Talking at the Woodpile (25 page)

“What are you going to do about it now that you know the truth?” Arnold asked.

Alice and Lily sat silently staring at me. I held their future in my hands. I sat thinking for a moment.

“Do you have any more tea, Lily?” I asked, hoping to give myself more time. I lifted my cup. “And a few more of those delicious cookies would be great.”

Lily got up and refilled my cup from the teapot warming on the stove, then offered tea to Arnold and Alice.

“No thanks,” Arnold said, not taking his gaze off me.

Alice silently waved her hand in a no.

The three of them waited politely as I added cream and sugar, took a sip and bit into a cookie. Finally I said, “Nothing. I'll do nothing. It's not my business. I'll leave it to you to make your own decision.”

They looked at each other as if to take a consensus. They seemed relieved.

Arnold studied me for a minute. “Okay, but if you change your mind, call us first.”

That's how people are in the Yukon. If they trust you, they don't quibble or question.

“I won't change my mind,” I said, reaching for another ginger snap.

Lily smiled. “Ed used to eat my baking like that, cleaning up the whole plate.”

“I wish I'd met Ed,” I said. “He sounds like a good guy.”

“He was,” Arnold said.

I got up to leave. As I hugged Lily, I asked her, “Do you know how I know Ed was a good guy?”

Lily Bluebell just shook her head.

“Because he had a sweetheart for a wife.”

She started to cry and sat down. Alice went and put her arm around her friend.

Arnold pointed to my notebook, stuffed with the table napkins I'd written on. “Do you need that?”

I adjusted the collar of my coat. “No, I suppose not.” I handed him the notebook.

“Thank you.”

I shook hands and left without looking back.

That evening I'd planned to get a room and stay over but I didn't feel comfortable after hearing three people confess to assault and dumping a body in the river. The snow was still falling when I passed McQuesten River Lodge at about eight o'clock. Blossom was sitting on her haunches under the porch light by the front door, and I swear that pig lifted a front leg and waved as I drove by.

When I arrived home my father was asleep, and my mother was reading in bed by a lamp. She was excited. I'd received a letter from the admissions department of the University of Victoria.

“Did you find any good stories over in Keno?” she asked the next morning over breakfast.

“No, not one, Ma,” I said. “I looked, but nothing ever happens over there. It's just a quiet little town.”

“Yeah, right,” my father said. He looked over his newspaper and gave me a wink and a smile.

A couple of years passed before I got back to Keno City. I held too many cards that controlled people's lives. Bob killed Ed for the worst of reasons, I believed: jealousy and hate. Maybe he'd actually wanted to kill Arnold or maybe both of them. He'd had his own reasons to hate both men. So Lily had lived all those years broken-hearted without her husband, Alice was abused every day and Arnold lost his friend and partner, then had to watch Bob hurt Lily and Alice. No one murdered Bob; his heart gave out after a lifetime of hard living. I was glad he got this Yukon justice.

Walter Rather was stacking shelves in his general store when he engaged Brian and me in his favourite conversation.

“More of those damn hippies arrive every day. Where are we going to put them? We'll have to support them, so our taxes will go up as well.”

Brian and I did our best to ignore him. Then Winch walked into our aisle, lifting cans of food off the shelves and placing them in a shopping basket. On his big arm it looked like a child's toy.

“Picking up a few things for Lulu?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and greeted each of us in turn. He seemed a little distracted.

“How are things at the creek?” Brian asked.

“Well, everything is fine, except that place is a madhouse at times. It's best if I get away for a few hours.” He lifted the basket to show us that shopping was one way to get away.

Walter finished stocking, and still muttering, moved off to help a customer who was too short to reach a top shelf.

Brian had been telling me all week that he thought he owed Winch an apology for abandoning him during the alien fiasco. This was as good a time as any to put things square.

“What are you doing these days?” Brian asked.

“Working,” Winch said. “I'm doing body work on Mrs. Godwit's Rambler. Next I'll repaint it.”

