A Place Called Winter (18 page)

WINTER

They were young and were certain they would make good in God’s open spaces, where a man is a man.

Jennie Johnston,
A Glance Back

Chapter Nineteen

While working for Jørgensen, in an area that wasn’t exactly hilly, Harry had often heard people joking that the western prairies were so dull and flat that a man driving a cart there had to fight sleep because of the extreme monotony of the landscape, but could at least rest secure in the knowledge that if he did nod off, his horse would be equally bored and feel no temptation to leave the dead-straight track while its master slumbered.

Between Moose Jaw and Saskatoon, Harry had certainly seen stretches that seemed to bear out the jibe, but as he left the Battlefords behind and drove the laden cart along the almost deserted dirt road towards Cut Knife, he was pleased to see mature stands of trees and then even a hill or two. It wasn’t exactly Derbyshire, he told himself, but neither was it Norfolk.

Compared to the area around the Jørgensens, however, it was astonishingly empty of people. He passed no more than four other carts on the road all day. Much of the land had not yet been cultivated, and he seemed to see more Indians – Cree, as he had just learnt these were – than Europeans on his way. He was worried his new horses would become overly tired, having no idea how fit they were. He found a stream where they could have a long drink and a rest while he ate some lunch and drank a rashly celebratory bottle of warm beer. Safe from any man’s satirical gaze, he spent some time talking to them and rubbing their faces and wondering what he should call them.

There was so little sign of life at Cut Knife, and he was so tired by then, that he nearly drove straight through it without noticing. At least Winter had a station. Cut Knife was no more than a few homesteads as yet, and certainly had no inn. The farmer he was sent to was chatty enough once he had got over his surprise at an unexpected visitor. He showed Harry where he could water his horses and secure them for the night, and suggested Harry sleep under his cart on the straw in his barn, saying there were thieving Indians about and that a fully laden cart was too much provocation for men with little to their name.

Cut Knife had only been settled four years before, he said, but they hoped to persuade the Grand Trunk Pacific to throw out a branch line to them from the Battlefords, if only to make shipping of grain and delivery of supplies less arduous. ‘And we have a hill nearby!’ he laughed. ‘A regular hill.’ He described how it was where the Indians had murderously routed a revenge attack during the rebellion of the 1880s, defending their women and children from far greater government forces. White men were killed, he said, and added suggestively that one had been
mutilated
. Harry could tell from the detail of his narrative that he had enjoyed few opportunities to tell anyone the story since finding it out for himself on arrival.

The barn was bone dry, being almost brand new, and the straw fairly fresh. Harry furled himself in both his new blankets and bedded down, as suggested, beneath his cart, mounding up some straw beneath him as a kind of pillow. He had enjoyed softer beds, and warmer nights, but the smell of the straw seemed to act like a mild narcotic, and it felt somehow tremendously safe to have the big, warm, sighing bulk of his new horses close at hand.

He was up at dawn to feed and harness them. The farmer offered him a cup of tea and a slice of bread, as well as the use of his privy (of which he was proud, as it was as new a feature as the barn), then solemnly talked him through the actually very simple route to Winter before seeing him off the property.

The scene at Winter’s tiny station when he finally reached it was like that at so many of the settler stations he had passed through on the way to the Battlefords. A little cluster of humanity – all men, of course – waiting to catch the next train or to do business with men getting off it. Troels strode out from their midst to greet him. He had spent another night with his German woman and was keen to share every lip-smacking detail.

