with me?
Shayna looks at him as if he’s an alien, beyond comprehension. He feels impatient. The barricade seems a kind of hijinks to him, injunction-burning a rash tactic to gain attention. The real work would happen in somebody’s office, the sorting through of titles and surveys. He is about to say as much but thinks better of it.
“Well, after you’re done with strategy, you can just slip through the fields. The kitchen door is always open. The light will be on.” He hates the entreaty in his voice. He wants Shayna to choose him. Women always have. Why, all of a sudden, do things have to be different?
He’s risked embarrassment for her already. A month after that first encounter with Shayna, he baked a crumble, using thelast of the frozen black raspberries and a recipe smeared with buttery thumbprints, handwritten by his mother. He covered the crumble with a red-striped tea towel and delivered it, still warm and smelling of brown sugar and oats and musky cobbled fruit, to the archives department of the reserve’s cultural centre, where she worked. His note said:
Enjoy. – Coulson Stercyx
.
He’d thought that was recklessly romantic. There was no reply. He started taking more trips to the new grocery store outside town, where everyone from the reserve shopped, hoping to bump into her.
Helen Fallingbrook, who worked in his kitchen from late August into September to feed his harvest crews, must have known, must have smelled the yearning on him.
“My niece borrowed my truck earlier. She’s going to drop it off here so I can pack up my stuff,” Helen said on the last day of last year’s harvest. “Hot day out there. You might offer her a cold beer.”
So she came to him after all, on a beautiful September afternoon, and sat at his picnic table with curious eyes and a beer in her hands while Helen packed up her big steel cauldrons, muffin tins, twenty-cup percolator. Then he made them both dinner: grilled steak, potato salad, homemade beet slaw, more beer. He poked fun at Helen, got her niece laughing.
Still, it would be months – including all of a cold winter – before Shayna would come to his bed. It was never a certainty. But after he’d studied her inscrutable face in the waning autumn sun, he’d known he wouldn’t stop trying. He couldn’t help himself.
“Good night, Coulson,” says Shayna. She raises her arm and gives him a wave. She walks towards Helen, who has emerged from among the coffee drinkers behind the entrance.
He looks around to see who has witnessed this rebuff. There’s just the indifference of sky and highway. He kicks thedirt and smacks the back of his fist against his forehead. Already she infuriates him in a way no other woman has.
Coulson checks his watch to calculate the hours before closing time.
No point wasting a new shirt
, he thinks.
CHAPTER 5
M itch Bain drives to the liquor store. It is a Wednesday, before lunch, and he feels sheepish. He sits in his car and inspects the parking lot for familiar vehicles.
There are two things he wants to avoid. He does not want to be questioned about the barricade.
Hey, what’s your next move? Will it delay construction?
He does not want to listen to a tirade about the police’s failure to protect a respectable, hard-working, law-abiding citizen like himself, a businessman who just wants to make Doreville a better place.
Can you believe the cops, those friggers in government?
People’s outrage on his behalf has worn him out.
And now, four days after the injunction was set aflame, his bottom lip is numb from hours spent on the phone with lawyers and political aides, none of whom can agree on whose jurisdiction the barricade falls under. He has barely left his office since, excusing himself from family meals, sneaking about like some furtive, light-shunning rodent for snacks and bathroom visits. Butit’s not just the calls that keep him there. The prospect of encountering Las alone, seeing again his son’s look of contempt
Shayna looks at him as if he’s an alien, beyond comprehension. He feels impatient. The barricade seems a kind of hijinks to him, injunction-burning a rash tactic to gain attention. The real work would happen in somebody’s office, the sorting through of titles and surveys. He is about to say as much but thinks better of it.
“Well, after you’re done with strategy, you can just slip through the fields. The kitchen door is always open. The light will be on.” He hates the entreaty in his voice. He wants Shayna to choose him. Women always have. Why, all of a sudden, do things have to be different?
He’s risked embarrassment for her already. A month after that first encounter with Shayna, he baked a crumble, using thelast of the frozen black raspberries and a recipe smeared with buttery thumbprints, handwritten by his mother. He covered the crumble with a red-striped tea towel and delivered it, still warm and smelling of brown sugar and oats and musky cobbled fruit, to the archives department of the reserve’s cultural centre, where she worked. His note said:
Enjoy. – Coulson Stercyx
.
He’d thought that was recklessly romantic. There was no reply. He started taking more trips to the new grocery store outside town, where everyone from the reserve shopped, hoping to bump into her.
Helen Fallingbrook, who worked in his kitchen from late August into September to feed his harvest crews, must have known, must have smelled the yearning on him.
“My niece borrowed my truck earlier. She’s going to drop it off here so I can pack up my stuff,” Helen said on the last day of last year’s harvest. “Hot day out there. You might offer her a cold beer.”
So she came to him after all, on a beautiful September afternoon, and sat at his picnic table with curious eyes and a beer in her hands while Helen packed up her big steel cauldrons, muffin tins, twenty-cup percolator. Then he made them both dinner: grilled steak, potato salad, homemade beet slaw, more beer. He poked fun at Helen, got her niece laughing.
Still, it would be months – including all of a cold winter – before Shayna would come to his bed. It was never a certainty. But after he’d studied her inscrutable face in the waning autumn sun, he’d known he wouldn’t stop trying. He couldn’t help himself.
“Good night, Coulson,” says Shayna. She raises her arm and gives him a wave. She walks towards Helen, who has emerged from among the coffee drinkers behind the entrance.
He looks around to see who has witnessed this rebuff. There’s just the indifference of sky and highway. He kicks thedirt and smacks the back of his fist against his forehead. Already she infuriates him in a way no other woman has.
Coulson checks his watch to calculate the hours before closing time.
No point wasting a new shirt
, he thinks.
CHAPTER 5
M itch Bain drives to the liquor store. It is a Wednesday, before lunch, and he feels sheepish. He sits in his car and inspects the parking lot for familiar vehicles.
There are two things he wants to avoid. He does not want to be questioned about the barricade.
Hey, what’s your next move? Will it delay construction?
He does not want to listen to a tirade about the police’s failure to protect a respectable, hard-working, law-abiding citizen like himself, a businessman who just wants to make Doreville a better place.
Can you believe the cops, those friggers in government?
People’s outrage on his behalf has worn him out.
And now, four days after the injunction was set aflame, his bottom lip is numb from hours spent on the phone with lawyers and political aides, none of whom can agree on whose jurisdiction the barricade falls under. He has barely left his office since, excusing himself from family meals, sneaking about like some furtive, light-shunning rodent for snacks and bathroom visits. Butit’s not just the calls that keep him there. The prospect of encountering Las alone, seeing again his son’s look of contempt
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