The Owl is convinced now that fate has it in for him this April Fool’s Day. What a chump, with his mental meltdown. He’s afraid his rider will try to kick in the rear window and strangle the cross-dressing psycho sex fiend, or maybe grab the chainsaw and decapitate him. But Grizzly doesn’t seem ready to do these things, just glaring at him from the rear-view, sitting on a sheet of plywood, nursing an elbow he banged.
The road is winding and ribbed with ridges, so Faloon can’t pour the juice on, but he doesn’t dare slow. He can keep going until he runs out of gas, and then the yard super will castrate him. As the road dips by the river, he dares a risky play, slowing almost to a stop so Grizzly can maybe drop the tailgate and clamber out, deciding not to be brave, content to be left alone on the road and not take chances with a psycho killer. But Grizzly doesn’t move, and there’s even an evil smile on his face, as if he knows what Faloon is up to.
Getting up speed again, he sees shimmering blue waters in the distance, log rafts assembled on it, and the road descends until it comes to a fork by the western lip of Cowichan Lake. When he rounds a curve, he is suddenly aware of flashing lights, officers lounging beside a blinking cruiser-another roadblock.
This he greets with mixed emotions, almost welcoming the sight of an officer furiously waving him to stop-horsemen do not as a rule remove your body parts. As the Owl brakes, he turns fatalistic, this has not been his day, not at all. He switches off the engine and listens to Grizzly, outside, loudly ratting on him.
When a constable approaches him to seek clarification of these accusations, he rolls down his window and produces Gertrude Heeredam’s driver’s licence.
“You make an ugly woman, Faloon,” he says.
3
With envy, Arthur Beauchamp watches juncos mating in the raspberry patch. A bumblebee tests a daffodil. There is lust in his garden, spring’s vitality. Maybe his sap will start flowing again too, and the lazy lout below will rise from flaccid hibernation. The desire is there, but the equipment faulty. When was his last erection-a month ago? A halfhearted attempt at takeoff. But he knows he must accept and move on. We age, faculties rust. Some men lose their hair. In compensation, Arthur has kept his, a thick grey thatch.
No one is around-Margaret is at one of her interminable Save Gwendolyn meetings-so he’s unembarrassed to rasp, to no recognizable tune, the song of Autolycus: “April, the sweet o’ the year, when the merry daffodils appear.” He mangles the verse. His memory has begun to wear at the edges, like his coveralls. There was a time when he could trumpet, even when in his cups, in that former wasted life, the entire madrigal.
He lays down his trowel, straightens, his back creaking like a rusting gate. Is it the somnolent country life that brings on this decay? Yet he is only sixty-eight. Doc Dooley, who holds the secret of Arthur’s high cholesterol and balky heart, is eighty-five and runs in the Garibaldi Island marathon. Run, jog, walk, he orders, and if you can do little else, wobble.
He closes the garden gate, washes his hands by the tap behind his country house-two storeys, 1920s gingerbread-and contemplates playing hooky with rod and reel. Below the house, where mown grass gives way to white-scrubbed drift logs and the rippled wash of Blunder Bay, his outboard beckons from his sagging dock.
But no, he must hike, must stay faithful to Doc Dooley’s regimen, a mile and a quarter up Potter’s Road and down Centre Road to Hopeless Bay, to load his rucksack with mail, skim milk, olive oil, and…what else was on Margaret’s list? Three tomatoes and two lemons. No need to write everything down.
She is keeping him on a strict diet. She blames herself for the minor stroke he suffered two years ago, attributing it to her over-bounteous table. “Eat light, Beauchamp, and avoid fats,” said Doc Dooley.
He skirts the upper pasture to look for holes in the cedar fence. Occasionally, and by no evident means, the goats escape under, over, or through it-wise locals drive carefully along Potter’s Road. Some thirty kids are expected at Blunder Bay Farm-Margaret has a way of knowing these things-so it will be a busy month. Other residents include chickens, geese, a horse called Barney, Slappy the dog, and a pair of cats named Shiftless and Underfoot.
The path descends to an alder bottom, then rises to a dry fir forest before joining the road. He is puffing a little, his nostrils filled with the soft scents of a pleasant spring day.
Avoid stress. Another of Doc Dooley’s prescriptions. Isn’t that why he fled to Garibaldi Island? To escape the city’s ferment, the law’s wounding duels? He was fat and foundering, lonely and ill, about to be divorced by a faithless wife. Arthur is a farmer now, he hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom for half a dozen years. Life has taken on a rosier hue since he fell in love with Garibaldi Island, then, just as quickly, with his neighbour, Margaret Blake, organic farmer, environmental activist.
She gave him eyes to see nature’s artistry after six decades of city blindness, when gazing at concrete, not conifers, at shop windows, not still ponds, seemed the natural way of humankind. Arthur’s milieu was more conservative than conservationist. “Let’s save this environment,” a fellow member of the Confederation Club once chortled.
But rural life comes with its cracks and stains. For one, he didn’t anticipate living with Margaret would be so hectic. For three of their five years together, she served as Garibaldi’s elected trustee, volatile, disputatious, scaring people with her gingery tongue. Now her ire is focused on the proposed development at Gwendolyn Bay, its threatened deforestation. On that issue, this is an island divided. Friendships have been broken in heated debate at permit hearings. Locals driving by still wave, but many no longer smile.
Arthur’s annual pursuit of tomatoes, carrots, and cabbage has kindled in him a love of green and growing things, refreshed each spring with the new life about him. He supposes he’s an environmentalist, but sees it as a lost cause, the earth warming, overpopulating, racing toward one of those messy epochal crossroads, maybe another mass extinction. Arthur would rather not think about this. He imagines there’s not much one can do about it. There’s no one to take to court. The whole thing lacks the sweet simplicity of a murder trial, a clean verdict at the end, freedom or punishment.
He sees two more houses being framed on Centre Road, view sites snapped up by weekenders from the city, the island changing too quickly, its population doubling in six years. The loudest supporters of the Gwendolyn development are these new people, who want “progress” and “conveniences,” who lug to the country as much of the city as they can, SUVs and gas barbecues and lawn mowers. Arthur has to forgive them. He too was a newcomer, he didn’t understand rural things-though he had a sense there was more to life than starting off the day in a crowded elevator at parking level five.
He suspects it’s unfair to deny others the right to live here, to pull up the drawbridge. He doesn’t know how anyway, it’s beyond him, it’s politics. Arthur is not a political person, not a joiner. Alcoholics Anonymous on Tuesdays, Tai Chi irregularly on Thursdays, bit roles with the Garibaldi Players, that’s his limited social docket. He leaves high matters of state to Margaret, who is a member of some twenty groups, Farmers’ Institute, Garibaldi Protection Society, Library Board, Parks Commission, Field Naturalists…When does she stop?
Across the road, just past the ferry turnoff, a pixie is hitchhiking-it’s the third time he’s seen her in the last several days-olive-skinned, big mischievous eyes, wide mouth, a classic beauty. A different kind of newcomer, a hippie, the kind you see at demonstrations. Spiked hair. Denim jacket with peace symbols and a Cuban flag. A smile and a wave, which he tentatively answers, a tip of his hand to his John Deere cap.