by Fred Stenson
Sometimes, if he managed to convince himself that Ella and he could make a fresh start, the writing excited him. Later, when he saw the words on paper, the hollow inside him said the time for that was past. He’d thought “blood running cold” was just a saying, but each time his hopes crashed, that was what he felt: a cascade of cold falling through him.
Every written word went into the trash burner before bed.
By the time Ella drove into the yard, Tom had cleaned the house as best he could. There was no letter and no plan to say anything. He would change his actions and that would be enough—or it wouldn’t be enough. He had filled the kettle with water, and as soon as he heard the car, he turned on the burner. Thawed scones were on the table, on a plate inside a plastic bag.
He hurried outside and took Ella’s suitcase as she was lifting it from the trunk. He was going to carry it to their bedroom, but she took it from him. When she returned to the kitchen, she had a work dress on. She reached her apron down from its hook, put it over her head. By now, Tom understood that all the writing, thinking, and planning were not going to change what was coming. While she made tea, he sat at the table, smoked and waited.
Ella set the teapot on its mat, then turned her chair to face him. Her hands were fists in her lap. She said she could not go on the way things had been. She had not made up her mind what to do, but, while she was figuring it out, she would feel better and rest easier if Tom would sleep in Billy’s room.
The weather changed, warmed, but the hills stayed brown. It was the windy time that pushes real spring ahead of itself. The upstairs-downstairs agreement continued, was routine, but a deadline approached. Though Billy had muttered all winter about not wanting to work at home this summer, he had called on his final day of classes to say he would be back in three weeks. Tom would have to clear out of Billy’s bedroom—and not just across the hall into the girls’ room. Things would have to be explained, and to explain anything to Billy, they had to know the answers themselves.
Every day closer to their son’s return, the knots in Tom’s guts and chest pulled tighter. He could barely stand to be in the house and worked later and later outside. He ran out of things to repair, grease, and sharpen, and at times just stood at his shop bench staring at the split window. Other times, he sat on the cracked saddle he had not ridden or oiled for years, where it hung over the iron seat of a pedal grindstone. Sometimes the smell of dirt, weeds, and oil irritated him. Other times, he cherished the stink as something he might lose.
With only days to go, Ella went to town for a long list of supplies. When her car was out of the yard, Tom went back inside. As he’d done when Ella was in B.C., he sat at the table and tried to write. There was a tradition of old bachelor farmers and ranchers going to town and living in the highest, cheapest rooms of the King George Hotel. Doing that was the only thing he could think of—not as a final destination but somewhere to go until he had a better sense of the future. He would not put that in the note because the idea of the decrepit upper floors of the George would make Ella angry: a bed of nails he’d chosen to lie on so she would pity him.
All he wrote was that he thought it was time to go, and that he would live in town and come out to do his farm work each day.
When the phone rang, he thought it would be Ella, needing him to check the supply of something in the pantry. But it was not Ella. He waited for the other person to speak. Whoever was on the other end was doing the same. Silence gaped.
“Is this the Ryders’?”
Tom could not say how he knew, but he knew it was Lance Evert.
“You’re looking for Ella?”
Evert tried a couple of times to speak but bungled it. Finally he told Tom his name. He was phoning to tell them he’d come back to the old plant. He was the engineer in charge. He’d arrived a few days ago.
“I remember you,” Tom said.
“I was wondering if I could come down and have coffee, with you and Ella. Remake your acquaintance.”
“Why not today?”
“Sure, if you folks have the time.”
“Ella’s in town but she said she’d be back by three thirty. Turns out I have to go in there myself. Meet a guy about a piece of haying machinery.”
“I’ll come another day, then.”
“Sounds like you were ready to come today. Ella would be very pleased to see you. Come at three thirty. It’ll be a nice surprise.”
Tom hung up quickly. He tore the note he’d written into pieces and dug the bits into the ashes under the trash burner. He wrote a new note that said Lance Evert was back at the plant and was going to visit at three thirty today. Below that he added that he needed to go to town and would not be home before six. He left it on the table, between the salt and the pepper, where they always left their notes.
Tom had heard Ella tell a friend on the phone that there was a new florist in town, next to the undertakers. When he got into Haultain, that was where he went. The woman apologized for how few blooms she had; there’d been a funeral. He looked at the few flowers she had in a glass case and saw something blue. Ella liked blue flowers. After paying, he asked the woman if he could leave them in her cooler until it was time to go home.
He went to the machinery dealer at the station and bought a part, something he didn’t need but might before summer’s end. Not much time had passed, so he entered the yeasty gloom of the beer parlour and slowly drank two glasses of draught.
At a quarter after six, Tom was back home. He entered the farmhouse. Ella was not there. He checked the basement, and her milk bucket was not on its nail. He cut the ends off the stems and put the flowers in water; saw two teacups and saucers in the drying rack by the sink. Outside, he did his own chores. When he saw Ella carrying her milk pail to the house, he checked his watch and told himself to stay out another twenty minutes. Before that time was up, she came outside and called him for supper.
The flowers had been put in a nicer vase. It sat on the back half of the table. The front half was set for supper. He tried to act like he normally did—except for not smoking. He would do his smoking outside from now on.
