Smoke (3 page)

This year his crop is worth close to forty thousand dollars and competition is fierce so he's keeping both eyes wide open to what's going on around him. The marketing board is being implemented; he needs to have premium bales and make sure he's able to hold his own. He's instructed the handers to pass the tiers a larger bunch of leaves, more than their usual three at a time, in order to put more into a kiln. Tom pays the curer per kiln and hopes to save money this way, but he knows it's not good practice. There's been grumbling about it from the tiers because tying larger bunches means the string breaks often and it's harder to hang the sticks. The shortcut is a risk and it's at their expense. No one says anything directly to Tom. Those tiers who do as they're told—wrap their blisters, ignore their swollen wrists, get over to Doc John's for a needle against the tobacco poisoning—are the ones who will last for the duration and be hired back next season.

Harvest lasts six or eight weeks and Tom begins every day at the first hint of sunrise when a burly brume rises off the field and dew drips from the leaves. He wears a black rain suit to keep from getting soaked. The rubber heats up with the sun and creates an unrelenting vapour, a second skin, which sits over top of his own. Harvest means bending backs in the hot sun until the kiln is full, working as long as ten hours, weather depending. Once a primer's down, Tom knows, it's better he not stand straight again until lunch. It's the straightening that kills the back. Harvest means one kiln hung each day, means crouching down low in the rows, no other way to do it, where the leaves block even a hint of a breeze and temperatures seem to reach one hundred and twenty degrees.

Priming is thirsty, back-breaking work, though Tom wouldn't dream of complaining, not even if he hated every leaf and every stack, which he doesn't. “Can't use a whiner for long,” he's fond of telling his boys. “A whiner can always be replaced.” In fact, there isn't anyone so valuable that he can't be replaced so you'd best earn your spot before someone else grabs it away. It sounds hard, mean. But it's true, he knows. The strained, sinewy, bone-weary truth of putting in a solid day, laying your head on a pillow at night and knowing you deserve that soft landing.

U
PSTAIRS INSIDE THE HOUSE
Tom's youngest son, Brian—Buster he's always been called—sits on the end of his bed dressed for his first day back at school, alive but not yet thankful. It's been four months since the accident took place, three months since he returned home—an eternity for any boy. The skin on his face and neck has hemmed and tucked and sealed up for good and his eyes have grown accustomed to the velvet fog, of seeing less than what is there. Doc John won't be coming for any more checkups, so that's that. Buster's lungs weren't damaged. He's in pain but he's as healed as he is ever going to be.

From the second-floor window Buster watches the table gang near the kilns hand and tie leaves, and without knowing he is doing so, he opens and closes his right hand automatically, matching their rhythm. His fingers think they feel the gummy tobacco. His palms sweat. When the primers hunch their way down solitary rows he feels his knees bend. The men outside work fast, running two days behind schedule due to a bad hailstorm, and Buster watches as they prime the seventh level up the plant—tips they're called because they sit up high, nearest to the sky. Tips are what give a cigarette its aroma and flavour. The sand leaves at the bottom are the part of the plant that makes a cigarette burn. His father's old horse, Darlene, moves slowly down the rows pulling the wooden boat while primers set leaves on it. At the end of each row Tom unhooks the boat, attaches it to his tractor and delivers it to the table gang.

The plants have matured to their fine ripe and bubbly green and been topped, and for the first harvest that Buster can remember he is not out in the fields priming with the others, with Percy Bozek, Bob Bryson (when he isn't hungover), with another local fellow named Frank Wadley, and with his father and Hank. He glances out the window in his brother's direction and sees that Hank could easily be their father; both are filled out in the same thick way. Same height. Same brown hair and eyes. Same solid, uncomplicated step. Buster was always the better looking of the two brothers and he knew it, but now he watches with envy as Hank removes his cap and wipes his sweaty brow. Hank is a shiny, sleek hunting knife out of its sheath.

