Property Values by Charles Demers

Author:Charles Demers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551527284
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2018-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Dhaliwals sat silently hunched over the blond pine table that Manjot’s father had built himself in the late 1960s, working in the tradition of the family’s relationship with West Coast wood. Like most of the earlier Punjabi settlers in the area, Pardeep’s great-great-grandfather had worked in the sawmills, churning the swathe of the British Empire closest to sunset into piles of furniture, paper, timber. Coquitlam was proudly home to a neighbourhood called Mallairdville, the first Francophone settlement in the area—but the pride didn’t extend to its reason for being there, namely as a sop to turn-of-the-last-century racists. When a suburban mill employing Sikh lumbermen was targeted with angry demands to replace their tanned workforce with a pastier proletariat of European ancestry, the owners fired their Sikhs and sought out a group of employees pale enough to appease xenophobes but benighted enough to pay poorly. Luckily, His Majesty’s realm contained subject peoples in all hues, and Vancouver’s first French-Canadian settlement was born.

The fact that the family had never left the Coquitlam area was a mark of almost unfathomable social stasis; that they had never gathered the necessary capital to pick up stakes and move further west, into the greater desirability of the city, ever closer to the ocean, nor had they ever been broken down to the point of being pushed east, the invariable direction of Lower Mainland failure, was almost impossible to explain. But the rangy area pulling up from the Fraser on one side, the Burrard Inlet on the other, as though for some reason squeamish of water, had been home to the Dhaliwal family on a scale of time that was unimaginable for nearly anyone in the area besides the people from whom it had been stolen.

Pardeep searched his father’s face now for the sarcasm or the defiance, the coolness that defined him, but he was just grey, his cheeks and jaw pocked with black stubble, resting on splayed fingers bearing the weight of his head and neck. Manjot was staring at Gurdeep uncannily; intimately, but with very close to nothing in her eyes: no reproach, no solidarity, no anger, no understanding. She had known, too. They’d both told him, but somehow it was clear that it came back to Gurdeep.

“Dad?”

Gurdeep swivelled his cradled chin in his palm, lifting watery eyes up at his son, and raised his shoulders.

“This is life, beyta. This is how it works.”

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