Falling From Grace (9 page)

Mary spent most of her time nursing Cedar, rinsing diapers, and flirting with Paul. Marcel proved a willing cook. “I learned from ma mère, eh?” Sue, Chris, and Jen, the three biology students from Vancouver, played Hackey Sack between the tents or wandered around the forest identifying plants from natural history field guides during their spare time. Mr. Kimori, the Japanese gentleman, a handsome stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair, went about his day surrounded by an aura of calm, well dressed, always in black. He spent hours drawing and painting in a large sketchbook and in the evening after dinner he sat by the stream with a mirror and trimmed his moustache and narrow beard with a fine pair of scissors before his nightcap of green tea. When not on the blockade with her mother, Rainbow followed me around like a puppy. Cougar and Squirrel raised my hackles, their attitude militant and their social skills non-existent.

“Are you prejudiced against dreadlocks and eyebrow piercings?” Paul teased.

“I've never seen them offer to cook or do dishes, paint signs or carry groceries.” I suspected they were high on pot most of the time and was careful never to leave anything of value lying around.

After three days of clear weather, the camp awoke to a fresh deluge of rain. Leaky tents, damp matches, and wet clothing meant the protesters got off to a late departure. When they reached the road they found the gate unlocked and evidence of heavy equipment traffic. Terry and Cougar hiked up the road and returned an hour later, expressions grim, bearing bad news. The company had given them the slip and were cutting trees in the upper valley. The group huddled together to discuss the unexpected turn of events. A crew-cab truck with a company logo on the door roared past, spraying muddy water over the already dejected and sodden troop. The truck screeched to a halt thirty metres away and reversed, careening back and forth across the road, grinding to a stop mere steps from the protesters. The driver, a wiry dark-haired man dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt, and work-boots, leaped from the cab, brandishing a wrench.

“Can't take rain?” he leered.

Terry stepped forward. “Put the wrench away,” he cautioned. “We have nothing against you.”

“Hah.” The man spat on the ground at Terry's feet. “I don't know whose welfare you're sucking off. I work for a living.”

“You don't want to work yourself out of a living, do you?” Terry held his ground. “No trees, no loggers.”

“You've already got your trees. Government don't allow logging in parks.” The logger brushed water angrily from his forehead with his arm. “I got a wife, kids. Who do you think you are, you tree-huggers, coming here, interfering with things that ain't none of your business.”

“The public owns these trees,” Cougar yelled. “We have every right, you scab.”

The logger's face twisted; he took three steps toward Cougar, wrench raised. Terry blocked his way and cautioned Cougar back.

“We don't want any violence. We're here to protest peacefully against the government and the company. We don't want anyone hurt.”

“You better get the hell off this road then.” He threw the wrench in the back of the pick-up, slammed the door shut behind him, and gunned the engine. A shower of gravel flew up from the back tires as he steered for the middle of the crowd. Everyone fled for the water-filled ditches. The truck veered off at the last moment and sped away.

Paul and I heard the whole story under the kitchen tarp when the protesters fled to camp, shaken, wet, and muddy.

“The guy's insane,” Sue declared, wringing water from her socks. “He was this close”—she held up a finger and a thumb—“to cracking Cougar over the head.”

“At least no one got hurt,” Terry said. “It's no surprise the loggers aren't sympathetic. They take us as a threat to their jobs. But the whole upper valley's a tiny fraction of the company's tenure.”

“More jobs are lost to mechanization and raw log exports than to the creation of parks,” Chris added.

“But big trees,” Marcel countered. “One tree is worth, what, fifty grand?”

“What about the trees?” Cougar stood and pointed out into the forest. “They're fucking out there cutting trees right now.”

“We have to beat the workers to the road in the morning,” Terry insisted.

“Not adequate. We failed once already. We need people in the trees,” Cougar yelled. “We need a tree-sit. A round-the-clock tree-sit.”

Silence fell at the new suggestion.

“Two lines of defence, the road and the trees,” Terry said. “Brilliant.”

A stir of excitement rippled through the group.

“Great plan. Who will go up?”

