Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  The sight of farmland ended hours ago. It was encroached upon by the forest until the sprawling ranches shrunk to nothing more than a few small herds of red cattle foraging between the aspen trees.

  “No more pastures,” I announce – quietly.

  In the backseat of our small, economy car, the kids are starting to get restless in their five-point harnesses – pinned down by mazes of nylon straps and plastic clips at their shoulders and hips like little chimpanzee astronauts. It’s too bad that when they’re awake, they don’t have any of that sad, stoic astro-chimp sense of resignation. Before we left the capital city, some of your grittier friends suggested you drug the boys with an over-the-counter anti-nauseant so they’d sleep through most of the trip.

  “Nah. If they’re anything like me,” you said, “pills won’t settle them down.” The boys are sleeping now, but not because you drugged them – I’m pretty sure.

  We’re still an hour south of the Fort McMurray town-site when the road climbs, rising out of the green trees and into the old, burnt forest. Back when we were kids, a colossal forest fire ate up hundreds of hectares of the land south of the city. The crest of this hill is where the flames burned right up to the gravel shoulders of the highway, climbed to the tops of the tall, thin trees, bending them over the asphalt in a hellish, orange-red arch, clawing out for the fuel of the treetops on the other side of the road. The policemen stood in the middle of the highway, behind their barricades, with the bulldozers and the teenaged forest-firefighters who rubbed at their eyes and leaned against their shovels. And they all just watched it go.

  When it was over, nothing came after the fire to finish off what was left of the tree trunks. Years later, all these thin, charred trees still stand like grey skeletons for miles and miles along the highway, right where we can see them – the Incorrupt Saints of the boreal forest world, or whatever. Something must be happening, some slow natural entropy that will eventually topple every one of them. It’s probably hidden low, near the knee level of the burnt trees, where aspen saplings are reclaiming the land by inches every season.

  It’s hard not to wind up getting maudlin out here in The Old Burn, even though everyone in this country knows that wild forests are supposed to burn themselves up from time to time. It’s a natural part of their life cycles, or something. Maybe making it into an analogy for the human condition is starting to get a bit trite. But you’re pregnant right now, so you like the idea of things that can only be fruitful while they’re being consumed. On good days, you don’t mind that you live your life set on fire. The heat keeps you fine and fluid, white as molten steel. But on bad days, you are ash – grey and weightless, floating in the air over the dry old bones of the forest, drifting down onto the scorched spruce tendrils, moving only with the creaking of the dead trees.

  “Are you getting sleepy?” I ask it in a near-whisper so the boys won’t be disturbed.

  “No danger of that,” you answer. “You know I can’t sleep in a car. Heck, I can hardly sleep in a bed these days.”

  I close my eyes and settle back into my seat. “Just let me know if you need me to do some driving.”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Just when it seems like any remnants of the civilization we’ve come from are long gone, you’re waking me up to point out the big sign on the side of the road announcing the city limits. Beyond it, the forest opens up, and the highway falls into a valley made by an enormous river. It’s called the Athabasca. It’s on its way out of the Rocky Mountains and into the Arctic Ocean, and it’s wider than just about anything else like it on the continent. There’re only two bridges spanning the Athabasca River inside the city. One goes north, to the petroleum plants where I’ll be spending nearly every day for the next five years. The other heads south, back to everyone and everything else we’ve ever known.

  We find our new neighbourhood, up in the roads running in concentric circles on the wooded hills above the city’s flood plains. It’s a brand new trailer park where we’ve mortgaged a half million dollar strip of land with the mobile home bolted to it. Right now, my mother is still alive, down in the south of the province watching courtroom television and eating potato chips in her own trailer park. But her neighbourhood is nothing like this one. There’s no vertical aluminum siding here – no harvest gold refrigerators, no peeling paper wood veneers, no orange shag carpet. Instead it’s full of skylights and Jacuzzi tubs, walk-in closets, and guys who pay more in annual income taxes than my Dad has ever earned in a year.

  We’ve arrived here a little too early to meet the realtor with the big white goatee – the man who has the keys to let us inside our new home. But it’s been a long drive, so we get out of the car anyway and walk around on the hard clay ground that was spread over this land – stiff and brown as refrigerated peanut butter – to fill in the unstable spaces where the muskeg used to be. The kids find a pile of boulders heaped behind the trailer and begin the serious work of climbing all over it. We sit on the wooden step built up to the back door out of new green arsenic-wood and wait for the realtor. I look down at my watch again. He is late now.

  There’s just the smallest trace of a smile around your mouth as you look up at me from the bottom step.

  “Don’t say it,” I grin.

  “I’m going to say it.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

  In the narrow street, huge red and white buses – touring coaches kind of like the ones rock stars travel in – are roaring between the rows of diesel pickup trucks parked along the curbs. The open space in the centre of the asphalt is like the eye of a needle. And the buses thread themselves right through it, all over the trailer park, dropping off men still wearing hard hats and blue coveralls mucky with grease and striped with reflective safety tape.

