A Beauty (2 page)

She didn’t go anywhere, naturally; she plopped down on the seat again and swung back, and the Gustafsons waved some more from the wagon, and the Clydesdales set their relentless hooves down, the white hair on their fetlocks fluttering. Such a romantic picture, as if Time itself was lolloping through a veil of dust to pluck her up and take her with it. The dance was at Liberty Hall. Liquorty Hall, the young people called it, since high spirits were expected in those days.

She couldn’t go on swinging once the wagon stopped or Mrs. Gustafson would be obliged to heave herself down and make the trek across the yard. She had to hop off in a jaunty, two-footed manner to show she wasn’t sad and then she had to walk sedately over to the wagon to show she wasn’t happy. It was her fate. Only eighteen, and everything she did had to be done in order to prevent something else having to be done.

With four pairs of eyes on her, it must have been difficult to know how to compose her face as she approached the wagon. The children didn’t count, they were eight and ten, too young to have opinions anyone would listen to, but they might see through whatever expression she put on. In spite of all their parents’ efforts to teach them complacency, they might still be capable of looking beyond the obvious. Luckily for Elena, although Henrik drove the horses, Maria Gustafson drove the family, and Maria’s ego eclipsed anything resembling a nuance. Heartiness carried her over the roughest terrain; she hardly saw or felt the bumps.

“Come to the dance,” Mrs. Gustafson said and beamed down from the wagon until her cheeks rose up and obliterated her eyes. She might have been praying, or more likely – seeing how pleased she was looking – overhearing a prayer that was being said especially for her. Mr. Gustafson might have been the one saying it; his long, corn-coloured beard trembled on his chest and his moustache quivered as if he had been speaking or was about to speak. You couldn’t tell which it was, if either – the hair curled over his lips. Only his eyes were on display and they said very little. He had practised making them beatific. He gazed down at Elena Huhtala until she looked right at him, and then he shifted his attention to his placid horses, as if it was momentous when one lifted its foot and the other whisked its tail.

The children’s mouths fell open. It was odd how it happened. They knew what the strange Finnish girl was going to do as soon as she knew it herself. Their surprise was over by the time she’d climbed up and settled in between them and put an arm around each of them for balance.

As soon as Mr. Gustafson turned the Clydes towards the sunset again, Mrs. Gustafson twisted halfway round in her seat (
careful with the layer cake), so she could peer at Elena Huhtala. “Any news?” she asked, just as she had asked the day before.

Elena shook her head. She lowered her eyes, but Mrs. Gustafson didn’t take that to signify anything. “You’ll hear one of these days,” she said. “He’s likely written and his letter’s gone astray. You know how the post is, it’s not reliable at all, and men – well, you know what men are.”

Elena did not raise her eyes to admit to any knowledge of men.

“He wouldn’t think you’d be worrying,” Mrs. Gustafson said, explaining.

“I’m not worrying, Mrs. Gustafson,” Elena said. The horses picked up speed and the wagon lurched, but nothing changed her calm demeanour.

“Of course you are,” Maria said. “What are you supposed to do with yourself, left like this on your own? You know you can stay with us. We’d be more than happy to have you. I hate to think of you out here all by yourself. We have an extra bedroom, you know, especially set aside for guests.”

“I’m fine, really.”

“At your age. What was your father thinking?”

“He’s gone to look for work,” Mr. Gustafson said. His wife went on regardless. The cake rocked on her lap. She had several theories to explore. She’d heard of a note left for the girl on the kitchen table. The Mounties had begun an investigation. Everyone had questions, no one knew the answers, unless the daughter did.

Elena squeezed the children’s waists and watched the orange sinking sun to avoid looking into Mrs. Gustafson’s pale, peering, guileless eyes. As for the children, they leaned into her on either side and seldom spoke except once in a while in a furious, whispered code behind her back. They giggled whenever one of the horses passed gas, and their mother shook her head each time and
glanced indulgently at her husband. He ignored them as he did most of the time, since they provided him with as little opportunity for wit as for poetry. He was fond of being witty.

“I realize people are different,” Maria said to Elena Huhtala. “Henrik often reminds me of it. Life would be so much easier if they weren’t. Then they wouldn’t be doing things you couldn’t imagine.”

