by Krista Foss
She looks back to see Coulson running from the barn, carrying a hoe. Ramirez is behind him, wielding a shovel. Coulson swings at the cars, the metal clanging against windows, dragging along the paint of side doors. When one car veers too closely to Ramirez, Coulson grabs him, pulls him out of the fray. They are sidelined by the strength of combustion engines, arms limp at their sides, the garden implements fallen to the ground.
In twenty-five minutes it is over. The plants, a phalanx of good soldiers, are down. Shayna falls to the soil, bewildered. A man shouts at her through a rolled-down window. “We’re taking back our rights! Our highway!”
She stares at him. “Why hurt one of your own?” she says in a voice he won’t hear.
A few townies have finally found their way around the blockade. And the half-dozen who press their faces against the windows of their vehicles look bright with revenge, drunk on righteousness. A few are young but the rest are middle-aged, senior members of their community. It is already too late when the sirens reach them. Shayna watches Coulson from a distance and worries over the crimp in his stature; he looks like a standing heartbreak. It would be better to yell, she thinks, to pull out a shotgun and wave it around. What is it about land, about taking one’s living from it, that can crush a man? The one natural disaster he won’t have counted on is the impatience of his fellow citizens to get to work or the cottage or the shopping mall on a weekday evening.
She reaches up to her neck, touches the new bite there, swollen with itch, and turns around to finish her work across the road.
After the cars leave, Coulson runs into the farmhouse, up the stairs to his old bedroom to survey the damage. If he had a gash or a burn as a boy, he would lift the bandage to stare at it, if only to be awed by the queer sight of his own flesh rudely split, red-purple, gelatinous. Something alien, like an octopus or jellyfish.
There’s nothing pretty ’bout our kind of farming, his father warned him early on. The summer before Coulson was born, his old man had been driving a highboy through the fields, spraying heptachlor to control budworm, when his horse got a scare, bucked, and sent his father keeling over backwards, bouncing off the chemical drums and dragging his face along a broken metal rib before he hit the ground. He got up with the white of his cheekbone peeking out from a flap of flesh, his smile ripped open at one side. He climbed back on the highboy to finish his work before he drove himself to the hospital. The scar that resulted – an ugly purple line that cut across his cheek and sank deep as a fishhook into the side of his lip – made others recoil. But to Coulson that scar was as intrinsic to his father as the old man’s strong nose, his heavy brow. He barely noticed it.
Now he can’t stop staring through his bedroom window at this new defacement, so many of his plants suppurating, the rot setting in. The south field took the worst of it. Half of the east field remains. The west field is untouched. But even with what he has already kilned, it won’t be enough to fulfill his contract, pay his bills. He feels a loss of will. He might just sell it all to Elijah Barton, even though its quality is too high for his discount cigarettes.
It’s been a cruelly perfect day for tobacco harvesting. The morning sun poked through a cheesecloth of cumulostratus, the kind of cloud that slows the heat but keeps the plants ripening apace, makes the air temperate and still burns off the dew – an ideal morning. They spent it priming the south field’s cutters and moved to the east field after lunch. Now it’s dusk and Helen has laid out dinner on the picnic tables. No one is eating. Ramirez walks through the spoiled rows, holding his head.
Coulson rolls his hand along the chalky walls of his bedroom. He can still sense the young boy in this room, the long seasons alone with work-wearied parents, the resentments that sent him away, the loyalties that would draw him back. It was a test, in a way, living with such continuity of place without feeling stuck. He feels he has passed the test. He has nothing more to prove. He grabs the keys on his bureau and runs down the stairs.
The way the blockade came apart was as practised as a theatre set being struck. A backhoe scooped away the gravel. Debris got thrown in a large waste bin delivered by dusk. A group of men hooked up the trailer home and pulled it from the highway, abandoning it on the edge of the development. What was created with such joyful defiance was dismantled sombrely.