“Me,” Cougar volunteered. “Me and Squirrel. We can do it.” Squirrel raised his eyebrows but didn't object.

Jen stood. “I'll go too,” she said. “We need a strategy. If we spread the tree-sit out they can't cut within a tree height radius of each tree without hurting us.”

“We'll need equipment,” Terry said. “And know-how.”

All attention shifted to Paul and me.

“Will you help us?” Mary walked over and took Paul's hand. I nearly gagged, waiting for the woman to flutter her eyelids and pout.

He hesitated. “Faye?”

I forced my gaze from the saccharine scene between Paul and Mary to the ragtag gathering, the weight of their hope directed at me. They didn't know what they asked of me. To jeopardize my reputation, to step over the line of objectivity. I shook my head. “No, I can't.”

Paul took my arm and steered me to the other side of the clearing. “They need us. It'll be safer if we help,” he said, then added. “Do you want to see our trees coming down?”

“Of course not,” I said, shaking his hand off, the rain pelting onto our heads. I pulled up my hood. “But I'm working through proper channels.”

He gave a short laugh. “Your proper channels don't seem interested in talking.”

“They have to,” I argued. “We have the murrelets now.”

He glanced back over at the shelter where the protesters had resumed talking among themselves. Mary watched us from the edge of the group. “A tree-sit might delay logging long enough for you to get answers.”

I wavered, the suggestion compelling.

“Who will know?” he said. “They won't tell the company we helped.”

Cougar? Mary? Could I trust any of them? I crossed my arms. “No, Paul, I can't.”

“Well, I'll do it without you then,” he said and stalked away.

I watched him return to the circle. The group cheered. Terry slapped him on the back. Mary threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. My chest tightened. I was losing him. To Mary. To my principles. I checked my watch. Enough time for a call in to
PCF
's office. No signal and I'd drive to their yard, to Vancouver if I had to. I grabbed keys, wallet, and cell phone and headed up the soggy trail for the car.

I collided with two hikers around the first bend. They were shrouded in rain gear, appearing like bulging packs with legs. One of the hikers stepped back and called out a muffled greeting. Sodden wisps of white hair had escaped from the edge of her rain hat and were plastered on her cheek. She let her hood fall back from her face. Her glasses were fogged up.

“Hello, Faye,” the woman said.

“Mother?” I gasped. “What on earth are you doing here?”

• • •

Terry and
Paul left in Terry's four-by-four to drive to town to buy ropes, gear, tarps, and plywood. The rest of the group, buoyed by the new plan, maintained a presence on the rain-shrouded road. They dodged two loaded logging trucks hauling out of the upper valley and endured the posturing, taunts, and curses of homebound loggers at the end of the day. I spent the afternoon trying to convince Grace and her best friend Esther to go home.

I sat on a stump under the kitchen shelter and watched the two women set up their camp in the rain. In spite of the bulk of her bright yellow slicker and pants, Grace carried herself with an elegance I had always viewed with awe and envy, the fluidity of her movements suggesting her limbs were made of air or water instead of bone and tendon. She never dropped things, or stumbled, each step, each hand gesture a flawless choreography. I knew she'd danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet until she quit, at twenty-two, to marry Mel and have children. No regrets, she always said. I found the trade hard to believe. A life of dance, music, and fame for Mel, Qualicum, and three rowdy children? My birth a certain shock. Grace must have hoped for a girl. Ballet lessons and pink tutus, satin toe shoes. Instead, after two galumphing boys who preferred hockey and soccer, she got me. A tiny mutation on a single chromosome.

I was my mother's fall from grace. When I asked her about my birth, she merely described my emergence “more difficult than the boys”; that relatives and friends had exclaimed on sight of my week-old face, “but she's so pretty.” My interpretation: the birth was hell, the relatives shocked. As a romantic teenager, I'd conjured the momentous occasion up with pen and paper. I remembered the embarrassing gist of it.

Unlike my elder brothers, who slid from Grace's womb with the ease of soft fruit dropping from a tree, I nearly killed my mother the night I was born. Twice.

