A Place Called Winter (16 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Troels arrived exactly when he said he would. ‘The Devil come to claim a soul,’ Jørgensen muttered as, alerted by the dog’s barking, they gathered in the yard to watch his approach. The new apprentice looked little more than a schoolboy and made Harry feel gratifyingly labour-toughened by comparison, something Troels seemed to notice, for he grinned as he jumped down from the cart and shook Jørgensen and Harry’s hands and said, ‘You made a man of him.’

‘Stay a few more months,’ Jørgensen growled under his breath, as Troels went on to embrace the women, ‘I might do the same for you.’

Harry knew he didn’t need to go with Troels. He knew he could find his own way to a piece of land and make an entirely independent start for himself. But in a country so vast, offering so many options, it was surely as well to exploit an informed traveller’s recommendation.

‘He’ll take advantage of your trust,’ Jørgensen warned, but it was hard to see what advantage there could be for Troels in helping him. For obvious, unvoiceable reasons of his own, he would dearly have liked to see Troels on to the train in Moose Jaw and then go his own way. Unable to sleep because of a full moon, he had passed much of the night before Troels’ return picturing scenes of trite but satisfactory revenge in which he did just that, or, better yet, contrived to leave him behind as the train pulled away, literally to leave him standing while he rode away to dizzying freedom and anonymity. And then he slept and had confusing, shaming dreams about welcoming his tormentor.

Troels was no sooner off the cart and standing before him again, unchanged except for a small scar on one temple, just as tall and remorseless as Harry remembered, than Harry found time spun savagely back and himself abruptly unmanned again. With Troels there, he felt his will and new skills ebb away and he was once again the English innocent who would go meekly where he was told, as though the man were his whip-clutching master and he his dog.

After a year of the modest, homely Jørgensens and their limited conversation, however, a year of dung and cows, of fence posts and ditches, Troels, with his height and worldliness and well-cut clothes and piercing stare, had all the glamour of a cruel god, and his smile, when he bestowed it, felt like sunshine after sodden February.

The new boy climbed down. He had only a small canvas rucksack for his belongings. ‘You travel lighter than I managed to,’ Harry told him, and the boy stared back rudely, saying nothing. Harry was surprised to find he could shrug and turn aside where he would once have felt bound to flounder on politely.

He returned to his room to finish packing. Half the possessions in his trunk had never left it. Now he found two neat piles of freshly laundered clothes into which Mrs Jørgensen had discreetly added a few extra items her husband could spare. On the table was a stoneware jar of Annie’s excellent cucumber pickle, which she had teased him was the very thing to make a diet of gopher palatable. Beside it lay a large handkerchief that Goody had been painstakingly hemming, night after night – he had not realised for him – and had embroidered on one corner with a blue silk H emerging from a clump of a flower he guessed was meant for a forget-me-not.

The evening was noisy. The catching-up on Danish family news, and the fact that his young replacement turned out to be a native Swede with little English, meant that Harry found himself linguistically excluded. The night that followed was much interrupted because the Swede, who claimed half Harry’s little bed, was a snorer.

Jørgensen sent the greenhorn to work cutting up and splitting a pile of logs, then drove Harry and Troels and the famous trunk to the station in Moose Jaw. Having gravely led Harry to one side in the crowded ticket office, he handed him an envelope packed with his wages for the year: sixty dollars, to which he had added an extra twenty, ‘Because you proved better than most and didn’t make fools of my girls.’ He advised him to bank most of it in Battleford once he had paid any fees at the Dominion Lands Office and bought lumber and a plough and horses. ‘You’ll find there’s not much call for cash. Men out there will prefer to trade: labour for tool hire, oats for fence posts and such. I’ve made you a list in there of what you need to get started. I’ve done this before. Troels never has. Remember that . . .’

Shaking Harry’s hand and taking his leave, Jørgensen looked him full in the face for what felt like the first time in their acquaintance, watery eyes bright in his round, battered visage, and Harry had the uncomfortable sensation of being momentarily known for what he was.

