Season of Storm (15 page)

"Of course not," she said, confused once again by how swiftly this harmless old man could ruffle her. Wilfred laughed, dropping the wooden spoon into the saucepan he held. He leaned forward and tapped her forehead with a finger.

"Or maybe if things get too quiet on the outside the war will start in there?"

Well, what on earth did he mean by that? "It just so happens," Smith told him irritably, "that my father is dangerously ill in the hospital, and that my life has been threatened if he doesn't accede to your people's ransom demand. So I'm kind of curious about whether the two of us are going to live or die."

"No, this isn't true. You know you are going to die," said Wilfred, placing a plate of thick-sliced brown bread on the table and sitting down opposite her. Smith stared at him, her eyes wide, her heart pounding crazily. "Everyone knows he is going to die. What you want to know is
when.
Because you think that if you did know, you could control events."
 

Smith breathed out on an outraged sigh. Her heart was still thumping in fear. "I thought you were telling me that they were going to kill me," she said; and then after a moment, "Are they?"

Wilfred stopped chewing. "I don't know,'' he said. "The world is very crazy. Things are crazy. Maybe there are some Chopa people who have been listening to the news too much."

"I'd be more interested to know if there are Chopa people who have been to one of the PLO's terrorist training camps," Smith said. The words came out as the thought formed, and the moment she heard them, a fear worse than anything she had felt before overtook her. She remembered her first vision of those five balaclava-masked figures around her father's bed, and suddenly anything seemed possible—except that she would get out of this alive.

For the first time the thought that if her father didn't give in to the ransom demand she really might be killed sank deep into her mind.

He must,
she thought desperately.
He has to love me enough for that, he
has
to give in. If I could only make him understand how much I want to live....
 

"Where's the phone?" she demanded. "Johnny's hidden the phone, and I want it."

Wilfred Tall Tree looked at her from gentle wise eyes and said nothing.

"I want it! I want to phone my father!" she demanded hoarsely, her voice beginning to crack. "I can tell him, I can make him understand, Wilf, if you'll let me call him. He'll listen to me—" Smith broke off as the sobs welled up from within, choking her. She felt a terrible sense of urgency, as though she had lived her life all wrong up to this moment, and if she died now her twenty-six years on the earth would have been a waste. She wanted to live, she had to live so that she could change things, so that her life would not have been wasted....

Gradually Smith became aware of the regular click of fork against plate. She lifted her head self-consciously. Wilfred Tall Tree was calmly eating the meal he had prepared. Smith wiped her eyes with her hands and sniffed. Then she reached for the paper napkin beside her fork like a guilty child. She didn't even know
how
to cry, she thought suddenly. Women were probably supposed to cry delicately into a handkerchief, not howl like a bull and then blow a reddened nose with a sound like a trumpet.
 

But there hadn't been much training in femininity since her mother had died. And lumber camps and sawmills weren't the best places to succumb to tears. Not for the boss's daughter.

Smith blinked her tear-spangled lashes at Wilfred Tall Tree as her breathing calmed. Then she scooped up a forkful of the vegetable concoction and tasted it. It was a delicate mixture of flavours, almost like a Japanese dish.

She eyed Wilf suspiciously. "I'm always crying when I'm around you," she said. "I never cry."

Wilf chewed thoughtfully. "Why not?"

She hiccuped into laughter. "I don't know. I really don't know." She paused and rubbed a damp cheek again. "It's really not so bad, is it?"

***

The telephone was probably not in the filing cabinet, anyway, Smith realized, examining the results of her efforts. The idea had been a product of her angry determination. Chances were it was in Wilf's cabin, because it would be almost criminally negligent for Johnny Winterhawk to take with him their only means of communicating with the mainland. Wilf was in his cabin now. She had told Wilf she was going for a nap, then watched him go down to his cabin before coming to search the study.  

She sank down into the chair behind the desk and gave up. She wasn't going to get into those filing cabinets. She had searched the room high and low for a key. Cursing, and remembering how easily she had once picked the lock on one of the filing cabinets at St. John's, she had spent a fruitless half hour trying to conquer Johnny Winterhawk's. At St. John's everyone had been so appalled by the ease with which she had jimmied the lock that the cabinets had immediately been changed for stronger ones that promised to be more secure. Even in her frustrated anger Shulamith was hoping that the cabinets now housing St. John's company secrets were as difficult to break into as Johnny Winterhawk's, and was making a mental note of the manufacturer's name in case they were not.

She had tried to pull the cabinets over on one side in the way she had heard about, but the four high cabinets were so heavy she could not even move them. She might have been able to tip them forward on their faces and let them smash to the ground, but unless they broke open on impact, which she doubted, what would have been the advantage in that? The noise would bring Wilfred Tall Tree, and that would be that.

There was one smaller cabinet at the end, which she could move, and she had dragged it down on its side, but nothing magical had happened to the lock and it was too heavy for her to lift back. Now it lay on Johnny Winterhawk's polished oak floor, mute testimony to her activities.

Smith sighed. Oh, well, she supposed she would be confined to her room after this. What difference did it make? She looked down to the absent watch on her wrist, a habit she couldn't seem to break, then wandered to the window and stared down at the tiny cove below.  How long it would be before he came home?

She wandered to the bookcase that ran the length and height of the wall that faced his desk. He was right: there were lots of books here that looked as though they might fill the gaps in her social education as far as native rights were concerned.

