Cadillac Cathedral (3 page)

PORTUGUESE CREEK IS A
quiet country place of woods and fields spread out along the Old Highway — houses flanked by trees at the head of long driveways, cows grazing in orchards, sleek horses looking over fences at the passing traffic. There is no sign saying “Welcome to Portuguese Creek” or “Thank you for Visiting.” Most drivers need neither the welcome nor the gratitude, since the Store is where most of them still have to go for their mail.

The Creek itself begins as a surface leakage from an underground stream and wanders over the district as if it has lost its way or decided to pay a brief visit to every small farm and house-lot before turning west to abandon itself to an inland river. In some places it is not much more than a ditch, choked with weeds and brush; in other spots it is
wide and shallow above a sparkling gravel bed, or filthy with the mud stirred up by cattle crossing.

The road past Arvo’s house and workshop had originally been a logging railway line, starting down near the beach and working its careful way inland to cross what would later be the highway — now known as the Old Highway — and then to pass between the Store and Arvo’s house and several small family farms towards the now-dismantled Company town where Arvo worked for thirty-five years in the machine shop. The railway tracks had been torn up long ago and the roadbed paved over with an inferior sort of asphalt, now crumbling away at the edges.

If they hoped to bring Martin home in that hearse, it was important to hurry up and do this before the hospital authorities decided on some other form of action. An arrangement made over the phone by an unseen executor and “closest friend” may seem less and less official as time went by, and Arvo did not want to drive all the way down to the city only to find that Martin had been released to some local funeral parlour where a stranger would be messing with Martin’s future.

Fortunately, they would not have to travel great distances to find what they were after. Bert Peterson remembered that he’d spotted the old hearse up an abandoned logging road behind Sentinel Hill and onto a lower slope of Douglas Mountain. “Well below the snowline. Probably no more than thirty k from here.”

Herbie Brewer muttered “
Miles
.” He had been raised in California and believed that mileage was the only legitimate form of measurement on this continent, proclaimed by God Himself while he handed out copies of the US Constitution shortly after the first mountain had risen from the sea.

Peterson ignored Herbie’s opinion just as he ignored everything
else he considered irrelevant. He was Herbie’s only living relative and had inherited his distant cousin after the aunt he’d lived with into his fifties had died and left him alone in a twelve-foot Arizona trailer.

Cynthia would not accompany them into the mountains. A niece had promised to stop in for a visit and she had yet to bake something to serve with tea. She promised, however, that once the men had rescued the hearse and got it ready for travel, she’d have baked a banana loaf for their trip to rescue Martin. “Martin loved my banana loaf.”

Arvo suggested her loaf would be wasted on Martin now. “If he’s aware of anything at all he’ll be busy checking out his new location.”

“Still,” Cynthia began, but apparently decided against explaining herself. Maybe she thought she’d made a joke and didn’t know what to do with his response.

He should not be making light of the matter — referring to Martin’s “new location.” The fact was, he didn’t know how to react to Martin’s death. It had hit him hard, coming close after the deaths of two other long-time acquaintances from his years at work — both of them not much older than he was. Martin may have been a little younger. It was possible that this adventure to rescue a hearse could turn out to be something Martin might have enjoyed.

Bert Peterson and Herbie Brewer would lead the way in the blue Henry J that Arvo had fixed up for Peterson after finding it behind an abandoned sawmill off the Lower Road. This was Henry J Kaiser’s short-lived experiment, a two-door car that looked, with its pointed nose, like a stunted shark. Or, some said, a two-seater plane without wings.

Arvo knew that if they were all to travel in the Henry J, he would have to sit in the back seat with his knees around his ears and his head bent forward against the slanted roof. Herbie was possessive of the
front passenger seat just as he was possessive of just about everything else that was actually Peterson’s, having so little he could actually call his own.

“I’ve been thinking,” Arvo said, with one hand massaging the back of his neck. “This is a chance for me to take the Fargo for a spin, now I’ve got her back in running order.”

