When Is a Man (18 page)

P:
When did you know for sure you were going to be flooded out?

M: I remember being surprised—you know, suddenly there's this treaty. There was a town hall meeting at Lambert, where they had an engineer and someone from government explain what was going on. A lot of people were angry, very upset. Afterwards, I think this was in 1964, everyone got
The Property Owner's Guide
.

J: We lived above the flood line. Figured that meant we could stay. Of course, there'd be no more village, no cable ferry, no way of getting across except your own boat. I thought, Well, at least we'll still have our home.

P:
So basically you'd accepted the inevitable.

J: I don't know that we accepted anything. Resigned is more like it. Young families were mostly on the dole, or they'd moved elsewhere for better work and education. Our neighbours were pensioners and war vets, mostly poor, and they just wanted peace and quiet.

M: Most old folks didn't want to leave. Fifty years in one place, you don't feel like new beginnings. You aren't going to start a farm from scratch at sixty-five.

J: Maybe the dam killed Lambert before Father Time showed up to do the job.

P:
So why did you lose your property? Did the flood line change?

J: Nope. Monashee Power decided they needed our land for construction access, or dump or fill sites. I never got the reasoning. The land is still sitting there. They never did a damned thing with it except cut down the trees.

P:
How much did you receive in compensation?

J: The price started at about a hundred dollars an acre, one hundred and fifty an acre for cleared land and buildings. We hummed and hawed, and the price dropped to fifty dollars an acre.

M: We said at that price, we're not going anywhere. And we'd seen the lots in Bishop. Land was stony, needed clearing. A roof for a roof, that's all we asked for. A roof for a roof.

J: Different men showed up to negotiate. The first ones were friendly enough. They'd come in for tea and ask about the farm, our quality of life. A couple of them quit for the stress of it.

M: It was tough, what they had to do. I mean, things came at you out of the blue, government edicts and whatnot, and you had no one to confront. The negotiators were flesh and blood, so people lashed out at them.

J: Later on, this squat toad of a man kept coming by. Young too. That bothered me. I mean, he was about my age. What would he know about living here? He'd say, Mr. Kruse, I'll offer you two thousand dollars for your place. I'd tell him to forget it. Finally he said, you do know that I can and will expropriate your property. Go ahead, try, I said. So we haggled back and forth, and a few months into the negotiations, guess what?

M: Joe.

J: A forest fire breaks out on my property. In late September. Burns down two outbuildings, some fencing. A few days later, the short guy shows up again with a few of his goons. “Lightning strike?” he says. I still remember that.

M: Never knew his name. Don't recall him ever saying it.

J: Always gave his title—you know, he was “acting on behalf” of somebody. Monashee dug a deep dark hole, then turned over a slimy rock and found him underneath. I heard he burned people's houses right in front of them, before they got compensation. Before they even got their belongings out. I hope he's roasting in hell.

M: Well, he could still be alive, of course.

Had he always been this awkward at conducting interviews? Had he always blundered along, leaving behind a trail of awkward silences, stuttering replies?
Knock off the lofty theoretical questions
, Dr. Tamba advised in an e-mail.
You spent too much time with guys—nerds, if you'll forgive me—like Nathan Cook.

His dad, who'd worked with contractors and construction workers his whole life, said much the same thing over the phone. “These are blue-collar types, practical people. You gotta be honest and straightforward or they'll tune you right out, believe me.”

People didn't want to talk about life after the flood. Or, rather, they didn't want to compare the before and after of the valley. The rather ordinary things they had done out of necessity, getting on with their lives after the flood, hardly seemed the stuff of university research.

The day after he'd talked to the Kruses, he interviewed Cal and Lucy Wendish. They'd lived up the road from the Huberts, raising livestock and chickens, and growing fruit and vegetables for market. The story of people's homes, he realized, was always about things amassed, grown and built over time. Their properties had been hacked out of rough, wild land, worked and reworked from the turn of the century through both World Wars and the Depression, a long dialogue with soil, roots, and stone. And still, by time the valley was flooded, their farms had only begun to attain an air of permanence, of belonging.

Cal
(b. 1935, 74 yrs old)

Cal: There was only ever a ribbon of good land here, along the valley bottom. Marshy along the river between the two lakes, but still decent for farming if you drained some land. We had one field for cold weather crops, another for early crops. Another where we kept cattle and some sheep. That was above the high water mark.

Lucy
(b. 1938, 71 yrs old)

Lucy: Monashee Power expropriated it, though, because the road to Bishop was being rerouted.

C: The original dirt road hugged the lakeshore. When the reservoir is low, there's a long gravel bench—that's the old route. Can't see any trace of our house, or the outbuildings. We had a granary, hay sheds . . .

L: Some of these things belonged to my parents. My father was a barkeep on the
Westminster
. Birch's Black Bottle Scotch Whiskey. Label's a bit faded. Hard to believe it lasted this long without the glass getting broke. That matchbox tin dates back to the twenties. Once it was decided you were being relocated, you had to get your stuff out of your house quick. Monashee men wouldn't think twice about torching your place with everything in it. Whether you'd gotten a cheque or not. That happened to a few folks.

Paul:
People have mentioned something about a short man . . .

C: Wasn't just him, mind you. He had help from Wallace's logging crew. They were his gang.

P:
Donald Wallace was part of this?

