Who by Fire (21 page)

How could something moving so slowly excite a boy? To please him, or try to, she bent over and looked at the two lines creeping and jiggling along.

Another crew from the plant put a “birdhouse” on one of their fence posts. People called them birdhouses because they were about that size and had louvred sides that let the wind through. Again Billy watched the installation and came back to the house knowing everything. It wasn’t a birdhouse; it was a Stevenson Screen, he told them. There were two jars inside, wrapped in two cloths, each dipped in different stuff.

“They turn a colour if gas gets on them. One’s for hydrogen sulphide, the other’s for sulphur dioxide—just like the Titrilog.” It did amaze her how much he could learn and how precisely he could repeat it all.

In mid-March, a government air pollution trailer arrived. They set it down in a field fifty yards west of the house. While a couple of men worked at setting it up, Billy stood outside the door peppering them with questions. That night he sat across from his father and drew a picture of a wind-speed gauge, putting curves like eyebrows beside the cups to show that they were twirling.

Then came a Saturday when Tom and the girls were in town. Tom had offered to take Billy too, but the boy said he couldn’t go. He considered watching the Titrilog his duty. Because the rotten-egg smell had been bad all night and was still awful when Ella went out to milk that morning, she kept Billy in the house until they’d had lunch. The smell was still bad then, but he was desperate to go. He ran to the Titrilog and came straight back, running even harder.

“Billy, what on earth?”

He yanked on her dress. “It’s the Titrilog, Mom! It’s broken!”

As Billy ran ahead and Ella walked behind, she felt as if she was parting invisible clouds of stink. How typical, she thought, that the machine would break when most needed.

“We have to do something, Mom!”

The boy’s face was greenish. She felt woozy herself. It was warm but there was almost no wind and the sun was brilliant on the wet snow. It was hard to see into the Titrilog’s window. But finally she saw what Billy was telling her. Both pens had drifted off the edge of the cardboard circle. They sat there jerking, like dying insects.

“The cardboard is still going around,” Billy said. “That’s why the pens aren’t at the end of the lines they made to the edge.”

“What do you think it means, Billy?”

“Something bad,” he said. “The lines go out if there’s more gas. If they go right off, that’s really bad.”

“Could it be broken? Could the clock have come unwound?”

“I just told you,” he said, “the clock’s still going.”

Fear rose through her. She was dizzy and had to grab the box to steady herself.

“Billy, we have to go.”

“We have to tell the plant.”

“That’s what we’ll do. Get your pyjamas, your toothbrush, and two pairs of underpants, really quick! We’ll go to the plant and then to town.”

Tom was in the Co-op warehouse when Billy came running and wrapped himself around his leg. The warehouse was an old grain elevator. Pallets of bagged fertilizer, weed killer, and seed rose into the darkness. Billy was chattering about the Titrilog. He loved saying the word and always punched the “tit” part.

“So what’s wrong with the Titrilog, Billy?”

“It went right off the cardboard! Both pens!”

The image settled into Tom’s neck.

“We told the plant. Mom and me.”

Ella was there now. She nodded.

“Did you talk to Dietz?” Tom asked her.

“He wasn’t there. I spoke to Bert Traynor.”

Traynor had told her the technician who looked after the Titrilog worked out of Calgary. They shouldn’t expect anything to happen today, nor tomorrow since it was Sunday.

“That sonofabitch,” Tom muttered. Ella turned away and looked into shadow. But, really, who was Traynor to talk as if the Titrilog belonged to the Ryders? As if fixing it was a favour to them?

Tom had told the girls to meet him at the drugstore at two. It was almost that time now. Ella told him she had brought overnight things for the girls and Billy—and herself; she thought she should stay too. They did not need to say that Tom would go back and look after the animals. That was understood.

When they got to the drugstore, only Donna was there. As soon as she heard her mother’s plan, she said she would not stay in town. She had her calf to look after.

Tom could see that Ella wanted his help. “You better stay,” he told her.

Donna turned her hard look on him. “I’m going with.”

Tom shrugged, and Ella’s face grew darker. He could not think of what else he was supposed to do. “We’ll be careful,” he said, but could not tell if Ella was listening.

