Kicking Tomorrow (46 page)

The clouds were a helter-skelter fox hunt now, hounds scrambling out over the lake with their tails streaking behind them, mud flying from their paws. Robbie, in tuque, big boots, and ski jacket, said he looked like the village idiot; Mom, in her fingerless gloves and frayed straw hat, laughed and said she felt like a mad bag lady.

“Life in the post-nukular world,” he joked. “At least we’d be self-sufficient.”

According to the
Farmer’s Almanac
he’d consulted, there’s invariably a day halfway through March that’s warm and sunny. It’s a dirty trick, however, because at least three more snowfalls are in store, and there’s a good month before the hills switch on green and the lilac and apple blossoms light up. Right on cue, the following Monday was so toasty Robbie had his shirt off. All around the land was alive with the thaw, the house’s eaves dripping snow water into barrels, the smelt brook rushing over exposed rocks. The ice had already melted off the lake, although Owl’s Head’s peak was still white, and Robbie pictured babes skiing in bikinis. He crouched down by the brook and scooped up two handfuls of chilly melting mud, rich as chocolate. He held it to his nose, pressed it to his lips.

He was really getting into this nature business.

He was basking on the terrace, half-snoozing beneath the weight of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, “a novel of mind-numbing suspense.”
Miriam was stretched out on a deck chair beside him.
Sonny Daze and Sandi Beaches
. She was wearing makeup, he noted out of the corner of his eye, almost as much as him. He sniffed the air, frowned, snorted phlegm. A smell of burnt toast or rubber. Some farmer must have a wet bonfire going.

“Hey, Miriam,” he said, absently scratching a rash on his chest. The roof of his mouth itched unpleasantly. “Did you know, if a wet leaf leaves a blue stain on a windowpane, that means it’s been soaked in acid rain. That’s Nature’s litmus test. See those patches of brown pine needles? That’s because they’ve been sitting under acid snow all winter.”

“No guff,” Miriam said.

“Death to the sugar bush, Mom says. Drag, or what?”

Miriam shrugged. “Whatever turns your crank, man,” she said, without even turning her head. “Hey, Rob, I got high with Pinch at a party the other night. We made out, it was ama-a-azing. Roman hands, Russian fingers, and more arms than Israel.”

“Miriam
, Chrissake.”

Robbie’s enjoyed some scenes in his time, but teenage girls getting banged senseless by grizzly acidheads is not one of his fond memories. He opened his mouth to give Miriam hell, but bit his tongue.

“Whatcha doing, Rob?” Miriam said. “Catching flies?” And did the air ever smell bad. He could actually taste it.

That night, not long after Robbie had hit the sack, Barnabus began to cough in his sleep. The cough had been irritating Robbie all day, every day, since his arrival in Kilborn. Now he lay awake. There was a knock; Mom’s soft knock, and then her head in the door. Robbie leaned up. She put a finger to her lips, and went over to Barnabus’ bed. She sat him up gently, holding him in the crook of one arm. Robbie saw for the first time how frail he had become. His body was drawing rapid, shallow breaths. In
the moonlight his ribs seemed bare, white, and dry, like naked bones. He watched Mom apply some tube gadget to his mouth, and squeeze. Puff. Barnabus coughed in his sleep, sucked gratefully on the tube. Mom dabbed his lips with the collar of his pyjamas, and allowed him to sink back into the sheets.

Robbie followed her downstairs, on tiptoe. They sat in the covered porch overlooking the lake. Alone with her like this, he felt unspeakably physical, overcome with the naked feeling he associated with concealing guilt. Why guilt? He watched her. She was beautiful, but tired and tense, the very bones of her head somehow strained, as if all the pressure of her life were squeezing the skull smaller. He wondered how different from other old ladies she’d look in twenty years. He remembered the first time he had inspected the lines on her forehead. Eight years old, and his navel had opened up and given off a sicksweet baby smell. You could see right in. He stood up and showed it to her at the dining-room table. Her forehead was at his eye-level as she stared back down the umbilical tube of her first and favourite son. Now he understood: he was aware of having been born by her. Weird, why would he feel guilty about that? For the pain he put her through back then? Or
since?
He had always raged about wasting his life away, his precious adolescence, but now he wondered how many years had he robbed from
her
. He broke the silence.

