A Place Called Winter (19 page)

Shortly after that, they arrived at the Slaymakers’ homestead, where her brother lowered him back over May’s neck. The sister held him in place while the brother dismounted, then the two of them unloaded him and carried him inside and laid him on a bed. He saw plank walls, framed pictures, and was aware of someone sliding off his boots and soaking outer clothes. A quilt was put over him, up to his chin, a real patchwork quilt smelling faintly of lavender and summertime. Petra Slaymaker held a bony hand against his head, then slipped a thermometer under his tongue. While she waited, she held his wrist and took his pulse, gazing intently at her pocket watch the while. She removed the thermometer, read it, then held a glass of water to his lips so he could drink.

‘You’ve a high fever, Mr Cane,’ she told him. ‘Paul will drive over at first light to fetch anything precious and your other horse. Sleep now. Rest.’

Chapter Twenty-One

At the time, he could not have said how long the fever held him, but they told him afterwards that he had been in danger and delirious for two days before it began to break. Day, night, heat and cold were all confused to him, and he was racked by dark dreams that blurred with waking fantasies in which he was being hunted by Troels Munck in league with his former brothers-in-law, hunted with dogs and guns across the empty landscape of Cut Knife, which at one time lay deep in moonlit snow, at another roasted in pitiless sun. So it was that his slow emergence from the fever, and growing understanding that he was not being hunted but cared for, was also the dawning of a friendship.

He had doubtless said much in his delirium, but the first words he consciously spoke from his sickbed were ‘You are very kind.’

Petra Slaymaker was in the act of washing his face and arms with a flannel she had been dipping in a basin of hot soapy water. The soap smelled of cedar, or some such bracing wood, quite unlike the harsh stuff he had grown used to at the Jørgensens’. She paused in wringing out the flannel. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Welcome back. I’m not kind. Just ferociously practical. Can you hear this?’ She clicked her fingers to one side of his head.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And this?’ She did the same on the other side.

‘Yes,’ he told her.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ve known fever like that leave a person deaf on one side. You were so hot that first night, I thought we’d need a priest! How do you feel?’

‘Hungry!’

She laughed. ‘Thirsty, too, I bet.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll bring you some broth.’

‘I should get up.’

‘Why? Do you need the pot? It’s just here.’

‘No, but . . . There are things I should be doing.’

‘You’ll be doing nothing for a while yet,’ she sighed. ‘You’ll be far too weak.’

‘But . . .’

‘Paul brought your other horse back here, and he loaded your things into your cart and drove that here with her. So even if they find your tent, nobody’s making off with your treasures. You read?’

‘Yes.’

‘We can trade books.’

‘Good. I’m a little bored of some of mine.’

‘I’ll leave you to wash the rest of you, now that you can. And, er . . .’ She glanced down at the chamber pot, over which a spotless piece of white cloth was draped. ‘Just don’t try standing up yet. Or if you must, do it very slowly. You’ll be dizzy. I won’t be far away. This isn’t a mansion.’

‘You gave up your room.’

‘Not me. I’m across the way. You’re in my brother’s bed. Paul’s been bedding down on the couch.’

‘That’s very kind of him.’

‘It is. He’s tall as a pine.’

When a woman was beautiful but did nothing to show her beauty off, or had no time for fashion or an elaborate coiffure, Winnie would call her
fine
. Petra Slaymaker was fine. She had sky-blue eyes and good bone structure, wore her auburn hair tied back in a simple plait and was evidently an assiduous hat-wearer when the sun shone, for her delicate Scottish skin was almost unfreckled.

Left alone, Harry realised he was in another man’s striped nightshirt – the brother’s, presumably. He succeeded in swinging his legs out of the bed, but could only stand to use the chamber pot by clutching at the brass bedstead. His urine was alarmingly dark from dehydration. Lowering the pot without spilling the contents almost defeated him, and he had to sit on the bed’s edge to wash his lower half. To climb back under the covers with skin that was no longer fever-sticky was a delicious sensation, and he had barely begun to look at the little room around him with fresh interest than he fell asleep again.

When he woke next, the brother was sitting beside the bed, eyes bright above his red-brown beard, wood chips in his slightly wild hair. ‘Brought you some broth,’ he said. ‘But I’m under strict instructions not to hand it over until you’re sitting up and in no danger of scalding yourself.’

A good, savoury smell coiled up in the steam from the mug he was holding.

‘Chicken?’ Harry asked.

‘Pigeon,’ he said. ‘Sit up.’

