The forest with its tiny trees and unimaginable cold closed off, falling away from experience like death closing in. She'd practiced it a dozen times but it still frightened her. She was in the grey murk between worlds... that's how it felt to her. In reality, she understood it was only the thinnest sliver of time as her consciousness disengaged from the interface and shifted over. But every time she hit it, it was like walking into a wall of some sap, reduced to its essence, slowing her down, dragging her limbs, filling her throat. She felt as though she had to wade through it, mentally, back to reality. Somewhere, the words of their dead kind flowed past her, still momentarily her own, confirming her orders, closing it off.
Her eyes opened, and she was in the chair. That soft, warm chair made for giants. Bennek was there. "Help me up," she murmured.
"Don't be alarmed, Kk'Alooka. It's okay," he said. "Someone tripped a perimeter sensor, but they didn't come this way. I'm sorry I called you back, but I figured better safe than sorry."
"It's alright," she said. "Thank you." She ground her black-skinned palm into the soft felt of her forehead. "How long was I in there?"
"Just a couple of quarter-spans. Are you okay?"
She grabbed his wrist. "I talked to him this time. Bennek, he talked back. We really communicated."
Bennek sat on the end of the seat, a definite liberty. "You really talked this time?"
"We did. And this time... I used the conduct command."
"Wow," Bennek breathed. "Did it work?"
"I think so."
Bennek snaked his tail in the air behind himself in excitement. "So you think, if he's ever revived, he'll remember it too?"
"If we've understood it correctly," she said.
"I'd love to interact with one of them," he said.
"Remember our agreement," she warned him.
"I know, I know. But it just sounds so exciting. I mean... all my life I've heard about them, seen them, their records. But you... you're going to get to know one. For real."
"I don't know how real it is," she said. "I might have recorded what just happened to his brain, too, but it's all being simulated by the computer here. And we don't even know how that works."
Bennek smoothed his hand over the massive helmet. "I love how alien they are, and how familiar all at the same time. It's like they're a different version of us."
"In a way, they are. It's exactly what they are," she said, watching him.
He said, "I'm terrified of letting them out. But imagine what it would be like."
"Things would be very different."
He was quiet for a moment. Contemplative. "When I'm in there," he said, "I can read. I can read their words. It makes me think."
"That's something you definitely need to keep to yourself," she warned him. She shifted, easing herself off the chair, her downhands pressing onto the cold, smooth lunar basalt. She moved her uphand over a panel at shoulder height, and the seat retracted smoothly in to the wall, tucked away behind its access panel, Bennek stepping down as it did so.
"Next time I get to go in," he said, "I want to talk to one."
"Bennek..."
"Not one of the ones we know is in the Chambre," he said. "Anyone. Synthetic. I don't mind. I just want to know what it's like. Walking around an environment pretending I'm one of them is one thing. Really meeting one... let me have that."
Alooka folder her arms. She didn't like bargaining with him. She didn't like having to count on a male, letting him have some kind of power over her, hold on her. But he was essential now. And he knew it. "I want to think it over," she said.
"Thank you, Kk'Alooka," he said.
She turned, smoothing her tunic front down, snaking her tail dismissively at him. He persisted. "May I ask you something?" he ventured.
"Yes, of course."
"I was wondering why you've chosen a male as a resource."
"I need your assistance to ensure security and to assist in formulating impressions and observations, of course."
"Well, I meant him. The human. Mwok'son," he said, forming his mouth around the impossibly foreign name Mark Wilson.
"Most of their hierarchy is male-dominated," she said. "That's something we have to accept. The researchers who come at it with traditional ideas are the ones who don't get anywhere."
Bennek nodded, tail low and swinging acceptingly just above the floor. The gesture was not entirely convincing, but she had no cause to point it out and he no business to press beyond her reply. And yet she indulged him, if only slightly. "I'm curious about them. That's my job." She moved over to the adapted chair that better served a waisluk-sized user in an human-scaled environment and accessed the ancient computer. "Can you tell me who it was who tripped the perimeter sensor?"
"R'kk'Sandannek," he replied. "But she went on to Main Research."
Alooka scratched her ear, impatient and anxious. "She's back around. She'll be looking for that cultural instance report. I'd really better finish that up." Again, she flicked her tail dismissively.
"Is there anything I can help you with?" he asked.
She turned to face him, perplexed. She wondered if she were giving off the Scent; she didn't feel flushed or desirous. "No. I hardly think so," she told him, quietly.
He dipped his head obediently, and began to leave her. Even so, he lingered at the door.
"What?" she said.
He paused. "You're different when you emerge, Kk'," he told her. "Just for a few moments. You're almost like a mother."
"It's disorienting coming back," she reminded him.
"I suppose. Yes, Kk'," he agreed. He left, and the door closed behind him, leaving her alone. She felt slightly humiliated having to indulge his masculine foolishness, and yet, somehow, disturbed to have caused him confusion. She brooded on it for a moment, leaning back. She sighed, and reaching up with her downhands, entered the code that retrieved the cultural instance her mistress's family had been researching for seventeen years: a murky, violent, thematically ambiguous tale that styled itself Casablanca.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Under a Mastic Tree
The clicking sounds were flat, lifeless, heavy in his ears; they came steadily. He did not hear them anymore. He heard only the silence when the batteries ran out, or the mosquito-like whine that rose in pitch and volume whenever he drew closer to a mark.
He was hearing it now. High, sharp, piercing. He swept the plate back and forth before him, letting the rise and fall of the pitch tell him exactly where the target lay. When he was satisfied, he set the finder aside, and reaching into the bag on his hip, he knelt, and carefully planted the tiny red flag that indicated where death lay in waiting, just inches below the surface.
And then he stood, stepped around the mine, and began to seek the next.
He climbed the hill, and smiled when the tree came into sight. He always glanced around when he was up here, making sure he wasn’t seen, no covetous eyes were watching. The tree was his watchman, and he reached his arm down into its hollow maw and found, as always, that the tree had honoured his trust: the brass case was still there, cold and solid to the touch. Glancing around one more time, he flipped the lid open. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a wad of military scrip, carefully counted out half of it, and tucked the bulk of the remainder into the case where a much large sum already resided. He carefully placed the little box back into its hiding place. Of the amount he still held, he tucked just a few bills back into the breast pocket of his jacket, and jammed the rest back into his hip pocket. He patted the tree a couple of times, and ducked down the wooded side of the hill.
The mail line at the depot was always long. As he waited, he amused himself with trying to imagine what the place had once looked like. He compared it with photographs he’d seen. The pictures never seemed quite real. How could it ever have looked that way? But this was what people said. He had to believe things had once been better, if he were ever to believe they’d one day be better again. Otherwise, how could people ever know?
“Name, address,” the woman recited when it was his turn.
“Belanger, Kensington Crescent,” he said.
The woman turned, checking the slot, and returned. “No mail,” she said.
“What’s new.” He turned and left. As he left the building, he pocketed one of the size B envelopes, as he always did.
He had grown adept at forging the government mark that proved payment, and he inked it onto the envelope’s upper right corner, careful to smudge it to mar its legibility and enhance its authenticity. Slowly, in a style consciously not his own, he printed his family’s name and address on the envelope, tucked the money from his hip pocket into it, and sealed it inside. Rising from the dirt mound, he slipped the envelope into his pocket and dusted himself off. He wandered up Smithfield Road, past the overturned tanks and burned out jeeps that had years ago ceased to hold any fascination for him, and made his way home.
“Cammy! Hey, Cammy!”
He turned, watching his brother come into sight from behind the rubble. “How’d it go?”
Cameron shrugged. “Same as usual. Pulling vegetables. What changes?”
David smiled as he came up. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Same in the claims office. Stamp, file. Stamp, file. Nothing much changes there either.”
“Why are you walking?” Cameron asked. He slowed his pace. David panted, wincing as the badly-padded rests of his crutches dug into his armpits.
“Aw, bus never showed up,” he sighed. “Probably broken down again. Maybe tomorrow.”
“You shouldn’t go if you don’t see it,” Cameron said.
“That’d be nice,” David grumbled, “if we were rich enough to turn down a day’s work. I wouldn’t mind.”
“I know,” Cameron nodded. “I didn’t mean you shouldn’t go… I just meant you shouldn’t have to.”
“I know, Cammy.”
Cameron pulled the envelope from his jacket. “Hey,” he said, “I think we got a letter from Uncle Jack.”
David looked. “Aw, great. That’ll make Mom happy. Be a load off her mind. That’s terrific.”
Cameron smiled, nodding.
The building was in a good location, as things went. It was near the edge of town, so the area wasn’t too crowded. It was near the local hand pump, not far from a route that crossed the river into town—at least, when it deigned to show up—and the power grid was underground, and so was one of the more reliable ones in the city. Interruptions in service almost never happened; at least, unintentional ones. When they arrived, the street was dimly lit, as the neighbourhood was currently on the 4 p.m. to midnight power shift. “I think I like power in the evenings best,” Cameron said.
“Me too,” David said. “Hot suppers. I don’t mind a cold breakfast, but supper should be hot.”
“I wish it could be like that all the time.”
“It will be, one day. It’s coming.”
“Sure.”
Cameron helped David up the steps; thankfully, their apartment was on the first floor. Their father had paid for that favour when they’d moved in, years before. At first it just made fetching water convenient. Now that David only had one leg, it was a double blessing. But one that probably would not have pleased their father.
“Hi, Mom,” David called as they entered the apartment.
“Hi, Dave,” she called from the kitchen.
“I’m home too, Mom,” Cameron said, kicking off his shoes.
Their mother appeared. “Oh, both my men come marching home together. How were your days?”
“Same as always, for us both,” David said.
“Except…” Cameron said, and pulled out the envelope. He watched his mother’s face light up, brighter than anything cast by the orange bulbs in the ceiling.
“Is it?” she asked.
“I think so,” Cameron said, handing it over. “Open it and see.”
She jammed her finger into the corner and tore the envelope open. With a sigh of relief, she retrieved the bundle of cash. “Praise God,” she said. Cameron smiled. His mother had long ago stopped wondering why her uncle never sent word, only money. She was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Oh, and,” Cameron said, and pulled the other bills from his jacket pocket.
David reached for the wages in his own pocket, and the two of them handed the money to her. She smiled her gratitude. “You’re both good boys, you know. Not like some of the louts around here.”
A white-maned face appeared in the kitchen doorway, warm and wrinkled by a grin. “Fellahs,” he greeted them.
“Hey, Granddad.”
The old man turned; having greeted his grandsons, the chair beckoned him back. “What’s the good word today?”
Cameron entered the kitchen, where the stomach-teasing aroma of his mother’s soup was bright and loud as if to make up for the dim lights and the ghostlike whispers coming over the short wave radio on the table. “You tell us.”
“Word is that that council in Paris is making headway,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“Just like the old days, huh, Granddad?” the girl beside him said.
“Starting to look that way, princess.”
David set his crutches against the wall, gently waving off Cameron’s help as he eased himself down into a chair. “You won’t like it, Tammy. School used to last about twenty years before the war.”
“I heard that,” she laughed. “I don’t think that could ever have been true.”
“Oh, pretty near,” Granddad said. “Sometimes, even longer.”
“When would anybody ever get anything done?” Tammy scoffed.
“Things were complicated then. People had to know a lot more than they do now.”
“Like with the steel works in Pittsburgh,” Mom said. “Complicated jobs. Things like that are starting up again. People are going to need more schooling.”
“The oil fields out west, things like that?” Tammy said.
Silence passed for a moment, while the radio whined and muttered.
“Things like that,” Granddad said.
“I wish Dad would come home,” the girl said.
“We all do,” Mom said. She stirred the pot. Tasted. Salted.
“They ought to have a continental council over here like they’re having in Europe,” David said. “We could really use it.”
“Things are getting better,” Granddad says. “Hasn’t been any border trouble for a while. It’ll happen.”
“I’m more worried about China coming back,” David said.
Granddad laughed, stubbing out his cigarette, reaching for another. “That’ll be a while. We showed them a thing or two.”
