Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Twice now, after talking late into the night, a tumbler of Scotch at his wrist, Mitch has fallen asleep at his desk. A case of Dalwhinnie arrived midweek, delivered by cab from the liquor store. When did we start getting home deliveries of booze? Ella barked from the foyer. He answered by pushing his door shut.

  “I have an appointment with Coulson Stercyx. You know how slippery he is. This is the best time to meet with him.”

  All morning she’s searched for a focus, something that will help her to feel well-groomed, unafraid, purposeful. Her office is clean. Her calendar is organized. That leaves only one unfinished item on her to-do list: her yearly discussion with Coulson Stercyx. He vexes her more than any of the region’s other remaining tobacco growers – a motley tribe of grizzled Belgians, paprika-stained Hungarians, garlicky Poles, and their ill-mannered, entitled, agricultural-college-graduate sons. She is wearing down the others in stages; Coulson is the only one she can’t reach. As the clock inched towards noon and she couldn’t conjure a more appealing task, she picked out a freshly dry-cleaned outfit, hopped in the shower, brought a heartfelt brio to her toilette.

  “Do you have to look so damn good to see a farmer?”

  Ella swings her head around and notices the slackness of her husband’s face, the puffiness under his eyes. “Mitch, it wouldn’t hurt to tidy yourself up, get yourself out of the house. You’ll feel better.” And then she sails past him, out the patio doors and through the back gate.

  It occurred to Mitch at a young age that he would never have his wished-for growth spurt. His stocky frame held fast to a boy’s softness; it resisted muscle no matter how many pull-ups he did, sneaking out to the monkey bars at a nearby primary school. His face, the thinness of his hair, the seriousness of his expression seemed to have slid towards middle age by the end of adolescence. He learned quickly to offset his deficits with good manners and strategy. At seventeen he was the point man and bookie for the drag races that made Doreville summer nights hum with distant engine song.

  The tobacco growers’ kids had Trans Ams, shovel-nosed Firebirds, and Ford pickups, even Buick Regals. The native kids had Dusters, juiced-up GMCS, and no fear. And Mitch, who’d found late in his high school career a branch of mathematics that appealed to him – odds – developed something he’d never had before: a reputation. He wasn’t known as a pothead or a rebel or a rich kid, but everyone knew Mitch had a taste for a gamble, and that he could be trusted with others’ money. The protocol was simple: a challenger pulled his muscle car into Mitch’s father’s grocery store parking lot, found Mitch in the store behind the deli counter, and asked him if the store stocked Road & Track magazine. We only stock Car and Driver. It’s better, Mitch would answer. And then they would wander over to the sundries aisle, which was usually deserted, and arrange the race, the preliminary wager. Over the next few days, prospective bettors had to buy a pack of gum or cigarettes from his father’s store if they wanted to get in on the action. It was good business, and if the old man suspected anything, he never said so.

  In 1981 the best place to drag race was along the dirt and gravel road that passed the outer boundary of the reserve and divided two large tobacco farms, one of which belonged to the Stercyx family and the other to a Frenchman named Flavelle. Mitch and his friends called the road Tobacco Ridge. It sat at a slight elevation from the fields it bisected, a narrow drumlin that made driving at high speeds in the wrong direction all the more thrilling for the steep bailout required should an oblivious driver come cresting over the ridge going the right way.

  The man who was killed in the last drag race Mitch organized was named Barrett David Williams Junior. He was a six-foot-three God-fearing Jamaican with a low laugh, and a fierce work ethic. On the Stercyx farm, where he started as a primer, then rose to become the harvest foreman, his name had gone through a series of truncations. B. David Jr. turned into Big Davy Jr. and finally just Big Junior. Rumour had it that old man Stercyx paid all his primers a premium to stop them from being poached by other growers, and Big Junior got double that. One large-framed red Raleigh three-speed bicycle was kept just for him. Other growers never said it to Stercyx’s face, but Big Junior’s special treatment made them grumble in private, All the primers will expect it.

