Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Ella adjusts her eyes to the glare coming off the paved highway, unhitches the water bottle from her belt, and takes a long draw. And there it is, another thing that’s amiss. A dump truck has turned into the Jarvis Ridge development’s entrance but has not advanced beyond the first few metres of dirt road. The driver and his passenger have clambered out. Ella hears alarmed voices. She moves closer, but there is the problem of how close she should get, how involved. Already she can hear Mitch’s reproach, as if she were breaking a trust.

  Two women are standing with their arms linked and their legs apart, blocking the development’s entrance. Ella’s mouth dries. She leans forward, brings her head to her knees, calms her laboured breath. Sweat slides from her forehead and chin.

  And what comes into her head, as it hangs in the morning heat, is not a strategy for this unexpected situation but a vision of a room in her home, corridor-shaped and banked with windows, set off from the rest of the house like a design hiccup and used for overflow during all those years she and Mitch spent making the rest of their home a showpiece. It had never occurred to Ella that she had plans for the room, that she’d integrated it into some imagined future self who’d make things, add beauty to the world. Not until Mitch bought an awkward antique railway partners desk, plopped it in the middle of the space, and winked when he found her standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. Squatter’s rights, he said. I need a new office. Ella has told herself that Mitch’s use of the back room is temporary, until the development gets into full swing and he rents something in town, as she does. Except “full swing” is taking a while.

  At this very moment Mitch will be slipping on his khakis, dusting his clubs, rehearsing his pitch to the hesitant city couple he is to meet at a sister development, the Northbrook Golf and Lifestyle Community, to sell them on their future happiness in Jarvis Ridge. He needs the model home finished by its planned completion date. He needs the lots cleared and staked. They both need this success.

  “Ladies, I’m going to give you one more minute to get the fuck out of our way,” says the truck driver, a ruddy young man in a T-shirt. “Then I’m getting back into my truck and I’m driving through.”

  “This is disputed land. You won’t be getting through today. Or tomorrow. Not unless the dispute is settled.”

  Ella recognizes that the older woman who answers him is Helen Fallingbrook. For the past three years Ella has bought a ticket for the annual powwow from Helen. True, she never intended to go. But surely this was evidence of her overall friendliness towards the natives, some diplomatic immunity she can leverage.

  The other man, bowlegged and beer-bellied, pulls off his cap and throws it to the dirt at their feet, raising a rainbow of dust. “You have to be fucking kidding! What is with you people? Didn’t win enough at bingo?”

  Disputed, Ella thinks. Disputed. Surely not. Mitch assured her that every clause, every rider, every possible contingency or claim has been scrutinized, plugged. Airtight, he said.

  His cap abandoned in the dirt, his face red, the older man climbs back into the dump truck, this time on the driver’s side, and pumps the gas so that it whinnies like an upset mare. His younger co-worker scrambles into the passenger’s seat. The truck edges towards the women. They pull their joined arms taut and thrust their faces forward. The woman who holds Helen’s hand looks around Ella’s age. She is radiant in the loose man’s shirt she wears, the weathered blue jeans, her beauty free and unmannered. For a second, something hard and sore suspends itself in Ella’s chest. It’s her, she thinks. That’s Stercyx’s woman. The idea feels like a vice, makes it impossible to think. This other woman laughs once, brief and throaty. No, surely not, Ella decides, and she’s surprised to feel so relieved. Stercyx loves his land with a kind of chivalric fidelity; he would not keep company with someone so blatantly disrespectful of property rights. And this is baldly unjust, Ella thinks.

  She’s one of the tolerant ones. She smiles at Bobby Horse even when he is staggering drunk in the middle of town. If her neighbours express discomfort with the natives, Ella reminds them how they all buy their cheap smokes up on Highway 3. She forces herself to read the tidbits of history tucked into news coverage: treaty rights that date back to the 1780s, stalling by government lawyers. Migod, she even turns her dial to the aboriginal station now and again. She loves Susie Stonechild! – she can sing a few bars of her new single!

