A Place Called Winter (15 page)

I can hardly believe I am writing this. (This is a fair copy, as you can imagine, after several I have scribbled on or cried over or thrown in the fire.) You have been worked upon in no short measure by us all, I feel, a thing my lawyer brothers would be angry at my writing, but it is true and I love you too much to be dishonest with you. I was persuaded that my heart would mend and alter and it did for a while, Harry. The transfer of my love would have been complete, I think, if only we could have stayed at Herne Bay, where we were so happy and where we were all in all to one another.

There was a large gap between paragraphs, quite as though the writer were taking a deep breath before feeling able to continue.

If, for Phyllis’s sake, if not for mine, you would consent to my divorcing you on grounds of ‘desertion’, Tom will meet all the legal costs. He’d then be in a position to look after Phyllis and me so that we would, of course, no longer be adding to your financial burdens. I will never let Phyllis forget who her father is and will see that she is in regular touch with you as soon as she is of an age to write.

In case you were wondering, the Whitacre department store has been sold and taken on its new owner’s name. Mother is convinced that Tom is a reformed character. I am not a party to the details but I believe he has given her some discreet financial assistance, which the brothers know nothing about!

I pray you will thrive out there, darling Harry, and that you’ll find the true, unstinting love you deserve, better than the sly half-measure you had from me. Winnie.

Harry had to read the letter through twice more, it was so far removed from the one he had expected. At first he felt sorrow at the rude demolition of his recent wholesome fantasy, then a flare of anger that his dashing – he felt sure Tom Whitacre was the sort of man thus described – rival should have made his approach to Winnie so soon after the field was left open to him. And indeed, at the convenient crumbling of Mother Wells’s principles. But he couldn’t help but see that her reversal of attitude was also rather comic, and rather than resentment of a wily manipulator looking to her own material comfort as well as those of her kinswomen, it stirred in him affection for a kindly pragmatist.

Physical exhaustion mastered a racing brain and he soon put out the lamp and slept, but when the cockerel’s crowing woke him to a room already filled with light, he remembered her letter even before he saw it lying unfolded where he had dropped it.

He would not answer her directly, he decided. He did not want Whitacre to feel everything going too smoothly his way. But he would write in a day or so, apologising for any awkwardness caused by his previous letter and giving her his blessing, just as he must swiftly write to Jack so that he and George should not be wounded at hearing the news second hand. If he withheld consent, he imagined it was only a matter of time before his consent would not be needed, since the desertion would have become a legal fact. Besides, he had no wish for anything to nudge Robert into making revelations that might overshadow Phyllis any more than a hopeless, absent father would already be doing.

He worked harder that week than he had since his arrival, but did so with a kind of relish at being nothing more than a fit body in the service of a tidy aim. Spring was sufficiently upon them for it to be the week when Jørgensen taught him how to plough, first with the team of horses on land already worked, then, far more challengingly, with the oxen on land cleared but not yet broken. Ploughing through centuries of roots left by scrub and tough prairie grass was like ploughing wood, like some impossible task set the innocent hero of a fairy tale. Even with the strength of two oxen to assist him, his progress was as slow as forgetfulness, but Harry was light-headed with relief, absolved of responsibility and guilt, if not quite freed of nostalgia for a lost Eden of marriage and fatherhood.

Chapter Sixteen

The year and a day did not pass swiftly. Living what was in effect an antique existence on the farm, rising and retiring more or less with the sun, labouring six days in seven, the height of entertainment consisting of an occasional family visitor or borrowed novel – read with exceeding slowness because he would fall asleep after two or three pages – Harry felt his days pass at a fraction of the speed with which his calendar had unfurled in town. And yet, deprived of choice or variety, he was happy and healthy. He passed twelve months, through broiling summer, an astonishingly beautiful autumn and the shocking dry freeze of the long, long prairie winter, with only one negligible, three-day cold; if one dicounted the odd attack of indigestion brought on by Annie’s cooking.

The Jørgensens, who grew in kindness towards him while never quite abandoning the distance politic between employers and worker, were his chief entertainment, along with their melancholy dog and glowering cat. Mrs Jørgensen took to doing his laundry along with that of the rest of the household, and at her prompting, Jørgensen advised him in the purchase of two sets of denim dungarees, which were infinitely easier to clean than the stiff wool suits sold him by the outfitters on the Strand.

