Corvus Page 3

  This wasn’t what he wanted to see. This wasn’t what he spent all that money on. He’d bought an ORV to experience the better things in life, the sky, freedom. He flapped hard, drove the bird south toward the Thunder Hills. The Two Forks River area lay beneath him, beautiful, wetlands that people had left alone. He stayed above it and played, experienced the Raven, experienced the thrust and glide of flying. And below him there was something nice, something natural, a soft place to crash into if by chance something did go wrong. He tried a swoop, a shallow one, too nervous, too uncertain, too inexperienced to really push it. Someday, he told himself, after he really knew the Raven, someday he would do a loop.

  He tried another swoop, a little steeper, a little faster, the smooth rush of the descent, and then reach out with the wings, head back and the g-force of the change in direction pumped the heart faster and a “Whoooee!” escaped from his lungs. The Raven called back, a long “Kawwwee.”

  “It’s not supposed to be able to vocalize.” Paul seemed surprised at George’s off-hand remark that he really enjoyed that aspect of the ORV. “It wasn’t designed in. But you know how these things work, we start with a bit of genetic material and we grow the bird. Sometimes we don’t get what we hoped. Other times we get a bit more. Looks like your bird grew that bit more.”

  11

  RICHARD WALKED BACK TO THE ASHRAM at Rabbit Creek, occasionally thinking about the raven on the roof of the courthouse that morning. As he crossed the bridge he noted that the Montreal River was low. The water that ran over the stones was not much more than a trickle at the bottom of the concrete floodway. He wasn’t at all fooled by the low level; at any time the sky could turn black, the clouds would roll and boil and drop a hundred and fifty, even two hundred millimetres of rain in a single event and the river would roar again. But not in winter. Winter was sanctuary from the storms. Everyone knew what caused storms: heat and high humidity.

  It was early afternoon before he reached the compound, tired and thirsty. Katherine found him at the well, a dipper in his hand, cold water still dripping from his chin.

  “So how’d it go?”

  “Eight hundred.”

  “Do you need help with that?”

  “Naw, I got it. I’ll work it off in Fine Option.”

  “Up to you, we’ve got a bit of money in petty cash if you want. That’s what it’s there for.”

  Richard thought about it. If he borrowed from the Ashram, he wouldn’t have the long walk every day. But then he would be indebted. No, he would pay his own way, make a bit more than his needs and give that to the fund.

  “Thanks Katherine, really, I have it.”

  “Shitty deal all the same.” She smiled at him with that way of hers, that easy way that made everyone trust her immediately.

  He returned the smile, looked back into her eyes, noted how clear the whites were, as though even the pollution in the air treated her differently.

  “The law says we can have it, we can grow it, but we can’t sell it,” she said.

  “Yeah, they’re the only ones who can sell it, but who wants to buy GMO weed? Think about it, weed and GMO don’t go together. If it’s a weed it can’t be genetically modified. To be a weed it has to be natural, free, know what I mean?”

  “I fully agree with you, my friend. But you know what’s going to happen if you get caught selling too often.”

  “I know,” he replied, and he did know, knew they would put him on a recognizance that prohibited him from growing marijuana, maybe even with a condition that he couldn’t possess it either. And he hadn’t really sold anything. There was no transfer of money. Surveillance at a protest he’d attended showed Richard on the fringes giving a joint away to a young woman. A simple act of taking it out of his shirt pocket and passing it to her because she’d asked. Some cop had apparently reviewed the video and decided a charge was appropriate. It seems, in law, trafficking included giving. Now he had a criminal record for being generous.

  Katherine patted him on the shoulder before she walked away, long strides, straight back, but not militaristic, just confident, comfortable in her own skin.

  Richard watched her cross the compound, thought about what it might be like, and pushed the thought away. It would never work. Maybe in the short term, an affair of sorts, but he could not imagine being with Katherine until death do you part. She was definitely attractive enough, kind, intelligent. What would she ever want with him? He was almost twice her age, not handsome, not brilliant, and with a whole lot of baggage.

  She had never been there; she didn’t know, wasn’t scarred, tempered, remade in the image of the warrior. The wars were over before she’d come of age. That was the big difference. That’s what separated them.

  Richard looked for work as he walked around the Ashram, past the bison herd. The fences were fine, tamarack posts that were naturally rot resistant and long, straight black spruce rails. Twenty-three very large animals. He knew them as a family, as a village, maybe even as a tribe. There was the chief, a huge shaggy bull that was always off to one side, separate. He was the sire of all the younger and none ever challenged him. Then there were the cows with calves, then the cows without calves, then the younger males, the warriors, the protectors. At any sign of threat the herd withdrew, the cows and calves stayed back and the young bulls formed a line between them and the threat. A four-year-old whose hair between his horns stood straight up always led the bulls, always in the front, stomping, pawing, face-first into the enemy. Richard imagined him as captain.

  There had been fights over the bison, or rather, over the ten hectares they occupied, fights between the carnivores and the vegetarians who wanted the land for vegetable gardens. But the bison had been here since the Ashram began, back near the turn of the century, they had seniority.