When Tom and Donna were in the truck, ready to leave for the farm, Billy ran out of the house. He was crying. Tom told Donna to roll down her window.

“I want to go too!” the boy yelled.

“Titrilog’s locked tight, Billy. There’s nothing you can do but look at it.”

“That’s what I want! I want to look at it!”

“Sorry, buddy. Step back now. You’re staying here.”

The boy crumpled to his knees. He was punching his fists into an old snowbank as they drove away.

Tom and Donna were quiet during the drive. They talked when they were at ease, kept quiet when they had things to think about. He remembered the look she had given him when he said she should stay in town. He supposed she felt betrayed; that the two of them should be more of a team.

“I’m going to halter my calf and lead him around. Give him lots of water,” she said when they were closer to home.

“Why?”

“If something makes you sick, you should move around. Drink lots. Wash it out.”

“Why are you sure he’s sick?”

“When I fed him this morning, he didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to be scratched.”

At the farm, Donna did not come in to change her clothes. She put on gumboots and ran for the corrals. Tom went into the bedroom to change and was still there when he heard her. It was a strange sound. A scream. A yell. She smacked the porch door open.

He met her in the kitchen. Floods of tears were pouring down her scarlet face.

“What the hell, Donna?”

“Goddamn fucking sonofabitch is dead!”

“Hey, now. Sit down. Sit here.” He pointed to her seat at the table. She threw herself onto it, buried her face in her folded arms.

Tom went and looked at the steer. It had bloated so high its legs jutted out. Back at the house, Donna was not in the kitchen. She had gone upstairs.

He phoned Doc Moore’s office but no one answered. He tried him at home and got him. When Tom had explained things, Doc asked if he had phoned the plant. Or maybe they should try to get the government vet to come.

“I don’t want a company man or a government man on the place,” Tom said. “I’ll pay you to cut the animal open.”

Doc tried again to make the point that, without a company or government witness, an autopsy wouldn’t be official.

“I don’t care if it counts with them. I want to know for myself.”

Tom and Donna were back at the calf pen when Doc flew into the yard. He came with his heavy canvas bag.

“You better go to the house now,” Tom told Donna.

Her tears had dried to salt on her cheeks. She would not meet her father’s eyes. She wasn’t going anywhere.

Doc went to work. First he stabbed the bloat with a nail, stood back while the rank gas blew out. From the first slice through the
hide, and right on down to when he was cutting out and removing the lungs, Donna stood stiff as a statue. She did not take her eyes off the bloody blade as it danced in the black-purple of the calf. When Doc hauled out a length of intestine, slit a length of it, and washed away the stinking contents, she was with him then too.

Once in a while, Doc set down his knife and signalled them closer, pointed his flashlight at something. He remarked on the swelling of tissues in the lungs. He shifted the light into the stomach and asked what the calf had been drinking.

“Water from our well,” said Tom. “Same as we drink.”

“No,” said Donna, the first time she’d spoken. “I’ve been taking him to the field. I let him drink at the coulee.”

Doc pointed the flashlight into the calf’s gut. “I expected the lungs to be like they are. Inflamed, full of fluid. Pulmonary edema. It’s probably what killed him. But the gut and intestines are inflamed too, like he was getting poisoned at the same time. Where does that runoff come from?”

“Coulee starts just below the plant.” Tom swept his arm along the coulee’s path.

“Christ, man. That goes right to your feedlot.”

“Feedlot’s fenced out. Calves drink from a well.”

Donna walked away, stiffly. When she got through the gates, she started to run, a careless, flinging gait as if her body had forgotten how.

Doc Moore sighed. “Now I’ve done it. She thinks she killed it.”

“She’s tough,” Tom said, more in hope than certainty. “She’ll get over it.”

Tom did not get into bed but sat on the edge of the mattress. He must be cold, Ella thought, staring at his back, but he did not move for the longest time.

Tom had phoned her at her parents’, told her about the calf but also that the stink had passed and they could come home. When they entered the house, Tom was in the kitchen. He started explaining what Doc Moore’s autopsy had shown, but Ella ran past him. She found poor Donna upstairs, under the covers, staring at the wall. Ella assumed she wouldn’t talk but might accept some comfort at least. She reached and rubbed her back.

