The Hour of Bad Decisions (2 page)

The river slow there – it comes in fast, dropping out of the hills and light-brown from draining the great, peat-bound barrens, but it loses all its speed as it swings against the back of the barrier beach, becoming deep and steady, taking its time to reach the near end of the beach where a gap in the stones let the river bleed brown into the sea.

Meade worked steadily, the thunk of his axe reverberating across the flat of the valley bottom, only occasionally silent when he stopped to stack more finished posts on the pile. All the posts the same length, piled evenly, the rough bark and its long-fingered, fine lichen torn by handling. Meade smelled like sweat and two-stroke engine oil. He wore a dirty black baseball cap, “
CAT
” written on the front, jammed down on his head, and his movements were spare and mechanical, the shortest possible distance between points. He watched someone walking along the short beach road towards him, skirting the muddy puddles from the heavy rain that had fallen overnight. The sky was blue now, the deep, reaching blue of late June, the heat already shrinking the puddles.

Tony Meade looked at his brother using the axe to trim the last few straggling branches from the posts, the small feathery branches the chain saw always missed, then turning each post towards the ground to make the points, sharp strokes with the axe, the white, long chips flying. Chips were lying all around, some new, some older and starting to yellow as the wood weathered. The wind full in off the bay, the air briny. A few chips had flown far enough to lie in the steadies at the edge of the river, and they floated, turning gently, surrounded by the small iridescent pools of oil that leached quickly from the sap-bleeding bark.

“Never the idea,” Tony said. He was a big man, almost six feet tall, but not as big as his brother, and he had his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans, his fingers tapping his legs nervously while he
talked. Tony's face was thin, his lips pursed as if he were tasting something slightly bitter.

“Wha?” Roy looked up from chopping, his dark face blank, straightening up and pulling his shoulders back, stretching. Roy was big but spare, with the wiriness of constant motion. Except in his face: his usual expression was still and almost expressionless, even his slight smile not without a hint of menace.

“Never the idea to burn no one,” Tony said. “Never th' idea at all.”

“His fault.” Roy shrugged. “Weren't supposed to be home. That were your job. You said he wunn't be home.”

Roy stopped and leaned the axe against the back wheel of his pickup truck. The box on the back of the truck had rusted away, replaced by a flatbed of two-by-six boards, nailed flat, with stakes on the sides to hold the load in. The sides of the truck were spattered with mud, and a case of beer, one flap open, sat in the back. Roy Meade reached in, took a beer, twisted the top off and dropped the cap back into the box. He stared at his brother for a moment before speaking.

“You said Thursday nights he's in St. Brides. Not s'posed to come back.”

“Still…” Tony said.

“No car in th' shed. Couldn't know.” Either way, Roy didn't look particularly upset. He drank a quick swallow of beer, and scratched the back of his neck. Across the flats, a group of crows were flying loosely, fighting over something one crow was carrying in its
mouth. The others put up a raucous cawing, tumbling in the air.

James Foley's wake was in St. Bride's, at his sister's house. The family held it as soon as the coroner released the body, while the police were still talking homicide and “no suspects” and “investigation continuing.” The family set up the casket in the living room. That day, a Wednesday, the room filled quickly, Foleys up from Barachoix and Placentia, one or two from Branch and a nephew, an oil rigger, all the way from Alberta. Foley's sister crying quietly in her hands, the noise muffled by her fingers, the other Foleys and some friends talking softly.

Around two o'clock, there was a sound at the door, and Roy Meade came in, and the room was suddenly silent.

Meade walked over to the closed casket under the front window. He looked around the room at the silent and watching Foleys.

“Shame,” Meade said. He examined his hands, turning them over, tore a loose scrap of skin off from next to his thumbnail. There was a ring in his dark hair from the hat, which was pushed into the back pocket of his jeans. No one else spoke.

It was a small, fussy room, overfilled with photographs, the flat surfaces topped with runners. A ship's clock on the mantel, and a faint scent of must; a coal grate, unlit, centered in the side wall, and all around, a crowd of soft, faded furniture. Meade looked steadily around the room, a moment for each person, as if he were taking count. Then he turned around
and left, a faint hint of pitch lingering in the air behind him.