They were eating supper when Ella mentioned the visitor. Lance Evert was back to run the old plant. “Of course you knew that. It was in your note.”
“That’s all I know. That he’s back.”
“It’s strange. What he said sounded like he’d done very well in his career. But here he is running our old thing.”
“He didn’t say why?”
“Not really.”
She said Lance must be serious about staying because he had bought a house in Haultain. He and his fiancée were going to live there after they got married in the fall. Her name was Judy and she was a Calgary girl who worked for an oil company in the city as a secretary. Then Ella thanked Tom for the flowers and asked if he’d like some dessert. She’d found a jar of his favourite canned peaches in the basement.
Two days later, Tom came inside after chopping barley. He’d beaten the dust out of his shirt and pants outside, but still needed to change to get away from the itch. Ella stopped him on his way to the stairs.
“Your clothes are down here,” she said.
The bedroom felt strange. The smell that used to be a mix of them was Ella now. He was taking off the dusty clothes when he saw that the near side of the bed was turned down. His cufflink and tie-tack boxes were on the bedside table.
Ella had decided she was going to call Billy Will from now on. Bill was a plain name, she thought, and as a professional engineer, her son would need a city name, more of a man’s name. A lot of thought had gone into this, and she was poised to start the moment he arrived.
In fact, he was very late getting in. About the time Ella was going to give up on him and go to bed, he drove into the yard. In the house, he smelled strongly of beer. He was in a surly mood.
She had a cold plate of supper saved for him. He sat and ate it, and made a show of his disappointment at being back at the farm. Ella felt like clou
ting him, but his father acted as if nothing was wrong. Tom told a story about the Depression and how he was having a good time riding the rods and living in hobo jungles when somebody from home got word to him that his father was sick and his mother needed him.
“It was hard to come back,” the story ended.
The only sign that Tom did not feel entirely at ease was the way his hand kept rising to the bulge of makings in his shirt pocket. He had stopped smoking in the house. Tonight, she could almost feel his need in her own chest.
The Depression story softened Will’s mood. He had always liked his dad’s stories about the thirties, playing hide-and-seek with railway bulls and those who would have put him in a relief camp. The Huck Finn part of his life.
“You know,” Tom said, after a silence, “I’m not sure you have to work here this summer. If you’d help on weekends, I think we could make out. Leave time for another job.”
Will was eating the last thing on the plate, a cookie. He sat there with his mouth open and a ball of dough on his tongue. Ella was stunned too. “Job where, though?” Will said.
“At the plant,” Tom answered without hesitation. “They shut down every summer to do maintenance. Call it turnaround. There’d be lots of overtime but it wouldn’t last long. If I were you, I’d go talk to the engineer in charge. It’s a guy who was here at the beginning. He’s come back to run it. Lance Evert. Tell him you’re in engineering and he’ll be interested.”
The next morning, Will was back from the plant in an hour, whooping. Lance had given him a job, and not just on turnaround. He would be a summer student, replacing well switchers in the field as one by one they went on holidays.
In the week after that, Ella saw her son as happy as he’d ever been. He ate breakfast in a rush, grabbed the lunch pail she’d filled for him, and sprayed gravel behind his pickup as he tore away. Every day, he returned bursting with news, the things he was learning about gas wells and how you regulated the supply from the field. There was also a little compressor plant in the hills that pushed the condensate to the big plant. It was his job to take readings and to soak up the oil the compressors leaked with rags from a box.
Ella realized the decision to let Will work elsewhere suggested Tom had given up the idea of their son taking over the farm. At the very least it meant he wanted him to experience other work so he could make an informed choice. She believed it was no contest and never had been. Will loved machines, and the plant simply had bigger, more interesting machines than the farm.
“How long have you been thinking about letting Will work at the plant?” she asked, when various hints had failed to produce.
He laughed every time she called their son Will. He said it made him think of Shakespeare.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a month. Seemed like a good compromise.”
As summer went on, it did prove to be good. Will was happy in his job and plunged into the farm work after shifts and on weekends. Ella assumed his old school friends must be after him to go drinking, but he only went on Saturday nights and would work again on Sunday.
Of course the situation with Will and Tom was not the only thing different about the summer. Ella had her own feelings, shared with no one. Lance was a much different man now, heavier in the shoulders. He was even a little plump in the waist, something she would never have thought possible when he was young and thin as a greyhound. He still had the beautiful face, beautiful lips.
The fact that he was about to marry was the final and fitting end to Ella’s worry and her episodes of yearning. She had always been too old for him, but now she looked it, with her greying hair and engraved lines fanning out from her mouth and eyes. When they met after his return, alone at the house, he’d said she looked wonderful, but it did not mean the same thing as it would have a dozen years ago. On a weekend in June, Lance brought his Judy to the farm to meet them—to meet Ella, really—and it felt unflatteringly like a nephew introducing his fiancée to a favourite aunt.
Once and for all, that left Tom, and that was strange too. Over the years she had assumed Tom wasn’t even aware of many of the obstacles between them, but he proved otherwise by taking them all away. After Ella was certain the changes were firm, not just short-lived acts of contrition, she phoned Jeannie.
