Smoke River Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY KRISTA FOSS

  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 case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Foss, Krista, author

  Smoke River / Krista Foss.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-3609-5 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-7710-3613-2 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8611.O7865S66 2014 C813′.6 C2013-903010-7

  C2013-903011-5

  Cover photograph: © Crystal Marks

  (smoke): © Nikolay Dimitrov/Dreamstime.com

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  One Toronto Street, Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For my sister, Katrine

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Shayna has always liked May, its warm afternoons and cool evenings promising all sorts of rebirth. She stands at the edge of a freshly planted tobacco field. Some new shoots list precariously into the space between the rows, risking root shock. She kicks off her flip-flops, as she did when she was a girl who abandoned footwear every year from mid-May until the end of August. By then she could sprint across gravel without a grimace, the soles of her feet indifferent to thistle, tough as jerky. Now the bottoms of her feet complain upon meeting the cat-tongue soil, sandy and wet. Stop being so middle-aged, she wills herself. Her big toe cramps.

  She’s in no hurry. The sky is dark and clear. Under a moon of dull zinc, the seedlings cast small shadows, easy to miss. Shayna scans for fallen plants and, spotting one, kneels down, pushes soil against its base, presses until the shoot straightens and aligns with the rest. Just as generation after generation of jack-planters – men with bourbon or rum in their accents – did before her. And before them all, Attawandaron women, who buried the cold slime of fish scraps in the earth to fertilize the new shoots.

  Her fingers drum along the plastic buttons of the shirt she wears – his shirt – and she slips the buttons open, one, two, three, until just one cinches the fabric closed at the base of her sternum. If the plants are just in, he’ll have been up since five a.m., his belly mean as a barn cat by the time the hired college students left for the day, his muscles sore and satisfied, his skin dry and radiating, the sun in his core. Shayna pictures him stopping at the door before he goes inside to wait for her. He’ll have a smoke, admire how the tobacco shoots warm the furrows with a greenish glow. He’ll want the cooler nights and warm days to toughen the roots, make them deeper and more resilient. She imagines worries gathering around him like whispers, repeating rumours of all the things waiting to rob him of the field’s bright possibility in the ten weeks ahead – late frost, nematodes, cutworms, wireworms, budworms, hail, drought, mould. A withholding sun. And finally price. Only the elders consider tobacco a sacrament; everyone else treats it as another word for money.

  The porch light is on. Barefoot, she is silent on the back step. Shayna places her forehead against the screen door and hesitates, wondering what the hell she is doing. Veins like hungry taproots spreading from her fingers, her jaw, deep into the country of her body. She is neither young nor old. Her grandmothers’ spirits exhale lake breath across the tobacco plants behind her, stooping them with dew, raising a shiver along Shayna’s back. She turns the handle, steps into the unlit kitchen. Now that she has crossed his threshold a first time, she will do it again. He is there, still and shirtless, a metre away. He steps forward and stops. She picks up a whiff of peaty smoke from him, the copper sharpness of his tumbler of Scotch. He has been waiting for her with a certainty he doesn’t have about his crop; he must have known she’d come to him eventually.

  It was his neck – not the fair hair, not the patrician blue of his eyes – that gave her pause the first time they met. Despite the fineness of his European features, his precise, over-educated talk, that work-leathered neck betrayed something essential; he was built from sun, sky, clay. She’d sensed a kindred restlessness too, the same tangled aches inside him.

  Shayna, he says, because she hasn’t given him permission to shorten it. He doesn’t reach for her. Instead, he stands so near she feels his pulse, smells the long, hard workday on him before he takes a draw of steadying breath, dips his thumb into the tumbler of Scotch, brings it to her bottom lip and rubs softly. She leans into his steadiness, his smell. For that moment, she stops wanting to be some other, better woman.

  CHAPTER 1

  Coulson studies Shayna’s sleeping face and asks himself when it will all go to hell. Last week, two tanagers landed on the branch by his bedroom window. He’d watched the male place food down the open beak of its mate, their necks a tango of scarlet and tawny green feathers, their cries at once delighted and anguished. You can’t predict a moment like that. And now this woman – the same kind of waiting surprise.

  In another life he drank espresso in the morning and Cabernet at night, picked up smooth shirts from the dry cleaner, pressed his slippers into antique Persian rugs, made love to a woman who was as cool and perfumed as new linen. He’d had a decade of her geography: beautiful but unsurprising. Marie had the prettiest smile, the smallest hands, of any woman he’s known.

  Shayna’s hands are strong. Even the whitish spittle in the creases of her pink-brown lips – this is something he can love. How different she is from Marie, who delivered her stings under cover of honey, her voice trembling with sweetness, leaving him unsure exactly when or why he’d been hurt.