  He wondered if Katherine might be a vegetarian. He’d never seen her eat meat. But then he could not remember if he had ever seen her eat. She lived with the women. She probably wasn’t. She couldn’t be. She looked after the rabbits. But yet maybe. The rabbits weren’t just for meat, they were quick compost machines, turning aspen into pellets for the gardens, the producers of perfect natural fertilizer: scentless and compact and rich in nutrients. There was no sense in checking out the pens, Katherine would have already taken care of cleaning them.

  Richard found work, good, simple, hard work. He stood in a trench with a long-handled spade, dug down into the warmth of the earth to lay pipes, expanding the Ashram’s geothermal network. He used a pick to break through the thin layer of frozen ground at the surface. There had been a time when the ground froze down more than a meter and municipalities buried their water and sewer pipes deep, but not for decades. Now the ground barely froze and some winters didn’t freeze at all.

  He worked until his arms and shoulders hurt, hurt with a pleasant ache. He enjoyed it, liked the feel of exhausted muscle, liked the warmth of it. There is a difference between ache and pain. Pain is sharper. Pain tells you something is wrong. Ache is quiet. You stop and take care of pain, you work through ache to get to the other side.

  But he did stop, climbed out of the trench and sat on its edge, his feet dangling, stuffed a pinch of marijuana into a tiny pipe, just enough for three good hits, and relaxed into the smoke wisps. He thought about what he was doing, about marijuana use and alcohol use. Alcohol was an escape from reality. It dulled things. Marijuana enhanced reality, gave it a deeper dimension. A person could work high, carefully, experiencing every movement, thinking their way through it. Whereas a drunk can’t work, a drunk is stumbling and lost, dulled and dumb.

  He slid back down into the trench when the pipe was empty. He shovelled with new energy, enjoyed the colour of the wet sand on his spade, red from iron oxide, and yellow and brown. He thought about the warmth of the earth, his mother. All the energy that humanity ever needed was here, and she loved us, provided for us, kept us warm. He stopped to pray, put his shovel into the sand and leaned against it. “Universe, I know your song, I know
your rhythms; let me walk to your beat, let me stay in your song, let me be a pure note in your symphony.”

  12

  KATHERINE LIVED WITH THE WOMEN BECAUSE it was simpler; five women in an Earthship. She liked her home, liked the thermal mass of recycled tires packed with sand that made up the walls; she liked the architecture, liked the sweep of it, how it flowed into the earth.

  It was one of the first buildings put up at the Ashram, in the time of Hayden Harder, the founder. Hayden was a bit of an anomaly, a hockey player before the game became ultra-violent, then a pacifist who used his wealth to contribute to the Ashram. And of course Hayden’s brother was Patrick Harder, the general who led the Canadian Forces during the Second IntraAmerican War.

  There were periods in the history of the Ashram when councils were formed, when the members convinced themselves that it would be more efficient to manage their affairs through formal structures. But they never lasted for long. There was still an elected council, though it had been a long time since there had been an election and the council had simply stopped meeting. The Ashram functioned because its members worked. No one needed to be told what to do. And as for coordination, that was simple, just ask Katherine.

  It wasn’t that she took charge. Katherine didn’t tell people what they needed to do. She worked like everyone else, perhaps with a bit more spirit, and usually with a smile. She genuinely liked people, and put you at ease with the first two sentences out of her mouth. She never sought leadership and maybe that is why it was placed on her. She coordinated the functions of the Ashram because the members wanted her to. The arrangement had simply evolved this way over the course of a few years. Now everyone was comfortable with it.

  Katherine was the first to say that she had no authority. She could not compel any action. She simply suggested that such-and-such be done and if no one picked up on the idea, she did it herself, gladly. So the Ashram functioned, day-by-day, night-by-night, meal-by-meal.

  There had been a time when everyone ate together in the big dining hall. It had been thought that communal meals were essential for the survival of the Ashram; not anymore. Now you ate with whomever you wanted. The meals were still communal, in the sense that people ate in groups and shared resources, but they had removed the structure. Not everyone wanted to have supper at six o’clock everyday. Now there was no set cooking crew and that change alone had removed a source of tension.

  Glyphosate; how could humanity imagine such a compound? She put the soil sample down, stepped back from the little workbench at the far end of the greenhouse. Just the word glyphosate stirred anger in her, an emotion that she was not at all familiar with. It wasn’t the droughts alone that killed the farmers. The soil died first. “Six times ten to the thirtieth power.” She said it aloud. The number of bacterial cells that had existed before glyphosate. She tried to imagine it; six with thirty zeros behind it, more than half of the world’s species and one compound; one bit of stupidity and now the soil was dying. The United Nations Convention on Soils had banned it. But too late; the damage was done.

  How could they have done it?

  How could a farmer imagine that he could spray a herbicide that killed everything, that clogged the life paths of every plant, and that that would be a benefit? The anger within her was becoming more than a stir. And in its heyday they thought the worst it was doing was creating herbicide-resistant weeds, as if weeds were the problem. It took decades to realize what it did to the soil, to the life force within the soil.

  She let her anger cool, closed up the soil test mini-lab. There was no way to get those micro-organisms back. They were extinct. It was like being angry because there were no dodo birds, no dinosaurs. When her anger dissipated, she was left with only sadness.

