The River Burns Page 3

  Mrs. McCracken switched her motor off, peeled off the helmet, and fluffed her white hair that she wore curled. Samad called down to her, “Blueberry pie today, Mrs.?”

  “Freshly picked blueberries,” Mrs. McCracken emphasized, “are the key.”

  “Bake trucker-sized pies,” Denny advised her. “You’ll make a mint.”

  She wasn’t sure if that meant they should be bigger or smaller.

  “Something we can eat on the go,” he explained.

  “Tarts!” she chimed in.

  “Bigger,” he said. “A tart’s not trucker-sized. Bigger than a tart, smaller than a whole pie.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. She seemed to be thinking about it.

  “Depends on what kind of tart you’re talking about,” Xavier pointed out. “I like mine small and curvy.”

  “X,” Samad forewarned, worried.

  “What?”

  “It’s Mrs. McCracken.”

  “School’s out, Samad. She’s not going to give you the strap.”

  “I might,” Mrs. McCracken let it be known. “Did you hear the rumour that the school gave me a strap as a retirement gift? That one went the rounds.”

  “Good for a laugh but I never believed it,” Xavier said.

  “I never denied it,” Mrs. McCracken pointed out. “But you’re right. You’re not in school anymore. A lot of good it did you when you were. In any case, you’re allowed an occasional double entendre, even when it is in my presence.”

  “Double what?” Xavier asked. “Espresso?”

  Samad and Denny laughed.

  “You boys,” Mrs. McCracken said.

  “Oh God, no. Don’t tell me,” André said. He seemed stricken.

  They looked where he was looking and his pallor and trepidation was such that even Mrs. McCracken gazed in that direction. On the other side of the bridge a bus was destined to cross next. Rather than proceed at a fitting pace, slow enough, the elderly passengers disembarked and were proceeding to walk across. A few were being pushed in wheelchairs. Among those who walked were the sprightly and the spry and a number of them kept up a good pace, yet others demonstrated a lethargy, or the carnage of difficult knees and hips, and so hobbled along while still others appeared barely ambulatory.

  “What the hell is that?” Denny asked.

  “I heard about it,” André intimated. “Had to see it to believe it.”

  Denny noticed the two men who owned sedans moving closer to them to observe the activity on the bridge and he no longer felt his previous antipathy.

  “Heard about what?” Denny asked.

  “Fuck,” Xavier said.

  “Language,” Mrs. McCracken chided him.

  “Those inspectors? Out to check the bridge? At first we thought they were on our side.”

  “Government inspectors you’re talking about?”

  “Highway Department, whatever. So there’s a new regulation now. Buses have to off-load before crossing.”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “Ryan O’Farrell! Language!”

  “Ryan’s my brother, Mrs. McCracked. I’m Denny. You never could keep us straight.”

  “What did you call me?” she demanded to know.

  “You started it.”

  “They have to off-load,” André explained. “After the passengers cross on their own, then the bus drives over empty. So passengers won’t be on board if the bus falls through the bridge.”

  “Fuckin’ hell!”

  “Mr. O’Farrell!”

  “Come on, Denny,” Samad whispered. “Don’t piss her off.”

  “I know you think Ryan’s your big success story,” Denny rebuked his former teacher, ignoring Samad, “and I’m your big failure, McCracked. You wanted me to be more than just another logger but here I am, logging. Get over it. You have to look at the situation we’re in today. This is what matters now.”

  She appeared nonplussed, yet could not follow his thread.

  “You’re partly responsible,” he accused. “You’re one of them who wants to keep this bridge. And it’s partly because you don’t like loggers. You never want to see our side. The worst thing is, you’re spearheading—that’s the word—you’re spearheading the people who want to keep this bridge. Look! We can’t cross and now the whole morning’s shot.”

  “You can go around, Mr. O’Farrell.”

  “We don’t have a choice now, do we? Is that what you want? But think. Try to get hold of this. The detour adds an extra nineteen kilometres per trip, one way. Never mind our time, do you know what that costs at the end of a day, just in fuel? Eleven trucks. Thirty-eight clicks round-trip. Make it four round-trips a day, five on a good day but you can forget about five now. Do the math. You taught it.”

  “You were good in math yourself.”

  “No, McCracked. That was my brother. Ryan. I’m Denny.”

  “Denny,” she said, as though to nail that down for good.

  “I’ve done the math. It’s over sixteen hundred clicks a day. Do you know how much fuel that is, how much money, not to mention the drivers’ time? And don’t talk to me about the company. These are our trucks. We pay the mortgage on them. We pay the fuel bill. Not the company. The company pays us by the load, not the time, so they don’t care how long it takes any more than you do, just so long as the logs get moved.”

  “I’m not going to stand here and argue with you, Mr. O’Farrell.”

  “Can’t even remember my name.”

  “You disparage mine. Why should I speak yours?”

  “Hey, Crackers, did you hear about the meeting coming up? You’ll have to stand and argue with me then.”

  “That’s fine. There’s a proper forum for every discussion, Mr. O’Farrell.”

