The Mountain Can Wait (6 page)

“You think you're about done with this block?” he said. “I don't want to roll into camp too late.”

“You should smoke,” she said. “It helps keep the critters away.”

“You about ready to go back?”

She inhaled deeply and flicked the ash onto the toe of her own boot and looked at him as if she were considering something. “Maybe another hour,” she said.

Curtis was four years old when Tom started his first and only season as a logger. After the thing that happened in the bathtub, when Curt was a baby, Elka had seemed okay. There were doctors who talked sense, and some who didn't, and different combinations of pills. Then, a few years of relative peace and normality. Five years of working indoors at the mill was about as much as Tom could take, so he signed on for a season up near Smithers. Not too far from home if Elka needed him.

Two months into the job, the beginning of June, and the lower half of Tom's face was padded by a thick beard. He was in the canteen, eating a plate of meatballs, when one of the other loggers tapped him on the shoulder and said his mother was on the radio. Something was wrong at home.

Outside, the sun had dropped behind the mountain and the warmth of the day was receding. Two guys tossed a football in the clearing behind the bunk trailers, and as he walked past, the ball seemed to wobble and spiral through the air in slow motion.

The radio was kept in a small, veneer-paneled room at the back of the foreman's trailer. Samantha's voice crackled over the line so that it sounded as though she was laughing. Tom's landlord, who lived above his basement apartment, had been kept up half the night by the TV on full volume. It was still blaring in the morning, so he let himself in and found Curtis asleep on the floor in front of the box. The boy was with Samantha now, but they still couldn't find Elka.

Tom borrowed a truck and was home within hours, kissing his son on the top of his head as he slept in Tom's own childhood bedroom. When he went to check out the apartment in the morning, he opened the door and Elka was there, sweeping up the crushed, candy-colored cereal that Curtis had spread all over the floor. She stood in the middle of the room, leaned with the broom handle against her cheek, and looked at him, her eyes like magnets. She told him she was pregnant again and that his new beard suited him fine.

After a
week of working straight through cold, early mornings that turned into damp and windy days, Tom wanted to give his planters a day off. He announced this at dinner and was given a rough hug by the person sitting next to him. Someone else got up from the table and slapped him on the back. Two planters from Matt's crew were elected to drive the two-hour round trip, south along the lake, to the Takla Landing outpost to buy beer.

After he finished eating, Tom headed to the showers with his tool kit. People had been complaining about water pressure. Even in the bush, they said, they expected more than this sad trickle. He checked the connections at the pump and the cables to the nozzles. He was in one of the cubicles when Nix approached him. She lifted the canvas flap, kicked the toe of his boot.

“Do you ever stop working?” she asked.

“Eh?”

“All we ever see of you is the bottom half. Your top bits are always hidden under a hood or behind a tire or something.”

Tom shrugged, turned his wrench against the nozzle fitting.

“Will you join the party tonight?”

He lowered his wrench from the nozzle and looked at her. She had her towel over her shoulder and gripped a plastic soap container in one hand, toothbrush and toothpaste in the other.

“If I get this done,” he said.

Two fires burned on the beach as the sky above the Skeenas softened to pink and orange, the clouds breaking for the first time in a week. Three people floated in a canoe in the middle of the lake, and from the beach their silhouettes grew darker and darker until they and the canoe were one perfect black form, drifting on the water. Depending on the direction of the wind, every now and then their voices and their laughter echoed through the air, like birds. Tom sat on a flat rock at one of the fires next to Penny with the pink hair. She spit sunflower seeds into the flames and said to no one in particular that after this week, her cold bones ached and she felt like an old woman. Someone else complained that the blisters on his heels were the size of apples. Amy announced that her chafing was already so bad that halfway through the day she'd ripped off her underwear in the middle of the block and wasn't going to wear any for the rest of the season. They all agreed, though, that for tonight, things were looking up. They had beer and dope and a good fire; the weather was turning and maybe the sun would come out for their day off. Three guys deftly kicked a hacky sack, tossing the dusty bag from the toes of their shoes, the sides of their shoes, their knees, chests. A red Frisbee cruised a smooth and lazy arc against the backdrop of the lake.

