The O'Briens (17 page)

A hook-and-ladder truck came grumbling along the dirt track behind the cottage, and three volunteer firemen — she recognized one, the delivery boy from the Italian market — clumped inside. One of them put his shoulder to the study door and broke it open easily. They found Joe lying on his side on his favourite maroon, gold, and purple Isfahan rug, an empty whisky bottle beside him.

The firemen revived him a little and carried him to bed. They seemed amused. One of them helped her undress him and get him into his nightshirt and between the sheets, where they left him snoring.

She'd never seen him helpless before, and maybe that was what she'd needed from him all along — a thorough, reckless commitment of self. Abandonment of coolness and all dignity. Passionate proof of his solidarity.

She made herself a nest of blankets on the living-room floor, but sometime before dawn she awoke, went back to their bedroom, and lay down beside her husband on his bed. When he stirred, she began to stroke him, then rolled herself on top of him, and they made love for the first time since she — since they — had lost the baby. Without saying a word, and afterwards they fell asleep in each other's arms.

She did not wake up until almost noon. He was in the kitchen, brewing coffee, baking bannock, squeezing orange juice, and scrambling eggs, all of which he carried in on a tray along with the
Los Angeles Times.

“We ought to sleep together, Iseult, from now on, don't you say?”

She nodded vigorously, and after he had pushed their beds together they lay in bed most of the afternoon, eating, sharing the newspaper, and making love again, in bright warm yellow daylight.

He didn't refer to what had happened the night before, and she didn't say anything either. What mattered the most — what had saved the marriage, as far as she was concerned — was that she had broken through to him, however savagely, and they could be close again. She thought she understood the meaning of his behaviour the night before. It was a weird language he was speaking to her, but at least he'd spoken. And she might never see another bottle of liquor in the house. He was, she figured, abstemious by nature.

The beds stayed adjoined. She ordered gorgeous new sheets: one set of Belfast linen and two sets of crisp cotton percale. Everything had to be white. She kept up her visits to the women in the lock-ups. They both wanted another child, and that spring she carried her second pregnancy into the Canadian mountains.

{ August
1913
}

That year men came up from the Coeur d'Alene mining district to hire on as blasters. It turned out they were IWWs — Wobblies — with plans to organize the contract. Iseult had seen the conditions the station men endured in the remote camps along the line. It didn't surprise her that they wanted a union.

A negotiating committee presented themselves but Joe refused to see them. Bullets were fired through some of the gangers' tents. Then one morning Iseult found a death threat scrawled on a scrap of paper in one of her husband's shirts.

Neither of them wanted to take chances with this pregnancy, and he had already been urging her to start for California, though it was only August. Grattan had found a buyer for the Venice bungalow after she decided it would be too small for them with a baby. Joe wanted to find a house on a beach. Through her mother's old theosophist friend Mr. Spaulding they had leased a house on Butterfly Beach at Santa Barbara, with an option to buy. The baby would be born at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara.

She was reluctant to leave her husband and her garden, now teeming with cabbages and kale, beans and onions, strawberries and spinach. The garden provided half the men at Head-of-Steel camp with fresh vegetables, and her hens were laying tens of dozens of eggs each week. But for the baby's sake she had been prepared to quit the mountains, until she discovered the note in Joe's shirt pocket. Then everything changed.

O'Brien, you must give the men their needs you damned bastard or the big Bomb will kill you.

As soon as she read it she knew Joe would be harmed if she left him. It was just a feeling, but she was sure of it. She went back to packing, even adding a few more items to her trunk, but a vision of fire, of conflagration, kept returning. Finally she sat down on the bed. The vision was as real as a taste on her tongue, and it would not go away. When she stood up, she started unpacking. When he came in that evening, he was surprised to see all her things still in the tent and her trunks nowhere in sight.

“I thought we agreed you were going out on the supply train, Iseult.”

“I read the note.”

He scowled. “What note?”

“The one that said they'll kill you with a bomb. Why? Were there others?”

“Don't be silly. It doesn't mean a thing, Iseult. It's just the way these IWWs talk. I think they're all reading Russian novels.”

“They've killed people before, haven't they. When they blew up the
Los Angeles Times
, they killed plenty of people.”

“I don't want you worrying. It's not good for your condition.”

“I'd worry more if I weren't here. I'm not going.”

So she stayed, and Joe pretended to be annoyed but was also gruffly grateful, which he demonstrated in small ways: working in the garden under her direction in the evenings; bringing her buttered toast and hot, sweet coffee before he went off to work; rubbing her aching feet at night while composing nonsense names for their baby. Lady Lancelot Goldilocks O'Brien. Strenuous Happenstance O'Brien. Loitering-Magnificently-in-the-Mountains O'Brien.