  The dump truck inches forward. Helen and the younger woman are both silent now, but Ella’s pulse yammers. Something unsavoury is about to take place, the kind of incident that could taint the project, make it seem unsteady or leaky. Suddenly she is very much interfering, in a way that Mitch wouldn’t sanction, in a way that puts her whole body between a moving truck and two hand-holding native women.

  “Stop! Stop!”

  Ella’s right hand slaps the hood of the truck and she looks through the windshield to catch the driver’s eyes. She sees what a surprise she is – the trim redhead in jogging gear suddenly leaping in front of his custom grillwork. When he turns off the engine, she turns around to face the two women.

  “Helen, we know each other. This is vandalism. It’s illegal. And I want it to stop.”

  She regrets using the word vandalism. She tries to calm herself, keep her manner open and receptive. Helen Fallingbrook is a small woman, corded with hard work and decency.

  “What’s legal and illegal is a bit tricky, eh, Mrs. Bain,” she says.

  “Helen! This is private property. It belongs to my husband and me. We’re good people who have a lot of money invested in it!” Worms of panic begin twitching under her eyelids.

  “It belongs to us,” says the other woman.

  Ella looks towards the unfamiliar voice. “Do I know you?”

  Ella holds out her hand, but it hangs unmet in the air. The woman looks Ella up and down, makes her wish she’d worn older gear. Her Lycra tank, the coral running shorts are so new, so obnoxiously bright and pricy.

  She turns back to the older woman. “Helen?”

  “I think you should go, Mrs. Bain. I think you are out of your depth.”

  Ella feels the flush on her face. What to do, what to do?

  She’d tried not to be rankled when the back room became crowded with a scanner, a printer, some lumbering bookshelves, and the smell of stale cigars. Then it was painted, a horrible shade of brown. Just like that – Mitch Brown – without a moment of consultation. Havana Gold, he called it. And before she could let out a squeak of protest, he raised his hands and said, Terra nullius, Ella. This room has been empty for years. Still it isn’t until right now, her sweat puddling in the small of her back and the humiliation of being asked to leave yet another place soaked with her money, that she feels the measure of what has been stolen from her, and how hard it will be to reclaim.

  She wipes her eyes on her forearm and focuses. Get angry, she tells herself. Don’t be so clouded by liberal pieties that you won’t name it, won’t do something about it.

  She wheels around to the dump-truck driver, whose face, pink with frustrated violence, hangs out the open window.

  “Do you have a cellphone?”

  He nods.

  “Call the police. Get them over here. Now.”

  Ella hears how ferocious she sounds. She is going to make things right. Justice will brighten her day.

  As they wait for the cops to arrive, Shayna lets go of Helen’s hand and stares into the middle distance. The two men stay in the truck, listen to the radio, drink from a Thermos, and glare. The runner paces alongside the road. That’s a type of woman, Shayna thinks. Burnished like copper gold. Lean and hipless as a teenaged boy. There was a time when that kind of woman would walk into a room and Shayna would feel low, crawl into herself, pucker with contempt.

  The police come and it unfolds the way Helen, whispering, assured her it would. The men are told to go home. They will need an injunction before the women can be arrested and work resume.

  “In the case of treaty disputes�
��”

  The jogger’s body spasms with disbelief. “It’s private property!” she insists.

  The officer repeats with a flat drone that in cases involving land disputes with natives – a word he lowers his voice to use – all municipal detachments must consult with the region’s Policing the Aboriginal Community Team. “The officers from PACT have been informed and will be monitoring the barricade. If a resolution is not reached through negotiations or court orders, PACT officers will arrive to design a policing solution within a week.” He doesn’t make eye contact with any of them.

  “A week. A week?” The jogger flaps her hands. Her voice thins. “That’s utter bullshit!” And then she turns on her heel and runs off down the road. The brightness of the day burns the colour from her.

