A Place Called Winter (17 page)

The native woman who opened the door was surely a far cry from the salacious imaginings of Varcoe’s English family. She was in a man’s gabardine, fastened with a stout leather belt, and what might have been visible of her legs beneath a mud-spattered skirt were thoroughly hidden in no less dirty woollen socks. Only when she half turned to call out, ‘Varcoe? Men wants you,’ over her shoulder and revealed the astonishingly black hair hanging loose down her back and a generous glimpse of well-filled bodice where buttons were missing on her coat could he see how she might tempt a man. As they waited, she raked him with her gaze and he felt something of power coming off her.

Because of the way she had turned to call him, Harry had assumed Varcoe was in their little shed, possibly still in bed, so was surprised to see him approach from outside. His arms were full of waste wood: scraps of broken packing case and offcuts of lumber. Seeing Troels, he dropped the wood beside the door, brushed his hands clean on his jacket and told the woman, ‘I’m going with them.’

She took his hat from a nail next to the door and handed it to him, an unsmiling echo of a loyal wife. She scorched Harry once more with her stare before turning back inside and shutting the door.

Introductions were made and hands shaken and Troels led the way impatiently to the Dominion Lands Office, where the day’s queue had already formed.

‘Remember,’ he said to Harry, ‘not a word about your business while we’re waiting. There are bastards everywhere.’

There was little danger of Varcoe chattering, except with fever. Twice on their way back into town he had been forced to a halt so as to give way to a racking cough that left spots of blood on his filthy handkerchief. From the little he let slip in nervy splatters of conversation as they walked, he had come to Canada after a brief, disastrous spell in his father’s cavalry regiment. He was younger than Harry, possibly even younger than Jack, but he looked ten years older. From his accent, his thoughtless good manners, his guileless, happy surprise on hearing Harry speak, he might have been one of Troel’s English puppies. Even were he cleaned up, however, given a trip to a Jermyn Street barber for a good haircut and to get rid of his uneven scarecrow beard, disease and hardship had wrought scarring changes in him. His polite phrases, the glimpses he gave of a sunnily untroubled Englishness, were the last twitches of a condemned limb. There was no risk of Harry falling into the clutches of a local woman, Indian or otherwise, or succumbing to the lure of alcohol or morphine, but he could not help look at the wreck of a man beside him as a terrible warning of what he too might become out here.

As though reading his thoughts, Varcoe suddenly clutched his arm. ‘I say, old man. Are you sure this is what you want?’ he asked. ‘You don’t exactly look the type.’

‘Perhaps I should grow a beard,’ Harry told him, instinctively joking out of discomfort. ‘I’ve been farming near Moose Jaw all year actually. I liked it.’

‘But not on your own, I’ll bet. Gets pretty lonely out there.’

‘Oh, I expect I’ll cope.’

Varcoe was shaken by another fit of coughing, which caused the men around them to step aside, and before long he was going through the door ahead of Harry.

It was only as he was before the Dominion Lands agent himself, entering his claim on the acres for which Varcoe had just filed his deed of abandonment, that the rashness of what he was about – committing himself to three years on a hundred and sixty acres he had only seen on an entirely unhelpful map – was brought home to him. Most of the men who were entering claims would have spent days riding around, inspecting several possibilities before hurrying here to secure their considered choices. Or was that mistaken? Were there truly now so few good quarter-sections left, even in so vast a terrain, that he would have been insane to let this opportunity slip? Why else would there be such a crowd jostling for position outside? He pictured afresh the challenge in the native woman’s inky stare. Would Troels take so much of the sum Harry paid for the fencing that what was left would barely keep her and Varcoe in food for the month? Should Harry not buy the man a train ticket to Halifax at least?

‘Is there a problem?’ The clerk at the desk brought him back to his senses.

