April Fool (4 page)

Though the trail to Gwendolyn Bay crosses private land, the owners, the Sproules, are well-regarded old-timers who resist the blandishments of the fly-by-night loggers who infest these
islands. They allow Garibaldians to use it, but the secret is kept from uncountrified visitors who tend to leave gates open or tramp on the chocolate lilies. The path also provides clandestine entry into upper Gwendolyn Valley, its lovely pond.

Arthur feels winded but in no distress as he climbs from sheep pastures into dense cedar forest, to a mossy mesa with thick-waisted Douglas firs, a swirling ballet of green-leafed arbutus, groves of Garry oaks, twisted and fat of bud. Below, through gaps, can be seen the rocky beach and the strait, and beyond, the perilously close shores of vast, busy Vancouver Island.

As he nears the Garlinc property–ill-protected by rusting fence wire–he hears a distant hammering, and wonders if a crew is already working on the road access. The valley is guarded on either side by high rock faces, and the only opening, known as Gwendolyn Gap, or just the Gap, is too narrow for a road. But the developers have been given a blasting permit. Arthur shudders, recoils from the ugliness of it, of man and his machines and his explosive devices.

He exerts himself over one last rise, takes in a soul-shuddering view of valley, sea, and distant snow-coned mountains, and realizes he has forgotten to buy lemons. What causes this Lethean forgetfulness? Maybe it's the bizarre murder charge against Nick Faloon, churning darkly in his mind.

He sits on the grass against a boulder, a cautious twenty feet from the lip of the precipice above the Gap. He pulls out the newspaper and his glasses and his old Peterson bent, and as he stuffs it with tobacco, he looks down upon Gwendolyn Pond at the buffleheads and mallards gliding among the water lilies. He is overcome by a feeling of helplessness.

Living in the country, living with Margaret, has connected him with the earth in ways that remain elusive, made him aware that an ancient, more beautiful time is gone. Forever, he fears. He can't see the Save Gwendolyn Society preserving even this tiny speck of the planet.

“Don't get yourself tangled in politics on this crazy island, Beauchamp,” Doc Dooley counselled. “It's an invitation to the grave.”

Arthur lights up, reads a précis of events in a sleepy outport four days ago–dubbed by the press the April Fool's Day murder. Several sports fishers robbed, Dr. Winters raped, choked to death on her own underwear. He had heard nothing on the radio, but it is regularly tuned to classical music. He won't have a television set.

The victim of this slaying is “a well-known psychologist and relationship therapist” whom he vaguely remembers smiling at him from the newspapers, a syndicated column,
Doctor Eve
. Indeed, he admits to having furtively read her advice. She was no pseudo-expert in the manner of Ann Landers, held a Ph.D. in counselling psychology.

“Nicholas Faloon, 54, proprietor of a local inn, was arrested while attempting to flee the area dressed as a woman.” This seems a Faloonish touch. He insisted, on being arraigned, that his name was Gertrude Heeredam, and demanded a Dutch interpreter. Thus the psychiatric assessment.

It is inconceivable that Faloon will pull this off. Has he not got a lawyer? Arthur wonders if he should urge a friend to take on his case, someone competent, experienced.

He looks away from the newspaper, listens again to the sound of hammering. Probably a woodpecker. Clouds, wet and gloomy, are rolling in. A kingfisher chatters by the pond. Two bald eagles make lazy loops above him, then one sails toward a perch on a Douglas fir. He makes out a clump of twigs there: an old nest.

He returns to his newspaper. “Sources say Faloon is known to the police.” That seems an understatement. Faloon is a kleptomaniac who, in brave acceptance of his disability, put his compulsion to profitable use from an early age. Arthur first acted for him in a juvenile case involving a missing box of rare comic books.

Faloon's last trial, the rape, still causes acid to burn in Arthur's gut, the low point of his courtroom career, the only wrongful conviction to besmirch his forty-year record. Ten years for a sexual assault Faloon did not commit. Arthur invariably rejected consent rape defences, the defendant often a brute, the woman twice victimized. But this mild-mannered thief would be as likely to attack a woman as a pumpkin to sprout wings and fly.

