Jim managed a chuckle despite himself.
Gladys stood a little worse for wear in the garden. The garden didn't need a scarecrow anymore. It was fall-weary, mostly dead but for the pumpkins and carrots. There were still withered scarlet runners clinging like arthritic fingers to the vine, winter squash, a few behemoth zucchini â nothing any bird was about to carry off.
The scarecrow wore a stained and decrepit white tux, a purple fedora and a pink fright-wig glued to a semi-deflated volleyball head.
“Hmmm,” said Jim, looking her over. “I'm trying to imagine a beaver frightened enough of you to fly away.” Gladys just grinned.
With the scarecrow on his shoulder and a shovel in his free hand, Jim walked along the tractor lane through the cornfield. Arnold Tysick and Ormond McCoy from up the line towards Onion Station had helped them plant the corn that spring and had already volunteered to help with the harvest. There
hadn't been a frost yet, but it wouldn't be long. It took two or three good hard frosts to dry out the feed corn just right.
Jim was trying to remember stuff like that now. He had helped with the farm work since he was six or so, but he was going to have to pay special attention from now on. In the summer, his mother had found work at the Jergens soap factory in Ladybank. Money was tight. They weren't sure what they were going to do about the farm. Hold on as best they could, for the time being. There was no way Iris Hawkins would hear of Jim dropping out of school.
“What would Hub have thought of that?” she had said to him. His father never finished grade eleven, but he regretted it all his life and made up for it as best he could. He had been an avid reader, mostly history.
“How're you gonna know what to do if you don't know what you did?” he used to say. And sometimes he would add in a mocking, grave tone, “Jimbo, history is all we've got in this God-forsaken corner of the county.”
Jim placed Gladys's gloved hand on his left shoulder and whirled around as if they were dancing. An odd couple â he in gumboots and overalls, Gladys's tux tails flapping in the bright fall air. He'd seen his dad dance with Gladys.
The memories came on like this sometimes, like a sweet, sad avalanche. He had learned to ride them out, not to fight them. But there had been a time when the memories had come on so fiercely that they stopped up his throat so he could hardly breathe. For three months he hadn't been able to talk. Not a word. Only bit by bit did he get his voice back, his life back. But not Hub.
Crossing the stile into the lower meadow, Gladys's head fell off.
“Can't take you anywhere,” said Jim, leaning the scarecrow torso against the fence. He rescued the volleyball head from the weedy overgrowth, getting a handful of prickles for his troubles.
As he sat on the stile sucking out the pain, he noticed a Coke can in the long grass. It looked new. He picked it up, looked around. It was too early in the season for hunters. He squashed the can under his boot. Then, having nowhere else to put it, shoved it through the neck hole into Gladys's head. There was nothing much else in there but rags and pebbles and a few dead moths. He plumped the head back onto her broom-handle neck. It rattled.
He ploughed on, getting more and more worked up. He didn't like to think of people trespassing on the farm, didn't like the idea of strangers sneaking around.
He stumbled on down the tractor trail into the woodland that separated the cornfields from the low swampy area. He stopped at the threshold of a shadowy place where the woods closed in tight on the road, forming a canopy that blocked the light.
This was the spot. This was where they found his car.
Jim took a deep breath, let it out slowly. His lungs filled with the heavy fragrance of cedar.
The cops found nothing. No signs of a fight. No cigarette butts, no threads â just Dad's old Malibu, the first car he had ever bought, the keys in the ignition. Outside there was a footprint or two in the muck. They came from a pair of boots Dad always wore. Matched up exactly with footprints in the barnyard.
After the initial search, volunteers came in droves to help out. Someone found a little tube of lip balm up towards the railway tracks and everyone went crazy as if they'd found a map or something. But it belonged to one of the volunteers who'd combed that part of the woods already. Then, at the fence, they found a tiny fragment of yarn hanging from a barb. The colour matched a sweater Hub had put on that morning. In the swamp land beyond the tracks, they found more of the footprints and, finally, a mile south of the farm, at a water-filled quarry, they found one of his blue handkerchiefs. They dragged the quarry but found no body.