Harry hastily apologised, and signed the next three years of his life away, receiving in exchange a precious slip of paper with the map co-ordinates of his new home: SW 23-43-25-W3. He shook hands with the clerk, who looked bewildered, so perhaps that wasn’t quite the thing, and found himself back outside, where Troels congratulated him and swept him off to buy supplies.

Varcoe had disappeared. ‘I’ve paid him off,’ Troels explained airily. ‘You can pay me,’ he said. ‘He said to wish you good luck.’

‘Will he go home, do you think?’ Harry asked.

Troels laughed but made no fuller answer.

Harry had a great pile of possessions waiting at the station, of course, but apart from the camp bed, rubber bath, gun, blankets and books, that was largely clothes. The forbiddingly named Winter, his new nearest neighbourhood station, was fifteen stops away along the Grand Trunk Pacific line via Oban but would take two days to reach by horse and cart.

From Indian traders on the edge of town, he bought a pair of horses – not the speedy, half-wild stock he had glimpsed enviously at points on his journey, but sturdy sisters, more Suffolk Punch than thoroughbred. The Indians assured him they were already well broken to both cart and plough. As if to prove their point, they threw a second-hand cart into the deal. Smaller than most, but big enough for his needs. Thus equipped, slightly giddy at the sudden freedom to drive instead of walking, he took the cart to an all-purpose agricultural depot near the station where, mindful of Jørgensen’s advice, he bought himself a tent big enough to shelter his trunk and camp bed and still leave him room to take a few steps. It had a flap expressly designed to take the little chimney of the stove he bought next. Excited from spending, after a year of punitive restraint, he bought tools: a scythe and whetstone, a mattock, a spade, a shovel, an axe and a simple walking plough as close in design as he could see to the one he had been using at Jørgensen’s. Then, as Troels, grown bored, went off to buy them beer, bacon, bread and cheese, Harry bought a sack of oats for his horses and, all important, a water bottle. Then a frying pan, a sharp knife and, because,
pace
Jørgensen, he could not quite imagine himself reduced to eating off a knife blade, a bone-handled fork. And then, because eating from a frying pan would be too depressing and he might, who knew, have company occasionally, he bought a second fork and two white enamelled tin plates and mugs to match.

‘Care for a tablecloth with those?’ the sales assistant asked and earned himself what Harry hoped was a most English look.

He remembered just in time to add a good length of rope, initially to lash down his ground sheet over his cartful of bounty, and to halter the horses; a hammer for the tent pegs, and two boxes of cartridges for his gun. By the time all this was loaded, Troels had returned with a better humour, and as excited by the buying of food as an overgrown boy heading on a picnic. He had consulted among locals, one of whom had scribbled out the directions to Winter on the brown paper the cheese was wrapped in.

BETHEL

From North to South the princes meet
To pay their homage at his feet.
While western empires own their Lord,
And savage tribes attend his Word.

Isaac Watts, ‘Jesus Shall Reign’

Chapter Eighteen

Harry slept at the slightest opportunity. It was as though his mind was in retreat, like a wounded or frightened animal, turning in upon itself rather than risking the exposure of whatever wounds it had sustained.

He was woken slowly by a gentle tapping. Still disoriented, he took a moment to recognise the young man at the door, dressed in a tasselled buckskin jacket, denims and a dark leather Stetson.

‘Sorry to wake you,’ he said, doffing the hat. ‘It’s time for your chore.’

‘You’ve changed,’ Harry said.

‘Ursula doesn’t go outside Bethel,’ the young man said with a wink.

‘You make a fine boy.’

‘Thank you. I’ve had practice. Oh, and don’t worry, I already signed you out on the register.’

They headed up to the drive, where two plump dove-grey ponies and a cart were waiting. The ponies had been tethered ingeniously with ropes tied to heavy cookery weights.

‘Clever idea,’ Harry said, as the young Cree scooped up the weights before springing nimbly up to the driving bench and taking the reins.

‘It wouldn’t work if they weren’t this docile. I’ve never known a pair so placid.’

