Smoke (25 page)

“Where were you that night?” Tom asks.

“What?”

“The night of the accident. What were you doing before?”

“I don't know. I … I was tidying up downstairs, I guess. Why?” It's been a longstanding, unspoken agreement between them— one that Tom is only now beginning to fully recognize—that he will have Isabel and she will have the children. It's a deal that was forged in subtle ways, incidents too small and too fleeting to have been noticed at the time, though now he remembers those moments. Isabel acting exasperated or impatient and through such displays reinscribing in them all the notion that he is merely a man, a father, and therefore not naturally suited to the work of raising a human being. Stick to weeds, she seems to say. He hasn't always noticed, or minded, for though it irks him some to dwell on the special status mothering affords, the greater part of him believes in it, agrees with her assessment, and is relieved by its convenience. Isabel has always left him free of changing the diapers he has no interest in changing, and far apart from the drudgery that makes up a mother's world. He's colluded in the arrangement, just as his own father did, and now that his son holds more respect for another man he is paying the price.

“If you'd been upstairs sooner maybe—”

“Maybe what? He wouldn't have been burned? C'mon Thomas. Be honest at least. Tell the truth. You think I can't sense it? It's plain as the scars on his face—you're ashamed of him and now you blame me.”

“I do not. I'm sick of always being the ogre, that's all.”

Each time Isabel takes Buster's side, Tom feels her betrayal. It's a hambone's sentiment, he knows. But he also knows that he can never truly win his wife's undivided attention, for she's chosen her children—an unconquerable need for biological family, for the bonds of blood—at every turn.

“Buster thinks you've replaced him, you know?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With Lizzie. The way you are with her. That you even wanted her in the first place.”

“That's ridiculous!”

“Is it? Two children, Isabel. That's what you always said. Any more and they wouldn't get the attention they deserved. But then right after the fire you were pregnant again.”

Isabel is silent, tugs her red hair behind one ear.

Tom clenches his jaw, feels a familiar frustration surge. With Lizzie Isabel is fast to grab the crying child away, soothe tears and reinforce that it's in mother's arms alone that comfort can be found. Will the pattern repeat again? Will Lizzie come to believe, as the boys have, that he is too busy, too otherwise preoccupied? But goddamnit, this isn't fair. It's his labour that pays the bills. It's his long hours in the fields that make it possible for Isabel to wear those dresses she prizes and for the boys to have fishing rods and baseball gloves and medical attention. Isn't he here beside all of them, joining in, holding up the foundation they take for granted? Yes. He is as available to his family as Isabel is, in his own way. He might be the invisible man around here but he's the father, not Doc John, and he refuses to be denied this respect any longer. Resentment dislodges in his throat and arches up like a broken bone. “The boys have always been yours,” he says. “I'm lucky if I get to talk to them without you interfering. I've about had enough. If there's to be anything like an operation I'll be the one making that decision.”

The next thing Buster knows he is sitting on a board in the barn beside Hank, pulling half-foot-long seedlings and laying them in a box to be transferred into the ground. This is soft work. Women's work. His father stands over him, dusting off the front of his overalls.

“Think you can manage?”

“Course.”

“Good. I want your brother out planting for the afternoon. Let's go Hank.”

Buster knows tobacco saves their father, wraps his hopes and luxuries in fancy ribbons or finely rolled paper and delivers them as far away as Europe for a large profit. He knows that it's tobacco permitting them all their big cars and modern conveniences. Nobody, not even Doc John, speaks a word against the stuff. Buster feels differently now, though he'll never say so. He understands the inherent danger in one thin wisp, the lurking menace of a foggy cloud, how it can reach out and grab you, pull you down into oblivion without warning. Anything can be ignited. A match. The old gas stove in his mother's kitchen, even his own incendiary heart that goes on
pounding, pounding,
longing to impress Jelly Bean even when there's no real possibility of it any more. The sting and stab of his migraines, the land he is used to tending, that black earth with its green and pink weeds, will always surround him like a wet wool blanket, reminding him of that.

He holds a young seedling up in front of his face to examine it. His father did market gardening before tobacco: strawberries, raspberries, watermelon and cabbage—all cash crops. Buster sets the seedling in its box. His father was one of the first sand land farmers to turn to tobacco. He's heard the story so many times that he sometimes feels as if he was there himself to witness it, though that would've been impossible for he hadn't yet been born. His father grew his first Burley in 1936—had to harvest it as the whole stock and leaf. By 1937 the first three kilns on their farm were built and flue-cured tobacco grown. Dad really made something of himself, Buster thinks. He must be a fast learner. Maybe that's how he stays ahead of the game now.

Buster raises his eyes to a dark figure standing in the barn doorway, blocking the sun. Jelly Bean is outlined by a sharp white light. She curves into the day like an hourglass. He stares at her full and changing body.

“Hey, what are
you
doing here?”

“Mother thinks it'll be good practice for when I help out later,” she lies.

“So, you're gonna work harvest after all.”

“I told you I was. Beats babysitting. Besides, art school's expensive.”
Art school?
He hardly thinks of her as a painter. Since New Year's Eve, despite himself, he thinks of her as his girl. “Right. Art school. You told me.” He passes her a box and she accepts it, sets it down at her feet.

