Falling From Grace (16 page)

“There.” Rainbow pointed, finger quivering. “There.”

I saw him then. He swayed in midair at the end of the rope, facing skyward, back arched. His arms dangled from his shoulders, legs twisted below, head flopped back. The video camera swung at the end of a length of webbing attached to his right wrist.

Rainbow whimpered and clutched the sleeve of my jacket.

“Paul,” I called up crossly. “What are you playing at?”

Moisture from the tree dripped onto my forehead and I brushed it away impatiently with the back of my hand. Rainbow whined like a desperate puppy and tugged at my sleeve. She pointed to a pattern of red-brown raindrops splattered on the flared tree roots that tangled like long giant toes across the ground at our feet.

I cupped my hands around my mouth to call again to Paul; the words caught in my throat at the sight of blood on my knuckles.

I started at a run down the trail to get help, then remembered Rainbow. She stood immobilized, eyes wide and frightened, cheeks tear-stained. But I couldn't wait. Paul's life depended on me. “Stay here,” I called out. “Talk to him. I'll find help.” Rainbow stepped back against the trunk of the tree and slumped to the ground, her attention fixed on Paul's body swinging overhead.

I jogged the trail back to camp to gather help and equipment, my lungs burning, muscles aching. In less than an hour, I returned with Mary, Marcel, Grace, and a handful of others. Rainbow was still huddled at the base of the tree, hugging her knees. At the sight of her mother she scrambled, sobbing, to her feet and into Mary's arms. I geared up for the climb, my hands fumbling with the buckles in my haste: a rope clipped to my harness, a flip line wrapped once around the trunk, an end secured at each hip, and a bight of rope wound tight around each hand. On my feet a pair of climbing spurs. I'd practised the technique once under the guidance of an expert arborist, Paul. To walk straight up a tree trunk with spurs, a section of rope and brute strength to defy the force of gravity the way a lineman climbs an electrical pole. A dangerous proposition. Suicide for the inexperienced. I had no choice. Paul's rope hung coiled in the canopy. I had no time to rig the tree.

Paul's instructions played through my mind, as clear in my memory as if he were standing next to me.
Stamp the spurs into the bark, in one motion lunge toward the trunk and flip the line up, lean back into its support, step up, one spur in, the other, flip the line up.
I kicked the spur at the arch of my foot into the bark, the sound like a hatchet biting the flesh of a log. “Stamp the spurs in, lunge forward . . .” I concentrated on the tree, trying not to think about Paul, about my own precarious position. One slip, one wrong move, and I would fall. My body burned like fire—knees, biceps, wrists, elbows. The skin of my hands screamed with pain from the friction of the flip line. I struggled to move the rope ever upward. It caught on the bumps and nubs of old branches on the far side of the tree, the ridges in the trunk. My right foot slipped and bark rained from the sole of my boot. I cried out and jerked the rope tight, pulled my body flat against the tree. I stabbed the spur again and again into the bark, heart in my throat, but still I slipped. Through the knot of fear that gripped me, I heard Paul's voice again in my head, loud and insistent.
Lean back, always lean back on the line.
I pushed away from the trunk, opening the angle of my body with the tree and my spurs set firmly into the bark. Instantly stable. I fought tears of relief.

“Faye . . .” The sound of my name floated up from below, my mother's voice like an anchor. “You can do it.”

I took another step. Another. I focused on the passage of the trunk, the ridges and dips, the variation in colour, the shape of each lichen, the feathery texture of moss. I imagined myself a mite on an epic journey up an old-growth tree. I recalled Billy's words.
Each tree has a song
. I closed my eyes and listened. Slowly I felt the vibration creep into my body, filling my bones, my muscles, urging me on. I continued up; the melody of the tree revealed itself in the rusty red lobes of the scissor-leaf liverwort, the moist edge of an olive-green mat of Menzies' neckera moss, the frills at the margins of a lettuce lung lichen. The rasp of the rope across bark on the other side of the tree, the bite of my spurs into wood. The sigh of the wind in the boughs above. The song of the tree moved through me, moved me upward.