“Showed us some stuff first, I think.”
“We kept what was ours,” the old man said, his pride quiet, but in evidence.
“Mostly,” David said. “But it seems to me there was a time you could go from Brandon to Calgary to work in the oil fields, or to Toronto or Montreal, without asking anyone’s permission.”
“It’ll be that way again, don’t worry. Sooner or later people will come to see there’s no point in bickering over scraps. But it takes time to build the economy back up. It was the economy collapsing that really led to the wars. It wasn’t that people wanted to fight; they just got desperate. I remember how it was.”
“Well, I wish they’d get on with it,” Mom said.
“If that happens, do you think we’d see Dad again?” Tammy said.
Granddad patted her shoulder. “We’ll see him.”
There was a frost, and that was good; it always set a few mines off, all on their own. Sometimes at night, Cameron could hear them in the distance. They were like echoes from his grandfather’s time. In truth, that was exactly what they were.
At dawn, he slipped from the apartment and headed east. East was where his family—if any of them were watching—would expect him to go to as the harvest finished up. Once he was out of sight, though, he headed north, where other crops, planted long before, waited.
He was two years too young to be doing work like this. But the contract men weren’t really particular. If you said you were 18, and you could pass for 18, that was all they cared about. And so long as his family never learned the truth, that was all that mattered, too.
Cameron gathered with the men and boys. They stood at the point to which they had cleared the day before. Waiting for his assignment, he looked the rows up and down. Desperate, hungry men, most of them. Drifters, placeless men looking to earn enough money to move on, or else to earn the mistake than would end their need for food, money, or anything else. Then there were the familiar faces, men and young men he knew from Brandon. Some of their names he knew, but it was an unstated rule that you didn’t go out of your way to cultivate friends among minesweepers.
The foreman rubbed his hands in the cold dampness of morning. “Okay, newcomers, line up here,” he barked. Cameron paced passed him, having been through this some months before. He watched a handful of men and boys form a ragged, defeated line before the man. “Everything between the stakes,” he told them. “The parameter is a hundred meters across. What you’re working on, if you don’t know, is the TransCanada. This is a re-opening effort. We have a 25 kilometer stretch to sweep before mid-November. We don’t make that, you don’t make your bonuses. That’s how it works. You don’t make your stretch for the day, we yank you for someone on the fields tomorrow. Plenty of guys want to sweep this stretch if you don’t. So pay attention to what you’re doing and move along. Don’t dawdle. And don’t step on a mine because the detectors aren’t cheap.” That provoked a few nervous chuckles from the men that were quickly stifled when they saw the foreman was in earnest.
Cameron took his place in the road. The men were arranged two meters apart, the second line five meters behind the first, and the third five meters back still. This was done such that no two men would be close enough together to be killed by the same mine if — when — someone set one off.
One of the newcomers, a tall blond man of advancing middle age, stepped up on his left. The man looked Cameron over with disturbing directness; hardly appropriate in someone who had just arrived. “You seem a little young for this,” the man said, stunning Cameron.
“What do you know about it?” Cameron snapped.
The man shrugged. “I guess you have your reasons. I didn’t mean any offense.”
Cameron grunted, attempting to project a disdain that he had only partially mastered in reality.
One of the foreman’s assistants walked the line, tapping men. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” he said, assigning them to their line. Cameron’s guts knotted as he as assigned a one.
“Do you want to trade places?” the new man murmured to him. Preceding Cameron, his number was three.
Cameron turned to him. Nearly said yes. Instead, he growled, “I’m not scared.”
The man nodded.
“Ones, forward!” the foreman barked. Cameron turned on his detector. A drummer at the side of the road beat out the pace, slow and steady. Cameron concentrated on the clicks, moving the detector slowly back and forth in his sweaty palms, the flags digging into his side in his jacket. The foreman called the second line to action, and then the third.
The morning dragged on with the sun passing in and out of the clouds, timed to the drum and the click of the peaceful earth before him, then below him. They had managed perhaps a hundred meters; already his stomach pestered him with the approach of the lunch break.
And suddenly he was on his face, sprawled in the dirt. His head was ringing; he could taste and smell his own blood. Oh my God, he thought. There was no pain, or not what he’d expected. Was it like this for Dave? But his lips hurt, and his knees, and his hands. It took him a moment to realize he had not stepped on a mine. Someone else had. Gingerly, he turned over. Five yards behind him was a hole surrounded by debris that had once been a man.
Cameron vomited with revulsion… and then fear. He turned, looking up the range. His detector was three or four meters ahead, tumbled into the unmarked zone. He looked back at the men behind him, gathered around the dead man. He shook with fear.
The foreman was barking orders and commanding everyone to fall back and reform the line. Cameron could not move. The foreman howled, but Cameron lay on his elbows, petrified.
The new man who had offered his spot stepped from the swarm of men, his detector in front of him. “Stay there,” he said. “I’ll make sure it’s safe.” The foreman ordered the man back, but was ignored. Grumblings from the other men around the corpse suggested to the foreman he would do well to be quiet.
Cameron trembled, watching the man approach, making his way slowly forward. Cameron had swept his own way clear, but only two meters wide. A foot placed outside that narrow strip risked death, and they all knew it. It was confirmed when the man paused, crouched, and planted a flag in the path the dead man would have crossed only moments later.
The man reached Cameron. “Okay, I’m here. We can get back. Come on.” He coaxed Cameron to his feet, telling him, “Hold onto my belt.” The foreman urged him to get Cameron’s detector while he was at it. The new man just glared at him as he led Cameron back to the safety of the third line. The others applauded, slapping the new man on the back.
The foreman came to them, a bit castigated, but he warned them, “We have rules, we have procedures. You disobey another instruction and you’re both off the crew without pay. Do you understand me?” Cameron and the man indicated that they did. “Alright, lunch,” the foreman barked, turning away.
It was an unusually long lunch, as it was bound to be in the wake of a man’s violent demise; dismemberment and thoughts of mortality providing few of the men with much in the way of an appetizer. In the meantime, a sandlot baseball game chose up sides, and Cameron sat with the new man like an empty vessel having its usual contents slowly poured back into it. “I didn’t thank you, did I?” Cameron said, finally.
“It’s alright. You’ve been through a lot.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen… that…” Cameron told him. “But…”
“First time in back of you. Yeah, no one expects that. Do you have a name, son? Mine’s Rob.”
“I’m Cameron,” he said, and they shook hands. “And thank you. Really.”
“It’s alright,” Rob said.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
Rob nodded. “I’ve been sweeping for about… oh, four years now, I think. On and off.”
“Wow. I started in the spring.”
Rob nodded, watching the other men begin to toss the ball. “Do your folks know you’re sweeping?”
Cameron resented Rob asking, treating him again like a boy. “My dad’s in a camp out west,” he said, simply.
“Oh,” Rob said. “I’m sorry.”
“Somebody’s got to get him out,” Cameron said, tossing a stone into the tall prairie grass.
“Do you know how much they want?”
Cameron sighed. “Five hundred.”
Rob whistled. “Your dad must have been trying to po— To get oil work.”
“You can say it,” Cameron said. “Poach. He didn’t have a permit and they weren’t going to give him one.”
“How long’s he been away?”
“Nearly a year. Around the end of the winter we got the notice. They picked him up in a truck with a dozen other guys inside Calgary East Mark. So that’s where he is… Detcamp CEM.”
“Five hundred. Even sweeping, that’d take a while.”
“I’ve got most of it,” Cameron said, letting his pride show through.
“How much?”
Cameron eyed Rob. “Most.”
Rob nodded. He sighed. “You make me wonder what my sons are doing.”
“Do you see them much?”
Rob shook his head. “I send what I can to their mother. We all came to a mutual realization they were better off without me, though.” The scent of grilled meat wafted past them. Rob got to his feet. “Come on, we’d better grab something while the grabbing’s good.”
“You go ahead, I don’t think I could.”
Rob said. “Come on, Cameron. You aren’t going to last long swinging that thing all afternoon without something in you. I know it’s rough, but that’s the job. You gotta eat, son.” Rob offered his hand. “At least try.”
Cameron took Rob’s hand and let Rob help him up. As it turned out, his appetite returned, sparked by the greasy chicken on offer.
The afternoon dragged on, but finally the drumming stopped. Cameron found Rob heading for the camp for the itinerates. It was in his heart to ask the man home, at least for supper, but he knew deep down no one in his family would believe such a man, a stranger to town, would have arrived just to pull vegetables. The jig would be up. They spoke as they lined up to be paid. The comptroller said, “Foreman’s docking you each five for insubordination. You got anything to say about it, say it to him. But you can expect to stay home from now on if you do.” And that was that.
Cameron sighed over his light pay. “Don’t let it get you down. It’s just one day,” Rob advised him.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Cameron said.
“Yeah. See you bright and early, Cameron,” Rob nodded. In the fading light, Cameron made his way back along the safe trail along the TransCanada to 1st Street, and headed south. He stopped by the tree to deposit the cash, and then made his way home.
Late for having lingered with Rob, Cameron found Dave was already home. There was a pensive air as he entered. “Hey, everyone… is anything wrong?”
His mother said, “Cameron, didn’t you say you were working at Weiss’s?”
“Yeah…”
Dave said, “Cammy, I processed a document today that mentioned that Carl Weiss died last April.”
For the second time that day, Cameron’s heart raced with fear. But after what he had gone through earlier, he was well and truly steeled. Without a hint of a tremor, he said, “Yeah, he did. Somebody else took it over.”
“Who?” his mother asked.
Hanging up his coat, Cameron shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care. As long as they pay me, and they do. I never saw Mr. Weiss when he was alive, either.”
“Well, alright,” his mother said, turning back to the stove. Dave and Granddad just exchanged looks, and Granddad nodded softly.
Rob didn’t seem to mind sharing his lunch hours with Cameron. It even seemed to lend Cameron some credibility with the older men, sitting in and hearing their stories, laughing at their ribaldries, drinking up the zeitgeist of manhood in his times. Cameron began to look forward to the day’s work in a way he never had previously.
Somehow, his mother had managed to get hold of lamb, and had prepared a lamb stew. In the cold, wet air of late autumn, it was ambrosia to Cameron. He wondered if it would be to Rob, too. “Mom,” he said, “I have a chance to help with work on some of the farm equipment this evening. Do you think I could get some of this in the thermos? I’m going to be a few hours.”
“Of course, honey,” she told him. And with a wave, he set out into the chilly darkness.
He found Rob at a card game. The inducements of a rare home-cooked meal were enough to separate Rob from the game, and another fellow quickly took Rob’s vacated seat. Cameron beamed with pride as Rob savoured his mother’s stew in the dubious comfort of the small, drafty tent that served him as home. He savoured it, making it last.
“Honest to God, Cameron,” he said, “it’s the best thing I’ve tasted in… I really don’t know how long. Thank you.” He closed his eyes, concentrating the whole of his being on the rare indulgence.
“You make me wish I could tell my mom just how much you’re enjoying it. You’d have her blushing.”
“She deserves every second of that blush.” Rob chuckled. “I used to hate turnip, but if it’s not straight off Heaven’s table now, I don’t know what is.”
“I guess it’s been a while,” Cameron said, softly.
“Well, four years,” Rob reminded him.
Cameron sighed. “I really wish I could bring you home, Rob. I just don’t think they’d buy that you were digging potatoes.”
“This late in the year, are they still buying that about you?”
“For now. I’ll tell them something else in a week or two.”
“Well, maybe then, huh?” Rob laughed. “Nice of me to invite myself to dinner.”
“You are invited. Just as soon as I can make them believe we work together.”
Rob picked at the last few morsels. “You’re a good kid, Cameron. Brought up right.”
“We have a good family. Well… we did.”
Rob nodded.
Cameron looked into the lamplight. “It’s not really Dave’s fault. He just wanted to make more money. Like I do. But then he stepped on that mine…”
Rob was quiet. Cameron went on.
