Who by Fire

by Fred Stenson

  “Half a litter of twelve,” Tom said. “That’s my profit on the shit pile.”

  Tom took his flashlight out of his coat pocket and shone the light into the hole, though he was certain he had them all. “I watched them being born. The ones that died took a breath and that was it. They smothered.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t think it matters what time.”

  “And your family?”

  Tom straightened his back. He pushed the tines against the ground, put his gloved hands over the knob end. “You care so much about my family, it took you until now to get here.”

  “I wasn’t on night shift.”

  Now that Tom was looking at Evert, he saw that he was upset. Grey in the face.

  “So what happened?” Tom asked him.

  “There was an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “We lost a man.”

  “Christ almighty.”

  Evert’s mouth worked but made no words.

  “So a man was killed by gas last night and still no one came down here or even phoned. That proves how much you bastards care.” Tom poked the fork at the shit pile. “Those could have been kids instead of pigs.”

  Evert swayed as if his balance was lost. His eyes looked elsewhere when he said, “I do care.”

  He turned and took a step toward his car. The dog was at his side, nose up, tail whipping.

  “I have to check the Gerstens and the Courts,” Evert said, seemingly to the dog.

  “You going to admit your plant killed these pigs?”

  Evert went the rest of the way to his car and opened its door.

  Tom leaned over the fence and yelled, “You tell Dietz I want an autopsy on these pigs! You tell him that!”

  Ella woke up beside Billy in her parents’ guest bed. It was Monday morning, and Ella made everyone’s breakfast before the girls went off to school. Then she left Billy with her mother and drove in the direction of home. Two miles from the farm, she turned south, then made one more turn toward Bauers’. This time she parked between the caragana rows. The frost was not yet out of the ground and the old garden plot held her.

  Back and forth Ella walked where once there had been rows of potatoes, peas, and beans. Dora had tried corn one year, and it grew tall but the ears would not fill. Ella wished to sing to herself, and the only song that came to mind was “The Tennessee Waltz.” “I was waltzing with my darling …” After the appointed time had passed, and another hour, she told herself aloud, “Lance is not coming.” He had only said what it would mean if Ella chose not to come. Maybe he was busy at work, or maybe it was the same message in reverse: that he did not want to see her anymore. She waited fifteen more minutes before she circled back around the plant and approached home the usual way.

  Tom’s truck was not in the yard. She saw the dead piglets on the manure pile, the peculiar colour grabbing at her eyes. She went into the house and waited. When he drove in, Tom didn’t come in but went to the pigpens first. Ella had made a pot of coffee.

  At the table, Tom and Ella looked in different places and thought their different thoughts. She knew most of the piglets had died. He knew the girls and Billy were in town.

  “Did Mr. Dietz come to the house this morning?” Ella asked him after the clock had gone halfway around.

  “He did not. Evert did.”

  She waited.

  “He said they’d had an accident. He said a man had died.”

  “Oh my God. Who?”

  “I don’t know. I told him I want an autopsy on those pigs.”

  “And what was his answer?”

  “Nothing. He left without answering.”

  Every minute of that week was strange. She felt like she was living someone else’s life. She did not know who at the plant had died—no one in the community knew there had been a death except Tom. She wondered if he’d got it right. She expected every day that there would come a call from Lance; that he would say work, or the accident, had made it impossible for him to meet her. She imagined him apologizing. She imagined telling him that no apology was needed. When she finally got desperate enough to phone the plant and ask for him, the woman who answered said Lance was not there and hung up.

  Only then did Ella seriously examine the possibility that Lance did not want to see her again. Maybe he had woken that morning with a picture of her in his head that was different than before: of an older woman, with her husband and children around her. But she could not imagine him being so unkind as to let silence be the messenger.

  Alf Dietz came to their house. Dietz knew that four was Tom’s time for coffee and a scone, and he timed his arrival to coincide with that. The two men faced each other across the Arborite, and Ella served them.

  “I was told you lost a man,” said Tom.

  “I don’t know how you’d know that, but it’s true.”

  “Lance Evert told me,” said Tom, and Ella jumped inside herself to hear the name.

  “The man who died was a young mechanic. Not from here—from Crowsnest Pass. Name of Andy Flannery. I told those young pups over and over, never open a pipe unless you know what’s in it. Flannery tried to change a filter by himself on night shift. It was sour and he didn’t know. He was dead a long time before anyone found him. The pipe was open and spewing sour gas—that’s why the siren blew. We’re lucky we didn’t lose half a dozen men.”

  Tom smoked and Dietz—who had never smoked in their house—reached for the tobacco tin and rolled himself one. Ella filled her sink and slowly washed the dishes.

  “It’s usually Lance Evert who comes down to talk to us,” she said with her face to the window.

  Tom said, “I probably scared him. I gave him hell that morning. Did he tell you I want an autopsy on my dead pigs?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Dietz. “Evert is no longer in our employ.”

  Ella thunked a cup against the wall of the sink.

  “That was sudden,” said Tom.

  “It was,” said Dietz.

  Dietz violently stubbed his cigarette in Tom’s tobacco lid. “What the hell am I doing? Took me twenty years to quit this stuff.”