Shayna wondered if a feeling of triumph, so absent from this grimy labour, would build gradually. That rested, cleaned up, and properly fed, all of them would feel altered by what they had achieved. The prizes were small: a moment or two of visibility, the brief drawing of attention to an injustice, a piece of land neither reclaimed nor lost entirely. With the blockade gone, tensions would lighten. Should lighten. Must lighten. Their voices, still hoarse from this recent thrill of being angry all the time, would recover, and somehow they would all slide back into a polite, if wary, coexistence. Still, things could never be quite the same. She looked over again at the destruction in Coulson’s fields.
When the work was completed, the garbage cleared, the two dozen who remained stood off to the side of the highway. Soon enough the first car whizzed past. And then the next one, the driver’s face turned away from them. Shayna had put her faith in action and then negotiation, and now the blockade was gone. And she understood that shrewder, more political people than she had thrown their hands into the clay of what would come next, given it a shape that was already hardening.
They hugged each other. There were some tears. Good work, they told her. She was offered rides home, but she told them she preferred to leave the way she came – on foot. Then it was just her picking up empty coffee cups, watching the crows alight to bargain-hunt the litter.
Now she crosses the asphalt once more. Her shoes come off. She steps from fallen leaf to fallen leaf. Juice seeps from crushed tobacco plants. It makes a sticky poultice under her weary feet. She feels level with this ruin. When Pete-Pete was born, she asked the nurses to save her placenta so she could bury it in the backyard just as her mother and sister had, to ensure their children would always return to them. The nurses said it was against policy.
The instant the car struck her young son, she felt a terrible calm. It was over quickly. Long enough. His little body sailed seven metres through the air. She saw his hands open. It wasn’t a trick of physiology. With whatever consciousness her boy had left, he understood something of what was to be. He let her go. She couldn’t forget that. She would wail and weep and wreck her body with grief, yet he’d begun for her the thing she wouldn’t do on her own. When she ran to where his body had landed, he was still. His eyes were closed, his small pink mouth curled into a smile, his hands open in a shaman’s benediction. Sonkwehonwe, she said as she laid her head on his small chest.
She kneels down now and gathers up a handful of unbruised tobacco leaves. They are supple and perfect. She fans them out on the soil so they look like opened hands. “Goodbye,” she says, and she straightens, a hand resting on the pulse of her belly.
Coulson’s truck rushes past in the farm laneway. Shayna watches him escape but understands that it’s momentary. He will go to the river. He will yell and throw things. Then he’ll come back, because he can. There is no leaving everything you love, Shayna thinks, and she turns towards home.
EPILOGUE
One June it was strafed, turned into a moonscape of mud, something injured. Now in this, another June, there’s a winding tangle of milk vetch tickling the hardpack. Patches of low wood sorrel and clusters of fleabane reclaim long berms with delicate blossoms of yellow, white, mauve leaning into every breeze. Like all land, it is finding its own way back.
Elijah Barton sits in his Mercedes at the edge of the former Jarvis Ridge development and smokes. The billboard is long gone; only its posts remain. The hydro tower lies at one edge of the field, a toppled giant. The trailer – set ablaze one dark night in the fall – is a shredded carcass. The wildflowers and weeds weave around, tumble over, nestle inside the structures like trusting children.
He likes t
o come here and think. Who owns the o’tá:ra, how it will be used, what is to become of it – all that has become a pile of papers, a small file in the large portfolio of an uninterested deputy minister. But wildflowers don’t wait for bureaucrats. Neither do people. Elijah sees a picnic table near the border with the reserve. A square has been cleared and planted with vegetables. Small walking trails wind through the scrub of weeds to the highway.
She has come before on this path, and today she does not disappoint. Shayna walks with a straight back. Her hair grows long down it. Swaddled against her chest in a bright cloth is the infant with extraordinary eyes. She held the child up to him one day, when they bumped into each other at the snack shack. The child was big. Hair the colour of flint. And blue eyes, deeply blue. A big, blue-eyed, laughing girl.
He knows where she is going. She will cross the highway, walk up to the farm, enter through the kitchen door without knocking. All spring he has been watching, making a game of guessing the arrangements, the negotiation that goes on between these two people with such a glorious child between them.
