Speak to the Earth

by William Bell

  “One of your guests?”

  “Yeah. And this is a B.C. licence.”

  “Well, Sherlock, this is beautiful British Columbia.”

  “But Kevin and Otto told me they were from Toronto. Said they drove all the way out here to take part in the protests.”

  Crushing the paper sack of food between them as she leaned toward him, Ellen peered at the licence. “It’s a Vancouver address,” she said. “Why would they lie to you?”

  “I don’t know, and I’m not going to ask.” Bryan dropped the wallet at the basement door. “He’ll find it easy enough here.”

  “Why not give it to him? Then you can ask him about the licence.”

  “Because I don’t really care. It’s none of my business anyway.”

  They zapped the burgers and fries and settled down on the couch. All through the episode of “Gilligan’s Island” Bryan turned over in his mind the mystery of the driver’s licence. What would be the point of Kevin’s telling him they were from Toronto? And of putting Ontario plates on their van? Maybe he had misunderstood Kevin. Maybe he had bought the van in Ontario and hadn’t changed the registration yet. Maybe —

  “I know!” he half shouted.

  Ellen jumped, spilling fries on her Madonna T-shirt. “You know what?” she asked. “How those dopes are going to get off Gilligan’s Island?”

  “No, I’ve solved the mystery. No wonder you call me Sherlock. I’m brilliant, Watson. Kevin must be the one from Ontario. It’s his van, see?”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Still, I was sure Kevin said ‘we.’ Oh, well. Any fries left?”

  “No, you ate them all, Mr Oink.”

  “I ate them? You —”

  “Hey, look, a news bulletin.” Ellen pointed at the screen.

  A bored-looking man in a cheap suit appeared where Gilligan had been seconds before. “Another act of sabotage,” he intoned, “against Mackenzie Forest Industries in Orca Sound region. Details at six.”

  He disappeared, replaced by a commercial for toilet paper.

  “Hey, Bryan,” Jimmy said as he limped through the kitchen door. With his plastered arm in a sling, one side of his face purple and yellow and stitches puckering the shaved skin above the opposite temple, Bryan’s uncle looked as though some malicious logging machine had tried to remove the left side of his body.

  “Hey, Uncle Jimmy. How are you?”

  “Not bad for somebody who lost a fight with a Sitka spruce bigger round than I am tall.”

  “So the tree wasn’t very big, then,” Bryan joked. “How about some coffee?”

  Jimmy laughed. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said, lowering himself carefully into a chair so as to keep his bad leg as straight as possible.

  Bryan’s mother came in a moment later, toting Jimmy’s small suitcase and several cloth bags.

  “Well,” Jimmy said when Bryan had stowed his bear in his room and returned to the kitchen, “you still make the best coffee in Nootka Harbour, Bryan. Glad to have me back?”

  “You bet.”

  “You don’t look overly joyful to me.” Jimmy had always been good at reading Bryan’s moods.

  “He’s mad at his mom,” Iris put in, stirring her coffee.

  “Ellen’s parents don’t want her to see me any more,” Bryan said.

  “Who the hell do they think they are, the snotty buggers?” Jimmy exclaimed. “Mr Three-Piece-Suit in a Buick, and Mrs I’m-a-Big-Shot-Lawyer! You aren’t good enough for them, I suppose!”

  “Well, it’s not exactly that,” Bryan answered, sorry that he had brought it up.

  Iris stared into her cup.

  “So what’s the problem?” Jimmy demanded.

  In the silence, Jimmy looked at Bryan, at his sister, at his nephew again. “Ah,” he said, nodding his head.

  Iris fiddled with the sugar spoon.

  “Well, well,” Jimmy said quietly, “this here logging issue has sure done some mean work in this family.” He struggled to his feet. “I’m kinda tired,” he said. “Time to take my pills and hit the sack.”

  “Me, too,” Iris said. Before she left the room she looked at Bryan. She left without saying anything.

  Bryan cleared away the coffee mugs, turned off the light and went to his room. He wasn’t tired, and he knew he would not be able to sleep. Putting on his earphones, he turned up the radio and lay down on his bed in the dark. He listened to a few tunes, then six or seven commercials. The news came on at the top of the hour. When he heard the lead story, Bryan tore off the earphones and hurled them across the room.

