A Place Called Winter (25 page)

King and country, like the peculiarly pro-empire version of God encountered every Sunday, were simply part of life’s accepted fabric, like lawns and buttered toast. Since emigrating, Harry had come to see he had not a shred of patriotism in him, and the display of it in others brought on in him a hunted feeling. Luckily he was among kindred spirits. Paul said he felt more Canadian than Scottish or British, and Petra was disgusted by all wars and suspected the motives of those who waged them. She believed the key element to patriotism was display; that it was all about being
seen
to support a cause, being
seen
to wave a flag. But she had not, he noticed, said any of this outside the security of their two houses.

Harry turned away and heaved another sack on to his shoulder. He caught Paul’s eye as they passed between cart and weighing machine. They had spent the entire night together, by an accident of exhaustion rather than romantic design, but waking to dawn light in Paul’s room, with Bella curled up on their discarded work clothes, and to find Paul unguardedly tender while still half asleep, had transformed the day that followed and left Harry slow and stupid with love, not just for Paul, but for Petra and Grace, who were still sound asleep when he rode home and fired up the stove to make their porridge.

‘Come on, lads! There’s time before we leave. No one loves a coward.’ The voice was familiar, even if the accent had been modified to sound more Canadian.

Harry turned from loading his weighed sack into the truck to see that the taller and bigger of the two recruiting officers was Troels Munck. Paul had seen, too, and was already striding up the platform. ‘No!’ Harry called out, and ran to catch up with him, grabbing his coat sleeve.

‘Where does he get the nerve?’ Paul growled. ‘I swear I’ll break his face.’ He was so angry, he was shaking.

‘He’s not worth it,’ Harry said. ‘Maybe it’s not even—’

‘Oh, it’s him. I’d know that smug fuck anywhere.’ The uncharacteristic profanity cut across the crowded platform like a whip-crack and earned them a glare from a coarse-featured woman wearing a Union Jack as a shawl.

The stationmaster’s whistle had blown and the recruitment team were boarding the train when Paul shook free of Harry and ran after them. ‘Munck!’ he shouted.

Scared that he was about to try jumping on to a moving train, Harry seized his shoulder. The larger recruiting officer turned on the top step as the train began to slide out past them. It was unmistakably Munck. He saw who had shouted, saw Harry with his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

As his carriage pulled past, he smiled and mouthed
coward
through the open window.

A black mood descended on Paul that in a less complicated man one might have dismissed as a sulk. He was not a sulker, though, and people sulked when they didn’t get their way or felt martyred or misunderstood. This was like a savage anger turned inward, to which he could not, would not give voice. When Harry tried to break through the storm cloud with calm reason, Paul merely said, ‘Stop it,’ not unpleasantly, but with a decisiveness Harry had learnt to respect.

When they returned from unloading the day’s final load, he did not come in for a minute or two, as he usually would, to see Grace and her mother, but simply whistled once to summon Bella.

Harry said nothing to Petra about their encounter with Munck, not wanting to upset her needlessly, and for the next two days, Paul kept entirely to himself, ploughing the lightly frosted stubble and, Harry assumed, communing with his stormy thoughts.

The day after that, Harry loaded the last of his grain to take to the station. Petra had letters to post and needed to visit the store in any case to choose fabric for a new dress for Grace. He unloaded the grain first, so as to have the cheque to take to the store. Petra had decided Grace needed new boots as well before the weather broke, so the visit was not going to be a cheap one.

The post office formed part of the much-expanded general stores. The outbreak of war had made it more than ever a little forum for the passing-on of news and exchange of gossip, more so than the churchyard, where people could feel a little constrained by the nearby presence of a vicar. Petra had a certain standing locally, because of her usefulness as a nurse when there was not a doctor to be had, but the hospitality she had once shown the Cree women – even though both Frencheater and Whompom and their people had been moved on and their camp grounds staked out as homesteads now – left her marked out as not quite sound, not entirely patriotic.

‘Of course no one says as much,’ she said, ‘not now I’m married and have a child, but they still use those euphemisms of me, I know. They call me
headstrong
or
eccentric
. And I’m sure Grace will soon be
Poor Grace Cane
, if she isn’t already, as though I were letting her run barefoot and feeding her weeds and squirrel meat.’