  When the figure disappears and the truck barrels down the highway, Shayna’s shoulders drop. She walks into the development and surveys. The land is plucked, deboned, dried. She closes her eyes to see past the insults and breathes it in. At first there is nothing but the smell of overworked dirt, arid and ungiving. She concentrates, slows her breathing, waits. Finally it arrives, the slightest mutiny of scent: sweet clover seeds germinating in the backhoed earth, an insurrection of moisture beneath the drained and filled pond, an invasion of pollens breezing in off the river. Everywhere the nerve endings, the memory of life, of what has been. She smells him too: her boy, Pete-Pete. The way a child’s skin, flush with spring air, the excitement of catching frogs at the pond’s edge, was a universe of smells, the land and sky, the nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon of creation. Her people called the place simply o’tá:ra, their word for clay as well as clan, for everything that was land and family and how who you were and where you lived were indivisible.

  With her eyes closed she sees the scrubby trees, brush, and sedge meadow that contained their summers and autumns of hiding-and-seeking; Pete-Pete somersaulting in the milk vetch and sweet pea, curling himself into a hummock of earth, imagining himself a fawn, scentless and hidden in plain sight. The first summer they played, he was three. She’d finish counting, open her eyes, and spot him almost instantly, his little denim bum poking up from behind a tree stump or his lime Ninja Turtle hoodie bright among the tangle of wildflowers. By the next summer he had improved. She resorted to instinct: thinking like a child, exhausting those spots first. By the third summer she had to look in earnest; sometimes an hour would go by but she didn’t want to give up. He expected her to try. Her tactic became to cover the territory as quickly as possible, her quick breaths drying her tongue, hurting her throat. She started making rules – not beyond that tree or past the ditch by the road, or anywhere near the creek’s edge – fencing him in where there were no fences.

  One October afternoon when he was five, she couldn’t find him after two hours of looking. She vowed that the game-playing would stop; he was too good. She began to call out. There was no answer. She broke into a trot, inspecting every tree trunk; she grabbed a stick and dragged it gently through the thickness of oat grass and goldenrod, hoping it would snag him. Then she was full-out running through the russets and dried seed heads, the wet mulch of fallen leaves and naked bramble. The sky became a gutted mackerel: grey-silver, lurid red. Pete-Pete, Pete-Pete, I give up. The wind threw back her voice. Come out. It’s over. The game is over. She jumped over stumps. Her knees hurt. It started to rain. Where are you? Answer me. Answer me!

  The worst was happening in her head; she began to run scattershot, back and forth over the same spots, wherever the compass of her panic directed her. She couldn’t see him, hear him, smell him. The clouds split open and she felt close to doing the same. Finally she stopped, bent over for a breath, and chided herself to calm down, pay attention. When she straightened, it was the flashing brightness of his eyes, his little grin that caught her eye. A hundred metres ahead of her was a patch of gooseberry bushes in the middle of the field, tough old things with sharp, unforgiving thorns and unpicked berries, overripe and burgundy brown. She’d run past it several times without looking, stared into it without seeing. He was there, still as a small animal, tucked in under the branches so as not to get scratched. There hadn’t been a moment when he was in trouble.

  She ran to the patch, fell to her knees, pulled him into the cinch of motherhood. The rain wet his face so he was shiny as a newborn. Tomorrow. Can we play again tomorrow? He was laughing – a sound that was joyful, at ease in its world. Each time she stepped on the land, she heard it again.

  The first to arrive are teenaged boys, curious. They skid their BMX bikes to a halt on the gravel shoulder, let them fall to the ground. Al Miller, a traditional council chief, and his sons drive up in a pickup loaded with old mattresses and discarded lumber. They proceed to drag them across the site’s dirt-road entrance.

  “Gotta make this barricade look serious, huh, Helen?” He winks at her.

  “Minnie’s on the way with a cooler, sandwiches.”

  Shayna scrolls through her cellphone address book, rhymes off names.

  “No, not him. He supports band council,” says Helen.

  “Jenny Hill?”

  “Wish-washy.”

  “What about the Porter twins? Their ma?”

  “Good people. Longhouse. They’ll help out.”

  Shayna clears her throat. “What about Ruby?”

  Helen imagines the sheen of effort that forms under Ruby’s lower lip around this time of day, the first hour or so after opening the Three Sisters snack shack on Eighth Line, which the two have co-owned for a decade. (Three sisters? white folk always ask. So where’s the third one?) The last thing she said to Ruby: “Sure a little resistance might not be good for you?”

