Killing Down the Roman Line Read online

  She rooted around the cupboard, pulling down what she needed to mix an ointment for thrush. Her dad’s own recipe, but there wasn’t a lot of betadine scrub left. There wasn’t a lot of anything, she thought looking over the shelves of the tack room. They had scrimped on everything to get through the winter, making everything go twice as far and Emma winced at her meagre supplies. This, their current state, the thriftiness of it all. If their situation didn’t improve this season, she’d be forced to sell the bay. There was just no other way. The horse wouldn’t fetch a lot of money but she simply couldn’t keep Smokey anymore. God forbid something happened to the animal that required a veterinary visit.

  The horse stood patiently and swished its tail as Emma washed and treated the infected hoof. She cleaned the other hoofs for good measure and led the bay out to the upper paddock where the ground was dry. The two goats clopped out of their stall and followed them out to the grass like dutiful escorts. Emma looked up when she heard the tractor rumble up out of the back field.

  It didn’t sound right, the rhythm of the engine was off and a sharp pop belched from the exhaust. It laboured into the yard and Jim killed the engine. He removed a side panel and reached into the engine of the old Massey Ferguson. He snapped his hand back suddenly, burning his finger. The index finger was bent at a slight angle, having been broken as a kid, and was forever getting burnt or cut or hammered.

  Emma closed the gate and crossed the yard towards him. “When are you going to put that old thing out of its misery?”

  “About the time we can afford a new one, I guess.” Jim sucked on his blistering finger and then flapped it in the breeze. “Which means never. Day after never.”

  She nodded at his hand. “Do you want some ice for that?”

  “It’s nothing.” He stopped flapping his hand. “Did Kate call?”

  “No. What time was she supposed to be here?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “I guess that means it didn’t go well,” she said.

  “Just means she’s late is all. Kate’s always late.”

  Jim looked up at his wife and smiled and shrugged. Her nose had already turned a bit red from the sun, as it did every spring. The rain and overcast skies of the last two weeks had finally given way to three straight days of hard sunshine and Emma had spent every moment outside soaking it up. That first blast of sunshine tinged her nose pink and brought out the freckles on her cheeks. In a few days her nose would peel and then darken. A spring ritual as reliable as tulips opening up along the veranda.

  Those three days of sun had been enough to dry up the dirt road they lived on and Jim could see a spume of dust rising above the trees. A car coming down the Roman Line.

  “Maybe that’s her,” he said.

  A Ford Explorer turned into the drive and trundled through the potholes. The wedgewood blue exterior shiny and clean, the grill free of bug spatter. Not a farm vehicle. The Explorer hewed up beside Jim’s battered pickup and the driver stepped out. A dark haired woman in nice clothes, good shoes crunching over gravel. Kate Farrell smiled wide and waved at Jim and Emma. An old friend of the Hawkshaws, and mayor of the township of Pennyluck, Ontario.

  Emma took her husband’s hand and gave it a little squeeze for good luck.

  2

  “THEY SAID NO.”

  Kate believed in being blunt, especially with bad news. Sugar coating it or delaying it just made the bad news all the worse. The sooner it was laid on the table, the sooner you could deal with it. An article of faith that Kate employed as gospel in her earlier career but especially sacrosanct in her second year as mayor. The Hawkshaws took it hard.

  Emma had offered coffee but no one really wanted any. Kate suggested they walk for a bit and enjoy the sun, so they strode down the fieldstone fence into a copse of poplars near the creek.

  “I tried everything I could,” Kate said. She turned her palms up in a gesture of crying uncle. “I’m sorry.”

  Jim could already feel the end closing in. Like something out of an old monster movie, Jim imagined his creditors as giant locusts flitting over his house, devouring it whole. The clapboard, the windows and even the shingles on the roof. Their armoured heads swivelling around, dark alien eyes as they picked the house clean to the studs while he and his wife and son stood at the end of the driveway and watched. He clutched at the timothy heads swaying at his knee. “They didn’t like the offer.”

  “The council dismissed it as soon as they saw your financials.”

  Emma soured at that. Again, the money. She squinted against the sun. “What about just leasing the land, short term?”

  Kate shook her head again. “They wouldn’t consider that either. Which is just ridiculous and I told them so to their faces.” She leaned against the stone fence and looked out at the untended field on the other side. “All this land and they won’t let anyone touch it.”

  The land in question bordered the Hawkshaw property on the eastern side. Eighty two acres of land cleared almost two centuries ago, left untouched for generations. There was a house on the property, a big timberframe with a stone foundation, still standing all these years. Its clapboard weathered to husk, windows like cored-out eye sockets. The last occupant was a caretaker who had died in the seventies. The fallow land was held in trust by the town but for whom, Jim had never found out. He doubted the town council even knew, it had been this way for so long. Empty acres and lost records.

  It was all bullshit. Jim had inquired about the property with both the council and the bank but was told flat out the land was not for sale and discouraged from making an offer. That’s when he had turned to Kate.

  Kate Farrell had grown up in Pennyluck, not six miles from the Hawkshaw place. Jim and Kate knew each other as kids but neither would say they were friends back then. Different grades and deep class divisions. Townie kids didn’t blend with the farm kids, each side despising the other for completely bigoted and erroneous reasons.

