Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Peg takes a deep breath and musters her high-wattage maternal warmth. “Your deadline, of course. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I’ll be right with you.”

  Peg pinches her waist. She hates the thought of being on the late news looking bloated, overfed, hypertensive. Then she presses on the door handle and unfolds herself from the car, freighted with all the ways Doreville’s potential could be looted if she doesn’t do the right thing.

  The first rule of remaining unnoticed in a town like Doreville is not to drive up in a limited-edition Mercedes the colour of a newly birthed fawn. That’s a car people look twice at, often stooping to the window to remark Nice ride, or I’ll be getting myself one of these little babies after the Dodge Caravan kicks it. It’s a car people remember. But today Elijah Barton wants to be another forgettable schlep rubbernecking the little drama at the new development: curious, but not curious enough to quit the inside of his vehicle, with its tinted windows and anonymity. As the mayor shambles into the fray, Elijah pulls his red pickup into an inconspicuous vantage point thirty metres behind her SUV. He looks around and sees at least a half-dozen other Dorevillians just like him, sunk low in their car seats and truck cabs as if they were at a drive-in movie.

  Even he can see that the policing situation is a mess. Holland must have been stuck with the thankless task of negotiating how the chain of command would work between the local cops and this infestation of out-of-district forces. By the way Holland keeps looking to the sky and then letting his shoulders slump, Elijah guesses the hapless guy had his sights on an afternoon golf game, now downgraded to a bucket of balls at the driving range. Soon he’ll have to give up that too, and even the Sunday night barbecue, coming home instead to grilled food shrunken and cold in its foil wrappings.

  Just beyond the mayor’s car somebody has set up lawn chairs and a hibachi. Beers are being tossed from open coolers. Townies are treating it like a freakin’ tailgate party, Elijah thinks.

  Ten metres ahead of him, a box-jawed sergeant leans into a young local cop, yelling. “Let him go. Right now!”

  Holland moves towards them. The young cop, his face rude and red as a baboon’s arse, is holding on to the scruff of a native kid, Marty Horse, Bobby’s son. Never misses an opportunity to cause some shit. The young cop looks like a recent college graduate with a short fuse and too much to prove. Elijah likes that he won’t let go of Marty, that he challenges the out-of-district sergeant, who must have a criminology degree and probably wears aftershave to work, and somehow manages to outrank not just the kid cop but Holland, who has to be a decade older than him. Elijah rolls down his window to hear better, pulls his truck in closer.

  “I caught this kid in the midst of a criminal act. Breaking into the parked cars of local residents. Two windows were broken.”

  “Let him go. You were ordered not to use force. You are under my command.”

  “Were we ordered to ignore criminal acts? Auto theft is not peaceful protest. Sir.”

  Constable Holland steps into the melee a bit tentatively. It must be unclear to him just how much authority he has at the moment. But he simply leans over and lays his hand on the young cop’s shoulder.

  The sergeant, smelling his advantage, ups the ante. “One last time, let him go. And I’m taking your badge number.”

  Holland nods at the younger officer, who releases Marty. Mistake, thinks Elijah. And sure enough, Marty scrambles away a few metres, turns, flips up his middle finger, and laughs wildly. The other local cops hang back silently, their faces flat with disbelief.

  “I think you’re understood. No need to press it much further.” Holland smiles at the sergeant, offers his hand to shake. The sergeant simply moves a few yards away and pulls out his phone. Holland turns, reaches out to pat the rookie’s shoulder, but the young cop keeps his eyes down, remains stiff with anger. Elijah rolls up his window.

  Helen Fallingbrook paces the margins of the media pack. Reporters irritate her, the way they jostle like crows over a bit of foil. Still, Shayna insisted they participate in the press conference, claiming it will be a good opportunity to present their side of the story, no matter how far down the columns of type it appears. And no doubt Shayna is right. The reporters will respect her niece – her cool command of the facts, the barely used law degree inflecting her talk with authority.