Peterson shrugged. “No sense taking both. We’ll just climb in with you.”

Arvo put a hand on the roof of the Henry J and spoke to the ground. “It might be safer if you went ahead and kept me in your mirror. I don’t want to get up into the hills and have ’er break down again.”

Of course there was little chance of the Fargo breaking down. It was just that he didn’t see any point in explaining the strategy he had in mind when he didn’t know what sort of negotiating might be needed once they were up in the hills.

He took his portable license plate down off the wall of his workshop and hung it at the back end of the Fargo — a three-ton flat-bed truck a lumber company had left behind on its lot when it went out of business. Not worth the cost of repairs, they’d probably thought. Not worth the effort of finding someone to take it off their hands. If they’d poked around Arvo’s place for a while they might have found all the parts it needed, and could even have flattered him into doing the job for the price of a month’s groceries.

A scattering of white clouds had collected along the mountain peaks to the west, though the sky was otherwise clear and the late morning sun was still shining on the lower slopes — defining not only the curve of individual hills but the jagged patterns of still-standing timber as well.

The Henry J led the way inland, crossing the Creek on a wooden bridge, then passing one small fenced-in hobby farm after another,
most of them cleared by families who’d arrived here just after the First World War. Some of their descendants still lived in houses built by their great-grandparents from a government-supplied pattern.

Younger family members had recently mowed and stacked the hay to dry in the fields. White-faced cattle cropped pasture grass or stared off into space, drool dangling from their chins. O’Hagen’s dainty riding horses trotted along inside their fence, keeping pace with the Fargo as far as the end of the field.

Members of the Macken family, a rambunctious lot that never seemed to tire of one another’s company, had built houses and developed hobby farms in every corner of the family’s original acreage. Much of the original farm had been opened up for a gravel pit, which was no surprise when you remembered the old man complaining that he’d been unable to get a thing to grow on what he called “this goddam pile of rocks.”

After crossing the Creek several times they passed through the site of what had been the Company town where Arvo had kept the trucks in good repair. All three rows of identical houses had been torn down or hauled away long ago, as had the Company office and the machine shop. Bert Peterson had been given the job of time-keeper in the office next door — after working for years on the booming grounds below town. They’d often eaten their lunches together on the roof, where they could enjoy the sun and the view out over the valley.

Martin had poked around in these remnants of a disappeared world now and then: chimney bricks and left-behind children’s toys and chipped crockery that people had considered not worth the effort of packing up for the move. History had been important to him, especially local history, the story of the people he’d tried to represent in Ottawa. The folks who lived in this Company-owned cluster of buildings might have moved out to the highway or in to town but he
found some sort of importance in the fact that this was where they had raised their children.

Alder had sprung up amongst the debris, but willows had grown along the river bank, as though to form a dense screen between this sad abandoned place and the logging-scarred blue mountains that reared up from beyond the river to their snowy peaks.

The pot-holed dusty road that for years had taken the loggers up into the hills now tunnelled beneath the new four-lane freeway and came out into a logged-off area blooming with tall pink foxgloves. They passed by an abandoned farm and a long stretch of second-growth Douglas fir, all precisely the same shape, the same eight-feet-tall, planted a few years ago as seedlings by a crew of university students.

The road that Peterson eventually turned onto was one that Arvo had not yet explored on his rescue missions. After no more than a few minutes of scanning the woods on either side, his practised eye had no difficulty spotting a red Toyota pickup parked beneath the giant cedars fewer than a hundred metres from the road. Someone hadn’t cared enough to make sure the truck was abandoned where undergrowth would hide it from view. The lazy bugger had done Arvo a favour, however, since even if the Toyota was beyond repair it was bound to have any number of parts worth a return visit as soon as he’d got Martin’s funeral out of the way.

