Speak to the Earth (12 page)

“I can’t hear you,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“What?”

Exasperated, Bryan threw off the pillow and sat up, jammed into the corner where his bed met the wall. “I
said
I didn’t
say
anything.”

His mother was sitting in his desk chair. “Gotcha!” She smiled. She had on one of her track suits that Bryan hated. They made her look dumpy. And poor.

“Very funny, Mom.”

“So what’s the reason for the rudeness? That’s not like you.”

“Jimmy’s leaving because of you,” he almost shouted. “You and that stupid damn committee.”

She ran his fingers through her hair. “I don’t think so, Bryan. Of course, I know he doesn’t agree with what I’m doing —”

“That’s for sure!”

“Is that what Jimmy told you? That he’s moving out because of me?”

“No, he said that
wasn’t
the reason. But I don’t believe him. I happen to know it’s true.” Bryan could not bring himself to tell his mother that Jimmy had a job with a very big string attached.

“Believe him, son. Jimmy doesn’t hold back on things. He’ll always tell you the truth, even if it hurts you. That’s the kind of man he is. It’s one of the
things I admire about him.”

Bryan remembered a time a year or so back when Iris was going out to some church meeting. She had come into the kitchen and asked Jimmy and her son how she looked. Bryan told her she looked fine in her jeans and bush shirt. She looked like she always looked, as far as he was concerned. Jimmy had said, “You look like you just walked out of the bush. Wear a dress, Iris. You’re a nice-lookin’ woman. Show it off a little.” Iris had been angry and pleased at the same time.

“I guess you’re right,” he said, knowing that, this one time, Jimmy had not told his sister everything. No matter how much he disliked what Iris was doing about the logging issue, he would not hurt her.

“I wish he wasn’t going, though,” Bryan said.

After his mother left him alone, he wondered how many more people he cared about would be pushed out of his life because of a bunch of old trees.

B
ryan hopped on his bike and headed south on the shore road, pedalling fast down the tunnel of shade cast by the conifers that lined the blacktop. When the road veered sharply west, he turned in the opposite direction into the trees, along a path that soon took him to the beach. He dismounted and shoved his bike into a copse of young hemlock, out of sight. Only a few paces farther on, he broke from the cool of the trees and into the sunlight. He waded through waist-high grass and onto the open sand.

The beach ran untroubled for kilometres in each direction. To his left, the sand curved westerly, fringed with conifers that hid a few houses from view. Whitecapped breakers rolled in, crashing fifty metres from the strand. The colourful wetsuits of a few surfers winked in and out of sight. In the distance the surf thundered against grey-black cliffs, tossing clouds of spume into the sky. To Bryan’s right, the waves that curled into the bay were flatter and less powerful, their energy dissipated
long before they hissed up the sand. Overhead an osprey wheeled, waiting.

He sat down on a bleached log that had been embedded in the sand years before, and looked out to sea where, about three hundred metres off shore, a low rocky island sustained no more than a dozen wind-beaten pines. At low tide, Bryan would sometimes walk to the island and look out over the limitless expanse of the Pacific and feel the salt wind on his face. But now, when he could sit on his log and watch the tide coming in, now was the time he liked best. The spit of sand between him and the island gradually diminished as the sea swept in from both east and west, losing its power as it encircled the island to meet just in front of him. He didn’t know how the water could move from opposite directions to come together in this place and at the same time creep toward the shore. It fascinated him.

Bryan was aware that, if he put the problem to Ellen, she would come here with a thick sheaf of tidal tables, wind and weather patterns, charts of the ocean bottom and textbooks about the sea. She would offer a neat explanation that would satisfy a scientist. Elias would give him a quizzical who-really-cares look. Walter, if he came here at all, would stand ankle-deep in the rising wavelets and say little or nothing because, to him, silence was the best answer and mysteries did not need to be explained.