  When Greg Sawicki rolled up to the grocery store in a new Chevrolet Camaro Z-28 that day, Mitch felt smug. He thought the new car’s tangerine colour was deeply uncool. And he figured Sawicki for the kind of guy who would forfeit a manual transmission for the extra ten horsepower that came with the three-speed automatic – which was going to make it too easy. Mitch bet on Stu Green, a huge kid from the reserve who put out his cigarettes on his biceps and drove a mustard-coloured Pontiac GTO he’d restored in shop class.

  Mitch didn’t go to the race, but he remembers the phone call that night and the way he watched a mosquito sink its proboscis into the damp flesh of his forearm as his throat tightened.

  Who won?

  He could hear Sawicki take a deep breath on the other end of the line. We didn’t finish.

  Whaddya mean? You mean you lost and Stu won. Ha!

  It was a scratch, man. Something got hit. Everybody took off.

  Mitch imagined the tires’ egg-beater chew against the asphalt, the car underbellies pinging with pebbles. Could you see what it was? A deer? A dog?

  I don’t know, said Sawicki. His voice sounded high, helium-thin. It was big. A deer maybe.

  Well, did you hit it or Stu?

  Both.

  They went quiet.

  Did you go looking for it?

  Everybody took off pretty fast. I could hear something moan. But it was dark out there, man. It was thrown way down the embankment, into the field.

  They stopped talking.

  Dented my hood.

  Standing there in the dark of his parents’ kitchen, Mitch wanted to scratch the flesh from his arm, if only to relieve the bad feelings in his gut. He hung up the phone and stood still, not knowing what to do.

  Two days later, his father lowered the newspaper at the breakfast table, took off his glasses, and squinted at his son. Stercyx’s foreman was killed on the ridge. Car that hit him was travelling so fast his body and his bike were thrown fifty metres into the fields. Cops figure it was drag racers. Damn awful way to die.

  Mitch shovelled spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth to avoid his father’s eyes.

  The man had four children back home. What he was doing out on a bike at that hour, God knows. Stupid. Stupid people.

  That afternoon Coulson, home for the summer from his first year of university, showed up at the grocery store. Two years older and nearly a foot taller than Mitch, his bare arms muscled and tight. He had an angry line for a mouth. For a half an hour he did nothing but follow Mitch. He stood at the end of every aisle Mitch was stocking and stared, clutched fists hanging at his sides. By the time his father summoned him to the back room, Mitch was shaking.

  What’s that guy want?

  I dunno.

  Well, go ask him!

  When Mitch approached, his voice quavered. Coulson reached out, grabbed the straps of Mitch’s apron, and tightened them like a noose at his neck. Don’t suppose you stock Road & Track?

  Mitch shook his head. Coulson let go with a shove. Mitch thudded against a shelf, sending a jar of raspberry jam crashing to his feet. Coulson turned and went, leaving Mitch with a spray of jellied viscera speckling his shins.

  In a small town there is no hesitation between tragedy and gossip. There were lurid rumours about where Big Junior was returning from that evening; a pox of speculation outpaced any police investigation. No witnesses came forward; no good citizens pressed for answers, indulging instead in a general indifference to the fate of migrant workers, unless they stole money or messed around with local women. A week after the hit-and-run, Greg Sawicki’s new Z-28 was found at the bottom of a quarry pond. Mitch’s betting days were over. Thereafter he avoided Coulson Stercyx if he saw him on the street.

  Three decades
later, it’s a habit he can’t break. And now the idea of his sleekly groomed wife cutting through Stercyx’s fields in her snug jeans for an unscheduled rendezvous with the brutish farmer leaves Mitch ransacking the pantry in search of the undrunk bottles of Scotch he has hidden from his son.

  Coulson is on a ladder fixing a rack in his kiln when he sees a woman cut through his north field of tobacco plants, rib-high and shiny green. In less than two months the plants will be felled, their broad, papery leaves cured yellow. He can already see how the earth holding them now will be chafed and bristled.

  The tobacco quakes and leans, arms raised in a green hallelujah to the sun, coyly flashing him glimpses of the woman’s long neck, her torso, and a roll of denim-clad hip. He wipes his brow, fires up the cordless drill, feels the wood give to the bite of a screw.