“That’s really how it started. Dave’s money helped us move where we are. A nicer place. But then he had the accident.” He sighed. “My dad… he was working for the district. Industrial reclamation.” He met Rob’s eyes with pride, saying, “My dad is part of the reason farmers here can get their crops on the trains to Winnipeg now. He helped that happen. But when Dave got hurt… Dad had to make a deal with some people. It cost so much. That’s why he went to Alberta. The oil patch. And now he’s in that camp. They saved my brother… but with Dad gone, it’s going to take us years.”
Rob shook his head slowly. He said, “There was a time… I guess still even when I was born… when a man didn’t need a permit to go work the oil fields. He just went. They belonged as much to someone here as to someone right on top of them, if only he got up off his ass. Now, though, everyone owns their own little square of dirt and no one wants to share. Unless they get paid for the privilege.”
“It’s all China’s fault,” Cameron growled. “Chinks. I wish there was one here now… I’d roll him down the highway and use him to clear the mines.”
Rob rubbed his chin. “Well… Cameron… I’ll tell you. I’ve done some reading and I know they had a rough time of it once. Back then the shoe was on the other foot. I guess we can’t really fault them for finally kicking back one day. Not really.”
“You’re sticking up for them?”
“I’m just saying… most of them were just people. Kids, not much older than you. I guess a few were fanatics; there’s always some who are in any crowd. But I think most of them were just doing what they were told. I don’t think most of them wanted to be here. Not really. Fighting and dying on a lot of flat, frozen tundra, ten thousand miles away from everyone and everything they ever gave a shit about…”
“But they came here. And we didn’t want them here.”
“Do you think your dad wanted to leave, Cameron? Do you think those oil folks wanted him there?”
“That’s different,” Cameron snarled.
“Maybe. Maybe. But to me, it kind of looks like having to do something you don’t want against the wishes of other people because you feel like you don’t have a choice. I think you can stand up for what’s yours but still feel sorry for the other fellow.” Rob just gave a soft nod and was quiet for a moment, taking a gulp of his coffee. He said, “Your father is a brave man, Cameron. I can see why you love him so much.”
Cameron looked up. “Just like you, I guess... Looking after your family out here.”
Rob looked down.
“You miss them,” Cameron said.
“I deserve to.” Rob picked at the stew, not eating for the moment. He said, “I used to drink, Cameron. A lot. Every day. It just seemed to make life brighter. I didn’t see that I had all the light a man really needs in the faces all around me. Or that I was taking away their light.”
“But you stopped, right?”
“I’m not a good man like your father,” Rob said. “I drank the jobs I got. I had a boy… younger than you. I guess he’s a little older than you now, though. Name’s Bill. One night when I came home he just hauled up and told me off. Put me in my place. He had every right. I was a shitty husband and a shitty father, and he said so.”
Cameron’s mouth dropped open. “He did? I can’t imagine.”
“From the sounds of your father, you never had to.” He looked away. “We got into a fight. I broke his arm. I broke his arm…” Rob’s eyes glistened; he set his jaw so firmly that Cameron grew afraid that he would hear the man’s teeth shatter. Rob took a deep breath. “That’s when I left. I knew I had to.”
There was silence in the tent. Elsewhere, men laughed, shouted, called out hands of cards and playfully cursed one another.
Cameron said, “But you love them, right?”
“More than anything.”
“And you quit drinking?”
Rob swirled his coffee, staring down into it. “Can’t quite shake that one, Cameron. Most of the time. But not all the time. And when I get the demon rum in me… I can do some terrible things.”
“I’m sorry,” Cameron said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
Rob smiled. “It’s okay. It’s good to remember. It’s what keeps me right. And you’re a good friend.”
“Really?”
“That’s the God’s honest truth. If my sons are like you now, I’d be busting with pride just to know it.”
Cameron sighed. Looked around. “Rob, you’ve been working on the TransCanada, right?”
“Mostly. Well, a lot of the time.”
“Is there still lots to do?”
Rob laughed, scooping up the last of the stew. “Kid, the thing’s six or seven thousand kilometers long. We mined most of it when the Chinese invaded so they couldn’t use it. When the PLA retreated, they mined it so we couldn’t use it. Mines on top of mines. Must still be ten years worth of work to get it clear end to end.”
“How much of it really has to be swept?”
“All of it. You can’t take chances…” Rob set the thermos down and sat up, his eyes peering into the darkness as if he could pierce it and see beyond. “There are long, long stretches we never had time to desurface when the invasion happened. So you can see mile after mile of blacktop even now. Crumbling, breaking up, grass-grown, yeah. But still there. Ready for wheels. Except the Chinese… they had this great idea on the retreat. Find a hole, make a hole… plant a mine, tar it over. Looks like a road repair. But it’ll do worse to you than hitting some pothole if you drive over it. So there’s still lots and lots to do.”
“And after we’re done here… are you going to head west?”
“Probably. That’s where most of the work is. We’re pretty much cleared to the Lakehead at this point. Beyond that, it’s someone else’s job, really.”
“Would you take me with you?”
“What?”
“My dad, Rob. I have to go get my dad out of the camps.”
Rob stared at him, his features swimming in the dancing lamplight. “Cameron… Calgary is weeks and weeks away from here. Even without stopping to work. There are men out there. Dangerous men.”
“I know that. That’s… that’s why I’m asking.”
“Christ, kid… I don’t know.”
“I wouldn’t hold you back. I promise. Rob… I don’t know if I… I don’t know if I’d make it. But I have to try. No one else can. Not my granddad. Not Dave with his one leg.”
“I don’t know, Cameron. It’s against my better judgement. Why don’t you ask me again when we’re done here and it’s looking more realistic?”
“Okay,” Cameron said. “But one way or another, I’m going to do it. Like that first day when I stayed in the first line.”
Rob nodded. “I remember.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“No,” Rob said. “You’re a boy.”
It was just after Thanksgiving and before Halloween that the foreman called them together. “We’ve been pushing. You all know that. But the inspectors have said they don’t believe we can meet the deadline of November 15th. So the company’s not making the bonus. And that means neither are you.”
The men raged at the news, pushing forward; the foreman held up his hands. “However… however! There’s another project, starting Monday. If they can get enough to sign on for it, this leg of the TransCanada recovery will be put on hold till the spring. They want to re-open the Assiniboine bridge to relieve the communities on the other side. If they can use that, then they can at least get one lane of commerce along the safe trail on the south side. I’m not going to blow smoke up your asses. It’s heavily mined on both sides and they nearly blew the thing up just removing the booby traps. But for every man who volunteers, there’s fifty up front. For every man makes it through, another two hundred at the other end. That’s for about three weeks’ work.”
The men’s rage turned to guarded optimism.
“Sign-ups are this evening at day’s end, and tomorrow and Friday, which is the day we shut down. Think it over. Now eat up and get back to work.”
Cameron’s heart lit up. This was it… unquestionably. This was being given to him. Nothing had ever been so clear. Just before Christmas? To know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would have enough money to free his father, and more besides? It was a sign. It was meant to be. When he turned to Rob, mouth open in joy, he found Rob was already regarding him. Something about the look kept Cameron from speaking out just then.
It was in the evening. They handed in their detectors and Cameron made his way to new line, not even stopping first to collect his wages. Something in Rob’s manner had made Cameron avoid the subject over lunch, but there was no hiding it now. And suddenly, he felt Rob’s hand at his elbow.
“Cameron, no.”
Cameron pulled his arm away. “I don’t have any choice.”
“There are other ways, Cameron. You’re nearly there. You said so yourself. Quit while you’re ahead.”
Cameron stared at him, his heart racing in his throat. “Don’t make this hard for me,” he growled.
Rob drew his hand back. Men behind them began complaining about the delay. Cameron turned, and stepped up to the table. The man behind it eyed him warily, but having seem Cameron around for months, he simply sighed and shoved the paper across the table at him. Cameron signed it.
He turned, glared at Rob, and wandered to the paymaster’s line.
“You don’t seem very hungry tonight,” his mother said. “Is anything wrong?”
“Just had a rough day,” Cameron told her.
“Isn’t it getting a little late for the harvest?” Granddad said.
“Mostly over,” Cameron said. “We’re putting the place right for winter. Getting set up for next year. You know.”
“Ah.”
Cameron picked at a boiled potato with his fork. “There’s only a couple days left now.”
Dave said, “They’re looking for runners at work,” he said. “A lot easier than what you’ve been doing. We could ride to City Hall together. Good way to spend the winter. Interested, Cammy?”
“I dunno,” he said. He looked up in to his brother’s hopeful face. “Why don’t we wait and see next week?” He could not fight down the lump in his throat at the sudden realization that his plan meant he would be far away from them by then. He had to look away.
“Sure. I’ve got an in… I’m pretty sure I can get them to take you on,” Dave said.
Cameron rose, reaching for his jacket. “Well, I better get back,” he said. “I’ve been learning a lot about the machinery, and I guess I’ve only got a few more days to learn.”
“Well, alright,” Mom said. “Don’t be out too late, okay? The nights are really starting to get cold.”
“I won’t. I’ll see you in few hours.”
He found Rob alone, with a bottle in his hand. It should have made him ashamed — and it did — but mostly, it made him angry. Cameron said, “Why can’t you be happy for me?”
Rob said nothing. His eyes wandered back and forth between the bottle and the boy.
Cameron sat. “I have to do it. Rob, I could get my dad home. For real. In weeks now, not months. And there’d be money left over. Fifty bucks gets you on the grid for six months, non-stop. I’d be able to get power for our house for more than a year. I’ve been putting it aside… I’ve been hiding most of it. Having to lie and tell them I’m picking crops for crap wages. Do you know what it’s going to mean when I bring that money home? When I can show it to them at last?”
“Cameron, do you know why they’re paying that kind of money?”
“Yes, of course. Because it’s so dangerous.”
Rob sighed. He raised the bottle and took two deep swallows. Eyes already becoming bloodshot, he leaned forward. “This highway is a convenience. Clearing it will make commerce a lot faster. Get things started up again for real. But trucks, tanks… they really don’t need highways. They can cross the prairie grass and make their own roads. But they need bridges, Cameron. Without them, well… people on one side don’t know the people on the other anymore, and we get a world like this. We know it, and the Chinese knew it.”
“That’s why they booby-trapped it. I know.”
“No. You don’t know. They mined this road up and down, that’s true. But they saved the good mines, the best mines, for the bridges. Mines made of wood, boy. Clay. Plastic. Mines that don’t show up on a detector hardly at all. Mines designed for men more than machines. A mile to either side. Do you get me?”
“You’re trying to scare me.”
“You’re goddamn right I am. And you should be. But I’m telling you the truth. You know, when I was a kid in Red Deer, they used to clear the bridges in town by driving cattle back and forth across them till they either ran out of mines or they ran out of cattle. But meat was getting scarce by then and when that got too expensive, they started using sheep. And when that got too expensive, that’s when they started paying men to do it. My brother is buried alongside the 49th Street bridge.”
“Then why do you do it?” Cameron sneered.
“Because I broke my son’s arm. Because sending money home is all I have left to offer them.” He raised the bottle again.
Cameron leaned in, seizing the bottle before Rob could drink. “Well, all I have is this to get my father home,” he said.
Rob stared into his eyes. “Cameron… about every third man they send out there is going to die. That’s a solid fact. They know it, I know it, and I’m telling you. And I’ll tell you something else. Your father would rather rot the rest of his life in that camp than have you blown all over that bridge for a lousy couple hundred bucks. If he’s even half the man you say he is.”
Cameron pushed Rob, who fell off the cot, his bottle tumbling to the floor. He stood up in the mouth of the tent, watching the man scramble for his liquor. The pathetic spectacle hurt and sickened Cameron. As Rob knelt there, cradling the bottle and looking up, ashamed, Cameron turned, and left him there.
Rob did not report for work in the morning. As the men gathered, Cameron looked around for him. He wondered if perhaps Rob had left, but something told him the answer was simpler than that. Hurriedly, he crept away. He found Rob insensate in his tent, reeking of liquor and vomit, snoring loudly. Cameron could not rouse him. Cursing the man, he made his way back to the line.
“Where’s your friend?” the foreman asked him.
