Killing Down the Roman Line (2 page)

He gunned the engine and jostled along in the hard seat. The vultures flapped to the ground. Three of the damned things, pouncing after whatever lay on the ground.

The Massey sputtered and popped towards them and the vultures backed off. They hissed and spread their wings in a span of defiance. Jim popped the handbrake and jumped down, already smelling their stench from here. He scrounged up a good sized stone and flung it at the birds. They hopped about in the peculiar way of those birds and snapped out their wings but didn’t fly off.

Killer lay in a row of freshly tilled earth, dead but still warm to the touch. His fur was matted and wet, the tongue lolling between the teeth and peppered with grit. At least the monsters hadn’t gotten to him yet. Small mercies. The scavengers withdrew, hissing and spanning their wings to scare him off. Bold as brass, waiting for him to leave so they could get at it. For a second time Jim wished he had brought the shotgun.

He scooped up the dead cat, limbs flopping loose as a sock puppet in his hands and carried it to the tractor. The vultures hopped and screeched in protest, cheated out of their breakfast. There was a spade mounted onto the back of the Massey Ferguson and Jim pulled it down and crossed to the stone fence that demarcated the property line of the Hawkshaw farm. The stones had been cleared from these fields two hundred years ago and stacked up to form a low wall, like some defensive barricade against an army of dwarves. On the other side was more acreage, untouched for generations and left to seed. Nature had made small forays to reclaim these neglected fields, creeping up from the creek at the southern end but most of the untended acres remained clear, with stalks of timothy and barley that grew and died and grew again each season.

Jim chose a spot next to the ancient fieldstone, a small pocket in the fence. He laid the cat in the weeds and started digging. Ten minutes in and his shirt clung with sweat as he dug the little grave under the hot sun. It was silly, going to this much trouble for an old barn cat but Jim didn’t care. His hatred for the foul birds was that strong.

Truth was he felt an affinity for the poor cat, wounded as it was with those grotesque birds waiting for it to die. Vultures were circling over Jim’s head too, waiting for him to croak so they could swoop in and gobble it all up. Banks and creditors, all eyeballing the Hawkshaw farm, clacking their beaks in anticipation of an easy meal.

He wasn’t going to last another season, of that he was sure. He would lose it all; the farm, the land, the house. Five generations of Hawkshaws had farmed this land down here on the Roman Line and he would be the fool to lose it. He’d be the one to betray the family, betray all those who had come before him and broken their backs on this hard clay soil.

The debts had snowballed into a dead weight he couldn’t hold up anymore. Each season yielding worse returns than the last, no matter how many times he alternated crops. He stopped lying to himself about the “one good crop, the one good year” that would balance the books and set them on the climb out of debt. He’d maintained this lie to his wife and by proxy, his son but now there were simply no more lies to tell.

Jim tossed the spade into the bunchgrass and looked down into the hole he had dug. Deep enough. He gathered up Killer and nestled him into the bottom of the hole. He smoothed his hand down the calico fur and then took up the spade and backfilled the little grave.

The vultures screeched and flapped around him.

To hell with them. To hell with himself too.

“Go on,” he said, looking for another rock to throw. “Find something else to tear apart.”

~

Smokey refused to cooperate.

The bay mare stood on the flagstone floor of the barn, tethered between the stalls and refused to budge. Emma Hawkshaw wagged her finger at the horse. Smokey was a beautiful horse to ride but oddly temperamental. Spookily so, the way she would nip at Emma out of the blue, like payback for some slight she had suffered. Other times, like now, the horse simply refused to do anything. Just swing her head up and look at her and then turn away. It was almost a challenge.

“Okay,” Emma said, blowing the bangs from her eyes. “Let’s try this again.”

She leaned into the horse’s shoulder and tapped the foreleg until Smokey relented and lifted the leg. Emma scraped dirt away from the hoof but when the pick touched the frog, Smokey winced and swung her head down.

“Okay, okay,” Emma cooed, leaning harder into the horse to keep Smokey from dropping her leg. She gently plucked away the straw and dirt to get a better look at the hoof. Thrush was common enough and the mare had it when Emma bought her three years ago. She had treated the hoof then but every spring it would flare up again. This season was no different. She let the bay drop her leg and smoothed her palm down its withers, talking softly into her ear until the horse settled. She’d have to mix up some more sugardine and treat it.

