Smoke River (19 page)

Chief White’s shoulders drop.

A long, disapproving
phssst
comes out of Clarence’s mouth. “You’re not serious,” he says. “You can’t be serious, Shay. You’re going to argue the original treaty? That will take forever.
Forever
. They will tie you up in discovery so long you’ll run out of money before you see the inside of a courtroom. That plays right into their hands. It’s idiocy – criminally stupid.”

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that last word,” she says. She’s halfway out of her seat.

Clarence shakes his head.

After all these years she still can’t tell if he is angry or truly surprised.
Our kid is going to preschool in the Legion?
he asked when she announced that Pete-Pete would learn the Mohawk language before he mastered English. She had to clear away beer bottles and ashtrays in the morning, wash the tables with baking soda and vinegar, open the doors to fresh air before the elders showed up.

Konkwehon:we
, Pete-Pete said one day, pointing to his chest, looking up at his parents. His smile used every part of his face.
Yes, baby, real people. You are one of the real people
, Shayna whispered. Her chest rattled. Her eyes watered. After that, nothing but her child could sate her hunger, ever really fill her up. Clarence knew it.

She pushes back her chair. Her ex-husband will suffer for that unkind word; she needn’t draw more attention to it. Still, she can’t muster the grace for shaking their hands. She leaves wordlessly.

Outside the council offices, Shayna is marshalling her resolve to walk back to the barricade when a voice from a parked truck stops her. “Can I offer you a ride?”

She starts. Elijah Barton is hanging out the window of his red pickup.
There are more reasons to be wary of this man than to trust him
, Shayna thinks. But she is tired and the distance she has to walk daunting. She climbs in.

Inside, the truck gleams with newness. Shayna sinks back. He will ask her what she is doing here, and she hasn’t the energy to lie. Perhaps Clarence better understands the nature of the compromises required when being strategic, when making alliances, she thinks. But she’s smart enough to recognize everything that a man like Elijah can lend to their cause. For now, that feels smart enough.

W
hen her father, Vilja, died – his body jaundiced, thin as a stewpot chicken – Ella started to run. It was the winter she was in grade ten. The high school track and field stars were the high-cheeked children of landowners and tobacco farmers, realtors and bank managers. Her father had picked tobacco in the summer, cleaned toilets in the winter. Accents clung like gristle to his and her mother’s English, and the air in their rented house was oiled with cooking and nicotine. Tryouts were in April. She tied on the North Star runners her mother had fished from the discount bin on her twice-yearly bus trip to the Pemcoe Zeller’s and told herself,
I will make that team
. The December air was chafing, the roads polished with new ice. Damp and salt loosened her shoes’ leather stripes, which flapped as she ran.

The echo of her father’s deep voice, his singing, followed her through the wintry monochrome.
There are things I cannot
be and others I can
, he told her once, and she wondered then if he were making excuses for the drafty house, the fact that he was not the popular musician he’d been in Budapest. When he was gone, the words took a different shape. Surely he was telling her to focus on what was possible. So she ran.

Every day she returned from school, did the dishes left by her mother, thawed a portion of venison left over from her father’s hunting trips or a package of beef kidney bought on sale from the
IGA
, checked her parents’ darkened bedroom to whisper,
Édesanya?
and listened for a soft murmur of
Édesem
from her mother’s lumpen grief. Then she layered her clothes and tied on the North Stars, stiff from sitting by the radiator. Her toes were angered by chilblains and her legs protested with shin splints, but she grew stronger and faster. And as she did, she imagined her lungs being scrubbed of her father’s endless cigarettes, whose smoke still hung in the curtains, clung to the threadbare settee, and permeated the synthetic down of her winter jacket.

By the time she was in grade eleven, Ella was a regional 1,500- and 5,000-metre champion. But in the district competition that year, her first, she choked. She’d never been on an overnight excursion outside Doreville, had never seen a university campus, never connected running to a future, an escape.
You’re holding back, Ella
, her coach said.
You have more doggedness, more potential than anyone I’ve ever seen. But it’s as if when it really means something, you don’t know how to turn on your win switch
.

