THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED. SOMETHING SACKVILLE had been told would happen months before. And was quietly waiting for. It was something she had plotted secretly with Tracy McCaustere within the confines of that silent university. That is, Tracy had told her to go see certain people on the reserve. All of this she believed was her design to help Eva, to allow her to be free.
Late one afternoon as he sat in the den, representatives of a First Nations group, Justice and Recompense, came to him. It took the representatives a half an hour or more to come to the point—telling him the acres Torrent Peterson bought and was now carefully culling for his business was actually theirs. That it was unceded land, a part of their nation—they told him that the person Torrent bought the land from, Clement Ricer, was not the owner, they were. They didn’t dislike Torrent but he had done something illegal.
“Aren’t you his business partner?”
“Only in a sense—they have a loan.”
“Well,” one of the men said, “I thought you were on our side. Are you on our side or what?”
Yes, the wonderful thing about reconciliation was you had to be on someone’s side.
But it was this interview with the band, in the paper the next week, that he couldn’t abide:
Furniture business illegally culling trees of local Native band, Albert Raskin partner.
Well-known environmentalist, indiscriminately cutting on Indian ground?
Professor Raskin, benefactor, champion of all that is, must answer to who he is now.
The committee meetings on Peace and Equality which had been held at his cottage were cancelled. McLeish was as disappointed as Dykes—or just about.
Faye Sackville herself told him she was surprised he had not looked into all of this more carefully. She kept from him her secret that she had.
Albert went around the house throwing chairs.
Dykes too refused to see him. He banged on Dykes’s door. Sackville said she was too busy for him. He cancelled his classes and sat in the dark. Though he was not being called a racist yet he was being called one who was unaware of his racist tendencies.
All of this happened within a week.
“I am in despair,” he wrote to Sackville on a little yellow sticky. “I will do whatever you say—whatever you think is right—tell me what to do and I will do it. My God, how can they ever call me a racist—me—moi—who fought for justice—you saw how I fought—me—moi.”
He kept leaving stickies all over her door, and they would disappear, and he would go by and leave more.
She was silent for five long days. Then she wrote:
“I will get back to you.”
Two days later came her response.
“My boy—what if you make a statement that under my direction the property will be turned over to me as a centre for peace and justice? That’s what I would do—look how you would fare among our mutual friends—we who want equality and justice to triumph in this godforsaken hole called Canada? You know how fond I am of you—you have already touched my breasts—can’t imagine what you may touch next.”
And she drew a funny face to go with it all.
“What if people don’t forgive me?” he wrote back.
“Oh—my pet—I will simply demand that they do.”
Torrent, working sometimes fifteen hours a day, could not sell as much as he needed to offset expenses. And for some days after the accusations started, he didn’t even hear of them. Eva knew, however. She suddenly read her name in the paper.
Then Mr. John from the reserve came to see him, and asked Eva to be present as well. They were in the house. Outside some men stood, in First Nations dress. One played with little Polly and gave her a sucker.
Mr. John told them that the deed to the land Torrent was culling was bogus. It did not belong to Mr. Ricer. It was distinguished from British holdings by an 1853 treaty—just as the asbestos mine itself was.
“We own the mine—we always have—and it’s time to take it back.”
In fact they were thinking of blockading both the mine and Torrent’s new land. Eva kept her head down, fumbling with her fingers, tears in her eyes, the same as she had done one day in grade eleven when she had to go see the principal. Mr. John saw this and said:
“But perhaps things will be okay—we can come to some compromise.”
Still, from the moment of that visit on, nothing was the same. For Mr. John did not control the band any more than a commander controls a battalion once the battle has begun.
The next few months Albert set the process in motion, the clause that allowed him out of the contract and the recoup of his losses, if good faith was broken.
Indian men said they were prepared to confiscate the lumber in Torrent’s barn, and the timber he had drying in its stall.
Eva had gone to the doctor, and was prescribed pills to help her sleep. Everything seemed to be unravelling and she did not know how to stop it. Still, she clutched her little knuckles in hope.
One night he told her, “We will owe him fifty thousand and I have no way of paying it back—and if I’m sued by the band, what then? I can’t begin to think—I can’t think anymore. We will lose the damn house—oh, if it was all for Polly—where will our little girl sleep?”
“How much have you paid back so far?”
“Fifteen thousand—and it left us almost penniless,” he told her. “It is all wrong—everything is wrong. I should never have done it—why oh why?”
“Well everyone says you work too slow, so why did you leave that job on the dredge if you work so slow. I told you it was up to you—I told you.” And she ran upstairs.
Albert had to start formal proceedings against false pretences and bad faith.
“Be the man you were meant to be,” Dykes told him, raising his fist in salute, in some measure of uncompromising, in some measure of solidarity with the masses, in some tribute to the Indian band, in some instant moment of vanity and self-gratification.
“Go for your uncles. Side with the Indians to show who you are.”
“Right on—wow, motherfucker,” the young woman said, her legs in a lotus position, and not so young anymore.
To Dykes the world was filled with conspiracies—and he was seeking evidence. He told his protégé this unequivocally—he was now seeking evidence, against Raskin Conspiracies. And of course the CIA—the CIA was always, always involved.
