A Place Called Winter (23 page)

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if everything were allowed, how many men would discover they were like you? I sometimes think most men dislike women intensely or resent them or something, and only marry them because that is what is expected, and because of children. And because no other option presents itself.’

‘Oh, but I like women very much!’

‘Oh. Good. Only not . . . ?’

‘Not quite so much. No.’

Paul returned, at once fired up from riding in the wet and dark and almost asleep on his feet from fatigue. There seemed, as always, an immediacy of understanding between brother and sister that left much unsaid.

‘I thought you’d be in bed,’ he said.

‘We were talking,’ she told him. ‘You’re frozen. There’s ham and pea soup. Let me heat some for you both. How far did you get?’

‘Only halfway to Zumbro, then I realised I had no idea where I was going to go when I got there.’

‘So . . .’

‘No. I shan’t be arrested for murder just yet. But if he comes back . . .’

‘I doubt he’d do that now,’ Harry ventured.

‘If he comes back,’ she said, going over to the stove and sliding the pot of soup on to the heat, ‘you may carefully maim him for me. But now I’d like the matter laid to rest.’

She had no appetite, but both men remembered they were extremely hungry and the simple meal that followed had a slightly hectic merriment to it from the strain of talking about anything but the outrage committed in that very room that afternoon. They talked of harvest yield, threatened bad weather and the need for Harry to build a proper, larger barn come the spring, and to set about, like them, laying down sufficient supplies for when the tracks and road became impassable with snow.

He had dreaded the coming of winter at Moose Jaw, partly because his little room was so cold, but mainly because the Jørgensens viewed it with such unremitting alarm as a season of death, danger and Nordic introspection. The Slaymakers, by contrast, seemed to regard it as children did Christmas, as a time of excitement and opportunity. She looked forward to being able to read in the daytime without guilt, and he could hardly wait to strap on his skis or to get out the little sleigh he had spent much of the last winter restoring. Harry found their attitudes infectious to the point where he almost looked forward to waking to find the windows crystalled over.

The rain had come again, so heavily it was drumming on the roof, and they wouldn’t hear of his riding home in it. Petra found a pillow and quilt for him so he could sleep on the couch where Paul had spent night after night when she was nursing Harry though his fever. After months of being the only soul in the house when he turned out the lamp, Harry liked hearing the others pottering about the place as they settled, following an unthinking routine in which she visited the privy before Paul did and left him to put out the lamps. Tonight she had a request she didn’t need to voice. ‘I’ll bolt the door when I turn in,’ Paul told her quietly. ‘Or Harry will.’

Harry was the last to bed, as was only practical as both their rooms opened on to his. He sprinted to and from the privy in the pouring rain, then bolted the door behind him, removed his jacket and boots, turned out the lamp and hunkered down on the rather lumpy couch, pulling the quilt over him. He had not long closed his eyes when a door opened. Even in stockinged feet, the tread was so heavy he could tell it was Paul’s.

‘Thought you might be cold,’ Paul murmured, and draped a heavy fur blanket on top of Harry’s quilt.

Harry remembered it folded at the foot of the bed in Paul’s room. It was made of black bear pelt, barbarous, soft and supremely warm. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

Rather than slipping immediately back to his room, however, Paul perched on the edge of the couch. Immediately Harry was wide awake, mindful that Petra lay only feet from them and was surely not sleeping. Half lying down beside him, Paul reached for Harry’s hand and drew his arm round him as though to gain comfort from the awkward embrace. Harry slipped his hand inside Paul’s unbuttoned flannel nightshirt. Paul held its palm briefly against his breast so that Harry could feel the warm fur there, and the pounding heart. Then he took the hand in his and kissed it, just once and lingeringly, before standing with a sigh and padding back to his room.

For all its indirectness, for all that neither could see the other or look into his eyes, it felt like the most nakedly tender gesture that had yet passed between them.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Petra abruptly ceased coming to church. The way Paul put it was ‘She has no stomach for it,’ and Harry knew from his own experience that she would be dreading eyes upon her, and anticipating judgement where there was only idle ignorance or bland curiosity.