Harry hauled himself upright against the pillows.

‘I guess we never met properly,’ the brother said.

‘You saved my life.’

‘Yes, but . . . I’m Paul Slaymaker. Petra’s brother.’

‘How do you do? Harry Cane.’

‘Were you teased about that at school?’

‘Of course. I was called Hurry and Windy. I . . . I don’t know how to begin to—’

‘Drink your broth. And there’s a piece of bannock, if you’ve the teeth for it. A bit stale, I reckon.’

‘Thank you. I’m sure it’s delicious.’

‘Ssh. Eat.’

Harry had assumed Paul Slaymaker would leave him to eat, but the strange young man sat while he drank the broth and ate the rather dried-out piece of bannock, wrinkling his eyes in a smile whenever Harry caught his gaze.

‘The children were staring in at your window earlier. You’re an object of veneration,’ he said, as Harry was finishing.

‘Your children?’

‘No. Little Crees. There’s a camp of non-treaty Cree a couple of miles away. Our little patch of wood has a significance for their women. Men in town wouldn’t like our letting them, but . . . They often make the journey there and bring the younger children with them. Much against my better judgement, Petra is doing her best to teach the mothers to read and write. She’s also studying to speak their language. She says it’s harder than Ancient Greek. Horrifies the women at church, who probably have her down for a rebel and a witch. All done? Good.’ He took the mug and little plate. ‘Sleep now. I’m back to my plough. I’ll be back at sunset and you can tell me all about yourself then. Assuming that what you said in your fever was just crazy dreams talking.’

‘Oh dear. Did I talk much?’

Paul Slaymaker stood. He was so tall, his hair seemed to brush the ceiling. He grinned down at Harry, teasing him. ‘Oh, not so very much. But you did hold my hand fiercely at one point and kiss it so hard I thought I’d have a bruise.’

‘Oh! Oh I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Most flattering attention I’ve had since we left Toronto,’ he said. He had to stoop as he passed through the doorway.

At some point in the afternoon, Petra slipped in with a cup of tea and a ginger biscuit.

‘Mr Cane?’

‘Oh please call me Harry,’ he told her.

She smiled to herself. ‘My father always said to treat patients with extra respect to compensate them for any loss of dignity caused by their afflictions.’

‘I believe I left all dignity behind in Halifax,’ he assured her.

‘Harry, then. Might I ask you an impertinent question?’

‘Of course.’

She glanced out of the little window, her sharp attention momentarily snared by a bird swooping down from a tree. ‘I was simply wondering how you came to be friends with Mr Munck.’

‘Oh but we’re not really friends,’ he told her. ‘We met on the boat and he rather adopted me as a project or an experiment. He found me work on his cousin’s farm near Moose Jaw all last year and he steered me out here because he knew a good quarter-section was mine for the taking if I moved swiftly. He frightens me rather. If I fail here the way poor Varcoe did, I think he’ll swoop down and claim my soul, like Mephistopheles.’

‘So it’s you, not he, who’s the homesteader down there?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re not . . . close?’

‘No.’

His denial brought a pungent recollection of having his face pushed into a hotel mattress, but it was quite true, he reflected: he had not so much as a forwarding address for the man.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘He said you knew each other back in Toronto.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted, her lips tightening in distaste. ‘And I never thought to see him again.’

‘And you probably won’t,’ he assured her. ‘He’s constantly on the move. I expect spring has seen him sail back to England to shepherd out another clutch of trusting young puppies.’

She looked confused.

‘Rich young men,’ he explained, ‘looking for adventure.’

‘Remittance men?’ she said with distaste.

‘Is that what you call them?’

‘When they live on money sent from home instead of by the sweat of their brow.’

‘Ah.’ She was looking severe, so he added, ‘I have some savings but I don’t live off money from home.’

She smiled a little at that and asked if it would trouble him if she practised her piano.

They were Toronto born, to Scottish parents. Their father was a doctor, unworldly and impractical in his tireless devotion to the poor of Cabbagetown and the teeming slums peopled by settlers – many of them driven from the Highlands by landlords or from Ireland by hunger – who had neither the means nor the wits to move on into Canada’s promising interior. The elder, with far more in common with their father than with their snobbish, dissatisfied mother, Petra had trained in all but a certificate as his nurse, but it was to his undisguised disappointment that Paul proved both squeamish and without scientific ability, interested more in Schiller than in test tubes. Their father died unfairly young, of cholera contracted from drinking tea with one grateful slum patient too many. Moving swiftly towards a second marriage to a wealthy Chicago meat merchant and city councillor she had met on a trip south of the border, their mother was keen to be rid of two hulking reminders that she was not quite as young as her hair colour would have her fiancé believe.

