The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning

by Audrey J. Whitson

  “I kept thinking, that she kept thinking . . .

  “Maybe it’s not the way you think. Maybe the answer will come to you different than you expect.”

  The kid is shaking his head again. “Too late for that now.”

  “You see, in the end, she had to hear it from me. That she was okay and we were okay the two of us. That’s all she needed.

  “And I had to acknowledge the change it meant for her and let us both go through the process. Change, that’s another thing I’ve learned at this game. It never stops.”

  “It’s bigger than that.”

  “Always seems so when it’s happening to us personally. Still, it sure is a blessing to have children. Hope you know that.”

  “Yeah.” He takes a deep breath. “Sure.”

  There’s always more than one way to skin a cat, Boy! I want to say. But instead, before I head back to the koffee klatch, I cuff him on the shoulder, just enough to maybe knock some sense into him.

  8

  MIKE

  After the ladies start to serve sandwiches and Bob says he’s not hungry, I ask him to hold the camera for a while. Something to keep him occupied. The truth is I’m hungry. I didn’t get breakfast this morning. I was on the phone with Alex first thing, planning how we could move a few things up with the History Project, take advantage of the funeral on Saturday, and not wait for the decommissioning on Sunday. Now I grab a ham bun off the passing plate.

  “You don’t have to be a scientist to know,” one of them is saying. “A little chem and a little biology.”

  “A lot of years on the ground.”

  “That’s Agriculture Canada for you. Those guys with their university degrees, all theoretical, easy for them to say in their glassed-in atmosphere-controlled offices. ‘We don’t know yet if this is climate or weather.’”

  “A winter like this last one.”

  “A spring with no moisture.”

  “The land is drying.”

  “Annie said as much.”

  We all pause and look in her direction as if on cue. Jack carefully wipes his eyes with his sleeve, then takes out his handkerchief and blows his nose.

  “El Niño they call him and he is one hell of a current,” Buster says after an appropriate pause.

  “Big spreads of land, that’s the way of the future,” I say between bites. “Knock the fences down, drain all the sloughs. ‘Efficiencies,’ the banker explained it to me, the only way to survive. Maybe. Maybe for the younger ones coming up. Maybe for the banker. My kids have all left to the city, got educations, good jobs.”

  We take turns around the circle like it’s the dead of winter or the height of summer and we’re warming our hands over an open fire. I’m taking a mental sketch for a painting later; Annie’s Wake I’ll call it.

  “It’s a young man’s game, farming.” Buster shakes his head.

  “The new machinery they’ve got, you need a ladder to get up the side of a tractor.” Alex waves his battered cap like a flag in one hand and nurses a cup of coffee in the other.

  “One man has to have the reach of five and the strength of twenty now they say.” Buster squeezes his big hands and ripples his biceps ever so little as he says it.

  “Wait for a foreign investor to buy your land and hire you as the manager.” I take the last bite of my bun.

  Bob looks like he’s watching a tennis match, the camera bobbing from one side of the court to the other. Any minute now and he’s going to provide commentary.

  “They’re not interested in land in this part of the province,” Alex continues. “Well, maybe Victoire or Harmonie but not Majestic. Marginal grey soils, tree loam, a few inches of topsoil if you’re lucky. Too much maintenance in the short term. Good for alfalfa. Oats or barley, better yields after hay or fallow. The big land companies don’t have the patience. This country’s a different kind of investment.”

  “You’re not keeping up.” I wink at Alex. “The big seed companies have crop rotation products for us too. GMOS. Kick-Ass Canola. Pretty soon, Kick-Ass Wheat. Kick-Ass everything. Decrease pests, increase yield. Everywhere comes up paradise.”

  The word “paradise” hovers in the air between us. Jack gets up and rearranges the roses in the vase at the foot of Annie’s sheet-draped body, her hair all combed, her work shirt ironed. The bandanna around her neck looks almost festive. Still leaning on his cane, Jack moves the two taper candles ever so slightly away from the blooms. When he finds his seat again, we wait for him to lay down his cane. The top end of it hits the floor with a light clatter. Then we pick up the conversation again, right where we left off.

