When Is a Man (27 page)

“So why did your father build a bunkhouse here? The mill was quite a ways up the road,” Paul said.

Hardy looked mildly puzzled at Paul's question, then pleased. His large hands, scarred and leathery, slid a mug toward Paul. He pointed out the windows. “Where the deck is, that used to be two rooms full of bunk beds. Tore those down, finally, in '72.”

“Mr. Wallace, would you mind if I recorded our conversation?” He placed the recorder on the table.

Hardy shrugged, scrutinizing Paul's face through the shag of his eyebrows. “You said you were writing an article for the paper?”

“No.” There was no harm in keeping his reasons vague, not in this case. “Research project. More like a book, I guess.”

“A book. Better, even better. Good.” Hardy settled into his chair and rested his elbows on the table with a low chuckle. “Because he liked this place—the answer to your question before. He could watch the logs go past from here, and catch trout along the seam of the pool.”

Paul studied him a moment. Hardy was much more focused than he'd expected.

“Mr. Wallace, do you remember me? From the weirs on Basket Creek?”

Hardy stirred his coffee, staring into it. When he looked up, the smile he gave Paul was either embarrassed or crafty. “The officer mentioned that the person minding the fence didn't require an apology.”

“I suppose he doesn't.”

“Well, then,” Hardy said, satisfied. “Sugar?”

“As I mentioned, I've been asking people how the relocation affected them. What the big changes were, good or bad.”

“You get different answers depending on who you ask, don't you?”

“Of course.”

“It depends, for example, if you were fairly compensated or not.”

Paul cleared his throat. This was good, already edging close to delicate territory. “Were you?”

Hardy barked a single laugh. “Well,” he said. “Sometimes I think so. In strange ways.”

From his experiences interviewing people—it helped that he wasn't being confronted by a Wentz—he'd learned to respect silences, not to be afraid of them. While waiting for Hardy to continue, he gazed at the salt and pepper shakers along a dusty ledge, a piece of china, or the black-and-white photo on the wall. The photo, presumably taken from the forest above Lambert, showed farmland by the river, fruit trees in their tidy rows, clusters of raspberry canes and dirt roads, countless other details he couldn't make out. On a far wall in the living room hung a map, a yellowed and wrinkled white copy of the one Elmer had shown him: Lambert overlaid with its contour lines, property boundaries, and lot numbers.

Outside, gusts of wind swept snow off the trees and the roof of the house and sent white wraiths dancing over the river. How would he get home in this? Daunted now by the passing of time, he turned back to the table and began to fire questions at Hardy.

“What year were you born?”

“I think I turn seventy-three in June.”

“Your father passed away . . .”

“Three years after they started building the dam. I found him lying facedown on the path to the woodshed, middle of winter.”

“Your mother . . .”

“In '63. Still believing they'd never flood the valley. Seems unfair, doesn't it, that a man as old and banged up as my father should outlive her by ten years.”

“You have children?”

“Never married.”

“You spent most of your life trying to get fair compensation from Monashee Power, to prove their land-grab was illegal.”

Hardy blinked. “Wasted most of my life, you mean. I was always making a big stink.” He laughed, a cheerful, phlegmy cackle. “I'd stand outside the Shellycoat courthouse waving a sign. I had a sandwich board I wore too. ‘Monashee crooks!' ‘Lies and fraud!' Doesn't get you too far.”

Paul coughed uncertainly, unsure whether it was safe to laugh along with him or not.

“Here,” Hardy said. He stumped off to the living room and rummaged through a small desk opposite the woodstove, setting aside stacks of papers and magazines. He returned with a bundle of manila envelopes and dumped them on the table, scattering pages of yellow foolscap.

“Thirty years of correspondence.”

Paul grabbed sheets at random and skimmed through them. Letters, each one similar to the one he'd read at Gina's camp. The sheer number was remarkable.

“I'm slowing down with age. I hit my peak in the eighties. Gerry Lang was editor. I buried him in letters.”

“Trying to stir the hornet's nest.” Flattery was sometimes a good technique in drawing a participant out. “Did you get that from your father?”

“He was a real politician—I'm just an old shit disturber. The Fruit Growers' Association was as good as government in the valley.” Hardy looked to the ceiling, licking his lips. “July 22, 1940: two thousand crates of cherries, seven thousand boxes of strawberry, cherry, and raspberry jam. Of those boxes, six thousand to the prairies, three overseas.”

“Sorry?”

“Those are poor numbers, by the way. That's the industry in decline. Jam for the war effort kept Lambert going in those years.”

“Did your father keep journals?” Paul asked, suddenly hopeful.

“No. I was quoting the association's records—purchases and whatnot. Read them so many times I've memorized most of the entries.”

“Why do you read them?” Paul asked, disappointed. The archives held the same sets of records, and they didn't tell him anything about the relocation or Caleb Ready.

“The numbers somehow stir things up, they bring to mind days growing up around the ships and ferries, the packing sheds, our trees and garden. Mostly, they remind me of how rich the valley was before I was born. I was not born into an easy age.” Hardy paused, lost in some memory. “He had real power, my father. He made himself heard.”

Paul said, maybe condescendingly, “In a way you did as well, I guess. With your letters.”

Hardy gave a low, disdainful hiss. “Sure, I made some real progress with Monashee and their goons. Still waiting for answers.”

“And what have you done, while you've been waiting?”

Hardy shrugged. “This and that. I travelled during summers. Logged in Horsefly, cut cedar shakes near Armstrong.” He challenged Paul with a look. “1987, I was a tree planter.”