Minnie, always grave to the point of rigour, surprised them all by marrying a rector from south of Moose Jaw she met at a combined church social that summer. He was reassuringly middle-aged, but she became quite girlish as the wedding approached, despite Annie’s efforts to make her fat. With Minnie gone to a distant parish, not only did Harry graduate to an upholstered dining chair and better cutlery, but Annie underwent a subtle alteration, her spite turning by degrees to wit, and instances of kindness entering her behaviour.

In one of the talks they often enjoyed while she worked nearby, Goody astonished him by admitting that Minnie had tormented Annie all their lives, physically when they were little, and psychologically when they grew older. The parents had no idea, apparently, and thought the sister’s thriving in the other’s absence was yet more proof of her unpleasant nature.

The divorce proceeded in Harry’s absence. He assumed Winnie would be married to Whitacre without delay but had no way of knowing. She could hardly continue writing to him once he had agreed to her terms; it would have made a nonsense of her desertion claim.

Then a letter came from Jack.
This is not going to be pleasant, old man,
he wrote.
Probably as hard for me to write as it will be for you to read, but here goes. We had an unexpected visit from Pattie last week. As you can imagine, she has become so very sophisticated that poor George had rather given up on her ever deigning to visit Chester and a house that might smell of horse. Tears and lamentations and she was immediately closeted with George while I was banished. Turns out Notty has announced he can have no more to do with her since an unfortunate business involving you, old man, and an autograph album and some pansy attempting blackmail. George relayed it all, simply livid, couldn’t believe Pattie had known about it and kept it quiet for so long, though relieved, of course, that Robert and Notty had seen that the police weren’t involved.

Pattie – who I gather can’t quite bring herself to return that splendid gold watch – has retired from the stage forthwith and resolved to train as a nurse.

Naturally I don’t believe a word of all this, Harry. It’s simply too incredible and disgusting, and I think you’re little short of heroic to have moved out there rather than involve the family in a scandal in trying to clear your name. But you must understand that now George is insisting I have nothing more to do with you, I have to knuckle under and do as the lady asks. She is my wife, old man, and pretty peppery when crossed. At least this way she can’t complain if I continue to keep a weather eye on Little Phil for you.

Harry read the letter several times before burning it in the stove. He wrote several drafts of replies, now protesting, now beseeching, and burnt those too. In the end he wrote a very short one simply acknowledging receipt, saying that it was plain that nothing he said would alter the painful position, and thanking Jack for his continued guardianship of Phyllis. Not surprisingly, his response went unanswered.

As summer turned to glorious autumn, Harry bought himself a gun and learnt to shoot rabbit and duck, which Jørgensen showed him how to prepare for the kitchen, and his wife and Annie how to cook. He had worried that Jørgensen might renege on their handshake and ask him to move on with the coming of winter, not wanting an extra mouth to feed when there was less for a hired hand to do about the place, but his fears were groundless. Jørgensen still made good use of him every day. Until the snows came, there remained ditches to keep clear, fences to mend, and winter supplies to collect and store. And once snow lay thick around the place – shoulder deep or more where it blew into drifts – the animals still had to be fed and bedded in the barns, and ice melted for them so that they could drink. There was dung to be forked from the barns before it froze like rock, and logs to be piled for the kitchen stove. And of course there was always snow to shovel, snow of a texture and depth he would not have thought possible.

As for the cold, he had never experienced anything like it: a dry, iron clamp upon the land, like death itself, full of unexpected beauty, like the hard crystals that formed on the inside of the windows. The cold did something strange to the quality of sounds around the farm, deadening all background noise so that the smallest scratching or whisper was emphasised. It was easy to see how the unwary settler could die in such a scene, lulled into marvelling at its deadly beauty even as his blood began to freeze. Just once Harry lingered outside as a blizzard got under way, amazed at the scale and savagery of it, but was furiously dragged indoors by Jørgensen and given a lecture about losing fingers and toes to frostbite and the impossibility of getting a doctor out until spring.