  One of the men from a rock star bus stamps up the stairs of the trailer next door – the one with the front door facing ours. He bawls out a greeting to us in a heavy Newfoundland accent. The sound of it brings out the borrowed Atlantic Canadian accent of your own, and in a few sentences you’re talking way louder than you usually do, breathing in instead of out when you say “yeah,” and referring to our trailer as “she.”

  I’ve just waved goodbye to him, and our new neighbour has one boot inside his trailer when we both stop and jerk our heads to look at you. You’ve let out this incredible, horror movie scream. Even our little boys have turned from where they sit on the boulder pile to see what’s the matter with you.

  “What is that?” you say, still almost in a yell. One of your hands has all your hair gathered into a ponytail while the other one is pointing at the ground, to the wooden planks laid down on the clay as a makeshift walkway.

  The neighbour looks over and laughs – making it even harder for me to figure out what he’s saying to us. I’ll get used to the sound of accents like his soon, but for now I’m still ignorant enough for it to take two repetitions – each louder than the last – before I understand that he’s identifying a big black bug sitting on the walkway. He calls it a tarsand beetle and claims it’ll bite us.

  I crouch as I creep up to the black creature waving its antennae on the walkway. It’s a large beetle, all right. It’s big enough that I might have believed someone if they’d told me it came here all the way from the Philippines. Its whole exoskeleton is matte black, as if it is truly made out of tar. What’s most striking about it are its antennae. They’re twice as long as the rest of its body, making the entire bug about five inches long in total from tip to tip. It’s probably the biggest bug I’ve ever seen in Canada – but I still think you’ve overreacted.

  I let you hear it in my voice. “For cryin’ out loud–it’s just a big beetle.”

  “Kill it!”

  “Oh, for heck’s sake. Someone’s going to hear you screaming and call the police.” I’m bringing my shoe down on top of the beetle. It’s not even trying to ge
t away. It just lies there, exposed, feeling up toward the sole of my shoe with its antennae.

  The beetle’s dead now so you let yourself get a little mad at me. “It–was–in–my–hair.”

  That is creepy. “But you’re fine now,” I say. “Aren’t you?”

  You just shudder.

  There’s a huge, mucus-white Cadillac SUV lumbering over the curb and into the yard. Its driver is our realtor. He’s out of his vehicle and coming across the clay with a set of keys on one of his brokerage’s fancy custom key fobs. He looks like he could be a Hollywood version of a plantation owner from the southern United States – but he’s still just a northern boomtown realtor. He doesn’t say anything when he sees the squashed tarsand beetle smeared by its ivory coloured guts against the wooden walkway – although he does take care not to step on it himself.

  The bug stayed stuck to the wood for days afterward – long enough for you to start calling him “Gregor” and wondering out loud which of the oil sand projects he used to work at before he was changed.

  We’ve been living in the city for a few months when one of the tarsand beetles finds his way (“Her way,” you correct me, “the biggest ones are the females”) inside our trailer. You’re in the kitchen packing a lunch for me to take to “the plant” when I hear the bread knife hit the countertop as you start to scream. By the time I’ve spun around to see, you’re standing by the counter in your undershirt. The T-shirt you were wearing is lying on the linoleum on the other side of the room.

  The whole trailer shakes as I stomp back toward the kitchen. “What is it?”

  “It’s – in my shirt.”

  I let out a long breath. “Tarsand beetle.” I stoop to gather up your shirt, heading to the back door where I’ll shake out the bug and flick it back into the air.

  The boys have come running and are standing at the edge of the kitchen, looking on with a fear a lot like your own. You never meant to do it, but you’ve made them afraid of the tarsand beetles too – though it’s hard to take the boys seriously when they can’t stop calling them “Tarzan beetles.”

  I’m standing in the doorway, calling back into the trailer over my shoulder. “It’s okay, boys. Even the biggest beetle can’t hurt you.”

  “Yes. Daddy’s right. It can’t hurt anybody. It just surprised Mummie.” You force a little laugh. “Brigs – I am so stupid. I’m sorry.”

  I close the door and hand your shirt back to you. You hesitate but you take it, pinching the hem between two of your fingers like it’s contaminated with some kind of biohazard now. I’m not surprised when you don’t pull it back over your head. You’re standing half-dressed in the kitchen, all flushed and ashamed. And I’m glad this happened at home, indoors, in private, because you would have done exactly the same thing if you’d seen a tarsand beetle perched on your shoulder, sorting through your hair, in the middle of a grocery store or at the park or in a restaurant or anywhere else.

  I shake my head and pull you into me. “You’ve got to stop this.”

  “I know. I am so sorry.” You’re nodding against my chest. When I let you go, you throw your unsalvageable T-shirt into the laundry hamper.

  As our first northern winter begins, all the bugs retreat into stasis somewhere in the forest. At the height of the cold half of the year, the daytime temperatures peak at no more than minus forty-five degrees Celsius. The snap lasts for two whole weeks without a break. It’s so bad the steering fluid in the car freezes, and you keep Scottie home from kindergarten even though the schools are still open. The schools are always open. The scarcest resource in this town isn’t money. It’s childcare. There are some shift workers who will drop their kids off at the free-childcare utopia of the public school and head off to plants no matter what the weather. If those kids ever found the doors to the schools locked – well...