“Your Clydes are beauties, Mr. Gustafson,” the girl said. Her voice was low and she spoke with a slowness that made those few words sound earnest.

“They’re only workhorses,” Henrik said, trying for a modesty to suit his beard.

“But they’re standouts,” she said, looking down at their braided, beribboned tails and their shifting haunches and their deep, dark, leathery sheen, knowing that Mr. Gustafson bred them and would talk about them for a long time if ever allowed. He raised Aberdeen Angus cattle as well as Clydesdales. “My animals have made a Scotsman out of me,” he liked to say. He appreciated the chuckle he sometimes got in response. Clydesdales were generally not as big in those days as they are now, and he liked their friendly height, but he bred them to be taller, as everyone did, because otherwise what was the point?

As for bigness, all around them the glowing sky was as huge as it could possibly have been if they’d been any place else, and it went on forever, as it does if you really look at it. But they didn’t look; they were used to it and they had other matters on their minds, Maria in particular, who was going to have to answer to the ladies of her community when she got to Liberty Hall. How could she drive all the way to Trevna with Elena Huhtala wedged in between her offspring, and gather such a pitiful dribble to tell them? How could she let talk of the horses interrupt a full discussion of the possibility of an act she couldn’t imagine? They’d be
more annoyed with her than if she hadn’t persuaded the girl to come. There was no excuse for it, so she patiently went at her from a creative variety of angles, while Henrik clucked at Bess and Basket until he heard himself and denied himself that comfort.

Behind them, the children swayed with the wagon’s movement, either side of the strange Finnish girl, and fell almost into a trance. So forgetfully comfortable had Ingrid become that she tucked her cheek in along the plushy side of Elena Huhtala’s breast and brought her hands up almost to her chin and whispered to her thumbs. Sometimes she made them whisper to one another, and they always said compelling things. Peter squirmed, on the other side, but didn’t extricate himself from the arm that lay warm and lightly supportive and uniquely feminine along his back, even though it gave him the occasional shiver as he delved further into a story he was telling himself, a story in which old Mr. Huhtala’s skeleton was discovered in a shallow grave in his own cellar. For a little while even Maria stopped talking, but she was only thinking what to say next, she was only moving from her inquest into the past to her advice for the future. “Now, Elena, you must make some plans,” she said. “You can’t go on like this. How will you support yourself? One good thing is you’ve got your grade twelve, now that’s something most girls don’t have, and you can thank your father for that. He was a man who valued education.”

“Is,” Henrik muttered.

“Oh. Yes, I meant that, Henrik, for heaven’s sake. Although I don’t know what good it does you to have your grade twelve out here in the middle of nowhere. He likely hoped you could go to college. In better times. Being an educated man, himself. But you’ll probably marry soon, anyway, won’t you? I don’t like you on your own in the meantime. People talk, you know. It’s not meanness, it’s only natural, they wonder, and they talk.”

“Look,” Peter said, behind Elena Huhtala’s back. He pointed up. It was a hawk, flashing light from its wings. “Seen something.” Peter turned to watch it. “There,” he said, satisfied, when it dove, beak down, to the earth.

“As I was saying,” Mrs. Gustafson continued, but Mr. Gustafson started talking, too, and stopped her.

“What do you call those pictures on our bedroom wall?” he wanted to know. “Sentimental things. Pretty couples painted in black on glass, with a paper landscape behind them.”

“I don’t know that they have a name,” Maria said. “Why do you ask?”

He shook his head; he didn’t know. He reached over and patted her wide knee and she, ever generous, shifted the cake. “Oh, I can taste this cake,” she said. “It is so good, my mother’s recipe, so moist and substantial. But the cost of lemons! Oh, yes, I know, Henrik, why you’re thinking of them. It’s our pretty Elena Huhtala, sitting on the swing. You were a picture, my dear,” she said, rearing back again to peer into Elena’s eyes. “Your hair all lit up like a halo.” She laughed as if she’d made a joke. “But this cake,” she went on. “Wait till you taste it. You can make it with vanilla filling but it’s not as good. The lemon filling is so cool in your mouth. I can feel it on the edges of my tongue when I say it. And with three layers, you put it twice so it soaks all through the cake. Now Henrik is going to tease me and say, ‘What about the frosting, Maria? You haven’t said a word about the frosting.’ Oh, look, here is Liberty Hall. And half the district’s arrived already.”