  He has the urge to pull the sheet from Shayna, to see her nakedness pimple in the morning air’s tang, the pale light. But there is coffee to make. Eggs and bacon. He wants to baby her – hand-feed her like an abandoned pup, rub the knots from her muscles, brush her hair. He edges quietly out of bed and leans over Shayna for a half-second to confirm that her eyes are still closed, pulls on his jeans, and quits the house barefoot to have a smoke. The sandy soil squishes between his toes. He walks among the tobacco, sturdy after a month of good sun, stretches his arms towards the expanding light, and inhales all the hopefulness of the Interlake morning.

  I can’t sleep here with that smell, Marie said the weekend they arrived to get the farmhouse ready to sell. Both of his parents had wanted to die on the farm, and they got their wish: a year after a stroke felled his father, his mother’s heart failed as she was pe
eling freshly picked turnips. Marie had squished up her nose at the kitchen’s archaeology of odours – decades of frying bacon, sausage, and minute steak, of scrubbing dirt-stained bodies with carbolic soap – as she wiped the surfaces with pine-scented cleaner. He’d kicked off his three-hundred-dollar shoes, walked among the abandoned tobacco fields, tangled with wild carrot and amaranth, and reacquainted his naked soles with the salve of dirt. Then he stripped to the waist and weeded and turned the soil of the large kitchen garden, occasionally catching a glimpse of Marie through the window, her face salted with distaste, her straightened hair dishevelling in the humidity of scrubbing and bleaching.

  Oh, I can still smell it, she’d said again, lying on her back in his parents’ bed that night, her eyes widened to the moonlit ceiling. Coulson was crisped by sun. He’d had too much to drink at dinner, had ignored Marie’s hurt looks and fallen into the cool, worn sheets with a kind of satisfaction, a pleasure he’d forgotten. Beside him, she smelled as exact as air freshener. He knew then that he wasn’t going to leave these walls of dolomite and limestone. And she was.

  Shayna may give him an hour of her waking life or just fifteen minutes. Back in the kitchen, he rifles the pockets of her jeans, abandoned on the floor and damp with morning, finds a cellphone, which he leaves on the enamel table, and shoves her pants into the oven, turning the dial to two hundred degrees. The coffee is percolating, eggs cracked, bacon sliding in the pan. Shayna’s cellphone bleats. Those infernal phones. Will it bring her to the bottom of the stairs, wearing his robe and a face that’s already halfway out the door? Potatoes would be trying too hard, he decides. The cellphone starts up again, jittery as a marsh bird, then goes silent after four rings. Coulson wonders if he should wake and alert her to the insistent caller. Instead he covers the cooked bacon, puts it in the oven to stay warm by the jeans. The eggs sizzle in the frying pan. He carafes the freshly made coffee. Toast, he thinks. The cellphone rings anew. He recognizes the persistence of a telemarketer who hasn’t checked the time zone, ignores it out of spite. He pours two glasses of orange juice, fishes out a tray from the back of the pantry, wipes it with a damp cloth, then lays out Shayna’s breakfast. As he pulls her jeans from the oven, the phone starts up a fourth time. That’s the one. He feels her hands slide across his lower back like a sweep of cards that ends his luck.

  She’s already moving across the room, a small, naked woman the colour of milky tea, leaning against his kitchen table, cupping the phone to her ear. With her face wan, the bedsheet creases on her cheeks, she is even more desirable.

  “Now? What? Okay. Okay.”

  She clicks the phone shut and turns to him, her eyes falling on the warm folded jeans in his arms.

  “I’ll need a fresh shirt,” she says.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, I’m about to reclaim some stolen property.”

  He is silent.

  “I should have mentioned it earlier,” she says.

  “Can you eat? I made eggs.” He hates the plaintive tone in his voice.

  She moves forward, bends to lay her cheek against his bare belly, and lightly kisses his rib cage.

  “I need to go.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  She looks up at him, her face tender and amused. “You won’t have to. Just going across the road. I’ll cut through your field.”

  She tugs the jeans from his grip and presses her nose into them. “Mmm. Bacon.”

  In the crack of morning light peeking through the bedroom’s custom-made blind, Ella Bain notices a small figure quit the Stercyx farmhouse. Who but a lover leaves at such an hour? She sits on the edge of the bed and tries to focus, but there is no more detail to squeeze from the bright morning. It is none of her business. Plenty of lovers must have come and gone in all the years Stercyx has lived alone at the farmhouse, but this is the first she’s witnessed. She wishes she could see what kind of woman he would take to his bed. Certainly there was plenty of speculation around Doreville when he first moved back. She listens to her husband’s contented breathing behind her, leans closer to the windowpane, just for a second. Then she pulls herself away. If she rushed into her running gear, took her normal route in reverse, she might get a look at the mystery woman. But that was a lot of effort. What would it be like to sleep in? Better still, what if she slipped her hands under the drawstring of Mitch’s pyjamas and started the day sticky with saliva and semen, her stale mouth ransacked by his stale tongue. She imagines Coulson’s salt still on the skin, the lips of the woman leaving his farmhouse. Would a small change in routine redraw her life? She turns to look at her husband, curled into a cetaceous hump on the other side of the bed, and wonders if she has a duty to risk it. And then why it feels like a risk. Or a duty.