As they turned north up what was evidently intended for Winter’s chief street one day, humanity fell away again except for the evidence of an occasional shack, tent or soddy, or a distant glimpse of a farmer at work. Between Moose Jaw and Jørgensen’s place the land had seemed entirely under cultivation already, whether for crops or as pasture. Here, as on much of the land Harry had driven the cart through that morning, the white man’s incursion was still a fragile, piecemeal thing. Moose Jaw was a city by comparison, with hotels, a library, a choice of churches, a proud governmental hall, most of it built of brick. Even Battleford had enough brick buildings to lend it a convincing air of permanence. The few buildings they passed in Winter were wooden, built with whatever men could carry by cart from the train, presumably, and while many were in better repair than the pitiful structure where Varcoe was living with his woman, they were rarely much larger. Jørgensen’s house was only built of lumber but seemed palatial by comparison; it had two verandas, a second storey, an attic and a cellar. But when Harry commented on this, Troels pointed out that since settlement in Winter was comparatively fresh, these were mainly places where men lived alone,
batching it
in minimal space and comfort until such time as they could attract wives and acquire, like Jørgensen, the trappings of domesticity.

The land rose steadily towards a distant ridge when all at once Troels was jumping down from the cart. Using Harry’s new scythe, he stamped and sliced his way through thick grasses and dazzling spring weeds to find a surveyor’s post, off which he read a number.

‘Yes,’ he shouted. ‘I thought so. This is your new home! The bastard lied about the fencing.’

Wire fence heading off from a single post into the thick prairie grass was what had alerted Troels to search for the surveyor’s marker. But there was no equivalent fence along the facing side of the property.

Having driven the cart a little way off the track, Harry tied the horses to a tree beside a small slough so they could have water. Troels and he then set about clearing ground for the tent, one with the scythe, one with the shovel. It was slow work. The grass was tough stuff, its closest English equivalent the sharp-edged marram found on seaside dunes. Everywhere there were sturdy clumps of weeds or small saplings that must have taken root since Varcoe performed what little clearance he had managed during his stay.

As they worked, they came upon the sad wreck of Varcoe’s attempt at a shelter: a tangle of mismatched lumber and canvas that must have given way under the weight of snow in the winter just past. Tugging the canvas aside and making a heap of the lumber for firewood, Harry found a stash of perfectly good if slightly rusting tools including, most usefully, a post-hole auger; a small reparation for Varcoe’s fraudulence over his fencing performance.

To his shame, Harry had never erected a tent before, not even in school, so was happy that Troels knew what he was about and took charge as they unrolled and set to pegging the baffling thing, telling Harry where to bang in pegs or secure poles. As they pulled the tent upright and he stepped inside, he felt a brief, boyish glee, which was swiftly followed by a species of panic at the realisation that this frail structure and this alone was now his home.

As though sensing the faltering of his spirits, Troels insisted they get on with heaving the little stove into place and securing its tin flue through the opening in the tent roof, pulling tight the cunning corset of leather straps and canvas that closed the gap around it to hold out the worst of the weather. They shared a bottle of beer to slake their thirst after their labours and christen the new home, then Troels left Harry to pull his trunk and bags inside and begin unpacking, while he went off to discover the full extent of Varcoe’s perfidy over the fencing.

Having assembled and made up his camp bed in one corner and arranged blankets for Troels and gathered a good heap of fairly dry wood for the stove, Harry left the tent – where the gloom and the strong smell of newly unrolled mackintosh was threatening to overpower him – and took his brand-new water bottle and whistling kettle in search of a stream where he could draw water fit to drink. He discovered one a little way up the slope, and tasted it gingerly at first, then eagerly when he found it sweet. (Jørgensen had told him horror stories of men settling on land that proved to have only alkali water on it.)

There were birds singing, more than he ever heard at Moose Jaw. He made out the cool, deliberate notes he had already learnt belonged to a chickadee. And there was an abundance of flowers. He made a note to send away for a botany book when he was next at a bookseller. That idea in turn brought home the realisation that he had not seen what he thought of as a proper bookseller since leaving Moose Jaw, and that it might be months, years even, before he saw one again. Perhaps he could write to the one he used in London. He stood from filling his bottle and kettle and looked around him at prairie grass and saplings, at trees he would have to fell and boulders he would have to lever on to a stone-boat for the horses to pull out of the way – once, that was, he had a lever and a stone-boat.