“I think he’s sick,” Cameron said.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll bet,” the foreman said. “Show me.”
“I don’t think you want to catch what he’s—”
“I said show me.”
Cameron led the man to Rob’s tent. The foreman looked inside, then drew his head back out. “At lunch time, if he’s awake… hell, if he’s not, wake him up. Tell him to get his shit together and get gone. He’s finished here.”
Cameron pleaded, “It was just one night. He misses his family. Everybody—”
“If you can’t follow orders, kid, you can stay right here next week. I don’t need nobody who can’t follow orders getting on the truck on Monday. Understand?”
Cameron nodded.
“Get in the line and get to work.”
It was a long morning; perhaps the longest since his first day. When finally lunch came, Cameron made his way to Rob’s tent. He wondered what he would say to him. There didn’t seem to be enough time to patch things up and say what he really wanted. He wanted to go with him to the next job, closer to his father, making their way across the Prairies. His stomach in knots, he leaned into the tent. “Rob?” he said.
The tent was empty. The few things that belong to Rob were gone.
Cameron made his way back to the others, looking around, hoping to catch sight of the man. Instead the foreman found him. “Did you tell him?”
“He’s already gone,” Cameron mumbled.
“Well, at least he’s got that much sense,” the foreman sniffed.
Cameron could not eat. He felt as though he had a boulder in his gut. If the morning had seemed long, the journey into evening seemed like an epoch; his feelings of loss hauntingly, disturbingly familiar.
His tread was leaden as he made his way home. In the twilight, he lingered at the tree for a long while, savouring the time alone with his feelings, the isolation between the loss of his friend and the show he nightly put on for his family, which this night he had no heart for whatsoever. He counted each dollar the tree guarded, like one more step home for his father. And then he turned and went home, feeling somehow never further from his goal.
It was mid-morning of the next day that it all fell apart.
The clicks made their familiar metronome beat in his ears; oblivious to all else, he swept the detector back and forth until suddenly, he was seized by the collar and hauled back.
The foreman jerked the headset from his ears and snarled, “You little bastard; why didn’t you tell me you were sixteen?” Cameron gaped at him in amazement. The foreman had known that nearly as plainly as he’d known the colour of Cameron’s eyes; it had simply been conveniently overlooked. Until now. Suddenly he became aware of the commotion, and he looked over to see his mother, raging at several of the administrators. Some of the men where laughing, clearly amused. Cameron saw his grandfather there as well, trying to rein the woman in. She was having none of it.
The foreman manhandled Cameron over to her, finally shoving him at her. “Get him out of here!” he bellowed. He pointed at Cameron. “Don’t come back,” he said, and stormed off.
His mother slapped him. “Minesweeping?” she shrieked. “After what happened to Dave? After your father went away?” She raised her hand to strike him again, but Granddad caught her arm.
“Easy, easy, Annie,” he soothed. Crying, she tucked her face into the old man’s jacket.
Eyes swimming, Cameron rubbed his stinging cheek. “What happened?” he wailed.
Granddad said, “A man came by this morning. Drunk. Said he knew you. Said you were sweeping, getting ready to go away. We didn’t believe him at first but he knew everything about us.”
Cameron shook his head, bewildered. “But I never told him where we lived…”
“Well, he found us, and he set us straight.” Granddad looked at his daughter, stroking her hair. “Boy, you’ve hurt your mother something awful. How could you do this? Have you got no sense? No sense at all?”
His mother turned, her features red and pinched. “Get home!” she yelled. “Get home! Now!”
“But how did he find you? I never told him…” Followed me, it came to him. He must have followed me. “Oh, my God,” he whispered, the very bottom dropping out of his soul. Without another word, he turned from them and ran.
He did not stop till he had arrived at the tree. Nearly slamming into it, he dove his hand into its depths. For a moment, a split second, he felt relief as his hand closed around the brass case. But it was distressingly light. From it emerged with a small handful of bills and a torn piece of paper. Frantically he counted them up. Fifty dollars. Over and over. Fifty dollars, fifty dollars, fifty dollars. Always the same. “No, no no!!” he screamed. “You fucking bastard!”
He pulled the irregular scrap of paper open, tears already tumbling onto it as he read.
I HOPE YOU’LL UNDERSTAND SOMEDAY was all it said.
Monday came and took the men away. Several of Brandon’s families said good-bye to fathers and brothers and sons, some of whom would never come back. Cameron was not among them.
In latter days, he was among those, including his brother, who daily made their way into the centre of town to attend to the menial chores of bringing a city back to life, making it work as best they could in the meantime. Long, boring, poorly-paid days of moving paper and arranging jobs and couriering what remained of the past for use by the present to build the future. And Cameron endured, rocked in silence, nursing his hatred and hurt, betrayal and bitter disappointment. The gift of his father’s return that he had hoped to make for his family was reduced to a half-year’s share of electricity. A marvelous thing in the winter months, unquestionably. But all things considered, a meager consolation indeed. His nights were tormented by visions of Rob drinking himself to death on the proceeds of his father’s freedom, or returning home in well-funded triumph to his own son to bask in love and absolution. He would wake barely able to breathe, and curse the man with every fibre of his being.
The winter was merciful that year. The first snows did not come until mid-December, and they fell on a Saturday. Cameron, with others, shoveled the walk of the building while Dave, precariously balanced, swept the stairs with a broom. The snow only seemed to Cameron to highlight the disappointment; something he should have shared in happiness that was instead a painful mockery of his naïve hopes and faith and trust.
He was stirred from his dark musings by the neighbours, murmuring a familiar name. “Ben?” he heard them say, asking one another as they peered up the street through the snow. “Is that Ben?”
“Dave, Cammy… isn’t that your father?” someone said.
Cameron dropped his shovel. “Dad?” he asked. “Dad?” he called, stepping forward. Breaking into a run.
The man in the street dropped his pack and opened up his arms. Cameron threw himself into them.
“Dad!” Dave cried, dashing forward as quickly as he dared on his crutches.
“Cameron! Oh, Cameron… Dave. Oh, my God… I can’t believe it’s you.” It was their father. He was thin… so terribly thin… and the year that had passed seemed to have worn itself into him five times over. But it was definitively him, and he was home. “Oh, my God, boys,” he wept as they embraced in the street. Already, the neighbours were gathering around them, or summoning the rest of the Belangers out of their apartment and into the street.
“How did you get away? How did you get home?” Cameron marveled.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “One day about a month ago, the guards came up and told me my parole was paid; I could go. Someone just paid it. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why.”
The tears stung Cameron’s cheeks, salty and sharp in the cold. “You don’t know who it was?” he begged, his voice cracking.
“No, Cammy. All I know is the message they gave me. To tell my family ‘Merry Christmas’, and especially my son.” He looked back and forth between Dave and Cameron, but David’s gaze directed him. “Cameron?” he asked.
But before Cameron could say anything, his father was swept up in the love of the rest of his family and the cheers of his neighbours.
It was Christmas Eve, and his father was home. There was light and laughter, warmth and food. Their family was whole again. It was, perhaps, the most joyous night of his life so far, he reflected. But even so, at some point that evening, Cameron felt himself drawn away. There was something more, something else, that rendered his soul a leaf in a tempest. Donning his jacket, he excused himself and slipped out into the starlit veils of winter.
He made his way to the place he’d been before, so many times — a place of trust and hope. All around him lay the snow, silvered in the moonlight as if in memory of all that had once resided here in the guardian tree: faith, fidelity, responsibility, true adulthood. As the wind tousled his hair with an unseen hand, he gazed to the west where the sun had dropped below the horizon. Seeing nothing, he turned his eyes to the stars, and felt them tearing up with what must have been the cold. Surely that.
And then he astonished himself. Compelled by something beyond words, Cameron did something he hadn’t done in years; not since he’d been a little boy. There, beside the tree and in the sight of the waxing moon, he dropped to his knees. Falteringly, but with an open heart, Cameron prayed. It was the only thing he could do.
He was hearing it now. High, sharp, piercing. He swept the plate back and forth before him, letting the rise and fall of the pitch tell him exactly where the target lay. When he was satisfied, he set the finder aside, and reaching into the bag on his hip, he knelt, and carefully planted the tiny red flag that indicated where death lay in waiting, just inches below the surface.
And then he stood, stepped around the mine, and began to seek the next.
He climbed the hill, and smiled when the tree came into sight. He always glanced around when he was up here, making sure he wasn’t seen, no covetous eyes were watching. The tree was his watchman, and he reached his arm down into its hollow maw and found, as always, that the tree had honoured his trust: the brass case was still there, cold and solid to the touch. Glancing around one more time, he flipped the lid open. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a wad of military scrip, carefully counted out half of it, and tucked the bulk of the remainder into the case where a much large sum already resided. He carefully placed the little box back into its hiding place. Of the amount he still held, he tucked just a few bills back into the breast pocket of his jacket, and jammed the rest back into his hip pocket. He patted the tree a couple of times, and ducked down the wooded side of the hill.
The mail line at the depot was always long. As he waited, he amused himself with trying to imagine what the place had once looked like. He compared it with photographs he’d seen. The pictures never seemed quite real. How could it ever have looked that way? But this was what people said. He had to believe things had once been better, if he were ever to believe they’d one day be better again. Otherwise, how could people ever know?
“Name, address,” the woman recited when it was his turn.
“Belanger, Kensington Crescent,” he said.
The woman turned, checking the slot, and returned. “No mail,” she said.
“What’s new.” He turned and left. As he left the building, he pocketed one of the size B envelopes, as he always did.
He had grown adept at forging the government mark that proved payment, and he inked it onto the envelope’s upper right corner, careful to smudge it to mar its legibility and enhance its authenticity. Slowly, in a style consciously not his own, he printed his family’s name and address on the envelope, tucked the money from his hip pocket into it, and sealed it inside. Rising from the dirt mound, he slipped the envelope into his pocket and dusted himself off. He wandered up Smithfield Road, past the overturned tanks and burned out jeeps that had years ago ceased to hold any fascination for him, and made his way home.
“Cammy! Hey, Cammy!”
He turned, watching his brother come into sight from behind the rubble. “How’d it go?”
Cameron shrugged. “Same as usual. Pulling vegetables. What changes?”
David smiled as he came up. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Same in the claims office. Stamp, file. Stamp, file. Nothing much changes there either.”
“Why are you walking?” Cameron asked. He slowed his pace. David panted, wincing as the badly-padded rests of his crutches dug into his armpits.
“Aw, bus never showed up,” he sighed. “Probably broken down again. Maybe tomorrow.”
“You shouldn’t go if you don’t see it,” Cameron said.
“That’d be nice,” David grumbled, “if we were rich enough to turn down a day’s work. I wouldn’t mind.”
“I know,” Cameron nodded. “I didn’t mean you shouldn’t go… I just meant you shouldn’t have to.”
“I know, Cammy.”
Cameron pulled the envelope from his jacket. “Hey,” he said, “I think we got a letter from Uncle Jack.”
David looked. “Aw, great. That’ll make Mom happy. Be a load off her mind. That’s terrific.”
Cameron smiled, nodding.
The building was in a good location, as things went. It was near the edge of town, so the area wasn’t too crowded. It was near the local hand pump, not far from a route that crossed the river into town—at least, when it deigned to show up—and the power grid was underground, and so was one of the more reliable ones in the city. Interruptions in service almost never happened; at least, unintentional ones. When they arrived, the street was dimly lit, as the neighbourhood was currently on the 4 p.m. to midnight power shift. “I think I like power in the evenings best,” Cameron said.
“Me too,” David said. “Hot suppers. I don’t mind a cold breakfast, but supper should be hot.”
“I wish it could be like that all the time.”
“It will be, one day. It’s coming.”
“Sure.”
Cameron helped David up the steps; thankfully, their apartment was on the first floor. Their father had paid for that favour when they’d moved in, years before. At first it just made fetching water convenient. Now that David only had one leg, it was a double blessing. But one that probably would not have pleased their father.
“Hi, Mom,” David called as they entered the apartment.
“Hi, Dave,” she called from the kitchen.
