The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  She had tried, but there was Colm triggered: “Teflon. Nails. PCB. Creosote. Aluminium. Old cars.” He trailed off and then began again. “Refrigerators. Air conditioning units. Galvanized scrap metal. Paint thinner. Acetylene. Licence plates. Cinderblocks. And then there are the things from before.”

  They passed the gate as he made his list, and despite what he said Anthea could almost believe the woods were pristine. Undergrowth grew fast and thick in the clearings, and though some things were visible— the cars, the grader, some burn piles—the more serious problems were beneath ten years of blackberry canes. Down at the house, Colm parked near the front door and Anthea followed him onto the porch. “Things from before?” she repeated as they walked through the sliding glass doors to the kitchen. She didn’t think he heard.

  He sat at the kitchen table and looked through the open dining room to the deck and the water beyond. Then he said, “There are stones up in the woods, from the old gardens. Got to think about those, and the old shacks, lots of the boards just fell, all those nails. Nails in the trees, too. Which makes you worry about chainsaws, even though we need to cull the woods.” He stopped. She set thermos and cup on the table between them and poured his coffee, black with one sugar. She passed it to him, and for a moment when he took it they held the cup together, their right hands touching. She noticed, as she often had, the sameness of their hands, something her father had pointed out to her many years before when he had held her hand in the car; she had liked that about her hands, that they were his.

  They weren’t only his, however. Though Colm and Anthea were both dark, with none of Hazel’s freckles or pale brown hair, they had both inherited her hands, slim and tapered and strong. With those fingers she had left them both her temperament: all three were tenterhooked and nervy. Sitting across the table from Colm while he drank his coffee, she could feel his mind turning because it turned like hers did: he was imagining all the variations on Teflon frying pans and cinderblocks that could be buried in twenty acres. The years of work, the cost of recycling, the consequences of dumped chemicals, broken environmental laws.

  Then she picked up her cup as well, and for half an hour they sat together, remarking on the weather, the colours in the water, and whether the bird that flew overhead was a raven or a very large crow. Colm thought she was being optimistic calling it a raven. Anthea talked about listening to Patsy Cline while she sorted things in Rm 023, and Colm told the story of the guy who worked for his father, back in the fifties, who could sing just like Patsy Cline. They liked talking about the guy singing “Walkin’ After Midnight” as loud as he could, in his truck with the windows open.

  After that they walked halfway up the drive to the old boat house Max had used for extra storage. Colm didn’t think there was a key, so they jimmied the padlock; dry wood came away with the nails, flakes of paint and dead bugs on the ground as they each swung one of the protesting doors. The shed was dark except for the light that speared in at the cracks, each beam so shot with dust it seemed solid. On the floor there were leggy, white-blind spears of grass that had wound up through the old Massey-Harris. Dead flies, paper wasps, desiccated rags.

  Colm swung his arms, the crowbar in his right hand grazing the earth. Anthea looked down at her own spindly wrists in their giant leather work gloves. She held a crowbar, too. “So?” she asked. “What you think?”

  “Ehhhh.”

  He took a step into the darkness, picking his way through the greasy cardboard boxes that formed the outermost layer of junk. There were neat shelves down each wall, which he could not reach, good solid shelves of two-by-sixes, the unplaned, slivery kind Max used for workbenches, back when he still had the little sawmill and milled his lumber from the drift logs. Those shelves were full of small wooden boxes with finger holes, like drawers. He’d labelled them with black Jiffy Marker on little cards stapled to the wood: “rusty nails all sizes,” “cable clamps,” “washers.”

  And that was just the walls. Looking at the floor full of auction boxes, she wondered out loud: “Why don’t we just—” she knew it was wrong while she said it—“why don’t we just take it all out? Burn what we can? Take the rest to the dump?”

  “No!” he said with the sound of a tight spring released. Then in a calmer voice: “That’s not the plan.”

  Anthea had never been sure about the plan. She knew parts of it, had the barest idea of the stages through which it would progress, and its intended results. Colm alone carried the intricate mechanism in his head, designed to separate the useful from the useless in his father’s rust-hoard, to turn the junkyard property back to wild, and on to a garden. It would take years.