“Really?” Paul's voice cracked, half-amused, half-incredulous, but Hardy looked more pleased than insulted. He tried to imagine a middle-aged version of Hardy on a company like Gina's: a dour and tired man shouldering a surly pride, alone on the far side of the mess tent while scruffy college students and lanky highballers yukked it up.

“Was it bad?”

“Work is never bad. Just the constant scrounging for it. But I'm on the pension now.”

Strange how Hardy and Cyril, for all their shared history, had ended up on such divergent paths. “But you always had this place to come back to.”

“I cling here, yes. It's thin soil.”

“Not like Lambert, you mean. You can't farm.”

“I've trapped and shot animals for food. I catch trout.”

He remembered watching Hardy fish, or not fish, at the Flumes. The aimless drifting of the line.

Hardy said, “I should have gone to that, that thing they held. In Castlegar, way back fifteen years or so.”

“The Kootenay Symposium?” Yes, he could imagine Hardy with his list of grievances clutched in his hand, queuing up for his chance to speak, like the other farmers in the video.

“Maybe that was my chance.” The old man shifted in his chair. “It's the knowing and the waiting . . . and the
not
doing
that makes you a bit crazy.”

Paul's vehicle looked like something abandoned all winter. It sat keeled over to one side and buried under snow, and when he opened the door to grab his shovel, snow slid off the roof, onto the seats, and down the back of his neck. He scooped a few shovelfuls around the front tires and knew he was overmatched. The bleak afternoon light was waning. It would take an hour, more, and then he'd have to brave the road in the dark. He'd end up stuck in the middle of nowhere, worse than now. The road was a whitewashed plain. Not a single snowplow had driven by all day. Behind him, Hardy stood with his arms at his sides.

“You picked a fine day to visit.”

“What should I do?”

“Come back to the house.”

A deep cold swept up from the river and stirred the falling snow into spinning figures. “Christ,” Paul muttered. He tried to think, but the air nipped at his face and limbs, herding him back down the driveway. Hardy picked his way over the ice with untroubled patience, his arms still hanging loosely by his hips.

Back in the kitchen, Hardy dumped a Tupperware container full of beef stew into a pot and heated it up. In between stirs, he took a loaf of dark rye bread, cut thick slices, and buttered them. After he set down the food, he pulled out a bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured them each a glass.

“You can ask questions while we eat, if you like.”

The stew tasted homemade, bright with fresh bell peppers and carrots, the beef and potatoes neatly cubed. The bread was speckled and scented with caraway. It all seemed too good for Hardy to have made himself. If he didn't drive into town, who brought him food? Paul eyed the whisky with some trepidation. “So what happened to the rest of the crew?”

Such poor discipline: he couldn't resist dredging the past, even though Hardy was the ideal research subject, one who perfectly illustrated the worst consequences of displacement. This could more than make up for the disastrous Wentz interview. But no, he still wanted to be led to the drowned man.

Hardy took a noisy sip from his glass and shrugged. “Some did quite well.”

Here we go, Paul thought. “Do you mean the ones who worked for Caleb Ready?”

Hardy barely flinched at the mention of Ready's name. “Young bucks always want to pick the winning side. Not like the greybeards on our crew. Men from the orchards. Old farmers becoming chokermen, fallers. No money saved for retirement is why. Loyal and desperate.”

Paul took a breath. “But what about men like Marcus Soules, your father's arborist? I mean, wasn't he the first to sell to Monashee?”

Hardy's face bunched up as though he'd been spit on. You picked a bad place to finally ask the tough questions, Paul thought.

“Marcus had no choice. He was in bad shape, mind and body. He didn't have much fight in him. His son, Arthur, ran their household.”

“So it was Arthur who sold?”

“Never was an orchardist—no money in it. He'd worked as an engineer for the trains, up around Chase and Kamloops, out to the prairies. Spent most months gone from Lambert. He saw things different. Had a certain respect for progress. Call it that.”

“He opened the door for Monashee Power.”

Hardy shrugged, shot back his drink. It caught in the old man's throat, and he gargled and sighed, a long soft groan. The stove made a slight rushing noise, air down the chimney. The fire flared and snapped inside the stove.

Paul tried another angle. “Cyril Wentz—I'm sure you remember him—mentioned that your company's contracts began to dry up when Monashee began expropriations. Was that just a coincidence, you think?”

“Not at all,” Hardy laughed. “It was because we said no to selling the Dalton Creek mill.”

“Dalton Creek? I thought they were just after your homes.”

“Oh, our homes were a foregone conclusion.”

“How was the sawmill connected to land acquisition?”

Hardy irritably flapped his hand in the air, like someone hounded by black flies. “Beats the bloody hell out of me. Had nothing to do with the dam. Caleb Ready wanted us to sell the lease for the mill site. Then later he sicced his goons on the valley, the big companies from outside got Monashee's lumber and pole contracts, and we went bankrupt a few years after the flood. Sold the chutes and saws off for scrap.”

Paul dared once more. “And then Caleb Ready ends up dead in the river, some forty years later.”

“Yes, well.” The old man wiped around his mouth, then rubbed his eyes. “Never really understood the Immitoin, that one. Thought he did. Figured since he wore the cap, the river was his to command.”

“Did you recognize him when they pulled him from the water that day?”

“They look much the same when they've drowned.” He grabbed the bottle and put back another shot. Paul opened his mouth and hesitated. A man at his host's mercy, without a means of leaving, wouldn't be wise to force the issue any more than he had.

Hardy chuckled suddenly, as though he'd read Paul's mind. “It's good for you to record all this. One day soon I'll succumb to old-timer's disease, and there'll be few left to tell the truth of things.” He coughed whisky spittle onto his beard. “Monashee'll like that. I waited all these years for their goons to come shut me up, put me down like a dog.”