  Kate had fled for university and then on to jobs in Windsor, Toronto and Montreal before coming back home to Pennyluck after the financial meltdown of ‘08. She had opened a business consultancy, geared specifically towards small business but soon became distracted by the local real estate market. After running afoul of some archaic bylaws leftover from the Victorian period, Kate started moonlighting in the town council, becoming drawn into local politics.

  It was around then that Jim and Kate had become friends, with Kate often having dinner at the Hawkshaw home or hosting them to a dinner in town. The autumn of last year, Kate decided to join the mayoral race when the incumbent mayor Talford McGivens refused to relinquish his nineteen year reign even after suffering his third stroke. Kate rolled up her sleeves and took the town by storm, ousting the old man in a sixty/forty split. Jim, who had never voted municipally in his entire life, volunteered in her campaign. He and Emma and Travis stuffed envelopes and helped organize fundraisers.

  It had paid off with Kate’s win and, three weeks ago, Jim called in a favour. That was how politics worked, he figured, even small town politics. He asked Kate’s help in buying or leasing some of this deserted land known locally as the Corrigan farm. Just who the Corrigans were, no one remembered or even cared.

  He and Emma both felt confident that with Kate (now mayor Farrell) advancing their cause, they would finally acquire the neglected farmland. However Mayor Farrell was still learning the ropes and ran smack into a stonewall of entrenched vagaries and inexplicable stubbornness of a very old and very small township. She was still reeling from the concussion.

  “Can’t you overrule them?” Emma asked, trying to toggle back the ire in her tone. “I mean, you are the mayor now.”

  “I can’t overrule the council,” Kate said. “I’m still only one vote among seven. The council has final say and those old fogeys will not budge.”

  “Well…” said Jim, crushing the spiky timothy crowns in his hand. Watching the chaff sift between his fingers. “Shit.”

  “Don’t sweat
it.” Kate looked both of them in the eye. “That was our first try. Learn from it and we’ll try again later.”

  “Later may be too late. We need to expand the farm now. This season. Or…” He didn’t bother finishing the thought.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Emma said. She felt her cheeks burning with shame, like a school kid explaining why her homework wasn’t done.

  Whippoorwills trilled overhead and they listened to the sound without speaking for a few moments. Kate leaned against the old stone fence, pressing a palm to the cold surface. “What if this fence wasn’t here?”

  Emma’s eyebrow shot up. “What do you mean?”

  Kate’s hands found a loose stone and rolled it away. The stone fell down the far side and rolled into the long grass. “What if you knocked a hole in this and farmed the back acreage?”

  “That would be illegal.”

  “Who would know?” Kate brushed the grit from her palm. “Outside of us?”

  It wasn’t a bad idea and they both knew it. Back here, well away from the road, no one would know the difference. Jim looked at his wife and knew by her eyes that she didn’t like the idea. Too risky or just plain wrong. “I dunno, Kate.”

  Kate took a step sideways, her heels sinking into the ground. “You farm this back forty and boost your production, right? A year from now, maybe two, you’ve pared down your debt load and you buy the property fair and square.”

  “It’s wrong.” Emma wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s shrewd,” Kate offered. “When your back’s against the wall, you have to get creative. Bend the rules a little.”

  A shadow passed over them. Jim looked up to see a turkey vulture drifting overhead, with three more further out. Riding the thermals without beating a wing, circling for something dead in the weeds.

  They watched Kate climb back into her Explorer and wave as she pulled out of the driveway. Tentative plans made for dinner next week. Tentative because Kate’s schedule was far more crowded since moving into the mayor’s office of their little town. The dinner plans had run over the last month, with Kate always begging off at the last minute as more demands were placed on her time.

  Emma watched the dust settle on the road. “You know it’s wrong.”

  “Who would know? It’s a waste of perfectly good land.”

  “That’s not the point, honey. It’s squatting on someone’s land. In the old days, people would kill you for such a thing.”

  “Good thing we’re living in more civilized times.”

  She turned back towards the house. “Travis will be home soon. We can talk about it over dinner.”

  ~

  Raspberry thicket swayed against the stone fence, flowering under the high sun. Here at the southern end of the property, the fence thinned out as it neared the creek. Down here Jim couldn’t even see his house, let alone the road. He stood in the bunchgrass and listened to the Massey Ferguson idle and sputter behind him.

  He climbed back up into the seat and lowered the bucket. The teeth of the front end loader sparkled like chrome, pumiced clean from digging. Jim geared low and inched the tractor forward until those gleaming teeth knocked against the fence. He gave it a little more gas until the stone cracked, flinting with pops. Dust spewed and the stones tumbled down. He backed the tractor up and hit another section, knocking it all down. Within twenty minutes, he had breeched twenty feet of wall. Knocked down, scooped up and piled into a neat berm under a beech tree.

  He circled back and hooked up the plough to the hitch and drove it onto the fallow fields of the old property. Green shoots of new growth fingered up through the choked deadfall of last season, the earth still wet from the spring runoff. Jim lowered the business end of the plough and shifted into second gear. The tractor crawled forward and the metal blades bit into the earth, digging up weeds and churning up soil. Black earth boiled up in the blades, spitting up truncated roots. The Massey Ferguson sputtered along, popping and belching black smoke.