Bryan did not want to solve the mystery. He knew that many people had a place that they went to when
they wanted to escape or think or grieve. This was his place. He had shared it with no one, not even Ellen, not because it was a secret — many people from town used this beach — but because he knew he could not begin to explain its attraction for him, no more than he could, years ago in Drumheller, explain why sometimes he would climb the crumbling banks of the Badlands just to feel the prairie breeze on his skin. In this place the wind, the sea and the land were always present and never the same. Sometimes in summer the sky was blue and porcelain hard, the sand blindingly white, the dark rocks etched against the waves, the wind sighing through the conifers. The next day might bring a scene of rain and muted greys, or a wind that drove thick mist shoreward.

Beneath the constant diversity there was something eternal, something as inexplicable and yet as real as the sea moving in opposite directions before him. It was this permanence that moved him in a way he could not put into words. Bryan wished with his whole heart that there was a corresponding permanence in his own life, as he was gripped by the fear that his world was slipping away from him. The way it had once before.

B
ryan slept fitfully all through that night — thinking about Ellen and trying to figure out a way to get her back — until he awoke to see 4:28 on his clock radio. He dove beneath his pillow but remained awake until he got out of bed around six, grumpy and tired. Iris had gone out right after breakfast, but not before giving Bryan his marching orders for the day: wash the kitchen floor, vacuum and dust the living room. She didn’t tell me when I had to start, Bryan thought as he turned on the TV and flicked from station to station, trying to find something un-stupid to watch.

Kevin and Otto thumped upstairs for breakfast. They made short work of the sausages, eggs and hashbrowns Bryan fried up for them. While he cleared the dishes and the two men had their second cup of coffee, Kevin asked for a favour.

“What is it?” Bryan asked over the rush of hot water into the sink.

“Well, Otto and I have a bit of laundry to do and we
wondered if you’d mind if we used your washer and dryer.”

“I don’t think Mom would go for that,” he answered. “The B&B fee is for room and breakfast, that’s all. Sorry. There’s a twenty-four-hour laundromat pretty close to here,” he added.

“We get along good with Iris, Bryan. I’m sure she’d agree. Besides, we’re really whacked, you know? Long day at the Wasteland yesterday, right, Otto?”

Otto didn’t reply.

“And besides, that laundromat is likely packed with tourists. From the campgrounds. It would really be a help if you could make an exception for this one time, Bryan. One hand washes the other, in a manner of speaking.” He winked.

He’s guilting me into it, Bryan thought. He helped me paint the fence and said that I didn’t need to clean their rooms. So now he’s calling in the favour. Bryan didn’t ask how Kevin figured the laundromat would be packed at nine o’clock in the morning. And he didn’t tell the men that their efforts at the protest site didn’t gain any sympathy from him.

“Okay,” he said over his shoulder. “But just this once. And you have to do it now, before Mom comes home.”

After the two men cleared out of the kitchen Bryan dried the dishes and swept the kitchen floor. He lifted the chairs onto the table. As he descended the basement stairs to fetch the bucket and mop, he saw Otto in the laundry room, loading clothes into the washer. He was
almost at the door of the tiny room, intending to ask Otto if he knew how to operate the machine, when the man looked up, saw him and pushed the door shut. Okay by me, Bryan thought.

He found the mop and bucket and returned to the kitchen. With a total absence of enthusiasm he washed the kitchen floor and then rapidly pushed the vacuum around the furniture in the living room. He took the dust rag and made a quick circuit of the room. The kitchen floor was still damp when he finished, so he tried the TV again.

One cartoon program and half a game show later, Bryan heard the door slam, then Kevin’s van start up. He turned off the set and replaced the kitchen chairs around the table. He took the bucket and mop to the basement. The laundry room door was ajar and the light was still on.

“Otto, you still here?” he called out. “You finished in the laundry room?” No answer. “Kevin?” Silence.

Bryan tried the doors to the two bedrooms. Both were locked. He went into the laundry room to turn off the light. Mom will go ape if she finds this on, he thought. Then he noticed a curious odour in the warm, damp air. Mixed with the smell of soap and bleach was something he couldn’t identify. He shrugged and reached for the pull string that hung from the light bulb — and caught sight of something grey sticking out from under the washer. He bent down and pulled it out. Otto must have dropped it, he thought. It was a thick woollen work sock.
And it smelled of kerosene.

