The Hour of Bad Decisions

The
H
OUR
of
B
AD
D
ECISIONS

Russell
W
ANGERSKY

© Russell Wangersky, 2006. First us edition, 2007.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Edited by Edna Alford.
Book and cover design by Duncan Campbell.
Cover image, “Man Walks Towards Town” by Kamil Vojnar / Getty Images.

Printed and bound in Canada at Marquis Book Printing Inc.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wangersky, Russell, 1962-
The hour of bad decisions / Russell Wangersky.

ISBN
1-55050-337-5

     I. Title.

PS
8645.
A
5333
H
52 2006       c813'.6       c2006-901076-5

    2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10

2517 Victoria Ave.
Regina, Saskatchewan
Canada
S
4
P
OT
2
www.coteaubooks.com

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
), Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the City of Regina Arts Commission, for its publishing program.

Burning Foley's

In Between

Hot Tub

On Call

Dealing with Determinism

Bowling Night

The Latitude of Walls

Mapping

Perchance to Dream

Musical Chairs

Heartwood

I want…

Big Shoes

No Apologies for Weather

Borrowed Time

Better than This

Housekeeping

F
OLEY'S HOUSE WAS BURNING.

You could see it from the top of the hill, from on top of the long green slope that led down into Cuslett.

There was old meadow on one side of the narrow, crumbling highway, matted spruce on the other. And in the meadow, which ran down in a rush to the river, individual and perfectly conical spruce trees coming up, dark blue-green and full, their skirts right down into the long grass, keeping the wind out. In the town, there were a handful of houses, a blocky red barn, and the long, curving river twisting down to Placentia Bay. It was the kind of small place dwarfed by its surroundings, the swooping spruce hills on both sides of the valley, the huge summer sky rising up over the vast silver bay.

A slight heat-shimmer in the air, the day just warm enough that the air over the road had a gentle tremble,
so that the corners and roof-lines of the houses wavered ever so slightly.

Other than that, there was no motion at all, no cars on the road, and from the distance of the top of the hill, no sounds either, as if Cuslett were holding its breath, waiting for someone familiar to arrive and wake the place.

Except for James Foley's house. Burning.

Roy Meade could see it, could smell the smoke and the gasoline on the cuffs of his work shirt. And he sat high on the hillside, watching, his brother, Tony, sitting just a few feet away. Roy was singing tunelessly under his breath, his mouth slightly open.

“I don't know,” Tony said. He was fiddling with a long piece of meadow grass.

“Shut up, Tony. Jest shut up.”

An inverted cone of black and dirty yellow smoke, rising and roiling straight up in the still air. The smoke was pillowing into itself, with the rounded bulges being caught from beneath by the next, faster-rising, still hotter breath from the fire below. Already, there was the distinct and tangled smell of the smoke in the air, that curious, almost dump-fire smell of someone's possessions burning. Around the burning building, inconsequential figures were running back and forth. Then the roof tar was well alight, with its particular orange flame and the heavy, even-blacker smoke, the roof buckling in the middle, edges shrugging up, the centre falling in with a whoosh of reaching smoke and flame, sparks and flankers showering down on the running figures. And then the too-late fire trucks
pounding down the highway, red lights on and sirens screaming, air brakes smoking heavily from the long, winding trip along the shore from Placentia.

Foley's house was the green one – or it had been green. It used to have windows, too, but the frames had burned, and the windows were gone, toppling either back into the flames or outwards to lie face-down in the grass. One window had blown out early, when the fire was hottest, scattered the grass with long, sharp knives of soot-blackened glass. The clapboard was smoking and falling off the outside of the house in sheets as the nails lost their grip on the sheathing, the dry wood popping and crackling angrily as the flames roared over it.

And Foley's was far from being the first house to burn in Cuslett.