“Barnabus
OK
, Mom? What’s he got?”

“Well, probably just asthma. I’m giving him Ventolin until he learns to wake himself up. He had such a rough time around the lake last summer, after Mendoza was put to sleep. Then he had indescribable food poisoning from a fish he caught around the Hogsback. Then one morning, after another night on the dock in his sleeping bag, well – he coughed up blood.”

“Chrissake!”

“It’s simple, in my mind – he breathes in acid mist for several hours every morning and then his little bronchioles are eaten right
through. But really, I don’t know any more. I may be alone in this. I’m told I get hysterical. I can’t get a straight answer from anyone.”

Weird thing about that Monday in March was, it turned out to be the first day of spring, after all. The temperature stayed high, the blackflies rioted, and Mom and Robbie had no idea whether to plant and risk frostbite to the root of the vegetables, or wait for the snowstorm and risk missing this freak spring altogether. It was the talk of the countryside; you couldn’t pass a farmer on the road without stopping to discuss it. And that burnt-meat smell was definitely not some bonfire; Robbie checked around, and everyone was curling up their nostrils. It was as bad as being in the city; you wanted to stay indoors with the windows closed.

Dad took the kids back to school in town, but Mom and Robbie stayed out, for Mom had a plan. Robbie was mightily impressed by her energy; in one afternoon she pulled together half a dozen locals – all with maple trees on their property – and set a date for a community sugaring-off party to be held on the field, right outside the gates of E
PX
Chemicals Corporation. She had to argue fiercely, for most of the farmers had long abandoned maple-sugaring; their trees were producing only small amounts of sap these days, and it wasn’t only the maples that were blighted – the beech and birch, too, and higher up on the Hogsback, the spruce and the fir. Several said they weren’t inclined to take on such pointless work, and one was particularly bitter; he had built a sawmill on his land, and several times his saw teeth had been sheared right off by old forgotten sugaring nails buried in the butt logs of maples. And his son had lost an eye to a piece of flying metal.

In spite of all that, Mom arranged for a temporary sugar-house to be built, and managed to borrow a disused evaporator
so maple sap could be boiled at the party. She and Robbie drove out to barns collecting old cedar buckets and newer tin ones, patching them up if they needed it, and redistributing them to the farmers who were going along. They found spouts that hadn’t rusted, and several augers for drilling into the bark; they polished up the sugaring arch and painted its metal frame a fresh fire-engine red, and even hauled out a rotted sled and scrubbed the mud and cobwebs down. They borrowed twenty trestle tables and long benches, and hammered together a low stage.

All the while, Mom explained to Robbie the art of mapling. Robbie never knew how abundant sap could be; when she first snapped off a twig, so much dripped out he feared the tree might haemorrhage; what maples were healthy were just about bursting, and to Robbie the land suddenly flowed with honey. He helped her stuff dozens of invitations, which went out not only to friends and neighbours, but to the mayor and sundry politicians, the Kilborn police station, environmental groups, and all the media friends she had made during her years on
TV
.

A week to go, and Dad was on the couch drinking scotch, watching the hockey; whenever he did make it to the country on weekends, he was so knocked out he was good for nothing. Robbie considerately asked if he was preoccupied with his latest contract, something – was it? – related to exercise.

“No, Robbie,” Dad said.
“Excise
. Customs and Excise, you lunkhead.” He punched him in the shoulder, right on the sore muscle with the fresh tattoo.

He must really be drunk, Robbie thought, to touch me for no good reason. The Canadiens scored on a power play, Dad shouted, but Robbie wasn’t really watching. His brain was buzzing angrily: every year, Dad comes back from his fishing trip on the Moise and says, Well, the salmon aren’t spawning this year, like it’s just a freak of nature, at best something that merits aum, a study. Robbie wished he would think
microscopically
for once; if
the old man had ever dropped acid – the psychedelic kind –
then
he’d appreciate life’s tiny secrets. But instead of struggling with words and fighting him, Robbie pretended to enjoy the game –
Cournoyer scores!
He punched the air. He had something better up his sleeve.

