Smoke (29 page)

“Is there something you're trying to confess, dear?”

“Don't be drippy, Walter. This is not the time or the place for your brand of humour.” Hazel sits right on the edge of her pew and points at Gladys and Herb Peacock. “We must take action. It could be your place robbed next.” Then she points at the minister's wife. “Or
yours
.”

“Hazel is right,” says Percy. “No disrespect Tom, but if it was your place ransacked I think you'd be singing a different tune. I want this fellow caught and I want him caught now.”

“I wish I'd kept better track of foreigners stopping in at my place,” says the owner of the dairy bar. “I've got a gun in the back now. Any more funny business and I won't be accountable for my actions.”

“Jelly Bean can do up warning signs for those who want one,” Hazel continues. “We could at least try and scare him off.”

“I want one.” Gladys raises her hand.

“So do I,” says Len. “And what if we take turns patrolling Main Street?”

“Hold on now.” Tom adopts a calmer tone. “I thought we were just meeting to talk. We sound like a bunch of vigilantes.”

“Oh I suppose you'd rather set out a welcome mat just like you did with the marketing board,” says Len. “Let in any outsider who wants in. Next thing, you'll be having that rotten thief over for dinner.”

“Better him than you.”

“All right gentlemen.” Minister Duff gestures for them both to take a seat. “Remember where we are. This community has always been a peaceable one and look what's happening; we're turning on each other. Now, I suggest we let the law deal with it.”

Hank glances sheepishly at Susan Rombout as his father sits, shaking with rage. Tom has been publicly humiliated and it's taking every bit of strength he has not to leap over the pew and grab Len by the neck. Buster faces his father, unable to think of a single thing to say to match the man's toppled, wooden expression or make up for such a halting. All at once he feels part of the community again; he isn't the only one with a cross to bear—he is every man, all of them. He's Hank without Susan. He's Walter and Percy and even his father. “My dad's a stand-up guy,” he says, pushing onto his feet. “And I won't have folks saying otherwise.”

“Sit down,” says a voice from the side.

“Yeah, sit down,” says Hank, pulling on his brother's sleeve.

“Not until Mr. Rombout takes it back.”

“You're out of line, son. Let me handle this.”

“But it's not fair what he said, Dad. If it wasn't for you this place would still be full of blow sand and tumbleweeds. You shouldn't let him get away—”

“Sit down!” Buster does as he's told this time and Tom folds his arms across his chest. “Now Percy I've known your family for years. I want this bandit caught as much as you do. Let's post a reward for information leading to his capture. I'll throw in a few hundred to start. That oughta get the ball rolling.”

“Best idea I've heard so far.” George pulls his wallet from his back pocket.

“Count me in too,” says Walter.

Buster feels a migraine coming on. Embarrassment reddens his scarred face. He tried to stick up for his father like any loyal family member would do and his father still disapproves of him. He can't win. And then it hits him: There was a celebration in the streets the day of the dairy bar heist. The bandit could've been spotted by a number of people. Percy's mother was home when her place got robbed; she might have woken up. This Springford break-in took place when the family was eating breakfast together. The bandit doesn't want a sure thing, Buster thinks. He wants risk. And what would be his biggest risk yet? The sesquicentennial! Buster can hardly sit still as a plan begins to take shape. His father's solid form presses against his side like a warm stone pillar and Buster thinks, Don't give up on me Dad. Don't you give up on me yet.

“I'll collect donations and pass them on to the sheriff by midweek,” says Minister Duff. “If something unusual happens again this'll be a good incentive for folks to come forward. This hooligan has got to know we mean business.” He opens his large black bible and motions the congregation to rise in singing the Lord's Prayer.

Tom is slow to his feet. He shakes out one leg and then the other, straightens his good pants. “Our father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.” He's rattled by Len's attack and Buster's display. His son took his side and he was ungrateful. He bows his head. “Thy Kingdom Come, thywillbedone, on earth as it is in heaven.” He glances around surreptitiously. Just because he doesn't think God is housed within these four walls doesn't mean he thinks God isn't watching him at all. How many in his community agree with Len Rombout about the marketing board? How many are angry? “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the Kingdomthepowerandtheglory. Foreverandever. Amen.”

The prayer is recited as if by assembly line and this annoys Tom. Prayer is what you do, not what you say, he thinks. Prayer is a daily routine found in the fields, not a pious Sunday activity. It engages all of his senses. When he bends. Primes. When he waters and sows. He encourages life and devotes his own to it. Growing is arduous, fervent—his own passionate bonfire of belief—and judgment day doesn't come when Len Rombout or anyone else decides. It comes once a year at auction. It comes every morning in the form of his family's respect. And every night when he stands on the back patio, surveys the land and takes stock of what he's done with his own blood and sweat. Idleness is the only real sin. Idleness and vanity, and there's no time for standing around looking good.

“Dad?” Buster leans in, whispers. “Can I have my hat back now?” Tom looks at the fedora, feels its worn material on his callused palm. He remembers how he felt the night of the accident. How disgust can come at you from underneath yourself, driven up by some visceral force. Fear too. Fear that says “There but for the grace of God go I.” Of course Buster should have that surgery, he finds himself thinking. He'll do some figuring after harvest. If it had been Ivan Rombout or Donny Bryson who'd caused the fire Tom would have railed at the boys, demanded they be punished. He would have made amends, or at least shown Buster that he tried, on his behalf, to redress the injustice. But the accident was not their fault, it was no one's fault, so up to now he's done nothing. His hands are useless dry mitts against the softer felt of the hat. Anger lifts with his eyes.

“Here,” he says, gently crowning Buster with the fedora.