“I’m home too, Mom,” Cameron said, kicking off his shoes.
Their mother appeared. “Oh, both my men come marching home together. How were your days?”
“Same as always, for us both,” David said.
“Except…” Cameron said, and pulled out the envelope. He watched his mother’s face light up, brighter than anything cast by the orange bulbs in the ceiling.
“Is it?” she asked.
“I think so,” Cameron said, handing it over. “Open it and see.”
She jammed her finger into the corner and tore the envelope open. With a sigh of relief, she retrieved the bundle of cash. “Praise God,” she said. Cameron smiled. His mother had long ago stopped wondering why her uncle never sent word, only money. She was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Oh, and,” Cameron said, and pulled the other bills from his jacket pocket.
David reached for the wages in his own pocket, and the two of them handed the money to her. She smiled her gratitude. “You’re both good boys, you know. Not like some of the louts around here.”
A white-maned face appeared in the kitchen doorway, warm and wrinkled by a grin. “Fellahs,” he greeted them.
“Hey, Granddad.”
The old man turned; having greeted his grandsons, the chair beckoned him back. “What’s the good word today?”
Cameron entered the kitchen, where the stomach-teasing aroma of his mother’s soup was bright and loud as if to make up for the dim lights and the ghostlike whispers coming over the short wave radio on the table. “You tell us.”
“Word is that that council in Paris is making headway,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“Just like the old days, huh, Granddad?” the girl beside him said.
“Starting to look that way, princess.”
David set his crutches against the wall, gently waving off Cameron’s help as he eased himself down into a chair. “You won’t like it, Tammy. School used to last about twenty years before the war.”
“I heard that,” she laughed. “I don’t think that could ever have been true.”
“Oh, pretty near,” Granddad said. “Sometimes, even longer.”
“When would anybody ever get anything done?” Tammy scoffed.
“Things were complicated then. People had to know a lot more than they do now.”
“Like with the steel works in Pittsburgh,” Mom said. “Complicated jobs. Things like that are starting up again. People are going to need more schooling.”
“The oil fields out west, things like that?” Tammy said.
Silence passed for a moment, while the radio whined and muttered.
“Things like that,” Granddad said.
“I wish Dad would come home,” the girl said.
“We all do,” Mom said. She stirred the pot. Tasted. Salted.
“They ought to have a continental council over here like they’re having in Europe,” David said. “We could really use it.”
“Things are getting better,” Granddad says. “Hasn’t been any border trouble for a while. It’ll happen.”
“I’m more worried about China coming back,” David said.
Granddad laughed, stubbing out his cigarette, reaching for another. “That’ll be a while. We showed them a thing or two.”
“Showed us some stuff first, I think.”
“We kept what was ours,” the old man said, his pride quiet, but in evidence.
“Mostly,” David said. “But it seems to me there was a time you could go from Brandon to Calgary to work in the oil fields, or to Toronto or Montreal, without asking anyone’s permission.”
“It’ll be that way again, don’t worry. Sooner or later people will come to see there’s no point in bickering over scraps. But it takes time to build the economy back up. It was the economy collapsing that really led to the wars. It wasn’t that people wanted to fight; they just got desperate. I remember how it was.”
“Well, I wish they’d get on with it,” Mom said.
“If that happens, do you think we’d see Dad again?” Tammy said.
Granddad patted her shoulder. “We’ll see him.”
There was a frost, and that was good; it always set a few mines off, all on their own. Sometimes at night, Cameron could hear them in the distance. They were like echoes from his grandfather’s time. In truth, that was exactly what they were.
At dawn, he slipped from the apartment and headed east. East was where his family—if any of them were watching—would expect him to go to as the harvest finished up. Once he was out of sight, though, he headed north, where other crops, planted long before, waited.
He was two years too young to be doing work like this. But the contract men weren’t really particular. If you said you were 18, and you could pass for 18, that was all they cared about. And so long as his family never learned the truth, that was all that mattered, too.
Cameron gathered with the men and boys. They stood at the point to which they had cleared the day before. Waiting for his assignment, he looked the rows up and down. Desperate, hungry men, most of them. Drifters, placeless men looking to earn enough money to move on, or else to earn the mistake than would end their need for food, money, or anything else. Then there were the familiar faces, men and young men he knew from Brandon. Some of their names he knew, but it was an unstated rule that you didn’t go out of your way to cultivate friends among minesweepers.
The foreman rubbed his hands in the cold dampness of morning. “Okay, newcomers, line up here,” he barked. Cameron paced passed him, having been through this some months before. He watched a handful of men and boys form a ragged, defeated line before the man. “Everything between the stakes,” he told them. “The parameter is a hundred meters across. What you’re working on, if you don’t know, is the TransCanada. This is a re-opening effort. We have a 25 kilometer stretch to sweep before mid-November. We don’t make that, you don’t make your bonuses. That’s how it works. You don’t make your stretch for the day, we yank you for someone on the fields tomorrow. Plenty of guys want to sweep this stretch if you don’t. So pay attention to what you’re doing and move along. Don’t dawdle. And don’t step on a mine because the detectors aren’t cheap.” That provoked a few nervous chuckles from the men that were quickly stifled when they saw the foreman was in earnest.
Cameron took his place in the road. The men were arranged two meters apart, the second line five meters behind the first, and the third five meters back still. This was done such that no two men would be close enough together to be killed by the same mine if — when — someone set one off.
One of the newcomers, a tall blond man of advancing middle age, stepped up on his left. The man looked Cameron over with disturbing directness; hardly appropriate in someone who had just arrived. “You seem a little young for this,” the man said, stunning Cameron.
“What do you know about it?” Cameron snapped.
The man shrugged. “I guess you have your reasons. I didn’t mean any offense.”
Cameron grunted, attempting to project a disdain that he had only partially mastered in reality.
One of the foreman’s assistants walked the line, tapping men. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” he said, assigning them to their line. Cameron’s guts knotted as he as assigned a one.
“Do you want to trade places?” the new man murmured to him. Preceding Cameron, his number was three.
Cameron turned to him. Nearly said yes. Instead, he growled, “I’m not scared.”
The man nodded.
“Ones, forward!” the foreman barked. Cameron turned on his detector. A drummer at the side of the road beat out the pace, slow and steady. Cameron concentrated on the clicks, moving the detector slowly back and forth in his sweaty palms, the flags digging into his side in his jacket. The foreman called the second line to action, and then the third.
The morning dragged on with the sun passing in and out of the clouds, timed to the drum and the click of the peaceful earth before him, then below him. They had managed perhaps a hundred meters; already his stomach pestered him with the approach of the lunch break.
And suddenly he was on his face, sprawled in the dirt. His head was ringing; he could taste and smell his own blood. Oh my God, he thought. There was no pain, or not what he’d expected. Was it like this for Dave? But his lips hurt, and his knees, and his hands. It took him a moment to realize he had not stepped on a mine. Someone else had. Gingerly, he turned over. Five yards behind him was a hole surrounded by debris that had once been a man.
Cameron vomited with revulsion… and then fear. He turned, looking up the range. His detector was three or four meters ahead, tumbled into the unmarked zone. He looked back at the men behind him, gathered around the dead man. He shook with fear.
The foreman was barking orders and commanding everyone to fall back and reform the line. Cameron could not move. The foreman howled, but Cameron lay on his elbows, petrified.
The new man who had offered his spot stepped from the swarm of men, his detector in front of him. “Stay there,” he said. “I’ll make sure it’s safe.” The foreman ordered the man back, but was ignored. Grumblings from the other men around the corpse suggested to the foreman he would do well to be quiet.
Cameron trembled, watching the man approach, making his way slowly forward. Cameron had swept his own way clear, but only two meters wide. A foot placed outside that narrow strip risked death, and they all knew it. It was confirmed when the man paused, crouched, and planted a flag in the path the dead man would have crossed only moments later.
The man reached Cameron. “Okay, I’m here. We can get back. Come on.” He coaxed Cameron to his feet, telling him, “Hold onto my belt.” The foreman urged him to get Cameron’s detector while he was at it. The new man just glared at him as he led Cameron back to the safety of the third line. The others applauded, slapping the new man on the back.
The foreman came to them, a bit castigated, but he warned them, “We have rules, we have procedures. You disobey another instruction and you’re both off the crew without pay. Do you understand me?” Cameron and the man indicated that they did. “Alright, lunch,” the foreman barked, turning away.
It was an unusually long lunch, as it was bound to be in the wake of a man’s violent demise; dismemberment and thoughts of mortality providing few of the men with much in the way of an appetizer. In the meantime, a sandlot baseball game chose up sides, and Cameron sat with the new man like an empty vessel having its usual contents slowly poured back into it. “I didn’t thank you, did I?” Cameron said, finally.
“It’s alright. You’ve been through a lot.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen… that…” Cameron told him. “But…”
“First time in back of you. Yeah, no one expects that. Do you have a name, son? Mine’s Rob.”
“I’m Cameron,” he said, and they shook hands. “And thank you. Really.”
“It’s alright,” Rob said.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
Rob nodded. “I’ve been sweeping for about… oh, four years now, I think. On and off.”
“Wow. I started in the spring.”
Rob nodded, watching the other men begin to toss the ball. “Do your folks know you’re sweeping?”
Cameron resented Rob asking, treating him again like a boy. “My dad’s in a camp out west,” he said, simply.
“Oh,” Rob said. “I’m sorry.”
“Somebody’s got to get him out,” Cameron said, tossing a stone into the tall prairie grass.
“Do you know how much they want?”
Cameron sighed. “Five hundred.”
Rob whistled. “Your dad must have been trying to po— To get oil work.”
“You can say it,” Cameron said. “Poach. He didn’t have a permit and they weren’t going to give him one.”
“How long’s he been away?”
“Nearly a year. Around the end of the winter we got the notice. They picked him up in a truck with a dozen other guys inside Calgary East Mark. So that’s where he is… Detcamp CEM.”
“Five hundred. Even sweeping, that’d take a while.”
“I’ve got most of it,” Cameron said, letting his pride show through.
“How much?”
Cameron eyed Rob. “Most.”
Rob nodded. He sighed. “You make me wonder what my sons are doing.”
“Do you see them much?”
Rob shook his head. “I send what I can to their mother. We all came to a mutual realization they were better off without me, though.” The scent of grilled meat wafted past them. Rob got to his feet. “Come on, we’d better grab something while the grabbing’s good.”
“You go ahead, I don’t think I could.”
Rob said. “Come on, Cameron. You aren’t going to last long swinging that thing all afternoon without something in you. I know it’s rough, but that’s the job. You gotta eat, son.” Rob offered his hand. “At least try.”
Cameron took Rob’s hand and let Rob help him up. As it turned out, his appetite returned, sparked by the greasy chicken on offer.
The afternoon dragged on, but finally the drumming stopped. Cameron found Rob heading for the camp for the itinerates. It was in his heart to ask the man home, at least for supper, but he knew deep down no one in his family would believe such a man, a stranger to town, would have arrived just to pull vegetables. The jig would be up. They spoke as they lined up to be paid. The comptroller said, “Foreman’s docking you each five for insubordination. You got anything to say about it, say it to him. But you can expect to stay home from now on if you do.” And that was that.
Cameron sighed over his light pay. “Don’t let it get you down. It’s just one day,” Rob advised him.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Cameron said.
“Yeah. See you bright and early, Cameron,” Rob nodded. In the fading light, Cameron made his way back along the safe trail along the TransCanada to 1st Street, and headed south. He stopped by the tree to deposit the cash, and then made his way home.
Late for having lingered with Rob, Cameron found Dave was already home. There was a pensive air as he entered. “Hey, everyone… is anything wrong?”
His mother said, “Cameron, didn’t you say you were working at Weiss’s?”
“Yeah…”
Dave said, “Cammy, I processed a document today that mentioned that Carl Weiss died last April.”
For the second time that day, Cameron’s heart raced with fear. But after what he had gone through earlier, he was well and truly steeled. Without a hint of a tremor, he said, “Yeah, he did. Somebody else took it over.”
“Who?” his mother asked.
