Who by Fire (4 page)

“And Ella, how’s she dealing with it? She grew up on your farm, didn’t she?”

“She did, and it upsets her to see it changed. None of us really likes it or knows what it will be.”

Ormond had a pen and pad beside him. He wrote his government address and phone number, tore out the sheet, and handed it to Tom. “I’m not the most powerful guy up there, but if things happen that are bothering you, let me know. Right now, I best go find my wife before she spends the whole paycheque.”

They stood up and shook hands. Wished one another Merry Christmas.

The offer seemed genuine, and kind given that Tom did not live in Ormond’s riding. Tom put the slip of paper in his shirt pocket, and the two men shook hands a second time.

Around noon on January seventh, 1961, the plant’s flare lit with a crack that ricocheted like a rifle shot off the Ryders’ barn. The flare grew, and grew again, against the western sky. The plant ripped and snorted all that day and the next.

Around midnight on the third night, the rotten egg smell began coming into the house, thick and continuous. Everyone in the family had headaches, sore throats, were sick to their stomachs. Billy said he could feel something swelling inside him. He kept talking about it until he threw up. Wiping his face, he said, “It broke,” which made everyone laugh. He was right too about the sensation the gas
caused. It was different than normal nausea. Just like Billy said, it was like something swelling slowly inside you.

The following afternoon, the girls came home on the school bus and said they’d felt better the moment they left, had felt good all day at school. Tom, Ella, and Billy had been sick all day. This proved it wasn’t the flu.

When Tom stared at Sulphur City, he boiled with frustration. The plant never looked any different, just buildings and towers, and the flare and steam rising in the blue cold air. You wanted to see some putrid yellow or purple smoke, or an explosion, something you could point at and say, “There it is. There’s the bastard that’s making me sick.”

In the late afternoon of the fifth day, black smoke billowed from the ground on the plant’s nearest edge. Whatever was in that smoke entered their throats like a rasp. Billy started coughing and could not stop.

In the night, the boy woke crying. Ella got up from beside Tom and ran up the stairs. She shrieked and then Billy did too. When Tom got there, Ella was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding their son and rocking him. In the light from the bed lamp, one shoulder of the boy’s pyjamas was wet and black, and so were the pillowcase and sheet. Ella had the corners of a handkerchief wound into his nose.

“I lost all my blood,” Billy whimpered to his father.

“It’s almost stopped,” his mother said. “I told you your body makes blood, remember? It’s making blood right now to replace what you lost.”

Tom had been told by the plant to call if anything serious happened. Ella was still busy with Billy, so he went down and cranked the hated phone himself. He was surprised the operator came on right away. He had never made a call at night and thought he’d have to wait. When she rang the plant, someone young answered.

“This is Tom Ryder. I’m at the farm east of you. What the hell’s going on?” Tom thought he was sounding too calm, too reasonable. “It stinks like hell down here. My son’s bled from his nose all over his bed.”

Sounding harried, the young fellow said he was sorry. He said he wasn’t the right person to talk to. Then the phone was taken from his hand.

“Alf Dietz. How can I help you?”

An older, rougher voice. Ill humoured too. Tom said his piece again.

“Yeah, well, we got problems galore. Too much sulphur. It’s overloading our incinerator. But that shouldn’t cause a problem for you. It should be going over top of you.”

“The hell it is. It’s in my house.”

“Must be the waste oil pit, then. We set a fire to kill the
H
₂
S
. Look, Mr. Ryder, if it gets worse, call me again. I’ll check on you in the morning. All right?”

Tom didn’t know what else to say. It was bad now. What would worse look like?

“These plants are complicated,” Dietz continued. “Take a new piece of farm machinery and multiply that by ten thousand. It’s going to take a while to get this place running right.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

Ella had put clean sheets on the boy’s bed but, since Billy was still upset, she brought him down and let him lie down between them. He was soon asleep. Then Tom remembered. “Ah shit.”

“What is it?”

“I didn’t check on Kees.”

“Well, you had better.”

As he crossed the yard, Tom could see by the plant’s flare that the chimney on the hired man’s shack was smoking. He banged on
the door. Kees did not open up, so Tom turned the knob and pushed inside.