  Her sister had smiled, looked wistful. She held up her coffee in a little salute. “We’re Mohawk, Helen. Resistance is a scouting party for a fight, nah?” Then Ruby turned back to the fry basket, gave it a wiggle. Bright beads of oil scattered in the sunshine as the door of the shack closed with a bang.

  Helen shakes her head. “No, not Ruby. Not now. But what about those Johnson boys – they back from university?”

  After the mattresses and lumber are heaped in front of the entrance to the Jarvis Ridge development and Minnie has distributed egg salad sandwiches and plastic cups of watery lemonade, Ryan Isaacs delivers two empty oil drums for fires at night. Al creates blocks of shade by stringing tarpaulins between lengths of pipe and setting out borrowed lawn chairs underneath; the half-dozen adults get out of the sun and settle into silence.

  The teenagers tear through the obstacle course of surveyor stakes on their bikes, until one wheels towards the adults on the lawn chairs and shouts. “So, whatta we doing now?”

  “We’re doing it,” says Helen.

  The boy’s face is bright with impatience. “But you’re not doing anything!”

  The adults laugh.

  “We’re doing what we’re good at,” says Al. “We’re waiting.”

  Helen watches the teenager jump back on his bike and make circles around the barricade. She smiles and wonders when it will all go to hell.

  CHAPTER 2

  From her vantage on a bench outside, Cherisse has yet to see a single customer walk through the doors of Curiosities ’n’ Collectibles and set off its teeth-grating chimes. Yup, that’s weird, even for the overpriced junk shop. And inside, the woman behind the counter has opened her cash drawer a half-dozen times, bumping it closed with her hip as if the contents were tea leaves she was trying to shake into a different reading.

  Cherisse looks around. There are three unclaimed parking spots outside the Main Street shop fronts, on a Saturday morning. That never happens. Another oddity: there’s an entire stack of fresh ciabatta loaves remaining in the window of Paulsen’s Bakery and it’s past eleven a.m. For a couple of years now she has watched the pale-faced big-city refugees who buy the large homes on Doreville’s outskirts go batty for fresh-baked bread – as long as it’s called anything but bread. Migod, there’s ciabatta in this little town! Pain ancien! Baguette
! Focaccia! Not today. People are avoiding the town. It hasn’t been a full week since her crazy aunties got their barricade up in everybody’s face, but there’s no denying Main Street is already a whisper less welcoming for a girl like her.

  She gets up and moves towards the junk shop. Within sight is the treasure she has been stalking this past month: an atomizer made from crystal, cubed like a chunk of river ice, the blue white of winter light caught within it above a shadow of smoky topaz. Cherisse stops and leans against the Curiosities ’n’ Collectibles window, studying the atomizer displayed there – its engraved Steuben crystal orb, its threaded puffer, its swan-necked plated pumper. Nothing special there, she thinks. But the crystal, the contradictions of its colours, they make her breath catch. So, how to get it for the money stuffed in her pockets?

  She opens the shop door and her shadow elongates in the banner of sunlight that precedes her. The owner looks up; her hands crab across the counter, seize upon her eyeglasses. And Cherisse is waiting for this, the moment when her black hair, brown skin, cut of jaw register and the woman’s shoulders slump with disappointment. Ah, there it is. Let the games begin, Cherisse thinks.

  Because now the owner has a dilemma: how not to appear overtly suspicious while at the same time not letting the native girl out of her sight. Just in case. So many things – the vintage Stratton cigarette case with the creamy enamelled front, the Baccarat hand-cut crystal powder dish with the Bakelite lid – could be slipped into a pocket or a purse. Cherisse gravitates to those things just to make the woman flutter about like an injured bat.

  “Can I help you?”

  The owner has moved in close, and she blinks as if startled by the abruptness of her own voice. Cherisse loosens her grip on the cranberry goblet she’s holding. In a flash, the woman’s hands have taken it from her, placed it back on the crewel-edged runner with the rest of the set.