcoming meeting with Clint Comstock: what he would say when it was time to deal.

During the weeks after Tom was gassed, the house had a supernatural feel to it. Ella was conscious every moment of the man in the bed in the bedroom, the one whom she had never seen in a weakened state of any kind. But there he was unmoving on the bed as daylight shifted through the rooms.

At times, when Tom was fully asleep, she would creep in and sit on the side of the bed, studying his face. He had a specific look when he slept, and sometimes too when he was awake, that reminded her of their courtship. When he had arrived to visit her, after riding miles through the hills in the evening, he always wore traces of what he had been thinking. What she saw wasn’t just affection but also how alarmed he was to have lost command of his emotional state. It made him resent and fear her at the same time as he tumbled into love.

Now, when he could barely lift a water glass, he was like that again. He did not enjoy being helpless and dependent, but at the same time was grateful. He knew she was being kind and patient with him. She was giving him the food and water that would allow him to get up and return to independence.

When he did finally have the strength to leave the house, it was like watching a soldier put on armour for a return to war. He assembled his anger, clapped on his hardness, covered it with an air of being the only one who could protect them against the plant. Last of all came the distance that had existed before, to which she responded with distance of her own.

But the time between, from the gassing to the return of distance, had taught her something she hadn’t known. Able to feel her old love for Tom—and she did feel it in the time of his helplessness—she was able to measure it against what she felt for Lance. She found
that the love for Tom was greater, maybe not stronger but greater. When she and Tom returned to their distant poles, she went back to thinking of Lance fondly. But she would never forget which love weighed more.

Weaning was always done in the inner yard of the feedlot. The slab enclosure was much smaller than the three-acre outer yard: just a set of walls anchored by a grain box and a roofed bed ground, two feed troughs down the middle. Only here could they hold the desperate calves and their mothers separate, the flaw being that it was fifty yards from the well.

The whole family was needed to haul water by bucket up the slope. They emptied the water into barrels roped to the inside of the gate, and the frantic thirst of the milk-deprived calves drained the barrels again and again.

The sound of hoarse cows and the shrill calves was composite, nearly solid. It dropped a pall of sadness over everyone as they worked. The world of the cows and calves was coming to an end, and it would have taken a heart of stone not to feel it. Donna was the only one who smiled, and that was from enjoyment in showing off how many more times she could carry two full buckets of water up the slope than her sister. Jeannie had no desire to win. She stopped often to rest, checking her fingernails for damage.

Billy took the work seriously. He had insisted on bringing a small bucket they used for tempting the horses with oats and went back and forth at a run.

What Ella noticed, as they did this work, was how little stamina Tom had, and how hard he tried to hide it. He was a terrible colour and sweating badly. Every time he came to the well end of the journey, he stripped off his glove and made a cup of his hand under the water’s pour.

“Don’t make yourself sick,” she said, but he didn’t reply or stop.

From the feedlot, Ella saw the mail lady’s car at the school corner. Wanting a break anyway, she drove down there. The letter from Comstock was in the roll. When she got back, Tom was sitting on the edge of the tank, heaving for breath. He had his cap off and his hair was a tangle of wet strings. She opened the letter and held it to the light so both of them could read.

“So he’ll be in Alberta a month from now,” Tom said when he was finished. “ ‘We can discuss the matter of your farm then. Please have two independent appraisals done.’ Christ!” He put his hat back on.

“You should rest more.”

“I’ve been buying, selling, and trading things since I was fifteen. Can you imagine if I asked Joey Lemaire, when he comes to trade a horse, would you mind having an independent appraisal done?”

“It’s just a different way of doing things.”

“Oh no. It’s not just that. It’s mockery. Aladdin bought Bauers’ and they bought Courts’. That gives them two prices. They could average them and offer us that. But no. He wants me to jump fences first.”

Donna stood there, puffing but fresh. “Dad, are we going to bring my calf home tonight?”

“Not tonight, no. Give him another day of weaning with the others. Then we’ll run him into the small corral. I’ll have to get the stock racks on.”

“Can I stay home from school to help?”

“No,” said Ella.

While they waited for their day with Comstock, Ella took Billy and looked at farms for sale. Nothing made her feel as black as this: walking through a stranger’s house, around a foreign yard. Every nook and cranny made her see the equivalent in her own home, garden,
barn. There was no emotion or memory in anything she saw, and she feared there never would be.

She got the idea that living near Dora Bauer might be a path out of emptiness, but the only place anywhere close to them was one that had been on the market for years. A bachelor lived there, and the house was unimaginably dirty. Cobwebs, stacks of yellowed newspaper, mouse dirt. When they left, Billy solemnly said, “Don’t make us move there, Mom,” and for some reason, that made them both laugh. Other places, not so easily dismissed, made Ella cry on the drive home.

As the time for meeting Comstock drew closer, Ella feared that too. What she was afraid of was Tom being too prepared. Too muscled up, as he might say. Tom had said more than once that it was her farm and no deal would be struck without her say-so. But he did not tell her his strategy. That was the horse-trading part, and he guarded it jealously.

Tom felt that Comstock had got the better of him, and, for that, he wanted revenge. Ella worried that Clint Comstock would know how to draw that anger and use it to trip Tom again.

When the assistant piloted the big white car into the yard, Tom was waiting beside his own truck in the turn-around. It was a cold day, a dip into winter, and, stepping out of the car, Comstock wasn’t dressed for it. After their handshake, the Texan tried to pass Tom to the house, but Tom blocked him.

“There are things I want to show you before we talk.”

Comstock looked at his watch.

“You know, Tom …”

“You made me wait months. I guess you can spare me an hour to look at what I’m offering to sell you.”

Tom told the assistant to go inside and have coffee. He wanted
Comstock by himself. He drove them to the Lower Place. Bouncing across the hayfield there, Tom explained the work that had gone into this part of the farm, since they had acquired it ten years before. Tom had traded his original family farm for this land. That brought the two halves of the farm closer and made the whole easier to operate. This had added value to their holdings.