by Amy Spurway
“I’m considering dedicating a portion of my land for this purpose, but we need partners with more substantial business experience. I know Spenser Mining is having some challenges. Understandable. Times have changed, and mining isn’t what it used to be.” I do my damnedest to meet her suspicion with sincerity. Or at least blow some hoots of sycophantic smoke directly up her clenched old ass. “Crann Na Beatha could be a great opportunity. Diversify your business. Give something lovely back to the Island and the people. An innovative legacy investment for you. Really positive PR, strategically speaking.”
She taps her carefully shaped nails on the table, looks at me, and again settles her gaze on the spot where a new generation of her own family is evidently growing. She smiles, tight and stiff. “My family has given you people enough already,” she says through gritted teeth. Her hands go still. Her eyes, spine, and voice harden in tandem with the darkening wafts of murky grey around her head. “And what do we get in return? Indignation. Ingratitude. Entitled have-nots with too many kids and not enough sense. Gutter snipes stretching out filthy hands, asking for more.”
From somewhere in the bowels of the groaning old mansion, Char hollers in a fake punk rock Londoner brogue, “Oy! Auntie! Biscuits? Thas what we want! Bloody biscuits!” Crashing and thumping ensue, until Char emerges with a handful of Fig Newtons. She plunks down beside me, lips smacking, crumbs tumbling all over the pristine Moroccan rug. The concrete edifice around Sarah Spenser’s head clamps down on any trace of emotional ether, hiding the little flecks of humanity I was hoping to draw out. I have seven minutes or less, and one final card up my sleeve.
“You do know that Alec isn’t really my father, right? That your father is my father. That we are sisters.”
I wait for the cracks. For a gush of raw green feeling. I wait for her to realize with crystal clarity that I’m trying to reach across the gulf between the Spensers and the Fortunes, the divide within myself, with some truth and intentions that might let our family tree grow into something beautiful and new. Instead I’m slapped with a red hot bolt of rage.
“What is this, more blackmail?” she snaps, her perfect jaw clenched and her voice, low, seething, slicing. “I suspected as much. I just wasn’t sure what kind of salacious rumour you and my brother had concocted.”
“No,” I say. “But maybe telling the truth about our families is the first step to building something better for us all. For future generations.”
“Unless blackmail is what you prefer?” Char says.
“Shut your mouth and eat your Fig Newtons,” I growl, again scanning for a trace of vulnerability, emotion, empathy, anything even remotely human in Sarah Spenser’s face or space.
“Hear me when I say this, Mizz Fortune,” she says, everything about her, mean and stony now. “I don’t know who impregnated your slut of a mother, but it wasn’t my father. It probably wasn’t even my idiot brother. And I don’t give two sweet figs about the next generation of lazy ingrates being spawned by the likes of you. Your fifteen minutes are up.” She stands, sweeping an arm toward the door. “This has all been amusing, but my patience ends here. If you don’t leave immediately, I’m calling the police.”
We hustle to the foyer as Sarah Spenser glides along beside us, buoyed by the swirls of pride-polluted navy blue victory I can see all around her. As Char and I start down the walkway, Sarah Spenser breaks her smug silence, “You were right about one thing, though. Spenser Mining is ready for change. That change is coming. And it is closer than you think.” She takes a minute to grumble at the rhododendrons, waves goodbye or good riddance, and shoves the door shut.
My arse isn’t in the car for more than a minute when my phone starts to sing. It’s Peggy, huffing and puffing like she just ran the four-metre dash.
“Get home,” she says. “There’s trucks and gear goin’ up the road. Spenser Mining trucks, taking the Crown access road to out behind your place.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Didn’t read the paper this morning, did you?”
“I never read the paper.”
“What, you think auras or whatever ya call them are gonna tell you everything? Don’t be so stunned. Read the friggin’ paper.”
“Are you gonna tell me or what?”
Newspaper pages rustle as Peggy clears her throat. “Spenser Mining Inc. Partners with Alberta Firm to Explore Coal Bed Methane. Drilling expected to begin this summer,” she reads. “What did I tell you? The stench of sulphur and pork fat. Dirty money. The bastards are planning to frack. For a puff of coal gas, of all things.”