Arthur still takes on the burden of the failed defence, excoriates himself. He didn't penetrate the armour of the complainant, Adeline Angella, an attention-seeking magazine writer who tearfully described to a jury how an interview with a celebrated jewel thief evolved into a rape extorted by a knife to her throat.

Angella sent out a plea to Women Against Violence to fill the court. Who in that hostile arena was going to believe that Nick Faloon succumbed to Angella's lure? Arthur wasn't able to put a firm finger on her motive for making a false complaint. Publicity? Profit? After the trial and appeal, her blunt account of her courtroom ordeal appeared in a major women's monthly.

The article in the
Sun
quotes Staff Sergeant Jasper Flynn: “The theory we're working on is the victim met her fate after resisting an intruder intent on robbing her.” “Met her fate”–a shy euphemism from a veteran cop. He declined to say whether anything was stolen from her. How absurd to think Faloon would engineer a lucrative robbery of hotel rooms, then compromise his success by targeting, in the dead of night, a visiting psychologist. But that seems the official view.

Surely, he's again a victim of circumstances, of coincidence, a man in the wrong place at the worst of possible times, an obvious target. The police zeroed in on him, ignoring other possibilities. An act of rape is alleged, so there is likely to be DNA from the attacker's semen–the test results surely will exonerate poor Nick.

The last time they met was after Faloon was given day parole. He came to Arthur's office bearing a gift, a box of Cuban cigars, which Arthur accepted guiltily, not wanting to offend the man he'd failed so grievously.

“Did I not hear you tell the parole board you've mended your ways?” he asked.

“Almost, Mr. Beauchamp. I'm just putting together a little poke, and then I'm certified street legal.”

Something in the tourist industry, he said. A bed-and-breakfast. Arthur had encouraged him, but held little hope.

It has begun to rain. The two eagles are in the air again: a display of aerobatics, cartwheels and swoops, one in pursuit of the other. Arthur is awed: this is their famed nuptial display–he can hardly wait to tell Margaret. After the eagles gambol away behind a hill, he folds his newspaper, packs away his pipe, rises, and casts a last look below. Gwendolyn Bay is on the other side of the island from Blunder Bay. He will not have to look at the damage they will do here.

 

He arrives home drenched. His apology draws from Margaret a look between disbelief and exasperation. “Jesus, Arthur, I don't care about the damn lemons, I care about your health.” She's fifteen years younger than Arthur, a feisty survivor of the 1960s–that's when her commune set up shop on the island. It didn't last; Margaret did.

This gracile, lithe, and energetic activist is leagues apart, in substance and style, from his first wife, Annabelle, chic and city-slick, artistic director of an opera company. She broke his heart, capping a series of affairs by absconding with a conductor. The sole child of that sad union, Deborah, a divorced single parent, is in Australia, a school principal. Arthur's parents also went their separate ways. Leeches of incompatibility lurk in the mud of the Beauchamp gene pool.

Arthur worries that Margaret, in turn, may yet find a bad fit with a Beauchamp, will find it intolerable living with this
forgetful soliloquizing bore. Pompous, donnish A.R. Beauchamp, a poor lover, frequently unavailable.

After he tells Margaret of the eagles' conjugal dance, she rushes to the phone to call her friend Zoë, the local minister's wife. “The eagles are mating!” Her bell-like voice, breathless and triumphant.

Arthur turns on the six o'clock news as he undresses for a bath, and garlic scents waft from the kitchen. He hopes there will be pie–he harvested young rhubarb, left the tender red stalks in the kitchen as a hint. But Margaret has become stingy with her desserts. He might be a few pounds overweight, but the flesh hangs well enough on his tall frame. His most attractive feature, says Margaret, presumably joking, is the commanding nose. Cyrano, friends call him.

