Who by Fire (2 page)

Then she started to cry. “Curt asked me to come outside with him. We stood there looking at our field. The man from the company had pointed at the spot and asked us to imagine a gas plant there. He asked us to think what it would be like to live so close. Curt said he thought we shouldn’t dicker. We should take their price now, in case it went down.”

Ella was imagining herself in Dora’s shoes. She knew that she wouldn’t have had the same thoughts. Dora wasn’t born and raised on their farm. Ella didn’t think Dora’s decision had been easy, just different than her own would have been.

Tom came into the kitchen, talking back over his shoulder. “Oh hell, Curt, don’t worry about it. Wouldn’t have changed anything if we’d talked.” He was on his way into the pantry to get the whisky bottle. Ella went to her china cupboard for the little glasses.

“I imagine we’ll move closer to town,” Curt said as Tom poured the whisky.

Dora said, “I thought we might as well move closer if we’re moving.”

“Closer’s good, especially in winter,” Ella said, though she didn’t believe it. She preferred this distance.

The men went back to the living room, and somehow that was a signal to the women. Dora rose. They hugged each other, weeping freely.

“Whatever will I do without you, Ella?”

“Let’s not worry” was all Ella could think to say.

The Bauers moved on the Dominion Day long weekend. The Ryders and their Dutch hired man, Kees, helped empty the rooms and fill the two grain trucks. Every time a piece of furniture was taken out, the space it left held some lonesome fact, but the work was hard and kept everyone on the dry side of grief—until Dora and Ella moved the old crib. Now that Petey was a boy, the crib did nothing but hold Dora’s ironing. Still, picking it up made the two of them cry so hard they had to set it down again. How were they
not
to think about their time together, their lives as women led so amazingly in tandem? Sixteen years ago, their husbands had taken them to the Haultain hospital on the same day. Within hours of one another, they had given birth to their first children, both girls. They were not the kind of women who liked to talk about such things, but Ella knew from various signs that they had their monthlies at the same time, were simply joined together in that way.

By mid-afternoon the Bauer household was mostly loaded into the trucks. It had been agreed that only Tom and Kees would drive over and unload at the other end. The two sets of children stared at each other in numb confusion. “We’ll get together all the time,” Dora said, with her arms across her daughter’s shoulders.

“You children can use the phone to talk,” Ella added. But all six kids stood like stones.

Ella stayed with her children in Bauers’ yard until there was nothing to see but dust hanging over the road. Then Jeannie, the eldest, said, “This is stupid,” and started walking home. Ella, the girls, Billy—they all fanned out, wanting to be alone.

Two weeks later, at the end of a blistering day, Ella took Billy upstairs to bed. She noticed that Jeannie and Donna’s bedroom door was closed. She thought it must be terribly hot in there, and she was on the verge of throwing the door open to allow a breeze, when she
stopped herself. The closed door meant Jeannie was having, or about to have, a cigarette. She kept them in a little cedar box that had belonged to Ella’s mother. Ella checked the box when she cleaned, and some dry crinkly specimen of a cigarette was usually there, on a bed of Jeannie’s cheap jewellery.

As long as Ella did not let on that she knew about Jeannie’s smoking, she did not have to have a fight with her headstrong eldest daughter. She would rather Jeannie did not smoke, but a lot of girls did. What ladylike meant was being reshaped by the movies, and who could control that? If she thought Donna was also smoking, Ella would have intervened, but somehow she knew Jeannie would not offer and her sister would not ask. Likely, Donna would be disgusted but would pretend otherwise. Donna was thirteen and only beginning to question her sister’s authority.

Ella started down the creaky steps, Jeannie’s cue to light up. She imagined her daughter hunched in front of the metal screen set in the summer window; imagined her blowing smoke through the wire.

Downstairs, instead of returning to the kitchen, Ella went into her own bedroom. She opened the closet door and pressed back the hangers. One of the oddities of the old house was that you could hear the girls’ room perfectly from inside that closet.

“Rhonda and I went to the barn and had a smoke on their moving day,” Jeannie was saying. “She told me the barn was going to be knocked down and burned. The house too. Burned to the ground. The plant people don’t want anyone to live there, not ever again.”

There was no sound from Donna. Jeannie must have thought she wasn’t getting through to her sister, because she said again, quite loud, “Burn down the house!”

After some smoking time, Jeannie started in again. “You know, if the house you’ve lived in all your life is burned, your whole life goes with it. You can’t go to the places where things happened, and
that makes it like nothing ever did happen. Rhonda’ll be a zombie.”

This time Donna did say something. Her voice was smaller, and Ella had to strain to make it out. “The people who live at the plant aren’t.” During the last two weeks, crew shacks had popped up beside the plant site: flat-roofed affairs, each one containing four living spaces. Donna perhaps meant that those people moved all the time, but they still had memories.

“Take Mom, though,” Jeannie said. “She’s lived her whole life in this house. She was born in it. Her father built it. It’s a good thing we’re not selling out or she’d be a vegetable too.”

“Maybe we will.”

“Be vegetables?”

“Sell out and move.”

“Don’t be stupid. Mom would never. And Dad knows better than to try.”

“What if we had to?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There was some noise Ella could not decipher.

“Oh my God, Donna! Quick!”

Ella imagined the two girls fanning smoke toward the screen.

When summer ended, Jeannie and Donna took the bus to St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic school in Haultain. It was Jeannie’s third year of going to town school and Donna’s first. At the end of June, the one-room school east of the farm had closed.

All five days of that first school week, Billy walked his sisters up the driveway to the bus and came back with a big lip. Keeping him amused was going to be hard.