In the hours between midnight and dawn, the time when all things mysterious and life-wrenching happen, after thirty-six hours of labour—and a crescendo of drug-induced contractions—I burst into the world with an audible pop that turned the heads of the nurses, Mel hovering in the hallway, the doctor waiting with gloved hands.

Pop. The sound of rectal muscle parting against the force of the baby's too-large head. The first sign of my lack of elegance.

I dropped, newborn, into startled silence.

Chaos erupted against the absence of a cry. While the room filled with monitors, machines, and an emergency medical team, Grace, confused, lifted her empty arms from the pillow. “Where's my baby?” The doctor, a kind woman with liberal leanings, focused like everyone else in the room on the scene in the corner—the oxygen tank, the wheeled incubator, the mutterings of the neonatal specialists—turned back to the bed, eyes tired above the white paper mask over her mouth.

“A girl . . .”

Of course I didn't know any of this. I didn't know if the doctor was kind, a woman or liberal. The precise instant of birth. Whether my father gaped at my stunted and bowed legs, willing me to die, or Grace's tears of regret mingled with the first watery stream of breast milk on my tongue. I had torn up the story into bite-sized pieces one day years later and fed them to my gerbil.

“I draw the line at sleeping on the ground.” Grace manoeuvred a light folding camp cot through the door of their full-height tent. “We are over sixty.” Grace appeared a decade younger, few wrinkles and slim, her hair—the white still streaked with coppery brown—swept up in a coil at the back of her elegant neck.

“Why don't you draw the line at camping altogether,” I argued. “Go home and write letters, make phone calls. I can give you a list,” I said. “I'm sure Terry would have lots of suggestions.”

“After all the work it took to get here? Besides, didn't you get my email. I explained it all to you. Affirmative action. Peaceful resistance.”

I mumbled about a lack of a connection. Rainbow, on sick leave from the blockade because of a runny nose, called out from Grace's tent where she was testing out Esther's cot, “Let them stay, Dr. Faye.”

“You keep out of this,” I shot back.

“I'm afraid you have no say in the matter, dear. Esther and I are here to do what we can to help.” Grace shook her sleeping bag from its sack and tossed it through the door to Rainbow.

Esther, Grace's loyal friend for thirty-five years, looked her age and was quite capable of dropping things and stumbling. She hammered in a stake at the corner of the tent. “Your mother and I never back down from a fight for justice.”

I knew Esther spoke the truth, she and Grace a formidable team at the endless marches I endured along with my brothers, Esther's four children, and a dog or two, the dogs tolerating banners with slogans like
Paws for Peace
or
I Bark for Human Rights
.
Save the Trees
was no different.

“What about Dad?” I whined, childishly.

“Your father can take care of himself for a few days. I told him he could bail us out if necessary.”

“You're not going to get arrested, are you?”

“If need be,” she repeated.

“It's not going to help,” I insisted.

Grace fixed me with the gaze that never failed to stop me in my tracks, my mother's sharp opal eyes pinning me to the wall or in this case a tree. “‘It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head than to crawl on one's belly.'”

How could one argue with Mahatma Gandhi?

“Come on, Rainbow,” I said. “Let's go make lunch.”

• • •

As soon
as the loggers abandoned the upper valley for the night, locking the gate behind them, the defenders packed the supplies needed to establish the tree-sit. Mary, Grace, and Esther remained at camp to watch the children and the belongings. I avoided the preparations, intending to hole up in my tent, get an early night, resume my aborted mission in the morning, find some answers. I made a quick visit to the latrine and was cinching up my belt, pondering the logistics of hauling half sheets of plywood up into a tree in the dark, when the sound of voices approached from the direction of camp. I peered around the crude privacy curtain erected by Esther an hour earlier and witnessed Mary, childfree and leading a feckless Cougar, run into view. The woman leaned back against a tree and pulled him to her, her hands tangled in his matted hair. He curved into her, grinding his pelvis against hers, and the two of them moaned and grunted like rutting bears, tongues flicking. Cougar lifted her skirt with one hand and tugged at his belt with the other. Horrified, I searched around for an avenue of escape.