On the radio, he hears that Nick Faloon has appeared in court on a psychiatric remand. A judge has ordered the appointment of a legal-aid counsel.

That will not do. Arthur climbs into the tub with the phone and leaves a message at Pomeroy Macarthur Brovak and Sage, criminal lawyers. Any one of them will do, though he'd prefer the brittle but oftentimes brilliant Brian Pomeroy–if he's at the top of his game and not struggling through another nervous breakdown.

 

Arthur spends much of the evening nodding sympathetically over poached salmon and greens, then rhubarb pie and tea, then in the comfort of his club chair by the fire, as Margaret holds forth. “There's old growth in there, Arthur, because there's never been a road. Now they're going to cut a swath sixty yards wide through it. Pavement! Power lines! Next will be a bridge–we won't be an island any more, we'll be a bedroom. Is that what you want?”

This is one of her rhetorical flourishes, not a question. He has learned it's unwise to argue, so he pronounces his loyalty, and she is satisfied with that and carries on.

Much of her fire tonight is directed at Garibaldi's trustees, who rezoned Gwendolyn, who “buddied up” to the developers, traded in this island's wild heritage–“for fifty acres of public park and a fire truck that we were raising funds for anyway.” She rejected such gifts when she was trustee, then was narrowly defeated in the last campaign.

“They're going to start tomorrow, Arthur. They're blasting the Gap. There are some three-hundred-year-old firs in there. How can you sit there and let that happen?” She immediately regrets that challenge, comes behind him, folds her arms around his neck, her brown, close-cropped hair tickling his ear. “Come on, Arthur, you've got to stop being such a doornail. You can't live on Garibaldi and be a political recluse. We're not asking much…some legal help, that's all.”

“In what sense?” He has always managed to tiptoe away from such requests: to assent means to get involved. Political meetings. Contention. That's not why he came to Garibaldi.

“We have to take some risks. Direct action.”

An expression that encompasses sins like civil disobedience, a concept in which he's never found much favour. Laws should be changed, not broken. “Surely you're not hammering spikes into trees.”

The phone rings. “We'll talk about it tonight when I get back.” She picks up the receiver: “Hi, what's up?…Twelve more bodies, right on.” She hangs up.

“Twelve bodies?”

“Don't worry, they're alive.”

Shrugging on her coat, she says, “Remember to look in on the Woofers” and races off, abandoning the recluse. Arthur is smarting, but he's also troubled: direct action hints of illegality and sorry consequences.

After he tends to the dishes, he strolls over to Margaret's former residence–their farms have been consolidated–to check on the Woofers boarding there. Willing Workers on Organic Farms: they come from lands near and far, they
exchange labour for lodging and food, they stay for a few weeks, they go. Blunder Bay has had as many as five, but currently only two: Paavo, a forestry student from Helsinki, and Kim Lee, a Korean nutritionist. Communication is faulty. Paavo struggles in English, and the Korean girl is beyond comprehension.

Sign language, however, makes do, though it demands skill at slapstick. Clucking and flapping ensures the chickens are fed; a pantomime of two-handed masturbation gets the goats milked. These efforts are usually greeted by uproarious laughter. Though the Woofers often create more work than they do, they are good kids, adventurous, travelling the world. Arthur enjoys sharing chores with them, swapping language lessons, brushing up on his French or German, learning a little Finnish or Korean or Japanese in exchange for English and Latin and ancient Greek.

No one is about but Kim Lee, a fresh-faced twenty-year-old. “Where is Paavo?” he asks.

“Go. Help. Save.” A sweeping motion, raising her arms high, then circling what may be the trunk of a tree. Arthur gathers Margaret has commandeered Paavo for her surreptitious project.

She doesn't return until after midnight, waking him briefly as she slides into bed. He seeks to caress her, but she denies him, rolls onto her stomach. Arthur has trouble resuming sleep.