“Wow, Mom. That seems unbelievable.”
“It is hard to believe but it has happened.”
“He doesn’t even curse?”
“Not around me. And he’s trying to quit smoking. He won’t succeed, which is sad, but he doesn’t smoke in the house.”
“Is that going to be enough for you?” She didn’t mean smoking or cursing; she meant the marriage, which of course was a much tougher question to answer.
Not long after, Jeannie phoned to say she had handed in her notice to the school. Right after that, she had told Hal she was leaving him. Ella asked if Jeannie wanted her to tell Tom.
“Will he flip his lid?”
“My guess is not.”
“You might as well tell him, then.”
Ella gave Tom the news over breakfast. She told him about the teaching job first. She let that soak in. Then added, “She’s given Hal notice too.”
Tom cocked his head. “Does she know what she’ll do?”
“She’s saved quite a bit of money. Donna is helping her make travel plans.”
“Where?”
“She thinks Australia. She wants to teach there, maybe at an Aboriginal school.”
“I always thought I’d like to go to Australia,” he said.
As Tom was finishing his coffee, and beginning to show his nervous need to get outside and smoke, he said, “I know she’ll think I’m on Hal’s side. I’m not. I want her to be happy. Would you tell her that?”
The days and weeks of that summer passed quickly. There were no frosts, so the succession of wildflowers was uninterrupted. Every time Ella looked up, it seemed, more of the farm work was done than seemed possible. By the end of July, every hayfield was cut and baled. By the middle of August, all the bales were in the pile.
At the beginning of that month, Tom had asked Ella if she would mind if he sold the cattle and rented out half the land. Of course her answer was yes. It was something she had wanted for years. He also asked whether, with the cattle gone, they should stay on the farm or go. Lance claimed he was going to fix the plant, modernize it, reduce its pollution, he said, but, if Ella wanted to move, Tom was willing.
The surprising man had been working it all out in money terms: what the cattle and the land would bring, what they had in savings, what a small house in town would cost. In the better grain years, they had saved money for the children’s education. Jeannie’s program hadn’t been long. Donna had gone straight to work. Billy was receiving scholarships. All in all, if they were frugal, which was the only way they had ever lived, they could retire.
Ella surprised herself by saying she was content to stay on the farm, for now at least. Maybe they could think of moving to town when they needed to.
Tom brightened. She thought he was just glad not to have to uproot himself, but there was something else.
“If we stay, I think I’ll keep a few cows, maybe twenty.”
“What for?”
“A show herd. People ask me what I did all these years, I’ll point at them and say, I did that.”
Twenty head would hold them down almost as securely as a hundred and twenty. They would still have to be fed and looked after. But before the thought could get out of her mouth, she understood how lost he would be without any work to do, and said nothing.
Tom asked Billy to help him choose the cows he was going to keep. The boy reacted as if it was an unreasonable favour, something outside their contract.
“I don’t have time.”
To agree to evenings of stacking hay and yet balk at leaning over a fence to say “That cow’s better than this one” made no sense, but Tom let it be.
After he’d thought about it more, he decided Billy’s reluctan
ce to help choose the show herd was similar to his own reluctance to listen to his son talk about the plant. For years, Tom’s greatest wish had been to have someone, anyone, tell him how a sour gas plant worked. Now he had a son champing at the bit to tell him, and he could barely make himself listen. He really did not give a damn anymore what they cooked and served up there. His thoughts were on cows: whether to keep the Simmental crosses or to concentrate on the old breeds; how much hay land he should keep out of the rental contract for summer grazing and winter feed.
Then one Saturday, Ella came back from a supply trip to town with the Lethbridge paper. A big headline on page one said Dry Fork had won a settlement. Tom understood what it meant before he read the article. It was a settlement out of court, something the companies would never have dreamt they’d have to pay. As Purcell had said, society was moving against corporations on air pollution. Alberta’s new government had brought in tougher air pollution rules. So the company wanted to put an end to things. The families, Arsenaults, Darbys, took the money. It was more than they believed they’d ever see.
As he read the article, he could feel Ella watching him closely. He recognized her fear that the news would bring him to a boil. And it did crank some old starter in his chest, to see his friends at Dry Fork victorious when he had never won a thing. It also touched the old fury to know that the settlement meant nothing was proven against the plant. The sour gas companies had not admitted a thing. Not one gassed farmer, not one dead pig, was laid at their door.
Geoff Purcell was quoted. “If in future anyone takes on an oil company for a complaint such as this, it will be less difficult than it has been for us. It’s like climbing stairs. The next person starts on the highest step the last person reached.” Tom did not even know if it was true but could imagine Geoff needing to say and believe it.
He closed the paper and pushed it away. “Good for them.” He did not know what else to say.
As the summer drew to its end, Billy’s desire to talk about the plant waned. When he and Tom were together, they settled into a routine of talking about the farm, about cows mostly. Whatever had made Billy not want any part in choosing the show herd was gone. In the cool of evening, they often walked among the cattle, reminiscing.
