fall, hoping to spot the tiny bird again. The ferns along the road had turned brown and the rosehips a vivid, glossy red, yet chicory still bloomed indigo. Autumn was here now, but warm, warmer than she remembered from her childhood. Still, she wrapped her sweater around herself as a wind picked up, scattering leaves and signalling a change in the weather.
— 6 —
Homecoming
JESSE ROBERTSON RATTLED along the highway in the baby blue ’57 Chevy pickup that had once belonged to his father, Stew, a truck that Jesse had intended to restore for as long as he owned it, which was almost a decade. He carried his equipment in the truck bed: his welder and tanks, his toolbox and grinders, torches, hoses, rods. The one bumper sticker read,
Welding Ain’t for Wimps
.
He had put off this trip back home for a full week, telling his daughter he had a welding job to complete, which was not the truth. But now, as he drove through the arid country past Kamloops, he felt the emotion start to rise:
home
. Bunchgrass, sagebrush, ponderosa pine. At Little Shuswap Lake the landscape shrugged off its austerity and grew lush: the small green farms and acreages of Chase, the emerald hills that surrounded the town.
The GPS unit stuck to his front windshield told him where to go, as if he didn’t know.
In two hundred metres, turn
right
. He turned off the highway at the Squilax Bridge, then followed the slow, winding road along Shuswap Lake, over the bridge at Adams River and then at Scotch Creek, heading for the home in which his parents had conceived him, where his father had been conceived, and his grandfather too.
The road diverted from the lake and rose over Lightning Hill. At the summit, Jesse pulled into the community hall parking lot to smoke a joint before facing his family. He stared at what was left of the forest, pines in the red attack stage of pine beetle infestation, still alive but dying. A sign read,
Mountain Beetle Salvage Harvesting
. The pines looked like an army of rusted tin soldiers standing at attention, interspersed with the dead, propped corpses, grey hair hanging. At their feet yearling pines no more than a foot or so high were also red, also dying.
Below him, Lightning River snaked through the narrow strip of river plain. Above the bridge at the narrows, the valley was still dominated by small farms of one kind or another. Holsteins lounged in pastures outside dairies, Herefords munched on dry grass, and he could even spot llamas out to pasture.
Stew’s cow-calf operation stretched from the bridge to the lake. He could see the farmhouse nestled in an orchard close to the shore, the barns and outbuildings scattered around it, the beef cows—Herefords—drinking from the river. The snaking wooden rail fences that bordered the Robertson homestead had been built by Eugene a hundred and fifty years earlier. He had constructed them without nails and they still stood, hugging the curves of whathad once been a wagon road, and before that an Indian trail. On the opposite side of the river, the reserve houses were tucked between the shore and the benchland. The cliff face of Little Mountain towered over the community, monolithic.
Jesse breathed in a last toke as his gaze settled inevitably on Gina’s property just across the road from his father’s. Smoke curled from the chimney, so she was home. He felt a tug in his gut at the thought of seeing her again. He had talked to her on the phone a few times in the years since he left, most recently about Stew’s health and his plans for the sale of the property, but they hadn’t spoken face-to-face since Elaine’s funeral, and even then Gina had only whispered a few guarded sympathies under her husband’s watchful eye. Jesse hadn’t been sure Grant knew about them until that moment. But conjecture had obviously spread after Elaine took her life. Grant had not offered his hand or his condolences to Jesse. He had stood behind Gina in his tailored suit and kept his eye on
Liz Reinhardt, Steph Campbell