Pontypool Changes Everything (26 page)

These stories are also the mark of membership in this community. In haying season all the farms join in a communal pool of machinery and labour. One farmer will cut several fields of hay, and another will bale them, and yet another will come along with a crew and a convoy of wide, flat trailers to haul the bales up onto conveyors that roll them offinto the black, dusty mows. This summer ritual binds the community. It is the counterpart to winter’s bitter collection of tales. The deep-blue ice of dependency and imagination give way to back slaps and bright forgetting in sunshine. All is forgiven. The good families are rising above.

The
HP
can see a man sitting in a tractor that drags a thresher across Jackson’s field. He has donated his labour and machinery in exchange for the use of Jackson’s combine. This man lost his combine back in ’67 after dishing out huge sums of money to lawyers. It seems that his son had come down with meningitis,
and the man had the bright idea that he’d treat him at home with massive injections from the same needle and medicine that he uses on newborn calves. He has kept his son at home ever since, locked in a room that has to be boarded against his freakish strength and mindless outbursts. His wife, who died in ’73, was supposed to have been torn limb from limb by her son one Christmas morning. No one can completely recall this terrible secret, and when the weather’s clear for a stretch in early August they slap their friend gratefully on the back as he mounts his tractor in their fields.

The engine clanks offand the man dismounts his tiny metal seat. In the quiet the
HP
hears another motor start up inside the barn. Jackson appears on top of a green tractor followed by the baler. They head toward a field that has already been cut. The
HP
runs toward Jackson, swinging his bottle of water and holding his cap down with his free hand. He has to sprint to catch up with the back of the baler. After two attempts he manages to clear the three heavy bars that drag on the ground. He steps onto the platform that also drags, bumpily, held by chains to the baling chute. The
HP
barely has time to pull the crisp leather of his gloves over his hands before the first bale rises shaking in the chute. The
HP
reaches down, forcing his fingers under the twine, and tests the integrity of the bale with a sharp pull. Too sharp. The bale springs into the air. He uses this momentum to assist in tossing the surprisingly heavy bale behind him, into position between the first and second bars. He succeeds in getting the bale in place but can’t recover his centre of gravity and flies headlong
over the long block of hay onto the ground behind it.

He shakes the dullness from his face and leaps to his feet. The second bale is already wagging at the sky and getting further away. It falls free of the chute and tumbles sideways. The ground grabs at it, pulling it off the platform. By the time the third bale appears the
HP
is standing behind it, reaching back again to the first twine. But this time he gives it only a respectful yank to encourage it along in the machine that, he knows now, is fully capable of doing most of the work. He slams the bale down beside the first, shifting his own position twice in order to preserve balance. He looks back at the second bale, now a hundred metres away, and knows that come the end of the day it will look lost and wasted in a field of neatly spaced, perfectly stacked triangles. The next bale is even less of a struggle. With these three forming the foundation of the structure, the
HP
slaps his full biceps optimistically and reaches over to swing out the fourth bale and begin the critical second tier. It falls on its heavy edge in the v-shape of the bales turned toward each other beneath it. The weight of the compressed hay binds their faces, pulling them towards each other, strengthening the structure. The
HP
heaves the last yellow obelisk into its slot. This forms an apex from which fall, on either side, the perfect sheer walls of a triangle. The last heavy bale makes the other tiers powerful. The
HP
kicks a heavy drop-forged pedal at the front of the platform, dropping the bars into the ground. The three edges at the base grip the earth, floating the A-frame off into the field behind the baler.