  A bone spewed up in the tilled earth, left behind by the blades. Its porous surface stained dark with soil, now touched by the sun after its long internment in the ground. The remains of some slaughtered cow or a horse crippled from a gopher hole and put down where it fell. Or yet some other slaughtered thing.

  Jim drove on at a snail’s pace, oblivious to what the blades were digging up.

  ~

  The school bus rolled to a dusty stop where Clapton Road crossed the Roman Line, the dented stop sign swinging out from the side of the bus. Travis Hawkshaw stepped off and the bus trundled away. Travis swept away the road dust and walked the empty quarter mile home. The bus used to bring him all the way but not anymore, Travis being the only school age kid left on the Roman Line. The rest of them had grown up or moved away so the bus dropped him at the corner and went on. He didn’t mind walking the rest of the way and he hated the bus anyway. The thing stank of orange peel and wet socks and he was glad to get shed of it.

  He wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer. A week left of school before the summer break and it couldn’t come soon enough. Summer was a double-edged thing for Travis. Eager to get out of school itself but he wouldn’t see his friends that much. The farm was isolated from town and most of his friends. And there was work. Not the usual chores but hard work that his dad needed him for.

  He kicked at stones along the way, watching them bounce along the dirt road. This summer was going to be different though. He’d made his parents promise him that he could ride his bike into town to see his friends. Alone. No drop offs, no lame excuses from mom or dad about driving him over to his friend’s house for the afternoon. He had turned thirteen in April, old enough to ride into town on his own. It would probably take him an hour just to reach the bridge that served as gateway to town but that didn’t bother him. The wet spring weather had mostly passed and once the fields were drier, he could shortcut through the Meyerside’s fields and the McFarlane’s pastures, shaving twenty or thirty minutes off his time.

  Halfway home, the old house peeked up over the foxtail stalks. A crumbling farmhouse of faded clapboard and tilted timbers. The windows broken and gaping like eyes. Eyes that Travis felt watched him every morning and afternoon on his way past. The Corrigan house as it was called by older people, his folks and their friends. It was the ‘haunted house’ to anyone under twenty. Not that Travis knew. His dad had made him promise to keep clear of it. It was unsafe and likely to fall in on itself any day now. The floor so rotted you’d fall straight through into God only knew what was lying in wait below.

  So Travis watched it from the road. He dropped his bag and searched the ground for a perfect sized rock and, swinging back like a pitcher, hurled it at the house. It fell short, disappearing into the long weeds like always. One time, last summer, he had braved his way up the overgrown driveway to get closer to it. A good sized stone in his hand, pitched perfectly and sailing clean through one of the few remaining panes. The satisfying crinkle of breaking glass. It was short lived. Something inside the house popped and then there was a creak. As if his stone had knocked loose a support stud and the whole damn thing would fall down. Later he would tell himself that his imagination had gotten the better of him but in that moment, Travis swore the house changed. Looked angry, glaring at him with those broken glass eyes.

  He didn’t venture up the drive again, content to hurl rock s from the road knowing they would always fall short. The house seemed to lose its wrathful visage, like a truce called and kept. The boy, the house.

  Travis looked but found no other suitable sized rock so he took up his backpack and went on home.

  ~

  Emma dropped a handful of beans into the sieve and ran them under the tap. The porcelain sink was old, the enamel cracked and worn through. Like everything in this house that had belonged to Jim’s parents and the parents before them. Worn out and weather-beaten, held together with patchwork and spit. Sometimes it burred into her bones, the look of the place, the a
ge of it, its resistance to change. God knows she had tried, repainting and moving furniture around. Jim had replaced the countertop, the tile and backsplash she had done herself. Refinished cupboard doors and a stove that, while not exactly new, was newer than the one it replaced. Nothing worked, none of it changing the appearance of the kitchen. The kitchen still looked worn down and used up. The new counter and stove only served to amplify the creaky age of the house.

  “Travis?” She looked over her shoulder. “Time to focus.”

  Travis sat at the kitchen table, his homework spread out before him. Their usual routine where Emma cooked and Travis did his homework before dinner. Left to himself, Travis was too easily distracted so Emma had compromised with him. An hour of homework that chained Travis to the kitchen table where she could keep him focused and prod him when he got bored. And boredom set in quick with Travis. He kicked his Vans against the table leg, slouching further down his chair as if his bones were jelly.

  “History sucks,” Travis sneered.

  History bored Travis. Specifically Canadian history, laid out in his seventh grade history text. The fathers of Confederation? Who gave a shit. Bunch of boring old white dudes bickering over politics and economics. It wasn’t cool like American history where you had a Civil War and wars against the Mexicans and shootouts at the OK Corral. Jesse James robbing railroads and riding off into the sunset. What did Canada have? Louis Riel maybe, but what did he do? Not like he jacked a train or laughed off all the marshals gunning for him. Canuck history was just a bunch of boring stiffs trying to weasel their way back into office. Snoozefest.