 

4

A
rthur is awakened by a clattering outside. When he sits up he is blinded by the sun streaming through his window. He finds his glasses and makes out Stoney and Dog throwing tools into the back of his pickup. Margaret's own truck has gone, and she with it–her side of the bed is empty. A memory of last night, her coolness, causes an ache in the chest, like heartburn.

He hollers, “Don't do anything. I'm getting dressed.” Stoney is a habitual borrower of his beloved 1969 Fargo, though that's partly Arthur's fault: he leaves the keys on the dashboard. The last time Stoney drove off with it, Arthur went two weeks without a vehicle–other than his Rolls, on blocks, under cover. Stoney sold him the Fargo, so perhaps he feels some inherent right to its use. He and Dog exercise a similar claim to the garage they built for Arthur, who once surprised them inside assembling a still.

Stoney – alias Bob Stonewell – is a supposed master of many trades: mechanics, carpentry, and a specialized form of horticulture – and is usually reeking of its well-smoked essences. His accomplice, who seems to bear no other name than Dog, is built like a fireplug and speaks about as often. Somehow, these two stalwarts have become part of Arthur's life, like extra appendages that one must learn to live with, however non-functional.

As he steps into his gumboots, Arthur sees Dog toss a tree-climbing harness into the cab of the truck. Closer observation reveals that Stoney's jacket is speckled with saw chips. Both seem exhausted, dirty as if from hard work, however unlikely that would be on this pleasant April morning.

“You fellows are up early.”

“Haven't been to bed.” Stoney extends a can of beer. “You drinking these days, Arthur?”

“Afraid not.” Why is it generally assumed that Arthur must one day, after fifteen years, finally succumb? “What have you gentlemen been up to?”

“First off, we're celebrating our new company, Island Landscraping. You heard that Dog and me, we bought a backhoe, eh? Kind of used and beat up, but we got it running smooth as silk.” However tired, Stoney is a tireless gabber, especially when under the influence of Garibaldi's infamous main crop. “I'm in hock for the parts, though, and I was thinking, that low spot over there, where all you got is horsetails, what you need is a pool–that's the only thing this property lacks.”

“We already have a pond.” Back of the barn, where the geese nest.

“Full of weeds. I'm talking about going down fifteen, twenty feet, for swimming.”

Stoney probably overheard him and Margaret talking about a swimming hole. “It's still rainy season, Stoney, but if Island Landscraping survives as a going concern until August, we shall then consider its bid.” The low spot is saturated with spring runoff; he has visions of a backhoe sitting forever in a wet hole a hundred yards from the house.

“Naw, you want to do it early, so it fills up, otherwise you got an ugly hole for four months. I know where I can lay my hands on a pump, it just needs an overhaul. That's all clay down there, eh? The walls will hold real good even in April. Anyway, what's happening is we had a little stall just up the road, and the
flatbed's full of tools we've got to return to the other volunteers. We can be back in an hour with this old fella.” He pats the hood of the Fargo, a fond gesture, proprietary.

“I will drive you.” Stoney and Dog climb in beside him, and they head off. “You have not spent the whole night idly. What else were you celebrating?” A tribal rite, perhaps, in which one's head is sprinkled with sawdust and fir needles.

“Project Eagle. Dog and me are up there with the ringleaders. We may need to retain you in case we get in shit. Don't think it wasn't a death-defying experience, eh? It got dark, and all we had was flashlights and a kerosene lamp. Dog did the finishing touches, the barrier, he can go up them trees like a squirrel. I did the roof. We had all the pieces pre-assembled, sent 'em up on ropes and pulleys.”

Arthur is still not fully awake, not following this. Project Eagle?

“I hammered in my last shake just as it was getting dawn. I told everyone, if I'm up here, I might as well stick around, but that got vetoed, they claim I ain't got enough staying power. They were drawing lots about who would go up there when me and Dog left to drop off the tools. Actually, we stopped off at Honk Gilmore's, he's got some primordial bud, man.”

Arthur's anxiety grows with every word. “Pause here, Stoney. They were drawing
lots
? To go where?”

