Who by Fire (3 page)

“I’m not going to pussyfoot with you, Tom, Ella. This hydrogen sulphide is poisonous stuff. In certain circumstances, it can kill a person.”

Ella felt a new pressure come on. She understood then that this was something Comstock was doing on purpose.

“Nor am I here to scare you. That plant we’re building in your neighbour’s field has several functions, but the main one is to change that dangerous gas into something safer. I see you’ve got a good old wood stove there. I grew up with one just like it. I’ll bet you five
dollars that within five years you’ll have a propane tank outside. In ten years, you might have a natural gas line right to your house. Those fuels are products we’ll make at our plant.”

He broke off a tiny piece of his scone, lifted it toward his mouth, then set it down again. He reached toward the assistant, and this time the young man placed a little yellow brick on his palm. Comstock held the brick out to Tom.

“Go ahead, take it. The plant’s main by-product is this, sulphur, which might wind up in the fertilizer you spread on your grain field. It’s dark orange in its liquid form. When it solidifies, it turns this nice lemon yellow. You can keep that.”

Tom weighed the brick in his palm, then handed it to Ella. It was heavier than it looked. She held it to her nose and it had a nasty but familiar odour. The smell of a lit match.

“How do you get the sulphur out?” asked Tom. He was becoming more confident.

“It’s complicated, but, to put it simply, you heat the raw gas very hot. You add oxygen. There’s a chemical reaction. You get liquid sulphur out one end and sulphur dioxide out the other.”

“Does all of the poison get changed?”

Comstock favoured Tom with a wink. “You’re an astute man, Tom. Nope. Chemical reactions never react a hundred per cent. Our plant is built to recover ninety-three per cent. That’s state-of-the-art.”

“That other seven per cent must be dangerous.”

“Right again. It could kill you.”

Comstock said this and held a sombre impression. Then he let his lips spring apart over his big white teeth. He laughed and slapped his leg.

“But
that’s
not all we do with the hydrogen sulphide. We’re just now completing the sulphur stack. It’s got an incinerator at the
bottom, one that will burn at one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. In that incinerator, we’ll burn the residual
H
₂
S—
that’s what we call hydrogen sulphide,
H
₂
S
. We’ll send what comes off that fire up the sulphur stack. That cement stack will be eighty feet high for two reasons: so the gases cool before they exit, and so they go high in the air, where the wind can take them away.”

Comstock made an upward motion with both hands—gas shooting out the stack. Then he nodded at the window. “It’s blowing pretty good out there today. I gather that’s typical.”

Ella and Tom started talking at once. Ella gestured for Tom to say it.

“This is a calm day. Wind here can blow hundred mile an hour.”

“Well, there you go,” said Comstock. “That’s going to help a lot. Dispersion. We’ll also be pumping out some sulphur dioxide, and some people ask me if that’s dangerous. What I say is, if you had to sit with your head in a bag of sulphur dioxide, it would be an uncomfortable experience. But once it’s shot out that big stack, blown all over the place by this wind, it won’t be anything at all.”

The assistant started packing things into his briefcase. Ella was struck by how much this was like a recent visit from a vacuum cleaner salesman. Spiel, demonstration, pack up, go. A formula. But then Clint held out his hand to stop the secretary.

“Hold on. Let’s let these folks ask their questions.”

The secretary looked at his watch.

“Never mind that. What about it? Ella? Tom?”

Both were flustered. They should have had questions but none came to mind.

“It’s going to smell, isn’t it?” said Tom finally.

“Yes, it will smell. Tom, let me be blunt. Some people dislike living near these plants so much they prefer to move away. I understand you and the Bauers are friends. As you know, we offered them
a chance to sell out and move, and they took it. I can’t say for sure, but my feeling is that Aladdin Oil and Gas would make you a similar offer if you want to go.”

Ella knew he was going to say this as soon as he’d mentioned the Bauers, but when he got to the words “want to go,” tears jumped into her eyes. She put her hand to her brow to hide it, but Comstock noticed.

“I’m sorry, Ella. I’ve upset you.”

She shook her head.

“Ella was born here,” said Tom. “It’s her parents’ homestead.” From beside her fingers, Ella saw her husband raise and lower his shoulders at Comstock.

She wiped her eyes on her apron. “I cry easily. People who know me don’t pay any attention.”

She felt angry was what she felt, at both of them. It was the feeling that everything in the last hour, even her crying, had been made to happen by Clint Comstock, and that Tom was being duped. She could not help feeling angry at herself too. If it wasn’t for her feelings about this farm, leaving would be an option: the possibility of putting their backs to these Texans and their stinking plant.

“I understand, Ella. I’ll also admit it’s not the best of luck that the preferred engineering location for our plant happens to be so close to your farm. Upwind, to boot. Thank you for the coffee and the delicious scone. I’m sorry I left some. I just had lunch. Thanks for being honest with me. I hope I was honest back.”

There was his big white smile, his hand demanding to be shaken.

After the assistant had piloted the white car from the yard, Tom stayed sitting at the table, smoking. Ella gathered the cups and plates. She put Comstock’s scone, of which he had not eaten one crumb, into the swill pail in the porch.

“I like him,” Tom said when she came back.

“I don’t.” Ella went to their bedroom to lie down.

Clint Comstock phoned from Houston in December and told Ella to expect the plant to go into action during the first week of the new year. It now had a name: Aladdin Hatfield.

On every Sunday leading up to that day, the talk on the steps of St. Bruno’s was what would happen next. As much as people could tell from the outside, construction was complete. The tallest, fattest tower, a giant concrete tree, stood alone, while shorter silver towers pierced through metal roofs and shone and sparked in the sun. Ladders wrapped these towers, giving them a fairy-tale appearance. At night, when he was trying to sleep, Tom, who had a fear of heights, yielded to sick imaginings of climbing them. During the day he made fun of it all. It was he who had come up with the name “Sulphur City.”