Turns out there is a shallow coal seam that runs through the woods on the Middle Rear Road, and while there’s not enough coal to mine outright, there’s enough to frack in order to extract methane gas. The biggest cache starts on the Crown land nestled right beside mine, and runs under my property in the direction the little fracking tunnel would need to go. My little deed of ownership only applies to what’s on the surface, not to what’s buried in the ground, and it won’t be worth the paper it’s written on if they find enough of what they are looking for. Because Spenser Mining Inc. has friends in high places. Friends who will be quick to bypass any pesky policies that hinder progress, and drown out any peeps of protest with a rousing chorus of that old, soothing refrain that lulls and lures people into a nervous state of grudging co-operation. We all know the words to that song, here: jobs, jobs jobs.
But instead of a mine, this time they’ll pound the ground, shoot the earth up with chemicals, and eke out a few wafts of trapped gas from inside an otherwise useless patch of coal. And if our well water becomes undrinkable, they’ll say they don’t know why. If the trees and the grass and the birds start dying around the tailing ponds, well, that’s just nature for you. If people start getting sick, clearly it’s because of our poor choices and bad habits. But they’ll be quick to remind us how lucky we are, and how grateful we ought to be that this industry came here, out of the goodness of its heart, to build a future for the next generation. Never mind if that future looks like a scene out of a Mad Max movie. And when the gas is gone, they’ll leave, taking their money and their magical song about jobs jobs jobs with them. But we’ll still be here. Sick and starved and broken all over again.
Over my dead body.
9 LOOK AT THAT ONE, MAKING A SCENE
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Char insists that it’s the onions planted in the yard whispering that, but she’s wrong. I hear it, too. And I know Mama’s voice, her words, her loving guidance when I hear it, even if it sounds like onions. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. More than one way to stop a pack of rat bastards from wrecking what we hold near and dear.
The poor buddies Sarah Spenser brought in from Alberta to start prepping the site didn’t know what hit them. They couldn’t figure out why things went missing, week after week. Keys, saws, lunches, toilet paper from the porta-potty. And when they’d see Brenda Baker out for an early morning stroll up the woods road with her hunchback mother Flossie, they’d smile and wave. Just as they’d all nod at Dulcie Cooper when they’d see her down in the ditch at dusk, filling a Sobeys bag with cattails. And of course, they’d humour Shirl Short with polite, protracted conversation every time she showed up, asking if they were up there smoking weed on the job and offering them tea and squares.
The transplanted cowboys couldn’t figure out why their truck and dozers wouldn’t start either. The odd fella with the tattoos and curled arm at the garage and the Alward boys who clearly know their way around big machines both had the same response when they took a look: they’d scratch their heads and say, “Jeez b’ye, I think your [insert obscure mechanical piece name here] is shot. I can special order that. Gonna take a while.” But all the special order parts in the world won’t help when there’s a half a Sobeys bag worth of sugar being dumped into your gas tank on the regular.
When they finally concluded that the gear was being tampered with, they tried to g
et the cops involved. But ever since Officer Duke got transferred, the local cops aren’t interested in paranoid stories of industrial vandalism out on the Middle Rear Road. So, Spenser Mining Inc. tried to hire a private security guard, not realizing that most of the guys in that business were friends of Cracker Parsons. And God love Cracker, he’d already put the kibosh on anybody working for them Come From Aways out to frack up Crow Fortune’s land. In the end, Spenser Mining Inc. paid a sketchy young guy named Weasel Tobin Jr. ten bucks an hour to do the job. Until he started coming to the boss with stories of a half-naked, wild-dreadlocked, snake-dancing woman flitting around in the woods during his shifts. Clearly, the guy was drunk and on drugs just like his old man they heard, so they fired him. Nobody else would take the job.
