Stain of the Berry (32 page)

While Stella went inside the house to fix her husband's lunch, I opted to remain outside and enjoy the beautiful weather. I found a shaded spot on an old but sturdy looking swing set and spent the next ten minutes or so swinging to the songs of meadowlarks and robins and watching Gerald and his younger sister, Sara, chasing after chickens. The woolly mammoth deposited his bulk next to me. He must have been unbearably hot under all that fur and fat. As I sat there commiserating with the dog, I reflected on how this was turning out much differently than I'd anticipated. I had erroneously expected the director of a gay choir to be gay. I expected Stella to be Steve and Gerald and Sara to be Snickers and Cuddles, pet Pomeranians. I was obviously way off base and chided myself for giving into stereotypical thinking.

Stella, a cardboard box firmly under her arm, marched out of the house followed by an as-yet unseen third child, a girl, older, maybe twelve and sullen. Frank's wife led the way to the back of the garage where a rustbucket Dodge was parked. She handed the container of food to the older children, who hoisted it and themselves into the box, then climbed into the cab with Sara. She arranged herself behind the wheel and I pulled myself into the passenger seat. It was tight quarters, with the three of us squished together like canned cocktail sausages, yet somehow Stella had room enough to expertly manoeuvre the on-the-floor stick shift and propel us out of the yard and onto the gravel road that would take us to the

"hill piece." I know from my own days in the country that farmers often have names for each separate piece of land they own, like "the back forty" or "north of the slough acres" or "granddad's quarter." The names rarely make sense to anyone other than the people who farm them and I fully expected the "hill piece" might full well be as flat as a chalkboard.

Several minutes later, Stella took us off-road (finally, here was someone who actually needed an ATV

but did just fine without) into a pasture, complete with mooing cows and a once-majestic windmill now far beyond its prime. We wheeled around a few bushes, through a dried out slough, onto a deeply rutted road, then over a set of abandoned railway tracks. Eventually we stopped long enough for Gerald to hop out of the back to open a barbwire fence gate, which allowed us access into the "hill piece." Shortly, just after we topped a rather modest hillock, we spotted a cloud of dust where Frank Sadownik, in a red and white, 806 International tractor, was pulling a disker-not the cutting edge of farming technology-round and round the field, plowing under the latest crop of pesky weeds. Stella drove us to a spot a little ahead of where the tractor was working and, while we waited for her husband to reach us, began a non-stop gay chatter about this, that and the other thing, mostly about people and events she simply expected I'd know about but that of course I'd never heard of before. My mother does the same thing. To some farm people, the world is a small place where everybody's business is everybody else's business too.

Eventually the tractor came to a stop next to us, the mighty motor grinding to a halt. As Frank Sadownik climbed down from the cab, his three children rushed to greet him as if they hadn't seen him in 134 of 163

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forever. Stella watched with a beaming smile on her pretty face.

"This is Russell," Stella told her husband as he approached the Dodge, wiping his brow and hands with a soiled rag he'd pulled from his Mark's Work Warehouse dungarees (the blue-collar version of wonderpants).

Frank Sadownik was a big man, big everywhere: head, shoulders, gut, thighs, feet, hands, nose. He was fortyish and beginning to lose his light brown hair, except for a thick thatch on his chest. I couldn't help but wonder if this was to be my fate. Despite paying it little attention or care, I like my hair and want it with me for a long, long time. Damn birthday. Farmer Frank reached out for a handshake, his crooked smile filled with crooked teeth. When he said hello, I had no doubt this unlikely character was not only a choir director, but could probably sing like a songbird himself: his voice surprisingly soft and melodious for such a big guy.

"I'm here to talk to you about one of your choir members, Tanya Culinare," I told him.

"Oh yes?" he said as he laid a smooch on his wife's rosy cheek.

"Frank," Stella said in a sad tone, "this Tanya girl has died."

"Tanya?" he said, surprised, both eyebrows reaching in vain for his hairline.