Troels had been right, however. Harry looked about him with eyes taught by Jørgensen and saw that it was land with good potential, watered but not waterlogged, with a gentle southerly slope to part of it and even a small pillow of a wooded hill where he immediately knew he would build his house. At the same time, the gulf between the scene of fertile wilderness around him and the rolling wheat fields of the recruitment literature and railway posters hit him with a force that made him lean instinctively on a tree for support.

Just then he was surprised by the rattle of wheels and saw a white pony and trap coming along the track from the north. There was a slim woman at the reins, veiled against the dust. She raised a gloved hand in greeting as he emerged from the trees and, after a slight struggle, pulled her lively pony to a halt.

‘Oh,’ she cried out as he approached. ‘I thought you were Mr Varcoe come back at last. But you’re not.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I’m Harry Cane. I just took over his, er . . .’

‘He gave up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, hello.’ She jumped easily from her little trap. ‘I was bringing him a couple of pies, but I’ll give them to you instead.’

‘How very kind.’

‘You haven’t tried my pastry yet . . .’ She handed him two small, still warm pies, wrapped in a piece of brown paper. ‘My brother and I are your neighbours. The apple one has a little sugar on it so you’ll know it from the rabbit.’

‘Where are you?’ He looked around, seeing nothing but bluff, prairie, trees and more prairie.

‘As the crow flies,’ she said, ‘we’re there on the next little bulge you might come in time to call a hill.’ She pointed. ‘But the way to reach us is up this track, then turn in at the next gate on the left. Out here
neighbour
is a relative term, as you probably know. But that’s where we are if you need anything. You’ll need a fire ditch, by the way. Once the weather warms up in earnest. Around your tent, I mean. Just in case.’

He glanced the way she was looking. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Thank you. We’ll get on with that tomorrow. Or I will.’

‘It was a miracle we didn’t get burnt out last year, and we’re overdue for a bad one. Are you here with your wife?’

‘No. No. I’m . . . I’m not married.’ The sad little truth sounded brave in that setting. ‘I’m going to be on my own, but a friend’s helping me get started. In fact it was he who picked out this plot for me.’

Hearing Troels stamping back through the scrub and dropping off what sounded like an armful of logs, he called out, ‘We’ve a visitor! A lady. I’m so sorry, I don’t know your name,’ he told her.

‘Slaymaker,’ she said. ‘Petra Slaymaker,’ and to his surprise he saw she was looking past him with something like fear.

‘Well, small world!’ exclaimed Troels, brushing the strands of moss and grass off his hands and waistcoat.

‘Mr Munck,’ she said, and all warmth had left her voice. ‘Fancy that.’

As Troels came to stand beside him, Harry smelt the musk of his sweat, and something else, something threatening, if threat had a smell. Miss Slaymaker had taken a step backwards and now had a hand on her pony’s bridle.

‘What a delightful surprise,’ Troels said, and Harry knew at once that it was no surprise at all. ‘It’s been months.’

‘Years,’ she corrected him. ‘We left Toronto four years ago. You look quite the man now.’

‘And you look as imperious as ever. Has some lucky man . . . ?’

‘I’m homesteading with Paul,’ she said.

‘Is he managing?’

‘He’s thriving, thank you,’ she said briskly, turning her pony to face back the way she had come.

‘Miss Slaymaker very kindly brought pies,’ Harry said, feeling he must say something, anything, to break the tension crackling between the two of them.

But she wasn’t prepared to play the politeness game. ‘Are you in Winter for long?’ she asked Troels.

‘Just tonight,’ he said. ‘I have business to see to back East. Young Harry has to cope on his own, and is sure to do much better than Varcoe did. Poor Mr Varcoe. But now that I know where you’ve been hiding, the prospect of coming back to check on his progress is suddenly much more attractive.’

She tried to smile, but it looked more like a wince. ‘Good to meet you, Mr Cane,’ she said stiffly.

All Harry could think to say was ‘Thank you for the pies,’ at which she gave a nervous laugh and took off up the track.

Troels, Harry saw, was staring after her, alert as a hound on a scent.

‘Did she say where she and her brother are farming?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Harry lied.

In the tension of the minutes just past, he had held the rabbit pie so hard that its pastry had cracked, and dark gravy was leaking across his hands like blood.