C: What they'd do is come around, asking questions. See where you stood—if you'd make much of a fuss about prices. Folks who were tired of the place, or had money, sold quick—the longer you waited, the worse the money got. After a few years, the whole valley was checkerboarded out. People on either side of you had sold—but you didn't know for how much. That's when the short guy, the crew leader, would really put the screws to you.

P:
You don't remember his name?

C: Always called himself by his title. Mr. Expropriations or whatever. He was a very arrogant fellow. He came by when I was away, trying to get Lucy to sign the papers.

L: Followed me around the garden, into the barn. He wouldn't leave. I herded him off the property with a pitchfork and our dog. Mr. Expropriations.

C: If you were unemployed or widowed or just scraping by for whatever reason, they treated you even worse. Piss poor. They shuffled us off to Bishop on cheap promises of good land. There wasn't any. They said there was decent farming and ranching above the flood line, but I never saw it. I'm not complaining. Just stating facts.

L: No real infrastructure—Cal helped build the storm drains and sewer system in Bishop, and there was the school and whatnot. But God help you if you had a serious accident, the hospital in Shellycoat was nearly a two-hour drive in those days. And people there treated you like a hillbilly.

C: I worked on the reservoir too. On tugs, clearing debris and deadheads. Basically cleaning up the mess they made. For years, the north end of the reservoir looked like a bomb went off—silt in the water, mudslides, dead trees. There were good folk in Bishop. But things weren't the same. People, I mean, not just the valley. You always wondered how much your neighbour received in compensation. And wondering kept you from trusting.

Paul stood in the kitchen, confronted by a whole chicken in a roasting pan, a red kuri squash he'd split in half and seasoned with olive oil and thyme. He rubbed rock salt and cracked pepper on the chicken, cut two small slits along the skin of the breasts, one more above each leg, and slid sprigs of rosemary and slivers of garlic between the fat and flesh. Gina's recipe, her favourite comfort food. She arrived holding a bottle of wine, Shane clinging to her leg and sporting a Spider-Man backpack overflowing with toys.

“I know you don't drink much.” She wore light denim overalls with flower patterns on the straps, and her hair was tied back, an oddly girlish look. Her face betrayed uncertainty, and she fidgeted with the bottle.

“How about a small glass,” he said cheerfully. “I'm slowly getting back to my old self. Could use a bit more exercise, though.”

“I'll wrestle you,” Shane said hopefully. He crouched, wild-haired, poised to tackle Paul's leg. His eyes were blue, not his mother's colour, and rather sharp and intense. He had scabs on his elbows and beneath his chin. Gina gave Paul a quick shake of the head.

“Some other time,” Paul said. “Thanks, though.”

“How about you play in the living room,” Gina said. Paul had laid out different vegetables for a salad that he clumsily diced as Gina opened the bottle and poured two glasses.

“I don't want him to get too wound up.” He was a smart boy, she told him, didn't mind playing alone for a time, but he got riled easily and was too sensitive around the other kids at school.

Gina grabbed another knife and helped Paul with the rest of the vegetables, slicing a pepper with quick and efficient cuts. “Hey,” she said. “I was thinking. I know a good doctor in town, if you need one.”

He paused, then resumed cutting. “Actually I will need to see doctor soon, so thank you.”

“I know it's not my business . . .”

“No big deal. I'm due for a blood draw in a few months.”

“Oh. I thought you meant—well, that's good.”

He caught the hint and blushed. “It's probably too soon,” he said. “Recovery-wise, I mean.”

“Yes. Like I said, not my business.” She threw her hands up in such a comically exaggerated way, he laughed despite himself.

“Can I ask what you'll do with your research?”

He shrugged, struggling to imagine a finished project. “Publish, I suppose.”

“No, I mean what do you use it for? Do you go after them?”

“After who?”

“The people who made the dam. The ones who cheated folks out of their property and burned their homes down.”

“It's not about going after people.”

She frowned. “Then what's the point? Doesn't your work have to do something to be useful?”

He flushed. “It is—useful. Not like that. Ethnography, it paints a picture of a community. A narrative. Can't start out being biased or political.”

“Ah.” A pause, and then she said he should interview Billy, which, he realized, was a subtle dig, like let's see you avoid taking a side around him.

“Not sure I feel okay doing that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I noticed you didn't park outside.”

“One block over.” She leaned over the table and craned her neck to look for her son. “You okay in there, buddy?”

Farty-lipped truck sounds emerged from the living room. “Yes.”

“Why did you park so far away?” he asked. She said nothing. “That's why I'm afraid. Unless you're keen to introduce me to him.”

“Not really, no.”

He stood up and opened the stove, poked at the squash with a fork. “I don't like that,” he said. “The bad feeling I'm getting.”

“From the squash? It looks ready.” Jokes between them always fell flat.

“Whatever you have with him. It feels dangerous.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“I was more worried about you and Shane.”

“I know. Let's have a drink? Please?”

“All right.” From the cautious way she held it, the bottle looked pricier than what she'd normally buy. An Argentinean malbec, a dark ruby colour when held to the light. She brought her glass to her mouth and then, for a moment, looked hesitant, even strangely defiant, as though daring herself not to drink. The rim of the glass pressed against her closed lips, pulled away, then returned, like a hummingbird at a feeder. She looked at him expectantly. He held his nose above the rim and smelled a jumble of scents he couldn't quite identify but would have called smoky. Moody? He took a small sip, unsure of what she wanted him to taste, and lowered the glass. His thumb left a perfect, greased print. Belatedly, they clinked their glasses together, and she gave him an impish grin. “To the bush,” she said. “Where losers meet.”