  Minutes earlier, Bobby Horse pulled Helen aside to loudly insist Shayna couldn’t represent the Great Law if she were seeing a white man, especially one who lived across from the development. “She’s an apple,” he said. “Only red on the outside.”

  Helen was not going to let a hothead like Bobby dictate spokespeople. She fired back with uncharacteristic irritation, “Great Law? Whose version can you recite? Gimme a break, Bobby. Don’t you just show up to burn things?”

  There were chuckles from those who overheard her, but it left Helen with an anthill of worries. Is it a problem, this tie between her niece and the farmer? Certainly even the slightest suggestion of Shayna’s being compromised is troubling, now that people are showing up at the barricade whom Helen doesn’t trust, whose reserve politics neither woman share.

  She tries to see beyond the crowd to what they are reclaiming. Townspeople and outsiders see a discrete, strangely shaped piece of territory, a passing patch of scrub or an inconsequential shape on the map. Helen imagines its sedimentary layers of memory and reinvention: Attawandarons coaxing tobacco from the glacial silt; Europeans plundering basswood, ironwood, oak, maple, and tulip trees, then ultimately the softwoods; expropriations, swindles, reworded treaties pawing away at the rectangles of forested river frontage awarded to the tribes who’d stood with the British in all their wars. The hunting gone. The unrooted sandy soil blowing everywhere. Dunes that showed up in a matter of hours, blocking roads, her mother, Lena, telling her. Blow pits in the middle of fields.

  The government’s grim-faced economists designating the interlake delta as wasteland, unsuitable for growing. And then an American soil chemist arriving with an appetite for cheap land and a vision of a tobacco plantation system north of Virginia. Poor Kentucky sharecroppers following. Belgians turning up next. And tobacco growing everywhere – except here. Somehow the kidney-shaped o’tá:ra remained uncultivated, ignored or left alone, assumed to be among the reserve’s diminished holdings, a challenge to their collective forgetting.

  When Helen was a baby, Lena had taken blows from an old Belgian who’d set up a sawmill among the o’tá:ra pines. She got a few of her own in too. He left a swath of savaged stumps; Lena was charged with assault. And the land was assumed again by her people; they didn’t care whose name was on its official title. They knew to whom it belonged.

  The mayor steps into the fray, and Helen stops her pacing to listen. Poor Peg Redhill always looks as marbled as bacon in the glare of the TV cameras. The city television station is here, and so are reporters from the county weekly, the big local daily, and the all-news radio station. They lob all the expected questions.

  What will the mayor’s office do?

  “It’s out of my jurisdiction. My hands are tied.”

  How is the town dealing with it?

  “The people of Doreville are very patient and resourceful. That’s why we are the fastest-growing community in the interlake basin.”

  Does the town support the developer’s injunction against the barricade?

  The mayor pauses. “Well, that’s a bit tricky. In spirit, Doreville is behind any development that brings new money and growth to the community. But because we haven’t assumed the roads on this particular development – it’s just too early – we can’t technically support the injunction.”

  Peg Redhill beads up in the glare of the cameras and her cheeks splatter with purple. She appears trapped. Where is Shayna? Helen wonders.

  A lavender-sheathed television reporter moves forward. Her voice is loud, triumphant. “Mayor Redhill, if the Town of Doreville will not come out in support of the injunction, how can people not interpret that
as support for the barricade?”

  The crowd of reporters moves in tighter around the mayor, shoving tape recorders and microphones closer to her mouth. Helen cringes at the disrespect.

  “The Town of Doreville does not support the barricade.” The mayor sounds newly unsteady.

  A voice Helen recognizes asks the next question. “Mayor Redhill, if the town has allowed this development to go forward – approved the land purchase, the zoning – for all intents and purposes it supports the development. You can’t have it both ways, can you?”

  The cameras swing around to find the questioner, and Helen sees in the parting crowd the small, sure stature of her niece.

  “We don’t support the barricade. We support the development.”

  Stick with the short answers, Mayor, Helen thinks. We’ll all do okay then.

  “But isn’t it true that, at every stage of this development, our people have filed considerations against it? And isn’t it true that, if you were to support the injunction, you would be financially liable to the developers if it turns out – as we think it will – that we have a legitimate claim to this land? Isn’t that what you’re really trying to avoid?”