There are rumours Stercyx will sell his farm. He has not put in crops this year. Speculation is rampant, potential buyers falling over themselves. All those acres without a treaty claim registered against them. Elijah chuckles. He knows something they don’t. The land is a bridge between these two people, an isthmus. If the woman cannot carry their child unimpeded from the land she fought for to the land he husbands, she will not come. It’s a simple metric, one Stercyx would understand. Next year there will be crops, thinks Elijah. Maybe even tobacco. He’d put money on it. In fact, he’d line up as a customer.
He turns on the radio, finds the reserve station. A song is playing, some simple tune about home and how you’re always coming back. Elijah cranks the volume. This singer has something, he thinks, a gutsy delivery saved from being ordinary by a hitch of heartbreak. It redeems the somewhat obvious lyrics, the unaccomplished guitar playing. Elijah doesn’t need the announcer to tell him who she is. He knows that anguish. You think you’ll leave and never look back, she sings with a big voice that slides into a ragged vibrato.
This is the very thing that Elijah gets about land: What’s on it may change, even what’s underneath, who controls it. But in the lifetime of a people, even that of a single man, the fact of land remains constant. Individuals, nations, ways of life may have to wait without justice, displaced from their own soil. But the land itself has its own kind of justice, its own understanding. It can outwait them all. There is something comforting about that, he thinks. Elijah blows a puff of smoke skyward, watches it curl away from him like a river, and laughs.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Kanyen’kehá:ka speakers will recognize I have taken liberties with the word o’tá:ra – which means “clay” or “clan,” and thus “family.” Thank you for your indulgence.
Editor Lara Hinchberger is a marvel of instinct, intelligence, and artistry. I’m truly grateful for the potential she saw in this book, and for her grace and hard work in shaping it. I’ve become a better writer because of her.
My smart-as-a-whip and charming agent Samantha Haywood has been another champion. So many thanks to her and to Stephanie Sinclair for their insightful readings.
Without the generosity of friends and fellow writers, the manuscript would never have been finished. As my thesis adviser in UBC’S MFA in Creative Writing program, Lisa Moore managed to see something worthy in a rough early manuscript and gave me the courage to stick with it. Trevor Cole was an influential role model for his focus and craft as a novelist. Jeffrey Griffiths, John Roberts, Miranda Hill, John Martin, Rick Montour, Sally Cooper, and Ania Szado provided expert reads and thoughtful feedback. Both my sister, Katrine Foss, and Mary Vincenzetti read the manuscript twice and offered insights, encouragement, and much-needed laughter. Conversations with Amos Key Jr. and Brian Maracle (not to mention Brian’s language lessons) provided critical perspectives. Nya:wen.
Many books and journalistic media were invaluable resources to me, notably the reportage of Turtle Island News, Tekawennake, and the Hamilton Spectator; Back on the Rez: Finding the Way Home, by Brian Maracle; People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka, by Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera; Entering the War Zone: A Mohawk Perspective on Resisting Invasions, by Donna Goodleaf; Conflict in Caledonia: Aboriginal Land Rights and the Rule of Law, by Laura DeVries; Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy and How the Law Failed All of Us, by Christie Blatchford; Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Aboriginal Reality, by Rupert Ross; and A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, by John Ralston Saul. A memorable afternoon in the Delhi Tobacco Museum and Heritage Centre, along with Tobacco in Canada, by Lyal Tait; Smoke and Mirrors: The Canadian Tobacco War, by Rob Cunningham; and Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, edited by Joseph C. Winter, aided my understanding of the history and agriculture of this important crop. My former student Megan Weatherbee was a wealth of information about growing up on a tobacco farm, and Alex Podetz shared his experiences priming tobacco.
Many thanks to my mother for inspiring wonder and respect for the natural world and providing four wonderful siblings with whom to enjoy it. My daughter, Fehn, has filled my life, and thus my writing, with meaning, and I am grateful to her for her abiding interest in this book, not to mention her talents as a photographer. Finally, thank you, John, for starting a conversation about a book I was reading.