Tom stands beside Buster in the middle of the field. Hank is fifty feet away, trying to fix the joint where the irrigation pipe meets the sprinkler pipe, and floundering. The sun beats down relentlessly as Tom tries to understand what's gone wrong. They were arranging the irrigation system when something burst on that last sprinkler— the water pressure built up in a weak spot and the pipe blew off. A large part of his crop is in danger of drowning. The water, from an underground stream, is fed through a combination of points in the ground, supplying a larger main pipe. The whole contraption, Tom thinks, looks like a wagon wheel with a pump attached. The vacuum created by the pump sucks the water up through the pumps to the sprinklers and, with a liquid pulse, beats it out over the crop. The sound is loud at close range. At night Tom hears it from his bed, a rhythmic
pth, pth, pth
lullaby followed closely by the quiet
hum
of the motor in the background. It's reassuring.

Tom doesn't sleep much at this time of the year. He checks on the sprinklers at two-hour intervals all night long except nights like the last when he was too damned tired to haul himself into the field. Instead he'd gone into Lizzie's room, stood beside her crib and listened at the window for her breathing and for the unbroken sound of heaven spitting on his crops for good luck. He reached out to touch Lizzie's damp amber curls. “Remember, whatever's good for the crop is good for you.” Then he slipped out of the room as unobtrusively as he'd entered it, and back into bed beside his wife.

Now, he is impatient. “Hank for cryin' out loud, hurry up!” He twirls the wooden A-frame that he used earlier to measure across the field. He's thinking of the expanse of water pooling like a lake, barely twenty-three feet below them. Just this year an archaeological crew from the University of Western Ontario combed the property for arrowheads and told him that the body of fresh water sitting under his land was so pure it might as well have melted off an arctic glacier. This thought makes him feel worldly, though he had nothing to do with putting it there or discovering it. It also makes him agitated wondering what might happen if the vacuum somehow sucks that lake through the pipe and pours it out and over his tobacco. He calculates the cost of lost stalks—thirty-five acres at eight acres per field, two hundred and twenty-five feet wide, six hundred and ninety-five feet long. And that thing is delivering water at a rate of … six hundred gallons a minute? “Jesus Christ! Hank!” Tom turns to Buster. “Your brother's strong as an ox but sometimes he's as thick as one too. Hank! Shut off the pump, hurry it up!” Tom hands Buster a four-inch pipe. “Go see if this one fits any better, and tell him to get a move on.” Buster jogs to where the pump is, shuts it off, and then hurries over to his brother.

“Dad says make it snappy.”

“Dad can shove it!” Water spews up into Hank's face as it cuts out, soaking him. The cold liquid is a nice antidote to the hot sun. He forces the pipe down into the earth with both hands. It still won't stay in place. Now more than ever he wants to tell his father that he needs to go and work on the Walker farm. With money in his pocket he could approach Susan again without fearing she'll brush him off or make a joke of it.

“Here, try this one.” Buster hands him the larger pipe.

“He's being a prick,” says Hank replacing one pipe with the other. “I'm working like a dog. Anybody else'd be paid.”

“What's it worth, you figure?”

“Be damned if I know,” Hank says, without turning around. “Fifty a week at least. I should go work for George Walker. He asked me to, you know.”

“He did?” Buster is surprised by this. If Hank leaves to work for another farmer, even in livestock, their father would feel he's been stabbed in the back. Buster also knows Hank prefers raising animals to growing tobacco. “What'd you say?”

“What do you think?” Hank fastens the larger pipe more easily, kicks it down into the earth with his boot heel and gives it a good stomp. “There. That should do the trick.” He wipes his brow and waves to his father a few yards away. “Try it now!”

“It used to be I didn't think twice about being here,” says Buster. “Before my accident. But you always wanted something else. You should go work for George.”

“Dad'll flip.”

“Yeah. He'll get over it though.”

Why not leave? Hank thinks. He's got nothing to lose. He's the big brother of a freak now, which means that he might as well be the big brother of a track star or a rock 'n' roll legend. Any kind of celebrity. All of his misfortunes or ambitions, however small and petty by comparison, are irrelevant. Not even worth mentioning. It isn't fair. He is supposed to be first. First to drive. First to get a girl. Stronger, faster, superior. Now he's just average. No, worse than average, he is
the lucky one
. Hank knows that he should be grateful that the fire didn't happen to him, that he was down in the rumpus room watching television when it broke out, and most of the time he is, but sometimes, every so often, like now, when he feels his own demotion, he wishes it was him instead. “Thank Christ,” he says as the sprinkler finally spits and rotates. He turns towards Buster. “If I had to stay out here any longer I might go ape.”

“So ask Dad to cut you loose.”

“Right.” Hank shoves Buster. “That'd be like asking you to part with a bad mood.”

“Maybe, but you get what you settle for.”

They reach Tom, Hank dripping wet, and all three stand with their faces bent towards the sky watching as the last steel fountain rains down over the field like glass streamers.
Pth, pth, pth
. “Let's call it a day,” says Tom after a few moments, and they start back in the direction of the house. Tom walks, flipping the A-frame, one wooden leg around to the other. They advance in three-foot increments. He is happy to finally have both sons at his side again.

“Dad?” Hank feels every muscle in his body go rigid.

“Mmm.”

“It looks like the yield is gonna be good again this year. I was thinking maybe you could let me out of working harvest.”

Tom stops, balances the A-frame up against one thigh while he pulls a package of Players from his breast pocket and lights a cigarette. “That what you thought.” He resumes walking.

“That's right. Tobacco's not for me any more.” Hank looks at Buster, tries to sound less definitive than he feels. “I might like to take my chances at something else.”