Before his accident, Buster assumed that he would one day take over the farm. Hank prefers working with livestock; chickens or pigs. He's often playing with the barn cats or helping the neighbours with birthing a foal. Hank wants to be needed, and tobacco goes on with or without them. This is precisely what Buster's always loved about growing it: the arrogance of the plant, its indifference. Even now he swells with pride at the thought of who they—the McFiddies—are in the world because of it. It's a small world, sure, but it's the only one that's ever mattered. “Watch the burners close!” his father shouts to his curer as he passes the kiln. “If the leaves dry too quick they'll be a poor grade. Won't sell at auction.”

His father supervises everyone. Babysits more like. Buster turns from the window. He has grown weary of looking out at them day after agonizing day. His only relief since returning home from the hospital has been the doctor's ongoing visits to cheer him with wild stories, and the invisibility of night. After the sun sets and his bedroom darkens, he is no longer confronted by the high, clean ceiling—plaster perfect—or his family's eyes so obviously trying to hide pity.

He looks around his room. Beside his bed stands an end table and on it a glass of water and a pitcher, both in solid cobalt blue. Also a roll of clean gauze, a pair of small scissors for cutting it, ointment to prevent infection and a brown clay bell for when he'd needed assistance. Next to the bell is a brand-new battery-operated transistor radio. “Something to lift his spirits,” Walter Johnson told Isabel when he dropped it by the house for Buster's birthday. “Give the boy something to look forward to again.” His dresser is filled with clean socks and underwear, corduroy overalls and blue jeans for outdoor work. His Sunday clothes are hanging on a hook next to it.

Walter also left a photograph showing himself—portly and balding—standing on the front steps of the hardware store in his checked shirt and baggy pants, the straps of his suspenders hanging down above his knees, with one arm around his daughter, Judy Beatrice—Jelly Bean—and the other around his wife, Hazel. Buster remembers taking it three years ago, on the day that Hazel appointed herself president of the first local chapter of the Barbara Ann Scott fan club. That day Hazel also presented Jelly Bean with a figure skating doll that she'd ordered from Toronto. Jelly Bean was unappreciative though. She shook that doll, upon receiving it, shook it so hard that it seemed if it had any brains at all they might rattle and come loose from its smiling plastic head. It still sits on the counter at the hardware store, Buster knows. A miniature figure complete with lace costume trimmed in marabou, cross-eyed. Gaze fixed inward.

The smell of smoke from the fire is everywhere—in his furniture, in his bedroom walls, a lingering acrid odour that cannot be scrubbed away or aired out through open windows no matter how hard his mother tries. It reminds him daily of the accident, his own carelessness, and of his father's distance. It leaches in through his pores, lines his soul with a putrid haze and resentment so combustible that the idea of working the land again, of doing any of the things he used to do, is impossible.

Above the dresser are deep shelves built into the wall. Hank's old catcher's mitt looks down upon him with its well-oiled skin. On the next shelf sits a series of electric trains. At one time they
click-clacked
in a circle on a steel track and the whistle blew. The trains were an inheritance from his late grandfather. Also there is an atlas and a globe of the world that his father picked up in Toronto when he stopped on their way to Wasaga Beach; the continent of Australia is facing outward. Buster sighs. Before the accident the farthest he'd ever thought to travel was to the end of the Old Coal Road. Now, Australia doesn't seem far enough.

He tries to think of himself as he was before that night, getting blotto with his friends then stumbling inside his house and up the stairs angry, falling into bed in his damp and stinky clothes. Before he lit that second cigarette and alone, under his sheets, dared the rest of the whiskey to warm the back of his throat. Just a few minutes and that's all it took for him to nod off, for the white stick dangling between his fingers to land on his pillowcase and for the bottle's remaining contents to spill. His hair, like dry-brush, caught fire and burned clean back to his scalp.

Since returning home from the hospital Buster has spent hours listening to his transistor radio, waiting for the infernal ache crawling across his skull to cease. He's tried to have faith that healing is possible but the leathery gullies and ravines that are his landslide face prove it is not so; some wishes don't come true. He's heard Elvis singing
Heartbreak Hotel
and tried his best to believe in a promise of liberation. But he can't. He glances down at the blue and yellow checked sleeves covering his arms and buttoned at both wrists. His collar is tightly buttoned also, making him feel like a boy with a noose around his neck. Ugly can be like that. Tight. Ugly is a scar, a bruise, a plum-coloured attitude erupting under the surface of skin. It's real and yet it's also the mind controlling the eyes, controlling the outcome and everything strong and alive burned into submission. Ugly is a miracle turned into a monster in a split second and now Buster knows it all too well—scars that don't heal with time, just get covered up and multiply, one terrible layer on top of another until living under them feels fundamental to a person, until it's like there's never been any other way. Ugly. He almost relishes the word; at the end of the day ugly is the one sure thing he has left.