On Troels’ railway maps – he had one for each of the different companies they might travel with – the Battlefords did not seem so very far away. The map gave no sense of terrain or true distance, however, truncating a broad slice of the continent to fit in all the stations in a convenient, comprehensible form. The Grand Trunk Pacific was the only service between Moose Jaw and Regina. Then they picked up the Canadian Northern as far as Saskatoon, where there was a long enough delay to leave the train and find a hot meal. Then they headed on via Clark’s Crossing to Warman, where they had to change and wait for another train west to Battleford Junction, where they had yet another change, and a wait, for the short ride into Battleford.

On account of the hard seats and the changes, with the bother of extracting and reloading their luggage, the journey seemed to take far longer than Harry’s initial journey from Halifax had done a year before. Perhaps he was simply less patient than he had been, and so conditioned by a year’s outdoor labour that sitting inside for so long had become less tolerable. The rolling stock felt more basic, too, than even that crammed colonial with its stoves and fold-down tea-tray beds.

Magnificently named, the Grand Trunk Pacific halted as often as any suburban service out of Waterloo, stopping at every siding, as the humble stops for new settlements were called. Compared to the railway
chateaux
at Regina and Saskatoon, most offered little more in the way of a conventional station than a simple signposted platform across which a family’s worldly possessions might fairly conveniently be loaded from crammed goods van to waiting ox cart.

Troels was either full of talk or eating. (He was slow to share the picnic Mrs Jørgensen had entrusted him with, although Harry was sure it was intended for them both.) Or else he slept, leaning heavily against Harry’s shoulder. His talk, as ever, was scornful or self-aggrandising stuff, and he showed no great curiosity to hear about Harry’s year, rightly assuming it had been uneventful, and contenting himself with saying, only half mockingly, at intervals, ‘So old Jørgensen made a man of you?’ or ‘You didn’t marry one of the daughters, then?’

Harry was curious to hear what had become of the English puppies from their boat. Most, as Troels had predicted, were having a high old time hunting, shooting, fishing and making no pretence of being there to farm. Some had evidently slipped beyond Troels’ control (scornfully dismissive noises here); others had proved less happy. One had died in the winter, falling off his horse when drunk and freezing to death in a snowdrift, where he had not been found (and then half eaten) until the recent thaws. Another had surprised his fellows by setting out to homestead properly, to the extent of fencing his hundred and sixty acres within the year, then had been defeated by cold, drink and the lure of a low native woman.

‘Which is how you, my friend, are about to come into a fine piece of land.’ The young Englishman in question was giving up – had been persuaded to give up – and was so short of money, having been cut off by his disgusted family on account of the Indian mistress, that he was prepared to file for abandonment if Harry would pay him for the cost of materials used for the fence. ‘Labour not included,’ Troels said with a chuckle.

Although many homesteaders had abandoned the attempt and fled south across the border to what they thought would be easier conditions in the American prairies, plenty were arriving to replace them, and, as always, the thaw would bring a rush of new entries. There were often ugly scenes in the long queues outside a Dominion Lands Office, as a man could sometimes wait all day without being seen, only to return the next day to find himself once again near the queue’s end. And an entry had to be made in person. Proxies and agents were strictly unacceptable (here Troels pulled a face), so if a man were small or weak or easily jostled out of position, he could find himself beaten to the land he wanted. It was especially competitive for brothers, or for any group from the same Ukrainian village, say, who wanted adjoining properties. A story, possibly apocryphal, was circulating of a young man, little more than a boy, who repeatedly lost his place near the front of the queue until his five hulking brothers came along with him and bodily threw him over the heads of the competition the instant the office door opened.

When he finally arrived in North Battleford, Harry was overwhelmed with fatigue, although it was still barely five in the afternoon. Having ensured his trunk could be kept for him at the station, he found he could be decisive in his single-minded pursuit of sleep. He took a small bag of necessaries to the nearest hotel, where he made Troels laugh aloud at the firmness with which he requested a room to himself. They agreed to meet again at breakfast.

