Men at work, men at work
Cane Wood: Based on True Stories
by Stephen L. Howard
Altona: Friesen Press, 2025
$13.49 / 9781038326300
Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski
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“The work was complete,” writes Stephen L. Howard near the end of a short story called “Scouting.” This simple, matter-of-fact statement crystallizes the world of Cane Wood, a collection of ten stories by the former surveyor, now living in Campbell River. The statement is uncluttered, the significance left purely suggested—yet, for a reader alert to nuance, charged. The very fact that the sentence signals the end of a day’s work and comes after a life of work in hard conditions doubles the impact.
Many short story collections make a virtue out of variety. In his collection of spare, sharply focused stories, Howard does the opposite. Though in some ways diverse and inventive, the collection is nevertheless tightly unified.
Most obviously, the stories are unified as they track a man’s life from boyhood to maturity—and, almost exclusively, his life of work. Born in 1957 (the title of the first story is “Six in Sixty Three”), the boy first experiences life in the context of the death of his grandmother. At twelve, in “Just Me,” he next meets head-on male aggression in the form of a fist fight with another boy. Awakening with a hangover in “Saturday,” the protagonist, now a young man, leaves town to start a hard manual job.
Next, the brutally inhumane training documented in “Survey School” leads, in “Underground,” to a sharply detailed account of a particular surveying job. Confrontations with an unhinged fellow student while training as a teacher in “Meaning” is followed, in “Patchwork,” by a mature man’s methodical description of a specific surveying job in a mine. The frustrated protagonist of “Friday Evening,” having turned away from fifteen years of surveying for an office job, looks for release and purpose in a martial arts class. The titular short story, “Cane Wood,” takes a slight sidestep. Here, the middle-aged protagonist takes his dying father on one last trip to the countryside to harvest wood for crafting canes. In the final story, “Scouting,” the protagonist is, significantly, again surveying, this time around a snow-bound lake in vaguely threatening circumstances.
Equally unifying is the fact that all of the stories are intensely male. Aside from a few paragraphs about Margaret, a prominent teacher at college, the text makes only fleeting references to the only other significant female, the protagonist’s partner, Cass. More strikingly, though, the strong maleness of the stories has two major qualities—work and aggression.
The world of Cane Wood is, first, a world of physical work, training for it, engaging in it—or suffering from its absence. To some extent, this work is part of the background texture of life. As the 12-year-old narrator observes, “it seemed like everybody’s father worked all year.” As a young man, the protagonist reflects on his four friends’ weekend: “Four guys, four jobs, two days.” As for the oil patch, the “amount of work to do is infinite.”
Yet not just the amount of work, but the adamant commitment to hard work is repeatedly built into the protagonist’s identity. In story after story, Howard creates a portrait of a dogged, determined worker, either pushing himself beyond the minimum, or refusing to buckle under the pressure of superiors. At his first job away from home he is worried—“how I was going to stand up”—but, unfazed, asserts, “No matter what, this was better” than “sitting in that tavern back home.”
Once in the oil patch, the protagonist, almost as a matter of course, works extra hours. Even when, as a much older man, he cares for of his dying father, he reports, without a trace of swagger, “I would get up at five or so … to get some physical work done.” The dedication comes as no surprise: the beleaguered student narrator in survey school does not just drive himself to achieve the best results, but also refuses to buckle. “My attitude was of dogged resolve,” he states.
On the flip side, the author repeatedly shows the lack of physical work is to be emasculating: “The man sat in his office, undid his tie, and reflected—with disgust—on what he had become. He was yet another government eunuch.” In another story Howard writes with trenchant sympathy of a fragile old man’s working himself into a sweat to cut cane wood: “For a few moments, he was a man again—no longer castrated.”
Far from romanticizing work, though, the author repeatedly shows both training for work and work itself often to be miserably daunting, or, as he says at one point, “tiring and frustrating.” Unquestionably, the most wretched conditions he records are at the surveying school. In this context the misery comes almost entirely from the instructors, one “a jerk of the first degree,” another a “pompous prick,” the whole group little more than “tormentors.” Out in the field, work can be equally miserable, even if for different reasons: “in muskeg it’s hell …. The crews are always up to their knees in water.”