Then three cases of dynamite disappeared from a shed. One of the clerks happened to write to his brother, a Vancouver newspaperman, saying that foreign anarchists were plotting to blow up the railway. The story ran in newspapers across the Dominion, questions were asked in Parliament, and twenty Royal Northwest Mounted Police under an inspector were dispatched aboard a special train, with horses, a machine gun, and orders to arrest the IWWs. By the time the police arrived the Wobblies had disappeared, probably across the border into Idaho, but work was shut down all along the grade and a meeting was called. The police pitched their camp at one end of the valley and groomed and exercised their black horses while men poured in from the remote stations and held their union meeting in a meadow on the other side of the river.

Iseult had spent the morning working in the garden and repairing fences. Elk had broken in again during the night, eaten all the radish tops, and unearthed a row of carrots. They were a constant problem. She had tried everything to keep them out but nothing seemed to work. A few nights earlier Joe had offered to sit up with a rifle and take care of the elk when they appeared.

“You mean, kill them?”

“That would be the general idea. One or two, anyway.”

“Not while I'm with a baby!”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Everything!”

“But they're stealing our food, aren't they? The baby needs those vegetables too — you're feeding the both of you. You kill chickens, don't you? What's the difference? You fix that fence and they'll knock it down again. Nothing will stop an elk from feeding up, not this late in the summer, except a bullet.”

“They do make me mad — they're so clumsy. But I won't have you shooting them. We're the intruders here. It would not be good for the baby.”

Instead she nailed up extra slats on her fence. He hadn't noticed, but she had not actually, personally slaughtered a chicken in weeks. Mr. Bee, the Chinese tailor, who was helping her in the kitchen, did the killing and plucking now. Earlier in the summer she had steeled herself to the task because it was necessary, someone had to do it, and squeamishness was no excuse. She was happy enough to eat chicken, so death had to be faced, and faced directly. She'd killed, plucked, and dressed half a dozen. An awful, bloody business, but it also made her aware of a new kind of strength, grounded in awareness of her own courage and determination.

But in the past four weeks she hadn't killed a single bird. Probably the unborn baby was making decisions for her. It was the same in the darkroom: over the summer she had shot rolls of film, but the smell of developing fluid had become repugnant to her and, she presumed, the baby. She couldn't go in there anymore. Pregnancy sometimes made her feel like a tenant in her own body.

Using a steel bar, she pounded more rocks around the postholes to firm them up, then strung more wire, knowing none of it would do much good. Elk roamed the whole valley floor in late summer, females, with one or two bulls bossing each herd. They were feeding up for the winter and looking for salt licks. The bulls made a strange call — Joe called it “bugling” — a whistle more than a cry. She liked hearing it. It was a resonant and intriguing, like the whoop of the barred owl circling the main camp every night, marking his route with hunting cries.

But she did resent their ravaging her crops, and if she weren't pregnant she might have let Joe shoot one or two. Or done it herself — she had more direct and legitimate cause than he did. The garden was hers.

She worked on the fence until she was tired, then went and lay down in the tent. Neither Lee Peng nor his sister-in-law had returned to the mountains. The elderly Mr. Bee helped with domestic chores. He wasn't much good at taking care of stock and was too frail to be of use in the garden, but he did allow her into the cook shed, where she had learned a lot from him.

She and Joe had visited the bone-house early in the season, pumping a handcar twenty miles back along the grade over flimsy temporary rails. There were no mountain flowers that early in the year; instead she'd brought along a chenille scarf that had belonged to her mother — from France, a brilliant orange. She'd left it there, wedged between some rocks. They had both cried. Her palms were covered with milky blisters; Joe had had to pump the whole way back to Head-of-Steel without any help from her.

After a short nap in her camp bed, she arose hungry. She fixed herself some bread and butter and jam and a mug of tea. Then she slung her little Kodak around her neck and headed out for the meadow where Joe had said the police would be exercising their magnificent horses. No workers were to be seen as she walked through main camp and out along the grade. The desolation and silence were unnerving. All the telegraph wires had been cut a few hours after the train arrived at Head-of-Steel with the policemen.

The grade smelled of dusty, ancient river gravel. And oozing tar in the sleepers. Everything was perfectly quiet except for the wind hissing through the tops of the Douglas firs.

She found Joe in the meadow by the river, with the policemen and their black horses. The workers were holding their union meeting in a meadow on the other side of the green, galloping North Thompson River. Not much sound came across the garble of the fast water. The speakers were standing up on a platform the men had built using lumber and sleepers removed — “stolen,” Joe had growled — from the dumps of stores scattered along the grade.