They pulled into the yard in front of the country hall and Henrik stopped the team near the door to let them step down.

“I’ll hand you the cake,” Maria said to the girl.

When her feet hit the dirt, Elena turned and put her hands up for the cake. It dipped when she took hold of it, being heavier than
she expected. Seeing that, Maria didn’t leave her in charge of it for long. As soon as Arnie Lindquist had given her a hand down, she took it back and sailed it past the group congregated around the hot dog stand, towards the open door and the crowd inside. It was almost as if she was carrying Elena Huhtala to them on a platter.

Maria set her cake down beside the other offerings and faced the women who’d trailed behind her. She threw up her hands and admitted defeat – not that defeat ever cowed her. “It’s true,” she said. “I drove all the way to Trevna with the girl and I didn’t learn a thing. Good heavens, ladies, it wasn’t from lack of trying.”

“She doesn’t know any more than we do, poor kid,” Hilda Lindquist said. “How long’s he been gone now?”

They decided it had been about five weeks since any of them had set eyes on Mr. Huhtala, although that didn’t mean he’d been gone so long. Sometimes ages passed without any of them seeing him. He was an outsider, they’d always said, and it was only the truth, a Red Finn in a community of Swedes, who’d refused to live among his own, who’d turned his back on his own. It was said he refused to speak Finnish and hadn’t let his daughter speak it since they’d arrived in Canada, although this wasn’t anything his neighbours could corroborate. Many of them had never spoken to him. They’d seldom seen him up close; from the road as they’d passed his farm he’d looked tall and gaunt, his clothes flapping about as if the wind had intended from the day it saw him to blow him off his own fields. And now, “They say he left a note for her, on the kitchen table.”

“The Mounties came to the house to ask if we knew anything,” Thelma Svenson said.

“They were at the Huhtala place an hour at least. Searching for him.”

“Do you know, I’m not sure I’d recognize Matti Huhtala if he walked in the door,” Britte Anderson said.

“Oh you would if you’d ever spoken to him, yeah,” Maria said. “You wouldn’t forget him if you’d ever been face to face.”

The ladies looked expectant – Maria had blushed, as if the thought of Matti Huhtala had aroused a memory best kept private – but she bustled off across the hall, her dress shining particularly brightly across her broad backside where the wagon seat had polished it.

“Well,” Thelma said. “What does that mean?”

“Peter’s pulling Ingrid’s braids,” Britte said. “We’ll never know.”

Aggie Lindquist brought her
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magazine with her for the times no one asked her to dance. The one she had was the one with Garbo on the cover and afterwards she never could believe she’d lost it. No, it was stolen and she knew who stole it even if she couldn’t do a thing about it. Garbo had a deep, pale fur collar like a cloud around her neck and face and she had her proud look on, as if to say she’d endured a lot of cloudiness and could withstand more. Aggie could put that look on her own face – chin up, eyes down, as if your own cheeks are more interesting than anything out there beyond you. As long as she owned the magazine she had that look down pat, but it didn’t come naturally to her, and once the thing was gone she could tell in the mirror she couldn’t get the right droop. The piece inside was “The High Price of Screen Love-making.” She’d read it to gauze. It didn’t help. She waved her hair every Saturday morning and she gazed into the distance a lot with a soulful expression that seemed to say surely, somewhere, there was a better world, and that didn’t help, either.

She saw Elena Huhtala walk in with Peter and Ingrid Gustafson on either side of her. Before the other girls noticed her, Aggie saw her and kept the secret for the few minutes it took until they cottoned to her being there. Aggie was the one who’d first said Elena looked like Garbo, and you might as well say she looked like the queen, because Garbo was a Swede. But Elena Huhtala was a Finn. Maybe there were Swedes in her family somewhere, Aggie didn’t know. None of the girls had liked
Anna Christie
much. Garbo wasn’t even pretty sometimes in it, and they hadn’t liked her voice, hearing it for the first time. It was disturbingly husky and she had an accent too similar to their parents’. But she was great at the end. She won them over in the end. Elena Huhtala was the same. You couldn’t say she was always pretty, but she was always great. Grand, that was the word. And she was prettier than Greta Garbo, maybe, to start with; Aggie thought she was.