While Petra looked at the bolts of fabric, with Grace in closely critical attendance, Harry paid over his cheque for the grain and watched as the proprietor entered the amount in his ledger and locked the cheque in a drawer concealed beneath the counter.

‘I’ve never seen a man leave with a parcel as fast as your brother-in-law did yesterday,’ the man said.

‘Oh?’ said Harry. Gossip made him uncomfortable, so he tried not to encourage it. He knew how much Paul, in particular, hated to be talked about by others.

‘Mind you,’ the man went on in a sly undertone, ‘given how it was addressed, I’m not entirely surprised. Reckon I’d have run out the place too.’

Harry saw that the discouragement had not worked and that he was now obliged to say something.

‘So how was it addressed?’ he asked.

The shopkeeper glanced at the other people there, with whom he had clearly been talking before Harry came in. ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly say,’ he said, taking in Grace and Petra’s presence. ‘Not with women and children present.’

‘Why on earth did you bring it up, then?’ Harry snapped, and immediately saw how his small show of anger had gratified the onlookers. Feeling himself redden, he turned aside to join Petra; then, when he saw that skulking at her elbow only gave an impression of impatience, he made his excuses and went to wait on the cart outside until she and Grace were done.

When Petra emerged with her purchases, she was in an indignant mood too, and Grace, who had a way of picking up on the spirits of those around her, was grizzling in a fashion certain to make her mother angrier still. ‘Small-minded pettifoggers,’ Petra muttered as she handed Grace up to Harry, then climbed up herself.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing really. I’m too thin-skinned. Grace, do be quiet. We’re off now, see? Isn’t that better?’

The sound of horses’ hooves and forward motion of any kind had invariably served to soothe Grace as a baby, to the point where Petra had sometimes climbed into a saddle with her at dead of night in the hope of a little peace. But today the remedy had no effect and the child complained quietly but ceaselessly as Harry drove along the arrangement of huts, houses, mud, road and wooden sidewalks that everyone referred to now with more optimism than irony as Main Street. The unsettling exchange with the storekeeper had stirred up a sense of dread, shame even, he had thought to have left behind. Grace’s soft complaining, made worse by Petra’s striving to ignore it so as to prove it ineffective, seemed to give his feelings desolate voice.

‘I think we should call in on Paul,’ he said. ‘Or I could go on my own later, if you’re getting cold.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s. We can demand lunch or give him a slice of this pie. Are you worried? Grace, please be quiet. Shush, child!’

‘Not especially,’ he lied. ‘Just . . . it’s a bit odd not to have glimpsed him in two days.’ If only he had told her about the ugly scene at the station, she’d have understood his anxiety.

What if Paul had managed to injure himself sharpening the ploughshare, or been badly kicked by one of the horses?

As they drew closer, he heard the dog barking and a whinnying from Paul’s horses, apparently all inside the stables. He began to wish he had dropped Petra and Grace off first. He found himself thinking of the boy back in Toronto, about whom Paul had never spoken, even in their quietest moments, the one who had tried to kill himself. He pictured Paul’s heavy body turning slowly in the draught on a creaking rope, and his irrational sense of panic grew so strong that, climbing down to tie the horses to the veranda posts, he had to fight the urge to tell Petra to wait in the cart with the child.

He hurried ahead, which was the next best thing, rudely leaving her to manage the cumbersome business of clambering down herself while steadying a fractious four-year-old on the seat above her.

The door was unbolted, as he would expect. ‘Hello?’ he called out, and knew at once there was nobody home. No swinging body. Not in the house, at least. The stove was cold.

He was about to hurry out to check in the stable and barn when he saw the parcel. It had been left on the otherwise empty table, as prominent, and meaningful, as a hastily penned note. It was small – a packet more than a parcel, really – and had been neatly torn open with a penknife along one side. Feathers, white feathers, were spilling out through the slit, and the clearly inked address label intended it for
PAUL
SLAYMAKER
ESQ
.,
COWARD AND BUGGER
,
WINTER
,
SASK
.