First thing he noticed, as he always did, was the smell. However bad it smelled outside, Kees’s bunkhouse was a match for it. The Dutchman was a hard worker but not a bather, no matter how often Ella offered to heat water for him. Now vomit was part of the stench.

“You’re sick, Kees.”

“Ja, Tom. I’m bad.” Some of the flare light poked between curtains Ella had sewn for the tiny west window. By it Tom could see the white of an enamel basin on the bed.

“You been throwing up?”

“Ja, Tom. Puking.”

Tom threw the basin’s contents out the door. He knelt in the frame and scooped up snow, rubbed it around the basin.

“We die from that plant,” Kees said from the bed.

“Damn well hope not.” The water bucket was on the floor. Tom felt around the rim for the ladle. “You better drink some water.”

Tom held the ladle and Kees took his drink.

“I like you Ryders, but I’m not staying.”

Much of the next day was shot on the telephone. Everybody for miles had the same complaints: headaches, nausea, nosebleeds, sore throats, sore eyes. Johnny Court just over the church hill had packed up his wife and new baby in the night and taken them to her relatives in town.

Bertha Kenhardt, a retired schoolteacher and widow who lived to the northeast, phoned around and suggested people start writing down what was happening. A diary of plant events: date, smell, how they felt, where the wind was coming from. Tom borrowed a couple of pages of ring-hole paper from Jeannie and started.

As promised, Alf Dietz visited the Ryders. Though he called himself a plant superintendent, he was reassuringly ordinary. It was easy for him to step out of his boots in their porch because he didn’t tie them, just pushed the laces inside the open tops. He wore a plaid flannel shirt, half tucked. When he stripped off his greasy cap, he was mostly bald, a few grey tufts sticking up.

Sitting in front of his cup of tea, Dietz stared solemnly at the table. He listened to their story in silence. When they’d finished, he said, “I don’t know much more than I said on the phone. I’m adjusting everything I can adjust. If it doesn’t work, I’m not sure what next.”

“Why not shut the plant down?” Ella said. It had not occurred to Tom.

“That would be the very last resort, Mrs. Ryder. Put us back a month or more if we do that. We’ll work at it.”

Dietz stayed longer because Ella got him talking about himself. He wasn’t American, though he sounded like it. He’d grown up in the West Kootenays, in B.C. His family had started out as farmers, but when that went poorly, his father took a job at the Trail lead and zinc smelter. When Dietz was old enough, he worked there too. Somehow that led to a sour gas plant job in a mountain state in the U.S. Because he was a Canadian with sour gas experience, Aladdin had offered him the job of running its Hatfield plant.

Ella was good at this, drawing people out, and Tom watched as Dietz told more than was probably normal for him. Suddenly aware of it, he slapped on his cap and said he had to go.

It was a week after Dietz came to the house that the flare shot to twice the height of its stack. The Ryders’ house shook on its foundation. Tom was barely awake when he walked through the rooms to the porch in his underwear. The linoleum quivered under his feet;
the windows were bright. He pulled on his gumboots and walked into the frozen night.

The flare was a hard thing to stand before, like a grizzly bear roaring in your face. Tom didn’t notice the boy until he was by his side, in his pyjamas and little gumboots, imitating Dad. What funny things children were. A week ago, the boy had been terrified by a nosebleed. Now he stood staring at something like hell released and was calm as a stone.

Tom placed his hand on the back of the boy’s neck and the slimness of it shocked and rebuked him. Here was his family in danger, and he had no idea what to do.

Waddens Lake, Athabasca Oil Sands

THE BANK OF WINDOWS
framed it nicely. A flare as still as a candle in an airtight room, except that every once in a while, some burp in the system caused the flame to surge.

The flare was not dangerous, its height was within the provincially regulated limits, but, not quite believing these lenient rules could last, Bill’s company had recently imposed its own clean-air regimen. That was what Bill’s flare was exceeding. If anyone in the computing heart of the upgrader was reviewing all systems—or chanced to walk or drive past Bill’s flare—there would be hell to pay and bosses to appease.