Harry continued to go occasionally, even when Paul as well as Petra stopped. It was nothing much to do with God or Jesus. The building was scarcely conducive to uplift of the soul, being little more than a clapboard barn with a perfunctory bell tower at one end, and the vicar a sweaty-palmed misfit it was easy to imagine had been obliged to leave an English parish in a hurry. The comfort, a thing Harry could not have predicted, came from the sense of home and England that arose from the services, the flower arrangements on the windowsills, the sweet familiarity of the old text in the damp-spotted prayer books and the Union Jack that stood to one side of the altar.

Harry’s most urgent task was the digging of a drain from the house so that he didn’t have to carry waste water from his kitchen in a basin but could simply pull a plug in a sink. Then there were sacks of grain to transport to the depot at the station and winter supplies to be bought further afield, in places that deep snow would suddenly make feel unfeasibly far.

Petra arrived on her own one morning, as he was working on his kitchen. He had dug the drain and installed a sink and a pipe, and was now padding and caulking around where he had been forced to cut a hole in the wall where the pipe left the house.

She had an odd request. She wanted his company on a trip down to the nearest unofficial Cree campground. Their women visited her freely enough, but Paul disliked her going to their territory, and for all her rebellious bravado, she would have felt uncomfortable going there without a white man beside her.

The latest snowfall had not been too deep and the roads were still passable if one went slowly. Harry didn’t want to cause trouble between brother and sister, however. ‘Does Paul . . . ?’ he began.

‘He doesn’t know I’m going,’ she admitted. ‘I let him think I was going to Vera with you.’

‘You were so sure of your power to persuade me.’

‘I can go to the camp on my own perfectly well.’

In fact he knew from talking with Paul that he felt there was less to fear from the red men than the white women, and the damage their tongues and religious influence could do. The almost tribal mistrust of white settlers for Indians was repellent to him, but it was utterly ubiquitous and unchallenged.

‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ he told her. ‘Stay here in the warm while I saddle up.’

He pulled on his warmest outer layers, including the helmet of Jaeger wool obediently bought at the outfitters on the Strand, which was already proving so invaluable he seemed to wear it for months at a time, sometimes even in bed. Her need or wish was clearly urgent. She was a good horsewoman, the only woman he had seen locally who routinely took to the saddle rather than perching on a little, two-wheeled buggy, but there was a tension about her that made him worry about letting her set forth on her own.

There were two camps of non-treaty Cree who had lingered in the area during the coming of the railway and the subsequent wave of European settlers, presumably banking on the railway bringing trading opportunities that would outweigh the seizure of lands. Chief Frencheater led one, on the east of the creek, Chief Whompom another, on the western side. The women and children so attached to the Slaymaker wood lived around Whompom. Rumours were rife as to how long these groups could stay, or indeed whether the mounted police would soon be called upon to evict them so the land they were on could be claimed for homesteading. Their traditional sources of food and income, through hunting and trapping or raising horses, must have been hard to pursue now that so much of their old territory had been fenced off.

As Harry and Petra made their way there, often letting their horses pick a route in single file where the snow had drifted across the road, Petra told him she believed the men were having to rely increasingly for income on the skills of the women in weaving blankets or making decorative leather goods and beadwork, all things that could be sold or at least traded in kind.

‘We should both buy something if anyone suggests it,’ she said. ‘It’s polite, they’re hungry and you won’t be sorry. They make some wonderful things. And don’t expect many of the men to speak much English, especially not the older ones. I suspect it’s a matter of pride as much as education.’

On the still, wintry air, they smelled the camp before they saw it, woodsmoke and, mixed through it, a pungent scent of something cooking or being smoked. At first glance, the cluster of tepees seemed to Harry chaotic, but as they drew nearer, attracting a noisy crowd of children, who soon recognised Petra, he saw it was as orderly as any village built of stone, with smaller tents for domestic life and larger ones for communal activities. Even with snow on the ground, there were people at work outside, cleaning animal pelts that had been stretched on wooden frames, preparing meat for drying or mending carts. The white man’s myth of pipe-smoking Indian indolence was dispelled at once by ubiquitous small sounds of industry. The contrast presented with the hovels where he had found Varcoe could not have been stronger.