The second corollary of maleness, it seems, is aggression. In story after story, context after context, Howard writes of males quick to snarl. In some contexts this aggression is largely verbal. At one job interview, the protagonist recalls an obnoxious engineer: “He was just another one of those ‘separate the men from the boys’ guys. Figures what he does makes him a ‘manly man’.” As for the fellow worker who can’t be bothered to pick up the protagonist from the bus, his brutal indifference says it all: “If you can’t walk up here from the bus, you’re not too goddamned good for much!”
In Howard’s world, the aggression isn’t just verbal. It is not by-the-way that the second story in the collection is a blow by blow description of twelve-year-old’s “first fight … in grade five.” For the protagonist of other stories, the inclination for physical aggression is almost reflexive. At one point, the protagonist thinks, without a moment’s hesitation, “I could beat this guy.” At surveying school, the protagonist “had recurring dreams of physical revenge,” all the more telling because, as he says of his algebra instructor, “he didn’t get that any one of us could beat him in a fight.” The middle-aged version of the protagonist recalls of his personal history the “drunken fights as a young man and as an ex ‘banger’ hockey player.”
Male aggression reaches its summit, though, in “Meaning.” First encountered in the context of Marty, a threatening, unhinged student, the aggression escalates when the protagonist “grabbed his throat tightly with my right hand, pushed him back against the wall, and hissed in his left ear, ‘DON’T FUCK WITH ME’.” The violence doesn’t end there. The story has two codas. The first reports the unsolved mystery of the death of the woman instructor who, as it happens, reported Marty to the authorities. The second includes a self-congratulatory speech by a successful CEO. His name? Martin. That the successful businessman should also be, implicitly, a murderous sociopath says a lot.
The fact is, though, Howard has, in this story, not laid his cards on the table. He has left it to the reader to make the connection between Marty, the murderer, and Martin the successful businessman. While this story, and, perhaps also the last story, work must fully through implication rather than explication, throughout the stories the author manages similarly suggestive and varied narrative techniques.
While many of the stories are written from the first person point of view, the voice varies considerably—the most affectingly modulated in the very first story, in this case to reflect the sensitive bemusement of a very young child. Also written in the first person, “Survey School” starts with a disarmingly frank narrative voice, even addressing the reader directly: “I debated telling you this.” In two other striking cases, though written from the third person point of view, the stories begin with exactly the same words, “The man,” and proceed to write through his eyes. One story, “Patch Work,” takes the form of a long letter to “Cyrus.” “Underground,” on the other hand, is, unusually, the single side of a long telephone call.
The best short stories, of course, make a point of tapping into the power of brevity and pure suggestion. One of the most characteristic effects in these stories is achieved by the author’s beginning in the middle of things, leaving the context to be inferred or never explained at all. Parallel to this effect is that produced by the faintest suggestions of continuing and linking characters—not just “Cass,” but a friend called Saughnessy. Even the largely unidentified recurring protagonist is, on occasion—but only on occasion—linked with the names “Ken” and “McDade.”
The fact, further, that the voice is so often frank and intimate, yet the context shadowy, produces a tension between intimacy and distance. In some cases, the reader feels treated like a fellow worker—yet still an outsider. This effect is especially strong in the three stories where the process of surveying forms the grist of the entire story. The tension is further elevated when specialized terms like “control feature,” “ground truthing point,” “level notes,” “chaining,” and “open traverse” work their way seamlessly through the conversational tone.
At other points, crucial narrative details are simply omitted. A statement like “he would tell the party chief about the danger”—never explained—is left to resonate and permeate the tone. It is perhaps fitting that the last story, one of the most meticulously detailed and “realistic,” is simultaneously, almost visionarily elusive. The methodical, intensely visual description of surveying around a snow-bound lake, becomes, in Howard’s hands, something much more. A sense of permeating threat, unexplained, is connected at one point with some distant figures and followed by the strange lines, “He stopped checking the mirror after a mile or two. Mission accomplished. And he remained that ‘grey man.’”
And the final line of the story? “On the radio, there was a research piece on the earliest signs of baby laughs.” In a book where childhood experiences centre on a funeral and a fist fight, the reference to baby laughter is unsettling. In fact, a few lines earlier, Howard makes the definitive—and defining—point not just about this story, but also about the whole world of male struggle: “The work was complete.”
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Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has written and illustrated several coastal walking and hiking guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea (Heritage House, 2012), Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016), and Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island (RMB, 2018, reviewed by Chris Fink-Jensen), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. He has reviewed books by Michael Whatling, Frank Wolf, George Zukerman, Robert Mackay, Genni Gunn, Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, and Tim Bowling for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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