Smoke River

S
hayna has always liked May, its warm afternoons and cool evenings promising all sorts of rebirth. She stands at the edge of a freshly planted tobacco field. Some new shoots list precariously into the space between the rows, risking root shock. She kicks off her flip-flops, as she did when she was a girl who abandoned footwear every year from mid-May until the end of August. By then she could sprint across gravel without a grimace, the soles of her feet indifferent to thistle, tough as jerky. Now the bottoms of her feet complain upon meeting the cat-tongue soil, sandy and wet.
Stop being so middle-aged
, she wills herself. Her big toe cramps.

She’s in no hurry. The sky is dark and clear. Under a moon of dull zinc, the seedlings cast small shadows, easy to miss. Shayna scans for fallen plants and, spotting one, kneels down, pushes soil against its base, presses until the shoot straightens and aligns with the rest. Just as generation after generation of jack-planters – men
with bourbon or rum in their accents – did before her. And before them all, Attawandaron women, who buried the cold slime of fish scraps in the earth to fertilize the new shoots.

Her fingers drum along the plastic buttons of the shirt she wears – his shirt – and she slips the buttons open, one, two, three, until just one cinches the fabric closed at the base of her sternum. If the plants are just in, he’ll have been up since five a.m., his belly mean as a barn cat by the time the hired college students left for the day, his muscles sore and satisfied, his skin dry and radiating, the sun in his core. Shayna pictures him stopping at the door before he goes inside to wait for her. He’ll have a smoke, admire how the tobacco shoots warm the furrows with a greenish glow. He’ll want the cooler nights and warm days to toughen the roots, make them deeper and more resilient. She imagines worries gathering around him like whispers, repeating rumours of all the things waiting to rob him of the field’s bright possibility in the ten weeks ahead – late frost, nematodes, cutworms, wireworms, budworms, hail, drought, mould. A withholding sun. And finally price. Only the elders consider tobacco a sacrament; everyone else treats it as another word for money.

The porch light is on. Barefoot, she is silent on the back step. Shayna places her forehead against the screen door and hesitates, wondering what the hell she is doing. Veins like hungry taproots spreading from her fingers, her jaw, deep into the country of her body. She is neither young nor old. Her grandmothers’ spirits exhale lake breath across the tobacco plants behind her, stooping them with dew, raising a shiver along Shayna’s back. She turns the handle, steps into the unlit kitchen. Now that she has crossed his threshold a first time, she will do it again. He is there, still and shirtless, a metre away. He steps forward and stops. She picks up a whiff of peaty smoke from him, the copper sharpness of his tumbler of Scotch. He has been waiting for her with a certainty he
doesn’t have about his crop; he must have known she’d come to him eventually.

It was his neck – not the fair hair, not the patrician blue of his eyes – that gave her pause the first time they met. Despite the fineness of his European features, his precise, over-educated talk, that work-leathered neck betrayed something essential; he was built from sun, sky, clay. She’d sensed a kindred restlessness too, the same tangled aches inside him.

Shayna
, he says, because she hasn’t given him permission to shorten it. He doesn’t reach for her. Instead, he stands so near she feels his pulse, smells the long, hard workday on him before he takes a draw of steadying breath, dips his thumb into the tumbler of Scotch, brings it to her bottom lip and rubs softly. She leans into his steadiness, his smell. For that moment, she stops wanting to be some other, better woman.

C
oulson studies Shayna’s sleeping face and asks himself when it will all go to hell. Last week, two tanagers landed on the branch by his bedroom window. He’d watched the male place food down the open beak of its mate, their necks a tango of scarlet and tawny green feathers, their cries at once delighted and anguished. You can’t predict a moment like that. And now this woman – the same kind of waiting surprise.

In another life he drank espresso in the morning and Cabernet at night, picked up smooth shirts from the dry cleaner, pressed his slippers into antique Persian rugs, made love to a woman who was as cool and perfumed as new linen. He’d had a decade of her geography: beautiful but unsurprising. Marie had the prettiest smile, the smallest hands, of any woman he’s known.

Shayna’s hands are strong. Even the whitish spittle in the creases of her pink-brown lips – this is something he can love.
How different she is from Marie, who delivered her stings under cover of honey, her voice trembling with sweetness, leaving him unsure exactly when or why he’d been hurt.