Her coach bought her new shoes. He slid the box across his desk towards her without a word. Shame bled warmth into her cheeks.
Next year
, he said,
you will win the district. These will help
. She took them. They were part of the either/or dilemma he presented her with. She couldn’t leave this place, couldn’t do better than her parents, without finding her win switch. There were six weeks left of grade eleven when she began to run trails along the banks of the Smoke River, jumping over logs, landing in brackish
puddles, letting the sumac switches flagellate her, all the while repeating in her head,
Turn on your win switch
. After a month, her forearms and calves were striated with bramble scratches, her feet blistered from the ungiving new shoes. She felt no nearer to understanding what the coach wanted from her when she stumbled over a large rock and yanked an ankle ligament.

Cross-train
, said her coach when she hobbled through his door.
Go work out with the swim team until the end of the school year. They haven’t competed yet, so they’re hungry. It’ll be good for you while your ankle heals
.

In the spring of that year, an Olympic-size swimming pool had been added to Pemcoe Secondary. Derek dePonde, who supplied curing kilns to every big tobacco grower in the region, made a donation that got his picture in the local paper and his name on the beet-coloured brick. The bronze letters were a foot high:
DEREK DEPONDE POOL
. Everyone referred to it as
da pond
at first. After the elementary school kids started busing across town to take swimming lessons, it became the
DDPee
.

The pool change rooms still had the smell of new paint. Ella was issued a standard one-piece racer-back red Speedo that clashed with her hair, flattened her breasts like a gymnast’s, and pinched her uncomfortably at the inner thighs. The other swimmers were broad-shouldered girls with big voices who shook their legs and slapped water over their bellies like playful seals.

There was a nervous ferocity to the way the girls torpedoed down the fifty-metre lanes, slicing up the two million litres of water. Ella struggled to keep up in the outside lane, pulling herself out of the pool at the end of practice. Spent, she sat on the tiled edge, her head down, her shoulders slack, her legs dangling in the water.

In the half-hour between the end of girls’ swim team practice and the beginning of the boys’, when the pool was deserted, Ella would linger in the water, waiting for the terminally boisterous
girls to vacate the change room. She dreaded that one of the nicer ones would try to start a conversation with her.
You’re doing so well! How is your ankle healing?
She wanted to be alone with the shower’s inexhaustible water pressure, its perpetual heat. She didn’t want new friends she could never invite back to her smelly home.

One day she was on her back in the water, her legs kicking aimlessly, when she heard a splash and felt a surge that pushed her sideways. Surprised, Ella let go of the flutter board under her head and stopped kicking. For a moment she was entirely submerged and looking at a long, tanned figure parting the water as if it were soft butter.

She made her way to the ladder and turned. The swimmer had already pushed off from the opposite end of the pool and was rocketing back towards her – a goggled head, a gleaming set of arms vectoring outwards with a fringe of water unravelling behind. Mr. Ellis, one of the history teachers, appeared at the end of pool with a whistle around his neck.
Stercyx! Stercyx! Save something for practice
.

As Coulson Stercyx pulled himself to standing at the pool edge, rinsed out his goggles, and bowed his torso in a luxurious stretch, Ella recognized a force both big enough and graceful enough for all the pool’s newness, its upstart ambitions. That’s what the win switch looked like – she knew it. It was a thing to behold. She never shook off that first impression of him.

Ella glances out the window at her back gate and the meadow beyond it and feels the cramp in the small of her back relax. She is wearing a fresh cotton blouse, slim-fit black jeans, new open-toed sandals with a saucy wedge. Under her arm she has tucked a fresh copy of
Tobacco Diversification Strategy: New Challenges and Opportunities for Interlake Farmers
.

