Cool Water (6 page)

The Dolsons' three-bedroom bungalow was built about the same time as Willard's to replace the original farmhouse that was old and small and did not reflect the prosperity of the times. The new house (not so new any more) sits three hundred yards off the grid road, surrounded on three sides by trees lovingly planted by Blaine's mother: poplars, Manitoba maples, even a weeping birch that has somehow survived the arid conditions of this part of the country. The house faces the road and from the living room window you can see the barn that is now pretty much unused, a rail corral, and a half-acre pen that is home to Blaine's horse, the only one he has left. In front of the house is a miraculous plum tree, of which Blaine's mother was exceedingly proud. South of the house is the vegetable garden, enclosed by chicken wire to protect it from the deer. The fact that it is still bountiful is perhaps more miraculous than the plum tree, since the gardens throughout the district are sparse, even non-existent, thanks to drought and grasshoppers. Vicki's garden is rich with produce. No one can figure it out. She plants in the spring and then forgets to water and never has time to weed. And the grasshoppers seem to have passed Vicki's garden by as they devoured everyone else's. Her own theory is that grasshoppers don't like weeds. They've cruised the country looking for the weed-free gardens, she tells Blaine, which is why it's a good idea not to weed a garden. “Ha ha,” she says. “It's a joke.” Blaine—who remembers the neat garden his mother was famous for—doesn't laugh.

Blaine's parents had three children and the house was a perfect size for their family, but it's a tight fit for Blaine and Vicki, who have six kids. Until today, the boys shared one bedroom and the girls the other. What's different about today (or technically, yesterday) is that Shiloh, the oldest and almost a teenager, has been allowed to “build” his own bedroom downstairs. Blaine didn't see the need for it, but Vicki tried to be more understanding of Shiloh's growing desire for privacy. She and Shiloh decided on the south
–
west corner as the driest and brightest spot in a mostly dark unfinished basement. Although she didn't really have time (the garden's bounty was waiting for her attention) Vicki helped Shiloh build a low wooden platform out of scrap lumber to keep the bed up off the cement floor. They carried a worn area rug down the basement steps and laid it on the platform, and they hung two old bedspreads from the ceiling to create walls, or at least the illusion of walls. Then they took Shiloh's bed apart and reassembled it in the new room, and Vicki found a floor lamp and a couple of plastic storage tubs for Shiloh to use for his clothes, and she made him some shelves out of boards and bricks for his CD player and other personal things.

Vicki noticed that Shiloh was sullen the whole time they were creating the room and moving him into it, but she didn't say anything. She assumed it was his age and adolescent hormones, and she promised to get him a desk as soon as they had a bit of extra money, and even a computer if they could afford it. She ignored him when he said, “I guess that won't happen anytime soon”—he was getting so like his father—and she said cheerfully, “Well, maybe not, but you never know, I might win the lottery.” She left him to his decorating then, and he covered the two cement walls with pictures of hockey players cut from
Sports Illustrated
and a poster from the national rodeo finals in Edmonton that Lynn Trass had let him take from the window of the Oasis Café.

Shiloh Dolson, just shy of his thirteenth birthday, likes his new room even if he doesn't show it. He doesn't care that it's dark and it doesn't have real walls and he's already had to squash a couple of sowbugs. There is one problem though, which he discovers on this, his first night in the basement. The problem is a heating duct that runs along the floor joists above his head. He wakes up at three in the morning, and through the duct he can hear his parents arguing. The fact that they argue is nothing new. Shiloh's heard them a hundred times before. What's problematic is that he can now hear what they're arguing about. He'd always assumed money, being fully aware of the situation his parents are in. He knows the farm is mostly gone, all but the home quarter, although Vicki keeps trying to reassure him that things will get better and that Blaine will get the land back, or at least be in a position to rent before too long. It's happened to people before, she tells Shiloh, and they bounce back. It's not your father's fault, she says, it's the times, it's like people running out of fish on the East Coast, not their fault, but things will change. Wait until people in Ottawa and Toronto have to pay five dollars for a loaf of bread, she says, then the politicians will come to their senses.