Don Harbeg had been working full time on the plant’s construction since harvest, and at church he drew crowds with his explanations. He said it was inside the silver towers that the fuels would be split out: propane, butane, and the mixture that made car and truck gasoline. “North of the cement stack is the sulphur building. Big vessels in there extract and condense the sulphur.” He flung around words like “condense” and “extract” as though he had always known them.

Besides the new words, Tom had noticed that, if someone said something about the plant that wasn’t favourable, such as that it would stink more than anyone was admitting, Don would say he doubted it, that the plant was going to be all right. Tom suspected that Clint Comstock had hired Don Harbeg so he could play this part. If you worked on something, it was natural to stick up for it. The Texan’s strategy was that of a cutting horse: get one out, then try to get another from the herd to join it.

The time for the plant to start operating came marching toward them. It was like the plant was filling with pressure and they could feel it in their own bodies. As Christmas neared, the normal good feelings that came with the season were replaced by an anxious mood. There were arguments about things that had never been argued about before.

Part of the Ryders’ Christmas tradition was a buying trip to Lethbridge. Some neighbours went farther, to Calgary, but Tom found Calgary an unnerving place to drive. Lethbridge had wide streets and a few street lights that changed colour on a leisurely schedule: a farmer’s city.

When the Ryders crossed the Old Man River Valley into Lethbridge, they ducked under the railway bridge and passed the brewery garden with its Christmas display. They parked in their usual place a block from the biggest stores and walked downtown together. At that point, they divided up so they could buy each other presents. Ella made the girls take Billy, and they groaned their disappointment. Billy was too excited to take offence.

Tom went to Woolworth’s and walked back and forth along the jewellery counter. A salesgirl with a Christmas corsage on her white blouse homed in on him, but he turned his back. He did not want help so much as time to think. Ever since the construction machines came and the Bauers left, he and Ella had been bickering. It was a kind of irritation more than actual fighting, but it was getting worse. Ella claimed he was angry every time he came in the house. He thought he was no different than he’d ever been. There was just more to be angry about.

Tom wanted to give Ella a present that showed he had put some thought into it. But he could not spend any more than he usually
did. Ella did not like extravagance and would take it back if he over-spent. He stared at every object in the glass case, then at its price tag. He would only submit to the salesgirl if time ran out.

Then it caught his eye: a silver brooch a couple of inches high that was one of the symbols on a sheet of music. Ella’s parents had been short of money all their life but had sprung for an upright when the Heintzman man came around. Ella had taken lessons as a girl and nowadays played the organ at St. Bruno’s. During the summer of their courtship, Tom had groomed and saddled his horse and ridden across the hills to visit her. Sometimes they went riding; other times they sat in her parents’ living room, and Ella played for him.

The brooch was the perfect thing, and now he was nervous lest it get away.

“What’s this called?” he asked the girl as she came up behind the glass cabinet. “It’s got to do with music.”

She looked like the kind of girl who would have had music lessons.

“Treble clef,” she said. “The other one’s the bass clef, but we don’t have a brooch for that.”

“Treble clef,” Tom repeated, and asked her the price. She reached inside the cabinet and flipped the tag, and he felt a thrill of relief. It was high but in the range Ella would accept. He paid the extra to have it gift-wrapped.

Tom now had time to kill. He went to the lunch counter at Kresge’s and treated himself to a chocolate milkshake. It took a while to notice that Ormond Cardwell was three stools down, having a bottle of orange pop and a piece of pie with ice cream.

Ormond and Tom had known each other since childhood. Ormond’s family lived close to the Kootenay River on the Mormon side, while the Ryder place was two miles away on the west side. On hot summer days, the Mormon and non-Mormon children had
gravitated to the same swimming hole. Between swims, they played baseball on the river bench, Mormons against the rest. Nowadays, Ormond was a member of the Alberta legislature.

When Tom waved and got the MLA’s attention, Ormond said, “Well, for heaven’s sake, Tom. Will you join me?”

Tom left his emptied milkshake can and moved to the stool beside Ormond. He felt compelled to make his first question about the government, to which Ormond gave a joking response. “We’re stealing your money as usual.”

Tom wanted to bring up the gas plant, but Ormond did it for him.

“How do you feel about that plant?” he asked. “Having it so close?”

“I don’t understand why they had to put it on our doorstep. Why were they allowed?”

“Thing is, Tom,” and Ormond twisted on his stool to face him, “our government doesn’t know a heck of a lot about oil and gas. We have a conservation board, and that was a good thing to create, but mainly it’s those conservation board engineers talking their mumbo-jumbo to the same types on the oil side. When they’re done, they make recommendations and usually we accept them. Frankly, we always do. They said Curtis Bauer’s farm was the best place for the plant, based on gravity flow or something, and we said okay. Our health man, Dr. Onge, is well educated, and he badgered them pretty good on air and water. Anyway, I’m sorry it landed on you.”

Tom looked away. He didn’t like the answer but was grateful for Ormond’s seeming honesty. “I guess these things bring in money,” he said.

Ormond smiled wide. His teeth were full of lead but they were his. “Oh, do they ever. When I think of how it was for us? One ball glove per family. Old broken bat held together with nails. It’s going to be a lot different for our kids.”

“They probably won’t be farmers, though.”

“That could be a good thing.”

Ormond and Tom were thinking about different kinds of families. Ormond had big Mormon ones in mind, where not all the kids who wanted to farm could. Tom had three kids and only one son. If his son moved on, and his daughters didn’t marry farmers, Ella and Tom’s farm might not last beyond this generation.