  Even in the eye-smarting brightness he can discern it is not Shayna. How he wants to imagine it is her, leaving the barricade, calling him away from his own work despite the hours of good light left in the day and all the tasks piling up like arguments against pleasure. He imagines taking a swallow of dark beer, sliding his malty tongue around her ankles, up the inside of her legs. He can already taste the syrup of Shayna’s skin, feel her fingers bounce like thrips along his back. He’s losing patience with this barricade business of hers, how it has emptied his bed, complicated every trip into town.

  Ella spots Coulson on a ladder. Even from this distance she is struck by the romance of the man – the sureness of his feet on the rungs, his strong arms raised above his head, a muscle twitching in the thick of his neck like a beating wing. Still glistening.

  The sight of him focuses her on how to phrase her approach so his face doesn’t bunch up, so he doesn’t immediately shut her down. Isn’t it just about finding the words that will paint the future like a landscape, a place he’d like to inhabit, a place that will pull him forward into redemption from tobacco’s dirty, soulless profits?

  Ginseng is all about sex, Ella said to Martin Wirkus a year earlier. And that’s why it’s a good investment. Sex is inevitable. Smoking, not so much anymore. It had taken years to wear down Martin, one of the region’s largest tobacco growers, and she credits the sex talk for ultimately making him relent. A sentry row of narrow, flat-topped tents covers his fields now. Under each black polypropylene tarp are raised mounds covered in straw mulch. This summer, nothing green will peek out from them. The soybeans and feed corn Martin planted on his remaining acres will help pay his bills for the next five years before he gets to harvest his first crop of ginseng. But if he protects the tender roots from winter frosts, a litany of vengeful fungi, and excess moisture dripping off the shade cloth, and if those roots grew into shapes that vaguely resemble a human trunk with skinny limbs, his Asian buyers will reward him generously. But until then he’ll need a lot of hand-holding.

  Ella visits weekly. They’ll both need some patience. It’s not natural, he repeated for the tenth time last week, his hands hanging like drought-sickened leaves. You work the fields all your life and you think sun, sun, sun. Will there be enough hours of it? Even when you want rain, you still want the sun the very next day. And now I grow a crop I have to hide from the sun; I spend money keeping the sun out. Cables, poles, connectors. Diggers. Yeesh.

  She can see he is resisting the vast scale of the changes ahead. Should she have elaborated on them more? But he’s a man of the land, an old, block-headed Pole, the kind who won’t let women explain farming to them. Still, ginseng is for nomads. A second crop can never be harvested on the land used to grow a first crop under artificial shade – the buildup of soil pathogens is too great. After he finally gets his first harvest, he’ll have to pull up the poles, cables, connectors, and tarps and move them to land where the root has never been cultivated. Poachers could be a problem too. Once the mature plants produce their pretty red berries, people other than Martin will be keeping tabs on his crop. There’s a price to be paid for every kind of success.

  Coulson tests his handiwork, swings himself down from the ladder, squints into the light, and turns towards the trim figure now stepping out to where he has set up easels for the priming tables.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Stercyx.”

  It’s stinking hot. He takes off his cap, mashes it into his eyes to wipe the sweat from them. “Ella, how long have we known each other?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, about thirty years. Forever.” Her laugh is anxious.

  She’s a metre away from him now, but with the sun still in his eyes he can’t focus, can’t locate her freckled cheeks, the country-club nose, the mouth that twists nervously in his presence and makes him want to either kiss her or say something mean – he can never decide which.

  “When are you going to start using my first name?”

  “Well, it’s just that I’m here on business.”

  He snorts and turns. “What business do you and I have?”

  She holds the report in front of her. Coulson notices the fine bones of her hands, the glint of her wedding ring.

  “You won’t come to my office,” Ella says with a feminine vibrato that reminds Coulson of his ex-wife. He wonders for a second what Ella looks like naked, what she sounds like laughing wildly, what’s the dirtiest thing she has ever done.

  He’s dripping with heat, so he strips to his cotton singlet and uses his balled-up shirt to wipe dry his face and underarms before waving at Ella to follow him to the farmhouse. If she didn’t fit so nicely into her jeans or there wasn’t something sweetly vulnerable in her constant lip-sucking, he would have stopped giving her the time of day years ago.

