Stung

by William Deverell

  * * *

  Arthur fills his pack with oranges, oatmeal, olive oil, and various other edibles that Blunder Bay’s fields do not yield. He buys few vegetables — garden kale abounds in February, and carrots and potatoes can be dug fresh and crispy until spring.

  What else? An essential item, but what? This latest forgetfulness attack finds him poking into his pockets for a shopping list he forgot to bring. He scans the shelves for clues. Coffee! He’ll be going through buckets of coffee. Dutifully, he goes for the high-priced organic fair-trade medium-roast beans from Ethiopia, hoping he’s not being conned.

  Nelson Forbish is behind the post office counter stuffing Bleats into subscribers’ boxes. He crowds Abraham Makepeace, making him irritable as he deals with Tug Cooley, a hairy bear, foreman of the team that keeps TexAmerica’s machinery oiled and ready at the quarry. He’s a Yank with a work permit. He wears a “Make America Great” cap.

  Makepeace weighs a shoebox-size parcel. “Eleven pounds, three ounces — what have you got in here? Rocks?”

  “Yeah, post office guy. Exactly. Limestone samples for quality analysis in Fort Worth, Texas, if you wanna know. Any more questions? I got a friggin’ drink waiting. They want this in three days.”

  Arthur stands close enough behind him to detect his alcohol exhalations. Cooley is often in the Brig on his off-hours, with a few of his crew, a sullen group, paranoid, locally unpopular. Graffiti is inscribed, in large letters, above the pub’s main entrance: “no miners allowed.”

  “I can’t promise three days,” Makepeace says. “We are the people’s post office, we are not some rip-off overnight courier. Can’t even promise five days.”

  “What kind of friggin’ bureaucratic bullshit is this? The sign says, ‘Expedited Priority, Three Days.’”

  “That doesn’t apply to Garibaldi Island. Sign here and here.”

  Cooley does so grudgingly.

  “A cougar,” Forbish mutters. “How come I’m the last to know?”

  “Maybe you ought to listen to the radio, Nelson,” Makepeace says. “It was on the CBC. It’s even got a name now. Tigger.”

  Tug Cooley chimes in: “Hey, editor guy, that lion gets you we can all relax, he won’t be hungry for months.”

  Hurrying off to his waiting drink, Cooley pretends not to notice Arthur, another limestone-hugging adversary. His only island friends are the few thirsty regulars he buys for and the two Trustees, hopefully soon to be deposed.

  “I can barely breathe.” Makepeace wheezes like an accordion as Forbish gives him a bump while bending. The postmaster is too agitated to examine Arthur’s mail, and without comment hands over a Harper’s, some letters and bills, Nancy Faulk’s latest packet of case law and opinions, and Dr. Dieter Hoff’s freshly revised German edition of De-Pollination. The new English version has yet to go to press.

  * * *

  En route home, Arthur turns down two offers of rides, but hesitates over the third, from Taba Jones in her canopied Chev pickup. She is heading down to Potters Road anyway, she explains. She’s collecting signatures to recall Trustees Shewfelt and Zoller.

  “You signed this yet?” She holds a clipboard with the petition, which already bears a couple of pages of names.

  “Not yet. Shall I do so now?”

  “When I get you home. It’s cold. Climb in and shut the door, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to eat you.”

  By now, Arthur has hesitated too long. Taba looks unusually attractive today, especially in full-breasted profile, and, rarely seen, in makeup and a dress, her russet hair under rare control, in a clip.

  He slings off his pack, climbs in. “I wanted the exercise, but those clouds look threatening.”

  “Say hello to Arthur, Rosie.”

  Her neighbour’s Labrador retriever — whom Taba often dog-sits — offers a friendly sniff from the king cab.

  Arthur tells himself he must stop being scared of Taba. They’d been good chums, pre-coitus: reserved Arthur, earthy Tabatha, fighting common causes, sharing cynical jests. They flirted. It went too far. She has a new lover now. Life goes on.

  He wants to ask how that’s working out, her affair with Herman Schloss: the environmentally friendly gentleman of means who feels no shame in so publicly cheating on his lovely actress wife. They’re from Los Angeles, where that may be excusable behaviour. But not on Garibaldi. Here, affairs are properly furtive.