She manoeuvred for them to move to Edinburgh, where she had cousins who would take them in, but they rebelled, waving her off to her new life across the border and setting up house modestly together. Petra took in piano students, while her brother enrolled at the university, studying philosophy with a vague view of then training as a lawyer. But then some crisis had arisen, obliging them to move out to Winter and to make a dramatic new start.

Neither said as much. The subject was changed and a passage in their history skirted over, and Harry, with shameful secrets enough of his own, had no intention of pressing them for details or explanation.

It was a fine day, with a real hint of spring warmth to it. Drawn by laughter, after he had dressed, and stripped Paul’s bed to air, Harry emerged on to the little veranda and was startled to find Petra at a table with three young Cree women. The women were working at copying letters with chalk on little home-made blackboards, while a crowd of children of different ages either hung around their necks or played back and forth between the nearby trees. The children hid when Harry appeared and the women looked wary until, in halting words of their own language, Petra reassured them. Then, as if to emphasise what she had said, she pointed at him and said in English, ‘Our friend Harry.’

‘Friend,’ the women repeated while Petra wrote the word down for them.

‘Our friend. My friend. Your friend.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Inspired by the Slaymakers’ example, Harry drew on his savings to order a house not unlike theirs from the Eaton’s catalogue. It would not come intact, of course, but as a kit of preconstructed wooden panels, windows, doors, floorboards and roof shingles. It still took two men a week or three to hammer the thing together. Paul had hired a couple of railway workers to help build his, but he reassured Harry that it was still far quicker and easier than building a traditional log house, and the walls could be packed with wool for insulation and papered or painted to taste. It was also easily extended should one’s needs expand.

While waiting for delivery, Harry allowed himself an hour a day to clear a site, choosing the high ground that would have a good view over his land and would not, he judged, be at risk of flooding in the spring thaw. Once he had cut down a few trees, he would be able to see one end of the Slaymaker place from one end of his, which would, he judged, be reassuring without feeling intrusive to either household. Petra joked that they could establish a signalling system with coloured flags.

Reluctant to continue digging small holes in the ground any longer than he needed to, now that the season of biting flies was upon them, he dug himself a long, deep pit for a privy on the edge of the building plot – far enough away for hygiene but not too distant for battling to in deep snow. With Paul’s help, he built a little pointed-roofed tarpaper shed over it and constructed a seat using the top of a broken-down deal table fallen off the back of some luckless immigrant family’s cart. With a roof light for ventilation and an improvised bookshelf, it felt like a promise of civilisation to come, even though it was some distance from his tent.

The time passed when he could sensibly plant any further wheat, but as his first tiny crop’s shoots began to be distinguishable among the inevitable weeds sprouting alongside them, he maintained his punishing schedule of clearing, ploughing and fencing off his territory. He was too tired of an evening to do much more than eat and sleep, but the Slaymakers sought him out occasionally for a trip to Winter for provisions, or to catch the train somewhere for a day out, or to join them for supper to stop him
going quite crazy
. And they all went to the nearest Anglican church on Sunday, even though it was a round trip of nearly two hours by cart. The Slaymakers were no more God-fearing than Harry was; they certainly weren’t pious Lutherans like the Jørgensens, but went, he suspected, for the same reasons he did, for the reassurance and continuity represented by familiar words and well-known hymns, badly sung with no sturdier accompaniment than a wheezy little harmonium. And they went for the chance to meet people.

The Slaymakers were in many ways as self-contained and aloof as Harry was shy, and there was a tacit understanding between them never to linger much when the service ended or to commit too often to church socials or picnics at Manitou Lake. But, as Petra said, even in such a small and scattered community, it was better to be known a little than to be thought odd and avoided entirely.

Another reason they found for seeing him was books. Harry wrote to his bookseller in Piccadilly, where he had never thought to close his account, and ordered Petra a complete set of Dumas in translation and Paul a set of Dickens, to thank them for caring for him in his sickness when he would surely have died without their intervention. Once the books arrived, they lent him volumes as they finished them, and borrowed books of his in turn. The Dumas, especially, were so preposterously removed from the reality of their lives, with their silks and jewels, swordfights and conspiracies, that to read them was to be briefly transported, but they were fustian stuff for the most part, and he sensed from Petra’s response to them that she would rather he had given her something less sedate. She retaliated with historical novels by William Kirby and John Richardson and with adventure fantasies by R. M. Ballantyne and the like, which made their prairie lives, with the Cree marginalised and faintly pathetic, and few encounters with wild animals larger than a coyote, seem tame and unadventurous.

