Travellers May Still Return Read online

  Lying in the room with the radiologist at his side, he’d decided to be positive, to fight the good fight, turn resentment into anger, a white-hot variety, let lust focus the fury and split lust’s aim from Abi’s image, set it at the illness. In his head, was it all? Was the journey almost over? To hell with Charles and his stories. He would not go where he was going, not toward death, but along a path between lust and fear, a windy ride through the plain, race to the tree-lined finish, pin the tail on the gatekeeper and pop through the trapdoor to land on baskets stuffed with what? Here’s a policeman, here’s a police bike. Here’s a cowboy and here’s a horse. Here’s a head and here’s some long black shiny hair. Sleek and bouncy, the young nurse on duty weekends. Match horses to their eyes, eyes to bodies, sailors to the sea. Recurring dreams in which Abi seemed a golden figure on the horizon or a ribbon that fluttered in his wake like an afterburn.

  The horses were fine. Abi was in the barn, sitting right where he’d left her weeks ago, now very pregnant. He was almost sad to see her there, though he’d planned the moment and what they’d say.

  “What’ve you been up to?”

  “I go to the dump sometimes with Harry.”

  “Yes? After school?”

  She sat on a bale. “After my chores with the horses. I go riding every morning.”

  “Who?”

  “Red. All the others.”

  “Should you do that?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Your parents?”

  She shrugged, kicking her heels against the straw.

  “Well, there you are,” he said. “You’re more and more like me.”

  “Can we go back to the cabin?”

  “Should you ride that far?”

  “For sure.”

  “Why do you want to?”

  “It’s peaceful there. Can you ride?”

  “Sure. I’ve been out already. I pulled a muscle.” He laughed.

  “What was it like, the hospital?”

  “A lot of waiting around.”

  “They took it all out?”

  “Not yet. They shrank it, I guess, so the surgery date’s set.” He got up and crossed the barn’s dusty floor. “You’ve been living here.”

  “Yeah. Are you scared?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But you don’t want to be dead.”

  He smiled.

  “I think the horses missed you,” she said.

  “I’m glad to see them.”

  “I’ll still help.”

  “I know. That’s good. But you’ve got your own problems.”

  “Can we ride to the pass?”

  “The cabin won’t be easy. The pass is too far.”

  “Okay. When can we go to the cabin?”

  “Don’t know. What’s the big hurry?”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and joined him at the door, staring out. A storm was gathering in eerie silence: forked lightning illuminated low black clouds boiling above them — not a blade of grass or a branch moved.

  “It’s just like the only thing,” she said. “The only thing I feel like doing.”

  V

  22.

  This is the little stone with which I have conversations, this round, volcanic, well-smoothed black stone that Danny brought me from the sea, that fits into my palm. What’s given away flourishes. What’s not told rots. This stone is the mother of the present wall. This stone contains the village’s fortune, if only I could read it. Before tragedy, before I began to know where I could and could not go, I held onto this stone. A moment ago the stone was cold, even with the summer’s heat, but it has warmed in my hand, and now I curl my fingers around a single thought with red veins. We lost our daughter. We started a school. We lost a son who might return. I have a brother who is dying.

  When my path crosses Abi’s, I see a contained girl containing and wonder how this place, once a frontier, now an anachronistic pocket, appears to her. How does our village affect her? She’s not the first mother this young, nor the last, but our insular spirit, unfed by recent travel, untrusting (because without perspective), cannot bear to register that she’s pregnant. I am not a seer or mystic — leave that to the weavers by the river — yet it seems we must keep Abi safe until our several-fold issues (nerves, fear, boredom) are passing weather. We used to produce in our children something unique and durable, and the village was built on that capital. Abi carries our last interest, our latest child.

  Tom has just brought me several bags of dusty sand and I have raked it into the lee of the home portion of wall and marched back and forth like a soldier on guard, tamping it down. The work is going well and the sand laps against the large bottom stones. Will I advance the wall next or the path? Will the path follow the wall or the wall the path? For now the partially built wall determines the path of the path, but there is no reason not to continue the path and then erect the wall along its length. But am I a creature who sets a plan and follows it? Sand is more flexible than stone. Without the wall, the sand will blow away. Sand is the time-infected progeny of stone. Stone is space-challenged sand. Sand whistles, sinks, shifts, drifts, stings, slips, softens. Stone calls us back. Sand gets in your eyes, ears, genitals. We approve of stone and want sand controlled, held, dyked.

  “Don’t forget to count the grains,” Emma calls from the house. “It’s in the Bible. Go on.”

  Or am I the kind of hero who looks for a plan in what is already aligned? Shouldn’t a hero just get on with things? I’ve lived here all my life and known nothing of other places; I rarely speak at meetings; but I have sent tidings of our village to the outer world and have built a wall to divide nothing from nothing that will always be unfinished.