  There is a collective inhale among the crowd around the mayor. It’s the “gotcha” moment, thinks Helen. She suspects that most of the reporters, including the young woman from the television station, haven’t done their homework. But even if they don’t fully understand their own good luck, they have the predatory sense to keep their microphones in position, their tape rolling, until the meaning of what’s happening becomes clear.

  Peg Redhill looks as if she has been struck. Her mouth opens like a hungry goldfish’s.

  “Mayor Redhill, isn’t it incumbent upon someone in your position, an elected official in paid office, to understand the protracted legal battles that lead to barricades? And isn’t part of your job to protect the town from financial liability, just in case we’re right?”

  Helen wiggles into the group, reaches for Shayna’s arm. The slender bicep is hard, tensed for battle, familiar. Helen pictures her mother’s jaw, as sharp as a Dutch hoe, her eyes tight and unsmiling. “Is this the direction we want to take?” she whispers into her niece’s ear. “Won’t embarrassing the mayor hurt us later?” But Helen can feel them – the dead grandmothers – huddling around Shay, giving her little room to move.

  It’s too late for Helen’s cautions. The mayor’s eyes are bright with the same combatant’s spark as her niece’s. “It is pretty clear what we support. We support growth,” she says. “We support good, hard-working people.” She clears her throat. “Some of us are busy earning our way. We don’t have the luxury of sitting around, blocking progress.”

  Helen draws in a breath of disappointment. Flashes of light stripe the mayor’s face. Now all the reporters are yelling, asking her follow-up questions, hungry for more remarks they suddenly recognize will make their editors smile.

  Peg’s face darkens with realization. She waves them away. “I’ve said enough. That’s it.”

  The reporters circle Shayna. In the aureole of camera lights, her proud face and dark hair are arresting. Helen notices that Shayna is wearing earrings, little winks of silver in the lights, and her eyebrows are freshly plucked into questioning arches.

  Behind them, Peg Redhill hobbles towards her truck with a rounded back. Helen feels an unexpected urge to comfort the woman. Perhaps I am too old-fashioned for this game, she thinks. In her mother’s generation, the skilled hunters left the lame to coyotes and other predators.

  The injunction arrives after eight p.m., when the sky looks like carbon-flecked amber. The man who brings it steps out of a black town car. Las, who is standing with Gordo on the other side of the street, recognizes the profile of his father pressing himself into the back seat of his lawyer’s vehicle, watching. They have lined up with the twenty-odd Doreville residents who have come to see things made right. Get out of the car, old man, Las thinks. Take charge.

  But no, it is this other man, wearing dress pants and a sports jacket, who holds the manila envelope, the gleam of his good shoes catching the last rays of sun as he walks towards the barricade. The natives huddle together in front of it, like an undisciplined football squad. Off to one side there is still a sparse collection of reporters and a TV crew. More police begin to move into formation across from them. Las recognizes the deep blue uniforms of riot cops, but he can’t see any shields, helmets, guns.

  “They’re goin’ in soft,” says Gordo under his breath.

  They lean side by side on Gordo’s red truck, drinking the last beers from a six-pack, denting the cans with veiny grips. The man in the dress pants stops. He extends his arm and the manila envelope hangs in the air between him and the Mohawks, who stand in an unmoving row three metres away.

  An old woman moves forward and takes the envelope.

  “Showtime,” Las says.

  She opens it up, pulls out the legal-sized sheet, and reads it. Las and Gordo chuck their empty tins into the back of the pickup and follow the other onlookers across the pavement to get a better view.

  The woman takes the sheet and folds it, then calls out. Another woman approaches. She is smaller, younger, her hair loose, falling over the shoulders of an untucked man’s shirt. The new woman reads the document. The watching crowd is a shuffle of feet, impatient whispers.

  The document is handed back to the older woman, who steps forward and rips it into dozens of small pieces. The younger woman crouches, scoops the shreds together in a pile, pulls out a lighter, and sets it on fire. An ululating cry breaks out among the Mohawks.