The skin on his face had melted like liquid glass, dripped and hung off him in black streamers and hardened into dead lumps and pockets and seams which the nurses and Doc John removed. They'd laid cold cloths across his face, wrapped his head in tight white gauze, pressure garments to help the new skin heal. The blood soaked through in patches. His mother had cried upon seeing him. She took his hand in her own, touched it to her soft, wet cheek.

Doc John had surprised him by showing up, familiar white coat of authority. He'd spoken with Buster's attending physician and gained special permission to take over the job of scrubbing his raw skin with a soft brush—gently at first, barely any contact—but even what little pressure he applied was like someone dragging razor blades across Buster's forehead, across his chin. The doctor sat in the chair next to the bed and distracted him from the terrible pain with stories. They barely registered at first, though when they did Buster pretended to ignore them, simply rolled onto one side laying his cheek on the cotton pillowcase that he could barely feel under the damaged skin. He stared at objects in the hospital room and imagined himself as a cold, cool thing. Plastic. Metal. Glass.

Doc John saved the best parts of his tales for when he needed to touch Buster's most damaged skin, reserved the exciting, shoot'em-up scenes for when the boy might want to cry out. He didn't. He never did. He just lay back on his pillows with his gritty eyes closed, listening and imagining it all in colour and with sound. The doctor also implied that fighting against all odds and the loyalty of brothers was worth any life sentence that might be received, but now that Buster is back at home and the doctor won't be passing by any more he is once more a helpless and pitiable victim. Deformed. Already his imagination is beginning to falter and it's becoming impossible for him to divine any other life than the one looming ominously ahead. The throb in his temples is growing louder, his mouth drier no matter how much water he sips.

After he got home school chums called on the telephone but Buster refused their calls. What could he say? He hoped to never see them again, or rather he hoped to never have them look on him. He wanted to be relegated to a place in their minds normally reserved for the forgotten, or the dead. Donny hadn't bothered calling even once, let alone showing up, and this was a surprise. Buster didn't know what to make of it so he cavalierly brushed it off whenever his mother made mention of it. He also dismissed his brother's stilted attempts at conversation. Ignored the sweet trays that churchwomen dropped off at the house. He hadn't even permitted his mother to show Jelly Bean upstairs when she dared to visit. He was sure she stood in the front hall armed with a basket of blueberry muffins, vanilla custard or the last of the hickory nuts gathered the winter before, because she'd been sent against her will. The only person Buster found tolerable was Doc John, for
he
understood the gravity of what had happened without saying so. He didn't look through Buster full of regret or sorrow.

The familiar fields are alien to him now, and the countless sluggish green worms, stray cats and occasional thieves who live in the margins feel more like kin. He longs for the times before the accident, those warm summer nights when he'd lie back in the dirt in his blue jeans and T-shirt, surrounded by the musky scent of his own sweat, able to hear a rustle from half a mile off. He loved the farm, every rotten inch of it. And now he's stuck here. Those tall stalks outside his window are nothing but bars on a jail cell. For months he's pored over newspaper pictures of the brand-new Corvette and the Ford Thunderbird and imagined flying down Main Street in either of these. Driving out of the village past Springford, past Tillsonburg, singing a daring new rock 'n' roll song or a robust baritone calypso with his sandy blond hair blowing in the wind, the wind smoothing out his face again.

Before the accident he'd thought only about batting home runs at the ball diamond, playing practical jokes with the other boys and getting lucky enough to brag, like Hank, about reaching his hand under some girl's brassiere. The world beyond Smoke is all Buster thinks about now, escaping to a place where no one knows him, where he could start over. He loathes the thought of returning to school where he might become the butt of the very jokes he so often propagated. He hates the fields outside his window where his father's fortune was made; green for the time being but with a certain, arid fate. There is nothing now that he doesn't despise.