When Is a Man (33 page)

“You invited him?” he asked, confused, but then thought, yes, of course: the lost opportunity Hardy had spoken of, the Kootenay Symposium. Tonight had been his chance to make up for that, to do—what, exactly? Rant into a microphone? Finally face someone with real power and look them in the eye?

“Why didn't he show up?” Elsie said. And Paul, now wondering the same thing, stared around at the emptying theatre, scanning for both television cameras and the old man, thinking that Elsie had stood at that lectern not just for the Friends, but for people like Hardy and Cyril, neither of whom was here. She'd spoken herself into a different place and time and was coming back from it almost completely alone.

5

Winter began to wind down, and there were rumours the mill would reopen in late April. The valley warmed, the sidewalks in Shellycoat turning brown and grey with slush. When he skied, the snow was slick, dull, and wet, and the forest smelled of soil and crushed fir and spruce needles. Rivulets trickled beneath the snow, a crystalline sound. He skied out to the huts with Lazeroff to eat lunch by the woodstove one last time and went home melancholy.

One morning, he and Gina took Shane down to the park along the water, where the snow remained only in isolated clumps beneath the trees. Gina had enrolled in a government-sponsored workshop on starting and operating a small business, and a few days into the workshop some other women in the class had approached her about running a catering company or maybe a small café together. She taped charts and graphs to the bedroom wall opposite Paul's chaotic workspace, and after Shane was asleep she spread her night's homework across the kitchen table: graphs, charts, and application forms, booklets on business loans. While Paul fussed and ruminated over his interviews and notes, her hands turned pages and rearranged papers with quiet efficiency. He knew that underneath her calm, solid grace, she was panicking about the future and the probability of disappointment, just as he was.

She told Paul that with the mill reopening, Billy wanted to spend more time with his son, knowing he'd be pulling long days in the woods to make up for lost income. “You'll be at your dad's a lot for the next few weeks, big guy,” she said to Shane. He was kicking pebbles free from the still-frozen sand and throwing them into the clear water.

“That's okay,” the boy said. “That's a good thing, right?”

“Very good. Your dad's looking forward to it.”

“Must be relieved to have his job back,” Paul said.

Gina shrugged. “Ungrateful. Guess he'll always be that way.”

At home that afternoon, he got a call from Elmer. “I think I may have found someone you'll want to talk to. A woman named Raina Thorstenson. You'll have to drive to Grand Forks, though. She's in a seniors home there, she's about ninety-one.”

“Elmer, that's brilliant. How'd you find her?”

“Because of you, actually. A fellow was in here the other day asking about your research, mentioned his grandmother had lived in Lambert. Don't think he quite understood what you're studying.”

“How so?”

“She'd already left the valley a long time before the flood, just after the Second World War.”

“Doesn't really fit the research then,” Paul said, disappointed. “Still tempting, but . . .”

“Well, once I had her maiden name, I dug around and found a couple of references. Her father was a foreman at the packing sheds—you know, loading the crates onto the steamship and so on. So they probably knew Donald Wallace quite well. Here's the clincher: her mother was a nurse.”

“You've lost me.”

“A nurse—you remember you wanted someone with the scoop on Donald's war wounds?”

“Sure. I'm surprised
you
remembered.”

Elmer laughed. “Oh, I've got a knack for sleuthing—it's all that reservoir noir.”

Grand Forks had a wide open sky compared with Shellycoat. Around the town, a large expanse of fields—not quite green, but no longer dormant—hovered on the verge of spring. The air was warm and smelled of soil and rain. All this made the Twin Willows Assisted Living Village seem like a lively place. Residents took themselves downtown using their walkers or electric scooters or congregated at picnic tables and benches along the lawns and sidewalks. At the far end of the Village, a sign on a set of metal gates designated the enclosed building as a “neighbourhood for the memory-impaired.” He double-checked to make sure Raina lived on the right side of the gate.