  “How does that work?” Buster asks, taking a bite of his beef and horseradish sandwich.

  “The first year, you put in oats. You spray a broadleaf herbicide the middle of May, just before seeding. The next year you use glyphosate and then plant the canola. The chemical kills all the volunteer oats and everything but the canola. The third year, you grow barley. You spray the soil before you plant with another herbicide mixed with glyphosate, to get rid of any residuals: weeds and last year’s canola. Then hit it again just before harvest to dry the crop. Year four, you start the canola-go-round all over again.

  “Skip the summer fallow. Plant the rows close. More yield, more production per acre that way. Better moisture retention. Less tillage. Less erosion. Less fuel. Less air pollution. Less herbicide in the end, they say.”

  Bob pulls back from the camera for a minute. “You know, they make some good points.”

  “Convenient that you have to buy the seed and the chemical from the same company though.”

  “They’ve got it all thought out.”

  “Sounds like something from Star Trek.”

  “I probably should have taken that university scholarship instead of agricultural college,” I tell them.

  “That’s right, Mike, you could have been an engineer working in one of those corporations downtown by now, a head office maybe in utilities or chemicals or oil, though there’s not too many of those left anymore.” Alex settles back in his chair. “Heck, the dumbest of my high school classmates are managers, pulling down six-figure salaries.”

  “Yeah, blessed are the citified,” Buster scoffs. “Spending their days driving this kid to ballet and that one to basketball. The next day it’s Scouts and band. Hockey and bowling. No end to it.”

  “Buying flat screens for every room in the house,” Alex takes up the chorus. “Renovating the bathroom every five years, matching towels and paint to the new tiles.”

  The circle starts to flex and crackle, like the conversation were a game. It’s about the time when Annie would come around with refills, offer a retort, something pithy, that showed she’d listened too, and that for all her reticence, she was, to the rest of us, the smartest person in the room.

  “It’s true; I was bored to death,” Jack speaks suddenly. “That was me for half the year when I wasn’t in the field.” His voice sounds distant, tired, and hollow. “I should have come back much sooner.” He glances back at Annie when he says it. “After my wife died, I could have retired early.” He let’s one tear pass down his cheek, wipes it away. “Too many days spent pushing papers across a desk, looking out of highrise windows, wishing you could open them, to feel a breeze. I was boxed up in there so long I forgot what real weather felt like.”

  The room is silent for a few moments. It’s as if the rest of us are breathing as one with Jack. From the kitchen, there’s a nervous titter. A couple of our circle glance over at Annie to see how she’s taking all this. A pall settles over the room, a deeper gloom.

  “Now it’s everywhere,” Buster says. “This mad cow disease. Quicker than I thought.” A new strand unspools in the circle of speech, new and somehow old too. Back to the very beginnings of just about everyone in the room. What would Annie say about survival?

  Buster rearranges his hat on his knee. “With the border closed, the price has dropped to practically nothing. I took some head in last week
and it hardly paid the shipping.”

  Alex takes a turn. “Here I was just trying to keep the bank at the door, praying for a change in the weather and now this. I’ve lost all of it — my initial investment, years of winter nights sleeping out in the barn pulling calves, a marriage, a son to the city. What I’ve got left: two hundred cows, this year’s young, last year’s steers.”

  Buster looks to each of us around the circle. “I might as well shoot the whole works. I’ll never sell them. The auctions are rigged. The prices set in the States.”

  Alex nods. “If you want to sell, there’s really only two companies. They set the price at head office. No negotiating.”

  “The meat’s on the hood by eight o’clock in the morning and in the stockyards by nine.” Buster pauses to frown. “They let it sit there a day or two, don’t feed it.”

  “Let it drop some weight,” Alex quips.

  Jack nods. “Then they sell it.”