It was as if Hub Hawkins had been spirited away. It was as if God had dropped down in a spacecraft and whisked him off the face of the earth. “Hey, Hub, we've got big beaver problems in heaven. The angels are getting the skirts of their robes wet. We could use some first-hand advice.”
Jim smiled, but the smile died on him. It was harder and harder to believe his father might somehow, somewhere, still be alive. Jim remembered the tracker dogs, the choppers, the experts from Toronto, the press.
He looked up as hard and high as he could, but he saw no heaven, no angels with wet skirts. No God.
Gladys's head fell off again. He stooped to pick it up. “You know what I think, Gladys? I think you're kind of like God,” he said. “Something we made up to scare off the crows.”
After the authorities had given up, Jim came down here, insane with longing, cursing everyone and everything. He came again and again. Fighting back the fear of what he might find or what might find him.
It was in this cedar glade that he lost his voice. He had been looking around, hoping beyond hope he might spot some clue everyone had overlooked. He had gone to call out his father's name â only nothing came out of his mouth.
He stopped coming. It had always been a favourite cross-country ski trail. He and his mother found other trails, not that they got out much last winter. In the summer, Lar Perkins came through with his bush hog to keep the trail passable. Never asked to be paid. But Jim never came down this way again. Not until today.
“What do ya think, Gladys?” he said. He waggled her head up and down and heard the Coke can rattle. The sound fired him up again. Then he stepped into the shadows of the glade and passed through to the light on the other side.
Before he saw the beaver pond he was walking in it. The road was squelchy wet even though it hadn't rained for days. He rounded a curve in the rutted lane and there it was, as wide across as a football field and stretching out of sight into the alder scrub on one side and the poplar woods on the other.
A beaver emerged from the far undergrowth dragging a branch. Jim watched it for a moment. Quietly leaning Gladys against a tree, he raised the business end of the shovel to his shoulder as if it were a rifle.
“Bang!”
With a loud slap of its tail the beaver vanished underwater. Jim pretended to blow the smoke off the mouth of the barrel.
“Take that, you lousy varmint,” he said. Then he headed around the edge of the pond through the submerged grass towards the dam site.
He knew whatever he did today wouldn't be enough. The beavers would be back. It was like a hockey game, his father used to say. The fourth period would be sudden death.
Mud sucking at his boot heels, Jim clambered to the top of the dam and started in chopping at the latticework of branches and sticks that constituted this latest instalment of Hawkins against Nature. The dam was wattle and daub: mud interwoven with grass, weeds and supple willow canes that made the wall hard to tear apart. Putting his back into it, Jim lifted a shovel load that came up with a great sucking sound and the stench of rotten vegetation. The dammed water rushed through the breach.
He worked for a good twenty minutes without stopping. The air was still warm but the wind was freshening. The dry leaves overhead shimmered, gold-edged and dying. There was no sound but the prattle of blue jays, the squelch of muck and, loudest of all, the water gushing and splashing over his feet.
Jim straightened up, out of breath. Gladys was watching him from her resting place against a sapling birch.
There was a noise in the woods. Jim turned to look. A moment passed before a squirrel appeared on a dead log and scolded him. A hawk circled overhead, screeching. Jim craned his neck.
The racing water slowed to a trickle. He had done a pretty good job. He wasn't sure how much more he could do. The big thing had been getting here at all.
He leaned on his shovel, sniffed the air â a great big lung-filling sniff.
“Ah, corn and potato chowder,” he said. It was the
kind of thing his father would have said. A set-up for Jimbo. “Funny, all I smell is beaver poop.”
Jim sloshed his way through the cloudy remains of the pond to dry land and Gladys. He patted her on the shoulder.
“Glad,” he said. “You did such a good job this summer, you got a promotion. We want you to keep the beavers from fixing up this here dam. You think you can handle it?” Gladys wobbled her head, nodding. “Good for you,” he said. Then he picked up the scarecrow and waded back to the hole in the dam. He drove her broom-handle base down into the mud, twisting it until she stood firmly in place. Then he took a step back and looked solemnly at her grinning mug.