"Russell, I hope you enjoy horseradish," Stella said. "I put it on the hamburgers, gives them a special zing."

I looked to where Stella had set out Frank's lunch on the lowered tailgate of the half-ton and next to his plate of hamburger on a homemade bun, homemade fries, sliced-in-half radishes and a thermos of steaming coffee was another plate of the same. For me.

"Oh my gosh, Mrs. Sad..."

"Stella, please. We're all friends here."

"I didn't expect lunch, really. You should have it. I have something; in the car."

"Oh no, no, this is for you. Really. Enjoy."

And so I bit into the best hamburger I have ever tasted.

"Mr. Sa...Frank, can you tell me what you know about Tanya?" I asked, chewed and swallowed.

"Well, not much really. I don't usually get to know any of the choir members that well. You see, I farm in the summer and in the winter I pick up some substitute teaching jobs, but that still doesn't keep me as busy as I'd like. I used to sing in church choirs quite a bit when I was younger but not so much lately. Then Father Gowsky approached me about directing this choir."

"Father Gowsky?"

"He's the minister from the church where the Pink Gophers do their rehearsing. I guess he listened in a few times and thought they needed help. He knew I liked to sing and had done a little choir directing in school, so he asked if I'd be interested in directing these kids. I said sure, I'd give it a whirl, as long as it was in the evenings and in the winter when I'm not too busy here on the farm. Doesn't pay hardly anything, but I enjoy it. Although, as I said, I don't really get to know the singers. In that way it's a pretty professional group, most of them are there to sing, not use it as some kind of social party place, if you know what I mean. We show up, we rehearse, we go home."

"But you do have some social get-togethers, travel as a group to concerts and competitions?"

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"Yes, that's so," he got out, between munches of hamburger. "But even at that we don't interact that much. They're all a fair bit younger than me. Not much in common really, other than music."

"I see." I looked at him hoping for more. I didn't get sniffed up by your dog for nothing, mister.

He complied. "Now Tanya, all I know about her is that she was pretty quiet. Serious type. Kept to herself most times I noticed her. She had a girlfriend with her this past year, Moxie somebody I think her name was. Moxie was a friendly girl. Liked to laugh. Probably loosened Tanya up a bit, but I can't really say. Now look at that." Frank had craned his head back and was staring heavenward. Stella and I followed suit in time to catch a glimpse of a massive flock of geese, hundreds, passing low in the sky overhead. As if they noticed us noticing them, they chose that moment to offer a greeting of cacophonous honking.

"Beautiful birds, those are." We nodded in agreement. "Kids, you see that?" he called out to the children who dutifully looked up to watch the disappearing birds. "How did Tanya die?" he asked me then. "Some kind of accident? That's just terrible."

Again I checked for the whereabouts of the children. They'd gone back to roaming the field looking for who knows what, safely out of earshot. "The police say she committed suicide. Her family is not so sure."

Stella let out a gasp and Frank just stared at me.

"If that's so," I said, thinking it was time to rattle the bushes a bit. "If Tanya was killed, there's a possibility it might have something to do with her involvement with the Pink Gophers, specifically the competition in Regina last December and the bus ride home during which they became stranded in Davidson."

He nodded and tossed a radish into his mouth. Not quite the reaction I was looking for.

"I understand that although you were at the competition in Regina, you were not on the bus that took them home, is that right?"

"Yes, that's right." He continued to look at me as if I was reading him a story that had little to do with him but he found curious nevertheless.

"I wonder if you can think of anything that happened at the competition that struck you as odd, maybe disagreements or fights between the various choirs or even members of your own choir? Was everyone getting along? Were there any disgruntled singers, perhaps jealousy over the Pink Gophers success at the competition, anything like that?"

"You mean somebody getting mad enough to want to kill Tanya?"

"Yes."

"I don't think so, Russell. That's not the kind of people we're dealing with here. And everybody in our choir got along just fine from what I noti..." He hesitated. Good sign.

