Smoke River (24 page)

The ice pieces crowded up against each other at the bend, split into ever-smaller chunks. Once the jostling mass turned the corner, the pieces scattered in the faster-moving width, chased by the dark serpent of water. Cherisse lay on her belly and inched towards the edge of her ice, waiting for the riverbank to be within jumping distance. She would have made it too, but her little dog, half-mad with panic at seeing her close and moving, leapt from the safety of earth to the moving ice. It fell just shy of the edge, scrabbling its little feet and nails against the frozen raft, trying to get purchase.
No, no!
Cherisse yelled. She stretched out her arm to the wet animal, her ears full of its frightened clawing. And this beautiful dog, unnamed because she knew it wasn’t hers, was no longer beautiful, but all bone and sinew, bulging eyes and strange freckled skin, drenched and shaking. In the half-second when the scratching stopped, the ice slipped out from under the dog’s paws, and the dark water sucked it under, she realized it had loved her more than its own survival.

She lay her cheek on the floe, which began to move faster, and she watched the water ahead, praying the dog would reappear. There was no going home without it.

“No!” Cherisse says again. And now the heat is back. She is lying in the dirt, smelling strawberries. The light behind her lids is tinted with the berries’ bleeding juice. There’s earth under her shoulders where she fell, running. Running away. Running home. The ground as giving as a mother’s lap. How long has she been here? She remembers a darkness in which all the birds were awake, filling the night with strange cries. A rock landing at her side, close to her ribs.

She is hurting, her whole body mapped with soreness, and now she has a thirst greater than pain. She concentrates, and one eyelid opens to the rosy blur of morning and then its stripes of green, pale and porous. The green of life, of plants. She feels the back of her head leaning into a thick stalk.
Tobacco sprung from the grave of the Creator’s mother
, she thinks. Dead would be good; dead would be cool as clay, cooler still.

W
hen Coulson was fourteen, his father said simply,
This is what we do
. For the next six weeks he was sentenced to picking tobacco in the day and sleeping in the barn at night.
You’re not really part of a priming crew unless you eat and sleep like they do
, his father told him. At four-thirty a.m. on the first morning, Coulson quit his soft bed reluctantly. The farm kitchen was already distended with frying, baking, and percolating. Every burner was in use, the oven light glaring, trays of fresh baking stacked on the table, his mother already damp and beaded with exertion. Coulson tore open a warm biscuit, slathered it in butter and apricot preserves, and ate painstakingly, until his father grabbed his shoulder, pushed him out into the wet morning and away from his comforts.

Outside, men lined up on the picnic table benches under the laneway’s pin oaks. In those days, primers were drifters from Quebec or Kentucky and seasonal migrants from Jamaica. The
hardest workers were not necessarily muscled and were often sallow and thin. All of them wore rumpled clothes and greasy caps, wiped their coffee-wet lips along their sleeves or bare arms, ate their eggs and biscuits with their heads low to the table, as if condemned. Angel, a Mohawk woman who worked afternoons on the tying line, filled tin cups with coffee, wordlessly swatted away impatient hands as she moved down the tables. Beyond them the fields hung with a tight mesh of tiny droplets that slid off the tobacco leaves, dripped into the sandy loam. For the rest of the harvest, Coulson would work, eat, and rest with the hired men and his father wouldn’t look sideways at him. He was orphaned, with his parents in full view.
Keeps the primers honest and my boy humble –
that was the way the old man explained it.

He wouldn’t have stood a minute of it had it not been for Big Junior. His father had first hired the man the summer Coulson turned eight, after the government relaxed regulations so farmers could bring cheaper seasonal farm help from outside the country. Big Junior had returned every year since. For the nearly two months he spent at the Stercyx farm, the man laughed; he drank every drop of his evening beer as if it were a grace; he lampooned the other workers with a mix of affection and astute mimicry that would make Coulson’s mother tear up in an anguish of giggling. The family began waiting for him, though none would admit it to the other; they waited through the long winters of quiet suppers, dim lights, and the parsimony of their affections. When he arrived late July, Big Junior would wrap Coulson in his arms and hug him in a way that was too demonstrative, too liberal for his father to ever consider. Then he would laugh, and Coulson would feel as if the man had lifted a heavy canvas off the top of the world to let the sun in.

