“Axe.”

I had a notion I knew who was calling, even before I checked the call display and heard the answer machine lie for me. I didn’t want to pick up, but I hadn’t done so on the previous six or seven occasions Hector had phoned. I lifted the receiver.

“Hey, Hector. How are things?”

“Jesus. I was beginning to think you died and went to the Dufferin heaven in the sky. Don’t you return calls these days?”

“Honey, the Dufferin is no longer anyone’s idea of heaven believe me. Just shows how long you’ve been living in the sticks.’

“Precisely, Sweetie. Nearly eight months and you still haven’t delivered your house warming gift.”

‘Oops! Is it really that long? How quickly time passes in town; shopping for shoes; fighting off the men, buying condoms, going for…’

‘I know. All that crap we wanted to get away from. So what about a visit this weekend?’

I figured the earlier I left Vancouver for the country on a Friday afternoon the better. I’ve known it take two hours and more just to crawl to the suburbs and make it, barely sane, to the highway. Where the hell do some of these drivers get a license I want to know? Do they even have one?

Frankly I wasn’t overjoyed to be visiting Hector and his partner Harry just the other side of Hope. Passing anywhere near the place slightly freaks me out. A church of different denomination on just about every intersection! What’s with that? Is its population big enough to sub-divide so many Christians? Still, that wasn’t the source of my discomfort. After all, I actually love the country. I’m a country boy at heart. But the point is, Hector and Harry really aren’t, though they decided otherwise and were sufficiently sick of the city to want to move there. I wasn’t sure what I might be getting in to and whether a visit could be misconstrued as full approval of their move. If, as most of their friends predicted, the enterprise flopped, I didn’t what to be in a minority of one who had seemingly endorsed it.

Like most of their other friends I counseled caution. I asked them what they would do if they met a bear or found wood ticks crawling up the inside of their trouser leg. But they remained undaunted and determined to leave for the backwoods, or more precisely, a place called ‘Spuzzum’. We all gagged on that when Hector told us.

They bought a huge house for a bargain on a bend in the road that was clearly a highway tragedy waiting to happen, with a dubious water supply trickling down from mountains on the other side. The building was old timber frame and had been maturing nicely for 70 years through its various incarnations as schoolhouse, local brothel and one time cafe. Leather clad bikers had a summer camp cottage two hundred yards further down a dirt road which was about the only bait H. and H. could offer to lure their friends for a visit. But I’m not in to bikers, and to be honest at this point in my life, leather has very jaded appeal. The real reason for going was I had run out of excuses for not.

I Googled Spuzzum and found it beyond Hope, which seemed appropriate. I thought about hiring a 4x4 but then realized I wouldn’t be driving far down their dirt road so settled for a more affordable Corolla and hit the highway just after noon. The sun was shining; the weather forecast good and most of the lunatic drivers were clearly still rushing round their office buildings frantically hoping to finish early for the weekend.

There was no missing the house. Well actually, I did because it comes up just as you round that bend I was telling you about and by the time I’d realized I was way beyond and had to turn around. The Fraser Canyon isn’t U turn friendly and neither are the monster logging trucks tooting my arse to get me moving, but I eventually made it. Suddenly Vancouver’s drivers seemed a little less suicidal.

There was no red carpet; in fact there was no one to greet me so I wandered in.

I found Hector and Harry peering in to their chick brooder, watching the one luckless gosling that hadn’t hatched normally. Its legs stuck out at right angles from its downy body. It moved frantically in circles, gyrating around the brooder between food and water bowls and, apparently for the past week somehow managing to gain weight. Neither guy noticed me.

‘Look at it! Poor thing. Flailing around, like a demented clockwork toy.’

‘Well what do we do with it?’ Harry asked nervously.

‘Kill it of course!’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘Well neither do I,” replied Hector dismissively. “I thought you were the poultry expert. How did you kill them before?”

“I didn’t. Dad always did.”

“Exactly! Your dad didn’t keep a lot of lame birds hobbling around the yard and neither can we.”