  We are running out of sand and drowning in bits of information.

  I send my wife a vigorous wave. I thank the gods every day for Emma, without whom I would go on like this, thought by thought, with no compass, forever. Who thinks me foolish. Who sends me out to the garden, signals me from the house, brings me a sandwich. At night she wraps herself around me, her belly soft against my behind.

  “Sometimes you look so sad out there,” she whispers. “How is it going?”

  “As you see.” I put my nose under the covers. “We churn in our own darkness.”

  She growls. She nips my neck. We understand each other.

  “I was jealous, I suppose,” I say. “Danny has a tattoo low on his belly. He showed me.”

  Emma bites my shoulder. “But my rival is a wall.”

  23.

  The hall stage was crowded with strangers, men and women in suits, while the villagers, local farmers, businessfolk and union people sat on white plastic chairs that at night formed towers to the rafters on either side of the gallery. The union members arrived in buses from the south wearing green T-shirts and sat stiffly beside the protestors of our village and neighbouring communities and outlying farms. Many of our crowd sported neon-orange shirts, something Emma had sorted out. Apocat and Kata’s cousins from the reserve sat in the back row, along with Pete Milkmemory. An early fog dimmed the room, of panic, anticipation, anger, greed and matter-of-fact conciliation. Cigarette smoke hung about the entrance.

  Tom stepped to the microphone at the edge of the stage and said, “This meeting is to discuss the proposed quarry mine.”

  Scores of union members cheered.

  A thickset man with a beard and a belly got to his feet. “There will be a hundred and fifty high-paying jobs on this rock mine.” He paused and squinted. “Such as would bring such relief to this recess-battered region!”

  Opponents of the quarry raised their arms and booed.

  A man in a white shirt and a yellow tie got up. He approached the microphone. He said in a low voice that a health study sponsored by the province showed that the quarry would lead to a hundred and seventy additional deaths in the region, many respiratory-related. “Supporting this project is tantamount to being a friend of cancer,” he murmured. And then his voice quavered. “Blasting an
d dust from the mine would poison our air and devastate the region’s wineries. It would increase unemployment. It’s not a partisan issue. It’s not about politics. It’s about protecting the good lives and jobs we already have . . . preserving quality of life. It’s that simple.”

  “The village is dying, man!” shouted a voice.

  Tom introduced the spokesman for Wildland Construction, the China-based firm proposing the quarry. The man waited and, when the crowd had quietened, he said, “That study is suspicious and ludicrous. Part of our plan is to divert the highway away from the town. The Air Quality Management folk we have talked to say that our plan for the rock mine will not significantly increase highway truck traffic, and overall will improve regional air quality. All our studies have concluded that the mine will not endanger the health of residents in surrounding communities. This is not the first quarry we’ve launched. This is the right project, in the right place, at the right time. The quarry will bring in an estimated two billion in sales tax over the life of the mine as well as create hundreds of indirect jobs. Our five-thousand-acre quarry will yield about eight hundred million tons of granite over the next hundred years.”

  “Yeah,” said Tom, taking the microphone, “and leave behind a hole fifteen hundred feet deep and four miles long. All the aggregate mined from the site will be trucked to the coast, to cities. Why should we sacrifice our beautiful and pristine plain to feed the aggregate demand of next century’s mega cities?”

  One of the union members stood. “I’m forty,” he said, “and I’ve been out of work for three years. We’re talking about jobs, about putting guys back to work. This is a job I could get.”

  Danny, from the back of the hall, called out: “I live within sight of the place Wildlife wants to mine. They’re misrepresenting the facts. People in this town want their land left the way it is.”

  “You’ve sold your place already, Danny-boy!”

  The Wildlife rep jumped up. “This land is crown land. It does not belong to the village.”

  The government woman stood and bowed. “Yes, that is right.”

  “They’re a billion-dollar transnational corporation that just wants its way.”

  “That plain is where life was created,” called Kata. “It is a sacred place. Chief, please talk to them.”

  “We have a moral decision to make,” Tom told the crowd. “It should be based on respect for religion and history. We should reject this massive quarry.”

  “No,” said the Wildlife spokesman.

  His supporters roared.

  He held up a hand for silence. “What we are talking about is an essential source of ingredients that will feed the region’s economic ascent. Most of the vineyards will be fine.”

  “How can it reduce highway traffic? How can you say to us there won’t be health hazards and environmental destruction?”

  “Our town is known for its grapes, for the beauty of its vineyards.”

  “Where will workmen and their families live?”

  “Save us from conservative politics!”

  “Take it to the Board of Supervisors!”

  “Put it to the vote!”

  Chairs screeched on the floorboards. The orange shirts and green T-shirts were roiling in opposition.

  The Indians from the reserve sat in silence.

