The fall rains came, hard as sticks, churning up the front yard until it looked like a muddy battlefield. Leaves in soggy wavelets lapped against the steps of the farmhouse.
Jim went out into the rain with a sign he had made under his coat. He had wrapped the sign in a clear plastic bag. With safety pins he attached it to Gladys out at the dam. The sign read, “I know who Tabor is.”
A week passed.
At church, Jim watched Father Fisher, watched his every move, half expecting to see clues drop off him like buttons. Or lip balm dispensers. After the service Jim lined up at the door and shook the pastor’s hand. He looked into his eyes and came face to face with someone looking hard into his own eyes, and they were both looking for the same person.
The rain was so bad Monday afternoon that Everett pulled the bus over at the bottom of the cut road. He turned in his seat to look back at his only passenger.
“This is what you’d call raining cats and dogs, eh, Jimbo? Mind if we wait up a bit? I can’t see a thing and I hate getting them cats and dogs smeared all over the undercarriage, know what I mean?”
Jim minded, all right, but what could he do? The windshield wipers could barely keep up with the downpour. Cats and dogs didn’t begin to describe the deluge. More like beavers and bears.
On the floor of the bus lay a canary yellow notice with muddy shoe marks on it. Jim had one in his binder; all the kids were taking them home. It was about Father Fisher’s Kosovo Relief Fund. They were going to adopt a town in that war-torn Serbian province, a town the size of Ladybank, a few kilometres northeast of Srbica where refugees were flooding. The title of the notice read, “From Ladybank to Ljivno.”
Jim looked up and saw Everett leaning back in his chair reading the same notice. He was wagging his head. “And we think we’ve got problems, eh, Jimbo?”
Jim turned back to the window. Being stuck in the rain was one thing; getting caught up in a one-way conversation with Everett was another.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his seat. What was he thinking? Everett had grown up in these parts. And he was Father’s age, more or less.
Jim got up and walked to the front, pretending that all he wanted to do was look out the windshield to check on the road. The hill up ahead — what he could see of it — looked more like a river.
He plunked himself down in the front seat. Everett smiled at him, folded up the notice and tucked it in his pocket.
“Hear they’re nicknamin’ it the Father Plan,” he said.
Jim nodded. “Father Fisher sure gets himself involved, doesn’t he? Was he always like that?”
Everett hooted. “Well, you could say that. But involved in what, would be the question.”
“Like he was wild, kind of?”
“He was a real caution,” said Everett. He whooped again, punched the horn to emphasize the point. Then he leaned towards Jim and whispered behind his hand, as if there was anyone to overhear. “Drinkin’, carousin’ — you name it. Wheelin’ and dealin’. Always near the cow plop but never got his shoes soiled, if you know what I mean.”
“So what changed him?”
Everett leaned back in his seat, scratched his belly. “I guess it was after the fire. The Tufts boy dyin’. You hear about that?” Jim nodded. “Fisher, he just dropped outa sight, eh. Gone. Next thing his drinkin’ buddies hear he’s in Ohio somewhere at theology school. Boy, did that get a few laughs. But people laughed out the other side of their face when he come back, a reg’lar sobersides with a dog collar to boot.”
“Must have come as a shock,” said Jim.
Everett nodded. “Oh, jeez, yeah. His father was fit to be tied. Oh, boy, Wilf Fisher. Now there was a piece of work, if I ever seen one.”
“But the fire…” said Jim, sensing that he was losing Everett.
“Oh, the fire. Well, that was somethin’ else. I chummed around with Stan Tufts a bit — Frankie’s little brother —’til they moved down to Brockville. He and I even wrote once or twice when they headed down to Mississippi. Pen pals, like. Baton Rouge. Hot down there, so I hear.”
This was the trouble with Everett. He could keep his bus on the road, more or less, but not a conversation.
“She was following up on her Acadian roots, Laverne Tufts — except her maiden name was Roncelier, see — French. Never liked it here. So she left that old slug-a-bed Wendall Tufts in Brockville and highed off south with little Stanley. I guess after Frankie died…”
Jim saw his chance. “Why do you think Tuff…I mean, Frankie’s…death tore up Father Fisher so much?”
Everett looked momentarily confused, as if he had lost the thread and couldn’t find his way back. Then he flashed a snaggle-toothed smile.
