Who by Fire Read online

  ALSO BY FRED STENSON

  FICTION

  The Great Karoo

  Lightning

  The Trade

  Teeth

  Working Without a Laugh Track

  Last One Home

  Lonesome Hero

  NON-FICTION

  Thing Feigned or Imagined

  The Last Stack

  RCMP: The March West

  Story of Calgary

  Waste to Wealth

  Rocky Mountain House

  Copyright © 2014 Fred Stenson

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Stenson, Fred, 1951-, author

  Who by fire / Fred Stenson.

  ISBN 978-0-385-66879-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-66880-4

  I. Title.

  PS8587.T45W46 2014 C 813′.54 C2014-903137-8

  C2014-903138-6

  Who by Fire is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: Cover images: (landscape) Shahriar Erfanian, 41 Stories/Getty Images;

  (scratches) © Milosluz | Dreamstime.com

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House company

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To my sisters, Marie Gray and Lois Johnston,

  and in memory of our parents, Ida and Ted Stenson

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Three Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Acknowledgements

  who will die at his predestined time and who before his time;

  who by water and who by fire

  Unetaneh Tokef, from the liturgy of the Days of Awe

  PART ONE

  So bright was the light outside his window that the frost on the stippled wall was glinting. This he saw as he came awake. A deep rumble from outside had woken him, and a humming in his bedspring. He reached above his head and touched a metal flower in the bedstead. It buzzed against his finger.

  He slid from under the heavy tick. His feet found the hooked rug. Through his window he could see along the snow to the top of the church hill, could see the cross on the steeple that his mother’s father had placed there on a windy day long ago. He wondered what could make a light at night brighter than a moon, and a sound that made a house shake. God, he supposed.

  The boy heard voices. The younger of his sisters was crying and the older one scolding from their bedroom across the hall. Between his and their room was a grate in the floor to bring up heat. His father’s growl and his mother’s higher voice rose through it.

  He went to the stairs and crept down. Through the door frame at the foot, he saw the shadow of his father cross the window. His father was wearing winter underwear, and the boy could see the comical lump at the back: the poop-flap hanging by its button.

  He did not announce himself but followed. He stopped in the kitchen while his father shoved his feet into gumboots in the porch. With no more clothes than that, his father opened the door and stepped into the freezing night.

  The boy copied his father exactly. Bare feet into cold boots. He left the house and went down the shovelled cut to where the trucks were parked and beyond to where his father stood, his face a moving yellow.

  Above the driveway hill, a fire leapt and twisted, like the fire in the Bible that burns without wood, or the fire that comes out of the rubbed lantern in Illustrated Folk Tales of the World. A genie set free after a thousand years. The boy could smell hard-boiled eggs. His eyes stung. His stomach filled with pressure.

  His father set his big hand like a collar on the boy’s neck, turned him, and pushed him toward the house. The boy ran ahead to where the door was open and his mother’s nightgown glowed. She took him and held him to her hot flannel shape. When the door closed behind them, she asked, “What?”

  “Sulphur plant,” his father said. “Goddamn thing’s upset again.”

  Teacups rattled in their saucers in his mother’s china cabinet. The linoleum floor sizzled through his socks. A wall cracked.

  The boy was embarrassed that his father’s words for this were so small. The roaring genie eating the darkness needed more. The boy could not say it either, but someone should.

  1

  Ryder Farm, 1960

  RUMOUR HAD IT there was going to be a gas plant, what some called a sulphur plant. The story had been around since the first crews came five years earlier, shooting seismic lines and drilling wildcat wells in the foothills. Ella first heard of the gas plant’s actual location on a supply trip to town in summer. While Mildred rang up Ella’s groceries at the Co-op, she asked, “Is it true the gas plant is going to be by your place?”

  Ella said she had not heard anything like that.

  “I did,” Mildred said. “Near Ryders’ and Bauers’. That’s what I heard.”

  On the drive home, their youngest, Billy, sat in his usual spot on the front seat, tucked against his mother’s side. The girls, Jeannie and Donna, were in the back, taking turns with a movie magazine they had pooled their allowances to buy. Billy had a Classics Illustrated Robinson Crusoe comic, but Ella could tell by the way he was leafing back and forth that he was losing interest. He would soon regret not having bought the one about Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in Hawaii, and then he would cry. He was only five.

  In fact, Ella started crying before her son did. The car was leaving the flat that contained the town of Haultain when the tears came.