  She stopped a moment in the greenhouse doorway, just stood there and looked around the Ashram, forty hectares, a blend of nature and management, where the people were not the most important element. There had been discussions about that big pine tree in front of her. Some thought it should be taken down. If a storm came it would crash into the greenhouse. The argument that won the day — she was happy to remember — was that the greenhouse could be rebuilt; to grow a pine like that would take a hundred and fifty years.

  Anyway, the Ashram seemed almost blessed. It had never been hit by storm, not directly. Sure, they had lost shingles, and big rain events had flooded cellars. But, never a tornado, never a plough wind. The Ashram had always been a place of calm.

  She could see Richard working, one deliberate shovelful at a time. They could get a machine to do that, to dig the trenches. The Ashram had money, more than enough. But he’d insisted, said it was honest work. She liked that about him, that he was a worker, that he was honest. She imagined what it might be like, remembered how when he spoke to her he always looked directly into her eyes, looked into her, and how that left her feeling open. Not open and vulnerable, but open and connected.

  But with Richard there was always a distance, as though he was somewhere else, as though the Ashram was simply a passage, a place to heal before he moved on. There had been many like that, people who came to put their demons to rest, found what they needed and went back into the world.

  Not Katherine. She found this place when she was eighteen, riding a bicycle, heading north, everything she owned in a packsack; stopped to ask for water and never left. She’d found home, found what she had been looking for, a place to belong.

  13

  LENORE NOTICED THE MOON AND COULDN’T remember the last time she had seen it, an orb of gold that shone through the top quadrant of her living room window. It drew her out, away from her studies, onto the narrow balcony. She stood there in the cold and looked up.

  There is always magic to a moon. She felt the old connection, a moon and a woman and the night. There was history here. Their relationship was ancient. Lenore bathed in the moonlight and the moment and experienced a rare sense of belonging. Her bare arms and face tingled. She imagined it was the moon touching her and wished she were away from here, somewhere out, somewhere dark. This moon was pale against the city lights, without all of its strength, unable to penetrate as deeply as she needed.

  The moment faded. The light on her skin became the cold of the night and she was just Lenore again, standing on a balcony in the middle of the city, and the moon was just another light. But when she went back in, she found she couldn’t study anymore. She tried, she wanted to, but the material had lost its relevance. She closed it out. Hit Save, then Exit. She thought she might run a search on the moon. She could tell the computer to “find lunar-woman connection”, but didn’t, because she knew it wouldn’t be there. There’d be no connection, just words and images. She closed the screen.

  Now what? It was too early to go to bed. She checked the time: nine thirty-seven. Well maybe. Maybe go to bed early, get a good rest. If she could sleep — that’s what worried her, whether she could sleep, or whether she would lie there awake, remembering. She didn’t want to remember.

  She chose a hot bath, a long lazy bath followed by a glass of hot milk. She was sure it was real milk, she’d paid a premium price for it.

  Her bedroom was small and cramped. She liked it that way, closed in, close, like sleeping in a cubby. It felt safe. She could make it even smaller, she thought, as she crawled onto the narrow bed, maybe another floor-to-ceiling closet would fill the space, tighten it up. There was already a large wooden one that she had placed to block the window. If she bought another, she would need a smaller bed so that the closet doors would open. That wouldn’t be so bad. She didn’t need more than space to lie down anyway. Maybe tomorrow she would go shopping.

  She slept, not the deep sleep that she preferred, not the sleep where nothing penetrated and she’d wake up without any memories of the night. Her sleep was light and filled with images of moonlight and water. The image she was afraid of did not come. She didn’t see the baby’s hand.

  14

  “YOU HAVE TO EXPERIENCE IT.”

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nbsp; Lenore thought she could imagine it, being up there, the way George described it. He had obviously found his passion, an ORV Raven. She had never seen him quite like this before, animated, alive, moved by something, something that had touched his heart. She wanted to join him in it. She wanted to be part of this new obsession of his, but she didn’t speak — she listened.

  “There’s something about making a high turn, as you just shift your body weight a bit and the ORV responds and the wind catches you and lifts you just that much higher.” He had his arms out, showing her, tilting his body to the left, then straightening and bending his knees to demonstrate a swoop. His briefcase in his right hand took something away from the image of flight, unbalanced it. Maybe if they had been outside instead of in a courthouse hallway, maybe if there hadn’t been so many people around, he might have been more convincing.

  She thought what it might be like to fly wingtip to wingtip with George, to share flight, share the freedom. The thought didn’t grasp onto anything and slipped away as George continued his solo flight.

  “I thought I knew La Ronge, been here all my life, well most of my life, but up there, flying low, you get a true perspective of it. You see its other dimensions.”

  Lenore had never seen La Ronge from anything other than street level and even though she believed George, that she might be missing something, something exciting and new, she couldn’t imagine it because it was beyond her experience.

  “Hey, I have court in about three minutes in seventeen.”

  “Oh yeah.” George looked at the watch on his left wrist. “I’m in nine. Judge Fritz.” He made a sour face.