A Place Called Winter (26 page)

A woman passing heard him and clucked disapprovingly. Munck stared at her with such disgust that she froze for a moment as though he had physically restrained her, then she hurried on into the shop.

‘I’m sorry about Paul,’ Munck added.

I will say nothing
, Harry told himself.
Nothing about the packet, about what he knows and what he suspects. I will not give him the pleasure.
He sighed and adopted the cheery tone he despised in others. ‘Yes, well, the thing is never to abandon hope,’ he said.

The willed optimism of his words acted like some bleak enchanter’s curse; whatever hope he had been nursing in secret from his braver, more realistic self fluttered and died. Paul was dead. Harry was sure of it now. He realised, watching the parade, that deep down he had known it for months. And with that knowledge he had taken on something of his lover’s nature, not his courage or intelligence or impulsiveness, perhaps, but a little of his oak-like ability to endure.

‘I imagine that sister of his will be moving back to civilisation. If she hasn’t already.’

‘Oh, Petra is still here,’ Harry told him. ‘We’ve been married for years.’ He saw from the fractional widening of Munck’s eyes that he was both surprised and hurt. ‘Petra has been astonishing,’ he went on. ‘Quite the strongest and bravest woman I’ve ever known. She does pretty much all the work Paul did
and
manages to be a good mother to Grace.’

‘You have a child?’

‘Yes, Grace. She’s six.’ Harry suddenly wished she were there, flu or no flu, riding on his shoulders to see the parade. ‘Apple of my eye.’

Munck made a snorting, dismissive sound. ‘So you’re quite the big f-f-farmer now,’ he said. ‘Little Harry.’

Chapter Thirty

It was dark when Harry rode up the track to the farm. Upset by all the parade had stirred up in him, he was left now angry, now triumphant, and always afraid, by the conversation with Munck. His mind kept returning to it, like fingers to an itchy scab. Chilled and tired from the ride, he wanted nothing so much as to eat an early supper, a bowl of hot soup or stew, before tumbling into bed. His heart sank when he saw that a visitor’s horse was tied to the hitching post they’d recently set up.

Unfortunately it was a sociable time of year, after harvest and before the onset of snow, and the likelihood of acquaintances dropping in unannounced had increased with the ending of war and all the family news that generated. By the time he had rubbed Kitty down and given her food, he had resigned himself to playing host for a while, with the consolation that at least it would mean there would already be food on the table.

But then he recognised not the visitor’s horse, but the saddle on it, fastened in place with one of the distinctively patterned girth straps that showed it had been hired from the livery stables near Winter station. This was a visitor who had come by train. He hurried up on to the veranda and in at the door to the brightly lit kitchen, barely able to hold back the name and the smile at his lips.
Paul!
he all but shouted.
Paul!

He must have opened the door unusually roughly, for in the tableau before him, every face was turned towards him, startled. Petra was sitting, as though against her will, in a chair where she never usually sat, Grace’s chair. Her face was white with tension and fear. At one end of the table, in Harry’s chair, an old carver he had found at a house sale in Lloydminster and of which he was particularly fond, sat Munck with a half-eaten plate of supper before him.

He had Grace on his lap.

They had all agreed how closely she resembled Paul, but seeing her face close to her natural father’s, the likeness between them, with her white-blonde hair and commanding stare, was so strong that Harry understood that, for Munck, to look on her must have been like looking in a mirror.

‘Harry. At last,’ Petra said. She sprang up, but Munck slammed the flat of his hand down on the table with such force that his water bounced and splashed. She shrank back down into her chair as if threatened with a whip, quite unlike herself, wary eyes on Munck and the way his other hand was spread around Grace’s chest, pinning the child in place on his lap.

‘Why, if it isn’t happy Harry Cane,’ he said quietly.

‘Hello, Troels,’ Harry said. ‘Twice in one day! What a surprise.’

Seeing him, Grace began to cry, free at last to give voice to the tension that had been building up in the room.

