Smoke (4 page)

Through his window Buster glimpses his brother crossing the field. The early-morning sun falls on Hank's features like a warm shroud, calling attention to his strong jaw and clear eyes. Hank moves swiftly and then breaks out into a slow jog and Buster remembers when the Lions service club first built the swimming pool inside the park. It was the only pool in the county. He was seven years old at the time. The sunny afternoon of the grand opening Doc John, Walter Johnson and his father held and cut the ceremonial ribbon and Hank took him down to the big swings and the teeter-totter. They picked wild raspberries. Hank was proud to have a little brother. When their faces were crimson with delight and their bellies full they ran back to join the others, peeled from their high-cut runners and socks and shirts and shorts and cannonballed into the deep end. Buster can barely stand to think of that day now, with Hank lean and muscular and himself carefree, perched upon his brother's shoulders like a prince.

He moves to stand before the mirror. Looking is the hardest thing he's ever done and though he's been looking frequently he instinctively turns away from the image. He tries to raise courage inside himself where there is only a thin lining left and is filled with that terrible smell that makes him gag whenever memory of the accident presses through. He still feels the singeing from when he crumpled like paper into ashes and everything truly fragile. Still feels sheets of flesh peeling back and up into black puffs, his life puckering and curling back like the lid on a tin can. His life. He stares into the mercury glass and slowly lifts his eyelids, blinking and blinking again as if his lids are heavy velvet curtains raising and lowering to make way for a new player onto a surreal stage. Please, let there be someone else behind this faded and drawn material, he thinks. But it's him every time.

His fingertips scan his melted forehead, nose, cheeks, lips, chin. The corner of his left eyelid is sealed to the top of his cheek. One nostril deformed. The top rim of one ear is partially gone. As the sun from outside shines brightly in upon him like a mean spotlight, he takes another peek. It isn't so bad. There's still some of the old him lurking under all that tough leather. Yes, his scalp hasn't suffered the damage that his face has and so his hair has grown back in, and part of his nose is more or less as it was. About a quarter of an inch changed; still, there it is all the same, his old nose. Both eyebrows and his forehead remain intact. Then, all at once, trying to turn disaster to his advantage becomes too much of a burden and a grotesque chill reaches up from inside and rattles through him as if he's an old, abandoned house. For the first time since being burned he begins to cry for no reason other than the loss, the criminal loss, and it shames him.

He reaches over to lock the door, then undoes his shirt and finds his naked chest. He unfastens his blue jeans and allows them to fall and gather around his ankles. And then he searches his entire body for beauty in smaller and smaller increments. Even less than beauty he is desperate for humanity. He reaches down between his legs and yanks and tugs violently, his eyes never moving from the mirror as a sickening kind of lust grows in his hand. It's a reminder of what living feels like and he needs to remember, if only for a few short seconds. In front of this new and odious image he is frantic and compulsive. Why me? he thinks when he comes. Why did this have to happen to me?

Through the glass patio door in the McFiddie kitchen there is a view of most of the farm. Looking at it, Isabel is filled with the same sense of pride she gets whenever the house is clean and organized, and in winter, when the snow is shovelled all the way up the drive. Satisfaction sits on her round face, a fullness that only comes at harvest when it's curing time. She grabs the handle on the door, pushes it open, and steps out of her warm kitchen into the large back patio. Tom built the rose arbours and picnic table years before, when they moved into the house—Hank just a toddler and Buster not even an idea. Opaque light rises through the clouds, a pale sheet of mother-of-pearl. She closes her eyes and allows the faint breeze and cool morning mist to absorb into her skin. The hardest weeks of the year are almost behind them. There's been no frost yet, money is expected, and her first trimester and the danger that accompanies it have passed. Buster is strong again. Isabel opens her eyes expectantly, ready for whatever challenges fall might bring.