“Where you off to?” Mitch asks as she applies melon lipstick in the hallway mirror and fluffs her hair.

Thirty days into the barricade and her husband is like a dented boat; formerly purposeful and energized, he lists towards being hangdog and needy. Ella has overheard him trying to move things forward. His voice resonates through the office doors. If it is loud and exhorting, tinged with desperation, she knows he is talking to lawyers or politicians.
Do something. Get the cops to raid
. A softer voice, on the verge of wheedling, means he is assuring skittish creditors and presold unit holders.
Hang on. It’ll blow over. The properties will go up in value
.

Twice now, after talking late into the night, a tumbler of Scotch at his wrist, Mitch has fallen asleep at his desk. A case of Dalwhinnie arrived midweek, delivered by cab from the liquor store.
When did we start getting home deliveries of booze?
Ella barked from the foyer. He answered by pushing his door shut.

“I have an appointment with Coulson Stercyx. You know how slippery he is. This is the best time to meet with him.”

All morning she’s searched for a focus, something that will help her to feel well-groomed, unafraid, purposeful. Her office is clean. Her calendar is organized. That leaves only one unfinished item on her to-do list: her yearly discussion with Coulson Stercyx. He vexes her more than any of the region’s other remaining tobacco growers – a motley tribe of grizzled Belgians, paprika-stained Hungarians, garlicky Poles, and their ill-mannered, entitled, agricultural-college-graduate sons. She is wearing down the others in stages; Coulson is the only one she can’t reach. As the clock inched towards noon and she couldn’t conjure a more appealing task, she picked out a freshly dry-cleaned outfit, hopped in the shower, brought a heartfelt brio to her toilette.

“Do you have to look so damn good to see a farmer?”

Ella swings her head around and notices the slackness of her husband’s face, the puffiness under his eyes. “Mitch, it wouldn’t hurt to tidy yourself up, get yourself out of the house.
You’ll feel better.” And then she sails past him, out the patio doors and through the back gate.

It occurred to Mitch at a young age that he would never have his wished-for growth spurt. His stocky frame held fast to a boy’s softness; it resisted muscle no matter how many pull-ups he did, sneaking out to the monkey bars at a nearby primary school. His face, the thinness of his hair, the seriousness of his expression seemed to have slid towards middle age by the end of adolescence. He learned quickly to offset his deficits with good manners and strategy. At seventeen he was the point man and bookie for the drag races that made Doreville summer nights hum with distant engine song.

The tobacco growers’ kids had Trans Ams, shovel-nosed Firebirds, and Ford pickups, even Buick Regals. The native kids had Dusters, juiced-up
GMCS
, and no fear. And Mitch, who’d found late in his high school career a branch of mathematics that appealed to him – odds – developed something he’d never had before: a reputation. He wasn’t known as a pothead or a rebel or a rich kid, but everyone knew Mitch had a taste for a gamble, and that he could be trusted with others’ money. The protocol was simple: a challenger pulled his muscle car into Mitch’s father’s grocery store parking lot, found Mitch in the store behind the deli counter, and asked him if the store stocked
Road & Track
magazine.
We only stock
Car and Driver.
It’s better
, Mitch would answer. And then they would wander over to the sundries aisle, which was usually deserted, and arrange the race, the preliminary wager. Over the next few days, prospective bettors had to buy a pack of gum or cigarettes from his father’s store if they wanted to get in on the action. It was good business, and if the old man suspected anything, he never said so.

In 1981 the best place to drag race was along the dirt and gravel road that passed the outer boundary of the reserve and divided two large tobacco farms, one of which belonged to the Stercyx family and the other to a Frenchman named Flavelle. Mitch and his friends called the road Tobacco Ridge. It sat at a slight elevation from the fields it bisected, a narrow drumlin that made driving at high speeds in the wrong direction all the more thrilling for the steep bailout required should an oblivious driver come cresting over the ridge going the right way.