Hanging up his coat, Cameron shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care. As long as they pay me, and they do. I never saw Mr. Weiss when he was alive, either.”
“Well, alright,” his mother said, turning back to the stove. Dave and Granddad just exchanged looks, and Granddad nodded softly.
Rob didn’t seem to mind sharing his lunch hours with Cameron. It even seemed to lend Cameron some credibility with the older men, sitting in and hearing their stories, laughing at their ribaldries, drinking up the zeitgeist of manhood in his times. Cameron began to look forward to the day’s work in a way he never had previously.
Somehow, his mother had managed to get hold of lamb, and had prepared a lamb stew. In the cold, wet air of late autumn, it was ambrosia to Cameron. He wondered if it would be to Rob, too. “Mom,” he said, “I have a chance to help with work on some of the farm equipment this evening. Do you think I could get some of this in the thermos? I’m going to be a few hours.”
“Of course, honey,” she told him. And with a wave, he set out into the chilly darkness.
He found Rob at a card game. The inducements of a rare home-cooked meal were enough to separate Rob from the game, and another fellow quickly took Rob’s vacated seat. Cameron beamed with pride as Rob savoured his mother’s stew in the dubious comfort of the small, drafty tent that served him as home. He savoured it, making it last.
“Honest to God, Cameron,” he said, “it’s the best thing I’ve tasted in… I really don’t know how long. Thank you.” He closed his eyes, concentrating the whole of his being on the rare indulgence.
“You make me wish I could tell my mom just how much you’re enjoying it. You’d have her blushing.”
“She deserves every second of that blush.” Rob chuckled. “I used to hate turnip, but if it’s not straight off Heaven’s table now, I don’t know what is.”
“I guess it’s been a while,” Cameron said, softly.
“Well, four years,” Rob reminded him.
Cameron sighed. “I really wish I could bring you home, Rob. I just don’t think they’d buy that you were digging potatoes.”
“This late in the year, are they still buying that about you?”
“For now. I’ll tell them something else in a week or two.”
“Well, maybe then, huh?” Rob laughed. “Nice of me to invite myself to dinner.”
“You are invited. Just as soon as I can make them believe we work together.”
Rob picked at the last few morsels. “You’re a good kid, Cameron. Brought up right.”
“We have a good family. Well… we did.”
Rob nodded.
Cameron looked into the lamplight. “It’s not really Dave’s fault. He just wanted to make more money. Like I do. But then he stepped on that mine…”
Rob was quiet. Cameron went on.
“That’s really how it started. Dave’s money helped us move where we are. A nicer place. But then he had the accident.” He sighed. “My dad… he was working for the district. Industrial reclamation.” He met Rob’s eyes with pride, saying, “My dad is part of the reason farmers here can get their crops on the trains to Winnipeg now. He helped that happen. But when Dave got hurt… Dad had to make a deal with some people. It cost so much. That’s why he went to Alberta. The oil patch. And now he’s in that camp. They saved my brother… but with Dad gone, it’s going to take us years.”
Rob shook his head slowly. He said, “There was a time… I guess still even when I was born… when a man didn’t need a permit to go work the oil fields. He just went. They belonged as much to someone here as to someone right on top of them, if only he got up off his ass. Now, though, everyone owns their own little square of dirt and no one wants to share. Unless they get paid for the privilege.”
“It’s all China’s fault,” Cameron growled. “Chinks. I wish there was one here now… I’d roll him down the highway and use him to clear the mines.”
Rob rubbed his chin. “Well… Cameron… I’ll tell you. I’ve done some reading and I know they had a rough time of it once. Back then the shoe was on the other foot. I guess we can’t really fault them for finally kicking back one day. Not really.”
“You’re sticking up for them?”
“I’m just saying… most of them were just people. Kids, not much older than you. I guess a few were fanatics; there’s always some who are in any crowd. But I think most of them were just doing what they were told. I don’t think most of them wanted to be here. Not really. Fighting and dying on a lot of flat, frozen tundra, ten thousand miles away from everyone and everything they ever gave a shit about…”
“But they came here. And we didn’t want them here.”
“Do you think your dad wanted to leave, Cameron? Do you think those oil folks wanted him there?”
“That’s different,” Cameron snarled.
“Maybe. Maybe. But to me, it kind of looks like having to do something you don’t want against the wishes of other people because you feel like you don’t have a choice. I think you can stand up for what’s yours but still feel sorry for the other fellow.” Rob just gave a soft nod and was quiet for a moment, taking a gulp of his coffee. He said, “Your father is a brave man, Cameron. I can see why you love him so much.”
Cameron looked up. “Just like you, I guess... Looking after your family out here.”
Rob looked down.
“You miss them,” Cameron said.
“I deserve to.” Rob picked at the stew, not eating for the moment. He said, “I used to drink, Cameron. A lot. Every day. It just seemed to make life brighter. I didn’t see that I had all the light a man really needs in the faces all around me. Or that I was taking away their light.”
“But you stopped, right?”
“I’m not a good man like your father,” Rob said. “I drank the jobs I got. I had a boy… younger than you. I guess he’s a little older than you now, though. Name’s Bill. One night when I came home he just hauled up and told me off. Put me in my place. He had every right. I was a shitty husband and a shitty father, and he said so.”
Cameron’s mouth dropped open. “He did? I can’t imagine.”
“From the sounds of your father, you never had to.” He looked away. “We got into a fight. I broke his arm. I broke his arm…” Rob’s eyes glistened; he set his jaw so firmly that Cameron grew afraid that he would hear the man’s teeth shatter. Rob took a deep breath. “That’s when I left. I knew I had to.”
There was silence in the tent. Elsewhere, men laughed, shouted, called out hands of cards and playfully cursed one another.
Cameron said, “But you love them, right?”
“More than anything.”
“And you quit drinking?”
Rob swirled his coffee, staring down into it. “Can’t quite shake that one, Cameron. Most of the time. But not all the time. And when I get the demon rum in me… I can do some terrible things.”
“I’m sorry,” Cameron said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
Rob smiled. “It’s okay. It’s good to remember. It’s what keeps me right. And you’re a good friend.”
“Really?”
“That’s the God’s honest truth. If my sons are like you now, I’d be busting with pride just to know it.”
Cameron sighed. Looked around. “Rob, you’ve been working on the TransCanada, right?”
“Mostly. Well, a lot of the time.”
“Is there still lots to do?”
Rob laughed, scooping up the last of the stew. “Kid, the thing’s six or seven thousand kilometers long. We mined most of it when the Chinese invaded so they couldn’t use it. When the PLA retreated, they mined it so we couldn’t use it. Mines on top of mines. Must still be ten years worth of work to get it clear end to end.”
“How much of it really has to be swept?”
“All of it. You can’t take chances…” Rob set the thermos down and sat up, his eyes peering into the darkness as if he could pierce it and see beyond. “There are long, long stretches we never had time to desurface when the invasion happened. So you can see mile after mile of blacktop even now. Crumbling, breaking up, grass-grown, yeah. But still there. Ready for wheels. Except the Chinese… they had this great idea on the retreat. Find a hole, make a hole… plant a mine, tar it over. Looks like a road repair. But it’ll do worse to you than hitting some pothole if you drive over it. So there’s still lots and lots to do.”
“And after we’re done here… are you going to head west?”
“Probably. That’s where most of the work is. We’re pretty much cleared to the Lakehead at this point. Beyond that, it’s someone else’s job, really.”
“Would you take me with you?”
“What?”
“My dad, Rob. I have to go get my dad out of the camps.”
Rob stared at him, his features swimming in the dancing lamplight. “Cameron… Calgary is weeks and weeks away from here. Even without stopping to work. There are men out there. Dangerous men.”
“I know that. That’s… that’s why I’m asking.”
“Christ, kid… I don’t know.”
“I wouldn’t hold you back. I promise. Rob… I don’t know if I… I don’t know if I’d make it. But I have to try. No one else can. Not my granddad. Not Dave with his one leg.”
“I don’t know, Cameron. It’s against my better judgement. Why don’t you ask me again when we’re done here and it’s looking more realistic?”
“Okay,” Cameron said. “But one way or another, I’m going to do it. Like that first day when I stayed in the first line.”
Rob nodded. “I remember.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“No,” Rob said. “You’re a boy.”
It was just after Thanksgiving and before Halloween that the foreman called them together. “We’ve been pushing. You all know that. But the inspectors have said they don’t believe we can meet the deadline of November 15th. So the company’s not making the bonus. And that means neither are you.”
The men raged at the news, pushing forward; the foreman held up his hands. “However… however! There’s another project, starting Monday. If they can get enough to sign on for it, this leg of the TransCanada recovery will be put on hold till the spring. They want to re-open the Assiniboine bridge to relieve the communities on the other side. If they can use that, then they can at least get one lane of commerce along the safe trail on the south side. I’m not going to blow smoke up your asses. It’s heavily mined on both sides and they nearly blew the thing up just removing the booby traps. But for every man who volunteers, there’s fifty up front. For every man makes it through, another two hundred at the other end. That’s for about three weeks’ work.”
The men’s rage turned to guarded optimism.
“Sign-ups are this evening at day’s end, and tomorrow and Friday, which is the day we shut down. Think it over. Now eat up and get back to work.”
Cameron’s heart lit up. This was it… unquestionably. This was being given to him. Nothing had ever been so clear. Just before Christmas? To know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would have enough money to free his father, and more besides? It was a sign. It was meant to be. When he turned to Rob, mouth open in joy, he found Rob was already regarding him. Something about the look kept Cameron from speaking out just then.
It was in the evening. They handed in their detectors and Cameron made his way to new line, not even stopping first to collect his wages. Something in Rob’s manner had made Cameron avoid the subject over lunch, but there was no hiding it now. And suddenly, he felt Rob’s hand at his elbow.
“Cameron, no.”
Cameron pulled his arm away. “I don’t have any choice.”
“There are other ways, Cameron. You’re nearly there. You said so yourself. Quit while you’re ahead.”
Cameron stared at him, his heart racing in his throat. “Don’t make this hard for me,” he growled.
Rob drew his hand back. Men behind them began complaining about the delay. Cameron turned, and stepped up to the table. The man behind it eyed him warily, but having seem Cameron around for months, he simply sighed and shoved the paper across the table at him. Cameron signed it.
He turned, glared at Rob, and wandered to the paymaster’s line.
“You don’t seem very hungry tonight,” his mother said. “Is anything wrong?”
“Just had a rough day,” Cameron told her.
“Isn’t it getting a little late for the harvest?” Granddad said.
“Mostly over,” Cameron said. “We’re putting the place right for winter. Getting set up for next year. You know.”
“Ah.”
Cameron picked at a boiled potato with his fork. “There’s only a couple days left now.”
Dave said, “They’re looking for runners at work,” he said. “A lot easier than what you’ve been doing. We could ride to City Hall together. Good way to spend the winter. Interested, Cammy?”
“I dunno,” he said. He looked up in to his brother’s hopeful face. “Why don’t we wait and see next week?” He could not fight down the lump in his throat at the sudden realization that his plan meant he would be far away from them by then. He had to look away.
“Sure. I’ve got an in… I’m pretty sure I can get them to take you on,” Dave said.
Cameron rose, reaching for his jacket. “Well, I better get back,” he said. “I’ve been learning a lot about the machinery, and I guess I’ve only got a few more days to learn.”
“Well, alright,” Mom said. “Don’t be out too late, okay? The nights are really starting to get cold.”
“I won’t. I’ll see you in few hours.”
He found Rob alone, with a bottle in his hand. It should have made him ashamed — and it did — but mostly, it made him angry. Cameron said, “Why can’t you be happy for me?”
Rob said nothing. His eyes wandered back and forth between the bottle and the boy.
Cameron sat. “I have to do it. Rob, I could get my dad home. For real. In weeks now, not months. And there’d be money left over. Fifty bucks gets you on the grid for six months, non-stop. I’d be able to get power for our house for more than a year. I’ve been putting it aside… I’ve been hiding most of it. Having to lie and tell them I’m picking crops for crap wages. Do you know what it’s going to mean when I bring that money home? When I can show it to them at last?”