  “No,” he said again, only quietly this time, as he seemed to regret the loosed spring and was now carefully recoiling it. “No—there’s too much to just burn, and look—” He gestured toward a loose pile of black piping. “You can’t burn that. If you did it would gas us both. What we’ll do,” he said, brightening, “what we’ll do is, yeah, at least we’ll drag stuff out and rebox what we can. Then fix the roof maybe. No. Yeah—we’ll see what we can do about all the rain.”

  With her hands dust-dry in her giant gloves, Anthea did not believe in rain. Overhead arbutus bark peeled away from the trunks in red curls like sunburned skin. Somewhere nearby broom pods burst, scattered seeds with the sound of falling pebbles. One day soon, broom would cover every open metre of their twenty acres, and beneath it nothing would grow, and only the barest outline of a garden and a drive visible under the branches. Broom died where it stood, turned the colour of old iron but remained upright. Even dead it didn’t give way to other plants.

  Anthea dropped her gloves from her wrists and knelt beside Colm as he turned over the objects in a box. “No,” he said, “yeah, get your gloves. Start carrying them out.”

  “But. If we just take them out and put them back, what good is that?”

  “If we don’t weatherproof, we won’t have any choice in a couple of years. It’ll all be shot. But if we sort it all out—well, there isn’t time to make, what, ten-twenty thousand decisions for everything in there, for every single box. And if we just burn, well there might be PCBs in there. That’s a carcinogen. Neurological damage, too. And PVC? Those pipes? If you burned them, you’d release carbonyl chloride. That’s a chemical weapon. They used it in the First World War. There’s R11 and R12 from old A/Cs and fridges. They’re toxic. We have to make sure they don’t leak until we know what we can do with them.” He glanced up. “Old paint cans,” he said. “And thinner. Creosote. Shellac. Engine oil.”

  “But it’s old so wouldn’t the thing—the coolant—already be gone?”

  Colm didn’t answer. He had half-uncovered an old fridge that stood next to the wall. As he moved boxes, he revealed a rusty wound in its almond-coloured side. “See—this is why you don’t leave fridges out in the woods.” His finely pointed fingertips touched the corroded metal of the pipes. “See there?”

  Anthea saw. She breathed deeply in the dusty air, wondering what else had escaped in the years her grandpa had left the slowly exhaling fridges hidden in outbuildings or half-buried in his earth. It was a lovely day. Even now sylphy particles of dichlorodifluoromethane were winging up to congregate at the poles.

  Ehhh, she thought.

  “Ehhhh,” said Colm.

  Picking up her giant gloves, Anthea turned to another box.

  “Don’t spill anything,” he said “and get away quick if you drop something. I saw some fluorescent tubes. Mercury.”

  Anthea returned to the shed for another armload. She was already bored, and she couldn’t see after the brightness: the interior seemed to go back beyond the Massey-Harris, beyond the shelves, the shed much larger on the inside than on the outside. When she returned outside with yet another armload, Colm was standing a little distance from the doors. He was looking up the hill into the undergrowth, and around them at the disgorged contents of the shed. She joined him, and put one hand on his and squeezed. They stood together
, graceless, beset among the salal, with the flicker of the fir canopy, and the glitter of the inlet below.

  “Break time,” Colm said, finally. “Hit her hard this afternoon.”

  In the house they took sandwiches and orange juice from the fridge; it hummed gently, devoid of postcards and the artwork of children, unfilmed by dust, its coolant secure in a closed system, an apocalypse temporarily suspended.

  After lunch Colm sat in his father’s chair beside the window, Anthea across from him. They watched the beach and the islands. A kingfisher hung in the air above the water.

  “Do you remember,” he said. She waited. The kingfisher dove. Colm didn’t speak. She couldn’t tell if the bird caught anything.

  “Do I remember what?” she asked.

  “Do you remember how scared you used to be of that story, the guy who had the place before Hazel and Max?”