  Las feels wild with rage. The law, he tells himself. No respect for the fucking law.

  The paper burns fast, leaves a ragged twining of smoke. The women walk back to their people at the barricade and begin to talk and laugh.

  Nothing else happens.

  “What the hell?” somebody from the crowd of townspeople yells at the cops. “Do something!”

  Then they are moving forward, two dozen law-abiding Doreville citizens who have come to see justice served, and all of them are yelling, screaming at the cops and then at the natives, who begin to taunt them back. Somebody picks up a rock and tosses it towards the barricade. It is answered by a dozen rocks, all of them rookie pitches, none drawing blood.

  The man in the dress pants turns on his heel and does a half lope to the black car, which accelerates away once he clambers in. Las’s father pivots in the back seat, and for an instant their eyes meet. Las holds his gaze, but the old man looks down quickly.

  “No, don’t run away!” Las shouts. But the car is an onyx blur.

  The police fan out to separate the townspeople from the natives. Somebody yells, “They have their backs to the lawbreakers. They’re protecting them!”

  They all start yelling after that. They yell in disbelief and outrage. “Get off our land,” the natives yell back. The police remain in a stiff-necked line and say nothing, do nothing. And then, after forty minutes, the voices become raw and they fade out slowly, like all the songs Las hates. Close by, two men start talking about a motocross race in the next town, and whether they can reach the beer store before it closes, and the futility of staying here in the dark, wasting this good summer evening, when they could be watching the prospect of a decent crash. The crowd drifts away until there is a just a single pickup, the same colour as Gordo’s, at a remove from where the action had been. Finally, it too leaves.

  Las’s voice is ragged from the strain of yelling. His fists are curled and he does not want to go home, cannot go home, where the lawyer’s gleaming black car sits in the driveway.

  “I need to hurt something,” he says.

  Gordo snickers.

  When the reporters have scattered, Shayna feels a caffeine flush, triumphant. She turns to look for Helen, to see her good work reflected in the older woman’s eyes. But her aunt is nowhere in sight. The barricade supporters have wandered over to behind the development entrance, where a n
ew urn of coffee has arrived and blankets are being handed out to those staying the night. Her elation loses its ballast. She was expecting pats on the back, some parsing of the scrum’s to-and-fro, even being ribbed for having tidied up for the cameras. She’s been looking forward to it.

  Now only one figure waits for her in the dusky light, his thumbs tucked into his belt. Coulson’s shirt looks fresh, even new. For her? She feels a flash of irritation. There is only so much of her to go around. And this stuff between a man and a woman requires some effort, initially at least. She is out of practice. If she leans against him, surely he will bend and kiss the part in her hair, tell her she has done well. But those smiling eyes of his are bright, a measure too intense. She feels the urge to turn and run.

  It’s only a year since she got a first impression of him, literally – a large bootprint in the mud among the o’tá:ra’s prolific black raspberry bushes. She didn’t presume the berries were only hers to pick, but they were small and seedy, not as popular as summer’s later arrivals: raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, elderberries. She could usually assume that it was just her picking, and perhaps a few grannies who understood the sweet magic of black raspberries lightly stewed with mulberries or tossed with a teaspoon of sugar and the season’s first strawberries. But the bootprint maker had been sloppy, stripping some vines bare and crushing others, still hung with unready fruit. It was greedy, expedient behaviour.

  Shayna preferred going to the patch in the coolness of dusk, but the prints had dried by then, having been made in early morning’s dew-soft ground. The next morning she was up early, arriving at the bushes with a Thermos of tea just after the emerald flash of sunrise. He was already retreating. It surprised and somewhat delighted her to see the back of a tall, broad-shouldered figure holding a dainty basket, when she’d expected an old man with a coffee tin or a teenaged boy with a grocery bag and more energy than sense.

  “Hey,” she said, and the man turned. His whiteness gave her a small shock. Even if the o’tá:ra wasn’t technically on the reserve, everyone knew that her people made use of it without interference.