  “It’s only a garage door,” Tom said. She knew what he was thinking: that she was crying because of what had happened at her parents’ place. They had stopped there for a minute to drop off groceries and Ella’s parents insisted everyone come in for coffee and cake. Billy stayed outside and nobody noticed him climb into the car. He liked to sit behind the wheel pretending to drive. His father had told him to never touch the green button under the dash. Billy pushed the button, and the car had lurched into the garage door.

  The car only went a foot before the transmission held. Still, it hit the door hard enough to crack it. Tom went racing out, and Ella followed. She could already see that Billy was fine, but she did not trust Tom’s temper. Before she could stop him, he had grabbed Billy’s arm and pulled him from the car. Ella caught her husband’s sleeve and told him to let go. She had read
that it was possible to pull a child’s arm right out of the shoulder socket.

  Tom dropped Billy’s arm like a live coal and gave the boy a scolding.

  “It’s not the garage door,” Ella said now. “It’s the gas plant.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Tom. “That Mildred likes to pass on bad news. She makes up half of it. How the hell would she know where the plant’s going to be?”

  “Those girls hear things. They hear everything.”

  “That doesn’t mean what they hear is true.”

  “The way she put it. Ryders’ and Bauers’. If she’d said it was near Ryders’ place, that could mean farther away, but Ryders’ and Bauers’ means right at our place.”

  “Oh, for chrissake.” Tom turned toward her and was not even looking at the road. As always he had a roll-your-own in the corner of his mouth. Ash fell and Ella grabbed at it. Billy flinched away.

  “That company’s not stupid. It’s not going to set a plant on top of two families.”

  “You don’t know that, Tom.”

  “Okay, I don’t. But there’s no sense crying about what you don’t know either.”

  But the gas plant site was at Ryders’ and Bauers’. Three weeks after that day at the Co-op, a stream of caterpillar tractors entered the field across from Ryders’ driveway, followed by dirt haulers that Tom called yukes. The cats and yukes scraped off a big area—down to the clay—in the middle of Bauers’ hayfield. Ella had been born in this house, had looked at that field all her life, and now it was nothing but a black and tan surface around which yellow machines crawled, carving and filling.

  “That’s less than a half mile from our house,” Tom said as they stood watching. His voice was strained and peculiar. The whole family had walked to the top of the driveway hill, the wind in their faces.

  “The stuff from the plant will blow right at us,” said Ella, and Tom’s look suggested he would like to argue but couldn’t.

  Not long after the machines showed up, Dora and Curt came over to the Ryders’ house. They were good friends, had been neighbours forever. Both families had three children, almost matched in age and sex. When Billy saw the Bauers’ car, he expected Petey to be in it. When Petey was not there, Billy went into a sulk, and Ella sent him outside to play with the dog.

  Curt and Tom went to the living room, while Dora and Ella sat at the kitchen table. The women could hear the men, and the first thing Curt said was, “I should have told you before I signed.”

  Dora turned to face Ella. “The company man who came to the house said the site was on our land. We thought we could say no if we wanted, but that’s not true. Since the government owns the mineral rights, they’d already approved it. We didn’t really have a choice, except to sell part of the land or all of it.” Dora paused, sat up straighter. “And you know, Ella, their offer was better than what land goes for around here. I can’t speak for Curt, but I think we might have argued harder if it had been a normal price.”

  Then she started to cry. “Curt asked me to come outside with him. We stood there looking at our field. The man from the company had pointed at the spot and asked us to imagine a gas plant there. He asked us to think what it would be like to live so close. Curt said he thought we shouldn’t dicker. We should take their price now, in case it went down.”

  Ella was imagining herself in Dora’s shoes. She knew that she wouldn’t have had the same thoughts. Dora wasn’t born and raised on their farm. Ella didn’t think Dora’s decision had been easy, just different than her own would have been.

  Tom came into the kitchen, talking back over his shoulder. “Oh hell, Curt, don’t worry about it. Wouldn’t have changed anything if we’d talked.” He was on his way into the pantry to get the whisky bottle. Ella went to her china cupboard for the little glasses.

  “I imagine we’ll move closer to town,” Curt said as Tom poured the whisky.

  Dora said, “I thought we might as well move closer if we’re moving.”

  “Closer’s good, especially in winter,” Ella said, though she didn’t believe it. She preferred this distance.

  The men went back to the living room, and somehow that was a signal to the women. Dora rose. They hugged each other, weeping freely.

  “Whatever will I do without you, Ella?”

  “Let’s not worry” was all Ella could think to say.