  “Just don’t get your hopes up. Things can go wrong.”

  “Denny,” André said, catching him before he said too much, and Denny relented. The problem with a secret plan was keeping it secret.

  “We better get turned around,” Samad said, as though he wanted the conversation to conclude as well. “It’ll take forever.”

  “Might as well,” Denny agreed. “The old folks won’t cross anytime soon.”

  Those who were spry and sprightly were now stopped to admire the view.

  “If they do,” André said, “we’ll just run them down.”

  “I heard that,” Mrs. McCracken said.

  “You hear everything,” Denny said.

  “I do,” she said. “I remember everything, too. Except maybe names.”

  “Guess what?” he said as he started towards his truck. “So do I.”

  Denny didn’t know why he said that or what it was supposed to mean. He was mad at himself as he knew it sounded stupid. He strode back to his rig. Now he needed to make up for lost time with speed. He’d drive angry. Probably get a ticket for his trouble when he was past the county limits where his brother’s jurisdiction ended. Down the road, those tickets were whoppers.

  4

  Whenever Alexander Gareth O’Farrell went to his knees to rout the latest trespass of weeds to sully his garden, past glories snared him like a vice. He’d grunt. Wince. Remember a time. Oh, there’d been the romance of those days, driving logs downriver for milling. Being a river rat and regarded as one of the very best helped him to woo his wife, a woman he considered above his station. There was that. Yet an infatuation with the river worked more powerfully within him than in others. As a boy on the verge of manhood he opted for the life through pure attraction, not because he found himself bereft of better choices. Now that he was on the cusp of old age he doubted that he could disentangle the various sentiments involved to explain himself, but the romance, or so he believed after a night of drinking and reminiscing, guided him as securely as a well-paddled canoe throughout his working life, up and down the humps of in
jury and perpetual pain, hardship, sacrifice, and fear. To be out on the water on a fall day, driving rafts downstream after the hills corroded to brilliant yellows, reds, and oranges, the ping of winter in the crisp air, signalled that he was distinctly alive, and the romance of those times aided him to overcome an abiding weariness and bequeathed to him his legendary endurance. He’d balance on a spinning log, strut across to the next raft, and work his peavey to free a jam against a rock, an obstacle he recalled from the previous year and the year before that, and never was he imperilled on that precise spot but in other places, yes. Often in relatively benign situations. He nearly mangled a foreleg once, a finger was amputated, an ankle got turned and jammed, a knee was twisted in unholy screaming disarray, his tailbone was battered, his scalp wickedly thumped after his hard hat flew off. Other assorted agonies. At times he would arrive back ashore bloody and bent, half-drowned, spitting up the river from his thorax and lungs. Romance helped him sail through the experience and now the romance of his memories encouraged him to carry on. For Alex, now retired, going down onto his knees mimicked the prayerfulness of others as he muttered involuntarily, as if to a host deity, wincing, fretting, obliged with each expression of soreness to reclaim that brief yet ancient time.

  He’d taken his lumps on the water.

  Now he scratched in the dirt.

  Gardening was never his thing.

  After his wife’s passing he foresaw a choice. Permit the care and labour that she invested in her gardens over their lifetime together to go to seed, and probably go to seed himself, or pick up a gardening spade and dig in. He dug in. He was even beginning to fathom her enjoyment in the wonders of a garden, and successfully compiled a catalogue of dos and don’ts. Begrudgingly, he admitted that despite the perpetual body aches the work bore upon him he was probably better off for it than if he just put his feet up and napped. Not that he did not nap. And hoist a few glasses. Yet he felt more comfortable taking it easy having first put in a few faithful hours on his knees.

  A way to handle this pending old-age thing.

  The heat was coming on. Toxins, he surmised, the crud from a life lived without regard for his eating and drinking habits, oozed from his pores.

  Alexander O’Farrell lived by a mountain stream that seemed quite still unless the viewer concentrated on observing the flow, the water cast into a lull by a small dam downstream. His was the first of six homes constructed above a straight patch of bank. The opposite side of the dead-end road that served their locale fell vacant, a farmer’s field fallow this year, so he was surprised when he heard a rattletrap percolate towards the cluster of homes, then stop before it reached any. Through a clump of birch he spotted an orange sedan, now parked, where a young man organized his materials. As he appeared to be on his own Alex ruled out the Jehovah’s Witnesses—no such sport today—yet hoped that his luck would hold, that the visitor would prove to be a salesman. So few were left nowadays. The stranger came around a cedar clump, tall, redheaded, flush with the confusion and anticipation of youth. Alex welcomed the good fortune that now beamed upon him. Not wishing to meet any man while down on his knees, he gathered himself to his feet, grunting a little, then waited to hear the fellow’s ungodly pitch.

  In a suit that ill-fitted him, probably culled from a rummage sale when first he got the job, the arrival was stymied before he began. He was undecided on the etiquette of approach. Should he cross the lawn? Or carry on down the road, the long way, and use the stone path? Alex waited for him to figure that out, and gave him marks for choosing to march straight across the lawn.

  “Morning,” Alex noted.