  “Any reason Evert’s gone?” asked Tom.

  “Can’t say,” said Dietz. “I don’t think he’s a sour gas man. Not really.”

  “What about the autopsy, Alf?”

  “It won’t be me who decides. I’ll pass it along.”

  “I’ll have one done myself if you guys won’t.”

  “Keep your shirt on. For a while anyway.”

  “I’ll keep the dead pigs frozen.”

  Dietz got to his feet, solemnly thanked Ella for the coffee. Stepped into his boots, as usual untied. When he was gone, Tom said to Ella’s back, “You’ve been at those dishes a long time.”

  She could not answer; was blind with tears. She heard him walk to the porch, the deep rip of his coat zipper, the door.

  5

  Waddens Lake

  BILL’S CREW BELIEVED that he was always touchy after days off. He had given them this impression deliberately, but it was not true. His happiest workdays came after days off, when the maximum span of work lay ahead. He affected owliness to keep them at bay, while he savoured his return.

  Henry came in without knocking.

  “What?”

  “Dion says he’s trying to phone you but your phone’s blocked or something. You’ve left it on call forward. He wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Something about Waddens Village. Do you have his number?”

  “I have enough Dion Elliott cards to build a house. Why does a PR man need me? Do I look like the public to you?”

  Bill asked Henry to close the door on his way out. He did not like to admit how much he wished Dion Elliott would be lured away by some other company. Dion was reed-thin with a pale dandelion coif, but the most disturbing part of him was his mouth: a tiny whipping machine that left simple concepts blurred with f
roth. He could say things like “inclusive,” “stakeholder,” and “we must learn from these people” with an entirely still gorge.

  What Dion belonged to was the Community Relations Group, a title he loved. For him, the new moniker was much more than hiding the old bean under a new thimble. It was something they could all shelter under, collectively and inclusively.

  Calling Dion a public relations man was mischief on Bill’s part, also a strategy by which he hoped to convey that he was not to be trusted with the community, that he was the kind of amber fossil who might call a female operator “honey” or refer to “our Indians” at an open house. This had worked perfectly until two months ago, when Dion came to Bill’s office and asked a favour. Before Bill fully understood what was going on, the two of them were across the lake in Waddens Village, parading through the homes of the Natives who lived there. After asking endlessly about everyone’s family, Dion issued a bunch of bald-faced pious half-truths about the upgrader, the environment, and the community. He kept turning to Bill to say, “Isn’t that so?”—to which Bill weakly nodded.

  Bill stood up, did some low squats and circled his desk a few times. The phone glowed with the potential of Dion’s call. If Bill let it ring, it was only a matter of time until Dion arrived in person.

  Waddens Village was a single crooked street of houses on a shallow rise above the lake. Half the homes were cabins that predated the modern oil sands era. The rest were recent. Marie Calfoux’s house was of the modern variety: a rancher on a full basement.

  Bill pulled off the centre two-track and drove his grille into a pile of snow. He shut off his engine and sat. The only people he could see were a girl and boy climbing a snowbank that the grader had left in the parking lot of the community centre. Two grey dogs fought nearby.

  Behind the kids and dogs, the community centre bestrode the town like a colossus. It had been a gift from New Aladdin and was Dion’s baby all the way. From his cultural sensitivity training, Dion had learned that Indians liked circles more than squares, and so the centre was an octagon, the closest design he could find. Two spruce poles flanked the entrance, meeting in a point above—tipi poles.

  Since its grand opening, the centre had reminded Bill of the Starship Enterprise, as if they’d scraped off the trees and an offspring of the mothership had descended and stayed. On the day Dion hauled him around town on the tea binge, Bill had asked an elder what she thought of it; did they use it much? She lowered her voice so Dion wouldn’t hear, said they tried to play cards there the first winter but it was too big, too hard to heat, and everything they said echoed. They’d gone back to taking turns in their houses.

  Bill was still in his vehicle, hands on the steering wheel. The engine was off and the cold was stealing in. He watched the two children flying down the gravel-specked snow heap. The dogs were going for the ruffs on each other’s necks with wide-open jaws. For all Bill’s determination and preparation, Dion had won again.

  An hour earlier, Bill had been in his office. He forgot not to answer his phone, and Dion was on the other end. In the middle of Bill’s rehearsed speech about why he should not do community work, Dion cut him off with a rudeness Bill did not know he possessed. Dion said he agreed completely; Bill was not someone he wanted doing communication work in the community.

  “I tried you that one time because I felt an older person might have rapport with the mostly older population of the village. But you’re not suited. You’re not positive, and you don’t stay on message.”

  “Then why this call, Dion? To tell me I’m not a team player?”

  Dion paused, which was uncharacteristic. “The only reason is that a woman in the community asked to speak to you. Specifically. I believe you know Marie Calfoux.”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Marie Calfoux does not want to talk to me. She asked to speak to you.”

  Bill climbed out of his SUV and looked across the hood. Between Marie Calfoux’s house and the old cabin next door, he could see the frozen width of Waddens Lake. Across the ice and above the fringe of black spruce, the upgrader raised its hump. Bill reached back into his truck and pulled a sniffer out of the catch-all. He inserted a tube and did a test. A little sulphur dioxide. Woodsmoke was all his nose could detect.