He has the urge to pull the sheet from Shayna, to see her nakedness pimple in the morning air’s tang, the pale light. But there is coffee to make. Eggs and bacon. He wants to baby her – hand-feed her like an abandoned pup, rub the knots from her muscles, brush her hair. He edges quietly out of bed and leans over Shayna for a half-second to confirm that her eyes are still closed, pulls on his jeans, and quits the house barefoot to have a smoke. The sandy soil squishes between his toes. He walks among the tobacco, sturdy after a month of good sun, stretches his arms towards the expanding light, and inhales all the hopefulness of the Interlake morning.

I can’t sleep here with that smell
, Marie said the weekend they arrived to get the farmhouse ready to sell. Both of his parents had wanted to die on the farm, and they got their wish: a year after a stroke felled his father, his mother’s heart failed as she was peeling freshly picked turnips. Marie had squished up her nose at the kitchen’s archaeology of odours – decades of frying bacon, sausage, and minute steak, of scrubbing dirt-stained bodies with carbolic soap – as she wiped the surfaces with pine-scented cleaner. He’d kicked off his three-hundred-dollar shoes, walked among the abandoned tobacco fields, tangled with wild carrot and amaranth, and reacquainted his naked soles with the salve of dirt. Then he stripped to the waist and weeded and turned the soil of the large kitchen garden, occasionally catching a glimpse of Marie through the window, her face salted with distaste, her straightened hair dishevelling in the humidity of scrubbing and bleaching.

Oh, I can still smell it
, she’d said again, lying on her back in his parents’ bed that night, her eyes widened to the moonlit ceiling. Coulson was crisped by sun. He’d had too much to
drink at dinner, had ignored Marie’s hurt looks and fallen into the cool, worn sheets with a kind of satisfaction, a pleasure he’d forgotten. Beside him, she smelled as exact as air freshener. He knew then that he wasn’t going to leave these walls of dolomite and limestone. And she was.

Shayna may give him an hour of her waking life or just fifteen minutes. Back in the kitchen, he rifles the pockets of her jeans, abandoned on the floor and damp with morning, finds a cellphone, which he leaves on the enamel table, and shoves her pants into the oven, turning the dial to two hundred degrees. The coffee is percolating, eggs cracked, bacon sliding in the pan. Shayna’s cellphone bleats. Those infernal phones. Will it bring her to the bottom of the stairs, wearing his robe and a face that’s already halfway out the door?
Potatoes would be trying too hard
, he decides. The cellphone starts up again, jittery as a marsh bird, then goes silent after four rings. Coulson wonders if he should wake and alert her to the insistent caller. Instead he covers the cooked bacon, puts it in the oven to stay warm by the jeans. The eggs sizzle in the frying pan. He carafes the freshly made coffee.
Toast
, he thinks. The cellphone rings anew. He recognizes the persistence of a telemarketer who hasn’t checked the time zone, ignores it out of spite. He pours two glasses of orange juice, fishes out a tray from the back of the pantry, wipes it with a damp cloth, then lays out Shayna’s breakfast. As he pulls her jeans from the oven, the phone starts up a fourth time. That’s the one. He feels her hands slide across his lower back like a sweep of cards that ends his luck.

She’s already moving across the room, a small, naked woman the colour of milky tea, leaning against his kitchen table, cupping the phone to her ear. With her face wan, the bedsheet creases on her cheeks, she is even more desirable.

“Now? What? Okay. Okay.”

She clicks the phone shut and turns to him, her eyes falling on the warm folded jeans in his arms.

“I’ll need a fresh shirt,” she says.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, I’m about to reclaim some stolen property.”

He is silent.

“I should have mentioned it earlier,” she says.

“Can you eat? I made eggs.” He hates the plaintive tone in his voice.

She moves forward, bends to lay her cheek against his bare belly, and lightly kisses his rib cage.

“I need to go.”

“I’ll drive you.”

She looks up at him, her face tender and amused. “You won’t have to. Just going across the road. I’ll cut through your field.”

She tugs the jeans from his grip and presses her nose into them. “Mmm. Bacon.”