Somewhere Over England (44 page)

But it had been said and Heine had had to live with that all the time, hadn’t he? Even the dress which Ed bought her with a long zip instead of buttons which she had never seen before and the shirt and thick trousers for riding could not brush the words aside. She watched him walk ahead of her into the grocery store, leading her to the books beyond the shelves which were stocked to bursting in a way that Helen had not seen for so long. She longed to see his rolling walk back again but for now it was pushed away by the stiffness of his injuries. Oh God, there was so much that was different, but last night in bed it had been the same. She must hang on to that; and there had been no dreams for him. But then, they had not slept.

That afternoon they saddled up three horses and rode out to
the house which was being repaired for them. It had been built by his grandfather, Ed told them, out of pine logs from the slope above them and had two bedrooms but would be big enough for now though it would not be finished until next spring. They stood and looked but somehow it wasn’t her house, though it had windows and a door. There was no roof, just bare rafters which looked pale against the seasoned pine of the old walls. She smiled at Ed.

‘It’s going to be splendid, isn’t it, Chris?’

Chris nodded and then urged his horse on up the rutted track and his hoofs sucked and slurped at the mud.

The horse was gentle beneath Helen and she felt confident while Ed pointed out the cabin hundreds of feet up the slope where the sheep herders based themselves in the summer and where you could hide from the world in the winter. She watched his hands as he pointed, his face which she loved, and she pushed the words of the old man and Heine’s pain away because her husband was here and therefore Little Fork must become her home.

The next day she sat in a chair in the lounge looking through the window at the men hurrying from the bunk-house to the lambing sheds. She saw Ed walking stiffly to meet them, his hat sat back on his head as he nodded to his father and sent one of the men into town. He had taken Chris with him, saying that Helen had done too much for too long but she was restless and walked around the room, smoothing the settee covers, flicking open books and then shutting them. The newspapers were there but held no news of England, only of America.

She walked into the kitchen and baked alongside Mrs McDonald who told her how ill Ed had been, how bad the nightmares were until he knew that Helen was coming.

‘That’s when I knew I loved you, my dear. I feared for him you see. I didn’t know what was in his head, why he screamed out like he did. We haven’t been in the war, out here. How can we know? But you know. You’ve been through it.’

Helen put her arm round her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. He’s such a good man.’ She mixed the flour with the butter, squeezing it through her fingers, wondering how long she could keep the darkness out of Ed’s eyes. She rolled out the pastry, shaking flour on to the board, wanting to be busy, but using her body, not just her hands because there was too much
time to think about how little she really knew of the horrors, the reasons for the dreams. And how could she help unless she knew?

‘I guess you might like to come down and take a look at the creamery, honey,’ Mom said.

They went after lunch, a large meal which was served in the kitchen to the men and the family. No one spoke very much as they crammed food into mouths then left, busy, purposeful, and Helen wanted to be with them, but instead walked with Mom down across the red shale track towards the bunkhouse and beyond. There were no flowers, no colour and Helen thought of the daffodils and tulips at Laura’s but then she must not think of things that were English.

It was damp in the creamery and her hair hung limp as she asked questions, shouting to be heard above the clatter of the churns and machinery. She saddled up her horse at four and rode out across the edge of the hayfields, missing John and the horses, missing the hoeing, the weeding, the feeding, and so the next morning she rose with Ed, pulling on her riding trousers and shirt and going with him to the lambing sheds because, she told him, she had come to America to be with him, not to get in his mother’s way.

He looked at her, then stooped and kissed her hard, calling to Chris to come too and roll his goddamn sleeves up or his mother would beat them both to it.

All day they worked because the lambs were coming thick and fast. In the lambing shed board pens about four feet square stretched row upon row and the bleating and curses of the men mingled with the smell of iodine, manure, wool and alfalfa. Helen’s hair hung in her eyes and Ed threw her his bandana to tie up around her head. Chris stayed with her, watching the lambs nuzzle the sheep, pointing out ones which were not suckling, then climbing into the pen with his mother to work the teats to make sure that the milk was flowing before putting the lambs on to suckle.