‘Must be the effect of watching the Athabasca all day,’ Harry said, climbing up beside him, and they laughed. It was disconcerting to feel a fluttering of desire for this man he had felt only respect for as a woman. ‘So if you’re not Ursula, what should I call you?’

‘What my father called me. I don’t expect you to get your tongue around the Cree. In English it’s Little Bear. I’m told Ursula means the same.’

‘It does.’

Little Bear flicked the reins and the ponies raised their heads from the grass and shambled into motion. ‘The track from here to Hinton is pretty rough,’ Little Bear said, ‘so we’ll have to go slowly. Which is fortunate, as these two don’t know how to do anything else.’

‘That’s fine,’ Harry told him. ‘I’ve no urgent business.’

They set off beneath the trees and were soon on a muddy, heavily pitted track beside the river, which Harry imagined must become impassable in flood weather or deep snow.

Although he was now speaking out more than he did as Ursula, Little Bear was no more chatty. Harry decided to be honest with him.

‘Gideon is very pleased you’re talking to me,’ he said.

Little Bear met this with thoughtful silence but at last said, ‘Of course he is. He mistakes my silence for sadness. He thinks if I talk, I won’t try to kill myself again. He believes talking cures everything.’

‘So your silence is shyness?’

‘I think it’s anger. He forgets English was forced on me when they tore me from my parents.’

‘You speak it very well.’

‘I was a star pupil.’

‘As a boy.’

‘You heard.’

‘Was it so cruel?’

‘Cruel schooling is the norm with the English,’ Little Bear reminded him. ‘So you might not have found it so. But we Cree love our children. We keep them close. Taking us away from our tribes and parents and forbidding us to speak or even think in Cree was only the beginning. You have to understand, as a
two-souls
I had a special position. I was being taught mysteries, things ordinary boys would never learn.’

‘A
two-souls
like . . . the people in Gideon’s reading the other night?’

‘The very same. I was special and my father was proud of me. But to the missionaries, I was an evil influence. I was fourteen, nearly fully grown, but to them I was an evil child. They cut my hair short and the evil they saw in me was beaten out day after day.’

‘Did you fight?’

Little Bear shrugged. ‘No. I was always quiet and good and a swift learner. And their Jesus was so kind, kinder than some of our spirits. He reached out to me and still hasn’t let me go. For a meek, mild dead man, he has a tenacious grip!’

‘Then what happened?’

‘My shaman had taught me better and earlier than the priest did, and I suffered . . . I suffered – what is it Gideon calls it? – a
paralysing
inner conflict
.’

Harry chuckled at this precise rendering of the good doctor’s way of speaking.

‘Is he helping you?’

‘He lets me be myself. But only in limited ways. He bought me my two dresses.’

‘They’re pretty.’

‘They’re as much a disguise as any boarding school suit. And this jacket and hat he got me are no more than fancy dress.’

‘So why can’t you go back to . . . to your people?’

‘Even if I could find them, they wouldn’t know me now. That’s one of Gideon’s wiser sayings, that most outcasts banish themselves.’

‘Do you think of yourself as an outcast?’

‘Don’t you, Harry? In any case, Jesus wouldn’t let me go so easily.’

‘You know . . . Jesus was a good deal more revolutionary than the men who teach in his name. He never married. He was a friend to outcasts and non-believers. Nowhere in the Bible does he speak out against . . . living as you do.’

‘I know. I read all the Jesus bits. Which makes him all the harder to shake off.’

‘What about the others? Does Gideon help them?’

‘Well, most are more residents than patients, I think. Their
cure
is to be able to take refuge from the world’s disgust and punishments. Mabel tried to kill her husband.’

‘Really?’

‘She didn’t succeed, but her lawyer had her sent to an asylum rather than face trial. And here, she and Bruno can have their . . . There’s a name for it.’ Little Bear thought a moment or two, then clicked his fingers. ‘Bostonian marriage.’