She was a short woman with a slight tremble, alert and talkative. Her room was tidy, decorated with framed watercolours and wooden spoons hanging on the walls. She still took a long walk each day, she told him, and was quite independent—she cleaned her own apartment and cooked her own meals, eschewing the nursing staff and communal dining area as much as possible. She only had a bit of time to talk—there was a senior's yoga class at eleven and a crib tournament with friends after lunch.

Her memories of Lambert were vivid and elegiac: cherry trees flowering in the spring, the crates of apples loaded on the
Westminster
—Winesaps, Golden Russets, autumn-red Gravensteins. And pears—Anjoulems, Flemish Beauties. Recollections of swimming and rowboat expeditions along the lake, fishing and looking for petroglyphs on rockfaces. They spent nearly an hour steeped in nostalgia before Paul got to the real questions.

“Your mother—a nurse, yes?—she must have known everyone,” Paul said.

“Everyone knew everyone.”

“Saw a lot of births?”

“And deaths.”

“Obviously, you must remember Donald and Belinda Wallace,” Paul said. “Did your mother help deliver their son, Hardy?”

“Oh, yes,” she said without hesitation.

“You're certain?”

“Absolutely,” Raina said, sounding slightly annoyed that a stranger was questioning her memory. “We were close family friends.”

“So Mr. Wallace knew he could trust your parents, your mother especially,” Paul said.

She looked confused. “With what—Hardy's delivery, do you mean?”

“With other things. I know Donald had been badly wounded in the war.”

She chuckled suddenly at a thought. “He couldn't bend or kneel down properly. So he never did anything that would draw attention to it—he was an absurdly proud man. It meant a lot of standing and pointing and ordering people about.”

“Did you ever hear anyone say—did Donald or Belinda ever tell your mother—that because of that injury he was unable to have children of his own?”

She squinted cautiously at Paul and smacked her lips once, false teeth slipping and wedging back into place. The question had either surprised her so much she'd forgotten to be indignant for Wallace's sake or else she was weighing her words carefully.

“No one would ever have asked, or brought it up in public. It's like talking about the Queen's underwear.” Raina paused, clouded eyes wandering. “It was unexpected when Mrs. Wallace became pregnant, that was all. Everyone just assumed there would be no children.”

“Did you know Marcus Soules?”

“Mr. Soules once showed me how to graft a Cox's Pippin branch onto a crabapple tree. I was probably there to play with Arthur at the time, we were close to the same age.”

“Do you think Donald would have told Marcus? About the nature of his injury?”

“Maybe . . . yes, him, if anybody.” Her eyes brightened with interest—she saw where Paul was going. “If it
was
true about Donald, not sure how he could keep that kind of thing from Marcus.”

“And of course, Marcus already had a son,” Paul said. “I wonder if that was hard for Donald to take, being so proud.”

She nodded, giving him a shrewd look. When is a secret ever really a secret, he thought, and not just a mutual agreement to look the other way?

Paul pictured Donald Wallace at the peak of the Great Depression. The markets for his fruit were disappearing, he had land and moderate wealth but no sons or daughters. A future without orchards wouldn't have seemed likely—everyone in Lambert probably assumed this was a temporary dip in fortune, that there would be new markets, better rail service for shipping. Despite the decline of the fruit industry, and without foreseeing the inevitability of the dam, Donald would have believed he was still key to Lambert's survival. But not to have an heir, to know his name would last only as long as his uncertain health—that must have been truly unthinkable.

Here was the kind of conjecture Elmer hated: that Donald talked Marcus into it as a business deal, a simple matter of propagation, of progeny. No different than grafting scion to rootstock. The Wallaces probably had money set aside for a nest egg, an inheritance. A portion of it could be given over to Marcus, a payment to give the Wallace orchards—and the Wallace name—a future, whatever that future might be. There must have been a strong friendship between the two men or, at the very least, the sense of a shared life, shared dreams, and shared risks.