“Well, they was as thick as thieves, lad. They and…” Everett’s face clouded suddenly. His mouth had gotten away on him.
“They and my dad,” said Jim.
Everett looked up the road, sniffed, pinched his nose with his fingers.
“I knew they hung out,” said Jim, not wanting the tap turned off just yet.
“He was just a kid,” Everett said at last. “Just taggin’ along.”
Jim primed the pump. “Frankie’s death upset him a lot, too,” he said.
Everett nodded thoughtfully, but then his memory uncovered something to smile about. “Old Wilf was pretty sore about it, that’s for sure. He was wild as a rabid fox, let me tell you.”
It took Jim a moment to remember that the abandoned cabin had been full of Wilfred Fisher’s hay.
“’Course Wilf was mad most near all the time, except when he was buying somebody’s farm out from underneath ’em. The only thing made him truly happy was lining his purse. Most everybody hated that man.”
Jim was about to throw in the towel, but then Everett said, “Your daddy — now he hated Wilf Fisher somethin’ awful.”
“Well, who could blame him? Everybody in the county kept a weather eye on that horse thief. But Hub…” He shook his head.
Hate was a word that was never heard in the Hawkins house. A word Jim’s father had forbidden him to use. Jim had never heard his father utter hateful words about anything, or anybody.
“Why?” asked Jim, draping himself over his backpack. “Why did he hate Wilf? I mean, if he was thick with Fisher.”
Everett glowered, staring out at the rain. “Same reason we all did,” he said. “He tried to buy your grandaddy out when he was down. Old man Hawkins was just scraping by — this would be the late sixties. Your grandfather had made some bad loans, interest rates went sky high, and Wilf was just hanging around like a vulture waiting to gobble up the place.” He snapped his fingers. Then he laughed. “Why, one time Hub come across Wilf on his tractor and Hub, he pelted that old crow with crabapples ’til the old man near crashed the thing.” Everett let out a great guffaw of laughter.
“My dad?” said Jim incredulously.
“The same. I seen it. Me and Stanley. Oh, it was somethin’ to behold.” He laughed some more, his gut jiggling at the memory.
“Another time he stove in the windscreen on the old man’s pick-up.”
Jim sat back, limp with disbelief, shaking his head. From the corner of his eye, Everett noticed and looked sheepish.
“Oh, you mustn’t think I’m sayin’ anything bad about your pop, Jimbo. Why, I remember my own daddy sayin’ that Hub Hawkins deserved a medal for showing some backbone, havin’ some spunk. And he was just a lad, mind you. A bit hot-headed, a bit of what you’d call a firebrand, eh. Nothin’ wrong with that in a young fella. No, sir.”
Jim could see that Everett was afraid he might have offended him. “Phew!” he said, grinning. “My dad, the dragon slayer.”
“You got ’er, Jimbo. And as fine a man as I ever met,” said Everett. Then he decided it was time to move on, mudslide or no mudslide. With his tongue in his cheek, and his bushy eyebrows jutting out like twin visors, he let out the brake and steered the school bus out into the flood.
The engine was revving high, the wheels spun, the bus shimmied from side to side. Jim clutched the guard rail as they made their way through one turn and climbed into the next.
His father a hot-head, a firebrand. This wasn’t what he had been looking for.
They pulled up finally to the stop sign at the Twelfth Line. Jim was pressing his face to the window, looking out the other side of the bus, not at his own land but at the fields that sloped down towards the old Tufts place, now nothing more than a grassy hummock. He could almost make it out through the fence-line trees, the wild grasses and the slanting rain. Or maybe he was just imagining it.
A log cabin converted to storage, filled with hay, consumed by flames. And a boy inside — a self-confessed fire-starter — stupid with drink, but maybe just sober enough to be hammering on the door, trying to get out.
Suddenly, the stench of the bus got to Jim: the airborne residue of lunch-pail fumes, stale farts and damp clothing. He felt like he was burning up, and there was a boy inside him hammering to get out into the air.
They turned west onto the flat and stopped at the end of his laneway.
“Thanks,” said Jim,
“Don’t you ever doubt your daddy was a good man,” said Everett.
Jim didn’t look at Everett. “I never did,” he said.
“Give my best to your mother,” said Everett. Then the doors opened and Jim stepped out into the rain.