  Just recently, after a second glass of wine, Marguerite from her book club confessed she makes love with her husband every morning. Doesn’t it become routine? Ella asked. Marguerite – who pronounces her name with a tarty French accent, though she can’t speak a word of the language – curled up in her chair and smiled like some sort of feral cat. No, darling. I don’t think I could start the day without it now.

  If only she could see his face within the swaddling of bedsheets, she might press her cheek against his neck, probe his ear with her tongue, discover if they still have the imagination for unscheduled pleasure. But Mitch shifts jerkily, nests more bedding around him, and settles into a phlegmatic, gape-mouthed morning snore. Ella turns again to the blinds; the sunlight pokes around their edges, sulphur-bright, slightly hectoring. The figure that left Stercyx’s door has disappeared. Ella heads to the washroom.

  Twenty-five minutes after her feet hit the pavement, she leaves behind the figure eights of houses with their backyard gazebos and pergolas, their saltwater swimming pools and engineered waterfalls, routes around downtown Doreville, and arrives back on Highway 3, near where it cleaves the Stercyx farm from the strafed two hundred acres of the development. Her project. The western and southern edges have been calved from the reserve by a winding creek that empties into the river; the northern boundary is marked by a county road leading into the reserve. Mitch doesn’t want her haunting the new development. But she is unsettled by the woman leaving Stercyx’s farmhouse, by Mitch’s snoring, the way he dodges her questions about the development like a welterweight. And the new billboard is up. She’s curious to see it.

  The sun turns the asphalt into crushed crystals, and Ella, who dreads more fine lines pleating her eyes, wishes she’d worn sunglasses. She turns away from the brightness and notices Stercyx’s handiwork – the neatly tilled furrows, the tender green of immature tobacco plants – keeping pace with her on her right. Tobacco. Mitch wanted it in the name of the new development, but Ella balked. Her immigrant parents had picked, stitched, and graded the crop. During its harvest, her father’s skin was freckled with the leaves’ tar and her mother’s ankles swelled. Tobacco juice stained their fingertips yellow-brown despite the rigours of nightly scrubbing. At night they dragged their humiliation and grit across their rented bungalow’s threshold. And Ella left out the back door.

  Tobacco Valley Estates, Mitch said. It’s the history of the place. She shook her head, crossed her arms. They’re using it in all the new men’s colognes. He wasn’t going to let it drop. And besides, smoking’s cool again. It’s got a whole retro masculine appeal. That was going too far. I’ll take every cent of my money out of the development, she told him. His cheeks had gone flaccid. Geez, Ella, lighten up. You can’t go making ultimatums every time you don’t get your way.

  Two weeks later, the development was christened Jarvis Ridge Country Club Estates. She’d found history they could both live with: the surname of an early colonial administrator; a nod to the glacial silt and sand that had forged the interlake delta, made it decent enough for agriculture, ideal for a small golf course and a man-made lake. You can change the history of a place, Ella thinks, with the right packaging.

  The billboard is within view, but Ella d
oesn’t raise her eyes until she is close enough to take it all in. She slows her pace, looks up, and the images come into focus. Let them do their job, Mitch had insisted. But Ella had ideas. And now she wishes she’d been more forceful. The gigantic sign depicts a slim, athletic, vaguely thirty-something couple. Too big, Ella thinks. The woman a bland, over-plucked yoga mummy. The man with a motivational speaker’s klieg-light smile, pomaded hair. Each holds a flute of sparkling wine. We’re not selling houses, Mitch insisted. We’re selling people a vision of themselves. But as she comes to a stop underneath it, Ella wonders whether people don’t have more originality and better taste. The billboard couple hover over a monoculture of dirt welted with tire tracks. An 80% PRE-SOLD! banner hangs over a corner of the sign. Mitch has assured her that, while not quite true in the purest sense, it meets industry standards.

  Realizing anew how much of her carefully hoarded, smartly invested money buoys the mortgage on the land makes her breath suddenly shallow. She’s supplied the regular cash flow by doing the thankless missionary work of the Doreville and District Tobacco Diversification Office for the past two decades. She saved 10 per cent of her yearly earnings even as successive governments tired of the office’s mandate, clawed back funding, first for educational conferences, then publications, then secretaries, and finally leases, leaving Ella as a one-woman operation with an Execushare cubicle above the strip mall’s EB Games emporium. And when one day Mitch pointed to a new listing for the property across from Stercyx’s farm, raised his eyebrows, and said, Whaddya think? she’d surprised herself as much as him when she said yes. Yes for a project that would make Doreville an estimable, desirable place to live. Yes to making money faster than her more conservative investments could. Yes to being part of something constructive, forward-looking, tangible. Now, take a deep breath. Trust that I’ll take care of this, Mitch had said. Because I’m the one who knows real estate. In the first several months she’d said yes to that too, she really had. But now her money has become an acreage of mud, a smarmy billboard, a bunch of unanswered questions cooling their shared bed.