“Blue,” I said.

Leaning against a shelf, Brian said, “Did you hear I gave up on all that alien stuff and threw everything out? Tobias helped me.”

“It was a ton of stuff we had to haul out too,” I said.

“I heard about that,” Winch said.

“I'm reading religious stuff right now,” Brian said, pretending to read the label on a tin; he looked like Hamlet studying a skull.

Winch didn't appear happy to hear about religion. He said goodbye and turned to leave.

Brian caught his shirt sleeve. “It's not what you think.”

Winch looked interested, as though he wanted to hear more and was sort of glad Brian had stopped him.

“Let me explain,” Brian said. “I had an epiphany. Now I believe we are alone, there are no aliens, and the universe is a gift to us from the Creator. Religion is the guidance we need to build the future. That's why I'm interested in spiritual things.”

“What's an epiphany?”

“A sudden understanding,” Brian and I said in unison.

Winch's eyes widened—it was obvious that Brian had caught his attention—and he leaned against the shelves, absent-mindedly peeling the label off a tin of peaches with his thumbnail. “You know, Brian, the first thing that comes to my mind is, here we go again.”

Bingo!
I thought.

“I was taken in by your alien conviction; you made it all sound so real. How do I know this isn't another phase you're going through, and I'll be left high and dry again like a fool?”

“I apologize for the last time. It was wrong that I didn't support you, but it won't happen again, I promise,” Brian said, placing both hands on Winch's grocery basket.

Winch sighed and patted Brian's shoulder with a huge hand.

After that, Winch and Brian started to rebuild their partnership and met at the Flora Dora or Brian's house for coffee in the evenings. They mostly discussed religion. I joined them once in a while.

“Tobias, Winch, what do you think the purpose of life is?” Brian would ask.

Winch had never considered religion before—it was organized and had rules—but independent study sparked an interest in him. Quickly he started developing his own interpretations and theories, and some of them went beyond moderation. He was already opinionated enough, but now that he had religion and God, he thought he was right on everything. Brian was patient with him, but Winch became increasingly more insistent and argumentative.

“That's it! No more coffee meetings,” Brian said one night, getting up abruptly. “I'm not arguing over religion.”

“You just won't listen,” Winch said, and stormed off to his truck.

It wasn't long before OP and Clutch realized they'd lost their brother again, since he was becoming totally absorbed in religion. This time they were determined to do something about it. They blamed Brian and took their complaints directly to him. One evening he and I were sitting at the kitchen table having a cup of coffee and going over notes I had written about his epiphany. OP and Clutch stomped up to his kitchen door, knocked and entered before being invited in.

Ignoring their bad manners, Brian picked up his cup and pointed it in the direction of the coffee pot. “Want a cup? It's fresh.”

“No, we don't,” Clutch said, without trying to hide the agitation in his voice. “Look, here we go again, but now you have Winch all involved in this here stupid, dumb religion stuff.”

“Yeah, why do you have to go and do this again?” OP chimed in. “He's our brother, not yours!” OP had never had an original thought in his pointed head; he usually just repeated Clutch's opinions.

“I've done nothing,” Brian said, raising his palms in protest. “In fact, Winch has taken off entirely in his own religious direction. I've stopped discussing it with him altogether.”

“He's on his own?”

“Yes, all on his own, as I said. I have nothing to do with his involvement in religion.”

They fidgeted for a moment, then Clutch turned and pushed OP toward the door, and both of them blustered out. I heard them arguing all the way out to their truck.

“Why didn't you know that?” Clutch shouted at OP.

“Assuming makes an ass out of you and me,” OP yelled back.

They climbed into their truck, gunned the engine and tore off down the street, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.

About a month later I was visiting the garage to see about Mom's Rambler getting an oil change.

“This is one weird-looking car,” Brian said when he lifted the hood. “But nice paint job. Have you seen Winch lately?”

I shook my head just as Winch walked in. His face looked flushed. He didn't bother to say hello but just started talking. “I had an epiphany!”

