Smoke River (44 page)

Others who’ve come from the reserve empty out from their vehicles and stand watching. A few men, some teenagers. All clutching handwritten lists, eager for items they’ve been doing without: light bulbs and plastic wrap, a can of coffee, bacon and hot dog buns. And for Helen, sugar, pastry flour, freezer bags. The grocery store has been their Switzerland, a place the politics of the blockade couldn’t spoil. Everyone understands the need to feed a family, especially the big-box store’s managers, who rely on the reserve for business.

Two cyclists arrive in front of the bridge. Helen recognizes Coulson’s primers, James and Diego. There is some conversation she cannot hear.

“Natives on bikes are still natives!” a young man from the bridge yells at them. There’s a cheer from the crowd. James and Diego look confused. They remain standing before the chain of townsfolk blocking their way until somebody yells, “Go back to where you came from! You’re not getting through.” James shrugs his shoulders and whispers into Diego’s ear; then they both walk their bikes towards the others who have been kept from entering.

Louis Greene marches up to the activist, so they are face to chest. A truck screeches in behind the scene and a
TV
cameraman jumps out.
Not again
, thinks Helen.

“It’s over. Don’t you listen to the news?” Louis tells them. “You should let people through. Children going hungry doesn’t dignify this protest.”

The activist, his face flushed carmine, pulls up his bullhorn, turns to the crowd, and addresses them. “It’s not over,” he screams. “They take land that isn’t theirs. Block roads that aren’t theirs. Terrorize our neighbourhoods. Then they saunter in for bread and cheese as if we’re on the same team.” His righteousness sprays out of the bullhorn, casts a driftnet of spit over the crowd. There is a chorus of hurrahs in response.

Louis says nothing. He doesn’t move. The bullhorn swings around, and now the activist is yelling directly into Louis’s unflinching face. “Police won’t enforce all the laws you break. So I’m making one, buddy. You don’t get to come here anymore. Got it?”

His words hang in the air for half a minute. The cameraman moves in closer. There’s a twitch in Louis’s jaw. He simply takes a step forward, a big man using up all the activist’s space, forcing him to stumble backwards with a yelp. Louis stretches his legs wide, folds his bare, tattooed arms so that their muscles clench. The crowd goes quiet.

And then a rock comes sailing out from behind the townspeople on the bridge. Helen lifts her eyes to see the shadowy path, curved as a swift’s flight. All the attention is on the two men facing off in front of them. And that is where the rock strikes, missing its intended target, hitting another.

Helen thinks how summer squash cracks under a sharp knife. The thin man’s head splits open at the top. His blood is thin and fast, and red drips from his chin like berry juice. He drops to his knees and Louis bends to help him, but the cameraman is there, moving in. He has stumbled onto great footage. Helen sees how awful it will look, how the picture will tell the wrong story.

Louis grabs the camera and levers it with his weight. The expensive piece of equipment falls to the ground, the cameraman stumbles after it, and then the Warrior has his foot on the cameraman’s back. He stomps.

“No! No!” Helen shouts.

A group of young men rush forward from the bridge and pile on Louis as if it’s a down in a football game. And Helen, who is tired of injustices, of waiting for the truth to alight from the sky like a bird with sharp talons, surprises herself by plucking a peach from one of the baskets in the back of her truck. She throws it. A soft orb of fruit, the colour of an Interlake sunset, hits one of the young men square on his shaven head. Orange-yellow viscera stream down his face and stick to his T-shirt collar. Helen rolls up her sleeve, picks up another. Shayna joins her. The families behind her are clapping and whistling now, and then James and Diego are at the back of her truck, and she nods her head in permission. The morning sky fills with rosy trajectories. The peaches fall and split against the townspeople’s signs, slime their faces in a baptismal of flung fruit. A few land in the river. The sirens get louder.

By the time the police cars arrive at both ends of the bridge, the peaches have been answered with rocks and eggs, pop bottles, a Thermos, dismembered lawn chairs. Two lines of officers form quickly. One pushes the townspeople off the bridge, the other compresses them in one quadrant of the parking lot. The air grows tight with angry jeers. Louis and the activist are handcuffed, taken away in separate squad cars.

When it’s over and the crowd begins to fall away, they remain sitting in the front seat of Helen’s truck, Shayna’s head hanging. Helen surveys the peach-dotted pavement and remembers her mother’s hair curling in the steam of jam-making. In the back of her truck, one basket of fruit remains, every one of its peaches singularly perfect and untouched amid the waste.
The way is clear to enter the grocery store, but neither woman has the heart. There are enough peaches to make a pie, perhaps two. She’ll borrow the rest of the ingredients and pay back her benefactors with a tithe of sweet pastry.

News of the government’s purchase of the
o’tá:ra
spreads around the blockade like rumours of an audacious theft, the dignity of disassembling it voluntarily, being the ones to announce it, stolen from them. Food tables are cleaned; plates, cups, utensils are thrown into plastic hampers. Some of the protestors drift off, and the remaining Warriors roll their sleeping bags and tie them, toss their tents and duffle bags into the backs of vans. They are gone within an hour, the white vehicles like sun flares on the asphalt horizon.

By late afternoon the police cars arrive. The officers are friendly but firm. It is time for the blockade to come down. “It’s your land now,” they’re told.

They all know that’s neither true nor untrue – impossible to decipher which.

“Give us a few hours,” Shayna tells the police. “It will be down before dark.”