  Arthur can’t seem to frame an appropriate question about Schloss, so the obvious fallback topic is the mountain lion. Taba shares his view that islanders are inflating the threat but she also shares his concern about the hippie back-to-the-landers at the island’s northwest crown, in the area called Bleak Creek.

  Taba had given a lift earlier today to a pair of them, hitchhiking to the mall. “Obviously mated to each other, but neither looked over twenty. Naive, earnest escapees from the rat race. We all went through that phase, right?”

  “I didn’t.” A matter of some pride to Arthur.

  “A cougar with the cute name of Tigger isn’t going to spoil their off-the-grid lifestyle experiment. They’re more thrilled than scared. It’s a spiritual thing — the cougar’s coming is a sign, a message. They hope such a beautiful animal will visit and bless them.”

  She parks outside Arthur’s gate, hands him a pen, holds out her clipboard. “Sign with a big flourish — I want your neighbours to see.” She plans what she calls a “walk and knock” — up one side of Potters Road, back the other, fifteen doors. In the meantime, could Rosie play with Ulysses?

  “Splendid suggestion.” The dogs have already sniffed each other out during a couple of outings, and Ulysses, who impatiently waits at the gate, seems eager to refresh their friendship.

  Taba takes off, blowing him a kiss. Arthur hefts his backpack and leads Rosie into the farmyard. The dogs romp off. He would love to join in their play, or at least sit on his front step and watch them, but he has made a vow, a promise to Nancy Faulk.

  Crack those books. Start learning about neonics and honeybees, start reading the several hundred cryptic pages of law reports piled up in his study.

  He casts one long, yearning look at the dogs chasing each other’s tails, then takes his groceries to the kitchen and grinds a batch of coffee beans.

  7

  It has taken Arthur an hour to snip open various bulky envelopes and sort their contents chronologically in four neat piles on his old oak desk. The smallest pile is correspondence from Nancy and Selwyn, mostly about tactics and procedures and other boring forensic matters. The biggest pile collects articles about bees and neonics from popular journals and scholarly reports. Witness statements and expert opinions comprise a third pile, and the fourth is law reports. Which shall he attack first?

  His inability to focus seems an increasingly chronic condition and it’s complicated by the same tension he felt earlier today, that insistent phallic itch, amplified by the recent nearness of Tabatha Jones.

  He supposes he should invite her in for coffee when she returns for Rosie. Or a real drink — Arthur keeps a supply of the better brands for guests. He wonders if he should start a fire. No, alcohol and a fire would seem too inviting. He doesn’t want her misreading his attentions. Or lack thereof.

  He sips his coffee, checks the weather on his iPhone — wind and rain expected: good, that will keep him cocooned here. He rises from his desk, puts on some Chopin études to help him relax.

  Finally, he picks up Professor Chernikoff’s analysis of the necessity defence, the one touted by Nancy Faulk. Thirty pages plus footnotes and references. Arthur takes a deep breath and plows ahead.

  Chernikoff kicks off with Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics lays it down that one ought to be excused for a wrongful act done under pressure which “overstrains human nature and which no one could withstand.”

  Chernikoff then draws on the wisdom of another philosopher, two mill
ennia later. Back in the days when life was nasty, brutish, and short, Hobbes wrote, in Leviathan: “If a man by the terror of present death be compelled to do a fact against the law, he is totally excused, because no law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation.”

  Terror of present death — that’s the hitch, the test that the Sarnia Seven seem bound to fail. The test that failed Morgentaler when Canada’s highest court belittled the necessity defence as an elusive concept.

  If one acts to save one’s own life under immediate pressure, the law may forgive. But if one acts to warn against planetary suicide — that doesn’t seem defensible. It would take a brave judge to loosen the necessity defence from the bonds of precedent. It should be called the impossibility defence, because it so rarely succeeds.

  Arthur is up again, pacing. This is hard work, this thinking. What has happened to his ability to concentrate? Maybe his brain rebels at the illiberal, depressing law on this issue. The whole case is depressing. The holocaust of honeybees, the dire consequences to humankind — it’s all too impossible to deal with; too much is being asked of him.