On the bureaucratic end, things should have gone a bit smoother for Spenser Mining Inc. After all, they have a long history of greasing the paperwork wheels by lining politicians’ pockets. But somehow every piece of paperwork got hung up. Or lost. Or both. Exactly how does a stack of such important documents end up behind a radiator, in the ladies’ washroom, or in the janitor’s closet? In the wrong building. If you ask everybody’s favourite little paper-pushing Natural Resources Department bureaucrat, Becky Chickenshit, she’ll tell you she’s never seen the likes of it in her life. And with that precious baby bump, and her slowly brightening eyes behind her thick-rimmed glasses, who’d have the heart to hassle her about an errant paper pile or two, after all she’s been through?
Tsk, tsk, tsk. It’s as if the whole dirty Spenser Mining Inc. scheme is cursed, now isn’t it?
Constricted rage brings a charming coyote howl tone to Sarah Spenser’s voice when she calls me. “What are you people trying to pull? We have every right to extract gas from that land.”
I feign a little wisdom-tinged obliviousness. “Sarah, dear, surely you must know by now that you can’t force these kinds of things. If the Universe isn’t co-operating with you, well maybe it isn’t meant to be. Maybe you should find something else to extract. Your head from your arse, perhaps.”
“Have your fun,” she snipes, “but when you’re done throwing your little tantrum, this project will move forward. It’s only a matter of time.” She pauses. Inhales sharply, begins again with a fresh menace lacing her voice, “And once we find what we’re looking for, don’t be surprised when that otherwise worthless scrap of land you think you own is appropriated and turned over to us for further development. For the good of the people, you see.”
“With all due respect, Saint Sarah, go fuck yourself.” I don’t even bother to make the loud angry click sound when I hang up on her. I don’t have time for that one and her threats and tactics. I’ve got threats and tactics of my own to plan.
[…]
I stare at my reflection in the trailer door glass. Put an edge of genuine into my best Viva Rica smile. Smooth the gaudy green blouse I had to borrow from Peggy over and around my growing girth. Play with my hair, which is coming back inexplicably curly and glinting with silver. The hair is finally long enough to make people forget that there are tumours in my brain, and the belly is finally big enough to make people call me “radiant” and touch me without permission. I refrain from biting them or cursing at them when they do. That wouldn’t be good for sales.
Hello. My name is Crow Fortune. Imagine spending your eternity as a vibrant piece of a precious eco-system, with a glorious tree on a peaceful property overlooking the Great Bras d’Or. With Crann Na Beatha, your final resting place will be clean, green, and serene, as part of our Sacred Memory Forest.
Yes. Clean, green, serene. That’s good. People like words that rhyme.
Or how about this:
Good day. I’m Crow Fortune. Are you uncomfortable with high-pressure sales tactics from traditional burial providers? Do you believe that we can be conscious consumers who value people over profits, even in death? Would you or your loved ones like to know more about Crann Na Beatha, an innovative eco-cemetery that uses state-of-the-art tree-growing burial pods, hand-crafted by a Swedish entrepreneur and imported by local Buddhists?
Swedish, like Ikea! And Buddhist, like the Dalai Lama!
Might as well cut to the chase.
Look. I’m Crow. Scruffy Effie’s daughter. Effie’s dead, Smart Alec’s alive, and the Spensers are gearing up to poison the bejezus out of our land. We’re trying to stop them by turning it into a tree-hugger cemetery before that pack of greedy bastards gets their fracking act together. Know any hippies with one foot in the grave and a few grand to spare?
C’mon almighty Universe. Don’t make me go chasing ambulances or hanging around the old folks’ home in Town, or staring at people on the street looking for those with a dose of the death aura in order to make this work. We don’t have time to diddle around here. She’s a race against the clock.
“Wouldn’t your mother be proud, God rest her soul. When’s the little bundle of joy due, Crow, Dear?” That’s what all the old dolls say every time they see me out and about. I pretend I’m not looking to see if any of them are close to kicking the bucket, and I pretend there’s not a slew of the new and improved Crann Na Beatha business cards and information brochures in my purse. Instead, I smile and say, “Oh, Mama would be in her glory. She’s looking down on us from a front row seat in Heaven, waiting for this baby. Due August twelfth. Now when are you gonna give me that recipe for those delicious squares of yours?” Even though I don’t believe in Heaven. Or due dates. Or squares. Unless it suits me.