He drove them on in silence and Harry chose to respect his privacy rather than grill him further. He admired the scenery, enjoyed watching the way Little Bear handled the lazy ponies.

When they arrived in Hinton, Little Bear stopped a discreet distance from the stores. ‘The quickest thing is for you to go inside with the list,’ he said, ‘while I wait out here with the cart. If I do it, I have to wait at the back door and they take too long to serve me.’

‘They don’t like that you’re an Indian?’

Little Bear laughed at him. ‘Oh you’re so very English! No. They don’t like giving white man’s food to Indians to handle. And then they really don’t like that I speak like an Anglican priest. If him talk like this, him no thought uppity. But I can’t play that game. You take the list and I’ll do the carrying. Gideon has an account; just give the address as Bethel Ranch.’

Harry took the drily vegetarian list into the small stores while Little Bear waited outside. He added a small box of matches to the shopping list because it felt odd having none rattling in his breast pocket and he hadn’t liked to take the ones from his cabin. Knowing what small country communities were like, he prepared himself for the mention of Gideon and his ranch of peculiar people to earn him a comment or a sidelong glance, but there was nothing. Either the shopkeeper was waiting to gossip once he had left, or Bethel had succeeded in keeping the nature of sanctuary it provided a secret from its innocent neighbours.

As they called in at the post office to drop off and collect Bethel’s mail, he fancied he and Little Bear received looks, not for where they were from but for the fact that they were an Englishman letting himself be driven about the place by a fancily dressed Cree who should, by rights, have been riding on the cart’s rear with the groceries. The postmaster muttered something as he handed over the letters.

‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’

‘I said,’ the postmaster told him, ‘you have mighty queer taste in friends.’

The remark left Harry shocked and angry, but he stumbled out in silence, cheeks burning, unable to muster a suitable retort. He said nothing of the exchange to his companion.

‘You’re having bad dreams still,’ Little Bear remarked a while after they had started back for home.

‘Not especially,’ Harry said.

Little Bear laughed. ‘You don’t have to lie to me. No. You are. You shout in your sleep.’

‘Really? I’m so sorry.’

‘
I’m so sorry
. So English! It doesn’t bother me. I don’t sleep much anyway. I like the night-time for walking about the place, which is how I hear you. Are you holding things back from Gideon?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Little Bear raised an eyebrow. He had a satirical, suggestive edge to his humour that Ursula lacked. ‘But?’

Harry smiled. ‘Now, now. Is that in the Bethel spirit of community openness and harmony?’

Little Bear shrugged. He flicked the ponies’ reins smartly, setting all the tassels on his buckskin jacket in motion.

‘I begin to feel he only wants to hear the things that will confirm his theories,’ Harry admitted.

‘At least you feel he still hears you. Sometimes I talk and think he is completely deaf.’

Little Bear pulled the ponies to a halt so they could watch a buzzard performing its mesmerising wheels high above the treetops. ‘Did you fight in the war, Harry?’

‘No,’ Harry admitted. ‘I was a bit old and I thought I was more use as a farmer.’

‘So the man you killed was here in Canada?’

Harry looked at him sharply, but Little Bear’s expression as he nudged the ponies back into motion was as unreadable as ever.

‘I’m so psychic, sometimes I frighten myself,’ Little Bear told him kindly.

Harry tried to focus on the scenery they were travelling through, the track, the bushes, the ponies’ flicking ears, but saw again the broad shoulders and distinctive head. ‘He wanted to destroy everything. Everything I loved,’ he muttered.

‘Just tell me, was he an evil man?’

Harry thought a while. ‘Evil like in a fairy tale,’ he said. ‘But fascinating too.’

‘Huh.’ Little Bear looked briefly at him and smiled faintly as if reading something in his face. ‘Bad men you want to kiss are the worst; he had only to use the right tone of voice and you offered your throat to the knife.’

‘That sort of thing, yes,’ Harry said, and cleared his throat, unnerved at the accuracy with which the young man beside him seemed able to read his darkest instincts.