  Defending crimes of murder was easier. No one cared if he won or lost except the client. Arthur wasn’t fighting for a cause; he wasn’t afraid of letting anyone down.

  This will be his last trial — no question about that, given his age and the apparent slowing of his brain. It seems almost inconceivable that the most important trial of his life will be his curtain call.

  He wonders if he’s suffering a kind of stage fright over it, and it’s blocking him, keeping him from buckling down.

  Three thirty. He suspects Taba has often been detained over tea and nibbles — the people of Potters Road are overly friendly. From the porch he waves to Solara and Stefan, who are taking the dogs for a walk along the shore. They have a concert tonight, bluegrass at the Legion.

  He decides to start a fire, a small, cozy one in his den’s airtight woodstove. He’ll be working late in this room, so may as well be comfortable.

  He puts Chernikoff away, picks up Hoff’s preliminary report. It’s in German but with an English translation which, on comparing texts, seems done inexpertly. Arthur takes some pride in his German — studied in his youth so he could read Goethe and Schiller — and he hopes to impress the Nobel Laureate with his fluency.

  Hoff’s popular book, De-Pollination: Why Chemistry May Kill Life on Earth, has been published in many languages. Arthur will take his recently updated German version to bed with him tonight.

  The author photo on the flyleaf depicts a handsome, robust hiker in an alpine meadow in bloom. A soft-brimmed bush hat, a hiking pole. Arthur worries the man may come across in court as pompös und aufgeblasen.

  8

  It’s after six, so Arthur has survived the first few hours of the ordeal known as trial preparation. He feels brain-dead, like one of those lost, poisoned bees. Their sense of direction is corrupted, they can’t find their way to the hive.

  Their assassins, known as Varroa destructor, are mites once isolated to the Far East that have now spread to Europe and the Americas, where they are ubiquitous. They lay eggs in the hives, and when the eggs hatch the young mites feed on the bee pupae.

  These parasites are helped along by pesticides that impair immune responses. Which leads back to neonics. Such chemicals not only make bees more susceptible to the mites, according to this study from Science Magazine, but cause overstimulation, paralysis, and death, and, short of that, loss of learning, foraging, and homing ability. They persist for years in soil and water, and spread to wildflowers near treated fields. Even the homely dandelion is a suspect carrier.

  Arthur flips through several pages. Here is a coloured illustration of a bumblebee. He wonders: How can you not love a bumblebee, so fuzzy and colourful and playful? More laid-back than the honeybee, less driven, but under an even graver threat.

  He takes a break, succumbs to the mesmerizing display of flames flickering from the window of his woodstove. The alternative view, outside, is too sombre now in the darkening twilight. The third option is to return to grappling with the tables of dosages and bee deaths drafted by a scientist at the University of Sussex.

  But now a fourth option opens up: the dogs bark a welcome to Taba Jones as she enters by the gate.

  It would be impolite not to ask her to come in awhile. He remembers she occasionally enjoys a bit of brandy with her coffee.

  As he takes her coat, he tries to recall if he’s ever seen her in a dress. Certainly not in such a hip-hugging skirt. Better than those baggy pants she prefers. He restrains himself from complimenting her, fearing that might be heard as a flirtation.

  She takes off her shoes, replaces them with slip-ons from her bag before being shown into his den, where she pauses, goggling at the stacks of documents and case reports. Arthur admits he’s finding little joy in his role as a weary, overworked warrior for justice. “It’s a struggle gearing up.”

  To his offer of something to eat, she says, “If I have another piece of pie I’ll die.” Taba is pleased with herself, having collected nineteen signatures from thirteen families on Potters Road. “Even old Gullivan, who doesn’t much fancy all the Goody Two-Shoes environmentalist stuff going on.”

  In the kitchen, Arthur digs out a decorative coffee mug he rarely uses. It came off Taba’s potting wheel a decade ago, Margaret’s birthday gift to Arthur. It’s the only one of Taba’s creations not to have been banished by his life companion; the rest are imprisoned in a basement storage room.