[…]
“You smell different after you’ve been down The Wharf,” Peggy muses, as I make my way into the trailer after an early evening wade in the calm, warm water. She’s busy scrubbing down my cupboards with Javex. “You were getting all mouldy bread and canned ham. Now you’re mint and sawdust.”
“Gotta get outside and blow the stink offa ya,” I say, a pitch-perfect imitation of Mama’s most sage advice. I try to ignore the heady haze of gold and purple ripples that have been emanating from Peggy with increasing intensity for the last few months. “Why sawdust, I wonder.”
“I don’t make the smells, I just smell ’em. Sawdust used to make your mother cry.”
“You throw it in her eye?”
“No, smartass. When we were small, every time the Old Man cut down a tree, she’d go out and gather up the sawdust in a bag, and she’d bawl because all the little wood chips missed their mother. So she’d go try to glue them back together, and end up with her arse tanned for using up all Ma’s bread flour for paste. She was an odd bird, that Effie. Do I ever miss her.”
“She never told me that story.”
“There was a lot Effie never told anybody.”
Peggy busies herself with water boiling and cupboard rummaging, while I mop beads of sweat and the traces of tears from my puffed-up face with my puffed-up hand.
“Peggy, why didn’t she tell me the truth?”
“About what?”
“About anything. About my father. About where she went and what she did with her hands? Christ, she missed my graduation because of it,” I say, trying not to look and sound like I’m sooking. And failing.
“As far as she was concerned, Alec was the man you deserved to believe was your father. They were best friends, and the messy truth was a technicality.” Peggy resumes her scrubbing. “She felt awful about not being there for you that night of your grad, you know. But that woman in the accident. She needed Effie’s help. It was damn near a miracle the way she healed.”
“Probably best Mama wasn’t at the grad. Not my finest moment.”
“The hell it wasn’t!” Peggy’s fists fly to her hips as she spins around to face me. “I was never so proud of you in your whole life as when you marched out of there with your head held high. You showed them. Talk about guts.”
“You were there?”
“Of course,” she says, a little indignant. “Your mother called and said they needed her hands at the hospital, and I couldn’t have you there with nobody in
the crowd. Stood near the back though, so as not to embarrass you with the noise.”
“That hooting and hollering was you?”
“What did you think?”
“I thought some asshole was making fun of me.”
“No dear, some asshole was cheering you on.” She thumps over to the table where I’m sitting and plunks a cup of tea and a plate of squares down in front of me. “Here. Eat. You and that baby’ve got nothing to come and go on. It’s that fruit tea you like, and the squares have some ahh-gaahh-vee juice or whatever ya call it in them. If the dog would lick his arse to get the taste out of his mouth, blame Charlotte.”
She goes back to her cupboard scrubbing, moving with a surprising ease and grace that pushes her halo of gold and purple ripples out faster and further, until I can almost feel them gently nudging up against me.
“Peggy, did she really drive off that bridge on purpose because she was sick?”
“Everything happens for a reason,” Peggy says, the Javex water sloshing on the floor as she scrubs the fridge door with a cloth she forgot to wring out.
“That’s bullshit.”
“Not bullshit if the reason was she knew she was a goner, she didn’t want people to see her suffer and waste away, and she had insurance that would give you the money you’d need to buy the land, now is it?”
As she moves to trudge across the linoleum floor to tackle another cupboard, her foot slides on the careless puddle she made. Peggy would have landed flat on her arse if I hadn’t seen it coming, and moved close enough to catch her by the flailing arm, helping to steady her balance.
“Goddamn floors,” she grumbles. “Me with a cracked hip, that’s the last thing we need.”
“Peggy, will you do me a favour?” I say, going back to my tea as she goes back to her cleaning bender.
“No, probably not.” Her tone is quick and cold. But the unspoken warmth radiating from her — which I can see and now feel with an almost jarring clarity — says otherwise.