  The Bauers moved on the Dominion Day long weekend. The Ryders and their Dutch hired man, Kees, helped empty the rooms and fill the two grain trucks. Every time a piece of furniture was taken out, the space it left held some lonesome fact, but the work was hard and kept everyone on the dry side of grief—until Dora and Ella moved the old crib. Now that Petey was a boy, the crib did nothing but hold Dora’s ironing. Still, picking it up made the two of them cry so hard they had to set it down again. How were they not to think about their time together, their lives as women led so amazingly in tandem? Sixteen years ago, their husbands had taken them to the Haultain hospital on the same day. Within hours of one another, they had given birth to their first children, both girls. They were not the kind of women who liked to talk about such things, but Ella knew from various signs that they had their monthlies at the same time, were simply joined together in that way.

  By mid-afternoon the Bauer household was mostly loaded into the trucks. It had been agreed that only Tom and Kees would drive over and unload at the other end. The two sets of children stared at each other in numb confusion. “We’ll get together all the time,” Dora said, with her arms across her daughter’s shoulders.

  “You children can use the phone to talk,” Ella added. But all six kids stood like stones.

  Ella stayed with her children in Bauers’ yard until there was nothing to see but dust hanging over the road. Then Jeannie, the eldest, said, “This is stupid,” and started walking home. Ella, the girls, Billy—they all fanned out, wanting to be alone.

  Two weeks later, at the end of a blistering day, Ella took Billy upstairs to bed. She noticed that Jeannie and Donna’s bedroom door was closed. She thought it must be terribly hot in there, and she was on the verge of throwing the door open to allow a breeze, when she stopped herself. The closed door meant Jeannie was having, or about to have, a cigarette. She kept them in a little cedar box that had belonged to Ella’s mother. Ella checked the box when she cleaned, and some dry crinkly specimen of a cigarette was usually there, on a bed of Jeannie’s cheap jewellery.

  As long as Ella did not let on that she knew about Jeannie’s smoking, she did not have to have a fight with her headstrong eldest daughter. She would rather Jeannie did not smoke, but a lot of girls did. What ladylike meant was being reshaped by the movies, and who could control that? If she thought Donna was also smoking, Ella would have intervened, but somehow she knew Jeannie would not offer and her sister would not ask. Likely, Donna would be disgusted but would pretend otherwise. Donna was thirteen and only beginning to question her sister’s authority.

  Ella started down the creaky steps, Jeannie’s cue to light up. She imagined her daughter hunched in front of the metal screen set in the summer window; imagined her blowing smoke through the wire.

  Downstairs, instead of returning to the kitchen, Ella went into her own bedroom. She opened the closet door and pressed back the hangers. One of the oddities of the old house was that you could hear the girls’ room perfectly from inside that closet.

  “Rhonda and I went to the barn and had a smoke on their moving day,” Jeannie was saying. “She told me the barn was going to be knocked down and burned. The house too. Burned to the ground. The plant people don’t want anyone to live there, not ever again.”

  There was no sound from Donna. Jeannie must have thought she wasn’t getting through to her sister, because she said again, quite loud, “Burn down the house!”

  After some smoking time, Jeannie started in again. “You know, if the house you’ve lived in all your life is burned, your whole life goes with it. You can’t go to the places where things happened, and that makes
it like nothing ever did happen. Rhonda’ll be a zombie.”

  This time Donna did say something. Her voice was smaller, and Ella had to strain to make it out. “The people who live at the plant aren’t.” During the last two weeks, crew shacks had popped up beside the plant site: flat-roofed affairs, each one containing four living spaces. Donna perhaps meant that those people moved all the time, but they still had memories.

  “Take Mom, though,” Jeannie said. “She’s lived her whole life in this house. She was born in it. Her father built it. It’s a good thing we’re not selling out or she’d be a vegetable too.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “Be vegetables?”

  “Sell out and move.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Mom would never. And Dad knows better than to try.”

  “What if we had to?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  There was some noise Ella could not decipher.

  “Oh my God, Donna! Quick!”

  Ella imagined the two girls fanning smoke toward the screen.

  When summer ended, Jeannie and Donna took the bus to St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic school in Haultain. It was Jeannie’s third year of going to town school and Donna’s first. At the end of June, the one-room school east of the farm had closed.

  All five days of that first school week, Billy walked his sisters up the driveway to the bus and came back with a big lip. Keeping him amused was going to be hard.

  By then, many of the steel structures at the sulphur plant had been erected, including a flare stack that, on some days, held a meager flame. Tom and Ella had learned the term “flare stack” from Don Harbeg, a bachelor farmer who lived south of the river. Don’s farm was only a quarter section, and he had always worked other jobs to support it. Before the plant had even advertised for help, Don went to the trailer office and asked if he could work. They gave him a job, just like that. Pleased to be the centre of attention, Don gave the community weekly reports, on the steps of St. Bruno’s after mass.