“We had about thirty people hammering away there. The Gap. Right in the middle of the road that ain't going to happen if we got a breath left in us, right, Dog?”

Dog nods, half-asleep. They have now pulled up to Stoney's two-ton flatbed. Arthur makes out, under a torn canvas, saws, shovels, grapples, pulleys, wheelbarrows, a generator.

“Let me understand this, Stoney. You are describing some kind of tree house?”

“Not some kid's tree house, a fort, a
real
fort. We're talking, oh, maybe eighty feet up.”

“Eighty?” That was the hammering Arthur heard.

“It's a palace, man. It's even got a chemical shitter.” He jostles Dog awake, and they get out.

“I suggest you fellows hide those tools for now, deep in the bush.”

He presses the accelerator too hard, and the Fargo bucks and spits gravel. He takes the old bypass, up by the deserted vineyard, a project surrendered to birds and broom. He senses that his worst fears are about to be confirmed.

As he approaches Centre Road, Margaret's full-sized diesel Toyota passes the other way, Paavo driving, no Margaret. Distracted, swerving, he almost clips the Hamiltons' roadside stand and its piled cartons of eggs. A hysterical chicken flaps past his front wheel. Slow down, he tells himself, everything's going to be all right. Progress is retarded, in any event, by an empty logging truck that leads him on a winding climb. As he passes the old granite quarry, a glimpse in the rear-view reveals a fat figure astride a midget car–it's Nelson Forbish, editor of
The Bleat
(“Covering the Island, Covering Up for No One”), on his all-terrain vehicle.

Centre Road climbs steeply to the Lower Gap Trail, where another logging truck sits, along with a king cab, a bulldozer, and an excavator. Down the hill is a straggling line of parked vehicles, curious locals approaching by foot. Arthur wedges his truck behind a fresh stump–an acre of trees is down, a field of amputated trunks. But the crew of Gulf Sustainable Logging are now standing by idly. As Arthur stares at the carnage, he feels a sickness, again comes that sense of helplessness.

“Hop on, Mr. Beauchamp,” Nelson says. He prefers to address Arthur formally, but after six years still mispronounces his name, anglicized beyond repair centuries ago as “Beechem.”

Arthur risks a perch behind Nelson's ample girth, grasping the straps of his camera bag. Nelson goes slowly up the Gap Trail, his horn making tinny beeps, encouraging pedestrians to give way. “Press vehicle,” he calls out, then grumbles,
“Nobody tells me anything till the last minute. Any idea what's going on up here, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“I intend to find out.”

“You want to give me a good quote for later?”

“Not now, Nelson.” So many of Arthur's quotes to
The Bleat
have been so garbled that he has begun creating fictions. Last month, Nelson printed his canard that the Northwest Nude Bathers Society was planning an anti-logging protest here on April first.

“How's the program?” Arthur asks.

“I'm down to two hundred and eighty, and it's killing me. I get hallucinations. I dreamed I was in chains and there was a pork roast sitting in front of me.”

After a few minutes they come to the narrowest part of the Gap, where sound is muffled by the forest and only an occasional spear of sunshine penetrates the canopy. It's made darker still by the sheer rock walls. Here, Douglas firs rooted centuries ago, and found the sun–many are massive, covered by thick slabs of ancient bark. Delicate moss fronds hang from lower limbs, and tiny birds cavort in them, kinglets.

Slappy bounds up to Arthur, tail wagging, as he dismounts at a small clearing made soft by a carpet of needles, with cones and dead branches raked neatly to the side. Among those gathered here is Reverend Al Noggins, ringleader of the Save Gwendolyn Society. He's in the far corner of the clearing, an alcove, talking with the attractive gamin Arthur saw hitchhiking, the five-foot-two hippie.