Again and again Helen did this and the heat in the shed built up until sweat poured down her body but this was work she understood and for the first time since she had left England she felt at ease. Ed called to Chris and showed him how to stamp the ewe and lamb with the same number to show that they belonged to each other.

After a lunch eaten in haste and with little conversation as they had done in the English fields they were out again, though this time Helen went with Ed to the pasture where they had to wrestle the ewes into the jugpen pulled by horses and then take them back to the shed. The sheep fought and Helen tussled them, holding them firm or snaring them by the hind leg with a sheep hook to snake them in backwards.

That night Chris and Ed tallied the numbers. It was mid April and now they had numbered over a thousand head of sheep and his father laughed and winked at Mom.

‘I guess we got a good bargain, didn’t we, Momma?’

That night Ed made love to Helen and it was not gentle but filled with passion as hers was and later she whispered, ‘I need to work alongside you, my love. We have had too many hours taken from us.’

He kissed her and said, ‘I love you and hate every second away from you.’

The next day a lamb died and Ed showed Helen and Chris how to skin the dead lamb, snipping four small leg holes and a head hole. Then he took a twin from another ewe, fitting the skin to the lamb.

His hands were smeared with blood and Chris looked away. ‘Now you have to present this to that ewe over there. The one whose lamb has died. She’ll accept it in a coupla days because she’ll recognise the smell as her own.’ He nodded at Chris and Helen. ‘You got that?’

Helen nodded and Chris too but he was pale. Later Helen found a dead lamb and called Chris to grab one of triplets from a pen higher up. He did and then watched his mother do a job he felt he could not attempt and later that evening he went and put his arms around her and said, ‘I love you, Mum.’ But what he wanted to say was, I respect you. You are so brave and so strong and I don’t know what I would do without you and I wish I could accept my German part but I can’t.

On Friday they went in the car to the house behind the drug store taking two casseroles with them to place on the table as Ed’s mom said they must. Mrs McDonald introduced Helen to the younger women first and they were kind and friendly and kissed her when the British would just have shaken hands. They also heaped presents on them for the new house.

They talked of Ed as a child, how he had fired arrows at targets and missed, breaking the drugstore window. How he had ridden his horse down the main street on Independence Day, firing his pop’s old gun. Helen looked across at him as he talked to a ring of men, throwing his head back and laughing, his arm on Chris’s shoulders and she loved him more than ever.

Two of the women talked of working in factories during the war, of leaving home while their men served in the forces. They spoke of how small the town seemed now. Of how they had been hated by the men in the factories and feared by them because of their abilities. They put their hands on Helen’s arms.

‘I guess it must be the hardest thing in the world, to come over to another country. It was sure bad just moving to a bigger town,’ Susie said, her blonde hair swept back in a pony-tail, her blue eyes sympathetic. ‘Come see me sometime, anytime.’

Though their heads ached the next day from too much to drink they were up at daybreak as usual because lambs did not stop being born to accommodate a hangover, Helen groaned, as she pulled on her trousers. But now she felt as though she had a friend in the small town and that made her feel safer somehow.

In the evening she wrote to Germany to try and find Frau and Herr Weber and Chris watched her but said nothing. They packed up a parcel of tins to send to Laura and Mary and next year Mary was coming, they decided, even if they had to go and fetch her, because Helen was looking forward now.

In June the mosquitoes were rising from the creek and the sheep had to go through the gate and be counted but Chris was not here during the day now because he had gone into the town along from Little Fork where the High School stood and he talked of pitching and batting, chewing gum as he did so. He handled the work well and liked the kids, he said, and Ed and his father chuckled when Helen told him to take that disgusting stuff out at once.

Chris lay in bed feeling the heat of the summer which he had never before experienced. Life was good but he missed Mary. He had not thought he would quite so much, but there was a difference between these kids and those back home. These ones were fresh and bright-eyed and knew nothing of bombs and
death. He was thirteen and he did. He knew its sounds and smells.