The men across the river could talk all they wanted, call him a capitalist and a bloodsucker; words didn't count for a lot with him somehow. Not the same as for other people. Her husband handled language reluctantly, as if it were an unfamiliar table setting. He probably used fewer words in a year than many people did in a week. Actions were what he cared about, what he understood — actions, and things he could touch, feel, and grasp.

She opened up her camera and began photographing the policemen, all expert riders, dashing their mounts around the little gymkhana course. They had set up the jumps using aspens they'd chopped down and limbed. She knew that her Kodak's shutter was too slow to capture the atmos-phere of strain and competitive tension, and that her lens wasn't fine enough for detail that would make the scene worthwhile. Usually the camera helped her see the world, but sometimes it felt extraneous, pushing her out of the moment instead of bringing her closer.

She put the camera away. She was wearing a skirt with a short jacket she hoped disguised her pregnancy, and a hat that she'd bought at I. Magnin in San Francisco on their way north that spring. The hat was very much the latest Paris mode and she'd paid far too much for it, but she had just saved six dollars by buying her summer's supply of photographic paper at a discount supply shop Elise had heard about on Third Street in downtown Los Angeles. She had been sensing the first twinges of pregnancy in San Francisco, and, feeling a need to indulge herself, she'd bought the ridiculous, beautiful hat and wore it whenever she plaus-ibly could. Of course she hadn't used much of the photo paper, hadn't printed in weeks.

A constant, faint hubbub floated from across the river as speaker after speaker addressed the men — in at least half a dozen languages so far, according to Joe. “I don't care what language they're talking. It's all anarchy.”

“They want a show of force,” the inspector said. “We can't have a crowd of foreigners thinking they rule the mountains.”

Joe shook his head. “You've got twenty men and they're a couple of thousand. I don't like it any more than you do, but if you interfere with their meeting you'll get more trouble than you bargained for. Best let things cool off. Anyway, I'll need these fellows back at work. I'm going to go back to the office and study the numbers and see what I can offer that'll get things moving. First snow'll be soon enough, then freeze-up, and we'd all be stuck here. If they're willing to talk sensibly, I can talk sensibly. Anything to get the work on its legs again. Walk with me, Iseult?”

“I think I'll stay out here a little while,” she said. The deserted camp had felt lonely and bleak; the daylight was better, more cheerful, away from the penumbra of firs. The policemen's scarlet jackets and yellow stripes were enjoyable daubs of colour. There wasn't a lot of colour at Head-of-Steel, especially after a while. It all started looking like mud.

She sat on a blanket spread on the grass, watching policemen jumping the big black horses over the aspen fences. Faint noises from the union meeting mixed with the dash of the river and the clattering of insects. The meadow grasses were dabbed with devil's paintbrush and coneflowers.

The police had a little campfire going, with tea brewing and biscuits baking in a Dutch oven. After a while the inspector, holding two enamel cups and a plate of biscuits, approached and asked if he might join her.

“Of course.”

He offered her one of the cups and held out the plate of buttered biscuits. They were delicious and the tea was hot, strong, and sweet. She hadn't realized how hungry she was.

The inspector took off his Stetson. His hair was thin and sandy. He was a handsome man, though not interesting to look at.

“I see you're in a happy state, Mrs. O'Brien.”

She didn't immediately grasp his meaning. Then she did. She felt her face flush. “Yes . . . well. Thank you.”

“Do you have other children?”

“We don't.”

“My wife and I expect our first around about Christmas time.”

“We the same. Congratulations.”

“Of course, I'm awfully old to be a father for the first time — I am forty.”

“That's not very old,” she said, thinking that it was.

“How old is your husband, if I may ask?”

“Joe will be twenty-seven next month.”

“Very young for such an undertaking.”

“He's always had a lot on his shoulders. He's used to it. He likes it.”

“Forty years old.” The inspector shook his head. “That's awfully late to start a family, but the Force don't make it easy for a man to marry, even an officer. It's a gripe we all have. They make no allowances, really. Of course the men aren't even allowed to marry, not below a sergeant's rank. And an officer's pay isn't much good. My wife finds it hardly sufficient to keep a decent household. I give her everything I can but she says it isn't enough.”

It surprised her that anyone would mention such private domestic matters to a stranger.

“She has often implied that I . . . that I . . . ” He paused and blinked. “That I falsely represented that particular aspect of my situation. Before we were married, I mean. She has accused me of falsely giving her an impression that my salary was greater than it is. It's ridiculous — I never did anything of the kind. I did talk about my prospects, probably more than I should have. I've always been looking for a promotion. Inspector's rank in the Force is something like between a subaltern and a captain in the army. In the Force they say a man needs to be a superintendent before he can keep a family happy on his pay. I only wish I had listened to them.”