Half Brothers and Other Strories

By Bill Stenson

These stories shimmer in summer heat under the gaze of a two-humped mountain and belong to the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. Children born to ex-cons, lawyers, longshoremen, boxers, wood carvers, investors and gamblers write their own new-generation stories, at times melodic, often discordant, always determined to carry a tune. Half Brothers is a masterly and unsentimental novella of the lives of two brothers left unchanneled by parental review. One brother is tough and likes to fight, the other does not. ​One is the father’s favourite and the other hides when he can. But in an extraordinary reversal of roles, and as the years pass, readers ultimately learn which one has the true grit. In the four short stories; Ball and Chain, Bon, Dick and Jane and Super Reader, Stenson uses wry wit to capture the voices of the young and old of small-town Duncan and area, in edgy juxtapositions. This is Canadian Literature at its best — calling forth a country that already exists. Flying beneath the radar, Stenson is one of our best fictionists..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mother Tongue Publishing
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781896949864

Bill Stenson

Bill Stenson won the Great BC Novel contest with his compelling novel, Ordinary Strangers (Mother Tongue). His books of fiction include Translating Women, Svoboda and Hanne and Her Brother (Thistledown). He was also a finalist for the Prism International Fiction Contest and the Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest. Stenson was born in Nelson, B.C., went to a one-room schoolhouse on Thetis Island and grew up on a small farm in Duncan. He became a teacher because he loved literature and taught English and Creative Writing at various high schools, the Victoria School of Writing and the University of Victoria. Many of his stories have been published in Canada and the US in Grain, The Malahat Review, Event, The Antigonish Review, filling Station, Blood and Aphorisms, Wascana Review, Prairie Fire, Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prism International, Scarlet Leaf Review, Darkhouse Books and the Nashwaak Review. Stenson and Terence Young founded the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for young adult writers. Bill Stenson lives with his wife poet Susan Stenson in the Cowichan Valley and writes every day.

Book preview

Four Fictions

Ball and Chain

Jack woke up and rolled over to face his digital alarm clock. It was 3:45 in the middle of the night. The third night in a row he hadn’t been able to sleep, and he wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow. When he didn’t get a good night’s sleep, he was hard to get along with. Jack lived by himself, but that didn’t seem to matter.

It was probably the damned raccoons again. Racoons were supposed to be a problem in the city, not out in the country. They had plenty of places to make their nests and have their babies, but for some reason they liked to pick on his house. His property bordered a lip of Bing’s Creek, and why they couldn’t just hang out there in the wild was beyond him. One year it was the chimney, this year it was the attic. Three days ago, he’d gone up into the attic to chase them away, and one of them, once cornered, attacked him, and Jack had lost his balance on the joist and slammed his foot through the ceiling. He could see the hole from his bed in the daytime. Even though it was country dark now, he could still visualize the plaster hanging down above his head, mocking his confrontation with the deranged raccoon. Raccoons could have rabies, and he wasn’t willing to take chances. After he’d cleaned the scrape on his shin, he fetched his twenty-two and silenced the critter with one shot.

Now it appeared they were back, and he tried to retrace the dream he’d been having. It was more of a nightmare. He lived on seven acres out in the country, and there were no other tracts of land out his way with people still living on them. At the end of the road that led to a secondary highway, they had built a new subdivision, a little urban sprawl out in the middle of nowhere. Jack’s road cut through the middle of the development, and he found it unnerving passing through the yards full of clothes and argument. In his dream, the reports of global warming had come true and the water levels had risen all around his house, which stood on the knoll of a hill, though the house really stood at the back of a flat meadow, surrounded by trees. People had blankets sprawled out by the edge of the water, right in front of his porch, and families were paddling by in twos on those plastic paddle wheelers they rented by the hour. Jack stood on his porch, yelling at them to get off his land, but as loud as he yelled, no one noticed he existed.

He rolled over onto his stomach. That had worked in the past to get rid of a stomach ache. Maybe it would let him forget the wild dream and get back to sleep. Then he heard the noise again. He listened carefully. It sounded more like it was downstairs on the main floor. Maybe the raccoons had returned to the chimney, he thought. It was uncomfortable lying on his stomach, a stomach that had grown out in front of him over the years. He couldn’t remember his stomach getting bigger, but it had—from size thirty-four to forty, and a tight forty at that. That was the way a lot of things happened in life. Some days he would drive the eight miles into town, pull in front of the hardware store and not be able to remember driving there. Suddenly, your life was altered, they built a new subdivision, and no one asked your opinion.

He forgot about it. In the morning, he would light some newspaper in the fireplace and try to smoke them out before they got comfortable. Maybe if he got in the habit of lighting it once a week all year, he wouldn’t have this problem.

Then Jack heard an odd sound. He swore he’d heard his kitchen table move on the linoleum. He was never upstairs when the table moved, but it sounded like it could be his table, only quieter. Jack moved to the edge of the bed and located his boxer shorts by feeling around on the floor. He’d left his twenty-two leaning by the bedroom door after the raccoon incident, and he grabbed the gun and walked into the hallway. When he got to the top of the stairs, he stood and listened to the silence that didn’t sound like a normal silence. Unless raccoons felt threatened, they carried on with their pillage and argued among themselves. He turned on the light and saw a man making for the door with something in his hands.