The stripping barn is full of a sweet, ripening scent. Every day the hanger and the curer remove tobacco from the kilns, pile the leaves onto a farm wagon and take them over to the barn where they are stored until harvest is over. This year, because they're running behind, stripping is happening simultaneously. The tobacco is removed from sticks and sorted according to colour. Then it's baled. Sorting is Isabel's favourite activity to do and to watch; she loves to be reminded of the plant's variant hues, the difference between one leaf and the next, and to find each its proper home.

Six red kilns with green roofs are lined up behind the stripping barn; five are full and another is getting started on. She will avoid the kilns and the barn as she moves into the next stage of her pregnancy. Smells become excessively powerful and the humidity causes her ankles and hands to swell. She has grown more cautious with each passing day, determined to carry a healthy new baby to term. Doors and shutters in the kilns will be opened and closed according to the stage of curing; what the tobacco needs. Everything on the farm, everything in their lives, is subsumed to what Tom's crop needs. Isabel feels a twinge of jealousy. How silly, she chastises herself. How ridiculous to be envious of the land. Still, this place, she knows, monopolizes her husband's touch.

Looking out across the property, she sees the vast emerald and lime field. Tom is always there with the rest of them. Every day. Supervising. Or, if there's a free moment, bent over priming until his fingers chafe and callus, tanning to a dark brown crisp, pulling the meaty tobacco worms off his clothes, each hour as long as a single lifetime. Hank's the same; never a peep. Works when it's working time, drinks when she or Tom or the boat driver carries water out into the field. Eats her feasts of sausage and steak, hamburg, potato salad, corn, and heads back to work again with whatever needs to be done—topping, suckering, priming, stripping, sorting, wrapping the bales in brown paper and string. It's better on a farm to have as many hands as possible, and until Buster's accident Isabel was content to be grateful for her small clan of men.

Buster should be out there. He was made for the land. He was swift, confident. Alive. His stated ambition was to become the best curer around so that his father wouldn't have to hire a fellow from the South any more. It would be him Tom wanted. Now it appears that he's given up trying to impress his father. It's as though he wants nothing to do with the farm, or even the family. Isabel noticed this right away after the accident, when she tried to offer comfort in the hospital and he craned his neck away from her. He'll be the one to leave me, she's been thinking, with all her childhood fears of desertion in tow. Of any of them, it will be Buster. She fights the urge to cry as it occurs to her that he already seems gone.

A chair scrapes across the kitchen floor and Isabel turns to discover her youngest son slumped over his empty place setting, waiting on breakfast. She watches him through the glass door a moment and his downward eyes and sunken shoulders remind her of herself when she was still in England. An orphan's posture. A child without entitlement. The glimmer in nobody's eye. She wants to rush and grab him up in her arms, squeeze until he knows that he is indeed one of the wonders of her world. At the same time she feels a sharp, sadistic desire to slap him hard across his scarred face. Be thankful you're alive, she wants to shout. Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Self-pity only digs a deeper grave. Instead of doing either, Isabel opens the door, leaving it cracked a foot for fresh, cool air, and steps back inside the house.

The kitchen is warm from having cooked and served breakfast to six primers, the curer and her family—with the exception of Buster—not an hour earlier. A clear moustache of perspiration soon dots her upper lip.

“Remind me to cut this,” she says, mussing Buster's messy mop as she passes him on her way across the kitchen. She grabs a full length apron from the countertop, wraps it around her thickening waist and moves to stand before the refrigerator.

“I like it long!” Buster snaps, lifting his head and hiding his face behind a wavy curtain. “Suits the new me.” His voice is low, barely audible, and fades on the word “new.”

Isabel opens the refrigerator door and lifts out a bowl with two fresh brown eggs, retrieves a matchbox from out of her apron pocket and strikes it to light the gas stove.

The sound of the match striking the sandpaper strip at the side of the wooden box causes Buster to shudder. He clenches both fists and grits his teeth. For a moment he is unable to think. He slumps lower down into his chair while his mother returns to the stove and cracks speckled eggs, one after the other, into the cast-iron frying pan. They sizzle and bubble. She scrambles them with a fork.

