Smoke (12 page)

Isabel sits in the kitchen with her legs spread widely apart to make room for her overripe belly. A mentholated filter-tip burns in an ashtray beside her. The radio is playing. With the boys out of the house there is time to work on bills. She lifts a pile of papers and allows them to slip through her fingers. “Seed, fertilizer, a rented tractor that's only half paid for. I don't know, Tom. We've even got small equipment outstanding.”

“Crop's sorted and baled,” Tom says without looking up from his coffee. “Ready for auction. We'll manage. Always do.”

“If we're lucky, after the mortgage there'll be a little left over for Christmas.”

“Let me see.” Tom reaches for an invoice, reads. “Hail and frost insurance.” He sets his mug down and selects another invoice. “Wear and tear on the Dodge.” He straightens and pushes the pile away. “It all adds up. We'll cut corners for a while but I'll figure something out. Every member of this family still gets a new pair of shoes at Christmas. That's the way it's always been and that's the way it'll stay.”

Isabel smiles warmly. The day Tom no longer concerns himself with providing will be the day she'll know he is no longer in love with her. She feels a slackening inside. Desire. Devotion. She's heard it said that tobacco produces lust in its growers. Maybe the same is true for a grower's wife? The chewing and sucking and the air of indulgence that accompanies the divine herb could be stimulating. Tobacco has medicinal qualities; perhaps it's also an aphrodisiac. Just last night she woke in the wee hours and climbed awkwardly on top of him with the same urgent fancy. C'mon man, she'd thought. Plow
this
field. But he was too exhausted then and she can still hear depletion in his voice. She watches him lift his mug to his lips, sees the dirt caked under his ragged nails and wishes that it were her scent, instead, lingering on his fingertips. She lifts the cigarette, takes her first long drag of the day, and exhales, enjoying the sweet flavour coating her tongue. “You talked about buying one of those new priming machines. Have you given it any more thought?”

“Like to. It would speed things up. Supposed to make priming easier for the men.”

“I'm not convinced it's a good idea. Len Rombout says it might damage the leaves.”

“Len. And you're listening to him now? He was the last grower to install the new curing system.” Tom isn't going to be out-primed or out-smarted by Len Rombout—or anyone else for that matter. “There's nothing anyone can do to stop progress, Isabel. Progress has a way of making room for itself. Fighting it only shows your ignorance.”

“That so?” She sets her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Yes it is.”

“Well I'll just wait and see what you bring in at auction, then. Now, would you like me to fix you something to eat?”

“Naw, I'll wait on dinner for the boys.”

“They might be out all day. Hank's gone to Tillsonburg for a matinee at the Strand and Buster's at school.” Isabel reaches over and draws Tom's free hand across her abdomen. “Feel the kick?”

He leans in and moves his face closer to her belly, listening while he feels for the baby. “Sounds like the ocean.”

“Which one?”

“Pacific.”

“Not the Atlantic?”

“Naw, too cold.”

“You've never even dipped a toe into the Pacific, Tom McFiddie. How would you know the difference?”

“All right then, sounds like the Michigan Central coming over from Buffalo,
kshook-kshook-kshook
.”

Isabel laughs at this. It's true. Sometimes at night her newest guppy swims inside keeping her awake and she's had the very same thought of a rapid train speeding much too fast towards home. “Think he's coming soon?”

Tom's thoughts leap forward to auction—he visualizes loading bales onto the truck and driving them to the warehouse, watching the tobacco marketing representatives walk up and down the aisles and indicate in their catalogues what they'll instruct company buyers to bid on. He sees the Dutch clock winding backwards to a reasonable price. Hears the buzzer as a buyer locks in. “I guessed wrong with Buster.”

“It's too early but my back's aching already, if that's any sign.” Tom reaches around and kneads her lower back with his fisted knuckles. “How's that?”

“Hmm.” Isabel closes her eyes and relaxes her shoulders, allowing the song on the radio to run through her like warm water.
Volaré
. Smoke from her burning cigarette spirals upward and spreads into the faint, carnal shape of a suggestion. All of a sudden she needs to bear down, be made still or readied. She spreads her legs another inch so that Tom might breathe in her musky scent. When she hears a moan catch deep in his throat her lips curl in satisfaction. “You sure you're not hungry?” she repeats, looking down over two milky boulders and the mountain of baby she's making.