  Her back is to him as he returns to the parlour — she’s almost hugging the woodstove. “Perfect,” she purrs, upon sampling the brandy-laced fair-trade Ethiopian in her artisanal mug. Without turning, Taba, a gossip sponge, entertains him with the affairs of the day, and the night, on Potters Road. Mrs. Tucker, according to a neighbour, gets it on with her gardener in the potting shed. Mr. Gullivan’s daily health walks often have him sneaking up Mrs. Rodlee’s driveway.

  Arthur sips his own coffee, just half a cup, to be polite, as he stands awkwardly by the bay window. He would prefer to sit, but suspects it’s proper etiquette to stand until a lady guest seats herself. She’s not budging, so he stays on his feet.

  In an effort not to stare at her snugly wrapped rear, he looks outside — and starts, spilling hot coffee on his hand. Ulysses is trying to mount Rosie. But making a botch of it, being shunned. Arthur decides it’s unwise to describe the scene to Taba, jokingly or otherwise — it would come off suggestive, a libidinous hint.

  She continues to offer her back to him, her well-rounded bum. If she’s doing that to arouse him, it’s working; he feels himself heating up. He needs to sit, to avoid a male mating display through the thin material of his slacks, and finally parks himself in his old club chair.

  At which point she turns to him with a bright smile. Somehow, Arthur notices, a blouse button has come undone, allowing for a more abundant display of cleavage. She salutes him with the coffee mug. “I remember this. Your birthday. Did she throw out everything else?”

  “It’s in storage.” The awkward topic causes him to tense.

  “Along with her husband, eh?” Grinning, as if to persuade him she’s joking. “I guess I ought to get Rosie back. Am I keeping you from work?”

  She seems in no hurry to leave. And anyway Arthur can’t deny he’s enjoying her coquettish company, enjoying this break from his labours. “I’ll get a fresh start in the morning. There’s still coffee in the pot. And a good splash of Courvoisier.” The threat of an erection has faded, and he rises.

  “I’d love another.” She departs the hearth, shoves him gently back into the chair. “After I pee. Don’t get up.” She pads off.

  Doubts creep in during the several minutes he’s out of range of her magnetic field. He really ought not to have asked her to linger. Is it the testosterone talking, trying to seduce him into doing something stupid and dangerous? Is
this some kind of test of strength?

  The mere thought of Margaret’s reaction to this little coffee klatch causes the air to hiss from his inflated libido. Margaret will not be pleased to hear that Taba had warmed herself with coffee, brandy, and a roaring fire in his parlour. He ought to tell her before she hears it from the neighbours. Taba’s old Chev sits outside the gate, so the whole of Garibaldi Island may soon know. Arthur can only hope she will be gone by the time Stefan and Solara leave for their bluegrass event.

  He gets up, wanders over to his desk, laughs at himself. Such paranoid nonsense. His is just one of a dozen homes Taba visited on Potters Road. No island scandal is being played out here, other than that she has something going with Herman Schloss, who is handsome and rich and quite a catch. Arthur is happy she has someone else. Now they can get back to being friends and confidants.

  On returning with her refilled mug, Taba gets close, invading the neutral zone he’d intended to enforce. She smells very good, of perfume and something else, glandular maybe, that causes him to go into full breast-fetish mode. Fearful she will detect his returning erection, he backs up and sits back on the thickly panelled oak desk.

  Taba eyes him mischievously over the rim of her fortified coffee, takes a healthy swallow — she’s already a little high — then sets the mug on the desk. “I’m so glad we’re friends again, Arthur. And by the way, I get that you love Margaret. Whom I also love. But it’s complicated, because I also love you. Differently. As you’ve guessed.”

  No, he hadn’t guessed. She reads the surprise on his face, breaks eye contact, turns pink. It’s the first time Arthur has ever seen her embarrassed. He is shaken by that casual confession of love, though vaguely flattered. He blurts, “What about Herman?”

  “Temporary relief. He’s a snore. He doesn’t recite from Keats and Milton.”

  Though Arthur did — on a mossy bluff under an arbutus tree. Arthur had underestimated the aphrodisiac power of great poetry, hadn’t expected it would get him so energetically laid.