So they took another gamble—Donald Wallace staked the last of his pride on the future—and from that came Hardy. A son for the Wallaces. The risk must have felt worth it at the time.

Perhaps Marcus had his own hidden motives—all those years tending the orchards with Belinda while Donald was overseas at war or away on association business. Perhaps, by making Marcus his instrument, Wallace took away the man's agency, rendered any secret feelings Marcus had for his wife moot, useless.

And how had Belinda felt about all this? Paul had a hunch that nothing of Belinda survived the burning of Lambert or the floodwaters, save the odd trinket and photo that Hardy kept (and probably hid from Donald, who would have been very old when they relocated). Unlike in Elmer's novels, no secret diaries would suddenly appear to magically and romantically resurrect her. No voice from the past would rescue Paul from speculation. And what was the point of all this speculating? He wasn't sure—it didn't seem to answer anything, except to show how some people in the valley, Donald Wallace in particular, were caught in a spiral of helplessness, of impotence in every sense.

Raina interrupted his thoughts. “Marcus's son, Arthur—he was a handsome boy but bookish. Very different from people like the Wallaces or the Wentzes.”

“He had a son, Kai, who died.”

“Oh, yes, dreadful. There was hardly anything in the paper, but I'd known because we kept in touch with the Souleses. His wife wrote the Christmas letter each year.”

“Arthur had already moved away from Lambert when that happened.”

“Yes, he worked with—” She stopped, straining to remember. “Well, he did something for the railroads in Kamloops. Anyway, it was all a terrible shame. Arthur was very proud of Kai because he'd taken a job with the hydroelectric company in the valley.”

“I thought Kai worked at the Dalton Creek mill? With Hardy Wallace and the Wentzes.”

“Arthur was hoping Monashee Power would point Kai toward an engineering degree or a government job on the coast—anything that wasn't farming or logging.”

“Strange, when you think of it,” Paul said. “By the time Hardy was born, it was already too late for him to become the person Donald wanted him to be—someone to take over the orchards, run the packing sheds and jam factory. There must have been a lot of shared disappointment between them.”

Raina nodded. “That's why Arthur wanted to get Kai away. That valley was no place for young people.” She thought for a moment. “It still isn't—don't tell me you haven't had a rough go of things there.”

He smiled, taken aback. “Things are starting to look promising.”

“Sounds like you're past the worst of it, then,” she said.

6

He and Gina left Shane with Billy for the week and drove south past Grand Forks and then east. At Castlegar, they left the main highway and followed the road through town to the Hugh Keenleyside Dam on the Columbia River. There was a narrow lane across the dam's crest where they could drive over the navigation lock to the other side and a viewpoint overlooking the generating station and powerhouse and the man-made wetlands behind the dam. They circled back through the benchland communities of Robson and Brilliant and returned to the highway at the rest stop overlooking the Brilliant Dam on the Kootenay River. The spillway below them thundered, early spring runoff churning in a polished granite mortar, funnelled into a canyon and passing beneath the old Doukhobor suspension bridge.

They continued driving up a long valley where the river ran unencumbered, and the road wound through dark forests that would suddenly open onto fields and farms, gas stations and roadside coffee shops. There was a pristine and rustic quality here, a sense of something preserved. The river was braided and meandering, the banks weedy and wild. This place was, in essence, what the Immitoin Valley might have been without the dam.

Paul recognized the valley from coffee table books and travel magazines. He tried to imagine a new hydro project drowning this highway and farmland. The outrage, the mass protests, would be enough to bring down a government—it simply wouldn't happen in the present day. But then again, there was Site C on the Peace, as Tamba had mentioned. He'd also read about a recent American proposal to flood nine thousand acres of grasslands, sloughs, and a First Nations reserve in the Similkameen Valley. He remembered that place too—he'd driven through part of it last summer on his way to Shellycoat and stopped by the side of the road to suffer through his incontinence.