  Ella thunks down her folder on the kitchen table. Coulson watches her wrinkle her nose and he becomes aware of the farmhouse’s intractable must, faintly acrid, collected from his parents’ hard work, harder worrying. And it comes back to him again: his enchantment with Marie, the way she slid through her world like a tall ship, an elegant anachronism. And all the nights after he realized he’d driven her away, how he tossed and turned in the farmhouse bed, tormented by the desire to lay his rough hands on the talc of her skin just one more time.

  Coulson turns to the refrigerator. “Beer?”

  Ella waves her hand, wipes crumbs from the vinyl padding of a kitchen chair, and sits primly on its edge. “It’s a bit early for me.” She worries the grit from her sandals, brushes her shins, and smooths her folder on her lap.

  He pulls two bottles from the refrigerator. “Well, then, I’ll have to drink both.”

  Just as he hopes, she purses her mouth into a little dried apple as her gaze surveys the modest kitchen, finds his shirtless torso and then retreats. “You realize I’m here professionally.”

  Coulson harrumphs. “You cut through my fields … Mrs. Bain.”

  “I don’t like driving past the barricade. It’s awkward.” She coughs.

  They look at each other. He takes his first sip of beer, and out of a habit from adolescence, swishes it in his mouth until wet glimmers on his lips.

  “Coulson, there’s a new program I want to talk to you about.”

  He puts the second beer on the table in front of Ella, leans against the kitchen sink, and rests his own beer on the lip of his belt buckle. “Guess the barricade’s not so great for the real estate business.”

  She flinches slightly. Ah, there’s the fighter, he thinks.

  Ella pulls her glance upwards from his knees until she meets his eyes. Then she reaches for the beer in front of her, holds it in the air in a toast, and takes a swig. “Truth is, it’s a real drag for us,” she says, breaking into a wary smile.

  “So this program,” he says. “Lemme guess. Next spring the government wants to buy out my quota, and you’ve got it figured out that even with my investment in the kilns, the price is right and this would be an ideal time to move out of tobacco and into something else. So what is it now? Hemp? Asparagus?”

  Ella straightens, clears her throat, opens her folder. She begins talking about Brazil’s cheap labour and better
growing season and the folly of trying to compete with South American tobacco. She stops and stares at him with an expectant tilt to her head.

  He says nothing, keeps her hanging there, her chin tipped sideways. Let her worry over whether he’s contemplating his glorious future growing cut flowers and sweet potatoes for bio-diesel or simply considering the freckles at the base of her neck. She might believe this shit, but he’s unconvinced. For now anyway. Finally he lets her off the hook. “Sorry, did I hear you say ‘baby vegetables’?”

  “Mini cabbages. Broccolini. Rainbow silverbeet. The market research coming out of Australia is encouraging.”

  “You want me to grow mini cabbages?”

  “Coulson, after next spring, most of the other large growers who’ve held out will take this buyout. And the government won’t keep coming back with these offers. They’ve already completely shut down the eastern growers.” She hesitates, then adds, “You know, your property has huge agritourism potential too, being right across from a new golf course.”

  Agritourism. Golf course. Adults in short pants pushing little white balls over a bent grass monoculture. It catches like a splinter. Coulson puts on a fresh T-shirt that he grabs from a hamper sitting on the stovetop. Now the beer has worked his tongue loose, and he feels impatient with the game he plays with this woman.

  “There’ll always be tobacco grown in the Interlake. The land’s made for it, Ella. And me, I’m not good for anything else either. Certainly not corn mazes and fuckin’ pony rides!” He wishes she could fathom the cruelty of a rogue frost, or how a spot of blue mould can crater a grower with worry. When you survive these things over and over with a crop, there’s a relationship, a level of trust and inborn knowledge that you don’t throw away the minute a pretty suburban wife wags a cheque at you.

  He doesn’t have the energy to apologize. She’s already on her feet, her face screwed tightly with offence. “Tobacco really is over this time, Coulson,” she says quietly. “Call me if you have any questions.”