  There had been a third act of sabotage. This time, an abandoned trailer near one of the old clear-cuts had been burned down.

  “Satisfied, Mom?” Bryan said in the darkness.

  SIX

  Bryan’s town did not have a courthouse. Not that the little community was without its share of drunks, brawlers, petty thieves and other bad actors of varying degrees of venality: there just weren’t enough of them to deserve a whole building dedicated to their readjustment to society. So, Nootka Harbour generally sent its bad guys down to Victoria to stand before a judge.

  The province considered the notion of searching out a temporary local venue to deal with the Orca Sound anti-logging protesters, because there were so many of them. The question was, where in Nootka Harbour to hold the trial?

  The cop shop, as Elias referred to the place where his brother Zeke worked, had no room big enough. The hotel down by the harbour did, but the officials allowed that holding a trial in the room beside a dingy and smoky drinking hole — called the Rainbow Room — would not seem dignified. The library reading room certainly possessed stature, but the librarian had recently set up an extensive display of characters from famous children’s stories, and the presence of large yellow duckies, white goosies, red foxes and at least one comical green dinosaur would, it was felt, detract from the gravity of the proceedings. The result of these deliberations was that when the long arm of the law drew Iris Troupe and the others to its bosom, the Talbot Inlet Community Centre meeting room was the place to be.

  Ellen, Elias and Bryan planned to attend the trial, but Ellen called early that morning to tell Bryan that she had been grounded for going over to his house against her parents’ wishes. Bryan and Elias arrived at the community centre at one o’clock, pushed their bikes through the crowded parking lot, and locked them to the pipe railing that stretched across the front of the building. Earning quite a few irritated stares, they shouldered their way through the onlookers to the doors, which were jammed open by bodies and guarded by a cop who looked like he’d already had a bad day. Bryan did not recognize the cop — probably, he thought, one of the many police brought in from other towns to police the demonstrations that now occurred every day except weekends, when MFI suspended its logging. The cop would not let the two friends in.

  “His mom is one of the people on trial,” Elias explained as Bryan stood by, embarrassed.

  “Son, you have no idea how many times I’ve heard that same line today,” the cop answered, pushing back his cap and mopping his broad forehead with a damp handkerchief.

  “Show him your I.D., Bry.”

  Bryan fished his school activities card from his wallet and showed it to the cop.

  “No good,” he said. “I got no list of defendants to check that against, see? You could be anybody. There’s nothing to prove your mom is in there at all.”

  Elias asked, “Have you considered believing us?”

  This remark won no points with the cop. Elias nevertheless kept up a constant stream of babble as Bryan stood quiet, looking around, hoping no one who knew him was within earshot. After ten minutes of pressure from Elias, the cop gave in and let them by.

  “Thanks for your help, there, Bry,” Elias commented.

  It took another few minutes of arguing to get through the doors of the meeting room, which was packed with spectators sitting on folding chairs. On one side, reporters were jammed together, jotting o
n Steno pads, and looking hot and irritable. On the other, about two dozen men, women and children sat in glum silence. Behind a small table a woman in a suit was making notes on a long yellow pad. Probably the lawyer hired by the Save Orca Sound Legal Defence Fund, Bryan thought.

  “We’re just in time,” Elias whispered.

  As Bryan took up a position behind the last row of seated spectators, his mother rose and stood before the judge. Bryan almost didn’t recognize her. She wore a floral-patterned dress and her normally casual hair was held neatly in place at her neck with a barrette.

  The judge, a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses, sat behind a file-strewn trestle table. He looked imposing even without the black robe and wig that Bryan had expected to see. He also sounded imposing. He began by telling Iris in a deep voice that she and her fellow activists had not convinced him that they acted from conscience. Rather, he intoned, they had displayed an illegal public tantrum for which there was no excuse.

  Oh, oh, thought Bryan as he saw his mother set her shoulders. He recognized the gesture.