“Cameron, do you know why they’re paying that kind of money?”
“Yes, of course. Because it’s so dangerous.”
Rob sighed. He raised the bottle and took two deep swallows. Eyes already becoming bloodshot, he leaned forward. “This highway is a convenience. Clearing it will make commerce a lot faster. Get things started up again for real. But trucks, tanks… they really don’t need highways. They can cross the prairie grass and make their own roads. But they need bridges, Cameron. Without them, well… people on one side don’t know the people on the other anymore, and we get a world like this. We know it, and the Chinese knew it.”
“That’s why they booby-trapped it. I know.”
“No. You don’t know. They mined this road up and down, that’s true. But they saved the good mines, the best mines, for the bridges. Mines made of wood, boy. Clay. Plastic. Mines that don’t show up on a detector hardly at all. Mines designed for men more than machines. A mile to either side. Do you get me?”
“You’re trying to scare me.”
“You’re goddamn right I am. And you should be. But I’m telling you the truth. You know, when I was a kid in Red Deer, they used to clear the bridges in town by driving cattle back and forth across them till they either ran out of mines or they ran out of cattle. But meat was getting scarce by then and when that got too expensive, they started using sheep. And when that got too expensive, that’s when they started paying men to do it. My brother is buried alongside the 49th Street bridge.”
“Then why do you do it?” Cameron sneered.
“Because I broke my son’s arm. Because sending money home is all I have left to offer them.” He raised the bottle again.
Cameron leaned in, seizing the bottle before Rob could drink. “Well, all I have is this to get my father home,” he said.
Rob stared into his eyes. “Cameron… about every third man they send out there is going to die. That’s a solid fact. They know it, I know it, and I’m telling you. And I’ll tell you something else. Your father would rather rot the rest of his life in that camp than have you blown all over that bridge for a lousy couple hundred bucks. If he’s even half the man you say he is.”
Cameron pushed Rob, who fell off the cot, his bottle tumbling to the floor. He stood up in the mouth of the tent, watching the man scramble for his liquor. The pathetic spectacle hurt and sickened Cameron. As Rob knelt there, cradling the bottle and looking up, ashamed, Cameron turned, and left him there.
Rob did not report for work in the morning. As the men gathered, Cameron looked around for him. He wondered if perhaps Rob had left, but something told him the answer was simpler than that. Hurriedly, he crept away. He found Rob insensate in his tent, reeking of liquor and vomit, snoring loudly. Cameron could not rouse him. Cursing the man, he made his way back to the line.
“Where’s your friend?” the foreman asked him.
“I think he’s sick,” Cameron said.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll bet,” the foreman said. “Show me.”
“I don’t think you want to catch what he’s—”
“I said show me.”
Cameron led the man to Rob’s tent. The foreman looked inside, then drew his head back out. “At lunch time, if he’s awake… hell, if he’s not, wake him up. Tell him to get his shit together and get gone. He’s finished here.”
Cameron pleaded, “It was just one night. He misses his family. Everybody—”
“If you can’t follow orders, kid, you can stay right here next week. I don’t need nobody who can’t follow orders getting on the truck on Monday. Understand?”
Cameron nodded.
“Get in the line and get to work.”
It was a long morning; perhaps the longest since his first day. When finally lunch came, Cameron made his way to Rob’s tent. He wondered what he would say to him. There didn’t seem to be enough time to patch things up and say what he really wanted. He wanted to go with him to the next job, closer to his father, making their way across the Prairies. His stomach in knots, he leaned into the tent. “Rob?” he said.
The tent was empty. The few things that belong to Rob were gone.
Cameron made his way back to the others, looking around, hoping to catch sight of the man. Instead the foreman found him. “Did you tell him?”
“He’s already gone,” Cameron mumbled.
“Well, at least he’s got that much sense,” the foreman sniffed.
Cameron could not eat. He felt as though he had a boulder in his gut. If the morning had seemed long, the journey into evening seemed like an epoch; his feelings of loss hauntingly, disturbingly familiar.
His tread was leaden as he made his way home. In the twilight, he lingered at the tree for a long while, savouring the time alone with his feelings, the isolation between the loss of his friend and the show he nightly put on for his family, which this night he had no heart for whatsoever. He counted each dollar the tree guarded, like one more step home for his father. And then he turned and went home, feeling somehow never further from his goal.
It was mid-morning of the next day that it all fell apart.
The clicks made their familiar metronome beat in his ears; oblivious to all else, he swept the detector back and forth until suddenly, he was seized by the collar and hauled back.
The foreman jerked the headset from his ears and snarled, “You little bastard; why didn’t you tell me you were sixteen?” Cameron gaped at him in amazement. The foreman had known that nearly as plainly as he’d known the colour of Cameron’s eyes; it had simply been conveniently overlooked. Until now. Suddenly he became aware of the commotion, and he looked over to see his mother, raging at several of the administrators. Some of the men where laughing, clearly amused. Cameron saw his grandfather there as well, trying to rein the woman in. She was having none of it.
The foreman manhandled Cameron over to her, finally shoving him at her. “Get him out of here!” he bellowed. He pointed at Cameron. “Don’t come back,” he said, and stormed off.
His mother slapped him. “Minesweeping?” she shrieked. “After what happened to Dave? After your father went away?” She raised her hand to strike him again, but Granddad caught her arm.
“Easy, easy, Annie,” he soothed. Crying, she tucked her face into the old man’s jacket.
Eyes swimming, Cameron rubbed his stinging cheek. “What happened?” he wailed.
Granddad said, “A man came by this morning. Drunk. Said he knew you. Said you were sweeping, getting ready to go away. We didn’t believe him at first but he knew everything about us.”
Cameron shook his head, bewildered. “But I never told him where we lived…”
“Well, he found us, and he set us straight.” Granddad looked at his daughter, stroking her hair. “Boy, you’ve hurt your mother something awful. How could you do this? Have you got no sense? No sense at all?”
His mother turned, her features red and pinched. “Get home!” she yelled. “Get home! Now!”
“But how did he find you? I never told him…” Followed me, it came to him. He must have followed me. “Oh, my God,” he whispered, the very bottom dropping out of his soul. Without another word, he turned from them and ran.
He did not stop till he had arrived at the tree. Nearly slamming into it, he dove his hand into its depths. For a moment, a split second, he felt relief as his hand closed around the brass case. But it was distressingly light. From it emerged with a small handful of bills and a torn piece of paper. Frantically he counted them up. Fifty dollars. Over and over. Fifty dollars, fifty dollars, fifty dollars. Always the same. “No, no no!!” he screamed. “You fucking bastard!”
He pulled the irregular scrap of paper open, tears already tumbling onto it as he read.
I HOPE YOU’LL UNDERSTAND SOMEDAY was all it said.
Monday came and took the men away. Several of Brandon’s families said good-bye to fathers and brothers and sons, some of whom would never come back. Cameron was not among them.
In latter days, he was among those, including his brother, who daily made their way into the centre of town to attend to the menial chores of bringing a city back to life, making it work as best they could in the meantime. Long, boring, poorly-paid days of moving paper and arranging jobs and couriering what remained of the past for use by the present to build the future. And Cameron endured, rocked in silence, nursing his hatred and hurt, betrayal and bitter disappointment. The gift of his father’s return that he had hoped to make for his family was reduced to a half-year’s share of electricity. A marvelous thing in the winter months, unquestionably. But all things considered, a meager consolation indeed. His nights were tormented by visions of Rob drinking himself to death on the proceeds of his father’s freedom, or returning home in well-funded triumph to his own son to bask in love and absolution. He would wake barely able to breathe, and curse the man with every fibre of his being.
The winter was merciful that year. The first snows did not come until mid-December, and they fell on a Saturday. Cameron, with others, shoveled the walk of the building while Dave, precariously balanced, swept the stairs with a broom. The snow only seemed to Cameron to highlight the disappointment; something he should have shared in happiness that was instead a painful mockery of his naïve hopes and faith and trust.
He was stirred from his dark musings by the neighbours, murmuring a familiar name. “Ben?” he heard them say, asking one another as they peered up the street through the snow. “Is that Ben?”
“Dave, Cammy… isn’t that your father?” someone said.
Cameron dropped his shovel. “Dad?” he asked. “Dad?” he called, stepping forward. Breaking into a run.
The man in the street dropped his pack and opened up his arms. Cameron threw himself into them.
“Dad!” Dave cried, dashing forward as quickly as he dared on his crutches.
“Cameron! Oh, Cameron… Dave. Oh, my God… I can’t believe it’s you.” It was their father. He was thin… so terribly thin… and the year that had passed seemed to have worn itself into him five times over. But it was definitively him, and he was home. “Oh, my God, boys,” he wept as they embraced in the street. Already, the neighbours were gathering around them, or summoning the rest of the Belangers out of their apartment and into the street.
“How did you get away? How did you get home?” Cameron marveled.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “One day about a month ago, the guards came up and told me my parole was paid; I could go. Someone just paid it. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why.”
The tears stung Cameron’s cheeks, salty and sharp in the cold. “You don’t know who it was?” he begged, his voice cracking.
“No, Cammy. All I know is the message they gave me. To tell my family ‘Merry Christmas’, and especially my son.” He looked back and forth between Dave and Cameron, but David’s gaze directed him. “Cameron?” he asked.
But before Cameron could say anything, his father was swept up in the love of the rest of his family and the cheers of his neighbours.
It was Christmas Eve, and his father was home. There was light and laughter, warmth and food. Their family was whole again. It was, perhaps, the most joyous night of his life so far, he reflected. But even so, at some point that evening, Cameron felt himself drawn away. There was something more, something else, that rendered his soul a leaf in a tempest. Donning his jacket, he excused himself and slipped out into the starlit veils of winter.
He made his way to the place he’d been before, so many times — a place of trust and hope. All around him lay the snow, silvered in the moonlight as if in memory of all that had once resided here in the guardian tree: faith, fidelity, responsibility, true adulthood. As the wind tousled his hair with an unseen hand, he gazed to the west where the sun had dropped below the horizon. Seeing nothing, he turned his eyes to the stars, and felt them tearing up with what must have been the cold. Surely that.
And then he astonished himself. Compelled by something beyond words, Cameron did something he hadn’t done in years; not since he’d been a little boy. There, beside the tree and in the sight of the waxing moon, he dropped to his knees. Falteringly, but with an open heart, Cameron prayed. It was the only thing he could do.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Trees
I can't tell one kind of tree from another. They either have needles, or they have leaves that drop off in the fall. I guess I can spot one or two types by their leaves... maple and oak. But that's about it. It just never seemed important.
Especially in winter, when it's really down to just evergreens and sticks. Evergreens are still alive. Everything else, you know, is just sticks. Living or dead; you can't tell. You won't know till spring.
I think it's a Monday. It has the feel of a Monday. I am down in the park in the valley where I've been before. I like the park and the forest more and more. Something about the city... the sharpness of the lines, the steel, the sun made malicious and stabbing at you from every shiny surface... it wearies me more and more as time goes by. The city's uncompromising. Everything is either this or that; fences, borders, doors. Yes or no. In the valley was the potential of maybe. Maybe. Down among the trees whose names I did not even know. This is a Monday; a modern Monday.
The last building before the path down is a pizza joint. The scent of it follows me down like a siren song beckoning me back onto the rocks of the concrete sea. But the fragrance of pine is wild and fearless and soon wrestles down that interloper from above. The sounds of traffic die away. I'm real.
The drop is pretty steep; a slip a couple of times on the way down but I don't fall. After a minute or two I reach the flood plain and the path surrenders its paved pretensions and gives way to the stumbling uncertainty of dirt. There's that compromise. It's hard to tell what's trail and what isn't. Really, it's up to your eyes and your feet. They may not even agree with last time.
Just before the path is swallowed up by the forest, there's a bench. The last outpost of civilization. And its last citizen. There's a girl sitting there. Well, a woman. University age, she looks. I'm a far better judge as I grow older. She's sort of white, sort of black... maybe Middle Eastern; we meet eyes. "Morning," I say as I pass.