The Foleys heard his truck start in the yard and pull away, and still the room was quiet, except for the steady step of the clock.

There was one pool table in the lounge in St. Bride's, but it sat crooked on the slanted floor, and only strangers ever tried to actually play on it. Roy sat as far away from the pool table as was possible, on the last seat near the wall where you could look up and watch the bright afternoon light shine in through the dirty glass and the wire grating that covered the outside of the windows.

When he had come in, his eyes had been dazzled by the bright sunlight outside, and he had thought the bar was empty. But after he ordered a beer and his eyes began to adjust to the light, he saw three men stand up from behind the pool table, pushing their chairs back, the scrape of the legs loud in the empty room.

The three men, all Langs, walked up to him at the bar; Mercy's son and two of her nephews. They stood in close to Roy. He watched the condensation form and then quickly pool around the base of his beer glass. The room smelled of old beer and disinfectant. Meade could smell the Langs.

“Whatcha going ta do? Burn us out, too?” Kevin Lang, the son. All three laughed, and it was an unpleasant sound.

The three of them had been cut from the same cloth, all three dark, blocky and threatening. Almost
shoulder to shoulder with each other, standing over him as he sat at the bar. Roy drank his beer.

“So I laughed, too,” Meade told Tony later that night, imitating himself gruffly – “haha, haha,” flat and wooden like a crow croaking.

Even later, the moon came up full and yellow over the too-black hills. By one o'clock, it was falling again, and by three, clouds rolled across and the night was suddenly dark.

It was cool, the air rich with the complicated smells of summer. The wet of the dew, the fine wick of the juniper rolling down from the barrens. Rhodera, leaves waxy and smooth, its complex resin almost reminiscent of eucalyptus, exhaling softly into the night. Damp moss and blueberry, ground cranberry and mash berry, each one adding a new and particular note.

In one corner of the meadow, the sheep moved by instinct, pushing up against each other, tight enough for the branch ends on the longers – the long fence slats – to pull tufts from the wool of the sheep pressed against the fence.

Roy Meade moved across the meadow carrying a stick, the tip of a spruce tree, branches cut away. The stick was about ten feet long, the end wrapped tightly in rags. Meade was carrying a red plastic gas can, too, and he walked up a short hill directly behind the Lang's house before opening the can and pouring gas over the rags.

He carefully screwed the cap back on before taking out his lighter. He flicked it and then touched the
flame to the rags. For a moment, he stared straight at the torch, watching the soot yellow flames at the edges, the blues in close to the cloth, turning the flaring torch slowly.

There were a lot of other things Roy might have seen, if he had been looking.

He might have seen the flames dripping from the end of the torch, yellow drops making fluttering, zip-ping sounds as they fell, and walking towards the back of the house, he might have seen the small burning islands the fallen drops left on the dark sea of the ground, flaring brilliant and burning themselves out. He might have seen how black the yellow gas flames made the rest of the night, how they licked and curled liquid up from the rags, might have seen how the flames stood out like a signal.

He might have imagined the three Langs sleeping by then in their small upstairs rooms, imagined their heavy snoring or the twitching, shallow moments of their dreams. Imagined that cold, first waking moment of fear when the room lit up in flickered orange, the tin taste of fear and the sinking ceiling of heavy smoke inching down the walls.

But he saw none of it, and imagined nothing. Meade simply held the torch up against the eaves, right where the electrical service came into the building, watching as the flames took hold and licked quickly over the roof. Reaching as far as he could, he used the edge of the roof to scrape the still-burning cloth from the spruce pole, and then walked down into the meadow to bury the wood in amongst its fellows.

The tar on the roof burned greedily, the light of it casting great, long, staggering shadows and quickly colouring the meadow orange. Without looking back, Meade walked away.

The next morning, Roy Meade walked into the senior's home in St. Bride's, holding the papers in one hand, the liquor store bag in the other. Two bottles of Schenley's Golden Wedding rattled against each other in the bag, the neck of the paper twisted over and over again so that the light brown kraft paper had permanent, soft-spiraled wrinkles.