Sweet's voice carried over from the other fire. He was holding court, telling a story he'd recounted so many times that it was now becoming mythical. And even though pretty much everyone in the circle had heard it before, they sat with their firelit faces toward him. The year before, there had been a heat wave that persisted for close to a month. The dust hung heavy those long weeks and everyone's throats and noses were full of it, and the land was as dry and brittle as the fur of a long-dead animal. The company was working fire hours, from two in the morning until nine, to avoid the hottest, most hazardous part of the day. One morning, as everyone was packing up to go back to camp, Tom got a call on the radio about a brush fire on Sweet's land. No one knew or was willing to admit knowing how it started—it could have been a cigarette butt flicked to the ground or it could have been a spark from a shovel hitting rock—but by the time Tom reached the site of the fire, there was nothing more than a sky full of smoke and a carpet of wet, black brush. Sweet had been quick with the fire box, pumping water from a nearby creek and arming each of his crew with a shovel big enough to dig a trench. If there had been any wind that day, the story would have been different.

“I saved the chief's ass,” Sweet said now. “Isn't that right, boss?” he called across to Tom. “Everything you see here would have gone up in flames if I weren't the fastest-acting motherfucker this side of the Rockies.”

Though they had put out the fire, they still had to call in the ministry guys to make sure there was nothing smoldering deep in the brush. Fires in the bush could last for months underground if they weren't extinguished right, living off dry roots and buried stumps. The sleeping, subterranean burn could one day creep up the inside of a hollow tree and rage into the forest.

Now the smoke from the fire shifted direction and settled over Tom, in his eyes. He squeezed them shut against the sting, dug his knuckles into his eye sockets, and waited for the smoke to shift again.

“‘I hate white rabbits,' chief! Say it!” This came from either Amy or Penny.

“Folklore,” said Tom. “Does nothing.” He waved the smoke from his face and coughed, his eyes still shut.

“You've got to have a little faith.” This came from a voice closer to him, almost in his ear. He opened his eyes and there was Nix, sitting next to him, just clear of the smoke. He was about to get up to move but the smoke shifted again, rising up the center of the circle, and he could breathe.

“See?” she said. “The magic words work.”

“But I didn't say them.” He wiped his wet eyes.

She swayed into him, pressing her shoulder against his. “I said them for you.”

Guitars came out, and drums. Somebody produced a flute. Tom got up from the fire and walked across the cold clearing, drawn to the punk music coming from an old ambulance painted midnight blue. The ambulance belonged to Luis, who was skinny and long-limbed, wore thick glasses, and was never without a wool toque. Tom didn't know a lot about him—only that he was a fast planter and hoarded a supply of Coca-Cola, which he shared with no one, in the depths of his ambulance.

Luis sat at the back of the ambulance, dangling his legs over the tailgate. The two swinging doors were open, and inside was a dark nest of blankets and clothes. He held up the oily joint he'd been smoking in a half wave, offering it to Tom.

“I grew it myself,” he said, his eyelids waxy. His face was red and swollen, as if he'd been punched. “I've got a whole closet full of mother plants, a water table. You can smoke this without any repercussions.” He chuckled, held out his pinched fingers: “Here.”

“What happened to your face?” Tom asked, refusing the joint.

“Fucking allergic to blackflies.” Luis twisted back into his ambulance and shuffled through a pile of clothes. He sat back up holding a paper bag, soft with wrinkles. Pulled out a string of black licorice and dangled it.

“I'll take one of those, though,” said Tom.

“You mind if I give you a red one? Black is my favorite.”

Tom took the candy and chewed on the end as if it were a piece of grass, and looked out toward the lake. A few stars had come out, people danced, and the fires bent in the wind. Nix walked across the clearing toward her cook van with Sweet just behind her. He stopped her, said something, and she laughed, put her hand on his chest, and shoved him away.

“Why buy red if you prefer black?” Tom asked Luis.

“Hm?”

“Never mind.” Tom grinned at him and moved on.

He decided to pack it in just the other side of midnight. Everyone was still up, either at the fires or the vestibules of their tents, drinking beer or red wine or mugs of tea. They would stay up all night and sleep, unburdened, all the next day. They deserved it. He would get up early in the morning, take advantage of the peace, and get on with his work. When he got to the door of his trailer he felt a light touch on his back, between his shoulder blades.

“You okay?” It was Nix, with a wool blanket over her shoulders.