Bryan quickly stuffed the sock back, his mind racing. He turned out the light, closed the door and sprinted upstairs. Then he cursed his stupidity. Otto would know he had been in the laundry room. He went back to the basement, turned the light back on and left the door open.

He went to the fridge, got a can of cola and took it into the living room. Instead of flicking on the TV, he sat in the bay window that looked out over Osprey Cove. High cumulus clouds floated like puffy islands in a sea of sky, and waves pushed lazily toward the rocks of the cove.

Bryan didn’t know where Kevin had bought his van, or how he got the Ontario licence plates, but when he put together the fact that Otto’s driver’s permit was for British Columbia, that the two men had shown a reluctance to take their clothing to a public laundromat and that at least one article of that clothing smelled of kerosene, he could come to only one conclusion. Kevin and Otto were the saboteurs who had set fire to the
MFI
truck and burned down the trailer. And they were also responsible for the cops hassling his mother. He slammed the empty can onto the table.

The question was, what should he do about it?

Should he tell his mother? If he did, would they hurt her? If he told Zeke, would the cops assume that Iris, known to be a leader in the anti-logging demonstrations, owner of the house where Kevin and Otto were living,
was a co-conspirator? Maybe, he thought, I should confront them myself and just tell them to clear out.

The phone rang. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello yourself!”

“Ellen! Where are you? Are you back home? Can —”

“Slow down, Bry. I’m still at my aunt’s.”

“Oh.”

“Still the snappy conversationalist, I see,” she joked.

“Well, yeah. Haven’t had much time to take lessons since you left. Although it seems like months.”

“You’re sweet,” Ellen said. “But. I bet you’ve already found another girlfriend.”

“Yeah, right. They’re lined up at the door. Nobody like you, though.”

“I miss you, Bry.”

“Me too.”

“So,” Ellen said, false cheer in her voice, “what’s new?”

Bryan told her about Jimmy moving out and about his new job.

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Seems a little fishy, doesn’t it? Makes you kind of wonder who’s behind this
SAVE
outfit.”

“Well, I thought it sounded a little too good to be true. And there’s something else.” Bryan told her about the sock.

“I think you’re right. It sounds like those guys are trouble.”

“What should I do?”

“Why not tell your mother? Maybe she can come up with some excuse to get them to leave. Like she booked the rooms before. Something like that.”

“Good idea.” Bryan pictured his mother’s face when she found out that her two fellow activists and only source of income were a little
too
committed to the cause.

“But we should try to think of a way to make them stop,” Ellen said.

Bryan told her his fear that if the men were caught it would reflect back on his mother.

“Good point,” Ellen admitted.

“Hey!” Bryan cut in. “I just remembered. This is long-distance. Maybe you should get off the phone.”

“Relax. My aunt told me to talk as long as I want. And guess what? She’s a tree-hugger! She sent fifty bucks to the SOS defence fund.”

“Oh, no,” Bryan said, “another one.”

When the sky was beginning to brighten the next morning, Bryan and Walter walked down to the docks, boarded Walter’s boat and put out into Gray’s Passage to check the crab traps. They sky was overcast, the wind cool but light. They spent the morning making the rounds, winching up the big wire-mesh traps, removing crab if there was any, rebaiting the traps and lowering them into the water again. In between sessions, they sipped coffee and watched the seabirds swing on the breeze, crying to one another.

Bryan tried to lose himself in his work, but he couldn’t get his mind off the problem posed by Kevin and Otto. Something had to be done, he knew. And he knew just as well that whatever the “something” was, it probably had to be initiated by him. Without knowing why, he decided not to share his problem with Walter.

When they had tied the boat to the dock, they loaded three boxes of crabs onto a dolly and Bryan hauled them up the road to McGregor’s Crab House, the little restaurant that always bought Walter’s catch. Bryan took the money back to his neighbour, who by this time had made the boat tight and secure.

When they got back home, Bryan was surprised to find Jimmy there.

“Your mom’s been arrested again,” he said without so much as a hello. “And this time it don’t look so good.”