In front of the control room’s arc of windows stood an extended desk, where Bill’s crew sat staring at screens and poking keyboards. Each man and woman was trying to find the cause of the errant flare, but the only one capable of doing so was Bill’s junior engineer, Henry Shields. Still, Bill felt it important the others try. Extended periods of non-emergency bred overconfidence and made his crew feel they were responsible for the peace and equilibrium. Today’s problem and their failure to solve it would tamp down the size of their heads.

The person having the most trouble sticking with the task was Bill himself. As he sat at one of the computers, jabbing keys, he
could feel his scalp bunching under his hair. His arms were zooming. Little workmen with tiny powerful wrenches were tightening a collar on his neck.

“Frig this,” he muttered. He boosted to his feet with a violence that caused his chair to jump and its wheels to jangle. The crew stared—except for Henry, who was too deep in the cascade of numerals, the fractal art, to notice.

“You mean you want us to stop?” one of the crew said hopefully. It was Dennis Whitcomb, his plastic-looking eyelashes fluttering. He would think that, the lazy whale.

The thermometer out the window read thirty below. Bill pulled on his snowmobile suit, steel-toed winter boots, and hard hat. He drew the flaps of the hat’s winter liner together and snapped them under his chin, donned his mitts.

He stepped outside into the upgrader’s corral of hulks. All along the tall walls, pipes came out to cool and dove back in for heat. Shit streams raced to their confluence with other shit streams, heat and pressure making the molecules jig and mate. Atomic plumes of steam and ice fog billowed above the highest catwalks. For all they were doing to it, the sky above was blue.

At ground level, Bill stood at a three-way intersection of salted sidewalks. On his left, a stack of horizontal pipes flew to their vanishing point. A deep thrum battered his eardrums. The only thing he could think to do was to walk out of the cubic forest and stand beneath the flares. If he stood at the foot of the stack and listened, maybe timed the eruptions, he might find something. A rhythm. A meaningful pattern.

Ahead, something in a down parka made a robotic turn and came toward him. Dark blue balaclava pulled over the head. Frozen breath puffing out the blowhole. It spoke Bill’s name and asked him where he was off to.

Clayton Brock. He remembered now sending Clayton off to do air tests at last week’s maintenance sites.

“What did you find, Clayton?”

“Clean as a whistle.”

Ironic tone. Synchronized pig roll of the eyes. It tired Bill, this business of having to tell young operators and junior engineers that the nature of precaution is to find nothing most of the time—and to be on it early when something does go wrong.

In the olden days, engineers had their office building upwind of the plant, while operators like Clayton worked near its stinking heart. Now they shared a control room. A work dynamics expert dropped by weekly with a box of doughnuts, from which they fed like a peewee hockey team.

Farther along the service road, Bill came to a silver pickup, diesel engine drumming. On the opposite side of the sidewalk, two men on ladders were removing tin from a horizontal pipe. Batts of yellow insulation curled on the ground below.

“Billy Ryder.”

Rime on Bill’s eyelashes made a blur of the ladder man. He brushed it away and squinted. A brown face; frost in a ragged moustache. No one called him Billy except his sisters.

“You don’t know me, do you.” Native guy.

A bubble of memory rose. “Johnny Bertram?”

“Ha!” The man punched the ladder rung with his mitt and started down. “Get in,” he ordered.

Inside the truck, Bill asked Johnny how he’d recognized him. “I mean, in all this gear.”

“No trick, really,” Johnny said. “Remember my sister Shirley, who you once loved dearly? She’s a friend of a friend of an old girlfriend of yours who told her you’d moved to the tar sands. When I started my company and got work up here, I Googled around and
saw you were at Aladdin. We got a contract.” Johnny pointed at the ladders. The rest was obvious.

Before he’d climbed in the truck, Bill had read the print on its door.
Black Hole Insulation
. He caught up to the joke.

“This is your company?”

“One hundred per cent.”

“Black Hole?”

Johnny smiled. “A guy in Gleichen told me he didn’t believe companies in the tar sands hired Indians as much as they say they do. I bet him I could call my company Black Hole Insulation and still get hired.”

“I thought you were a cowboy.”

“A man can be more than one thing, Billy.”

Johnny pointed his mitt at the spidery youth still up the ladder, wrestling tin. “That’s Elmer. We call him Elmo. He’s Shirley’s youngest. He thinks he’s a cowboy too.”