“But the poor thing has been trying so hard. Look how it eats.”

“Honey, you were the one so keen to get these things, so you are the one who will have to deal with it. How did he do it?”

“Do what?”

“Your dad. How did he kill the bad ones?

“How should I know? I never asked. He did it when I wasn’t around.”

Harry replaced the lid on the brooder and Hector knew he would turn his back on the problem yet again.

“How many weeks are we going to keep this thing suffering?”

“It doesn’t seem to be suffering”, replied Harry. “But you’re right I suppose. I’ll have to do something.”

“Look. It’s still cold at night. Why not stick it in a box and leave it out side.”

“What! We can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s cruel.”

“Uh. No more cruel than keeping the poor thing alive.”

Harry didn’t sleep easy that night thinking about the wretched gosling. He wrestled with his conscience or something, and tried to fight off the inevitable. More to the point he was trying to figure out a decent way to get rid of the little bird. By the time he joined us at the breakfast table we had more or less finished and Hector had filled me in on the abrasive details about goslings and too many birds too soon and more or less all the current friction in their relationship. Seemed like their friends’ prediction might not be far off.

“Hey Harry! How’s it going?”

Harry’s face didn’t exactly show good morning glee. Hector eased himself from the table with his dirty dishes and headed for the kitchen sink. I felt abandoned, deserted to take in Harry’s version of life in Spuzzum, which I could have handled duplicitously if Hector was out of earshot

“You’re a country boy. How’d you kill a gosling?”

“Sweetheart, I was more of a country girl and murdering domestic poultry was never quite my thing.”

“There! You hear that Hector; ‘murder’. That’s what it is really. All right I know what…”

Hector cut Harry short like they had been down this route before.

“Harry. It’s a goose for God’s sake, not your aunt Mary.”

Harry stared straight at me. I gazed as far as I could in to the bottom of my coffee cup.

“You see what I have to put up with.”

I should have changed the subject; asked how the water supply was holding up and whether I could have more than one shower per visit. Stupidly, in stead I asked if they had an axe. Hector stopped dishwashing and Harry suddenly looked like he was ready to listen and had a big question mark expression.

“No, seriously guys. I think my dad used an axe. I mean, he used to have rabbits and chickens and things. You know. Every now and then I’d see a headless rooster hanging around for Sunday lunch. Quick and painless I guess? Not a bad way to go.

Harry skipped breakfast Sunday morning; fed all the poultry and went to the workshop. He honed their axe blade razor sharp and found a 6x6 block, making sure it was the right height. He moved it outside behind the workshop, out of sight of the house and the accusing glance of scratching fowl. He practiced first with thin sticks of wood, and scattered sawdust on the ground. Then Harry went to the house and fetched the gosling. We didn’t ask any questions bowing to the solemnity of the moment. He stroked it gently. The baby bird was calm when he placed its head on the block, but Harry told us later he couldn’t bear to see the separation and closed his eyes, just as the axe hit.

We heard the commotion from behind the workshop and rushed to the front porch just as Harry rushed towards us, shouting for Hector to go get the Jeep out front and me to run cold water and get ice cubes fast. Harry was holding something in his right hand that turned out to be half his left thumb, nicely severed. I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the gosling but it probably wasn’t a good time to ask.

The Jeep wouldn’t start which is why I drove us all to Hope in my rental car past churches, some disgorging early worshippers, while Harry did his own disgorging on the Corolla’s back seat. I pulled in to the emergency unit of Hope hospital where not a soul was to be seen. Perhaps they were all in church? Hector went off shouting for somebody, anybody in fact, who was good at stitching and two hours later, Harry appropriately sedated, I left them both back home and fled Spuzzum for the safety of town. There may have been the usual crazed drivers enroute but I didn’t really notice. I was too preoccupied thinking of the clean-up job on the Corolla’s back seat, what insurance cover I had opted for and why the hell a country girl opened his big mouth to mention an axe.

-30-