"Good morning," she says. Her English is perfect to my ears, but she speaks as through she's never tried it before. Eyes still fixed on mine, she seems to hold them, her head turning to follow. I'm so struck I actually have to stop.
"Are you human?" she says.
"What?"
Flustered, she says, "I mean— Accept command reset three-fifteen execute—"
—path is swallowed up by the forest, there's a bench. The last outpost of civilization. And its last citizen. There's a girl sitting there. Well, a woman. University age, she looks. I'm a far better judge as I grow older. She's sort of white, sort of black... maybe Middle Eastern; we meet eyes. "Morning," I say as I pass.
"Good morning," she says. Her English is perfect to my ears, but she speaks as through she's never tried it before. Eyes still fixed on mine, she seems to hold them, hear head turning to follow. I'm so struck I actually have to stop.
She seems at a loss for words. She's acting like she's never seen anyone else before in her life. Hands in my jacket pockets, I finally give a shrug. "Can I help you? Are you okay?"
She says, "I'm — yes, I'm okay. I'm called Alooka. I mean—" She cuts off with snort. "Accept command reset three-fifteen execute—"
—path is swallowed up by the forest, there's a bench. The last outpost of civilization. And its last citizen. There's a girl sitting there. Well, a woman. University age, she looks. I'm—
"Isn't it a cold day?" she chirps.
My pace falters. "Actually, I was just thinking how mild it is, myself. Maybe we'll have an early spring."
She seems a bit downcast. "Oh," she says. She looks around, faintly embarrassed.
I take a chance, even though her English seems flawless to me. "Are you here from a warmer place?"
She looks up as if she'd been drowning and I'd just tossed her a life line. "Yes, yes, exactly. It's much warmer where I'm from."
"Whereabouts?"
Again she's at a loss. "South," she says, glancing in the direction of the sun. "East of here." She looks down at the bench she's sitting on. Picks up some snow in her bare hand. "I've never seen this before. I've seen ice, but..." She suddenly shakes it off, visibly surprised by how uncomfortable a handful of snow is.
"Snow?" I say.
"Snow," she nods, as if trying out the word. She adds, "I knew that, I've just never..." She looks up, sighs. "This isn't going well."
This is weird. Time to go. Back up to the street? No, she's not dangerous. And I'll be damned if I'm going to give up my walk just because some scattered girl is looking for someone to chat with. "Well, you take care. Have a nice day," I tell her pleasantly, and step into the screen of trees.
She doesn't rise or even turn. I just hear her say, "Your name is Mark Wilson."
I turn. "How do you know that? Who are you?"
She gets to her feet, long jacket gathering around her boots. "I'd like it if you called me Allie," she says.
"How do you know my name?"
Suddenly she looks coy. "What would you say if I told you I'd seen you before?"
"Where?"
"In the future," she murmurs. "Far, far, far into the future."
If she hadn't spoken my name, I would simply turn and leave. But she has. "I'm not fooling around. How do you know my name?"
"I can tell you anything, you know. And you won't even remember."
Okay, now I'm scared. I don't even know how you talk to someone like this.
"I want you to leave me alone. Do you understand?"
"But no, please. I won't hurt you. I want to talk to you. I came here looking for you." She drops her eyes, no longer willing to meet my gaze.
I shake my head. "What the hell are you talking about? I want you to explain this. Right now. Or I... or I'll go to the cops or something."
"Your name is Mark Wilson, and you're interested in gravimetrics, right?"
I feel a sudden splash of relief. A possible answer. "Do you work at the institute? Or are you on a study assignment...?"
"I just know that you work in gravity theory. Don't you?"
"Yes... that's right."
"I'm a scientist too."
"Physics?"
"Anthropologist. That's what you'd call it." Her eyes lift again; fix on mine. "I always wanted to talk to you. Ever since I first saw you. I never dreamed I'd be able to but when I found you here... I couldn't believe it." She looks around, suddenly delighted. "Everything I say sounds so strange, but it's all so natural."
"Where have we met?"
"We haven't... well, here. Now."
"Then where have you seen me?"
Eyes back on the path. "Like I said. In the future."
"The future. Yeah, you said." I take a step back.
She says, "Do you think it would be easier to detect gravitons on the moon?"
How could she possibly even guess that? "How do you know these things? Allie? Who the hell are you?"
"Because that's why you're there. In the future. And that's where I've seen you. Although... it's not really the future, because we're both there now. It just seems like the future from your perspective..."
She can't be insane. She knows things she couldn't know if she were just nuts. But how can I believe any of what she's saying? "Would you please cut the mystical shit and just tell me what you're talking about?"
"It's going to take time to explain," she pleads. "I don't want you to run away. I don't want to have to start this all over again. The things you can teach me... they could help me more than you can imagine. And I may even be able to help you."
"Help me? Help me to do what?"
She looks startled. "They're coming," she says. "I have to end this. But I'll be back. Will you meet me tomorrow?"
"Look, I—"
"Meet me tomorrow!" she begs. She darts into the forest.
"Hey, wait a minute!" I follow. She's instantly lost in the trees. "Come back!" I follow her trail, the boot prints in the snow, until suddenly they vanish.
COMMAND END ACCEPTED EXECUTED
COMMAND SAVE ACCEPTED EXECUTED
COMMAND CONDUCT ACCEPTED EXECUTED
UNSPOOLING... COMPLETED.
Especially in winter, when it's really down to just evergreens and sticks. Evergreens are still alive. Everything else, you know, is just sticks. Living or dead; you can't tell. You won't know till spring.
I think it's a Monday. It has the feel of a Monday. I am down in the park in the valley where I've been before. I like the park and the forest more and more. Something about the city... the sharpness of the lines, the steel, the sun made malicious and stabbing at you from every shiny surface... it wearies me more and more as time goes by. The city's uncompromising. Everything is either this or that; fences, borders, doors. Yes or no. In the valley was the potential of maybe. Maybe. Down among the trees whose names I did not even know. This is a Monday; a modern Monday.
The last building before the path down is a pizza joint. The scent of it follows me down like a siren song beckoning me back onto the rocks of the concrete sea. But the fragrance of pine is wild and fearless and soon wrestles down that interloper from above. The sounds of traffic die away. I'm real.
The drop is pretty steep; a slip a couple of times on the way down but I don't fall. After a minute or two I reach the flood plain and the path surrenders its paved pretensions and gives way to the stumbling uncertainty of dirt. There's that compromise. It's hard to tell what's trail and what isn't. Really, it's up to your eyes and your feet. They may not even agree with last time.
Just before the path is swallowed up by the forest, there's a bench. The last outpost of civilization. And its last citizen. There's a girl sitting there. Well, a woman. University age, she looks. I'm a far better judge as I grow older. She's sort of white, sort of black... maybe Middle Eastern; we meet eyes. "Morning," I say as I pass.
"Good morning," she says. Her English is perfect to my ears, but she speaks as through she's never tried it before. Eyes still fixed on mine, she seems to hold them, her head turning to follow. I'm so struck I actually have to stop.
"Are you human?" she says.
"What?"
Flustered, she says, "I mean— Accept command reset three-fifteen execute—"
—path is swallowed up by the forest, there's a bench. The last outpost of civilization. And its last citizen. There's a girl sitting there. Well, a woman. University age, she looks. I'm a far better judge as I grow older. She's sort of white, sort of black... maybe Middle Eastern; we meet eyes. "Morning," I say as I pass.
"Good morning," she says. Her English is perfect to my ears, but she speaks as through she's never tried it before. Eyes still fixed on mine, she seems to hold them, hear head turning to follow. I'm so struck I actually have to stop.
She seems at a loss for words. She's acting like she's never seen anyone else before in her life. Hands in my jacket pockets, I finally give a shrug. "Can I help you? Are you okay?"
She says, "I'm — yes, I'm okay. I'm called Alooka. I mean—" She cuts off with snort. "Accept command reset three-fifteen execute—"
—path is swallowed up by the forest, there's a bench. The last outpost of civilization. And its last citizen. There's a girl sitting there. Well, a woman. University age, she looks. I'm—
"Isn't it a cold day?" she chirps.
My pace falters. "Actually, I was just thinking how mild it is, myself. Maybe we'll have an early spring."
She seems a bit downcast. "Oh," she says. She looks around, faintly embarrassed.
I take a chance, even though her English seems flawless to me. "Are you here from a warmer place?"
She looks up as if she'd been drowning and I'd just tossed her a life line. "Yes, yes, exactly. It's much warmer where I'm from."
"Whereabouts?"
Again she's at a loss. "South," she says, glancing in the direction of the sun. "East of here." She looks down at the bench she's sitting on. Picks up some snow in her bare hand. "I've never seen this before. I've seen ice, but..." She suddenly shakes it off, visibly surprised by how uncomfortable a handful of snow is.
"Snow?" I say.
"Snow," she nods, as if trying out the word. She adds, "I knew that, I've just never..." She looks up, sighs. "This isn't going well."
This is weird. Time to go. Back up to the street? No, she's not dangerous. And I'll be damned if I'm going to give up my walk just because some scattered girl is looking for someone to chat with. "Well, you take care. Have a nice day," I tell her pleasantly, and step into the screen of trees.
She doesn't rise or even turn. I just hear her say, "Your name is Mark Wilson."
I turn. "How do you know that? Who are you?"
She gets to her feet, long jacket gathering around her boots. "I'd like it if you called me Allie," she says.
"How do you know my name?"
Suddenly she looks coy. "What would you say if I told you I'd seen you before?"
"Where?"
"In the future," she murmurs. "Far, far, far into the future."
If she hadn't spoken my name, I would simply turn and leave. But she has. "I'm not fooling around. How do you know my name?"
"I can tell you anything, you know. And you won't even remember."
Okay, now I'm scared. I don't even know how you talk to someone like this.
"I want you to leave me alone. Do you understand?"
"But no, please. I won't hurt you. I want to talk to you. I came here looking for you." She drops her eyes, no longer willing to meet my gaze.
I shake my head. "What the hell are you talking about? I want you to explain this. Right now. Or I... or I'll go to the cops or something."
"Your name is Mark Wilson, and you're interested in gravimetrics, right?"
I feel a sudden splash of relief. A possible answer. "Do you work at the institute? Or are you on a study assignment...?"
"I just know that you work in gravity theory. Don't you?"
"Yes... that's right."
"I'm a scientist too."
"Physics?"
"Anthropologist. That's what you'd call it." Her eyes lift again; fix on mine. "I always wanted to talk to you. Ever since I first saw you. I never dreamed I'd be able to but when I found you here... I couldn't believe it." She looks around, suddenly delighted. "Everything I say sounds so strange, but it's all so natural."
"Where have we met?"
"We haven't... well, here. Now."
"Then where have you seen me?"
Eyes back on the path. "Like I said. In the future."
"The future. Yeah, you said." I take a step back.
She says, "Do you think it would be easier to detect gravitons on the moon?"
How could she possibly even guess that? "How do you know these things? Allie? Who the hell are you?"
"Because that's why you're there. In the future. And that's where I've seen you. Although... it's not really the future, because we're both there now. It just seems like the future from your perspective..."
She can't be insane. She knows things she couldn't know if she were just nuts. But how can I believe any of what she's saying? "Would you please cut the mystical shit and just tell me what you're talking about?"
"It's going to take time to explain," she pleads. "I don't want you to run away. I don't want to have to start this all over again. The things you can teach me... they could help me more than you can imagine. And I may even be able to help you."
"Help me? Help me to do what?"
She looks startled. "They're coming," she says. "I have to end this. But I'll be back. Will you meet me tomorrow?"
"Look, I—"
"Meet me tomorrow!" she begs. She darts into the forest.
"Hey, wait a minute!" I follow. She's instantly lost in the trees. "Come back!" I follow her trail, the boot prints in the snow, until suddenly they vanish.
COMMAND END ACCEPTED EXECUTED
COMMAND SAVE ACCEPTED EXECUTED
COMMAND CONDUCT ACCEPTED EXECUTED
UNSPOOLING... COMPLETED.
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