They climbed a steep hill on a series of long rough switch-backs and eventually reached a plateau to level out through a shuddering stretch of washboard. From here he could look down upon a small gleaming lake like a woman’s sapphire brooch dropped into a stand of spiky hemlock. The patchwork of small farms in Portuguese Creek spread out to the edge of the long blue stretch of the Strait with its scattered islands.

He hardly dared to hope that the hearse, once they’d found it, would be the one he remembered Old Man Birdsong driving at the head of a funeral parade — his pretty yellow-haired daughter beside him, sometimes even steering, though with her father’s hand never far from the wheel. She had been in Arvo’s class at school, had needed his help cleaning up her failed science experiments, and his advice for getting them right the next time she tried. She had been the school’s prettiest girl — in his eyes at least — and of course she had known this about herself. She had probably known the effect she’d had on him even at that early age.

They travelled upwards along a side-hill where young firs were growing amongst the gigantic stumps left by the logged-off giants. When he’d first applied for a job in the woods, it was taken for granted by the bosses that he’d be a faller like most of the other Finns in the district, though he’d wanted only to be a mechanic. He’d had to set chokers for four or five years before they’d finally transferred him to the machine shop as Sparky Desmond’s helper, keeping the steam locomotive in good repair, and then, once the loci and Sparky had both passed into history, servicing the large White and Kenworth trucks.

At the top of a long rough slope, they found themselves in a cleared space of raw stirred-up dirt, with a small unpainted plywood house at the far end. Peterson pulled over to one side and stopped, then oared his arm outside his window to encourage Arvo on past. It seemed they had arrived.

Arvo pulled up behind the Henry J and stopped, letting the Fargo motor tick over while he had a good look at what appeared to be someone’s home. The house was roughly nailed with mismatched boards of various widths and thickness — some fir, some rough-sawn yellow cedar. Part of the roof was overlaid by a sheet of black plastic
held in place by a heap of rocks at each corner. Whoever lived here could be squatters, or they could have a license for salvage. A half-ton Ford pickup without fenders or wheels rested on stacks of wood blocks, most of its yellow paint eaten up by rust. A dog house sat at a slant, a limp chain lying out across dirt as though a dog had taken a good hard run and broken free. A pair of speckled hens pecked at a scraggly patch of grass.

And, just as he had hoped, when he’d moved the Fargo slowly forward he could see the old hearse parked at an angle at the base of a clothesline pole off the far back corner of the house. It was almost certainly the one Joe Hudson had used to deliver his butchered meat after Thomas Birdsong had bought a newer model for his funerals. No one else had owned one of these, so far as he knew. A Cadillac — the
Cathedral Hearse
. He recognized the open-air driver’s cab, the long hood and longer running board with the encased side-mounted spare wheel, the row of windows and elaborately carved frame of the carriage. As he drove slowly closer he could see that its lower half was caked with hardened mud.

This was disgusting: the mud, no garage to protect the hearse from weather, this isolated dusty location, and, worst of all the evidence that the hearse had been employed in some way for a private salvage operation, even for hauling poles down out of the bush.

He climbed down from the Fargo for a closer look, slowly circling the long black vehicle that made him think of a nineteenth-century stagecoach trying to convert itself into a modern limousine. Having no roof to protect it, the driver’s seat was strewn with fallen twigs and rotting leaves, and had obviously suffered from weather. Aside from this and a shallow dent to the left rear corner, the hearse appeared to be in fairly good shape. He ran a hand down the long hood and the large chrome-plated headlamps, then twisted the cap off the radiator. The water was up. He raised the long engine cover to check the
motor: it was clean, obviously cared-for, probably in good working order.

Since there was no question in his mind that this was the same hearse he’d tuned up for old man Hudson’s meat deliveries, he already knew some things about it — that the body was designed by “Fletcher” for instance; that the synchro-mesh transmission allowed for three speeds forward. The clutch was a twin-disc version. For its time, it was definitely a luxury model. It still was, for that matter. A beauty.

He crouched to examine the tires. The rubber was firm, the tread on three of them worn but still safe enough, but the fourth — rear left — was dangerously close to bald.