Shiloh doesn't know what to think. He doesn't know what the cost of a loaf of bread in Toronto has to do with anything and, except for Vicki's reassurances, what he hears, he hears on the TV news like everyone else in the country. Maybe there's too much wheat in the world and Blaine hasn't figured that out, although Shiloh does remember him growing canary seed a few years ago and swearing he'd never do it again because of the full-body protection he'd had to wear to harvest the damned stuff, complaining to Vicki about the itching and chafing he'd had to put up with to grow feed for canaries in New York City. But maybe the canary-seed experiment failed because Blaine is a bad farmer. Maybe it
is
all Blaine's fault.

There's another possibility. Maybe, and this is what Shiloh would rather believe, it's Vicki's fault. Vicki who, according to Blaine, is “bloody useless” on a farm. Sometimes Blaine calls her this in a teasing way, as though her scatter-brained nature is endearing, but if he's desperate for another set of hands and sends one of the kids to the house for Vicki and then she sends a wrench clanging through the frame of a piece of machinery or lays a bolt on the ground to get lost forever, or fails to hold her ground and lets a yearling calf escape through an open gate, he'll say something like, “For Christ sake, you grew up on a farm, how can you be so bloody useless?” and the way he says “bloody useless” in these circumstances leads Shiloh to believe that his mother actually is. Vicki never gets mad in return, or defends herself, and Shiloh takes this to mean she knows Blaine is right. Shiloh is too young to understand Vicki's brand of diplomacy, which involves keeping your mouth shut until things blow over. Of course the need for Vicki's help on the farm is now a thing of the past because there's no farming left to do, but Blaine still finds the odd occasion when the word
useless
seems appropriate, or at least easy.

On this first night in his new room, Shiloh wakes up, and Blaine and Vicki are not arguing about land or cattle or money. At three in the morning, they're fighting about green beans. Shiloh thinks he must be hearing things, he must have it wrong, but Blaine says, quite clearly, “When I get home from work tomorrow I want those beans in the freezer, Vicki.”

“I'm planning to do the beans tomorrow, I told you that. Or do you want me to do them now? Would that make you feel better, if I clattered around the kitchen right now and woke everybody up? Come on, Blaine. Be reasonable.”

Shiloh hears Blaine's footsteps on the floor above. Back and forth.

“I don't want the only thing we grow on this place to end up moulding in the basement.”

The beans in question, Shiloh knows, are in plastic tubs in the cold room, which is a misnomer at this time of year. He helped pick them two days ago.

“They aren't moulding,” he hears his mother say. “There's plenty of time. But tomorrow. I promise.”

“And I know how much that promise is worth,” Blaine says. “You'll wake up with a big plan to get them done, but you'll be off to town before you've got a pot of water boiling. You'll be gone for the day, and I'll get home and you won't have done a damned thing and the beans will look like a compost heap.”

“That's not fair,” Vicki says, “that part about me not doing a damned thing. We have six kids. It takes a lot of time, looking after six kids.”

Shiloh is resentful that he's included in the category of “kids.” He doesn't need looking after. He tosses back the covers and swings his feet over the side of the bed, thinking he might get up and throw his two cents in. He knows Blaine will agree with him. There are only five kids who need looking after. He wants to say this, and be on Blaine's side.

“My mother raised three kids and grew a garden and worked like a man on top of that,” Blaine says.

“I know about your mother,” Vicki says. “She was amazing. I'm not. I don't want to fight.” Then she says, as though she's just remembered, “Shiloh is right underneath us. Let's not wake him.”

Shiloh is just about to part the bedspread curtains and head for the stairs when he hears Blaine say, “If it weren't for that bedroom idea—another one of your big plans—you could have had the beans done.”

Vicki says something Shiloh can't hear, and then Blaine says, “To hell with Shiloh.”

Shiloh stops.
To hell with Shiloh?
Did he hear correctly?

“Blaine,” Vicki says.

“Don't Blaine me.”

There's a long silence, and then Shiloh hears Vicki's footsteps going down the hall, and a few minutes later Blaine follows.

Once they're in their bedroom Shiloh can't hear what they're saying. Nothing, he thinks. He doesn't know that when Vicki asks Blaine what he meant by “To hell with Shiloh,” Blaine seems exhausted and answers that he didn't mean anything, he just said it. Shiloh doesn't hear Vicki swear to do the beans and not let them go to waste, and Blaine say, “Well, we both know it's not the beans that are stuck in my craw.” Shiloh doesn't know that in spite of the arguing, his parents get into bed together and Blaine says, “How can you wear flannelette in the summer?” and Vicki says, “You never mind my flannelette.”