He passed the packet to Petra as he hurried past her to the stables. Bella stopped barking as soon as he unbolted the door. She flew out and licked his hands frantically, then set off up the track towards the road. He called after her, yelled, but she gave only a rapid, questioning glare. He had not the understanding with dogs he had with horses, and knew he had no power to retain her. She would surely be following her master’s trail into town until she lost it at the train tracks.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

They heard from Paul to say he was joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force marching out of Saskatoon. Petra warned Harry that her brother had always been an unreliable correspondent and it was best to prepare for silence rather than count on receiving even a letter a season. ‘He doesn’t make small talk on paper any more than he does in person,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t see the point in writing a letter just to be polite; if he thinks he has news, he’ll set it down, otherwise he just lets time pass.’

The first letter was written shortly after his arrival in France and was addressed to them both. It apologised for any lack of specificity but explained that letters were checked before being sent. It spoke mainly of his journey, his fear that their boat would be sunk during the crossing, his frustration at finally reaching London without being allowed time to see anything of it, the difficulty of sleeping, the itchiness of his uniform and his wish that in his haste he had thought to pack something, anything, even bloody Dumas, to read.

Barely six weeks after that, Petra received official communication that Paul was missing in action, and another month after that, they had his second letter, which he must have written shortly before the action in which he went missing. It was two letters, one for each of them. Harry’s, sidestepping risk by addressing him simply as
My dear H
, was far shorter than the one to Petra, which was full of observation and narrative. It was the first love letter Harry had ever received. It cut itself all the deeper into his consciousness for being so spare and for arriving over a month into the horrible, suspended mourning of knowing only that Paul was missing.

If you let me,
Paul wrote,
and if I make it home, I want to make old bones at your side. You have brought a happiness I never thought to know. I don’t have your picture (which is, of course, a hint that I want one, and quickly!), but I don’t need one, for your face, like your voice and your touch, is tucked away in my heart, from where I can summon it night or day. Your photograph, like this poor writing paper, would soon grow stained and crumpled from damp and much folding. But the thought of you is indestructible and remains as fresh as on the day I left you.

Harry had managed to show little emotion since the official notification arrived, wanting to spare Petra and Grace, but that second letter sent him rushing out, hatless and coatless, into the snow and thence to the stable. He did his weeping, as other farmers had before him, to his horses, maintaining his composure with the women indoors but exposing his rawest emotions to sensitive beasts who could only nuzzle his hand and search his pockets for carrots by way of reply.

So yes, Harry and Petra had managed, spurred on by the merciful imperatives of land and animals, which must be tended whatever one’s desolation of heart. And Grace, whose keening for her uncle’s lost dog had been almost as hard to bear as her frequent questions when Paul had first gone, helped them. Like any child of a prairie farm, she performed simple chores as soon as she could walk, feeding hens and gathering their eggs in a basket when she was little over five, learning to milk at six and to turn the heavy butter churn at seven. Inspired by the sight of her mother cleaning out ditches and driving a plough, hair tied up off her face in a scarf, skirts abandoned for Paul’s dungarees, she seemed to regard nothing as beyond her. There were plans afoot to open a school in Winter, now that the district had some fifteen children of school age, but finding the funds to build a schoolhouse and pay a teacher had proved less urgent than building a grain elevator. Meanwhile, Petra taught Grace at home and saw that she attended Sunday school, more to make some friends her own age than to gain any great knowledge of Bible stories.

From the day of Paul’s departure, news from Europe became something urgently wished for, so they had a
Toronto World
posted out to them once a week. Lists were published of Canadian soldiers dead, missing, wounded or, very occasionally, taken prisoner. But just as everybody knew that letters could go astray or be lost altogether, so there seemed to be a shared understanding that, for all the patriotic sound and fury, the bureaucracy of the war was frequently clumsy and inept. They dreaded bad news, at first, dreaded it for two long years, then reached the point of simply needing to know.