Chapter Twenty

After helping to wolf the pies, Troels threw himself into digging a fire ditch round the little encampment with a single-mindedness that was unsettling to watch. He did not say he was upset, or what had upset him, but it was obvious. He said only, briefly, that he had known brother and sister when he was growing up in Toronto, and that they thought themselves better than their peers because their father was a doctor.

The ask-me-no-more tone in which he said this made it plain that there was more to the story than he was revealing, and Harry remembered their long-ago first conversation on the boat and guessed he had fallen for Miss Slaymaker – who had not struck him as remotely stuck-up, merely self-possessed – and been unable to countenance her rejection of him.

Troels dug as though proving himself and punishing Miss Slaymaker all at once. With sticks and twine they marked out the lines along which they would dig, and Harry worked one way, Troels the other, until they met at last on the other side of the rectangle, by which time night was falling and Troels was sweaty and in a better humour again.

Harry parried his teasing and set about lighting the stove to cook the sausages and onions they had brought with them. Then Troels produced a small bottle of whisky from his knapsack, splashed some into a mug for Harry, and they grew quietly merry, hunkered by the warmth of the stove, sitting side by side on the trunk in lieu of any other furniture

Harry was immensely grateful to him for all he had done and, made stupid and sentimental by the whisky, could not help but imagine the two of them setting up some clumsy domestic arrangement there together. While Troels went outside to relieve himself, Harry bedded down in the blankets on the floor, leaving the bed for his visitor, who had, after all, laboured hard on his behalf until well past sundown, whatever his obscure motive.

Troels returned, kicked off his boots, blew out the lantern and accepted the bed without demur. He fidgeted noisily for a while. Lent courage by darkness, Harry asked if he’d known all along that the Slaymakers held a nearby homestead when he had urged Harry to take this one on.

There was a pause and a heavy sigh, then Troels said that of course he’d noticed their name on the map, because it was such an unusual one, but that he had convinced himself it couldn’t be the same people as the brother was such an unlikely farmer.

‘Like me, you mean,’ Harry said quietly, at which Munck snorted.

There was silence for a while, broken only by the restful sound of a log settling in the stove, then Troels mumbled, ‘I’ll come down there and join you, if you want.’

His words were so indistinct that it took Harry a second or two to be sure he had heard them correctly. At once he thought back to the incident in the Moose Jaw hotel, to the pain of it, and the lasting humiliation. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, really,’ he replied, louder than he had intended.

He had become, he decided, strong enough to fight Troels off, if necessary, and tensed himself in readiness. But no rejoinder followed and soon the other man was snoring, while Harry was left staringly awake, his limbs aching from desire as much as labour.

He woke to the babbling song of a skylark and a cold draught, to find the stove long out and the tent tied open. Troels was outside, standing on the cart to scan the distant view in the direction of the Slaymakers’ place. All good humour gone, face puffy from sleep, he said simply that they must leave at once so he could catch a train east.

They rode on the cart in silence until they neared the little settlement at Winter, where a cluster of men and vehicles had already gathered in expectation of a train.

‘I dare say I’ll be back this way within the year,’ Troels said.

‘Be sure to check on my progress,’ Harry told him, meeting sulks with bonhomie. ‘And give my best to the Jørgensens when you see them next.’

Raising his hat to Troels as the train pulled out, he felt he had passed some trial.

In the weeks that followed, he lost all sense of days of the week. If the sun was up, he worked; if down, he slept. After twice mistakenly trying to buy supplies from Winter’s still rudimentary dry goods store on a Sunday, he picked up a simple seed merchant’s calendar, so he might cross off the days as they passed. Rather than be overwhelmed by the size and number of the tasks before him, he made lists and broke them down into further lists. Building winterproof shelter for both himself and the horses (whom he had mischievously christened Kitty and May, after Winnie’s flighty youngest sisters) was clearly essential, but less urgent than clearing and ploughing his first patch of ground so as to produce a wheat crop, however small. As for the fencing, it transpired that Varcoe had fenced off just one of the homestead’s four half-mile sides. The side he had fenced was where the surveyors had left an optimistic road allowance on what was still untouched prairie. The side facing the road had yet to be done, and the other two he might slyly have been relying on neighbouring farmers to deal with. And then, of course, he had lost heart or time or met his distracting woman. Harry found a great pile of fence posts dumped in the long grass, and after picking his way through on May, the calmer of the two horses, he discovered another load abandoned on a perfectly good cart, along with two rolls of wire and a big box of U staples, the box turned to pulp over the winter.