Hey, Jack yelled. What the hell?

The man turned and saw he had a rifle. He tried to change direction and slipped on the small Persian rug, the last purchase Jack’s wife had made before she left. He lost his balance, and the VCR went flying while the man fell and hit his head on the table near the entrance where Jack always hung his hat. Jack had the rifle up to his shoulder and wondered what circumstances would have necessitated him using the gun.

He lowered the rifle when the man didn’t move. He put it back against his shoulder and walked tentatively down the stairs into the hall entrance. Just when the raccoon had looked passive, it had lashed out at him, and he knew the same thing could happen again. Once he got close enough, he could see that the man was a young kid, and he appeared to be out cold. The VCR sat on its side against the wall, and Jack’s hat had fallen onto the kid’s chest. It looked like he’d been laid to rest.

Later, when he went over the details of the incident, he wondered if he hadn’t had the encounter with the raccoon if he would have done what he did. He found a roll of gray duct tape in the back pantry and lashed the kid’s hands together, then his feet. He made sure he was breathing, then went to the kitchen to get a glass of water to splash on his face. By the time he returned to the front door, the kid had come to. He picked up his hat and threw the water on him anyway, and the kid writhed and squirmed like he was afraid of drowning. The kid looked at him. Neither one said a word. Jack walked back upstairs with his rifle to fetch his housecoat.

He came down the stairs dressed. There wasn’t much chance of catching any more sleep before the sun came up, not with a thief tied up at his front door.

I thought you were raccoons, he said. And when the boy didn’t respond, he explained, I’ve had a problem with bloody raccoons, and when I heard the kerfuffle, I thought the raccoons had come in through the chimney.

Jack went into the kitchen and fetched a chair. He placed it in the hallway and sat down with his rifle across his thighs.

So, you like to watch movies, do you?

What are you going to do with me? the boy asked.

I don’t know. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do. I might just shoot you and be done with it. That’s what I did with a raccoon two days ago. Shot him right between the eyes.

The boy tested his hands and feet, but realized there was no hope of freeing himself. He rolled over and back again with great effort, and when he finished, Jack could see tears glistening in his eyes.

One thing I can tell you is you don’t need to worry right away. I never do anything without giving it serious thought. That’s the kind of man I am. I like to think things through.

He leaned the rifle against the wall and picked up the VCR. It didn’t look too bad, just scraped up.

Well, I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee. I always make lots. Do you want some if I get it for you?

The boy turned his head away. I don’t drink coffee, he said.

Suit yourself, Jack said. I was hooked on coffee at your age, and I’ve been drinking it ever since.

On his way to the kitchen, Jack turned on the TV feed from an antenna on the roof. He flipped through the channels to catch the news, then realized it was too early for the news. The only thing he could find was an I Love Lucy rerun, so he turned it off. He put the kitchen light on and got out the coffee pot. He wished he had a cigarette. He’d quit twelve years ago, but if he had one now, he would have enjoyed it. While he was at it, he made eight cups instead of his usual six. It was possible the kid would change his mind.

Dan Fletcher was thirty-six years old and had been a realtor for twelve years. Some of those years had been fruitful, but this wasn’t one of them. There were too many houses and too few buyers. The last thing a realtor wanted anyone to know was that he lived in a rental. He could buy a house, he had enough equity left after his wife divorced him and they sold their home, but he knew this wasn’t the time. A major price adjustment was due, and he would bide his time. This was the story Mariah Medford had listened to on their drive out to the country. Dan said the house he was about to show her was an exception she might want to consider. The owner had fallen ill and needed to do something, or he would lose the house altogether. Mariah could arrange a conditional sale for a year down the road and rent it in the meantime. Assuming she liked the place, Dan said, the key would be to negotiate a suitable price, and if interest rates fell as he suspected they would, she would be sitting pretty.

I don’t know if I like this area, Mariah said. It’s a long way from town.

Mariah had just put her compact back in her purse. When she had taken it out to do a touch up, Dan had said there were some women who didn’t need to bother with makeup. It only camouflaged their natural beauty. He said if she didn’t mind an unsolicited compliment, she was one of them.

It’s a bit of an oddity, all right. But you’ve got the best of both worlds: the peace and quiet of the country and the facilities of a full-fledged neighbourhood. Turn the clock ahead twenty years, and this area will be on the outskirts of town.

The way life had turned out so far, Mariah had a hard time imagining what she’d be doing in twenty years.

Bud Medford, Mariah’s son, sat in the back seat alone. He had harnessed himself in using all three seat belts. His mother had said to buckle up when they got in, so that’s what he did. Is there a swimming pool? he asked.

No, Dan said. But there’s a water park for little kids.

Is there a skating rink?

No. You’d have to drive into town for that. It’s only six miles, and the road’s not busy.

It had been a tiring trip from Ontario all the way to British Columbia,