by Fred Stenson
“I don’t know what any of that means,” said Paul, “but either it didn’t work or the gas came out somewhere else.”
“What about that?” Tom asked, pointing. Black smoke rolled at them from the burning pit.
“Yeah,” said Paul, “that stuff stinks like hell and hurts your throat too.”
Lance stared at the glass tube.
“Are your kids okay?” Tom asked Paul.
“They’re not. I’d take them out of here but my truck’s broke down.”
Lance put the glass thing back in his pocket, then reached and scratched the back of his head. “I’ll take them.”
“That would help.”
“You should probably go too. You and your son.” Lance nodded at Luke.
“Can’t be done, not in that little car of yours.”
“You can come to my place if you want,” said Tom. “It stinks there too but it’s not this bad.”
“Luke and me better stay with our pigs.”
It made no sense but Tom didn’t argue. Evert and Paul discussed where Gertie and the kids should go. Luke was sent to the house to get things moving. Tom followed Lance to his car. The look of Lance’s tiny car sandwiched between the caragana row and the rusted grille of the truck pleased Tom, made him swagger a bit. Lance stood by his car door, hand on the handle.
“Something else you wanted to say?” he asked.
“I’ve got two sows about to farrow. We’re not in the pig business for fun.”
“I understand that.”
“I doubt it. Do you know what Paul’s truck is broken down from? No gas in the tank or money to buy any. Pigs and a bit of cream are his only sources of income.”
“Is your family all right?”
“You know they’re not because Ella phoned last night. Ella’s taken Billy to town, so don’t bother going to our place.”
There was no sign of Gertie and the Gersten kids yet. Tom leaned on the tall fender of his grain truck and rolled a smoke. He held out his makings to Lance but the young man shook his head.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Lance said.
“They blood-tested Billy,” Tom said. “Doc says he’s got anemia. Said we should feed him liver. He hates liver, and so do I. Even the dog will only eat it raw.”
Tom waited, expecting Evert to say he was sorry again, but the young fellow seemed to understand how weak and unhelpful that was to hear.
Tom continued. “I could say the plant caused Billy’s sickness. You could say it didn’t. But I’ll tell you one thing. Ella and I grew up around here, eating what our kids eat. Our families’ beef, pork, eggs, milk, butter. Lived out of our gardens in summer and ate our own canned stuff in winter. Now suddenly our boy can’t make good blood.”
“We’re starting a new round of maintenance. We’ll change out filters and solutions.”
“Why don’t you just admit you don’t know what to do?”
The two of them stood looking at each other until Lance turned sideways and stared at the plant.
“This is an important time of year on a farm,” Tom said. “Besides the sows, the cows will start calving soon. My neighbours say I should take the whole works to our Lower Place, but I don’t have electricity or buildings there for pigs. Or enough shelter for calving.”
A deep rumble came from the plant. Tom nodded toward it.
“I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like when that sonofabitch is bigger.”
Then Gertie Gersten came, carrying two kids and bunting two more along the path with her knees. A fat cloth bag dangled from the crook of her arm. Lance ran to help. Tom remembered Ella’s milk cows. He tipped his cap to Gertie and got into his truck.
Ella’s car came into the yard earlier than Tom expected. He had finished feeding his cows and was unspooling straw bales, making a clean bed in the A-pens that held the heavy sows. He kept expecting Billy to come, to peek through the rails and make some funny comment about the sows and their peggy teats. But Billy did not show, and when Tom went inside for lunch, Billy wasn’t there either. Ella explained that she had left him in town.
“Is he sicker?” Tom asked.
“Mom wanted him for a while.” After a pause, she said, “I wanted to see if a week in town would help, if it would make his colour better.”
“A week?”
“A day or two wouldn’t prove anything.”
“What if he gets a lot better?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought that far.”
He tried to tell her about the situation at Gerstens’, how it had left him worrying about the litters inside their own sows. But Ella hurried away on an errand he suspected was imaginary.
Tom’s pattern was to have a second cup of tea and a smoke before he returned to work, but now he went outside and did his smoking by the pigpens, studying the sows. They lay inside on the fresh straw with their snouts into the fresh air, their ears forward over their tiny eyes. He also thought about how Ella had not looked at him the whole time they ate lunch.
Then came a new thought. In all the time since they met and were married, things had gone along, if not always well, then much as he had expected. They were both creatures with tempers and had occasionally had fights that shocked them both, rocked them back on their heels. But after it was over, what they wanted most was to mend the tear. That had always been possible before.
When the time in his life came to be a husband, a father, Tom had felt he was up to it. As long as things in their lives and the children’s resembled what had gone before, he was able to do it all, even easily, and mostly without thought. But now, this thing, this plant, was testing him in undreamt ways. Daily he felt too ignorant and weak to solve their problems. He guessed that Ella felt the same way—that she was living in a life too foreign to predict. But knowing that was not a solution either.
The plant made a crack and then a huge shifting noise behind his back. He looked and there came the black smoke from the pit. The wind had moved, and the smoke coiled toward him. He saw the house door open and Ella come out in her town clothes with a suitcase. This she slid onto the back seat. She did not beckon him but stood beside the car waiting.