There used to be two horses in the barn. Both quarter horses, bay Smokey and a young pinto that Emma had fawned over. Skittish and harder to control than the older bay, the pinto had been untrained and barely broken. Emma suspected the animal had been badly used. She spent hours with the pinto, just walking him around the paddock to gain its trust, easing him into a saddle. She had only sat him a dozen times, each time a struggle to keep the horse from bolting or bucking. It would take time and Emma was patient but reality had bitten down and knew she couldn’t keep him. Arguments with Jim over the expense and Emma crunching numbers but to no avail. She sold the pinto in the fall and still regretted it. There was simply no way to justify the expense to keep the little pinto. It was sold off, the money dumped into the black hole of debt and Emma had bought two goats on the cheap from Norman Meyerside down the road, companion animals for lonely Smokey. They were odd looking animals and Jim hated them but she didn’t care. Smokey seemed calmer with the nannering things around and that was all that mattered.

She rooted around the cupboard, pulling down what she needed to mix an ointment for thrush. Her dad’s own recipe, but there wasn’t a lot of betadine scrub left. There wasn’t a lot of anything, she thought looking over the shelves of the tack room. They had scrimped on everything to get through the winter, making everything go twice as far and Emma winced at her meagre supplies. This, their current state, the thriftiness of it all. If their situation didn’t improve this season, she’d be forced to sell the bay. There was just no other way. The horse wouldn’t fetch a lot of money but she simply couldn’t keep Smokey anymore. God forbid something happened to the animal that required a veterinary visit.

The horse stood patiently and swished its tail as Emma washed and treated the infected hoof. She cleaned the other hoofs for good measure and led the bay out to the upper paddock where the ground was dry. The two goats clopped out of their stall and followed them out to the grass like dutiful escorts. Emma looked up when she heard the tractor rumble up out of the back field.

It didn’t sound right, the rhythm of the engine was off and a sharp pop belched from the exhaust. It laboured into the yard and Jim killed the engine. He removed a side panel and reached into the engine of the old Massey Ferguson. He snapped his hand back suddenly, burning his finger. The index finger was bent at a slight angle, having been broken as a kid, and was forever getting burnt or cut or hammered.

Emma closed the gate and crossed the yard towards him. “When are you going to put that old thing out of its misery?”

“About the time we can afford a new one, I guess.” Jim sucked on his blistering finger and then flapped it in the breeze. “Which means never. Day after never.”

She nodded at his hand. “Do you want some ice for that?”

“It’s nothing.” He stopped flapping his hand. “Did Kate call?”

“No. What time was she supposed to be here?”

“An hour ago.”

“I guess that means it didn’t go well,” she said.

“Just means she’s late is all. Kate’s always late.”

Jim looked up at his wife and smiled and shrugged. Her nose had already turned a bit red from the sun, as it did every spring. The rain and overcast skies of the last two weeks had finally given way to three straight days of hard sunshine and Emma had spent every moment outside soaking it up. That first blast of sunshine tinged her nose pink and brought out the freckles on her cheeks. In a few days her nose would peel and then darken. A spring ritual as reliable as tulips opening up along the veranda.

Those three days of sun had been enough to dry up the dirt road they lived on and Jim could see a spume of dust rising above the trees. A car coming down the Roman Line.

“Maybe that’s her,” he said.

A Ford Explorer turned into the drive and trundled through the potholes. The wedgewood blue exterior shiny and clean, the grill free of bug spatter. Not a farm vehicle. The Explorer hewed up beside Jim’s battered pickup and the driver stepped out. A dark haired woman in nice clothes, good shoes crunching over gravel. Kate Farrell smiled wide and waved at Jim and Emma. An old friend of the Hawkshaws, and mayor of the township of Pennyluck, Ontario.

Emma took her husband’s hand and gave it a little squeeze for good luck.

2

“THEY SAID NO.”