The flip line resisted. A spray of needles scraped across my helmet and I knew I'd reached branches. The manoeuvre from trunk to the limb above my head sapped my remaining strength. I straddled the branch, lungs heaving, and anchored the climbing rope with a length of webbing, then collapsed back against the trunk, panting, clothes drenched in sweat. Below a dozen faces tilted heavenward, watching.

I could see Paul's body, hanging in mid-air, two body lengths above me, a body length out, his face the colour of ash, shirt soaked crimson with blood. The shaft of the bolt pointed skyward from the centre of a glistening red stain.
A wounded swan
. I couldn't rest. From here on up, the lineman's technique would no longer work, the branches too numerous. I had to free climb through the thick canopy, without a rope, setting anchors with webbing and carabiners for safety as I went.

“Paul,” I shouted.

No response. No movement, no flicker of life, nothing to tell me he could hear. If only I could fly. Bile rose from my stomach into my throat. I spat, then swallowed the foulness. My goal: his hammock; my purpose: to find his rope and belay him down. Paul had fallen more than ten metres before his tangled line arrested his descent. His second mistake in two days. He had failed to use a safety lanyard to tie himself in. His third mistake—and a shock for me: Paul, the most safety conscious climber I knew, wore no helmet. His head was bare.

Free climbing was easier, safer than spurs and a flip line, but my short arms and legs restricted my reach, my progress slow. As I crawled my way upward, I recalled a film Paul showed me of orangutans travelling through treetops, smooth as flowing water. “One limb at a time,” he explained. “Like a mountain climber. Never less than three points of contact with the tree.”

When I reached Paul's gear, I tied myself in, looped his rope through a carabiner with a figure-eight knot, and took his weight. I unclipped his rope at the anchor webbing and dropped the loose end to Marcel. Marcel belayed from below and together we lowered Paul to the ground. I prayed the rope would not snag, but it slipped smoothly through my gloves. His body descended like a lead weight on a string. A dozen arms cradled him to the earth and bore him away, a centipede gliding on a bevy of legs along the forest floor. I slumped back against the tree trunk. Grief burst from me in great heaving sobs.

“Faye?”

I gulped air, fighting for control, the safety rope gripped in my gloves.

“Faye, it's Grace. You need to come down.” My mother peered up from the ground, too far away to see her face. “Stop crying and come down.”

I wiped tears from my cheeks with my sleeve at my mother's order. I dismantled Paul's hammock, folded his gear into it, and lowered the bundle to the ground, then rappelled myself down. At the moment my feet hit the duff, Paul was on his way to the
PCF
yard in Terry's four-by-four. Grace waited for me at the base of the tree. She helped me out of my gear and together we ran the trail. By the time we reached camp, an emergency helicopter kilometres away was lifting off the tarmac next to Roger Payne's trailer in a whirlwind of dust and pebbles. Nobody at camp could tell us if Paul was alive.

I collapsed to the ground, a helpless sack of muscle and bone. Others sat in shocked silence around the clearing. Esther and Sue embraced, sobbing into each other's hair.

“We need to find out where they took him.” Grace laid her hand on my arm. “Come.”

I lifted my head and considered the dubious band of activists, young and old, male and female, liberal and traditionalist, in the valley for selfless reasons. Why? To save a few big trees from the chainsaws? To protect a future they valued for their grandchildren? Paul might never have grandchildren, let alone children. I dropped my head into my hands. All I saw was the image of the crossbow bolt, the blood, his swaying body.

A warm hand settled on my shoulder. “You are a brave and strong woman, Faye,” came Mr. Kimori's serene voice. “But you are not Buddha. Come.”

He cradled my elbow and urged me to my feet, then led me to a cedar at the edge of the camp and positioned me in the shade of the tree. He arranged my arms doll-like, out from my sides, palms rotated to face the sky. “Look up,” he whispered as he stepped back, arms folded.