I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
She had heard of that one.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The Unjust Society.
He had shelves full. Conscious of a sense of reluctance, Smith put out her hand and pulled one off the shelf.
The Unjust Society
by Harold Cardinal. The title didn't bode well for her feeling that someone had been looking after social wrongs while she was concerned with other things.
 

"Chapter One. The Buckskin Curtain. The Indian-Problem Problem," she read. "The history of Canada's Indians is a shameful chronicle of the white man's disinterest, his deliberate trampling of Indian rights...."

Smith closed the book with a snap and put it back on the shelf. "No, thank you," she said aloud. "Anyway, it's not my fault." Restlessly, she moved to his desk and sat. She flicked an eye over the things on his desk top and then pulled open a drawer she had searched earlier.

The one full of writing pads and notebooks, and a tray of pens and pencils.

I could keep a diary of this,
she thought dryly.
Someone might publish it for its curiosity value, especially if I'm killed in the end. Kidnapped people probably go through some interesting mental processes....Dear Diary,
this morning I did the laundry and read a book but didn't go outside even though it's a beautiful day; and after lunch I tried to get into Johnny Winterhawk's filing system. I was hoping to find the phone. Last night....
 

Smith bit her lip. She didn't want to think about last night, because last night she had been crazy. Last night she hadn't been herself at all, and what had happened was the scariest thing that had ever happened to her.

Shulamith gazed down at the faint blue lines of a blank notepad. She could hear the soft sound of the waterfall outside the broad span of glass, and all the greenery was glistening and rich.

Poetry had been a closed book for years, she had given all that up during university. But she suddenly felt almost feverish in her need for some sort of activity.

"Quite often practice makes perfect," Johnny had said. There was only herself and the blank page. And she had to do
something
.
 

Fourteen

You are a nomad

Desert dweller

Your eyes

Hot with thirst

Your eyes

It is not me you see

It is the reflection of your desire

In the burning sky

I have no water for you

My throat also is dry...

Why do you burn me?

Your mouth is a naked flame

Why do you put naked flame to a dry wood?

Life dies when forests burn

Your mouth is a naked flame

I said I loved you

I do not love you

It was the shape of your head

Against a window

Some primordial template

Meaningless...

Shulamith threw down her pen, ripped yet another page from the pad and crushed it in one irritated hand. Johnny Winterhawk. She didn't want to write about Johnny Winterhawk! She didn't feel anything for him, it was stress messing her mind. There was a lot more than him burning in her—why couldn't she get to it?

She sat back in her chair, idly balling the paper in her hand as she gazed sightlessly at the discarded sheets that now littered the kitchen table, the new blank page in front of her.

She had forgotten what hard work poetry was. Over the past few years she had been remembering that brief period of serious writing as being filled with a stream of flowing creativity, but the hard labour she had just put in gave the lie to that. The process was familiar to her, but after so many years it was a distant, difficult familiarity.

Or perhaps it was just that she was resisting?

She had wanted to convey the nameless, formless longing that she felt from time to time, but it kept coming out clothed in a yearning that was too immediate, too specific. Somehow that old familiar longing had fixed itself on the last man in the world she could fulfil it with—her kidnapper.

Smith dropped the crushed page onto the table and slowly stood up, moving towards the window to stare out over the balcony and the treetops to where the sun glinted on water in the distance. There was a languor in her limbs, as though the poetic process had been erotic. She clenched her jaw briefly. Well, the creative process
was
erotic, of course it was. Of course there was something almost sexual in the act of pulling out your own deep responses and submitting them to the light of day....
 

Anyway, the writing's crap,
she told herself.
What did you expect? You're a timber merchant, not a poet!
 

Smith collected the discarded sheets of her writing and impatiently stuffed them into the garbage bin. Then she moved out onto the balcony.

It was a hot day, she discovered with surprise. Very hot. The house, protected by trees, was cool without benefit of air conditioning, and the heat that beat on her now as she stood in the sun-drenched square of afternoon sun surprised her. They must be in for a heat wave.

She moved toward the chair that he'd sat in last night, telling her that story of terrible beauty. Did he really imagine that he and she were some kind of reincarnation of that distant ancestor and his foreign lover? That what he felt was a kind of compulsion from the spirit of the man called Tree By Itself? It was crazy! Wasn't it? And if so, what was supposed to be driving
her
? Was she supposed to believe that the red-haired woman who had come out of the sea had fallen in love with a stranger in a strange land who—what? Rescued her? Or simply considered her his property? Snatched her up and....
 

The way Johnny Winterhawk snatched you?

She did not love him. It was hallucination.

Smith put out a hand to the smooth wood of the chair back and her stomach knotted, as though Johnny Winterhawk had left some trace of his desire behind to reach for her now with invisible hands.

"I will teach you to like it," she whispered, and felt the sun burning on her hair, her breasts, her thighs. It was too hot; it was making her feel faint.

Below her, the Pacific sucked and pounded in the rocky gorge, and suddenly Smith was running, down the steps and over the rocks as though someone chased her, to follow the steep narrow trail that led deep into the forest cool, down and down toward the sea.

"There's a bit of sand beach down that path," Wilfred Tall Tree had explained when she caught sight of the faint trail from the kitchen window. "It's a good place to beach a canoe." He laughed, and she knew he was laughing at her.