Everything else was circumscribed – the respectable period for mourning a spouse or brother; the length after a death that a girl should wait before remarrying; the acceptable forms of words for offering sympathy; the degrees, to the last month and dress shade, by which widows could be inched back into the usual knocks and pleasures of society. But nothing dictated how long one should wait before giving up and mourning in the absence of a body or ashes or a telltale scrap of muddied uniform. Rules, which Petra so liked to kick against, at least in private, would in this instance have been a mercy.

Stranger than the simple envy of happier households to which a soldier had returned alive but merely injured was Harry and Petra’s unspeakable envy of the grieving, who had been given categorical proof and, however bleakly, released from intolerable suspense.

On a practical level, it was lucky that there was no farm bank account as such, nothing from which Petra might have been excluded. With the nearest bank so far away, Paul had fallen into the habit, as they all had, of keeping a stash of cash in a strongbox in the house and of making most of his grain cheques over to his account at the store. The surplus, as she had been playing the role of farmer’s wife, he had always handed over to Petra for banking, a habit he continued after her marriage, knowing her to be a trusty bookkeeper. Had he died, his one-page will, of which she found a copy in his kitchen dresser, made the property over to her as his next of kin.

They waited until the spring melt of 1918, however, before taking the symbolic step of removing a length of fence between the adjoining properties and fitting posts and a gate in its place.

Bellowed in newspaper headlines and rung out from clapboard church belfries, news of peace came swiftly, returning sons and daughters at a rather slower pace. That a lethal strain of flu had come back with them was such a bitter piece of news, on top of the disproportionate sacrifice the country had made, that it was as though some people could not digest or accept the truth of it. Some said that it was a last bit of Boche propaganda spread across the prairies by Hun sympathisers or Bolsheviks, perhaps from the interned Germans who had been released to work on farms when manpower became so short. Others, only marginally more rational, said that it was unpatriotic and cowardly to fuss about a thing like flu at a time when heroic children of empire were returning and needed to be celebrated and thanked.

Petra knew more about the flu, and sooner, than others in the district, because one of her friends, not quite lost to the conventions of home and family, had been volunteering as a nurse in an army hospital to the east and had seen wards and their staff decimated. Knowing of Petra’s interest and basic nursing training, she sent her details of what to watch for. In the cities, people were taking precautions, apparently, wearing masks and, where possible, avoiding mass gatherings. Some even fled to the countryside. In the Battlefords and surrounding small towns, nobody seemed worried, as though the countryside and a farming life there were so healthy as to be proof against a mere fever.

After arguing with one of the church wardens, who had dismissed flu in her hearing as
no more than a bad head cold, provided you’re man enough
, Petra insisted they stop going to church; missing a service of victory thanksgiving was, in any case, no great loss. When the threshing gang came to work on their harvest, she insisted Grace stay in the kitchen rather than help carry lunch to the table or clear away the men’s plates. And when plans were announced for a grand Armistice parade in Unity, she insisted Grace stay home, even though all her friends were going.

Harry felt he must go.

‘I don’t suppose I can persuade you to wear a mask?’ she said, and he saw she was only being slightly ironic.

‘Would you rather I stayed here too?’ he asked.

‘No, no. You’re right. One of us should be there for Paul. And your brother.’

After years of wounding silence, Harry had received a no less woundingly uninformative photograph from Chester. Almost exactly like the one he had imagined George circulating at the war’s outset, it showed Jack looking splendid, if older and more tired, in uniform, with George in a chair before him and an athletic daughter hanging off either arm.
Safely home! Best, Jack
was all it said. He might have autographed another ten identically.

So Harry promised he would shun sneezes and avoid handshakes, and if one were pressed upon him, he would wash his hands in the hottest bearable water soon afterwards. And he promised to ride there rather than risk the potentially unhealthy confinement of a railway carriage full of people from heaven knew where.

It was the first day off he had taken for months. The autumn colours were already on the wane; leaves tugged from trees and gathered into drifts by keen winds. As always, Kitty responded as keenly as any dog to being taken anywhere but through familiar fields, and seemed to relish the relative ease of being ridden rather than pulling a cart or plough.