  The judge went on to tell Iris that, as a family woman and a business person in the community, she should be the first person to obey the law, not one of the first to break it. She ought to be a responsible mother, providing a positive example for her child. He fined her five hundred dollars, warned her against any further action against the injunction, and asked her if she had anything to say.

  That, Bryan thought, was a mistake. He braced himself, suddenly wishing he had not come.

  For a small woman, Iris had no trouble making herself heard in the crowded room. She told the judge that he ought to be ashamed of himself for punishing with such large fines citizens who were, whether he thought so or not, acting according to their conscience. He also had an obligation to provide a positive example for the community by showing understanding and leniency to his fellow citizens, who, after all, were not embezzlers or murders but men and women — and children, she added with a degree of sarcasm that would have made Elias proud — who were trying to protect their environment from cynical commercial rape. Since he had seen fit to tell her what her duty was, she would like to suggest to His Honour that his duty was to serve his fellow citizens, not the multinational corporations at the root of all the trouble.

  And that was when the judge interrupted her. “Mrs Troupe,” he warned, without the objective calm that had marked his remarks so far, “my court will not brook disrespect. I advise you to desist and sit down. Your fine is increased to one thousand dollars, and if I hear another sarcastic word escape your lips I’ll find you in contempt and throw you in jail!”

  “Find her in contempt?” Elias hissed. “He couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a compass.”

  Bryan was convinced he was so red with embarrassment he must have glowed like a light bulb. He glanced around, wishing he could disappear.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.

  “Not yet.”

  Moments later, the defendants, followed by their lawyer, filed down the centre aisle amid the murmur of the spectators. As Iris passed him, a look of surprise crossed her face. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ll be home later, dear,” she whispered. “I have a meeting.”

  “Nice going, Mrs Troupe,” Elias said.

  Bryan remained silent as he watched her leave.

  When he got home, Bryan reported the courtroom proceedings to Jimmy, who burst into laughter at Iris taking on the judge — “That’s my big sister!” he crowed — then called Ellen to tell her the news. As soon as she answered, he knew something was wrong. She was crying.

  “Bry,” she choked, “they’re sending me away!”

  “Away? Why? Were?”

  “To my aunt’s in Nanaimo. They’re furious at me because I ignored their orders not to see you. They say you’re …”

  “I’m what?” he said bitterly. “The son of a jailbird or something?”

  “That you’re a bad influence on me, and a lot of other stupid stuff. It’s not your mother, really. They don’t like what she’s doing, no, but it’s me they’re angry at. I’ve never disobeyed them before and they went completely mental. They yelled at me! They never yell at me. We’re leaving today!” she wailed.

  “I’ll be right over,” Bryan said. “Don’t let them take you until I get there.”

  As if possessed, Bryan jumped on his bike and tore across town. Ellen’s place was on the Gray’s Passage side of the peninsula, in an area of large houses on spacious, thickly treed lots near the water. As he rode up the Thomsons’ driveway, Bryan saw the three of them at the car.

  Ellen’s father, still in his suit, was putting suitcases into the trunk of the Buick. Her mother, her arms crossed on her chest, stood next to the car. When she caught sight of Bryan, Ellen ran down the drive to cut him off.

  He stopped and dropped his bike, chest heaving. He was speechless. He had rushed to Ellen’s house with no thought about what to do when he got there.

  “I made it in time,” he said.

  “We’re leaving now.” Ellen’s eyes were puffed from crying.

  Bryan fought to keep his voice from cracking. “How long?”

  “They want me to stay at my aunt’s for the summer. They say I’ll have a good time in Nanaimo.” She rolled her eyes. “They say there’s nothing to do around here in the summer anyway.” Ellen shrugged, as if to say the idiocy of parents is beyond comprehension.

  Bryan was aware of an ache in his throat and a hollow feeling in his chest. His fists opened and closed. “I guess we can’t do anything about this.”

  Ellen forced a smile. “We could run away together.”

  “Yeah. Live in the bush and eat slugs while we sit around a campfire.”

  “Right. Wrestle bears and run with the deer.”

  “Build a log cabin.”