An optical effect is emerging. An illusion, one whose fidelity grows on the
HP
, as he creates second and third arrowheads. The field begins to flow outward in waves from the suddenly motionless platform, carrying buoys on waves that roll back from the distance. A hollow sky pulls at this figure, as he leans, in his fantasy, against the bailing chute. He raises the gloved fingers of his hand and traces an imagined coastline, as far away as the white morning moon, now a perfect pressure, light against his palm. The
HP
feels that he may die for seeing the field this way, and he very nearly cries. There is consciousness breaking in the soil, other people’s consciousness. A curl falling across Greg’s cheek appears in a quick spindrift of dust coming off a stone in the mud.
As long as I can see the moment everything changes.
As long as the
HP
can see the moment when everything changes, then everything in its vying is as good as home. And eventually, in an infinite cross-current of sadness and longing, every weak, blinking kindness is restored. And then, seconds later, lost. The
HP
feels for the first time in his short life, the millions of years it takes to produce a single, brief moment of passion.

At noon the tractor drops into neutral and Jackson jumps down. He turns off the baler and the
HP
realizes that in some way he has been sustained all morning by its roar. His arms throb, and his abdomen twitches. He looks down to make sure his body isn’t as huge as it feels. He feels like a perfect giant, gleaming and hard, with fingers too strong to move. Jackson stands beside the platform and removes his cap. He squats and presses a palm through the short grass.

“Ah-yeh. Don’t want it wet.”

The table is laid out with oversized plates and bowls steaming with multiple helpings of a variety of foods. A dozen steaks are bleeding down on each other beside a serving tray of ribs so tender that meat falls from the bones when the
HP
pulls back his chair. He fills his plate with slick, hot carrots and ice-cold beets. Harley, who has been cleaning the mow all morning, is watching television with his sister. Jackson stands, straddling the metal strip dividing the kitchen from the living room, watching the small black-and-white set. A young woman is holding a microphone under the chin of a man in a naval uniform.

“Ah-yeh. Ah-yeh. Don’t want rain.”

After lunch Harley helps Jackson on the baler and the
HP
is sent to the mow to wait for them to return from the field with the first load of hay. A neighbour was busy stacking bales on the truck while they ate lunch. The
HP
watches Harley trailing after Jackson across the field. He feels a drain of energy caused by the task of digestion. The
HP
walks slowly toward the barn. The younger man is picking up stones that his father kicks from the ground. He sails them through the air to bounce off an island of rocks in the middle of the field. The
HP
can see Jackson’s shyness even from this distance: his resignation and defiance. He’s a tightly packed, complex man who frowns when people laugh and seems never to have exhaled in his life.

The barn is dark inside, with shafts of white sunlight turning orange on the floor. The
HP
climbs a ladder of planks nailed across six-by-twelve uprights. At the top
he has to jump across an opening of a metre and a half onto a loft. A window at the peak of the roof opens out onto the field where Jackson and Harley are working. The black rubber of a conveyor belt obscures the view. The
HP
sits on a bale of hay and waits. The mow is a trap of nearly unbreathable air, where waves of heat rise, cooking the atmosphere through stale hay into a gas that holds the oxygen near the roof in a dark poison. The
HP
is having difficulty breathing, and when the conveyor rattles to life it takes him three attempts before he can stand without support. He can see the first bale climbing towards him, and he lays his shaking hands on the edge of the conveyor belt, taking its vibrations up his arms.

He believes that this bale will fall against him and drive him to the floor. He knows that they vary in weight, from about forty to seventy pounds, and that the range represents what is possible and what is now, in this strength-sapping fire, clearly impossible. The bale teeters at the top on a brief fulcrum and falls against the
HP
, driving him to the floor. He kicks his legs across the sliding chaff and rolls the bale, end for end, to a corner of the mow. The first tier can go like this. The second has to be lifted. So does the third. The fourth has to be heaved. The fifth has to be built by arms that push upward, straining and, hopefully, the
HP
thinks, numb.
At least I’m alone up here, no one can see me struggle.

Within an hour he has completed the first wall. He has begun to cough the cough that he’s been warned about. His lungs are skipping uncontrollably on a tripwire of chaff that is pulled taut inside them. He sputters
up a gluey fluid, speckled yellow, and he wipes his burning lips in the black acid that coats his forearms. The second wall seems to go quicker and he feels a muscle in his back break free to dominate his dying arms. The new muscle is a bright and powerful sensation, equal to the ruin it compensates for, and when he straightens he feels it push against him, tripping a series of recoiling muscles, retrieving his arms to his sides and cracking his thighs.