The elders confer and organize a thanksgiving ceremony for those who have stayed, a sacred address normally used as an opening ritual. “There’s a beginning here too,” Linda Goodleaf says to Shayna.

Al Miller makes the address in the old language. Shayna has a stitch in her side that clangs with pain, but she holds herself still. “
Etho niyohtonhak ne onkwa’nikonra –
so now let our minds be as one on this matter,” the old man intones.

When it is finished, she slips away across the street to
Coulson’s fields. The day hangs with heat, the air as heavy-sweet as newly picked mint. A deerfly bobs around her head, and Shayna waves her hand, ducks. The fly intensifies its interest. It dives, swoops up, and dives again. She escapes deeper into the tobacco, unsettled by the biting insect, determined to outlast it, using both hands to flap at the space above her head. And because of the deerfly she does not notice right away the gathering of cars at the galvanized steel and wooden post barrier between the dead end of the asphalt and the beginning of a south field row.

She deciphers the motion of a swing, an arcing sledgehammer that knocks the posts out of their concrete casings as if they were teeth, leaving a ragged gap. Metal clatters as it hits the asphalt, sounds that crack open the quiet suburban twilight with a gleeful violence. There’s a hurrah and she sees a half-dozen figures run back to their trucks parked on the side of the road, and hears the engines turn on. The trucks plough right into the tobacco plants.

It seems to Shayna, as she runs through the east field, her arms waving, her screams of “Stop!” unheeded, that the tobacco puts up a fight. The plants cling to truck grilles, tangle themselves in rusted axles, rebound from the first flattening blow of rubber tires with their limbs snapped or crooked. For a moment they are shabby scarecrows. Then they are no more. The trucks are followed by a few cars and
SUVS
.

“Wait! Wait! The blockade’s coming down! You don’t need to. It’s coming down!”

The cars don’t follow each other in single file. Instead they spray like rifle shot, dirty and damaging. The south field, the largest acreage, which Shayna remembers from earlier that week as a low tent of summer yellow, is a holocaust of leaves and stalks. The vehicles career wildly into part of the east field, its nicotine-rich mid-leaves and tips still unpicked, plundering half of it as well, as quickly.

Three months of sunshine, rainfall, cool nights, morning heat. Ninety days of out-thinking weeds and birds and fungus, worrying about late frosts, rogue hail, dry spells. The bank loans secured by a future crop. The pleasures deferred.

She looks back to see Coulson running from the barn, carrying a hoe. Ramirez is behind him, wielding a shovel. Coulson swings at the cars, the metal clanging against windows, dragging along the paint of side doors. When one car veers too closely to Ramirez, Coulson grabs him, pulls him out of the fray. They are sidelined by the strength of combustion engines, arms limp at their sides, the garden implements fallen to the ground.

In twenty-five minutes it is over. The plants, a phalanx of good soldiers, are down. Shayna falls to the soil, bewildered. A man shouts at her through a rolled-down window. “We’re taking back our rights! Our highway!”

She stares at him. “Why hurt one of your own?” she says in a voice he won’t hear.

A few townies have finally found their way around the blockade. And the half-dozen who press their faces against the windows of their vehicles look bright with revenge, drunk on righteousness. A few are young but the rest are middle-aged, senior members of their community. It is already too late when the sirens reach them. Shayna watches Coulson from a distance and worries over the crimp in his stature; he looks like a standing heartbreak. It would be better to yell, she thinks, to pull out a shotgun and wave it around. What is it about land, about taking one’s living from it, that can crush a man? The one natural disaster he won’t have counted on is the impatience of his fellow citizens to get to work or the cottage or the shopping mall on a weekday evening.

She reaches up to her neck, touches the new bite there, swollen with itch, and turns around to finish her work across the road.

After the cars leave, Coulson runs into the farmhouse, up the stairs to his old bedroom to survey the damage. If he had a gash or a burn as a boy, he would lift the bandage to stare at it, if only to be awed by the queer sight of his own flesh rudely split, red-purple, gelatinous. Something alien, like an octopus or jellyfish.

There’s nothing pretty ’bout our kind of farming
, his father warned him early on. The summer before Coulson was born, his old man had been driving a highboy through the fields, spraying heptachlor to control budworm, when his horse got a scare, bucked, and sent his father keeling over backwards, bouncing off the chemical drums and dragging his face along a broken metal rib before he hit the ground. He got up with the white of his cheekbone peeking out from a flap of flesh, his smile ripped open at one side. He climbed back on the highboy to finish his work before he drove himself to the hospital. The scar that resulted – an ugly purple line that cut across his cheek and sank deep as a fishhook into the side of his lip – made others recoil. But to Coulson that scar was as intrinsic to his father as the old man’s strong nose, his heavy brow. He barely noticed it.

Now he can’t stop staring through his bedroom window at this new defacement, so many of his plants suppurating, the rot setting in. The south field took the worst of it. Half of the east field remains. The west field is untouched. But even with what he has already kilned, it won’t be enough to fulfill his contract, pay his bills. He feels a loss of will. He might just sell it all to Elijah Barton, even though its quality is too high for his discount cigarettes.

It’s been a cruelly perfect day for tobacco harvesting. The morning sun poked through a cheesecloth of cumulostratus, the kind of cloud that slows the heat but keeps the plants ripening apace, makes the air temperate and still burns off the dew – an
ideal morning. They spent it priming the south field’s cutters and moved to the east field after lunch. Now it’s dusk and Helen has laid out dinner on the picnic tables. No one is eating. Ramirez walks through the spoiled rows, holding his head.