“Going to bed,” he said. He could barely see her face in the dark, only the hint of her features; when she turned her head, her profile was backlit from the fires.

“No, I know. Me too. I just wanted to say good night.”

He pulled open the door and put one foot on the step and looked back at her. “Good night, then.”

“Can I come in for a bit?” She said this as she shook the blanket from her shoulders and unfolded it and wrapped it around her body, so that her head was down and her words difficult to hear.

“Sorry?”

“Are you going to make me say it again?” She hopped a few times and hugged the blanket tightly around herself. “I want to come in with you. Can I?”

He looked at her dark shape, considering. He did want to bring her inside; there was something about this time of night that made him feel as though he could. Somehow the lateness of the hour and the dark meant that it wouldn't count—he couldn't even see her face. And he had thought about her, about touching her. Over the past week he'd thought about it plenty of times.

Somebody dumped a big log onto the fire, and a clap of sparks rose into the night and hung there spiraling, and then extinguished. And he had enough sense to think beyond this hour, this dark, and to how this would all look to him when the sun rose.

He wanted to be kind, but he was no good at flirting. He smiled, hoped that she could see it in the dark. “No. You can't come in.”

“But you thought about it,” she said.

Elka died
four years after she left. News reached Tom via a brief letter from Bobbie, who still lived on Aguanish, in the same run-down cottage where Elka had grown up. By that time, Tom and Curtis and Erin were doing pretty good. House was clean; they ate the food he cooked. Curtis was starting to win trail races on his bike, and Erin could climb the neighbor's maple tree to the top. At the bottom of Bobbie's letter was a plea for him to come to the island, and if there was no other option, he could bring the children.

So he packed a small bag and left Curtis and Erin with Samantha. Crawling in first gear behind a laboring truck on the switchbacks before Pemberton, a black Lab panting out the truck's back window, Tom thought about the only other time he'd been to Aguanish Island. That first trip down, he had bruised the heel of his hand from hitting the wheel. On the narrow road that cut into the side of the mountain just north of Horseshoe Bay, he'd wanted to launch over the sea to the west; he couldn't get there fast enough. This time, at least, it didn't matter how long it took.

He slept on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island and then drove unimpeded the short distance to Nanoose, where he could catch a smaller, foot-passenger ferry to Aguanish. The last scheduled crossing of the day was canceled due to high winds, and he was obliged to stay the night in a motel. The weather hadn't improved much by the next morning, so he sat down to a late breakfast in the marina pub and watched the cruisers swing on their moorings and waited for the wind to die down, as the man at the ferry terminal said it would.

It was just after 3 p.m. when he stood on the wet ferry deck, the flat-nosed boat plowing through the chop of the Georgia Strait. The clouds were low and heavy and scraped across the rocky hills of Aguanish. All the letter had said was that Elka had been found dead in Alberta. It wasn't news that he was surprised to get, but listening to Bobbie tell it was going to be hard, like lifting a bandage to see a wound.

From Owl Bay, Tom caught a ride to Bobbie's place with an elf-like woman in a yellow van. A trinket of beads swung from the rearview mirror as she turned south onto the main island road.

“You visiting someone?” she asked.

“My mother-in-law.”

The road moved gently through dense Douglas fir flossed with hairy grandfather's-beard and mist. Something heavy rolled in the back of the van. Up ahead, two men in raincoats walked by the side of the road, and when she was level with them she slowed the van and leaned out the window. She asked if they needed a lift. Smiling, they waved her off, and she told them she'd see them later.

Elka had asked him once or twice if he would consider moving there. Some aspects of the place would have suited him—subsistence farming, producing his own energy, and wasting nothing. But what he couldn't fathom was the familiarity. All the people on the island knew each other. And the basket weaving, the spirituality, the self-centeredness. So much of Elka's upbringing had been about seeking some kind of inner peace, and he sometimes thought that maybe after looking so hard at herself, she'd bored a hole right through her middle.

“So who's your mother-in-law, then?”

“Roberta Sirota.”

“Bobbie?” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “No kidding.” She cupped the wheel loosely with the fingertips of her right hand and draped her left arm out the window. She cocked her head to the side. “You staying long?”

“Just down for the day.”

“You know, a bunch of us built her a cob hut last year, a place to make her brews and creams and stuff.”