Since meeting Winnie, Harry had come to realise that he found the company of women easier than that of men. Or perhaps it was since his fateful involvement with Browning. Was it simply that women presented no danger of temptation? Whatever the reason, he found that Petra’s initial guardedness with him rapidly gave way to a frank and easy friendship. She knew his partial history, that he had a wife who had divorced him for another man, and the sorrow of a daughter effectively lost to him, but she was without feminine guile or game-playing and seemed to accept with something approaching relief that he was not about to pay court to her. She felt uncomplicatedly like a sister to him, as George had done before her affection had turned to disgust.

Paul he found far harder to read. He was quite without that tiresome aggression or competitiveness that even casual male acquaintances seemed to feel bound to display and, compared to his more forceful sister, could keep his counsel to the point of seeming withdrawn. And yet he had a way of smiling that Harry felt sure might be satirical. He believed Paul thought him a citified fool. The more he thought this, the more foolishly he feared he talked in his presence.

Word reached him that his house, or the makings of it, had finally been deposited at Winter station. With even the larger of his two carts, it would take several journeys to gather every stack and bundle of the kit to the site. Several of the panels were heavy as well as cumbersome. He had to clear a way so that he could bring cart to plot without panels and posts snagging on branches, and then it took him a while to unload.

It looked very little like a house and every bit like a lumber yard where an explosive had been detonated. His initial resolve to be methodical and stack like with like had crumbled as the day wore on and he ran out of space to unload tidily. He was looking about him in the fading light, knowing he should stop and light the stove to heat up some unappetising stew, when he heard laughter and turned to see the Slaymakers hurrying up from the track where they had just left their cart. They had been to the Battlefords on the train for the day, they told him, and called in to take him with them, but he must have been out fetching one of his loads. Petra insisted on giving him some cheese and a loaf of proper yeast bread – one of the great treats of such a trip – and began to rebuke him for thinking to take on such a big task unassisted, but Paul stopped her.

‘Perhaps he’d rather do it on his own,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’s quite capable.’

‘I’m not,’ Harry told him cheerfully but said he didn’t like to make any further calls on their good will.

‘Oh stuff,’ Petra said. ‘You’ll pay us back in kind some day, you’ll see.’

He admitted he had tried without success to find hired hands to help him and said the least he could do was pay Paul for his time, as he would have paid them, but he was overruled in that, too.

‘You’ll help me enough when our harvests are ready,’ Paul assured him. ‘And I promise not to pay you a bean!’ Before they carried on for home, he showed Harry the pouch of precious instructions and plans tacked to the back of the door. ‘Campfire reading for you,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, keep it in your privy, or somewhere dry where the mice won’t gnaw away something crucial . . . I lost a page of ours and had to improvise.’

He arrived first thing the next morning with a gunny sack of tools, a ladder and a packed lunch, as he did every day, Sundays included, until the walls were up, the windows in and the doors hung. He helped Harry unroll and nail roofing felt in place but left him the tasks he could complete thereafter on his own: hammering down floorboards and fixing shingles and gutters.

Their conversation, such as it was, was almost entirely about the matter in hand – the bedding-in and assembling of the house’s wooden frame, the raising and joining of its outer walls and inner tongue-and-groove partitions – yet Harry felt Paul’s character steadily opening out to him and grew to appreciate his gruff commentary on what they were doing, his dry humour at Harry’s expense, the way the softness of his gaze or kindness of his smile could make his pioneer’s beard seem a mask or piece of disguise.

A more experienced man might have armed himself against such a thing, but Harry was not experienced. So he was charmed, drawn in, and before he realised quite what was happening, he found he was looking forward to Paul’s company in a way Paul surely didn’t intend, and finding small ways to delay his departure each day.

One morning dawned unexpectedly cold, and Paul arrived in a thick flannel overshirt, which he tossed aside as working warmed him up. Gathering up his things at the end of the day, Harry found the shirt and took it back to his tent with the tools, thinking to keep it from the dew. Lying on his camp bed after the evening’s unvarying supper, however, to read by lamplight for a little, he became aware of the faint scent coming off it, Paul’s scent of nutmeg and woodsmoke, and without thinking, he drew it to him as he never could the wearer, and pressed his face deep into its age-softened fabric.