He established a routine whereby he began each day by augering then hammering in another five posts, stretching the wire between them before he harnessed the horses and set to clearing. Clearing, as he had learnt at Jørgensen’s, was slow work, best done methodically, felling useful trees first, using the horses to pull out such stumps as he couldn’t burn, clearing scrub and the larger stones, and only then attempting to plough.

And in this place, attempting was the word. Ploughing in England always looked such a smooth affair, the horses working in steady lines, guided by the ploughman as the plough parted and folded back the ground in neat brown-black ridges like so many tidy pleats. Here, even more than on Jørgensen’s land, the untouched ground was so thick with roots that even when a patch was sufficiently clear, one’s progress remained agonisingly slow. He calculated that they walked a stately ten or twelve miles in a good day, which meant he had ploughed a little less than an acre and a half. At the day’s end, giving the horses their oats and looking about him, he tried to be glad at the ground he had thus covered and not to dwell on how long it would take one man and two horses to claim his quarter-section of a hundred and sixty acres. After dark, he would sharpen the ploughshare as best he could with the whetstone, although once a week he had no option but to drive it in on the cart to be sharpened in Winter.

He had never appreciated until now the simple pleasure of food being cooked for one by someone else, whatever its quality. Following instructions on the tins of flour and oatmeal, he learnt to make himself water porridge for breakfast and, in lieu of bread, a kind of rough stove-top substitute called bannock, which could be used to mop up meat juices or smeared with marmalade from another tin.

Taking pity on him, the clerk in the store taught him how to save money and time by slowly simmering up a mess of pork and dried beans with a few onions to produce a dish something like one he had tasted all too often at the Jørgensens’. Portions of this could be ladled out and reheated in the course of the week, or even eaten cold if he was too tired to wait for the stove to heat it.

His only conversations were with that store man, discounting the ones he had with the horses as they worked for him, and he made an effort not to seem too pathetically starved of human contact on his trips in for more bread or beans or salt pork.

The area he was clearing and ploughing was hemmed in on all sides by small trees and prairie grass, so his views were minimal. But occasionally, on his dawn sessions working on the fence around the perimeter, he glimpsed another farmer, dark, bearded, walking behind a plough through land that had clearly been ploughed for at least two seasons already. He raised a hand in greeting but the other man rarely waved back so perhaps had not seen him. As for Petra Slaymaker, he saw her just twice on his way to or from town. The first time she passed him at a trot, and made do with a brisk salute with her gloved hand in answer to his raising his hat. The second time she was in some difficulty with her pony and, knowing horses, he pulled up and jumped down to help her extract a sharp stone it had picked up in one hoof. She thanked him and asked how he did and whether he had heard from his friend Mr Munck. He began to explain that Troels was not really a friend, but must have sounded half crazed with loneliness, for she seemed in a great anxiety to be off and he did not like to detain her.

He had sown his first few acres of wheat, which seemed a laughably small achievement, and had begun to clear a section on the rise of land where he imagined he might erect a little house, when he fell ill. Perhaps it was influenza caught from someone in Winter; perhaps he had poisoned himself with too large a pot of pork and beans kept too long at the back of the stove.

All he knew was that one fine morning he had barely eaten his porridge and started hammering in the first of the day’s fence posts than he brought it all up again. He felt better after being sick, so after resting a few minutes and rinsing his mouth out from his water bottle, he returned to work. He managed to drive in a second post, but then all at once found his arms had no more strength in them, and he had to drop the sledgehammer again and lean against the nearest tree. Then he found he had to sit. He told himself it need not be for long. If he simply closed his eyes a little, the dizziness would surely pass.