The star of this show is a venerable Douglas fir eight feet wide at the base, dwarfing even Nelson Forbish as he gapes upward. Arthur calculates the platform as not eighty feet high, as Stoney claimed, more like fifty, the height of eight tall men. It girds the entire trunk and is protected by a sturdy guard rail. A shake roof, supported by diagonal beams, is held to the trunk with foot-long bolts. Canvas rain blinds that can be lowered.
Affixed to the beams, a fan of poles, sharpened at the ends like spears: the Dog-built barrier.

He calls, “Are you up there, Margaret?”

She appears over the railing, shouts down, “Here I am.” An expressive shrug, arms held out as if she's about to take wing. “I didn't plan it. My name was pulled from a hat.”

“And how long will you stay?”

“We're provisioned for…well, three weeks. That's the plan.”

Arthur stares up dumbly as the kinglets flit and cheep in the boughs above her. Two more heads appear. Cudworth Brown, the dissolute poet manqué, and his teenaged current interest, Felicity Jones. Margaret gathers them in a hug.

“We have sleeping bags, a little Bunsen stove, books to read–I may finally get to
War and Peace
.”

“I'm not quite sure what to say.”

“I can't hear you.”

He shouts. “It's a shock.” What means her bold and naked smile? There's no apology here, no misgiving.

“Arthur, I know this will seem extreme to you.” Extreme? To stable, steady Beauchamp? “I put my name in the hat with five others, I can't renege, I have to do it. This is about finally taking a stand. If we don't, we surrender. I can't live with surrender.”

Nelson is transcribing every word. Cameras are also at work: Flim Flam Films, a Saltspring Island company. By now, fifty friends and neighbours have arrived. Trustee Kurt Zoller is here. Striding anxiously into the clearing comes the CEO of Garlinc, Todd Clearihue.

Last seen, he was giving a lift to the pixie. Arthur massages a crick from his neck, glances over at her, olive complexion under spikes of black hair. A row of rings in an ear and one in her lip. A jacket open to Che Guevara on her T-shirt, an exhortation: “Rise Up!”

“Three weeks, did you say, Margaret?” Though shouted over the increasing ambient noise, it sounds of snivelling.

“That's the plan, we're doing shifts. Will you remember to put out the bird food? The vet's bill has to be paid, and you'll have to get in some feed.”

“What about the kids, the goats?”

“Edna Sproule will help with the birthing. I want you to eat at the Woofer house. Kim Lee is a knowledgeable cook, and you ought to be on a vegetarian diet anyway.”

The hidden text: He's helpless. He will be spoonfed lentil soup and tofu. Margaret looks proud and beautiful, Rapunzel in her tower. Removed, remote, unreachable.

Everyone is listening breathlessly to these disclosures of Arthur's helplessness and dietary needs. He will seem a worrywart to boot if he broadcasts his fears for Margaret's safety. Not to mention her mental health, after three weeks living with this pair.

Cudworth Brown is a former ironworker, runs the recycling depot. Most call him Cud, which is reflective of the slow, chewing motions of the ruminant creator that he is. He's been writing poetry for the last dozen of his forty-two years, and has finally been published:
Liquor Balls
, a thin volume of lusty verse. The local literary celebrity has attracted, in Felicity Jones, his first groupie, an eighteen-year-old naïf repeating her final year at Saltspring High.

“I can't conceive of how you got up there, Margaret. How will you ever get down?”

Reverend Al Noggins finally brings this neck-wrenching tête-à-tête to a close, moving Arthur away. “Have to keep the banter brief, Arthur.” The reverend, everyone calls him, or Reverend Al, a short, bearded, energetic Welshman, twenty years of preaching the gospel at the local Anglican church. “We have a nesting eagle pair over there.” He points to a Douglas fir thirty feet away. “We had an engineer design the platform,
old boy, it's built to specs. For emergencies they have a rope ladder with a safety line.”

Todd Clearihue comes striding up, but before he can speak, Reverend Al says, “Todd, we're not moving until you send away the logging crew. In addition to humans, there's another species up there we propose to protect. Bald eagles. There's a nest.” A sonorous voice, well suited to the pulpit.