I can’t teach you how to pick with talk
, Big Junior told him the summer he joined the crew.
Just follow me and do what I do. And do it the way I do it, or else you gonna be hurting bad
.

Within the first hour of priming, Coulson’s shirt lay flat and wet along his back because of the dew-beaded leaves. His fingers were numb. He heard the staccato of other men’s grunts as they bent to snap ripe young leaves at the base of the plant stalk. Coulson made a science of Big Junior, following him through the rows, copying his position, noting the angle of his knees, the precise way he folded his body at the waist so that his spine was almost perfectly parallel to the earth but for the slightest arch in the small of his back. He listened to the man’s slow rhythm of breath, visually estimated the length of the gait that took him from one plant to the next. Big Junior bent at the hips and softened his knees to reach the sand leaves at the base of the tobacco stalk. Along the length of a row, 650 plants deep, he used one hand to pick and the other to hold the leaves. In the next row he switched hands. Big Junior didn’t stand up until the arm farthest from the plant clutched so many leaves to his side that he risked dropping one. Then he used his picking hand to secure the leaf bundle, and in one smooth movement that left him bending again, scooped them into the tobacco boat that followed the primers.

Don’t straighten too much, kid
, Big Junior warned him.
Or you’ll never get yourself back to bending
.

Before finishing his first row, Coulson felt the pull in his calves, in his buttocks, the armful of fresh-picked leaves making his right shoulder throb. The sun had burned off the fog by then, baking dry the back of his shirt. His socks were still damp, his cheeks flaming from heat and mounting despair.
Sips, honey
, Angel reminded each man as she handed out cups of water at the end of the row.
You sip for a drink out here, or you’ll piss yourself dry and keel over
.

Near midday the steam was out of the soil, the sun bearing down on them hard, and Coulson, who was too proud to stop to pee, let urine slide down his leg and into his shoes. It didn’t matter if he stained his pants; all of him was damp and reeking by then,
numbly borne forward by the rhythm of the work – pick, step, pick, step, pick, step. With each plucked leaf, he felt the periphery of his vision wobble and his eyes sting from the saltwater streaming from underneath his cap. With every new row, he thought,
I’m not going to make it through the first day
. Coulson imagined the pressure of his father’s work-swollen knuckles on his shoulders, the way it felt as if the older man were pushing him down into the earth in order to root him there.

That night he lay on his cot in the barn while men moved about him, smoking and talking, and he wondered how he’d got there. There was a dull complaint at the base of his back and his knees; the rest of him was sun-whacked, buckling with a tiredness that was gravitational, sucking him towards the centre of the earth. Being a tobacco grower’s kid would have consumed him in a fever of resentment, if Big Junior hadn’t come along, shaken his shoulder, and offered him a sweating beer as if he were just another tired man.
Nice priming, kid
, he said. Coulson groaned in response, pulled himself up to sitting.

The beer rinsed him clean; it was cooling and delicious. Big Junior leaned back and told him things: the tricks to picking sugar cane and bananas, how good rum can turn friend into foe, the fish he’d caught in water bluer than Coulson’s eyes, until the boy fell asleep, the step, pick priming rhythm sloshing against his ears as if he were doing laps in the swimming pool.

There are five bikes leaning against the bunkhouse; three are brand new, the other two Coulson pulled from the barn and tuned up in the spring. Five bikes for five primers – the first rite of harvest. Leaving the farmhouse to join his crew already out in the fields, Coulson restrains himself from retesting the brake pads, adjusting the tire pressure, re-greasing the chains.

There’s a bike for each of you this year – you won’t have to share
, Coulson said to his first three primers, the veterans, when they
arrived on a direct flight from Mexico City to the small regional airport a week ago and walked the tarmac to his truck, a rucksack of clothes slung over each of their shoulders.
It means you can go into town together. Anytime I head out with the truck, you’re welcome too. But driving into town is a bit complicated lately
 …

Ramirez, whose English is strongest, is from a small village near Palenque, in Chiapas. James and Diego are also Mayan but from the cities. On the ride home from the airport, Coulson told them about the barricade. They nodded their heads. Ramirez’s smile was wry, a bit weary. He looked out the window and muttered at the passing landscape like an old acquaintance.