Kate believed in being blunt, especially with bad news. Sugar coating it or delaying it just made the bad news all the worse. The sooner it was laid on the table, the sooner you could deal with it. An article of faith that Kate employed as gospel in her earlier career but especially sacrosanct in her second year as mayor. The Hawkshaws took it hard.

Emma had offered coffee but no one really wanted any. Kate suggested they walk for a bit and enjoy the sun, so they strode down the fieldstone fence into a copse of poplars near the creek.

“I tried everything I could,” Kate said. She turned her palms up in a gesture of crying uncle. “I’m sorry.”

Jim could already feel the end closing in. Like something out of an old monster movie, Jim imagined his creditors as giant locusts flitting over his house, devouring it whole. The clapboard, the windows and even the shingles on the roof. Their armoured heads swivelling around, dark alien eyes as they picked the house clean to the studs while he and his wife and son stood at the end of the driveway and watched. He clutched at the timothy heads swaying at his knee. “They didn’t like the offer.”

“The council dismissed it as soon as they saw your financials.”

Emma soured at that. Again, the money. She squinted against the sun. “What about just leasing the land, short term?”

Kate shook her head again. “They wouldn’t consider that either. Which is just ridiculous and I told them so to their faces.” She leaned against the stone fence and looked out at the untended field on the other side. “All this land and they won’t let anyone touch it.”

The land in question bordered the Hawkshaw property on the eastern side. Eighty two acres of land cleared almost two centuries ago, left untouched for generations. There was a house on the property, a big timberframe with a stone foundation, still standing all these years. Its clapboard weathered to husk, windows like cored-out eye sockets. The last occupant was a caretaker who had died in the seventies. The fallow land was held in trust by the town but for whom, Jim had never found out. He doubted the town council even knew, it had been this way for so long. Empty acres and lost records.

It was all bullshit. Jim had inquired about the property with both the council and the bank but was told flat out the land was not for sale and discouraged from making an offer. That’s when he had turned to Kate.

Kate Farrell had grown up in Pennyluck, not six miles from the Hawkshaw place. Jim and Kate knew each other as kids but neither would say they were friends back then. Different grades and deep class divisions. Townie kids didn’t blend with the farm kids, each side despising the other for completely bigoted and erroneous reasons.

Kate had fled for university and then on to jobs in Windsor, Toronto and Montreal before coming back home to Pennyluck after the financial meltdown of ‘08. She had opened a business consultancy, geared specifically towards small business but soon became distracted by the local real estate market. After running afoul of some archaic bylaws leftover from the Victorian period, Kate started moonlighting in the town council, becoming drawn into local politics.

It was around then that Jim and Kate had become friends, with Kate often having dinner at the Hawkshaw home or hosting them to a dinner in town. The autumn of last year, Kate decided to join the mayoral race when the incumbent mayor Talford McGivens refused to relinquish his nineteen year reign even after suffering his third stroke. Kate rolled up her sleeves and took the town by storm, ousting the old man in a sixty/forty split. Jim, who had never voted municipally in his entire life, volunteered in her campaign. He and Emma and Travis stuffed envelopes and helped organize fundraisers.

It had paid off with Kate’s win and, three weeks ago, Jim called in a favour. That was how politics worked, he figured, even small town politics. He asked Kate’s help in buying or leasing some of this deserted land known locally as the Corrigan farm. Just who the Corrigans were, no one remembered or even cared.

He and Emma both felt confident that with Kate (now mayor Farrell) advancing their cause, they would finally acquire the neglected farmland. However Mayor Farrell was still learning the ropes and ran smack into a stonewall of entrenched vagaries and inexplicable stubbornness of a very old and very small township. She was still reeling from the concussion.

“Can’t you overrule them?” Emma asked, trying to toggle back the ire in her tone. “I mean, you are the mayor now.”

“I can’t overrule the council,” Kate said. “I’m still only one vote among seven. The council has final say and those old fogeys will not budge.”

“Well…” said Jim, crushing the spiky timothy crowns in his hand. Watching the chaff sift between his fingers. “Shit.”

“Don’t sweat it.” Kate looked both of them in the eye. “That was our first try. Learn from it and we’ll try again later.”