View Cover
Excerpt from Chapter One
1979
He lights a match.
The phosphorous glow throws shadows behind the irregular shapes of the barn and reveals three cows standing together for warmth. One turns to examine the dishevelled young man standing in the doorway.
A trough in the corner contains a thumb-deep reserve of water. The man forces the barn door shut and hobbles toward it, letting his rucksack fall to the hay. The match goes out when he leans over the edge of the basin, lowers his cupped hands and brings some of the liquid to his mouth. He gags. The cow-water mingles with his saliva. It tastes woody. Something that shouldn’t be consumed.
Considering I stopped at the first shelter I saw, he tells himself, I should feel lucky for all this. He remembers the last time he vomited and collapsed. It was a month ago in Vancouver, a public library, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, now distant.
~
In a nearby house, a radio mumbles. A young woman and a girl sit in the upstairs bedroom. The girl creaks a rocking chair. The woman watches the storm through the window. Branches like suspended puppets.
Last year, she remembers, there was a storm like this that threw a tree clear through the kitchen window.
“Do you think it’ll happen again?”
“What are you talking about?” the girl asks.
A faint orange light slips between the cracks of the barn, flickers for a minute and disappears.
“There’s someone in the barn.”
The young woman puts on a jacket and walks out. When she opens the barn door, she brings with her a flood of lantern light.
The man in the hay is maybe eighteen, twenty, twenty-three? She bends over to get a closer look. A baby face but with stubble. A boy and a man at the same time, depending on the angle, like one of those novelty holograph pictures that changes when you flip it back and forth.
She leaves for a few minutes and returns with a plate of bread and cheese, a knife, and a glass bottle of water. She places the items by his elbow. He’s still as dirt. Almost. Probably not dead.
~
The rain continues overnight and into morning.
“I just brought him food and water, that’s all.”
“And the knife? I noticed it was missing.”
“Yes.”
Her mother sighs. “You’re a silly girl, Gayle. A silly, stupid, silly girl.”
“Why?”
“I know you’re trying to help, but—why did you give a trespasser a weapon?”
Rain surrounds the house like static. Outside, grey light yawns through the clouds and falls on the yard, the fences, a truck pulling a trailer across the road, the trees, the barn—
“It’s fine, Gayle. I’ll call Davidson. He’ll come with his sons and they’ll drag him out.” The mother grabs the phone, sticks her finger in the first digit, pulls, watches the dial churn back.
“Wait, Mum.”
“What?”
“Those boys are morons. They’ll throw him out like a vagrant.”
“He is a vagrant.”
“But he’s my age, I think. Probably just some hippie. He’s got a mum, too.”
~
The stranger is still unconscious when they return.
“He doesn’t look so heavy,” says the mother. “Looks like he puked on himself, too, so—where do we bring him?”
“To the sofa in the library. Put some old blankets down.”
Gayle uses the edge of her coat to wipe matted straw from his face and then loops her arms around his shoulders. Her mother takes the legs.