By then, many of the steel structures at the sulphur plant had been erected, including a flare stack that, on some days, held a meager
flame. Tom and Ella had learned the term “flare stack” from Don Harbeg, a bachelor farmer who lived south of the river. Don’s farm was only a quarter section, and he had always worked other jobs to support it. Before the plant had even advertised for help, Don went to the trailer office and asked if he could work. They gave him a job, just like that. Pleased to be the centre of attention, Don gave the community weekly reports, on the steps of St. Bruno’s after mass.

During summer, a few phone calls came to the Ryder house from representatives of Aladdin Oil and Gas. Ella always answered; she was in the house more and Tom hated telephones. Ella was used to American accents, because most everyone across the river to the east were Utah Mormons. But these accents on the phone were different. Some were so drawly she had to cover the mouthpiece in case she laughed.

The last caller said that somebody from the company was going to pay them a visit, but no date was mentioned. Mr. Clint Comstock was the visitor’s name, and he intended to visit all the local families. Mr. Clint Comstock was a busy man, and it was not easy to find time for them in his schedule.

“Of course we’re up here sitting on our hands,” Tom said.

The visit happened toward the end of September.

“Clint Comstock and his assistant will be at your house in an hour,” a fellow said on the phone.

Ella ran to her car and raced to the Lower Place. She found Tom and Kees in a field of wheat, rubbing kernels into their palms and chewing them. Tom looked up, saw her, started over.

“Goddamn him,” Tom said when she’d told him. “He should’ve given us more notice.”

“I don’t even have time to bake.”

“Give him last week’s scone same as you give me. Don’t bend over backwards.”

She waved him off—not his business. She jumped in the car, U-turned, and returned up the road.

Ella was barely back home when the white car pulled into the yard. She answered the door and invited the two men in. She said for them to sit at the table, and Mr. Comstock sat in Tom’s place. It seemed rude to ask him to move so she didn’t. She had a fire in the stove and a pot of coffee ready to perk. She set out small plates, knives and butter, along with the plate of dry scones.

Clint Comstock was tall and broad shouldered, possibly less broad shouldered than his western jacket pretended. Under it was a bone-coloured shirt. He had on blue jeans with a razor-sharp crease. He wore his blond hair brushed back same as Tom, but the Texan controlled his hair with pomade, a sickening smell like the beginning of rot. He was so red across the cheekbones, like he had gone at himself with a wire brush.

That Mr. Comstock was sitting in Tom’s place seemed not to matter until Tom arrived. After introductions, Tom had to sit on the children’s side, and Ella could see it made him ill at ease. She had the odd thought that someone who did not know them, coming into the house, might assume it was Comstock’s home, that she was Comstock’s wife. Tom would look like a shy visitor, maybe a vagrant looking for a job.

As soon as Ella poured the coffee, the Texan pushed the cup forward on the table and set his hands behind it, fingers laced. He spread his elbows wide so they almost went to the table’s corners. He had by now taken a scone. He’d broken it in two and buttered it, but had put the pieces back on his plate without taking a bite.

The younger man had a brush cut, so close you could see the middle bone of his head. Comstock introduced him, but Ella promptly forgot the name. She felt she was supposed to forget. This one rustled around in a briefcase and set out writing pad and pen.

From the start, Ella could see that Clint Comstock was a mixture of politeness and pushiness. In the introductions he’d called them Mr. and Mrs. Ryder, but abruptly switched to Tom and Ella without being asked. Now, he looked Tom in the eye and pushed himself forward so his chest was tight to the table. This caused Tom to slide his chair back, cross his legs, and start rolling a cigarette. When Comstock spoke, he mostly addressed Tom, but swung around every few sentences to toss a few words at Ella. This part was just small talk. He adjusted himself to indicate when he was moving on to business.

“I wanted to say hello to our nearest neighbours. It’s nice of you folks to make time for me.”

Without looking, he reached to his assistant, who put a sheet of paper in his hand. Comstock set it on the table and twisted it around so the print was right side up for Tom.

“You can keep this. It includes what we call plant specifications. A copy of it was filed with your government in Edmonton. Your health minister and the minister of mines and minerals signed it. So did your premier, Mr. Manning. Yours is a farmers’ government, isn’t it.”

“Started that way,” said Tom, showing a bit of his real self. “Sometimes they forget.”

Comstock pointed at one of the numbers. “When we’re up and running, we’ll be processing hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of gas a day. That’s to start with.”

“You mean it’ll get bigger?” Tom said.

“That’s right. In a year or two, we’ll move to the second phase.”

“How much bigger?”

“Several times bigger. Millions of cubic feet.”

Tom’s cigarette had gone out. He felt his trouser pocket for his lighter. He pushed it up with his fingers until the metal head showed.
He flipped the lid and thumbed the wheel, he closed the eye nearest the flame.

Tom pushed his tobacco pouch toward Comstock, but the other man held up his hand. He probably thought it a primitive way to smoke.

Tom breathed out a cloud and said, “Maybe you better tell us how this plant will be to live beside.”

“You know what I mean when I say it’s a sour gas plant, right?” Comstock said.

What they knew came from Don Harbeg and a piece in the
Haultain Herald
. Tom said he wanted Comstock to explain from scratch. This was smart, Ella thought. Better than trying to show off and getting confused. She wasn’t sure yet how she knew, but she felt Comstock wanted Tom to make mistakes that he could correct.

“Sour means natural gas containing hydrogen sulphide,” Comstock said. “The gas here’s about eleven per cent hydrogen sulphide, and there’s also six per cent carbon dioxide. The second field we’re testing for this plant is over twenty per cent hydrogen sulphide. The plant will run at fifteen hundred pounds per square inch. Trust me, that’s a lot of pressure.” Clint Comstock leaned back in his chair.

Ella felt a weight or a pressure lift from her and imagined Tom feeling the same thing.