The welfare house by the beach had burned, too, a few weeks earlier, the family off in Placentia on a grocery trip. It was an old two-storey, three-bedroom, hard to heat, down on the flats where Roy Meade had his wood piled, the rising heaps of sharp-pointed posts and the eight-foot, thin longers. The family had lived there for three weeks. Meade hadn't even waved hello.

That time, the fire department arrived in time to soak down the charred main beams; the walls had fallen in before the trucks got there. After the fire, the only things left were the chimney and the Enterprise oil stove, squatting down heavily where the kitchen had been. The stove still intact, its white glazing all crazy-cracked from the heat, the cracks milky from
smoke. The trees on what had been the back of the house had their leaves seared black on the side nearest to the fire. The
RCMP
parked in the driveway overnight, as if something might change in the misting ruin, as if somehow someone might tamper with the steaming beach fire remnants. It smelt like a beach fire, too, the kind of fire that had been doused with salt water and left behind after everyone piled into the car and headed back to town.

Eventually, the police headed back to town, too, unable to find the cause.

The fall before, two summer cabins burned on the same weekend that their owners had packed up and gone home, the cabins well up on the river flats behind the town where the Meades had their sheep pasture, fences running for straight-edged miles through the alder scrub and the small rectangles of clearcut. Roy Meade suggested it might have been a chimney fire in the smaller cabin nearest the river, because he had never liked the look of the angled and rusting stovepipe, and he knew they burned green wood anyway. Meade said he had seen the fires while he was well back on the flats where the river first came down from the barrens.

The post office burned, and the house the police used when the roads drifted in.

And Mercy Lang's house burned in the snow while the Langs were snowbound in St. Brides during a storm. And then the abandoned house under the cliff edge, which burned late at night, so bright in the January dark that the red-rock cliff was lit from
bottom to top, thirty feet or more, like an overdrawn backdrop to a small and burning one-act play.

The road in to the abandoned house was long grown over and filled in two feet deep with snow, so the fire trucks didn't try to get in to put out the fire, and the firefighters stood next to their grumbling trucks instead and watched the huge fire throw its shadows onto the cliff. And in the morning, when the sun came up bright and winter-hard, the snow was melted and yellow six or eight feet from the foundation, and a great yellow and brown wedge of dirty snow extended away from the foundation in the direction the wind had been blowing, the snow stained by the falling embers and ash. By the time the police arrived, all of Cuslett had been to see the ruins, and hundreds of footprints twined and spun through the snow like wild strawberry runners, and no one could tell which ones might have been the very first footprints in.

The police didn't stay for that one, just looked at the twisting footprints, got back into the cars and drove away.

The police stayed longer at Foley's: while the foundation was still smoking, they surrounded the property with police tape. They found Foley inside, in a corner of the kitchen. The coroner said later Foley had died from the smoke, although you couldn't tell from the blackened body they brought out of the charcoal, his arms and legs pulled up tight to his body where the heat had shrunk all his sinews. It looked too small to be Foley, but it was. Plenty of policemen
then, most in white overalls sifting through the blackened bits and charcoal and remains with shovels; finding a belt buckle and the batteries from a flashlight, coils of copper wire with the insulation all burned away, the welded workings of an ancient pocket watch. Finding every single bit that couldn't burn: finding nothing else.

Roy Meade was stripping and piling spruce fence posts near the beach by that afternoon, the air sharp with the smell of sap. Meade's hands were black and tacky with the sticky resin, and the axe handle had distinct palm and fingerprints all along the length of its varnished wood. He was standing behind the big berm of beach rocks thrown up by the swells, between the rocks and the long, brown, peaty curl of the river, and he was using the axe to chip long, thick points onto one end of each post. It was wild river meadow there, isolated clumps of blue flag iris, nodding heads of Queen Anne's lace, and the fresh new grass still supple and not yet beginning to yellow. Damselflies working low over the water's surface, turning and wheeling and fluttering high, their crystalline wings catching the light as they rose from the water in mating flight.