Petra dismounted, so Harry did too, and she encouraged him to trust some boys to lead Kitty safely away to food and water. They were taken to pay their respects to Whompom. The chief and his sons had gone to check trap lines, they then learnt, but his old squaw received them instead.

Harry said how do you do and doffed his hat and followed Petra’s cue in sitting on a sort of skin cushion to which the old woman waved them. Petra stammered a few words in Cree, adding, ‘We’ve come to see Lily. Lily Thunder.’

The old woman seemed to take this in, then pointed enquiringly at Harry.

‘Oh,’ Petra said. ‘No. Just me.’

At this the chief’s wife called raucously for one of the children who had followed them to the mouth of the tepee, and dispatched her with what was clearly a command.

A long silence followed, broken only by the settling of logs on the fire in the tepee’s middle; it seemed not to bother the old squaw a whit. She invited Harry, with a gesture, to share her pipe, but he declined with a smile, miming coughing, which she thought extremely amusing.

‘Funny,’ she said to Petra, pointing at Harry. ‘Funny man.’

‘Yes,’ Petra said, glancing at him too. ‘Funny man. Oh. Here.’ She reached into her coat pocket and brought forth a jar of her pincherry jam and a napkinful of muffins. ‘For you and Chief Whompom,’ she said, and the old lady took them complacently and tucked them away on the ground to her side.

The little girl returned to the mouth of the tepee and announced that Lily would see them now. Released by the old woman, they followed the child through the camp. They received curious stares from all they passed, apart from the women who knew Petra, who greeted her warmly and reserved their curiosity for Harry.

‘They’re frightened that if they go to a reserve, their children will be taken from them,’ she muttered. ‘And their fears are well grounded.’

Harry was interested in the Cree but made nervous too for the simple reason that he was not always sure if he was faced with a man or a woman. The men were beardless, and men and women alike wore their hair long. Over a certain age they were uniformly wrinkled, the women’s features often just as powerful and craggily angular as the men’s. To his untrained eye, the traditional clothes of one gender seemed confusingly like those of the other, a matter not helped by women electing to wear the most practical of Western garments, which were male, of course. Compared to Western women, for whom femininity often seemed a complex and time-consuming game they were obliged to play, Cree women struck him as unconstrained, as assertive, as powerful, even, as their menfolk. He was too shy to ask but suspected this was one of the things that had attracted Petra to their culture.

Lily Thunder’s tepee was slightly set apart from the others and, unlike them, was positioned so that its opening faced away towards the creek and distant countryside, as though she acted as the encampment’s sentinel. Taller than Harry, and athletic, with strong hands and a determined jaw, she looked as though she might have shot a bison or wrestled a young steer with equanimity, and yet she was hung around with feathered necklaces and had a small boy clinging to her leg.

‘He’s adorable,’ Petra said, ruffling his hair. ‘Is he yours?’

Lily Thunder laughed uproariously, showing gleaming teeth. ‘I look after him,’ she said in a guttural voice. ‘He loves his Lily, don’t you, precious?’

The boy nodded and hid his face in her skirts.

Lily stopped smiling. ‘How can Lily help you?’

‘Alawa said you could help me with . . . some medicine I need,’ Petra said.

‘Come,’ Lily told her, but laid a firm hand on Harry’s arm. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Handsome man. Wait out here.’

Petra caught his eye to reassure him as she went inside. ‘Won’t be long.’

People evidently regarded Lily with some respect, for her taking Petra into her tepee seemed to grant permission to others to approach Harry. A man beckoned him over to admire some moccasins, and a woman tugged his sleeve to look at her jars of pungent bear and buffalo grease. He bought a prettily beaded pair of moccasins to post to Phyllis for Christmas. Although the season for pestilential blackfly had passed, he bought a bottle of the efficacious fly oil, too. As he was completing the purchase, people stepped back from him and he saw that Lily Thunder had come out into the snow to join him.