No, you didn't
, I thought.

“An old dust-covered gold miner in a wide-brimmed hat, tattered shirt and carrying a gold pan. Said he belonged to some committee of miners or something. He came to me in a dream and said I was special. He said, ‘You're a real piece of work.'”

Brian caught my eye, then said, “That's not an epiphany, Winch, that's a nightmare.”

I remained silent but studied Winch's face to see his reaction.

His face went red, then redder, and he blew the words out of his mouth like a tornado. “It wasn't a dream, it was my epiphany! You're not the only person to have them.”

“You were asleep, and it was probably Lulu snoring in your ear,” Brian laughed.

I cringed. Winch was in no mood for Brian's kidding. He wanted his own epiphany so badly that he was willing to accept anything and call it that. When he wheeled around and left without another word, I felt as if an angry bear had left the room.

Joshua came out of the back of the garage, wiping his hands on a grease rag, to watch Winch drive away. “Uncle Zak was in town the other day and stopped by the house. He told me the family thinks Winch has gone zealot. He wants the adults to gather in the living room while he stands and preaches. He tells everyone the world was created in six days, all of creation died in a flood and only a fixed number of people are going to heaven. He's gone real kooky. Where's the seven-sixteenths-inch wrench?”

“Keep your pen and paper handy, Tobias,” Brian said with a chuckle. “If he keeps this up, he's going to give you plenty to write about. When I tried to talk sense into him, he got angry and pounded the kitchen table with his fat fist until the cups jumped out of their saucers. Maude grabbed his ear and told him, ‘Thump my table one more time, and you'll find out what a real thumping is about.'”

“He's a big guy. When he gets physical, it's intimidating,” I said.

“To us maybe, but not to Maude. She would pile-drive him.”

Joshua wiped the grease off the wrench. “I don't like to analyze people, but I'm guessing he thinks an epiphany means leadership or something.”

With his zeal to be special, Winch continued to spread his message. He cornered me a few times, and I listened politely.

One time he was explaining his theory of “the return” when I asked him, “How could a person descend on clouds when clouds float up?” It seemed like a simple and logical question to me.

“Everyone knows that's how it will happen. The Lord will be standing on a cloud coming down to earth.” He then pulled up his hand like a six-gun quick draw, squinted like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver and stuck a cracked and grease-stained finger in my face. I expected him to say “Aargh, matey!” like Long John, but instead he said, “Don't be a heathen unbeliever, Tobias. The wages of sin is death.”

I had to cross my eyes to see his finger, he held it so close. “Winch, it's me, Tobias, your friend. Why are you getting so worked up? There's no call for this.”

He growled and walked away.

Winch had become a different person. I believed in the good of religion, but his type of religion had ruined him. He had slid past zealot to become Mr. Fire and Brimstone. It made me uncomfortable to hear him talk about sin, especially my sin. I always thought sin was supposed to be private, between you and God. It also saddened me to realize that there was nothing but trouble down the road for Winch and his family, but I felt powerless to help.

I told my dad about Winch. He laughed and said, “Son, I grew up with that. It's abuse. Ignore it. Those guys burn themselves out in time. Brimstone doesn't last forever. I shouldn't laugh, because it is serious, but those guys are such hypocrites.”

Everyone in town was talking about Winch. His endless preaching was like a noise that couldn't be turned off. Most waved him away and didn't hide their annoyance.

Halloo family members met in private, concerned because he was the head of the family. Lulu told me about it later.

“There could be a coup d'état if things don't straighten out soon,” Zak announced. “I was first in at Dieppe. Taking Winch down will be a piece of cake.”

The Halloos didn't buckle under Winch's religious insistence and become a closed sect. I attributed this to their fierce disregard for authority. The women seemed to take the lead in that area.

“To hell with him,” Stella said. “Who does he think he is, some television evangelist?”

“Better watch out, Lulu. Those guys end up in some sex scandal sooner or later,” Olive laughed.