It was a ridiculous thing: a schoolboy crush, grotesque in a grown man, which threatened to endanger a pair of friendships he was coming to hold dear. Waking to find the shirt draped across his pillow, he dressed quickly, washed and shaved in bitterly cold water as though it might instil upright sense into a softened nature, and took the shirt back to the emerging house while the kettle heated for his breakfast. He spent the day trying and failing to find his neighbour less appealing, looking in vain for whatever small, unflattering detail he might use to effect a cure.

Like the other women homesteaders, of whom there were still remarkably few, Petra’s days were as full as any farmer’s, and she had been obliged to master chores that in Toronto would have fallen to servants. So, like any farmer’s wife, she maintained a clutch of chickens, milked a cow and had a pig to fatten, but she also had to clean the house, wash clothes and cook. She claimed to hate cooking with a passion, an attitude not helped by her having a natural talent for it. Since the nearest doctors were in Unity and Lashburn, her skills as a nurse, for which she would be paid as often as not in bags of flour or sugar, were often called for. All of which left little time for her particular inflammatory interest in bringing basic literacy to a handful of Cree women, and learning in turn from them both their language and the uses of local trees and herbs. Paul always said it was she, not he, who should have been enrolled at the university.

Still, she found occasion to drop in now and then on the building project, to see how the house was progressing and to hand over some reluctantly produced delight such as jam tarts or the bacon and egg pies that Paul teased would make them rich if only she would be serious and bake batches of thirty. That day she came in the afternoon bringing Harry a bottle of the pungent but effective fly oil the Cree women made, and a brace of muffins made from chokecherry, a fruit those same women had taught her to gather and preserve. There were several local berries, all of them prized, and he had yet to learn to tell them apart. She balanced on two floor trusses to admire the view Harry would eventually enjoy from the veranda, said she hoped Paul wasn’t taking all the most satisfying jobs for himself, and pointed out that they would have to invite everyone from church to a housewarming picnic once the house was done.

‘Really?’ Harry asked, alarmed.

‘People expect it,’ she said. ‘Normal people, that is. We’ve been to several since we arrived. You need never have them round again, but it satisfies everyone’s curiosity and reassures them that you’re no fancier or better off than they are, which people like. A good trick is to do it before you’ve moved in much furniture; if they can’t sit, they won’t linger so. You boys haven’t forgotten we have to go to the bachelors’ ball at the Haysoms’ place tonight?’

Paul groaned.

‘It’s what the muffins are for really. You didn’t tell him,’ she said, realising.

‘Forgot,’ Paul mumbled.

She flicked a stray nail her brother’s way. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she told Harry.

‘Yes he does,’ Paul growled. ‘I’m not going alone.’

‘You won’t be alone. You’ll be with me, and I certainly can’t go alone.’

‘Of course I’ll come,’ Harry said. ‘You both make it sound so appealing.’

‘It won’t be that bad, but you’re both to dance with me at least once. Who knows? I might even land myself a rich husband and not just bruised toes.’

Paul laughed slowly and sarcastically, which earned him another nail.

‘I’ll be off,’ she said. ‘Let you gentlemen resume your hammering.’

Bachelors’ balls, heartily supported by the churches, were designed to lure women into newly settled areas. Harry had heard the Jørgensen daughters talk of them with longing disguised as scorn, Moose Jaw being too established a place to need such crude affairs. Winter and the next stops along the alphabetical line, Yonker and Vera, were typical in having women still outnumbered by some twenty to one. And, of course, most of those women were only there because they were already somebody’s wife. Such dances would normally be held in a church hall or large schoolroom, but Yonker, the nearest town to the Haysoms’ place, was too new and underpopulated yet to possess either, so the Haysoms had mounted a broad awning on posts – a kind of marquee – on the side of their barn. Because the tracks were so dusty at that time of year, Petra had done as the other women did and travelled with her party dress in a bag so she could change on arrival. The band consisted of a fiddler, a banjo player and a man on a piano that sounded as though it had been jolted many miles on a cart to get there. Rather than have people raise a dust storm by dancing on earth that was powder dry, Haysom had gone to the trouble of constructing a dance floor. The planks nailed across a square framework produced a slightly bouncy and extremely noisy effect.

Dancing was already under way as they arrived, and Harry was startled to see, by the light of lanterns slung on poles around the dance floor’s edge, men dancing with other men, not cheek to cheek admittedly, but holding hands.