‘I have questions,’ she told him gruffly.

‘Yes?’ He glanced over her shoulder, anxious for Petra.

‘You the lady’s husband?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You her lover?’

‘Certainly not. We are friends. Just friends.’

‘Friends.’ Lily seemed to chew the word over. ‘So you know about baby?’ She saw at once from his reaction that he knew nothing.

‘I must talk to her,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’

Again the restraining hand, this time against Harry’s chest. The other Cree had slipped well away; Lily seemed to hold a sort of priestly power among them. He had the odd sensation that she was reading his thoughts through touch, that her hand told her more about him than her ears did.

‘She by fire,’ she said at last. ‘Keeping warm. Thinking. She must think first. Baby maybe angry and haunt her.’

‘She’s . . . expecting a child?’

‘Yes. Two months nearly. Father bad man, I think.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What she asks is against law. So she come to me, yes?’

‘Probably.’

‘If you tell, I never see you. No one here see you.’

He nodded. ‘Is it . . . dangerous?’

‘Birth dangerous. Many things go wrong.’

‘What do you do to . . . to end the baby?’

‘Easy. Herbs. Some good, some bad. Black cohosh. Blue cohosh. These good. Squaw mint not good. She be very sick and dizzy. Heart go fast. She have to pretend to be ill some days.’ Lily Thunder chuckled. ‘Not need to pretend – she feel so sick from herbs.’

‘But it’s dangerous?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘People die? Women die?’

‘With me, no. But when they take too much. Slowly and in pain. Guts bad. But Lily will be careful.’

‘I must see her.’

‘You love her?’ Again that strong hand spread against his chest as though to read him.

‘Yes, but . . . Yes. I love her very much.’

Lily looked at the little moccasins he had bought for Phyllis. She smiled broadly and stood aside to let him pass.

He found Petra hunched on a low carved stool before Lily Thunder’s fire. There was a strong, sagey scent, not unpleasant but sharply evocative, perhaps from herbs or special bark cast on the embers. Lily had draped a striped blanket about Petra’s shoulders before leaving her to her thoughts.

‘You’re not to go through with this,’ he told her.

‘I must,’ Petra said.

‘No. Marry me.’

She gasped.

‘Marry me. The child can be ours. I’ll be its father.’

‘But you won’t be.’

‘If I’m there, I’m the father.’

‘What if I don’t want to marry?’

‘The herbs are dangerous. She just admitted as much. We can marry quietly. In Battleford. I’d leave you alone afterwards.’

She smiled at the flames. ‘Love’s young dream,’ she sighed. ‘And so convenient.’

‘Discuss it with Paul first.’

‘Oh, I imagine he’ll be delighted.’

‘So don’t,’ he said, irritated by her tone. ‘Take her herbs. Be sick. Kill the baby.’

‘It’s not a baby. Not yet. It’s just a . . . I’d be killing nothing.’

‘A what?’

‘A threat,’ she said. ‘That’s all it is.’ She nudged a stick back on to the fire with the toe of her boot. ‘A little wisp of thundercloud.’

She seemed so relaxed, even drunk; he wondered if she had already been dosed with some narcotic brew the mannish witch had stewed for her. Then he noticed afresh the powerfully herbal fumes coming off the fire. He felt relaxed too, he realised, despite cold, wet feet and a racing heart. It was all so utterly simple. He would marry Petra and the three of them would farm together, alongside each other. With a child.

He found himself remembering Phyllis, the weight of her little hand in his as he stooped to let her walk alongside him by the river in Radnor Gardens, the sweet scent of her skin as he kissed her good night, her furious tears at Strawberry Hill station as he tried to say a meaningful goodbye.

He turned away to lift the cloth that hung across the tepee’s opening and looked out. Lily Thunder was out there, watching and waiting. Petra’s hand stole into his and squeezed.

‘Are you sure?’ she whispered. ‘Dear, sweet man. Are you quite sure?’