Meade unwound the top of the bag as he walked into a bright room where an elderly man lay strapped in tight under white sheets, his arms free, a tray with half the morning's breakfast still sitting there, and a pair of glasses. Meade moved the tray, put the papers on the table and swung it across in front of the man.

“This is where you sign,” he said.

“Is this land near Foley's?” the man said, squinting. Meade open the drawer next to the man's bed, slid one of the two bottles in on its side, and watched the bubbles race up the inside of the label.

“Yeah,” he said. “Near Foley's. You remember.”

The land registry in Placentia had burned decades before, leaving many pieces of land as the preserve of memory and good fences. Affidavits were used to prove clear title, affidavits from men and women old enough to remember whose father had owned which land, and what abutted what. Meade held the first affidavit flat for the man.

“You sign there,” he repeated. “I'll witness.”

“Can't get the rights of it,” the man in the bed said. “Hectares and metres an' all. Says here off the side of the road and down next to the river. Bottom land's always belonged to Foleys. Sure you got it right?”

“Sure am. Like always,” Meade said smoothly. “It's always been Meades,” he said, pulling the document back as soon as the signature was on it. “Bottle's in the drawer.”

Then the same thing next door, two affidavits, and Meade walked slowly down the polished floor towards his truck, rolling the newly-signed papers in his pitch-stained hands.

Two weeks later, the heat had come in full in the valley, and the air was full of stouts, the angry, biting flies with their zigzag rainbow eyes. The new sheep in the meadow weren't used to the windless valley, having spent more time in the windswept community pasture on the barrentops, where the flies were kept at bay by the cold and steady wind from the water. The flies bit the anxious new sheep around their eyes, so they bled bloody, steady tears, butting blindly with each other and trying to force themselves deeper into the flock to escape the biting clouds.

Nearby, Roy Meade's truck was heavy-laden, piled high with new fenceposts. He was standing next to the truck, pounding a post into the ground with a log maul, sweat showing at the armpits of his shirt and in a T across his back. A straight line of similar posts stretched away to the trees, longers lying in the grass and not yet nailed on.

A car stopped on the road, and its driver leaned out the window and called out to Roy.

“That's Foley's meadow.”

Roy stopped pounding the stake into the ground.

“Not the way I remember it.” And he stared until the driver put the car in gear and drove away.

Tony Meade walked quickly out into the pasture about three in the afternoon, and Roy was already twenty more posts along the fence line. Roy had barely put the maul down when Tony started talking.

“Langs'll kill us,” Tony said, the sentence high-pitched at the end. Roy shrugged. “If they din't think you burnt out Mercy at first, they sure think so now. You gotta stop.”

Roy looked at him, holding the handle of the maul loosely. He smiled.

“Langs don't live here no more. Don't have any place
to
live.”

“Come on,” Tony said, exasperated. “They've got the truck. They've been up and down the road all day, real slow and lookin'. You gotta stop. If ya don't, I'll call the cops on ya myself.”

The last words hung in the air, as if they were their own punctuation.

Then, eventually, “You won't be going to no cops,” Roy said thinly. “You watched Foley's fer me. You won't be doin' nothin a'tall, less I tell ya.”

Far up the river valley, a bird was kiting high on the thermals rising towards the barrens. Too far away to make out what kind of bird it actually was, just that it was alone and alert, hardly more than a speck tilting up and down in the air.

“I've got the shotgun, you know,” Tony said, looking at the ground.

Roy looked at him steadily then, his hooded eyes not blinking, his face impassive. His mouth moved slightly as he chewed on a sliver of wood. A long, measuring look.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged, took out a cigarette, lit it carefully with his lighter, the flame flaring high in front of his face for a moment. “It's a long summer. You gotta sleep.”

Then he lifted his chainsaw from the ground and turned it so that the chainsaw blade lay flat across his shoulder. He turned away and walked down the road next to the river towards the truck, his feet raising small dusty clouds, the maul hanging from his hand by its long handle as if it weighed nothing at all.