He nodded. She turned onto a smaller, dirt road that cut into a seam of island bedrock. Patches of gray sea could be seen through the trees, and soon the road swung to the left and followed a cliff. There were glimpses of the coastline dipping in and out of rocky coves before the road turned in again. Tough pines and junipers accustomed to strong wind and saltwater spray. This was Bobbie's island.

The woman stopped the van in front of a familiar wall of blackberry. She leaned over to turn off the ignition, and the edge of her ear poked through the straight fall of her hair, like a kitten's tongue. “Tell Bobbie to come over and see me sometime,” she said.

It had been nine years since he'd been to Bobbie's place, and nothing much had changed. There was the poorly built driftwood gate that needed to be coaxed open with a knee, which led to a path through salal and blackberry into the yard. The brick cottage, surrounded by fruit trees and overgrowth, hunched stubbornly at the top of a slope. Where the ground leveled out along the side of the house there was the pond, half hidden by the skirt of a large willow. This, Elka once told him, was where she used to hunt tadpoles. And beyond that, the vegetable garden.

Dirty smoke curled from the chimney into the overcast sky, and from somewhere behind the house came the rumble and chuck of a generator in need of a new exhaust. He looked up at the front of the house, preparing to go in.

Bobbie must have been watching for him from the window, because she opened the door before he made it to the porch steps. She stood in the doorway, as if she were unsure whether or not to let him past. Her hair was now more white than gray, and she wore it in a long, thick braid thrown over her shoulder. Her eyes, dark and heavy-lidded, had sunk a little farther into her face, the skin tanned and tagged and deeply lined.

“Letter said you'd be here yesterday.”

“Couldn't be helped. They stopped the ferry because of the weather.”

“Bah.” She swatted the air.

He put one boot on the bottom step and crossed his arms casually over his knee. “Can I come in?”

“I didn't think you were going to show up. I'm in the middle of something now.” She wiped her nose with the back of her finger and went into the house, leaving the door open.

Inside, the smell of something waxy—lanolin. And woodsmoke. A tepee of burning logs in the fireplace, pockmarks on the rug in front of the hearth. Watching her move about in her kitchen, setting a blackened copper kettle on the stove, spooning loose leaves into a mug, he'd forgotten how tall and broad she was. How she could fill a room entirely.

“It is good to see you, Tom.”

“Is it?”

“Let's not start things off this way, eh?” She lifted the kettle with a rag and filled the mug. She handed it to him as she passed and headed for the stairs. After a few steps up, she stopped. “You coming?”

Elka's old room. The walls were bare, the brown carpet grimy. Her bed was covered with clothes and cardboard boxes. More clothes, and dolls, and puzzle boxes split at the corners spilled out of the closet onto the floor. Bobbie sat heavily on the edge of the bed and exhaled what seemed to be her frustration with Tom, and with the whole world that stood against her. Tom, his hands firmly in the pockets of his jeans, leaned one shoulder against the wall by the window. In the backyard, one of the island's wild sheep grazed, and where the shed used to be there was some fool-looking mud hut in the shape of a mushroom. There were the salal and blackberry bushes that bordered the edge of the land, and beyond that the bedrock and Douglas fir that rolled away down to the strait, nothing more than a misty gray band between this place and the dark coastal mountains on the mainland. Bobbie selected something from the pile on the bed and held it up. A child's t-shirt. Other clothes were shaken out for inspection. Denim overalls, a raincoat, leotards. “Why didn't you bring the children?”

“Implication was I shouldn't.”

“Well.” She flipped through a shoe box of cassette tapes, her mouth turned down rigidly.

“Come on, Bobbie. I'm sorry I was late. Nothing I could do about it.”

“There never is.” She held up a green dress by its sleeves. “You want to take some of this stuff home for your girl? How old is she?”

“Four.”

“Of course she is.”

“Bobbie, I've come all this way.”

“You've come all this way.”

“And I'd really like to know what happened.”

She sighed and looked up at the ceiling, and puffed out her cheeks.

“Did you know she was in Alberta?” he asked.

“She left me as she left you.”

“I guess I just thought in all this time she might have contacted you.”

“Don't you think I would have told you if she had?”