  “This vote will be a watershed moment for us,” shouted Tom. “We’ve seen land all around us go to mining, microwave towers, landfills, prisons and other horrible so-called necessities.”

  “I didn’t think the village was organized enough to really fight any change,” Lucy said to Emma.

  “We can’t stick at what we wanted to be fifty years ago,” Emma said. “We have to change. But not this. Not this.”

  A new figure stood from the table on the stage, a lanky young man with hair tied back in a ponytail and wearing a suit that looked too small for him. He stood at the microphone. “If I might have your attention.”

  “Who the hell are you!” yelled Danny.

  “That’s the tent man,” Emma said.

  “I am one of the scientists who camped here last year,” the young man said. “I’m speaking as a consultant to Wildlife. Please — ” He held up his hands to quiet the boos. “There has been an influx of upscale housing and care-homes in your neighbouring counties — in towns and villages closer to the cities — over the last fifty years. The first people who moved out here were politically and economically conservative and vocal and the NIMBY attitude was very strong. It overwhelmed the natural openness and vitality of village life. Where there was successful opposition to major mines, to jails and similar employers, villages became bedrooms to the city and retirement centres. My partner and I have studied these communities. Broadly speaking, most now look like soulless ghost communities. You will be next, but you do not need to go down that road. Towns that have seen the light and welcomed mines and such sources of blue-collar jobs into the region have experienced a new spirit of revival. There is a healthy bustle in these towns. When much of the workforce has only a high school diploma, there’s the sense of family and the sense of possibility. There’s a real community, instead of a retirement or bedroom community.”

  The Wildlife spokesman leaned over the microphone and smiled. “Wildlife Construction,” he said, “built a five-hundred-acre rock mine on Loaf Mountain over in the southwest corner of the province.”

  “That is so,” continued the young man. “The town there was formally an upscale suburban haven, and that mine has now attracted thousands of new families into those quiet neighbourhoods. Property values have risen. That mine has filled those good schools and gentle hills with a fresh generation of kids.”

  “Indeed,” said the spokesman. “Let me recap. It is quite simple. We will extract almost a billion tons of granite over the next century, supplying building material to other booming towns and cities. The final result, by the end of the century, will be a deep lake — plenty of water for the irrigation of crops and the potential for hydro power. In the meantime, plenty of jobs.”

  “That’s bullshit! What about light-radar robot trucks? There won’t be any jobs in a couple of years!”

  A thin man in a green T-shirt climbed onto the stage and stood shaking in front of the microphone. “I am an unemployed labourer. I am thirty years old. I have two kids. I grew up a mile from the proposed mine site, and now live in the city. I am two weeks away from losing my house and car. We need these projects to happen now. I just want to come home.”

  “I speak for the wineries, and I vote yes,” came a voice from the table.

  Representatives from local school districts, tourism councils, and chapters of the Sierra Club spoke in favour of the mine.

  “I have a list, everyone,” called Dmitri. “Grape growers, teachers, the principal are all for the mine and so am I. Billion dollar transnational, so what? Wildlife will win!”

  Locals whistled.

  “What about our sacred land?” said Kata. “Chief Pete?”

  Chief Pete Milkmemory stood up. He was as old as the sisters and wore beaded slippers and a red, white and black headdress. In one hand he held a tapered wooden peg, and in the other a small pelt.

  “Yes,” he said. “We only have one creation site. Only one. It’s like your Garden of Eden.” He looked out of the hall window to the north. “Once it is destroyed by a mine, it’s gone. The site of the proposed mine is the place where all life was created.”

  “But you’ve applied for a permit to build a four-star resort casino!” called the Wildlife rep.

  The Chief turned slowly around. “I can’t remember the first time I rode a horse,” he said. His wide eyes stared ahead and his voice grew firmer as he continued. “We made a circle when the grass is brown. I will not talk here about the circle, but there were thousands of horses. We know the old ways will be forgotten. The wild horses are dangerous to people . . . We will not leave. If we go away we will always come back.” He shuffled into the aisle and held up the peg and th
e skin. Above his eyes, white discs with red centres revolved, dangling black beads trembled.

  The band rose en masse and chairs clattered and the men and women began a rhythmical hymn, and the boards shook with their stamping.

  Tom tapped the mike. “There are just too many uncertainties for me,” he said. “This vote is about the right to determine what happens in our community.”

  I helped Tom and Harry stack the plastic chairs. Locals gathered out in the parking lot dust as buses carried the union members away.

  I dreamed my wall was falling, the house full of water, and I was watching Danny from the glass room lose his footing and tumble into the dark thick loamy flood and Abi, all pale limbs, was swimming to rescue him, trying to haul him toward the house, and I jumped out of the window, down into the water, and he floated up in my arms, his face bony, his left eye shrunken shut, his right looking into my eyes, and there was no sign of the girl.