“What now?” he asked.
“I didn’t have Billy’s iron pills with me this morning. I have to go back. I might as well stay the night. He doesn’t want to be there and he’s probably upset.”
“He never has liked their place much.”
Tom was thinking of the odd smell, medicine, brandy, pipe smoke. The old man rocking in his leather chair with a three-foot-long pipestem in his teeth, the bowl on the floor, and a taper for relighting it.
“I wouldn’t say he doesn’t like it,” Ella said.
Then don’t say it, thought Tom.
“He prefers home, that’s all,” she added.
“Like you.”
“Like anybody.”
“You’d better go, then.”
She studied him, her black eyes dancing around his face. She’d explained what she was doing clearly enough, but he felt left out anyway. He turned and went back to the pens. He heard the car door slam and the motor start. The tires spun in a pocket of mud. He was glad not to be watching.
Ella drove north and then west, but at the next intersection, she turned south for a mile, then east. She had made three sides of a square back in the direction of home and stopped in the blazed place that used to be Bauers’ yard. A crew working for Aladdin had burned the house down and pushed the charred remains into the cellar hole. Then they bulldozed it flat. She parked atop where the cellar had been and waited. Soon Lance’s car came around the corner of the windbreak. He pulled in between the caragana rows that had been the sides of Curt and Dora’s garden. That was smart: to ensure the two vehicles were not seen together.
She followed his tire marks into the garden space. Lance jumped from his car as if levered by a spring. Then it was just the two of them, with the sixty-year-old poplars towering and the melting drifts le
aking wet around their boots. She saw no need to be coy and took his hand and held it. They kissed. It lasted, and they held each other close afterwards. She got that far before being swamped by dread. She broke free and stood with her back to him, feeling the wind, a warm chinook, stroking through the trees.
Five minutes passed like this. It was odd how they did not talk, how it was like they lacked a language to do it in. Except for her everyday desire to see him and kiss him more, she had no list of wants, nothing on earth to ask or give.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, shy as a boy.
“No.” She turned and took his hand again. Smooth, cool, young hand. It must disgust him a little, inside all his foolish love, to feel the rough splits on her fingers.
“Things like this don’t happen,” she said. “Not here. You must know that.”
“But here we are.”
“I honestly don’t know what I’m doing.” She laughed. When she heard the songbird sound of this, it was shockingly like a stranger’s voice. “I don’t want any of the outcomes this leads to. It’s like the gas from your plant has made me crazy.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“Then you must be.”
When she had phoned him and asked him to come here at this time, she had indeed meant to touch him and kiss him. But what was supposed to follow was that she would tell him it was over before it started, this whatever-it-was, and that she would never meet him again. From this moment onward, he must treat her like any other local woman. She had planned that speech and was not saying any of it.
“You probably think I hate my husband to do this.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“That’s what I would think, if I were you, but it isn’t true.”
“I guess I don’t know anything about being married.”
“I thought I did. Back before the plant, I thought I was an expert. I looked down on people whose marriages went wrong.”
“Is it the plant that changed things?”
“Of course, but I don’t know what that means. Didn’t there have to be something wrong in the first place?”
“It wasn’t me that changed things, then.” He was looking down at the ground between them. She couldn’t tell if he wanted to be the reason or not.
“You’re just a nice young fellow who came along.”
“Is that all?”
“No. It’s not all.”
She kissed him again, and he was eager to continue. “I have to go,” she said. “Billy’s in town. He’s expecting me.”
“Can we meet again? Here?” he said, and she knew how it was for him, how he was blindly driven to do this and then push it further and further. The flattering, maddening thing that women always deal with when they deal with men.
“I just don’t know.”
Then he was different. She saw the change. Someone else emerged, maybe the person he was at work.
“Could you meet me here on Monday? At the same time, if it suits you?”
She looked at him. She did not say no.
“If you’re not here that day,” he said, “I’ll assume you’ve made your decision not to see me anymore. Unless I hear differently after that, I’ll leave you alone.”
Right then, even before she left his company, she was planning a strategy for Monday. Not one bit of the reluctance she claimed to have entered into it.
She gave his hand a quick squeeze and went to the car. She felt nervous suddenly and looked in all directions, as if all the eyes of the community were watching. She saw a motion along the nearest coulee edge, maybe a crow’s wing or the black tail of a horse flashing. She drove away, afraid to look in the rear-view.
Tom was wishing Billy was home. He would have been excited to see the expert, Dr. Hemmel, holding a silver bottle up like a priest with his chalice. He’d done something to break its seal and let it fill with air. Tom would have enjoyed explaining it to his son.