He watched her fold and unfold a wool sweater. She tossed it aside and knelt on the floor, and pulled a wooden tray out from under the bed. It was full of shoes: one yellow rain boot, scuffed runners, leather sandals furry with dust.

He lowered himself onto the floor and drew up his knees, and rested his arms across them, to allow her this power to stall. A twelve-year-old calendar was still pinned to the wall above the bed.

“It's amazing, really, that they were able to track me down at all, to let me know,” Bobbie began. “But there was a postcard. They found it in her bag, already stamped and addressed. It was evident from its condition that she'd been carrying it around for some time.”

“She happen to mention my kids in that postcard?”

“Well, no. It was meant for me. A message from a daughter to her mother.”

“She had a daughter too.”

Bobbie clasped her hands together and smiled sadly, as if all this had been ordained. As if no one need be sorry for the fact that his kids were growing up without their mother.

“She was found in a place called Wetaskiwin. Just south of Edmonton. Wetaskiwin. Word comes from the Cree, something about the hills where they made peace.” She looked at him, as if she wanted some kind of confirmation. “Maybe she could have found happiness there.”

“Maybe.”

“They found her in a snowbank, right in the middle of town. Apparently it looked like she had just gone to sleep; they've ruled out foul play.” She said this stonily, jutting her long chin at the floor.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Somebody did something to her. Obviously. There was vomit in the snow where she lay, and her blood-alcohol level was very high.”

He held his head in his hands and imagined Elka in the snow. “So you think someone forced the booze down her throat and then left her out there in the cold. She didn't do this to herself.”

“No she did not.”

He stood again and looked out the window, at the sheet of rain slanting across the coastal mountains, the strait all but obliterated. “She's never been well,” he said.

“You just didn't understand her. You always thought I was a crackpot, and when I told you she'd get better if she stayed here, you completely disregarded me.”

“Maybe there's a thing or two you didn't understand either.”

She shrugged.

“Where's she buried?”

“She was cremated. A good friend of mine collected her ashes from a funeral home in Vancouver. I kayaked out to Stoney Island the evening I received them. Full moon, water like glass. I made a bonfire and cooked a kelp and carrot stew. Things got pretty intense with half a bottle of whiskey and some chanting, and then I fell asleep on the beach. Froze my ass off. But it was worth it. I gave her back to the sea at dawn, spread her ashes over the kelp bed.” Bobbie looked at him with one squinty eye, as if she were considering something. “Good for the thyroid, kelp. It's packed with iodine, iron, potassium. I cook it down with essential oils and vitamins to make a salve that can kick the ass out of any burn from here to kingdom come. Would you like to take a bottle home?”

“You didn't think we'd want to be a part of her funeral?”

She looked at him, her dark eyes shining. “No one on this earth could ever come close to guessing what a man like you wants, Tom.”

Later, Tom stood at the back door, the toes of his boots getting wet from the rain spitting through the screen. It was getting dark and he knew the last ferry would be leaving soon and he would be there for the night. Tomorrow when he got home he would tell his kids that the mother they didn't know was dead, and he wasn't sure how he felt about that, or how they would react. Right now, all he was was worn out.

Bobbie fed him a soup of lentils and potatoes and poured him a rough clay mug of huckleberry wine. They ate without speaking. He wiped the last of the soup from his bowl with a hunk of bread and sat back in his chair and looked at her across the table. “Bobbie. Why did you ask me to come here?”

She carefully put her spoon down and pulled her braid from one shoulder to the other. “You're the husband.”

“You could have told me everything in that letter.”

She went to pour more wine into his mug, saw that it was full and frowned. “Don't you like the wine?”

He laid both of his palms on the table and watched her.

“In the end, she came to me.”

Tom pushed back his chair. “You brought me here so you could gloat?”

“No, you fool. She came to me, and I wanted you to have some real part of it. Telling you in a letter would have been cruel.” Her lip curled. “Goodness, I forgot what an idiot you could be.”

Bloated from the soup, wound up, he tried a few hours later to sleep on her couch, the last of the fire pulsing quietly in the grill. He woke at 5 a.m. when Bobbie clambered through the room in high rubber boots and a swishing nylon jacket. She carried a basket and walking stick, and when he woke properly at eight, she fried him the blue chanterelles and jelly ears she'd picked on the low eastern slope of the hill at dawn.