  “It’s on a cattle liner to Calgary,” Alex repeats what every one of us knows already, “butchered hanging on the hooks that same day. Everyone takes their piece of it along the way. The trucker, the stockyards, the railways, the meat companies, the grocery chains, the fast food franchises.”

  “Lucky if we get twenty cents a pound. Twenty months or forty months.” Buster finishes his story: “It makes no difference. Butcher cows, twenty-five cents a pound. Three to four-hundred-pound steers, one-twenty-five a pound. It’s been weeks now, the border closed.”

  “Weeks and no sign of let-up. That’s what they say.”

  “Mad cow is here to stay.”

  “They don’t even know what causes it. Not just contaminated feed.”

  “What they grow these days. Chickens that eat pig.”

  “Pigs that eat cows.”

  “Cows that eat each other.”

  “These critters can form on their own,” Jack says. “In the brain from spontaneous mutations. Prions they call them.”

  “And where do they live before that,” Buster wants to know. “In the liver? In the kidneys? I’m just thinking of cutting my losses.”

  “What would Annie have said?” Alex asks suddenly.

  “Something contrary.”

  “The soil is your life.”

  “Treat the land like it is your own body.” This last from Jack, who barely whispers the words, daubs his eyes quickly with the back of his hand, and looks straight ahead again.

  “We’re definitely too late for that the way this global warming is going,” I say. And the circle starts to flex again.

  “Soon we’ll all be raising rabbits and selling like it was chicken.”

  “Just like the thirties.”

  “Worse. That’s what Annie said. Drought year round. Winter and summer. No snow and no rain.”

  “Come to think of it, the snowshoe hares look to be the only creatures prospering through all this.” Buster clears his throat. “Like I said, I’m thinking of cutting my losses.” He’s turned serious all of a sudden. “I’ve got this idea to just let her go. The back quarter. Let her go back to the land. Let the poplar and the spruce and the birch retake her. Maybe keep the odd head of cattle, a cow for milking.”

  Jack looks up, looks hard at Buster.

  “What are you talking about?” Alex says. “You can’t just let it go to wild.”

  “Should never have been farmed. This is forest soil.”

  “What about your people?” Alex says.

  “What about them? They’re all gone.”

  “All that hardship, the years it took to pick the roots, burn the brush.” Alex turns in his seat. “It was backbreaking. Without land where would we be?” Alex turns to the coffin at the head of our circle. “What if we could wind back the clock, reverse time?”

  Then we hear it. Not out loud but in our minds, like an image, only in song. Annie’s laughter. We all look at each other, then at our hands, startled.

  Buster sticks his chin out of the silence. “All I know is that it can’t continue this way.”

  “Why don’t you sell then? Let someone else carry on?”

  “Why, so they can fail too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “My grandparents made more per bushel than I am right now. With all the extra machinery costs, the amount of inputs: time, fertilizer, pesticides, seed. It all keeps going up. The outputs are only declining. That’s what I know. I’d rather grow roses like Bob here. Don’t need much for that. Cow manure, water, leaf mulch.”

  Bob sets the video camera down on his knee before he responds. “Buster’s right. I’m going to clean out the old corral. Three feet of manure in there at least. Built-in fertilizer, properly aged.” He looks around the circle. “I won’t have to add nutrients or mulch for years. I’m going to make it a microclimate, build a narrow shelter belt — harder to do in a drought I know. Can’t use any of the water-loving trees.”

  “Now, I think you might have a situation of scents competing.” Buster sits back and smiles.

  “No, this here would be an example of one scent transforming another,” Alex says.

  “Alchemy, modern-style,” Buster quips.

  “Annie would approve,” Jack’s voice trembles.

  Bob leans in, sets the camera on the floor in front of him, and rubs his hands. “See, you can request just about anything on the internet.”

  I can’t help but laugh.

  “All you have to do is sign up. I’m on the mail list for Kew Gardens. They’ll send seed just about anywhere. And all the horticultural research stations. They’re always coming up with new varieties.”

  “Maybe you could open to the public, Bob.”