As winter progressed, he came to understand the hunger with which Goody had eyed his meagre library when she first saw it. He had soon read everything he had with him, rereading much of it, and fell to trading books with the Jørgensens. With so little choice of entertainment and such long nights amid the stupefying silence and snow, far from any neighbours, the usual demarcations of books for women and books for men, books for children and books for their elders became irrelevant before the imperative of diversion. He read Jane Austen, which he had never thought to do before, and Lamb’s
Tales from Shakespeare
and
Black Beauty
as well as Jack London, Fennimore Cooper and Hans Christian Andersen. He even found himself, just like his employers, slowly turning the pages of the latest Eaton’s catalogue, which displayed everything from wooden house kits (up to eight bedrooms large) to cream separators, from guns to underwear, the latter modelled by coyly simpering women. (Men’s underwear, he noted, was listed but unmodelled, the men in the catalogues rarely appearing in anything less than evening dress.)

Winter had come on them suddenly, whereas spring arrived by slow, unconvincing degrees, far later than he’d have expected. What Jørgensen called chinooks, warm winds from the western mountains, arrived and began to shrink the snow into patches of dirty ice rather than melting the lot overnight the way warmer weather would have done at home. A thaw was announced with loud cracks around the place before it turned all Harry’s laboriously cleared ditches to so many little canals. With the spring melt came a flurry of unexpected visitors, as neighbouring households emerged from the long freeze like so many bears, hungry for news and less familiar faces and other people’s baking. Mrs Jørgensen cursed these visitors, who often arrived at the least convenient moment, when she had her hands full of chores or nothing but leftovers to set before them, but she welcomed them, too, being as hungry for faces and talk as anyone else.

Once the roads reopened, albeit with a few floods where sloughs had overflowed, the Jørgensens headed into town, trusting Harry with the guardianship of the place now they had passed a winter with him there. He was glad to be left behind – relishing having only the dog and horses for company as he set to work continuing to plough the patch of ground he had begun working over when the frosts arrived.

When they returned, shortly before dusk, Jørgensen’s greeting was a little tense, even by his standards, and Harry wondered if the hoped-for lunch with Minnie and her husband had displeased in some way, or failed to materialise. The explanation emerged at supper. They had brought back quite a bundle of post, including a clutch of long-overdue Christmas cards, one of which was for Harry, clumsily painted by Phyllis. (This made him feel bad, as he had been taken by surprise by their long winter confinement so had been unable to send the child either card or present.) There were letters from their friends and relations and one brief one from Troels. And this was the source of Jørgensen’s gloom, for Troels confirmed the date a year and a day since his departure when he would be coming with the carter to collect Harry, for whom he had identified a choice piece of land on a quarter-section two days’ ride beyond the Battlefords, in northern Saskatchewan. He would bring another greenhorn to take Harry’s place.

‘You don’t have to go with him,’ Jørgensen said. ‘I can’t afford to pay you more than I do, but . . .’

‘The man needs his dignity,’ Esme Jørgensen said, which earned what sounded like a Danish curse from her husband.

‘She’s right,’ he conceded later. ‘But you could find land on your own. You don’t need his help. You’re not a
grønskolling
any more.’

‘But he says he has the perfect place in view.’

‘Canada is big. There are many such places.’

‘Where are the Battlefords?’ Harry asked, thinking they sounded charmingly like English villages in Sussex or Hampshire, and already knowing enough of Canada to understand they would almost certainly be nothing like.

Goody fetched the map of Canada from her father’s desk and unfolded it on the cleared table. It was no use, however, because so much of the western prairie had still been ‘empty’ at the time of its printing. But Annie had a map of the Canadian Pacific Railway system Troels had given her on his last visit, and after much poring over that with a magnifying glass, she found Fort Battleford. Another, lesser railway went on from there to stop at places called Unity, Vera, Winter, Yonker and Zumbro. ‘Troels says the sidings are named in alphabetical order because there’s nothing else to call them in such a vast, empty space.’

‘It’s miles away,’ Goody announced gloomily. ‘Miles and miles from civilisation.’

‘Civilisation will follow the railway,’ her father told her. ‘It just takes time.’

Before he joined the women in retiring for the night, Jørgensen went outside with Harry on the pretext of checking the henhouse fence, as Harry had spotted a coyote prowling in the distance that afternoon. They talked in the codified language men used at such times. They spoke of oxen and horses, of the respective merits of log-built houses over lumber ones, of the need to sharpen the ploughshares before Harry continued breaking ground in the morning. The unmistakable sense, however, was that Jørgensen would miss having him about the place and was wary of starting again with whoever Troels was bringing with him in exchange.