The room was tiny – a single-bedded cell where there was barely space for the washstand at the bed’s end. He washed his face, gulped down two glasses of icy water – the Jørgensens’ picnic had been full of salty cheese and pickles – and barely found the energy to strip to his undershirt and long johns before falling into bed. After a year of sleeping on thinly padded apple chests, it could have been a plump divan at the Ritz.

Used now to farming hours, he awoke at five before remembering where he was and relaxing a little. He retrieved the envelope of wages from his jacket pocket and teased out Jørgensen’s note.
Shelter matters more than anything,
he read.
Even food. You need a bell tent, ideally one with a chimney flap, and a simple stove. Matches. Good knife. Fry-pan. Fork. (You can eat from the pan!) Remember to have the flue outside before you light up or you’ll
 . . .  Here he had failed to spell
asphyxiate
a couple of times and had written
die
instead.
Don’t waste hours building a soddy unless the ground is very stony. Get on and dig a cellar – good for storm shelter, fire protection and storage – and build a lumber house right away if you can afford it. Soddies are for peasants and you would not last a month.

From the train, Troels had pointed out newer sod houses than the ones near Moose Jaw. Constructed of rectangular sods packed together around a wood frame and, for the luckier, windows, they could be more or less sealed inside with layers of paper and whitewash. They were snug enough to keep out the wind and snow but were said to continue raining inside for days after the weather outside had dried up.

While waiting for Troels to join him for breakfast, Harry took advantage of being briefly near a post office to send Phyllis a picture postcard of a buffalo and some Indians. When he strode in, Troels was in an ebullient good humour and soon let slip that he had found a woman the night before. ‘Blonde, German, built like a feather bed and very fond of her job.’ She had left him with a great hunger for chops and egg and, it seemed, a rapacity for the morning’s fierce business. ‘We must catch our prey promptly, even if we have to drag him out of bed,’ he said. ‘A weakling like that may have made the same promise to others.’

‘What about the . . . his Indian woman? What if he’s married her?’

‘He’s weak and lazy but he’s not a complete idiot. Yes,’ Troels went on eagerly to their waiter, ‘more coffee. More! We must get him to the Land Office before he changes his mind, Harry, and make sure that you are absolutely the next person to go in after him.’

‘Troels?’

‘Harry?’ The Dane turned on him an expression at once patient and mocking, as he gulped his coffee.

The dining room had filled rapidly with other guests, all men, and become correspondingly noisy. Harry wondered how many of them were about the same business as he, were in fact his rivals.

‘Why are you doing all this for me?’ he asked.

‘Because I like you and believe in you.’

‘Forgive me for being indelicate, but . . . do you look for some kind of payment? A percentage of the sale, perhaps?’

‘Oh. That. That I will have from Varcoe when you pay him for his fencing. Most of the money will be mine.’

‘Ah.’ Still Harry didn’t understand. ‘But if the land is so good, why not take it for yourself?’

‘I’m not a farmer, Harry. I’m a businessman. Yes, yes, sleeping under the incredible stars, hunting duck, riding across a prairie: all that is good, a kind of adventure, but the rest, putting up fences, breaking that impossible prairie ground day after day, watching wheat grow, watching it get eaten by bugs and gophers or flattened by rain or burnt in a fire –
this
is not for me! But I can see that land, good land, is a good investment. When your three years are up and the land is yours – assuming you haven’t blown your brains out or been frozen to death in your cabin or eaten by bears – if you decide it’s not for you either, then you can sell it to me. How’s that?’

‘Agreed.’

They shook hands across the little table.

‘Maybe by then I’ll be ready to settle down,’ Troels added, and laughed at the idea.

Varcoe was not living in a hotel, or a boarding house, or even in one of the little, low wooden houses beginning to cluster on building plots, but somewhere in the middle of a sea of mud, in an apparently unregulated district across the railway tracks, where scrawny children stared at them from the mouths of shacks and tents as they passed. Troels stopped at a wooden shed of a kind that back home might have been used to house a lawnmower, tennis things or a croquet set. A blackened tin chimney thrust out of what would have been a window at one end, the void about it plugged with bundled sacking. When Troels knocked on the door with his customary vigour, Harry thought instinctively of the tale of the three little pigs and the wolf.