Remembering the departing trains crammed with young men off to fight, he had expected Unity’s parade to be bigger. Of course, it was only a parade of returned soldiers and nurses from the districts around. There would be a much bigger one in the Battlefords, and countless such parades from one coast of the continent to the other, but still it was a shock to find so many more men and women cheering and waving flags from the pavement than were marching or being wheeled by nurses down the main street. Their numbers were boosted by quasi-military supporters from the area who had been too young to fight – like boy scouts – or too old, like the veterans and marching bands who broke the marchers up to make their numbers seem greater. It was impossible not to watch and think of the hundreds, thousands, who had left for ever. In Winter, Yonker and Lashburn alone he knew of farms now without sons. He found it impossible to cheer; indeed, the cheering of the crowd became so oppressive that he felt obliged to move to its rear so he could watch it rather than feel a glaringly non-participatory part of it.

No one was allowed to sell liquor, of course, since Prohibition, but it was hard to believe the people around him had drunk nothing stronger than tea. One constantly heard rumours of stills hidden in barns. A theory had spread that the only sure prophylactic against infection from the advancing flu was to remain gently inebriated. It was said that Dr Routledge had been approached so often already to supply alcohol for medicinal purposes, he had been driven to hang a framed notice in his front window telling patients not to bother asking since the answer, whatever their circumstances, would be no.

Harry felt and heard Munck before he saw him. A heavy arm dropped so suddenly across his shoulders that he flinched, thinking someone was pushing him aside.

‘If it isn’t my old friend Harry Cane. How are you, Windy?’

He must have come out of the shop at the side of whose doorway Harry had come to lean. He squeezed Harry’s shoulder, pressing down ostensibly in affection but unpleasantly, too, to emphasise the difference in their heights and builds. Harry could smell brandy on his breath, and guessed there was a hip flask in one of his pockets.

This was the man who had raped Petra and almost certainly goaded Paul into enlisting so impulsively. What Harry wanted to do was cut him dead and walk away, to treat him as a non-person, as he deserved, but Munck had him trapped and he did not want to give him the satisfaction of seeing him struggle.

He had heard it said by their usually ineffectual vicar at the first of several memorial services for the absent fallen that when a person died, the people who loved him best could unconsciously absorb the best aspects of his nature so that the timid became a little braver or the flippant a little less lightweight. ‘Death does not automatically confer nobility on the dying,’ he had said. ‘All too often there is no time for preparation or even dignity. But it can confer it on those they leave behind.’

Harry realised he could remove himself from the moment, just as he had removed himself from the cheering, braying crowd. He could smell the brandy on Munck’s hot breath and the distinctive salty musk that came off his big, warm body, and see how it was exerting an animal force over him, making him want to melt like some giddy flirt and lean into him, and he also understood that Paul had given him the calm strength to resist it.

‘Hello, Troels,’ he said, his voice level, then remembered Munck as a puffed-up recruiting officer and took in the significance of the fact that he wasn’t marching. He went quietly on the attack. ‘You’re not in uniform,’ he said.

It worked. Munck withdrew his arm and shuffled into a sulky position, leaning against the shop window, hands thrust deep in his coat pockets.

‘Shouldn’t you be proudly marching?’ Harry pursued. ‘After all you did?’

‘They retired me early,’ Munck said. ‘On health grounds.’

‘Surely not. You’re as strong as—’

‘I had a fever,’ Munck cut in. And the rest of his explanation was a mumble beneath the blare of a passing band.

Anger boiled up in Harry like bile after too rich a meal.
Paul didn’t need to go
, he wanted to tell him.
Farming was a protected, respected way to spend the war, and he was thirty-six. Even when they started conscripting, they didn’t take them at that age. But you made him. Didn’t you, bastard?
But he said nothing, merely turning away to watch a troop of boy scouts march past, young faces held high, bare legs grey and surely goose-bumped in the autumn chill. He turned back, stepped away from the doorway so that his back was to the parade. ‘So why are you here?’ he asked.

Munck looked directly at him and Harry felt his new strength falter. ‘I like it here,’ Munck said. ‘Clean air. Good people. Productive land. Opportunity. And no fucking mud or blown-apart bodies.’ A violent spasm shook him, and Harry saw he was quite drunk. ‘You have no idea, Windy,’ he said. ‘I still have my legs, my arms, my face, my cock.’