“Uh-huh.” Her tone is impatient. She's hurt that he didn't remember, though she'd only mentioned it once. Still, of anyone, she expects Buster to understand what it's like to want to break free. “I'm going to apply next year,” she adds. Her brassiere straps dig into her shoulders. Sweat rolls down her sides and she wonders whether Barbara Ann ever bears perspiration marks under her arms. The pictures in her mother's scrapbooks never show any. “Toronto's swell I figure. It's where Mother gets her catalogues. There are big department stores and street trolleys and there's the Royal York Hotel looking over Lake Ontario. I could see it all. I could arrange for lessons.”

“But you already draw.”

“Oh I just fiddle around. Real students learn from live models, paint on proper canvases. Imagine all the things we'll never know, being cooped up here.”

“You like painting that much?”

She nods. “It's the scariest, most exciting thing in the world. That second before I drop the ink onto the emptiness and begin to fill it in with colour.”

Buster shifts in his seat. “Why?” He doesn't understand.

“I never know if the picture in my mind can be matched. I don't want to be disappointed.”

“Oh.” He shudders. Is he one of her blank pages?

He plucks a seedling from its earthy bed and lays it in the box to demonstrate how it's done. Before the accident the land was his to feed and breed and claim. His to grab up and scatter through his fingers. His to smell. Taste even. Tobacco knew him inside and out, and even now, with everything else changed, it still lives in his lungs, in his bones, like a pleasurable poison. It rules him as Doc John's best stories do—all day, unshakable. But what if he wants out of it?

He'd once thought of this place as his empire, the best place there was. He wanted to become a curer himself—a king on this throne made of grass and weeds. He's a grower's son; it was natural that he would become a grower himself someday. Now he can barely stand the thought of planting these seedlings, never mind priming or curing them.
Cure
. A word he no longer believes in. Cured tobacco is nothing but a dried out, turned to yellow, wrinkled form. A scar. He looks at Jelly Bean.

How do you love something imperfect?

This single question lies alongside each row in the field. Sits in the creeping worry lines that guard his mother's protective eyes. In his father's impatient toe tapping. In every story Doc John recounts. The question presses through him with a force that he senses could squash him one day soon if he doesn't find an answer. He has to know because, if nothing else, he, Buster McFiddie, is sweet on a clumsy pest of a girl. There's no denying it any longer. And she's sweet on him, she must be. She's here, isn't she? Turned up of her own free will. Her hair and eyes colour all that is desire, and as he stares at her he is drawn in as if she's inhaled him.

“Does Toronto have a mob?” he asks.

“Dunno.” She taps her foot and gazes across at him with big blue eyes like two open windows. He continues pulling, feels the firm stems in his hand.

“Doc John saved me the night of the accident, you know? I wouldn't have made it otherwise. He visited when I was in the hospital. He's awful secretive though. Never talks about his life before, in Michigan.” Buster's face is shiny, the fedora yellowing around the brim. “Ever notice he won't give a straight answer? What do you make of that?”

Jelly Bean shrugs. “Old people are funny.”

“Yeah but he wasn't always old. It's just he's been around for a long time and still he's kind of … kind of like a stranger.”

Jelly Bean laughs. “Silly, there's no such thing as a stranger here.” She lifts a seedling and places it delicately in the box at her feet. She admires its bright green colour, wonders if she shouldn't try her hand at oil paints for a change. “Hey, you're so interested in other people's lives all of a sudden, maybe you want to help
me
with something?”

“What's that?”

“Mother wants to advertise for the sesquicentennial. She's asked me to create a few posters. I thought I'd travel to Tillsonburg and Simcoe with them.” Her voice is quicksilver and shoots straight through Buster's most vulnerable parts. He lets her glimpse his waxy face full-on in the relentless light.

“I could ask Dad to borrow his truck one weekend.”

“That'd be swell.” She squints a near-perfect smile.

On the last Saturday of May Buster waits for Hank to return with the Dodge but he doesn't. So it's afternoon by the time Buster gives up waiting, grabs his fishing bag and a roll of electrician's tape and walks into the village to ask Doc John to borrow his Olds.

“What do you need it for, son?”

“Errands. Out of town.”

Doc John fiddles with his glasses. “What kind of errands?”

“I'm taking Jelly Bean around with posters for the anniversary. No big deal.”

“That's wonderful.” Alice stands on her tiptoes, poking her head over her husband's shoulder. “I mean any early publicity can only help with fundraising.”

“Hi Mrs. Gray. How are you today?” Buster tips his hat.

“Oh, you know. Planning is well underway. Have a good time now.” She steps back.

“Posters huh?” Doc John chuckles, coughs, and wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.

“You're bleeding.” Buster points.

“Shush!” Doc John uses his hands to quiet the air. “Shush. Just a touch of the influenza, nothing serious. Hold on while I fetch my keys.” He withdraws and returns a moment later pushing his way out the front door with his hat and coat and his cane. “Second thought, I could use a drive.”

Buster rides in the passenger side for the short trip down Main Street to the hardware store while the doctor inches them along like a big black snail. He appears focused and preoccupied all at once.