  “I wasn’t scared!” she protested. “Jesus! I was just a sensitive kid.”

  He laughed at that. “Sweetheart, you were terrified. You were never very good at hiding it. I mean, you weren’t a brave kid. Anyway. Sometimes I think about him, how he lived here. Do you suppose he’s still out there?”

  “Sensitive!” she said. “Not a coward. Not terrified. I guess he’s dead now. It was a long time ago.”

  “I suppose so. Suppose so. But I think about all the people who lived here.”

  Anthea held her breath. She didn’t want to disrupt the current of his memories or his conversation, so she waited and looked where he looked: across the water where the kingfisher had flown. After another moment of his silence, she asked gently, “What sort of things did they leave behind?”

  “Those new people tore down Old Sweeney’s place. You should see what they built. All glass, for the view. Solar panels. Geothermal.”

  “Green.”

  “Yeah, and earthquake safe. No beach where they are. You know they asked for an easement? Through our place? Actually, right where Old Sweeney used to walk, now I think about it. Anyway, I told them no. They’ll probably have waterfront in a few years, anyway, when the sea levels go up.”

  Anthea nodded. Colm thought a lot about the sea levels as well as erosion and tsunamis; it came of living on a high bank above salt water right near a fault line. Colm went on, “We used to find things here, you know. We’d find buried things. I think.” Here he stopped again and pointed at a seal who surfaced for a moment and seemed to look up at them. Irritation then, that he would be so vague when she had such particular questions. She was about to ask again when he said, “I think it wasn’t a very good place. You know. I think he was sort of...”

  She waited, then started him back with, “You mean, when he took their money—?”

  “Not just that.”

  “Not just what?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Did you ever hear the story about his plans? What he wanted to do?

  “Old Sweeney told me a bit, once. He didn’t like it if you asked, but once he said that they were working on an Engine.”

  Anthea held her breath, then she asked carefully, “What kind of Engine?”

  “I don’t know. That was all Sweeney said.” He stopped again. “You heard anything about Jasmine?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s another sad story.”

  “I wasn’t scared, you know. And Jasmine might be okay. She might.”

  “You used to love the little house,” he said. “Looking at it, I mean. You stopped me talking about it when I told you stories.”

  “Did I?” She didn’t remember anything like that, though she remembered how much she had wondered about the little house, thinking it was just the right size for her, but how its name—“The Place of the Stones”— had been so strange and full of some quality she couldn’t understand. “It made me sad. What was the plan, Dad?”

  “Plan?”

  “The guy here. The prophet. You said they were building an Engine.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. Old Sweeney never told me.”

  While her father had an after-lunch sleep on the floral chesterfield in the front room, Anthea went down to the beach. That day the path was overhung with maples and a Sleeping Beauty wall of blackberry vines, what had once been wide enough for a car now reduced to a narrow passage between the trees, gouged by winter runoff from the top of the hill, like a dry creekbed.

  The water was calm and high. She sat on one of the logs up past the tide line and thought about how the points that enclosed the beach were as they had been when she and Jasmine cast their circle, before that when she and her brother made rafts as little kids, when Colm learned to swim, when Hazel and Max built their house. In Simon’s day, they had stretched out on either side of the beach in just those angles. Long before that, since January 26, 1700, when the last megathrust earthquake had shaken the earth to its modern configuration. Every season rearranged logs and gravel, but in three hundred years the tide had only managed to soften the corners of the megaliths on the point. Looking up toward Simon’s foundations, she saw that salt-poisoned trees withdrew from the encroaching shore. The arbutus might not last as the climate changed; like Garry Oak, they had a narrow range. The coast would look different then.

  She climbed the second trail, the steep, sliding trail that wound up over the rock face where all the soil had been worn away, and beyond that to the point. It too was undercut, and what had once been a staircase was now only a slight interruption of the high bank’s incline. Watching earth and pebbles dislodged by her feet, Anthea wondered why they even tried to save the topsoil. A cliff didn’t want to be a cliff, after all; it wanted to be flat, riding winter rain down to the bottom. Stone hangs on longer, but earth slides further with every storm. When the arbutus die, the whole hillside, unsupported, will follow.