Tom adores Isabel, always has, since that first time seeing her sitting on the bench at the railway station with her small blue suitcase in her lap. He'd stopped by the canning factory next door and on his way back to the truck noticed her alone, waiting for her new family to retrieve her. He understood that she was a Home Girl on first glance; it was her wandering, aimless expression that told him, a look in desperate search of a place to land. The corners of her mouth curved upward in relief and defiance. Her pallid, malnourished complexion spoke of abandonment. He'd wanted to bring her home himself, have his mother feed her, help her to grow. It wasn't until many years later, after she turned sixteen and her adoptive family dismissed her, that he fell in a romantic way, hard and soupy, so that his torso went rigid but all his limbs went to rubber when she was near. It was her full hips and her big laugh and mostly it was her absolute refusal to be defeated that sunk him for good.

She'd been standing outside the greengrocer that overcast afternoon, frantically nursing a cigarette. “Hello,” he said, on his way into the store.

“Humph.” She was indignant, dismissive.

“Isabel?” He stopped.

“They put me out. After all these years, they actually put me out.” He'd known others, most of them boys, who were never fully adopted into their new families but instead raised alongside the natural children, treated as free labour and dismissed when the law required that they be paid. He reached for her arm but stopped when he was met with sharp, cutting eyes. He did not find the tears he expected, but one cold, clear pearl of rage rolling down her cheek. Isabel dropped her cigarette and crushed it with the heel of her shoe. “Time to make my own family,” she said, walking off. He'd watched her leave that day and thought, Isabel will never be alone again. Isabel belongs with me.

He's bound to her. She charms, intoxicates. She overflows with affection in an earthy, sensuous way he'd never found in other women. Her cotton dresses don't hang with straight lines and flat fronts as they are meant to. Her red hair rarely stays pinned into place. No matter how plain or how controlled the attempt at self presentation, Isabel appears to tumble out of her clothing as defiantly as a daredevil tumbles over Niagara Falls.

He is most powerfully drawn to her in spring when it's planting time, as if the ten thousand tobacco seeds found in just one ounce are a measure of his potency, and spreading those seeds across sterilized beds is like making love to a virgin all over again. He glances through the glass door towards that other territory he does so love to tame. Powdery flakes melt as soon as they hit the ground. He listens for footsteps in the garden. “Boys might be back early.”

Isabel spreads her legs even wider now—as widely as they will stretch, and lifts her grey wool skirt an inch. “Better hurry then.” She smiles, pulling him closer, and struggles down onto her back on the floor so that he might be more convinced.

After this Tom pays no mind to the possibility of interruptions. He turns and drops to his knees where he nuzzles his face in between his wife's thick thighs and inhales. He quivers as he runs his tongue along her damp underpants. “I forgot what a good cook you are,” he says, pushing aside the cotton material and lapping at her like a thirsty dog.

T
HE BABY COMES
in the night with a sharp wind wailing and rattling through closed windows like the threat of life itself. Tom leaps from bed as soon as Isabel, already dressed and in her slippers with the belt of her robe hanging undone at her sides, pokes him hard and says, “Something's wrong.” He storms down the hall and dials Doc John's number. It rings and rings and seems to ring forever. Tom hangs up right before Alice reaches the end of the hall and lifts the receiver. He bangs on Hank's bedroom door but Hank isn't there. Furious and panicked, Tom steps into Buster's room without knocking. “Get up. Your mother needs the doctor.”

Buster sits up in bed, bleary-eyed. He doesn't bother dressing, merely throws his winter coat over his pyjamas and slips into his boots, barefoot. He charges downstairs to the basement where he expects his brother has once more fallen asleep on the pull-out. He flicks the basement lights on and off fast. “Mom's gonna blow,” he reports. But Hank is nowhere to be found so Buster flees out to the driveway and hops in the truck. He tears out fast along the dark country roads towards Main Street.