  And then one day, while Scottie is away at kindergarten, you hear on the radio that his school is “in lockdown.” At a construction site a few blocks from the schoolyard, a giant beetle appeared, looking exactly like a man. It scuttled into the cab of a bulldozer and bolted itself inside. They say it used to work for the contractor who owns the machine, so it’s got keys, a stash of potato chips, a bottle of rye, and a sawed-off rifle it brought from home tucked under its puffy down coat that morning. Every few hours, the beetle fires off a shot, aiming into the frozen ground in front of the line of police cars that have gathered to pen him in. The shots keep the cops from losing interest in the standoff.

  Desperate gunmen pirating heavy equipment – this is what it takes to get the boomtown school to finally lock its doors. You strap Aaron and baby Levi into the car, take the detour around the police barricades, and gather at the school with the rest of the moms who aren’t at work themselves. None of you is afraid of the beetle’s rifle, and together you stand in the snow banks outside the school, pulling on the doors, imagining your kids sitting under their desks inside, away from the windows.

  Outside the school, it’s like a meeting of surly mother bears. “I bet they won’t say a thing about this in the media,” one of the other bears snuffles through her muzzle at you. “All the news up here cares about reporting is the price of shares at the plants.”

  Eventually, the principal cracks the front door and starts walking the kids out, bringing them to their mothers in small groups. The ones without parents in the crowd outside will just have to wait.

  The beetle eventually burns off all the gas in the bulldozer. It shoots away all its rounds but one. And then it pleads with the police over its cell phone, asking them to go find the dowdy single mother who won’t sleep with it anymore and bring her to the construction site so she can watch the beetle blast its brains out into the snow. The cops refuse to do it. Instead, they just arrest the beetle after the rye is all gone and the cold sets in.

  Despite the months and months of cold, you never stop thinking about tarsand beetles. There’s a handful of truisms we remember from our days as kids in school – something about fear being bred by ignorance. We do some research on tarsand beetles, hoping to cure this crazy phobic problem of yours.

  “Don’t call it ‘hysteria,’” you warn me. “That’s a sexist term.”

  Maybe you’re right. But I never did try to call it hysteria.

  “Okay. They’re not actually called tarsand beetles,” you explain as you turn off the computer. “And they never really eat tar. They’re supposed to be called spruce sawyers.”

  “Well, that makes more sense.” I wonder if you realize your hands are in your hair, fingering it, strand by strand, as you speak.

  “And the guy next door was wrong. They won’t bite people. They don’t even try to eat anything that isn’t part of a dead tree. They’re actually a vital part of the forest ecosystem.”

  “Right.”

  “What they do is they lay their eggs underneath the bark of dead softwood trees once it starts to get cold in the fall. And then their larvae hatch in the spring and eat up a bunch of the wood. So they’re helping to break down old trees and renew the soil. They’re decomposers. They’re helping.”

  I pull one of your hands away from your hair. “Of course they are.”

  You turn your hand so its fingers are holding onto mine. “And I bet you can guess what their favourite habitats are: areas where land has recently been cleared for new construction – which means everywhere, around here. Oh, and they also love land burned out by forest fires.”

  Forest fires – all those grey trees still un-fallen along the highway. They’re standing out there waiting for your thick yellow hair to ride past them down the road, scattering the tarsand beetles you’ve ferried from the city.

  The city makes it through another winter. It’s well into spring when I come home from work to find the bottom third of your hair is white. You were in the backyard painting the new fence with a sticky alkyd wood stain when a tarsand beetle flew right
at your face – legs dangling under its belly, antennae laid back. It probably just came to see what was making that fantastic turpentine smell. When you heard the low, horrible buzz-flap of its big black wings, some mindless, electrical spark in your spinal cord ordered your arm to flinch. As always, the reaction was too violent and a tall, toxic plume of white paint came rising out of the can. It splashed against your back as you fled, destroying both your ratty old T-shirt and your braided rope of blonde hair.

  At the salon where they cut off four inches of your hair, you tell your story to the stylist. She clucks her tongue as she tries to pull a comb through your hair. “No one likes dem, my love. Dey was the devil when we was kids.”

  “You had tarsand beetles back in Newfoundland?”

  She shrugs into the mirror. “Well, we had June bugs. An’ dey serves de same purpose.”

  When you’re home again, I try to be gracious about the haircut but it does make me sad. I meet you at the front door, pushing your hood away from your face, sliding my fingers underneath what’s left of your hair, up the length of your neck to where it starts to grow out of your nape. It’s not just shorter. It’s darker – made up of the new hair you’ve grown over the winter, since the light went away. All that’s left are the strands that haven’t been out in the sun long enough for their pigments to break down, lightening enough to lose that bamboo colour Janae used to call “dishwater blonde.”

  You won’t look at me. “I had a lot of split ends that needed trimming anyway.”

  “What are we going to do with you?” I say. “These bugs aren’t going anywhere. This is their natural environment. They’ve been here since before the dinosaurs. They’re leftover from when this place was still the great big, hot jungle that made the oil sands in the first place.”