  “And we could all work for you in the summers when we’ve all gone bust.” Alex chortles and sits back in his chair.

  The circle crackles again, pops. How to show this quality in colours, in action? It’s something I always puzzle over with the Table of Truth.

  “Rose gardens. They take a lot of water,” I say.

  “That’s for sure,” says Buster.

  “And a lot of care,” Jack chimes in, protection in his voice, still glancing back at Annie.

  Buster snorts. “Cripes, if those poor buggers in Cali can grow commercial roses up the side of the bloody Andes, we can sure as hell grow them here in Majestic.”

  “There’s a market,” someone else quips.

  “Darn rights.”

  “This is not a commercial venture.”

  “We know, we know.” Jack puts up his hand. “The fellows just can’t resist pulling your leg, Bob. But we shouldn’t. We should show our respect, seeing as this is a day for respects.”

  “Well, I appreciate your interest. I’ve researched it. The first three years are critical. They need watering, five gallons a week per bush. But once they’re established their roots are like an auger to a well. They’ll bloom fifteen to twenty years.”

  “Can’t argue with that. Roses are nice. When I was in Ag at Olds, I used to help out in the greenhouse,” I say, trying to smooth the feathers. “I liked working in the breeding section. All that crossing and mixing and splicing. Then waiting to see what happened.”

  Jack sits back in his chair again.

  “I got my first shipment last week.”

  “Roses from Alberta.” Jack shakes his head emphatically. “Annie would say, ‘the toughest roses in the world.’”

  Buster chins his way into the conversation again. “Remember that cemetery over at Reymund? That land was first cleared, what eighty years ago? It’s been abandoned for forty years. Peaceful spot to walk on a summer’s day. All going back to swamp. Overgrown with spruce, aspen, poplar, blue-eyed grass and wild rose, wood lily. The headstones, the fence posts, all of it under moss.”

  “Yup, I remember it, Buster,” Jack says.

  “Boreal forest that. Yup, once the native plants come back, the animals will too. Then I’ll open it up like a natural game park. After the tour bus crowds are done seeing Bob’s roses there, t
hey can come by and pet the deer. Buy a few table linens too.”

  Bob takes up the camera again.

  “I always knew you was an old hippie, Buster,” Alex says.

  “I’ve never known any hippies that trapped lynx for hide or shot moose for meat.” I point at Buster across the circle: “That’s a mountain man.

  “But, what’s it all for?” I’m serious now. “All this science, this worrying about yields and technology? We’re never going to make money. We make a lot of other people money: the equipment dealers, the fertilizer people, the pesticide industry.”

  “It’s just so shady down there in that old cemetery,” Buster says, poking his pipe deeper into his mouth, his other hand out of habit looking for matches he no longer carries in his chest pocket.

  The conversation keeps turning back and back and back.

  “But we’re farmers.” Alex is red in the face. “We have a responsibility to feed the world!”

  That’s when I decide to tell them. “Last week I took down all the breeding signs on the home place. The thoroughbred English Poll Hereford Angus Cross.”

  Buster doesn’t skip a beat. “Let the world feed itself. I’m tired of subsidizing this city way of life. Let those people feed themselves. It’s wrong-headed to think that we can feed everyone, that we’re supposed to feed everyone. I’m not sure we’re doing people any favours, feeding them.”

  “I’m cutting my herd in half,” I add.

  “My God, Buster, what about trade?” It’s Alex again, ignoring me.

  “What about it?”

  “People have been trading since before the last ice age, for thousands of years before we got here. Speaking of roses!”

  “Roses came from China over the Silk Road to Persia. And then to Europe. Annie told me that.”

  Jack barely nods his head. “Everything comes from Persia. Wheat, barley too. The fertile crescent.”

  “I’ve not given up on trade. Hudson’s Bay still takes pelts. Just mail them off at the post office. Annie can attest to that.”

  There is a small pause in the proceedings, a nod in the direction of Annie, who even in death is still our hostess.