They all have families waiting for them. Coulson never asks to see photos: he doesn’t want the responsibility such intimacy demands. But this year Ramirez insisted. He had to look: a boy, maybe nine or ten years old, holding his younger sister’s and brother’s hands, all of them tentative and half-smiling. The image puts pressure on Coulson’s temples.

He walks through his fields, stops, and tops a tobacco plant. The head of trumpeting pink flowers gives a shudder, falls as lightly as a child’s hand into Coulson’s palm. Ahead of him on the harvester, the three men have become a topping crew. The two younger ones have stripped to singlets in the mid-month heat. But Ramirez wears long sleeves and doesn’t perspire. Coulson figures it will take a few days to finish removing the blossoms, which even now still impress him with their delicacy, a balance of wildflower and hothouse exotica. His mother counselled him against this kind of romance – she must have seen it in him.
Farming is a showdown between us and nature’s spite
, she’d say.
So you best be spiteful in return
. When the tobacco shoots were newly planted, she’d sweeten huge tubs of bran with molasses, then mix in lead arsenate.
It tricks the cutworm grubs. They think someone’s left them dessert
. His mother would laugh like Hecate as she spread her concoction over the fields on early spring evenings.

Still, Coulson can’t resist the alchemy of sun and flowers. He selects the seed heads with the most open blooms to later plunk in a Mason jar of water on his kitchen table. Beyond the rows of shoulder-high tobacco, the grade of the land rises at the highway, where there’s a blur of movement. Overnight the barricade has morphed from a small protest against the development into a carnival crowd spreading over a blocked highway, carrying banners for poverty action groups, trade unions, urban Métis. There are first-aid and food stations and a crazy quilt of tents. It looks like some apocalyptic ruins on the horizon; parked vehicles catch sunlight in short sparks as if the air around them is overly ionized, ready to combust. This morning he dug out his father’s old binoculars, telling himself it was okay to be curious. He could not find Shayna in the crowds. By noon there were at least a thousand people milling around the blockade. He knew she’d be the one navigating the logistics of food, fuel, toilets, and trash. Her cellphone was busy every time he called, until he lost the heart to try again.

The last time they were together, he flipped her on her stomach, pulled her up on all fours, knelt behind her with one fist dug into the flesh of her hips, the front of his thighs slapping the back of hers, his free hand pushing into the small of her back, then twining her hair with his wrist. When he was done, he fell to the bed panting, and a confession of feeling burst from him. He can’t remember his exact words, only that she stayed silent, her head on the pillow, eyes staring past and right through him. When he woke in the dark hours before sunrise, she was gone without a note or a brush of her lips against his cheek.

He wishes he were more like his parents. Such a singularity to a life centred on plants and earth and sky. It spoiled them for love. The old man never raised a hand to Coulson’s mother, but neither did he place one tenderly on her neck or shoulder. She was, like his land, something inextricable, a constant: sorrows
and joys mixed in her like the temperaments of sun and rain. To have made her special would have been to doubt her inevitability.

Coulson doesn’t notice that the harvester has stopped ahead of him until shouts pull him from his thoughts. James and Diego have jumped off their seats, pulled out water bottles and cigarettes as Ramirez marches forward, investigates. He sees the three of them circle, hears nothing, and then Ramirez turns, his arms up in the air, his mouth flared. Coulson drops the topped flowers and runs.

It was the dog, mewling and scratching at the barn door, that led him to a patch of uncultivated field that harvest season when Coulson turned eighteen. He’d slept in his underwear, his waking belly empty and tight, the sun not yet fully risen. The other primers were still snoring as he snuck out into a half-lit dawn. He stopped after crossing the highway, followed the dog with his eyes. There was something about the way Big Junior’s body was twisted, the clothes torn, the blood candied over his grey-lipped gape. Coulson knew. He ran towards him, lifted the man’s head into his lap, touched his cool skin, pressed his fingers into the pulse-less neck; nothing of his friend was left inside that casing. Coulson tried to carry the body, but in death the powerful man had even more heft. So he grabbed the dented bike thrown to one side, because he had to carry something.