"What is it, Frank? Do you remember something?" I pushed.

He swallowed some coffee to wash down the last of his burger. "No, not really, it's just that Jin sometimes made a fuss about things. Small things, like the time of rehearsals, or how long they were, or the colour of the shirts we wore at concerts, that type of thing. It was always something with him and it turned some people off."

Having met the makeup-savvy Jin Chau, I did not find this hard to believe. He struck me as the type to regularly get under people's skin. But how deep? "Did it turn
you
off?" My intent was clear and I hated to ask this in the way I did to the husband of the hand that was feeding me the best hamburger in the world, but it was my job.

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Frank looked me squarely in the eye, then replied slowly, "I really didn't get to know him well enough for him to turn me off." He turned to his wife. "You bring out supper around six then?"

She nodded and that was it. Frank shook my hand perfunctorily and told me he had field work to get back to, in case it rained.

The forecast for the next few days was for continued sun and hot temperatures.

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The odour was unmistakable.

Pig-Lots of 'em.

The second thing I noticed when pulling into the farmyard-not five kilometres from the Sadownik homestead-was the endless rows of cars and trucks and combines and tractors and every other motorized vehicle created by man, each long past its best-before date, lined up like broken toy soldiers waiting for repair that would never come. Most of them were sitting on rims, gutted of their motors and other usable parts, the colour of rust and dirt mixed together. The Mazda, although twenty years old herself, looked like Cinderella's glass slipper in a closet full of worn out, dirty workboots. Making my way through the metal carcass graveyard, I inched the car up to the nearest of seven humongous, low-slung barns, no doubt housing the source of the offending aroma that permeated the air like oil in water, coating it and choking it with its overwhelming, almost tactile consistency.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all, I thought to myself as I stepped out of my automobile and approached the door of the pig barn; my farm-boy nose had obviously become citified over the past decade and a half and was not enjoying its current circumstance. I slid open the door of the first barn and a fresh waft of the stuff assaulted me like an exploding water balloon. I persevered and entered. Welcome to Pigdom Come. The barn was huge, wide and long, with a continuous row of end-to-end pens running down each side from which I could hear the grunting, squealing, guttural, unmistakable song of swine.

Marvellous. Sensory overload for both nose and ears. Yet, despite rumours to the contrary, and upon closer inspection, these pigs seemed to keep their room pretty darn neat, nary a spill of slop or mess of manure to be seen. So then where the good hell was that smell coming from?

I gingerly took a few steps forward until I was close enough to lean forward and sneak a peek into the first pen. Yup. Pig. A little further. Another pig, this one as big as a house, lying on her side like a beached whale with about three million little wriggling pink things suckling at her three million little teats. The mother seemed oblivious to all these piglets feeding off her, and I swear she was staring me right in the eye, her pink ones meeting my green ones with a certain degree of animosity and...wait...what was that...did I hear chanting...it sounded like..."Four legs goooooood, two legs baaaaaaaaad." I was outta there.

I fared no better in the second barn, but in the third I found what I was looking for: a human.

"Excuse me, sir, hello," I called from the door, hoping he'd come to me and I wouldn't have to go to him.

"Whatever you're selling, I don't want any," the pig farmer's voice called back.

Oh geez, I'd have to go to him. I entered the barn and, without acknowledging the sows and boars and their countless progeny on either side of me, I approached the man who was busy doing pig farmer stuff about halfway down the barn's length, three-tine pitchfork in hand. He was a rather attractive man in his late thirties, balding, average height, soulful eyes, powerful chest and baseball-slugger arms obvious beneath the cotton of his one-piece jumper (I'm sure that's not how he referred to his outfit, but that's what it was).

"Lots of cars and things out there," I started out in an amiable tone.

His face took on a friendlier expression. "That what you're here for? You looking for parts? What kinda vehicle? I can see what I got. Got most everything. And can I ask how you heard about me? Was it newspaper ad, referral, the notice up at the post office, my website?"