I did as he asked; the striations of stringy red bark drew my gaze up the ladder of droopy limbs and into the canopy where swags of green foliage blocked the sky. “What?” I asked, confused.

“
Shin rin yoku
.” He opened his arms, palms up. “Tree shower. Close your eyes. Listen to the breath. Let the tree rain peace and calm upon you.”

I did as he asked. The sharp fragrance of the cedar mingled in my nose with the stink of my own sweat. What peace? Rage tore through me. My eyes flew open and I whirled to meet the kind-hearted gaze of Mr. Kimori. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't.”

I strode across the clearing to a stack of placards and grabbed one from the top of the pile, not bothering to read it. “Screw process.” I spat the words out to no one in particular. “To hell with the law.” Without a backward glance, I strode up the trail.

Rainbow caught up with me at the road, breathless and panting, and fell into step beside me. Halfway to the blockade, she grabbed my sleeve and pointed back. Mr. Kimori, Grace, Esther, Mary with Cedar, and the others followed. Marcel towered over them all, waving a placard of his own.

Esther's voice rose in song, strong and fine, a refrain that I recognized from my childhood. “We are peaceful, angry people. We are walking . . . for the forest's life.”

Marcel handed his placard to Grace and pulled out his flute. Grace's high soprano joined with Esther. I turned back up the road and marched on, feeling the anger but not the peace.

Rainbow tugged on my hand. “Let's sing too, Dr. Faye,” she pleaded. “Please.” The words wedged in my throat, but when Rainbow's sweet voice rang out, “we are singing for Paul's life,” I took her hand in mine and stepped forward. I sang my heart out.

Our song and our collective resolve faded as we neared the blockade. The road seethed with people, police cruisers, buses, and logging equipment. A dozen or more armed officers in flak jackets dragged, carried, or led protesters from the road to waiting school buses. Two constables worked with bolt cutters and hacksaws to cut chains off protesters locked to the gate. A half-dozen reporters and photographers recorded the drama with cameras, microphones, and video equipment. Billy and his family, wrapped in button blankets and eagle feathers, drummed and chanted from the roadside while behind the cordon of police officers, a crowd of loggers screamed insults and jeered when a new line of activists stepped in to fill a gap in the human barrier. The drums grew louder, the heckling stronger as the officers cleared the road again and again.

A logger sprinted from behind the police line and attacked a protester. He jabbed at the man's shoulder with his fist. “Scum, fucking traitor.” The victim was Chuck, face blanched with fear, his assailant a stranger to me, not easily seen in the disorder. The police shepherded the attacker back behind the line, but he turned and raised a finger. “You deserve what you get,” he hissed, then elbowed his way through the crowd.

We followed Esther and Grace onto the road, linking arms to form a human chain. An officer stepped forward and faced us. “In case you didn't get the message”—he waved a sheaf of papers in the air like a fist—“this orders all persons having notice of this Court Order be restrained and enjoined . . . any person impeding logging operations in the watershed, blockading the road to the upper valley, or standing within a metre of the roadway, will be arrested and charged with contempt of court for defying an injunction.” He rolled the papers into a tube and stuffed them in his back pocket. “Here's your chance to avoid incarceration,” he yelled. “I'm going to count to ten and we'll arrest anyone left on the road. We've got buses enough for the lot of you. One . . . two . . .”

No one moved. I glanced left to see Grace, head held high, three over, Mary at her side with Cedar in a sling. To my right, Sue and Chris, Terry, Marcel, Mr. Kimori. Where was Rainbow?
Four, five, six
. She hadn't left my side the entire march from camp. I scanned the crowds, spotting her the same time I heard her. She screamed from the ditch where she struggled with a police officer, kicking her feet at his shins.

“Mary,” I yelled. “Get Rainbow.”

Eight
. Mary tightened her grip, drawing her neighbours in closer.

Rainbow's voice shrieked over the beat of the drums, “Let me go, let me go.” I released my arms, but before I could run for her, Grace stepped forward and left the road. She spoke with the officer, picked up the weeping child, and whisked her away.
Ten.