He went back to the house—he went along the lanes, he walked with one great moment of being resolute.
“You do look angry,” Sackville said. “Oh my God, you are finally your own man!” And she kissed him passionately, and let him touch the inside of her thigh, “I have waited a long time for this—”
Some months before, Torry had gone with Eva to a party in Judge Lampkey’s large cottage. He had never been inside before—only on the outside when he was hired to do the shutters in the fall, to paint an outbuilding in the spring, and to plant flowers.
Eva collected things from the party to bring home; she took a small placemat that Mrs. Lampkey had given her. The MP Edgar Lampkey was there, and she had rushed back in to have her picture taken with him at the last moment. Now that picture was on the wall in their living room. Never had Torry seen her act with such sycophancy, though he didn’t understand it.
The party at Lampkey’s was a catastrophe. Torrent was so shy he didn’t want to talk about his cabinets to anyone, or couldn’t.
Ms. Sackville standing beside Albert said: “Male stupidity. Get rid of him, I’d say.”
So that day, Eva was humiliated; rushing around trying to tell people about the furniture that her husband made, “ta fit real snug in all yer houses,” and Torrent was embarrassed by her, left early while people drifted off in the summer sun.
Later that day Albert had sat on the veranda of his cottage smoking, looking over the pale water as it was growing dark, and she, who had gone back to her house, suddenly appeared, in a halter top and very tight white shorts. She suddenly bent over, put both arms around his neck, hugged him and said:
“Thanks for today, Mr. Raskin sir—I met an MP and got a placemat from Mrs. Lampkey and everything. And look—one of the invitations that you made.”
He laughed at that innocence, and kissed her quickly.
And then in bared feet she ran off the warm veranda and disappeared, by the darkening hedges, while he watched. He turned his head and saw Ms. Faye watching him.
No one was more disappointed in Torrent than Eva. She was both embarrassed and furious. She didn’t speak to him. And this caused her to suddenly forget, or want to forget, who he was.
Eva left Polly alone the next day, and went to the cottage, walking down to Arron then across to the bay, and up along the beach. It was pouring rain. She thought others would be there, for they usually were (or did she think this), but he was alone, and the rain fell and lashed all the windows.
Her clothes were so tight and wet they seemed to make apparent every part of her. Her hair was damp on her face.
Some crow cried too and the sound of the rain sounded comforting on the roof, made everything more enclosed, as if it separated them from the world.
“You have to help me,” she said, crying. “You must help me. Torry is not the same Torry.” And suddenly she clung to him, her face both scared and tragic.
It was the last thing he ever thought he would do again to a woman. He gave her two Valium that his mother used to quiet her nerves. He spoke to her about being her guide. He spoke to her as she clung to him.
He looked at her, kissed her very suddenly.
“Your clothes are wet.”
He then began to take them off.
It was—her destiny—not Torry’s or even Polly’s but hers alone. She was exclusive—and was meant to be with different people. Sackville had bought her a blouse and had given her a book too.
She would be with Professor Raskin, and be like Clara, yes, just like her.
That first day the air remained still in the room they had left, the couches with their blankets, the chairs with their old cushions, the fireplace mantel with its small seashells and crafts, the black soot that had over the years crawled up the orange brick, the wood in the wood box sat alone in the sound of rain, while murmuring came from somewhere up those stairs, and along the hall.
This moment, this very moment would be the height of their relationship, the high-water mark.
Nothing else would ever be the same. For anyone, really, in Arron Brook.
Darkness called, waves, and sky birds sang. The rain was over.
And Torrent was alone with Polly when she made it home that evening at ebb tide. He didn’t even ask where she had gone because he had been trying to find buyers on the phone.
The birds sang in the willow branches, and the gravel drive had spots of clear mirror-like puddles. She ran upstairs, she hid without him knowing why she would ever want to hide. There she shook both in pleasure and dread at what she had done. Why didn’t she tell Albert that Torrent was putting money aside for her education?
She remembered how she had stumbled to put on her wet clothes and ran from the cottage. She thought of the line from Genesis. “How do you know you are naked?” seemed to hang in the dank air, in the towels and the smell of pink soap.
Then it all came out—that is, who the land belonged to. People no longer spoke to her at the grocery store. That is because too many were against them, too many were saying they were greedy. Too many others—like the beekeeper Jessop, and the maple syrup guy—had hoped to get that money and had never gotten it, to have much sympathy for those who had. They walked by Eva as if distraught by everything she had brought to the world. And there were now rumours too and she could not dispel them.
When Torry was away Eva drank, and wandered from one end of the house to the other, crying, with little Polly following her, holding her doll Mo Mo in her hand. Finally she telephoned him. But Ms. Sackville answered the phone.
“It’s Torry’s fault,” she said, holding back Polly who wanted to talk on the phone. “It is, Professor Sackville—it’s not me, it’s Torry’s fault.”
It was raining now too. The rain came down on Matilda, on the old horse in the paddock. It came down on the window like some kind of curse. And she was weeping and hoping to run away.