He lay with his hands behind his head. Mary had written to say she would come next year, definitely, and Laura too, and he wanted to show her the jackpines, the creek and his horse, Sorrel. He wanted to show how he could lasso a calf, hauling back on the rope. He wanted to show her the calluses on his hands.

Would she like his friends? Roy with the broken tooth because he was a fighter; Ted with his red hair. And what about the coach who said he’d make a great batter one day? He turned over in the bed. Gee, it was hot. He lifted the sheet, waving it up and down.

The coach was German but nobody minded. He should tell them he was too, but he couldn’t and he didn’t know why. Chris turned over towards the window. He needed to tell. He knew he did but he couldn’t because he hated the Germans. He still hated them.

In mid June Helen and Ed drove with Mom and Pop to the High School game because Chris was playing. Helen sat in the stand and watched the girls dancing at the edge of the pitch, heard the school band and ate popcorn which Ed handed to her in a cardboard carton. She wanted to wave to Chris when he ran on to the field and the supporters stood and cheered their team but she did not. She just watched and wondered at how American he had so easily become and how English she still was.

She watched the battle between the pitcher and the batter, heard the screams and cheers as runs were scored and home base was reached. She listened as Ed explained that each team had nine innings and that each team’s inning lasted until three men had been put out.

‘The visiting team is always the first to bat,’ Ed’s father told her, roaring as another run was scored then groaning as a batter hit an infield fly.

Helen didn’t understand but shouted when Chris hit a homer and scored a run and the rest of the team went wild.

‘I showed him how to hit that, Christ almighty. I told him,’ Ed said, grabbing her and kissing her and she laughed, feeling free tonight, and happy. She looked along the rows of people watching, seeing their faces, hearing their voices drawling and
American, but not seeming as strange as they had two months ago and she settled back for the rest of the evening. She would write her monthly letter to Claus tomorrow and he would laugh at all this.

On 15 June, while Chris was off on a baseball tour, Helen and Ed went into the timbered slopes to herd sheep for two weeks with a wagon full of groceries, opening fence line gates on the rutted tracks leading up into the mountains, feeling the coolness of shade which could not be found in the valley.

The wagon sat high on the spoked wheels and the leather reins were soft in Helen’s hand from years of use. She propped her foot up on the weatherboard and smiled at Ed, feeling the lurch of the wagon over roots and stones, hearing the yap of the herd dogs as they ran round and round the wagon as it moved along, so slowly.

‘I’m looking forward to this sheep herding your mom’s been talking about.’

He smiled and his mouth was lazy. ‘I guess I am too.’

They looked back down into the valley. Smoke rose from the farmhouse chimney and the creek moved sluggishly through dried banks. They could see the shimmer of the heat and Helen relaxed in their shaded cool, bringing out her camera, taking shots of the valley, the mountains, the darkness of the pines.

‘It’s a bit more like England up here,’ she murmured, leaning over and kissing him.

‘I guess so, honey. Do you miss it so much?’ His hands caught at hers and held them loosely and he watched the horse as it picked its way along the track.

‘No, not at all,’ Helen said but she did. She still did, though not with the sharp pain of the first days of strangeness. She looked up picking out the sky through the branches. It was a dull ache which never left her. But she loved him so much that it filled every other part of her and it was this that she tried to think of each day.

They stopped beneath sun-splashed pine boughs before the day ended, knowing that the sheep were all around, hearing their bleats and the whine of the dogs. They unhitched their horses from the tailboard and rode out; checking, laughing, listening and just sitting with their hands on the saddle, looking together up at the mountains, breathing in the pure air, hearing nothing of the world beyond the timber and it was a
touch of heaven. A soundless time which they each sucked in after the screams of the last few years.

That night they lay together on the soft pine needles and loved beneath a sky filled with the smell of jackpines and clear mountain air, and Helen felt that this was what she had been waiting for all her life and the ache for England would subside with each day that passed for this was her home, here in the cool of the mountains, in the silence of its skies.