Smoke River (43 page)

Her mother was admitted to hospital with congestive heart failure just as Ella began her second trimester. With the right clothes, the slight swelling was easily hidden. She held her mother’s papery hand and wiped her resinous brow. She didn’t tell her about the pregnancy lest this new joy tax the woman’s faintly pulsing heart, the slowly flooding lungs, embitter her last days with regret. Ella denied the thrum in the recesses of her conscience: a growing impatience for her mother’s death as a week stretched into four and she had to
wear dresses with looser waists and dirndl skirts to hide a more perceptible belly.

One day she heard loud cackles come from her mother’s room as she alighted from the elevator. From the doorway she could see three women sitting on chairs around her mother’s bed. They’d cranked it so her mother was sitting up, tubes coming out of her like some strange sea creature. It shocked Ella to see her mom’s eyes rheumy with laughter. The women around her – one on each side clutching her mom’s swollen, needle-punctured wrists – had opened little buckets of food on the bed, tucked them into the folds of the bedsheets, turned the Javexscented room into a picnic party. She would have stepped forward, protested, but a flash of recognition stopped her. She knew these women – Angel, Linda, Delisle. All were Mohawk. All had worked the tying line with her mother for twenty tobacco-picking seasons, and then sorting and grading in drafty barns during the fall and winter. They were her mother’s friends. It was something the teenaged Ella, bursting through the front door after a day of school to find them draining cups of tea at her parents’ kitchen table, had never accepted. There was enough social stigma in how her parents earned their living, their thick accents, the tilting verandah. She’d brush past these women on the way to her bedroom as if she could not see them, or how her rudeness was reflected in her mother’s hurt expression. They remained invisible to her even after her father died and they filled the refrigerator with venison stew and dumplings, Mason jars of strawberry lemonade and corn chowder, food that sustained Ella when her mother did not rise from the shrouded bedroom for weeks.

Now Ella is the one who lies in a darkened bedroom, conjuring the faces of the women who brightened her mother’s smile for the last time before she suffocated from her own lung fluids a few days later. She hadn’t wanted to notice them, hadn’t acknowledged them, had rarely even thought of them until
now. And it occurs to Ella that what you choose to notice, and what you don’t, shapes your understanding, and so your life. She turns her face into the pillow, closes her eyes.

Las is sitting on the front step. He is sitting on the step and looking at things as if for the first time, as if he hasn’t lived on this property for his whole life.

For instance, on the step a planter spills with mutinous growth. Las hears his mother reciting her springtime mantra –
thrills, fills, and spills! –
and telling him, as if he cared, that she’s planted canna, petunias, and sweet potato vine for their blend of colours.
It is too much
, he thinks,
too much of everything
.

He stares down at his feet, a flip-flop on one and on the other a bulk of bandages, covered with a sock. And he thinks,
Holy shit, I love flip-flops
. They’ve been a constant, a comfort, for most of his life. At age six his toes and arches were already strengthening around the flip-flop gait. There must be dozens of them he’s outgrown or broken, still degrading in the municipal dump. When the thong ripped clean out of the cheap foam Spider Man flip-flops he had at age ten, he burst into sobs in the hallway of his elementary school and had to be taken home. It’s a story his father still brings up during family dinners.

He shudders. He is never going to wear a pair of flip-flops again. Ever. He wonders why it has taken him until now to realize this. A toe beside the big one is absolutely necessary, and he’s missing all three in the middle of his foot. He’d trade both his baby toes for any one of them, but he can’t. And it’s hard to believe, hard to accept, because there isn’t much else left to look forward to. His throat gets tight and tears stream down his face, and of course the police car pulls into his driveway now –
Oh Jesus, there are two of them –
and this is not how he imagined it
going when he called, insisting they come and get him, not how he wants to be taken in, crying, holding a girly gift bag, and with a whole life before him where not just the obvious things will change, but the things he has always counted on – such as wearing flip-flops – will be gone forever too.

Ella hears the departing cars but she doesn’t run to the window. She walks to the basement, silently passes her husband asleep on the couch, finds a stack of empty cardboard boxes, and carries them up to Mitch’s office. She starts in the east corner, the one farthest from the windows, and begins to pack away his things. She feels differently about the room right away. She wonders if it’s too bold to call out to Stephanie, ask her to brew up a fresh pot of coffee, come and help.
Not yet
, she tells herself. First she’ll make such a change here that there’ll be no turning back.

I
’d like a pie, Ruby. Can you make me a peach pie?
Cherisse asked, standing in the hole of the kitchen doorway, soaking wet in a ripped nightie, blood streaming from her forehead. Ruby wrapped her in blankets, dressed the wound, put her to bed. And now Helen is picking peaches, the memory of her grandniece’s face making a lump in her throat. Enough peaches for Cherisse’s pie and dessert for Coulson’s primers, and enough to can or freeze so the taste of summer can soften a mean January night.

She stands under a tree, cups a hanging fruit, tests it for the slightest give in its skin, then twists it from its stem, places it in the basket. Ruby says she has the touch for picking. A peach can disappoint if it is taken too early or if it has ripened too quickly. And Helen loves the feel and smell of peach trees, the vulnerability of young fruit, the heft of a full basket as she places it on the earth, the hopeful weightlessness of the empty basket she carries up the stepladder. She tires more easily, aches sooner
than a few years earlier, but still the repetition, the stretch of her limbs, and the fragrance under a tree’s canopy allow reverie to creep in.