As he steps over the foundation of his third wall the
HP
notices the light in the mow shift from orange flame to purple. The conveyor stops suddenly and squeaks backward horribly before settling. He feels the silence as he did this morning, as a barrier against sensation dropping, and gravity returns to his limbs, pulling him down towards the floor. Above his head the rattle of rain stones up off the aluminum roof. This sound, cool and falling from far away, intensifies the heat and deafness in the mow.

From within the barn below him: “Ah-right!”

The
HP
makes the jump across to the ladder, floating almost as he climbs down. He feels the rungs in his hands as empty spaces, their surfaces held from his palms by bruises.

The haying isn’t finished, and the rain means they won’t resume for several days. A barn full of wet hay will eventually explode.

The dinner table is twice as laden and the
HP
finds himself eating smaller portions. He eats alone. Harley has showered and sped off in the car towards town to drink, and Jackson is having a beer himself, sitting in a
reclining chair. His daughter is colouring in a book on the floor in front of the television. Dolly is standing by the dishwasher with a long wooden spoon in her hand. She is looking through the house. It seems to the
HP
that she’s calculating. First, she looks to Jackson, then to the dog’s dish, then over to a fly banging against the window screen. She taps the spoon three times quickly and jumps visibly when she notices the
HP
looking at her. She recovers by smiling and tilts a bowl of greens toward him.

He returns the smile and says, “No, thank ya kindly, ma’am.”

She continues smiling and looks to her husband, who has now fallen asleep in the reclining chair.

That night the
HP
cannot sleep. He lies on the lower bunk, staring up into the dark. There is no space heater’s glow and the room is only present in its strong smells. He is picturing the people he shares the house with. Quiet, strong and beautiful. Jackson’s shyness and his intimate game with the sky. Harley’s coltish grin and addiction to showers. And Dolly. Dolly’s strange sight. She confers something with it.
She sees. What?

The Higher Power decides he’ll get up and wander through the house a bit. Listening. He gets to the upper floor and finds himself tiptoeing down the hall.

I shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t.

He stands in front of the master bedroom door and listens. The toy tractor of Jackson’s snore purrs. The
HP
turns and notices a soft light beneath the daughter’s door.

He presses his hand against it, and the door falls open.

She is sitting on the edge of the bed facing the wall. In a voice like a snapping twig she says, “Now what?”

When we began to look at putting out a new edition of this book, my editor and friend Michael Holmes asked me if I wanted to change anything. It hadn’t occurred to me that that would be part of the deal. Change it. I dug through some bookshelves to find a copy and cracked it open. Would I change anything? Really? As I read through the first few pages I realized that, no, I wouldn’t change anything — I’d change everything. It is not the book I would write today. I’m not the person who wrote this book. I remember him. He had just graduated with a degree in semiotics, which is to say he was insufferably preoccupied with literary malformations. He didn’t actually expect anyone to read it and he held this to be the book’s best virtue. He wanted to magnify the least recognizable parts of his thoughts and feelings. Not just a sketch book, but something far, far less. He wanted to write an “instead,” or an “in case.” “Instead” of a first novel. “In case” one day there might be something to say. “In case” I ever decide to write a book. It’s a place where a book might have been written. And so, and this is the aggravation of the book, and, indeed, the arrogance of the damn thing, it didn’t have to ever be a good one. When I read it and think, oh no, you shouldn’t have done that, and this part can’t work like that, I have to remember, it never really guarded itself against “bad” or “wrong” choices. And so, now that I have been asked to write this afterword, I realize it has to be an apology, not for the book, which can’t be helped, but for that fact that I was unfaithful to its first virtue: I have asked you to read it,
and now, sitting here at the end, I am telling you that it might be a mistake that you did.