  Still, he did not go in. He clung to the still-warm hood. An image of his father rolling a smoke came to him, and he understood how comforting it would be at times like this; to put some distance, however artificial, between yourself and what you had to do. He was also thinking of how he had originally met Marie Calfoux, at a company information session. The upgrader was mostly built at the time, so the meeting was all pretense. We want to hear what you have to say, but it won’t make any difference. A couple of you might get low-level jobs.

  The locals were divided about the plant. By the time Marie got up to speak, Bill had already noted how striking she was. He thought she must be younger than him but she referred to grandchildren—then to a recently arrived great-grandchild. It seemed impossible.

  That night, Marie spoke for five or more minutes, more than anyone else from the community. Bill remembered two things she said: that she hoped Waddens Lake construction and upgrader jobs would lure her children back, and that the company was about to scour off the landscape that was her life story. The woods surrounding the lake, their creeks and bogs, were what she had grown up with, where she had gone as a child in the footsteps of her grandparents.

  “When the place you grow up in is destroyed, something in you gets destroyed too.”

  That line hit Bill between the shoulder blades. He was not sure where but he’d heard it before. A long time ago. Close to home.

  During the tea-coffee-and-cookies that night, Bill had moseyed around Marie Calfoux. She showed stiff resistance at first, but as they talked, he felt her loosening. He had often replayed this because it was important to know what caused the shift. It was somewhere near the point where she’d asked him what he did at the plant, and he said he turned poisonous gas into sulphur. “A kind of magician, really.”

  She replied, “But isn’t sulphur what they make explosives out of?”

  “Only old-fashioned explosives” was his answer, and she laughed at that.

  That must have been what improved things: the laughter. When people started leaving the open house, Marie said he should come to her house sometime for tea; see how the Indians lived. He said he would and meant it. What destroyed this good beginning was Dion’s using him as the token old person on visiting day. Marie’s house, the rancher before him now, was one of the places they had gone. After the dismal fakery of the occasion, he never got the courage to return.

  Bill whacked the hood of his truck with both hands. The sudden violence caused one child and both dogs to stop playing and stare. He walked up the swept path. Marie had a horseshoe affixed to her door where city people put their peepholes. The shoe was nailed in the proper manner, open side up to catch the good luck.

  When she let him in, the house smelled of meat simmering. Either his nose or his kitbag of Native stereotypes said moose stew. Marie sat him down at the table by the window, exactly where he’d been the last time with Dion. While she finished making the tea and piled muffins on a plate, he half expected her to tease him about waiting so long to come inside. That she didn’t reminded him they were not friends. He took his first bite of blueberry muffin, sipped his tea, and admired her figure as she stood with her back to him at the counter.

  When she picked up the teacups and pot, he shifted his eyes to the nearest wall, the one covered with family pictures. The photos were arranged by generation, something Dion had insisted she explain in detail.

  “So that gentleman is a cousin?” Dion had asked her.

  “That gentleman is an ex-husband.”

  The only very old picture was in the middle: a group photo of Indian kids in uniforms, flanked by nuns, on the steps of a residential school. Marie had talked to Dion and Bill about the damage done to her family by that
system. Bill could no longer remember which child was her mother.

  Marie set down the cups and the teapot, pointed at a little girl seated on the ground in the front row. “That one. It’s the only picture I have of my mother’s childhood. I don’t have any pictures of her parents.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  She sat across from him, checked the tea, and poured both cups.

  “Tell you the truth, I like it that there aren’t any pictures of the old ones. It shows that my grandparents weren’t part of a white world. People like Dion talk as if my neighbours and I grew up wearing deer hides. We pretend he’s right. But when you come from a time of no pictures”—she blew across her tea and drank a sip—“that’s not bullshit. That’s true.”

  The table they sat at had a vintage look, something pulled from another home and time. Otherwise, the furniture, equipment, and decorations that he could see were new. Brushed-steel fridge and stove. Hefty German food processor. Coffee maker like a steel dolphin in the midst of a trick. There was an elaborate workstation on the far side of the living room. Bill recognized the computer suite as a Mac and new. The printer was a multi-purpose affair, scanner and the rest.

  “I get high-speed internet off the satellite. That’s how I keep up to date on what goes on around the oil sands.”

  There. They had arrived.

  “What were you wanting to talk about?” he asked.

  “I have concerns I want somebody at your plant to hear. That doctor at Fort Chip who they’re trying to silence. My friends in that town tell me everything he says is true. Those rare bile duct cancers exist, but he was treated like he made it up. What do you say to that?”

  “He got screwed, is my opinion, mainly by his fellow doctors.”

  “Not by the oil industry?”

  “The medical association’s report said he went public too soon, something like that. The companies picked out the most damning sentences and spread them around.”

  She thumped the table with her finger. “I did an internet search on bile duct cancer. That duct is how toxins leave the liver. When it’s shown up in the U.S., it’s been in places with industrial pollution. Down there, industry uses lawyers to muddy up the connection. You guys use the medical association.” She sat back and folded her arms.