  Emerging at the top some distance from Hazel’s house, she stood at the entrance to the old garden, near the place Jasmine had selected to raise the dead. On the other side of the high garden wall, fir trees were sunk like triffids in the old carp ponds. She thought of Craiglockhart and the estate wall that still survived along front lawns and back alleys in the neighbourhood around Mrs. Kilgour’s Castle. She wondered if Simon, like Mrs. Kilgour, had planned for the long term, a dynasty to lead the coast through a thousand dark years in the Kali Yuga. His manor had not lasted the generation. It had burned down, its masonry cannibalized for other houses on what was left of the estate, for the summer cottages built after the war, for Hazel’s house, a stone bungalow on the site of some acolyte’s cedar shack.

  She found the place where they had cast the circle and sat for a moment, remembering the evening sunlight, then the first yellow moonlight. She waited an extra moment for the fear to rise again, watching the airport as she had done that night and wondering what it was Jasmine had wanted her to see, and what Mrs. Layton thought they had done wrong. The trunks of arbutus groaned in the breeze, speaking their own language, and though she listened she did not understand. It was strange to find that she was not afraid.

  Back at the house again, she noticed a two-year-old buck standing on the drive beside Colm’s truck. It watched her, flicked its ears, and then picked its way across the grassless clearing of the drive and back into the woods. Grassless now, but green leaves and white roots squirmed up through the seams in the pavement. It didn’t take long.

  Through the window Anthea saw her father sleeping. She wanted to say that he should join her in the woods, and they should release the house, let the leaves blow through the doors, let the water run, clear the topsoil, undercut the foundations until the house tumbled down the high bank to the beach. There would be a new point on the coast, indistinguishable from the others, unless someone stripped the rockweed and the purple mussels, revealing the original machined surfaces, unchanged beneath the water.

  Anthea followed the buck away from the house, along the old pathway that led from Simon’s manor and through the village. Much of it was gone—interrupted by Hazel’s flowers and the driveway—but shor
t passages survived, leading toward the Taberners’ and past their woods to Old Sweeney’s place that was no longer his, but a new glass mansion up the hill. She followed the path to the barbed wire fence on the edge of the property and looked through the narrow belt of trees and across the Taberners’ lawn in the direction of a small wooden house she could not see: The Place of the Stones. The Taberners used it for storage, though it also made a good story to tell when they had people in for drinks. Old Sweeney had always disapproved of the way they kept broken oars in there, and life preservers and gardening tools. He said it was too important for that. Once when the Taberners had invited him around, they had prodded him for stories, but he had shot his rye and told them all to go to hell and that had been that.

  After his rest Colm was in a better mood, and suggested they go for a bit of a walk before they returned to the shed. As they followed Max’s tractor trails through the bush, they found things that had been collected with obvious intention, though Anthea could not always tell what had fallen into relation by chance and what had been set just so, the rusted rebar placed opposite the boiler by one of her grandfather’s plans, the scribbled papers he liked to fold up tight and keep in his trouser pockets, or in that shortbread tin beside his recliner, the one with the Scots laddie on it, done up in a kilt. Grandpa used to tap the tin’s lid and talk about building a better mousetrap, about how any man could get ahead with a little ingenuity.

  It was good that they went for the walk, because some of the projects made Colm remember nice things. He rested one foot on the lip of a boiler and pointed at the cannibalized tractor opposite. “Yeah,” he said, “this’s one of his projects.”

  Anthea knelt and brushed away the moss and found three glass dials with smashed faces above the boiler. Black characters on white, concealed by the seep of greenish water, the scum of previous rain marks.

  “Once he tried to make hydrogen, electrolyzing water. I think it was in Popular Mechanics.”

  “For blowing things up?” she asked, and Colm shrugged maybe. The gauges of her grandfather’s experiment were marked in hieroglyphics when she looked again. It was funny what smashed glass did.