Dr. Hemmel was an odd man, all business and rude. He was about five and a half feet tall, with a funny crown of salt-and-pepper hair shaped out to a point in the front. From some angles, he looked like he had a little ship on his head. The scientist had shown scant interest in Tom when Lance Evert had introduced them and kept his hands in his overcoat pockets. Maybe Hemmel thought Tom went around covered in pig shit. Ella wasn’t there. She’d gone to town again; her mother had phoned to say Billy wanted her. When the bottle was filled and capped, Hemmel spoke, and Lance Evert wrote something down in a scribbler. Using a fat grease pen, Hemmel wrote #1 on the bottle’s silver side.
“We’re done here,” he said.
“I see you picked a day when it’s not stinking,” Tom said to the two of them.
“We did not pick the day,” said the scientist unpleasantly. “This is the day I could be here.”
“I also see the burning pit isn’t burning.”
The scientist swung a look at Lance Evert.
“It won’t be a fair test of anything,” Tom said.
“I’ll be testing again tomorrow,” said Hemmel. “Then I have to return east.”
“Jim dandy. Pontius Pilate washed his hands.”
“We have a full day of tests. Let’s get moving.” Hemmel said this to Lance Evert, then went to the truck and let himself in the passenger side.
Tom had been expecting more and he wasn’t sure what. Glass globes? Copper pots lit from underneath? Bubbles racing down tubes?
He followed Lance to the truck. “Who ordered this air study?” he asked. “Was it Comstock?”
“I think it was the government. But Aladdin was willing to go along with it.”
“I imagine Aladdin had no choice if the government told them to. But I bet Aladdin got to pick the day.”
“It’s like Dr. Hemmel said. It’s the day he could be here. It wouldn’t have made any difference if we’d picked it. It’s not as if we know what this plant or the weather’s going to do one day to the next.”
Tom laughed. It was a good answer. Hemmel and Evert had come in a company pickup, and Tom was looking at the rear window, at Hemmel’s head inside. Suddenly the scientist jerked sideways and thumped on the truck’s horn. Tom’s old dog sleeping in a shadow came up barking.
Evert had his hand on the door handle.
“That’s not true of the burning pit, is it?” Tom said. “You guys fire that up when you please. Today, you chose not to.”
Evert didn’t answer, and Tom left it at that. He didn’t want to hear the scientist hit the horn again, in case it made him angry enough to jerk open the door and tell the little prick to mind his manners.
Driving home from the Lower Place in the afternoon, Tom saw the Aladdin pickup by the old schoolhouse. Hemmel was holding up another steel bottle. Ahead, Tom could see the black smoke from the plant’s burning pit coasting over the rises toward them. He could smell and taste it. He smiled to think of the bottle tasting it too.
It was the Sunday night before her visit with Lance Evert, and Ella was thankful Billy was in town. The smell was the usual one but had a texture, like wads of tissue winding in your nostrils. In the early hours, the plant siren howled for the first time ever, a sound that rose and swooped and did not stop for a long time. The flare was huge and seemed to move in time to the siren.
Donna, who was not the type to cry, was crying. Jeannie called her a baby, and Ella told her older daughter to shut up, words she never used. Tom went outside and came back briefly to say that the first of the sows was about to farrow. He stayed out for more than an hour, until Ella feared he had been knocked out or even killed by gas. She watched out the window until she saw his lantern pick up and move.
Then Tom was in the porch and calling her. He’d left the porch light off because he carried the lantern. Its upward light made him ghost faced.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s terrible out there. You and the girls have to go.”
“Why doesn’t he phone us? Why is nobody telling us what we’re suppo
sed to do?”
“Don’t wait on them. Just take the girls and go.”
“You should go too. It’s not like you’re any stronger when it comes to gas.”
“I have a sow to look after. She’s lying down and ready. I want to see her farrow.”
“That’s stupid!”
He laughed. In the yellow light, his red eyes looked devilish. “This plant makes us stupider every day,” he said.
She would have argued more but he left, slamming the door too hard. She did as he said, roused the girls and loaded them into the car.
“What about Dad?” Jeannie said.
“He said he’s not coming.”
“Why?”
“His sow is farrowing.”
Donna was crying again. “Why is this happening?”
They could see across the yard where Tom had set his lantern on the ground outside the pigpen. Jeannie banged the window with her fist. Ella said nothing. She backed the car from its spot and pushed the pedal so hard the back tires spun before they caught. She looked once in the rear-view at Tom’s light, then drove. The road and fields were bright but sapped of their real colour. Everything had turned the yellow of sulphur. She told her daughters to hold their breaths as long as they could. Then she gunned it.
In the dawn light, Tom was reaching his pitchfork into the mouth of the pigpen. The sow snorted at him. He fished with the tines beside her pale flank, where the living piglets were hooked to her teats. He drew the fork back and brought another body to the light, turned and tossed it to the top of the dung heap. There were five of them now, sprawled pink, new, and dead on the brown. There was at least one more dead one inside.
He thought last night’s disaster merited a visit from Dietz, but the vehicle that came was Evert’s. Tom went back to fishing with the pitchfork as the car approached from behind. Its pint-size engine kicked a couple of times and died. He hoped the dog would growl, but he did not even bark. Tom had the last dead pig on his fork, waiting. When he heard Evert’s footsteps, he threw it up with the others.