Although the local police had given her no more than a warning after her arrest that winter, Mom had obviously acquired some notoriety since her show was taken off the air. The weekend of the cabane-à-sucre, Robbie and Miriam and Barnabus went down with her to the site, and though it was not yet noon, a horde of camera crews had already set up camp, and the EPX Chemicals Corporation had deployed security guards along the fence. The fields were busy with farmers’ families stringing up striped tents and pastel bunting and tables to display their maple-sugar products. Two trestle tables were laden with pots of steaming beans and deer stew, and the air above a row of barbecues was wobbling. Robbie sat on the edge of the stage, closed his eyelids to feel the glorious sunshine warm them over his eyeballs, leaned back with his palms on the hot planks, and took the sounds in: the flapping of canvas in the wind, the ping of sap as it dripped into the metal buckets hanging on the trunks of trees, children giggling as they stuck their tongues out under the dripping spigots, a radio scraping out
Tam ti de lam
on a fiddle. He breathed in deeply, and for the first time in weeks he couldn’t smell the sour rotting odour on the wind; only the pungent fragrance of boiling maple sugar. He opened his eyes and went to help.

Because the snow had melted so early on the lower ground this year, he had to hitch a ride with an old farmer in a pickup to the top of the Hogsback. It was the same old guy who had driven him that battered Xmas Eve; he still had the bottle of beer wedged between his thighs.

“Enwoye,” Robbie said, and shook his huge knotted hand. “Ça va bien? Good to see you, guy.”

Together they shovelled snow into the back of the pickup, and from the crest of the hill Robbie surveyed the fabulous 3-D topographic map of the Townships. What a high; natural, too. They drove back down and transferred the snow to a trough set up in the shade of a canopy by the lakeshore. Soon people would dunk sticks in fresh-boiled maple syrup, roll them in the snow, chew the hardened stuff like taffy, and lose all their fillings in it. Robbie stood back, put his fists on his hips, and admired the unsullied whiteness before anyone started dunking.

The field rapidly filled with people milling, people catching the rays, people linking arms in fours and dancing on the grass, and people dipping their toes in the lake and lining up for the hogfest of maple-sweetened stew, waffles and maple-baked beans, maple-glazed squash, eggs and sausages and ham drowned in pure maple syrup, maple apple crisp, maple tarts and maple-fried bacon rinds that curled up like ears –
les oreilles du Christ
, as Robbie’s old farmer buddy called them.

While people ate, several men set up a pretty big sound system on the stage. When they were done, Mom introduced herself to the crowd. The mob of reporters jostled for a view, and if you were sitting on the grass to eat you could hardly see her at all. Robbie sat and listened as she did her number: sulphate deposit acid mist aluminum phosphate indigestible to trees
EPX
air pollutants, and so on. It was passionate, and Robbie was proud. Barnabus got up and said the immortal word
POOLUTION
. Then, one by one, the farmers took the stage and, hesitating, described how their woods were depleted, how their livestock were falling sick – how their cuts weren’t healing good – how the air smelled like an abattoir, how brown foam was washing up on their shores. The crowd applauded and waved banners and booed
EPX
and
made disgusted faces for the cameras, and in the heat and excitement, the sweet afternoon air bent and stretched.

Children in threes were carrying the heavy buckets of sap and sloshing it about and making the grass sticky, and what looked like a pack of Mendoza’s bastard pups licked the ground after them. A lone French-Canadian fiddler mounted the stage and scraped off tunes as fast as any heavy-metal guitarist Robbie had ever heard, stamping his foot on the bowing planks. People whooped and spun one another around, and already one local had had too much syrup and beer and was upchucking onto the ground. Plus there was an accident in the little sugarhouse; too many people had crammed in to watch the raw sap being poured into the evaporating pans, someone had jostled the hot arch, and the whole thing had tipped over. Maybe that had been Mom’s and Robbie’s fault, for in their haste they hadn’t set the contraption on a proper concrete floor; since the ground had only recently thawed it was still soft and uncertain, so the arch tilted over, sap spilling onto several pairs of pants and spattering the lens of one television camera, and the air quickly filled with the smell of scorched syrup. Robbie shrugged, went to the car, and with Barnabus’ help, unloaded his equipment.