After a while, he could not have said how long, he became aware that he was now lying down, staring up at the sky. He could feel moss and twigs against his ears and neck, and cold dew soaking into his trousers, and knew he should move, but the chill and damp were far outweighed by the great, soothing comfort of being horizontal and not having to stir. So he closed his eyes again.

He must have fallen unconscious; when something made him open his eyes again, the quality of light had changed, and the weather with it. The sky overhead was dark grey, where he had last seen it blue, and it was raining. He felt water sluicing down his neck and inside his shirt, felt the raindrops begin to fall as hard as hail on his face and hands. And yet still he couldn’t find the strength to move, or the will. On the contrary, he almost relished the sensation of the water washing his face and the ground growing spongy beneath his fingers. He entertained a delicious fantasy that the ground would soon begin to absorb him if he only lay there still enough, that the sweet moss was beginning to embrace him and would shortly start to hide him from view.

He closed his eyes again. This was the stillest and most calm he had been in months, if one discounted the dead exhaustion of sleep.

‘Hello? Are you all right? I’ve got your horse back for you. She was . . . Hello?’

He felt a hand, hot against his soaking chest, and opened his eyes again. It had stopped raining, although the plants and trees were still bright with it and the sodden ground seemed to be steaming.

A dark angel thinly disguised by a rough reddish beard was crouching over him, a hand on his heart. The angel smiled briefly. ‘You’re not dead, then. Are you drunk?’ Harry couldn’t answer, but the man brought his face close to his and sniffed him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not drunk!’ He sat back slightly and moved his hand from Harry’s heart to his forehead, where it pushed back his hair and briefly sank on his brow. ‘You’ve a mighty fever. We need to get you home. The nearest doc’s in Unity, but my sister’s a nurse. This won’t be very comfortable, but I’m going to put you on to your horse. Up you get now.’

He caught Harry under his arms and hauled him into a sitting position against the tree again, so that Harry could see May standing calmly by, eating whatever grass was to hand. Then he heaved him upright so that, for want of strength, Harry fell close against him and was briefly aware of his relative warmth after the damp chill of the ground, and of a smell off him like spiced woodsmoke. Then the man was heaving him over his shoulder in a sort of fireman’s lift, and, from there, across May’s broad back.

To be slung, stomach down, over a horse’s back was hardly easeful, but the warmth she gave off was comforting even in his stupor. Holding him firmly by the belt, the man hauled one of his legs up and over her. Harry was sure he would simply slide off head first, but as though sensing what was required of her, May left off eating and raised her head so that he could grip her mane on either side while his rescuer, after a couple of swearing failures, because she was tall and there was no mounting block handy in such a spot, managed to climb astride her too, by hauling on a low branch. Close behind him, thigh to thigh, and reaching round him for her reins with one hand, he held Harry firmly against him with his spare arm. After clicking his tongue to get May moving, he murmured, ‘Soon have you home,’ in a low, soothing tone that might have been addressed equally to mare or master.

The necessarily slow journey could have taken anything from half an hour to two. Harry had no sense of time passing, slipping in and out of consciousness as he was. More than once his rescuer brought both arms briefly around him to pass the reins from one hand to the other, murmuring that his arm was falling asleep. Riding bareback, they could move at no more than a walk. May’s rather galumphing trot, which reminded Harry of an old insult of Jack’s that a certain horse he had to treat in Chester was like a sofa with hooves, would have toppled them both in no time.

At some point night fell and Harry woke to find his head flopped backwards on the other man’s shoulder, his view full of stars and the other’s soft beard tickling his ear.

When he woke next, it was to see lanternlight and hear a woman’s voice. A figure he soon realised was Petra Slaymaker was now leading May by the bridle. ‘I’d quite given you up for lost,’ she was saying to her brother. ‘I’d all but taken down the rifle to protect my honour.’ And she chuckled.