The sky is lifting like consciousness, waking and fading to white. There is no one else on the road, as if the world itself has closed its eyes to him. Breathing inside the cab of the truck is like inhaling thin needles of ice. He sees his cloudy breath, and the frozen steering wheel causes his bare hands to turn numb. Snow falls heavily. Perfect for packing, he thinks. When he knocks at the front door he hears the hollow
rap-rap
of his white knuckles on the wood frame and his own fast breath in the night. He rings the bell and knocks louder. Still no answer. He's at the patients' entrance, he realizes, and darts around the side and thumps on the screen door with his fist, making a terrible racket.

Doc John's sleepy face appears on the other side of the door like a watery ghost. He is sinewy in his robe and pyjamas. “What is it, son?”

“It's Mom,” Buster says, jumping up and down in place for warmth. “She's having the baby.”

“Alice!” Doc John hollers over his shoulder. “There's a problem at McFiddie's. Maybe you should come.” He pulls his robe more tightly around his body, folds his arms across his chest in a gesture that appears oddly self-conscious, as if he's been stumbled in upon while reading a dirty magazine. He stands up taller, stiffens. “Wait in the truck.”

T
HEY AREN'T WITH ISABEL
five minutes before Doc John announces that there is no time to drive her to the hospital in Tillsonburg. Alice scuttles Tom out of the bedroom. “We'll call you in when it's time,” she says. “Say a prayer.” And she closes the door.

Tom and Buster sit in the hall, leaning up against the wall rubbing their temples and yawning in that transparent way men do when they want to appear casual, unflappable. Tom cleans his fingernails with a pocket knife. “Thanks for your help tonight.”

Buster notices that his father's thumb and pointer finger are stained yellow from nicotine. “Sure,” he says. His mother's cries and moans sound disturbingly like the swine on the Walker farm, like his own from the night of the fire. He covers his ears to muffle her agonized voice and to block out the worst migraine he's had in months.

“She wanted another baby,” Tom says shaking his head and forgetting that he's speaking to his son. “Out of the blue, just like that. One day she's happy with the family she's got and the next she announces it's time for another child.”

“Yeah,” says Buster, dropping his hands to his sides. “To replace the one she lost.”

Tom snaps to, regards Buster. “What? Oh … Where in hell's your brother, anyway?”

When eerie silence is replaced with heavy breathing at ten, eight, six, three and one minute intervals, Buster begins to imagine that he could unscrew his head like the cap on a bottle and leave it in another room for the night. Unsure of what to do with his hands, he settles them in his lap, one resting up against the hidden gun. He won't move a muscle, he tells himself. Not until the new baby's cry comes through that door healthy and strong and until he hears his mother's voice calm once more.

Twenty minutes later the bedroom door opens and Doc John emerges covered in bright red blood. Buster is first to his feet, feels his chest contract and his brain balloon.

“Is she all right?”

“Yes.” Doc John holds the bucket half-full of afterbirth. It's covered with a blood-soaked towel and smells faintly of tin and battery acid. He looks like an old-time accoucheur standing there before them—a male midwife. He pats Buster on the back, leaving bloody fingerprints while Alice hands the new baby to Tom.

“Congratulations,” she says. “You have a daughter.” Tom takes the tiny shrivelled pink bundle in his arms; he's a father three times over now. Another reason to be grateful. His heart begins to race. One more mouth to feed.

Buster moves closer to examine his sister. “She's hairy,” he says. He tickles under her chin, feels how smooth and clear her skin is. On her head swirls a storm of thick ginger hair. He judges that with her big round eyes she favours their mother and he wonders if her eyes will eventually turn green like his own.

“Can she see me?”

“Their eyes take a while to adjust,” says Doc John. “And she's come early. But I'm sure she can make out who you are.”

The baby gazes up at Buster with round wet pools that appear ancient. She is old and new at once. He wants to dismiss her, wants to ignore her out of being for all that she represents, but then something wonderful and devastating occurs to him: she is the first person since his accident who hasn't looked on him with fear or disgust. To his sister he is normal. He loves her instantly.