There’s a snapping turtle that lives in the reedy pond behind the snack shack. Every spring that turtle moves up into the sandy drive to lay her eggs. Helen protects the nest from cars and people with chicken wire and scrap dowel rods. But every year, in the jet of spring nights, a mother raccoon plunders the turtle’s nest to feed her own young. The turtle keeps trying again, spring after spring, waiting for the universe to make amends. Helen prays for a goshawk or a coyote to deliver the justice – take to the air or the woods with the soft neck of a raccoon pup snapped in its jaw. She has to believe the universe is so ordered. Even if she waits another season for justice.

Shayna called
, Ruby said this morning.
Can you fetch her after you’re done picking? She wants to make a run to the grocery store
. It wasn’t even six a.m. Ruby lowered her voice.
She was up all night, finalizing an agreement to dismantle the blockade. I guess she needs to feed them, make a party of it
.

They were quiet.
I wasn’t there
, thought Helen.
She did this without me
.

You’re staring into space again
, Ruby said.
You need to get out of here
. She handed Helen a list.

After three hours of picking, Helen stops at the blockade with ten six-quart baskets in the truck bed. She’s overheated, her skin tacky with fuzz and punctured fruit. Shayna piles into the front seat.

“I had to do it,” she says immediately, as if Helen’s silence is judgment. “Otherwise they wouldn’t negotiate. Today’s the deadline.”

Biting her lip, Helen looks in her rear-view mirror, sees the peaches lined up in the back of the truck. Every struggle for justice has its compromises. That is why she has been left out.
One of the Warriors, a large man with an open face, is ambling towards the truck.

“He argued with me last night. Kept at me for hours – didn’t want the blockade to come down,” Shayna says, watching him. “Now he insists on helping pay for the food.”

Louis Greene opens the back door, folds his big body into the small seat, and nods to Helen, who starts the truck. Shayna says nothing to him, just slumps against the passenger-side door. The route to the grocery store takes them back through the reserve to its far western boundary, where a new bridge spans the Smoke and connects the reserve to Doreville’s outskirts and a gleaming big-box store anchoring a massive parking lot. To relieve her own unease, Helen turns on the radio and hums along to the local station’s tinny pop music.

A few blocks from the grocery store, the music stops for an hourly news report. Suddenly Shayna’s fingers wheel frantically across the dials and she loses the station. The truck hiccups. “What? What the fuck? Turn it up!”

Helen slows the truck, slaps Shayna’s hands away from the radio, adjusts the tuning dial and volume.

“A spokesman for the minister responsible could not be reached, but developer Mitch Bain confirmed by phone that he’s accepted an offer from the federal government for his land. Asked if this means the development is cancelled, Mr. Bain said, ‘Yes, until the government sells the land, nobody can develop it.’ Anyone who bought a lot in the development will be fully compensated, he said. Meanwhile, federal negotiator Antonia Taylor has issued a statement saying the blockade will come down today.”

“My job is done here,” a chipper-sounding Antonia tells the radio reporter. “Now that the blockade is coming down and development of the land is a non-issue, the need for formal negotiations, their urgency, is moot. The protestors can deal
exclusively with government lawyers and the whole process will move to the courts.”

“Stop the truck! Stop it!” Shayna shouts. She jumps out and bends her small body over the gravel shoulder. Helen watches the shuddering figure. Among the women of her family, morning sickness was rare; Bertie shone like a polished apple when carrying her two daughters. Helen hears sobs. She opens the truck’s glove compartment, searches for a tissue, and turns to Louis, who looks uncomfortable and sweaty compressed in the back seat. The expression on his face tells her she has missed something. “What’s going on?” she says.

He looks at her as if she, of all people, should know. “They did an end-run on us.”

Shayna gets back into the truck, slams the door. Her face is ashen, grimy with tears. Helen reaches with a tissue, but Shayna swats her hand away. “Food. We still need food,” she says. Her voice is a croak.

Helen puts the truck in gear. She turns towards the bridge that leads to the grocery store entrance and comes to a full stop. Other cars have stopped and pulled off to the side of the road. A small, wiry man stands in front of about twenty townspeople who have lined up lawn chairs to block the bridge. A straggle of bystanders and gawkers gathers behind. Helen recognizes the pub owner, Will, in a lawn chair sandwiched next to the nervous woman who runs the junk shop. It’s such a perfect August day. Why aren’t they on their back decks or walking by the river?

The activist is yelling orders through his bullhorn, his face a rictus of outrage. “Turn your cars around and go home. This is a blockade, folks. Natives keep us off the highway, so we are keeping you out of our grocery store.”

There is a cheer from the assembled group that sounds tentative. With a show of effort, the townspeople hoist their signs
and begin to circle their lawn chairs, chanting their slogan: “Rule of law is the rule for all.” Cars with non-native drivers approach the bridge from beyond the reserve’s western edge and are waved through with high fives and applause. A van – Helen catches Bobby Horse’s unmistakable profile behind the wheel – tries to barrel through, but the crowd cinches up, beats it back with their signs and sticks. This energizes them and they chant louder. Helen notices a dozen shaved heads bobbing like peeled potatoes among the townspeople, their pale arms raised. She gets out of the truck. Shayna and Louis follow.