Donna bolted upright and started chattering. She let her mother hug her and stroke her hair as she described over and over what the calf looked like when she found it, what the autopsy had been like, how Tom had asked Doc Moore to write down what he had found in the innards.

Ella kept thinking that her daughter was released. Something had been holding her. Now she was free of it.

“Why did you ask Doc Moore to write everything down?” Ella asked Tom now, while he continued to sit on the edge of the bed in the deepening cold. “Are you going to show it to the company?” Without turning, he said, “I will show it to no one at that company. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust the government either.”

“What’s it for then?”

“That’s what I’m thinking about.”

Given their talking habits of late, Ella assumed he was finished. She rolled away and into her own thoughts. But Tom stood up and began pacing the little distance from the night table to the dresser.

“I told Doc that Donna would get over it. It’s true. She will. We all will. If we just let everything be, it will all go away. The kids will go away. You and me will go away. We’ll disperse is what we’ll do, like Alf says gas does. Go away from each other and pretend we’re people who never had this in our lives.”

“Is that what should happen?” she asked.

“Some might say so. I don’t think so.”

“But how can you prevent it?”

“That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking there has to be a way. They can’t come in here and wreck our farm and our family. I have to find a way to stop them and make them pay.”

“Do you think there might be something in the health study?”

“That’ll be the day, Ella,” he said, and the back of her head prickled at the rare sound of her name. “There will be nothing in that study that does us any good. But we can’t be the only ones. Everywhere these plants are, there must be people like us. I’m going to find them and I’m going to talk to them.
That’s
who I’m going to show Doc Moore’s autopsy to. I’m going to show it to them.”

Waddens Lake

BILL SAT OUTSIDE THEO
’
S OFFICE
, pretending to read an industry magazine. Paula hammered away at her computer. He had tried to restart the Ryder-Walker joke, but she would not bite. A bad sign. You don’t make jokes with the condemned.

While he waited, he rehearsed. First, he would say he was sorry about Dennis Whitcomb. After that, the apologizing must stop. “The rule for days off is to be reachable by phone,” he would say. “I was.”

When Dennis had his accident, Henry Shields was at home with the flu. Clayton Brock was shift boss and he phoned Bill’s cell. It must have been when Bill was in the casino. He hadn’t heard the ring or felt the buzz. Instead of trying to phone later, Clayton texted Bill twice, then gave up.

“I didn’t know my phone did texts,” Bill planned to tell Houle. It was a questionable tactic—an engineer pleading ignorance of technology to save his job—but Bill had gone over the alternatives, and it was the only one that might not lead to further questioning of his whereabouts.

Dennis Whitcomb had been knocked down by gas in the sulphur unit on Saturday night. In the days before, a maintenance crew had opened and closed a sour pipe. Any crew rebuttoning a pipe connection had strict rules to follow about how tight to cinch
the nuts, and because the wrenches showed the pounds of torque, it was hard to screw up. Despite all these rules and precautions, maintenance had managed to leave a couple of nuts loose enough to leak.

During Dennis’s rounds, he’d smelled sour gas. Everything he did beyond that point was wrong. He was supposed to leave the area; he didn’t. He was supposed to get help; he didn’t. Acting on a potential gas leak without backup, he had also failed to mask up. He went sniffing around the vessels and pipes like a dog, until he finally arrived at the leaking bolts. The hydrogen sulphide nailed him.

In Bill’s forty-year career, he had never seen anyone go to so much trouble to get his little bell rung. Dennis had breathed in just enough to make himself fall over, to have to crawl for his life out of the building. The Waddens Lake sulphur unit’s perfect record for lost-time accidents was kaput.

The rest of the crew were furious with Whitcomb, whom they had long ago renamed Menace Fuckwit. They had been proud of their safety record, to the point of arrogance, and the ones Bill had talked to so far wanted Dennis fired. No one seemed to blame Bill—or rather, no one except Theo Houle.

The wait in Theo’s anteroom continued. The fact that even Paula was ignoring him made him think his getting canned was a real possibility this time.