  “Good morning, sir!” the young man enthused. He was trying to offer his hand while shifting the weight of his awkward sales catalogue from one arm to the other. “My name is Jake Withers, and I—”

  “Whatever you’re selling, son, I’m not buying. Just so we understand each other.”

  Jake paused. Already this was not going as well as planned. He was still waiting for the handshake.

  “I represent the Rathbone Company?” The statement emerged as a question, as though he doubted his own claim. Alex rescued the hand hanging in midair and took it in his own and, cruelly, compressed it. He could see Jake’s eyes blanch with the pain. Then he let go.

  “Is that a fact? Don’t know those people. You don’t sound so convinced yourself.”

  “Yes, sir. I work for—I represent the Rathbone Company? And I’m asking you today to imagine the one alteration that will transform your property.”

  “You’re asking me to use my imagination. Is that a fact.”

  “Yes, sir. Now picture this.” He turned to his left, and cast his free hand over the ground, as if to emulate Moses dividing the waters of the Red Sea. “A gleaming black driveway.”

  Alex looked over at his pocked gravel drive and saw a thing of beauty.

  “Eh? Eh?” Jake pressed.

  “Excuse me just a moment, will you, son?”

  “Yes, sir!” the young man consented. He walked with the older man until Alex turned into his house and then the younger one stood still. He silently rehearsed how he was going to embellish this deal, then close it. “Sir!” he called out before Alex made it inside the house. “You got a beautiful spot here.”

  Alex turned, smiled. “Thank you, son.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”

  “Excuse me for one moment, son.”

  “For the boost to your property value that this will give you, you should be paying me double. Really, it’s like I’ll be paying you. But this is what I’ll do. Sign on the dotted line today, I’ll give you a ten percent discount. Just like that, right out of the blue. No need to haggle. That’s over and above the big boost to your property value that I’m talking to you about today.”

  “Am I excused or not?” Alex inquired.

  “Sure, sure,” Jake Withers said. “Go right ahead, sir. I’ll be here.”

  “I’ll only be a moment.”

  “Go right ahead, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  Looking at the visitor from inside the house through the screen, Alex wondered if this was the lad’s first attempt at a sale ever. He returned outside onto his sunlit porch carrying a shotgun cordially pointed at the ground.

  The young man’s pupils dilated. “Is that thing loaded, eh?”

  “Not much point if it’s not.”

  “What do you shoot out here? Ducks? Is it ducks?”

  “This time of year, no.”

  “Then what?” He was trying to be brave and friendly but Alex could tell that his knees trembled. His whole torso quavered.

  “Old people in this town, we just don’t like scammers. So we’re armed.”

  “Look, if you don’t want your driveway paved, eh, that’s okay.”

  “That’s all right with you, then?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I’m glad to hear that, son.”

  “I was only trying to help you out with your property values.”

  “That’s a lie. This is why we hate scammers. They lie. You don’t give a shit about my property values. Do you? Admit it now, Jake Withers.”

  “I was just trying to help you out, sir.”

  “No, you weren’t. You were trying to make a sale. That part I don’t mind so much but you were also trying to screw me over. That’s the part I mind. Why don’t you just admit it and then get on with your life? Maybe do something useful with it while you’re still young.”

  “Look, I’m going to go now.”

  “You’re always free to go, son.”

  Jake Withers hurried off, but he was not heading back to his car.

  “Hold on there, son.”

  Petrified, the young man stopped. He turned slowly.

  “Don’t go pestering the neighbours either.”

  Jake Withers
hesitated. He gazed at the wild old man, perhaps for the first time he really looked at him, at his dusty, weathered face, a scratch of white morning stubble across his chin, at the receding hairline and thinning salt-and-peppery tufts, at those unflinching steely eyes. He looked like an old crabapple tree in an abandoned orchard. The old man was ornery, he could see that, probably not worth standing up to, but he did so anyway. “Sir, I got a right to earn a living, don’t I? I’m just calling on people today. I’m not causing you any harm. I’m not making trouble.”

  For the first time, the boy sounded genuine. Alex liked that, but felt a need to explain the rules of the road to him. “When I want to shop, son, I go to the store. People here, we don’t expect the store to come to us.”

  “I don’t want any trouble, sir, but if you don’t let me go door to door, like I have to do, it’s my job, well then . . .”

  He waited, as though the consequences were obvious.

  “Well then what?” Alex asked him.

  “You won’t leave me a choice. I’ll call the police on you. I don’t want to, you understand that, I hate the police. But maybe I won’t have a choice.”

  Alex was curious. “Why do you hate the police?”

  He shrugged, explained, “I got no reason to like them.”

  The reply disappointed Alex, since it seemed rote, an impulse informed by hearsay, not experience. “Actually, son, I don’t want trouble either. That’s why I’m keeping you away from my neighbours. If you think I’m a bothersome bastard, a few doors down you’ll find worse than me. Don’t think it’s only the men either. There’s one woman— Look. What you need to know is this—nobody’s gonna let you pave their driveway.”

  The young man stood on the lawn, undecided.