Shiloh lies there most of the night, worrying. He's twelve years old and he's worrying about things he can't understand, not the least of which is why the words “To hell with Shiloh” slipped so easily from his father's tongue, just as easily as “bloody useless.” He wants to cry, but he won't, he's too old to cry, and he reaches over and turns on the lamp, and the light falls on the cowboy in the rodeo poster, a bull rider wearing purple chaps with gold fringes. His hand is wrapped tight into his bull rope and the fringes on his chaps are suspended as he gets set for the bull's next jarring contact with the earth. Shiloh wonders if he could be a bull rider, and then remembers that the steers he could practise on are gone.

Who should he blame? Maybe, somehow, this is his fault, and that's why his father said what he did. Or maybe not his fault alone, but the six kids, too many, and the name Shiloh came out first because he's the oldest. He wonders how much money it costs to feed and clothe six kids. It must cost a lot. He wonders how they could save money, and makes a pact with himself not to ask for Big Gulps or rented movies. Or school things. When the teacher gives them notes about money for field trips or extracurricular activities, he'll tear them up and not even show them to his mother. He won't ask for new running shoes or jeans or T-shirts. He won't, he vows, ask for anything, and his father will notice this and realize that he isn't a kid any more, and when he needs a hand he'll ask for Shiloh and leave Vicki alone because she's bloody useless anyway.

Shiloh lies awake and thinks of all the ways he can save money and not be like the younger kids, who are asleep upstairs and don't even know what's going on. He thinks and worries and tries to solve problems that his parents haven't been able to solve, and eventually he falls asleep, the light still on, the bull rider still suspended, waiting for the buzzer that will tell him he lasted the eight seconds and he can now begin the perilous task of getting off.

Upstairs, his mother—way too hot in her flannelette nightie—hears the droning sound of a small plane overhead, the same plane that she has dreamed about again and again since childhood. In her dream, the drone turns to a sputter, then a stall, and she witnesses the plane's death spiral from sky to earth, its disappearance behind trees or buildings, after which she reluctantly and never successfully searches for the wreckage. In variations of the dream she strikes out, always alone, down a blacktop highway, or a country road, or a path of nothing more than tire tracks through a field. Once, she got into a canoe (she'd never in real life been in one) and paddled across an open lake. In the way of dreams, her anxious journey turned into a pleasant, although confusing, paddle.

When Vicki hears the plane hiccup and then drone its way to earth, she thinks she is still awake. She sits up in bed, then stands and feels the floor beneath her bare feet.

“Blaine,” she says.

He groans in his sleep and rolls over, away from her.

She can still hear the plane. The sound is real, she's sure of it. She grabs a pair of jeans off the floor and pulls them on under her nightie, but then the sound of the plane stops. No crash. She listens. Nothing. A dream. So she wasn't awake. She just thought she was awake.

She gets back into bed, still in her jeans, and pulls the sheet up even though she doesn't need it. She rolls against Blaine's warm back, but he mumbles “too hot” and pushes her away. She rolls to her own side of the bed and drops off to sleep.

No falling planes in her dreams this time. Just one endless, obsessive dream about shelling bright green peas and sweating in the hot, hot sun.

Home Invasion

There's barely a breeze but it doesn't take much to get a creak out of the ancient, probably half-dead, and therefore unstable, evergreen tree outside of Norval and Lila Birch's bedroom window in Juliet. As Norval half listens to his wife recite what she expects him to do the next day, he resolves, once again, to cut the tree down before it falls through the roof of their split-level house and lands right on top of them. Thinking about the tree leads him to think about his lawn, and then the hardware store and the new lawn mower he's been eyeing. It's not a riding mower, but it is a shiny green electric with many special features. Norval gets great pleasure from the act of mowing grass, which he's been unable to do since his old gas mower died on him a few weeks ago. It bothers him when he gets home from work and sees that his grass is too long, but he just hasn't had the time to stop at the hardware store. You'd think the overgrown lawn would bother his house-proud wife too, but it doesn't seem to.