“Now, here's the gross part,” he said. “Beavers don't see so well. So â and I don't want you to take this personal â the only way we're going to keep those beavers away is if you smell bad. Bad as a human being.”
Gladys stared dumbly at him. He felt dumb, too â talking to a scarecrow. He remembered the first time his dad told him they were going to pee on the scarecrow.
“And that would be because we're perverts?” Jim had said.
His father had laughed. “Not so. To a beaver, human beings stink to high heaven. Eau de wee-wee is the answer. They'll be wary of coming too close.”
Like wolves, thought Jim, staking out their territory. Then, without further ado, he opened his zipper and let fly.
There was another disturbance in the woods while he stood there baptizing Gladys. Another squirrel, he thought, as his eyes travelled to the source of the noise.
But what he saw there wasn't an animal â not a small one, at least. He caught a glimpse of black hair, a flash of pale skin. Enough to be certain that what he saw was a girl.
There was the initial shock, and then a moment of bottom-of-the-barrel humiliation followed by an adrenaline rush of blinding rage. Like a rocket, Jim exploded out of the muck, charging over the dam towards the woods, pulling up his zipper as he ran and yelling his head off. The girl had a good head start on him and she was wearing sneakers, not gumboots, but even though he fell a couple of times, slipping in the mud, tripping over branches, something drove him on with a will and he stayed with her.
It wasn't just the shame of being caught like that. It was something else. A grudge. Unfinished business with the forest. And there was more. She was laughing at him. Laughing like a crazy person!
He chased the girl through face-slapping firs, down muddy deer paths, across rocky mounds and over a rotting split-rail fence. He chased her along Incognito Creek and then scrabbled up the steep wooded slope to the back meadow, catching glimpses of her but never catching up to her.
And then she was gone. He was on the high meadow now and she was nowhere to be seen.
He heard a train coming. Standing up to his waist in the tall grass, as still as a scarecrow, he watched it pass, a slow freight. From where he stood he saw only
the rusty tops of the cars. Then it was gone, rattling its way southeast towards Ladybank. He strode to the fence line and peered down the embankment to the tracks. She wasn't hiding there.
He whirled around, as if maybe she was lying low or creeping up on him. He cupped his hands.
“This is private property,” he yelled at the wild field. “Don't come round here!” His words echoed off the wall of dark woods that surrounded the field. Big-man words in a high-pitched kid's voice. He listened for laughter, heard nothing but the distant clatter of the train.
Then he heard a dog.
The barking came from up the tracks. It sounded ferocious. Scared stiff, Jim swore under his breath, wishing he'd kept his angry outburst bottled up. Once in a while, wild dog packs came around, more dangerous than wolves. Berserk. They would kill cattle just for the fun of it.
But as the barking came nearer, Jim realized it was only one dog, and as it came nearer still, he recognized its voice.
The cornfield dog â that's what he called it â coming up the tracks like a noisy caboose trying to catch the train. Then it veered up the embankment from the railroad bed, shinnying under the fence â a lab retriever with a pelt the colour of corn husks, shaggy and uncombed, full of twigs and burrs. It came straight for him and ran around him like a dirty blond whirlwind, barking up a storm.
“Cut it out,” said Jim. “Shut up, you stupid mutt.”
The dog sat, but its body wriggled with excitement and its mouth lolled open. It wore a collar but Jim had no idea who it belonged to. It showed up sometimes
when he was out on the land, always with this eager look on its face, as if anything you might be up to would be more interesting than sitting around the farmyard watching laundry dry.
“Whoa, boy,” said Jim, calmly now. He reached out to scratch the dog's head, but it suddenly tore off again before he could lay a hand on it. It stopped over by the woods to see if he was coming.
“I don't have time for games,” Jim shouted. The sun was already nearing the tree line and he didn't plan on walking back through the woods in the dark.
But the dog barked again and raced towards a towering pine tree right on the property line. The dog stood at the base of the tree, four-square, looking up, barking for all it was worth, its tail wagging hard enough to start a brush fire. And following its gaze, Jim saw the girl, all in black, perched like a crow on a branch, scowling down at him.