“You all right?”

Buster folds his arms across his chest like two metal bars. He doesn't want to go to school. He knows he will be gossiped about. Not that he hasn't been already. But he knows that when he reappears at school and on Main Street tongues will cluck louder and heads will shake more sympathetically after he's passed. There is no privacy in a village, only the quiet pretence of not noticing and not knowing. He stands and storms off through the house.

“Brian Ernest McFiddie!” Isabel turns and is standing with an aluminum spatula in one hand and the other poised sternly on her hip. “I was talking to you.” She knows she sounds trite, insensitive, but nothing she says or does makes any difference—it's as if he's angry with her, blames her for the accident. She calls out again. “Buster?” But he's ignoring her and there's nothing she or anyone else can say to ease the pain of this transition, so she does the only thing she can think to do, the womanly thing. She scoops the eggs onto a plate beside the home fries and bacon she'd already set aside for him, grabs cutlery from a drawer, pours a small glass of orange juice and follows her son into the living room balancing his breakfast on a Melmac TV tray. “I know it'll be awkward,” she tries in a gentler tone. “But it'll be harder the longer you wait. Really. You'll feel better after you get it over with.”

“No I won't.” Buster spits his words like nails, each one pronounced more sharply than the previous. “You know I won't. How can I—look at me. I'm a freak!”

“Don't talk like that, I won't have it. Your whole future is ahead.”

“I'm not going, so just drop it.”

“Yes you
are
.”

“Hank didn't finish high school. Neither did you or Dad. What's the big deal?”

“He can work with me.” Tom's voice booms from the patio door. Then
stomp, stomp, stomp
—he moves through the kitchen and into the living room. “I've got plenty that needs doing. Enough to keep him busy.” A lit cigarette dangles from between Tom's lips and Isabel shoots him a cross look. She's been making an effort not to smoke in the house since the accident, at least not in front of Buster, and she hoped that her husband would have the presence of mind to do the same.

“Someone in this family's got to get an education.”

“He should be alongside Hank until harvest is over. He can start school a week late like he's done other years.”

“Thomas, he needs to get back to his friends.”

“Maybe he wants to help his old man for a change.”

“Will you two stop talking about me like I'm not here! And I don't need your help. I'll find myself a
real
job.” Buster says this although the instant the breath leaves his lungs he knows it isn't true. He can't imagine anyone hiring him the way he now looks. His stomach turns at the smell of his father's cigarette and he watches smoke file towards the ceiling in an unbroken line.

“Fine.” Tom is hurt. “If that's the way you want it. But until you've found something better it'll be school like your mother wants or here on the farm with me. Choice is yours.” He tucks his undershirt into his work pants with confidence.

Buster meets his father's unwavering brown eyes and looks for any sign that he'll relent. He sees a man who's never lost at anything, a self-made man. Now, as much as his father believes in the entrepreneurial spirit, he also believes that the only sure way to beat the accident is for Buster to put it behind him, get back out there and act as if nothing serious has happened. This, of course, is infuriating. Something
has
happened and no passing of days and nights is going to fix it.

“Things will be back to normal in no time,” adds his mother.

“Normal!” Buster hollers. “Normal? I have no face to recognize. There's no such thing as normal any more!” There is no hope for the future either. He has begun to think that in a place like Smoke there never was. He's listened to Buddy Holly on the transistor radio for months singing
That'll Be the Day
. He's drifted into a half-sleep thinking how the farm was originally made by blazing trees. Fire had eaten back the tree line and stolen ground as cunningly as it stole his life out from under him while he slept. The accident feels inevitable, even when he wishes it away. It feels inevitable and somehow, his destiny. “I'm a crip, Mom. I'm not even me any more, though no one around here seems to notice.” He watches grey ash fall from the tip of his father's cigarette onto the carpet.