  “Oh, Bryan.” She began to cry softly, and Bryan put his arms around her, drawing her fiercely against him. She buried her face in his chest. He looked up. Ellen’s parents, standing side by side, looked back at him. His mouth set in a firm line, he tried to stare them down.

  They won.

  SEVEN

  Although he swore he needed his nephew to help him shift gears, Bryan suspected that Jimmy had asked him to come along to the meeting to take his mind off Ellen.

  “What meeting?” he had asked.

  “Well, my foreman wants me to come to a meeting over in Talbot Inlet. Something about a community group.”

  Bryan had immediately been suspicious. His uncle was probably the last person on the planet to be interested in joining any group, unless it was organized around the dart board at the hotel, but he decided to go along anyway, just to keep Jimmy company. His uncle had even dressed up for the occasion in a white shirt with his favourite bolo tie — a raven’s head carved in pewter — clean jeans and polished cowboy boots. They left Iris bent over the fax machine, programming it to send out long-distance faxes during the night when the rates were low, and went out into a light drizzle.

  Bryan knew that the logo on the truck’s rusted front quarter panel read “V8,” but Jimmy claimed there were only six working pistons, one doubtful, and one just going around for the ride. Jimmy turned the ignition key, uttering a prayer that was only slightly sacrilegious. The twelve-year-old engine burped once, laid down a smoky backfire and rumbled to life.

  The meeting was held in the community centre, in the same room where Iris had recently told off the judge. Already the brightly lit room was active. About thirty men and women milled around, talking and drinking from white plastic cups. Bryan noted the trestle tables laden with aluminum beer kegs, bottles of wine and platters of sandwiches cut into dainty quarters with no crust. In the centre of one table a huge smoked sockeye rested in a bed of lettuce, surrounded by cracked Dungeness crabs.

  Jimmy let out a low whistle. “Wonder who sprung for all these goodies?”

  They stood uneasily in the centre of the room, neither of the
m comfortable in large gatherings. Bryan was already sorry he had come.

  “Go on over there and grab some of that food, Bry, before it all goes bad.”

  “Hey, Jimmy! Glad you could make it.”

  They turned to see a man with a ruddy complexion bearing down on them, a foam-topped cup in one hand and a sandwich in the other.

  “Hi, Scotty,” Jimmy greeted him. “How’s it goin’? Bryan, meet Scott Weatherby, my foreman.”

  The big man’s blue blazer stretched tight across powerful shoulders when he shook hands.

  “Good turnout tonight, eh, Jimmy? Let’s get you a beer. Bryan, help yourself. I know you young fellas have a hollow leg.”

  A hollow leg? Bryan thought resentfully as he left them. He piled a few sandwiches on a foam plate, careful to avoid the ones made with chopped egg or the salmon salad. He took a cola from a tub of ice.

  He scanned the crowd. They were working people, and some of them he recognized from around town. He was the only kid in the room. Great, he thought, hoping Jimmy would soon get bored and offer to leave. With nothing to do, he rejoined his uncle, who stood with a beer in hand, talking to Scott Weatherby.

  “… probably wondering what this is all about,” Weatherby was saying.

  “Yeah.”

  Noticing Bryan, the foreman asked, “Uh, can you excuse us for a minute, Bryan?”

  Bryan’s face flushed. “Sorry.” He turned away.

  “No, stay here, Bry,” Jimmy said. Then to Weatherby, “He’s all right, Scotty.”

  “Well,” the big man went on, “we’re going to start up a chapter of SAVE here in Talbot Inlet, and I figured you’d want to get in on it.”

  “SAVE?” Jimmy’s brow creased, emphasizing the jagged line of his stitched wound.

  “Yup. There’s chapters all over the province now. See, a lot of us in town figure that in all this controversy about logging the sound, the average man, like you and me, hasn’t got no voice. I mean, we hear a lot of noise from the politicians, the corporations and the radicals — er” — he looked at Bryan — “the activists — no disrespect for your mom intended there, Bryan. They’re in the papers and on TV all the time. Can’t get away from them.” He pushed the remains of a sandwich into his mouth and talked while he chewed. “But where’s the ordinary citizen at? Who’s speaking for us?” He took a swallow from his cup of beer.