‘Hello, darling,’ he told her. ‘High time you were in bed. Better let Petra put Grace to bed,’ he said.

‘Oh, but we were getting on so well. Like a burning house.’

‘Like a house on fire.’

‘I know what the bloody expression should be, Harry.’

‘It’s long past her bedtime,’ Harry said. ‘Let her go. Then we can talk.’

Munck stared at him. His eyes were swimming and he had brought the reek of forbidden alcohol into the house. He slowly loosened his grip on Grace, who sprang off his lap like a frightened cat and ran across to Harry.

‘There, there,’ he said, swinging her up into a hug. ‘I’m pleased to see you too. You missed the parade. You missed the trumpets and drums. But I can tell you all about them in the morning. She’s very hot,’ he told Petra.

‘She’s been sitting too close to the stove,’ Petra said. ‘That’s all.’ And it felt as though they were speaking in code.

‘Go with your mother. There’s a good girl.’

She clung on tightly at first, but seemed to sense Petra leaving the table and drawing closer, at which she relaxed and he could pass her over. He merely met Petra’s eyes as the child moved between them. He said nothing, but knew she had imagined this horrible scene so often on sleepless nights that she would already have rehearsed exactly what to do next.

They didn’t visit the privy first, which would have been Grace’s usual bedtime routine. Petra must have thought that leaving the house might be taken as a provocation. As soon as she shut Grace’s bedroom door, there was a rumble of furniture moving and he guessed she had slid the chest of drawers or even the bed hard against it.

‘Sit,’ Munck said, ignoring the sound.

‘No,’ Harry told him. ‘You’ll have to leave, Troels.’

‘You’re turning me out?’

‘You must know you’re not welcome here.’

‘But we are like a family now.’ Munck inclined his head minutely towards the barricaded door. ‘Knowing your woman as well as I do . . .’

Harry stepped over to the outside door. His shotgun hung above it, high out of Grace’s curious reach, but kept loaded. Petra knew how to use it and he could only imagine that Munck had caught her outside on arrival, or, worse, caught Grace.

‘What? You’re going to shoot me now?’

Ignoring him, Harry simply opened the door and held it open to the night. The waiting horse snorted, its breath misting the air. There was no cloud cover, and bright moonshine lit the slough nearest the house, which early autumn rains had already filled to its weedy margins.

To his surprise and relief, Munck had left the table and was clumsily pulling on his coat. Perhaps he would leave without fuss after all. He came out after Harry, and Harry closed the door to keep the warmth in.

‘It’s late,’ Munck said.

‘I know. There’ll be no train now until morning, but if you ride up to Paul’s place, you can spend the night there. You’ll find the house key on a hook on the back of the stable door. There should be hay and oats there still, for the horse. But in the morning, you must go and not come back.’

‘I don’t see why I should go at all. I was explaining earlier, to your hospitable lady wife. You’re going to sell me Paul’s land, and at a knockdown price.’

‘It’s not ours to sell. Paul will be back soon.’

‘Paul’s not coming back.’

‘Why? What have you heard?’

‘So sharp! What have I heard? Other than that he was shot for cowardice and that there’s an MP in Toronto who’d see him hanged for buggery? Well, I’ve heard stories that, if I repeated them in the grain depot, where little Windy Cane is now such a respected grower that people are saying he’ll be the next secretary of the Grain Growers’ Local, or the post office, where people say Mr Cane gets no mail at all from whatever family he had back home, but is always polite, such a gentleman . . . if I repeated those stories, I don’t think it would take people long to make the connection between you and Mr Slaymaker, how very helpful you are towards each other, how supportive, how very like brothers. Closer than brothers, in fact. And how your good lady wife is no wife at all but a . . . decoy for depravity.’

‘You know nothing.’

‘Are you denying it?’ Munck read something in his face. ‘You’ll be the one making a swift departure in the morning. Not me.’

‘What’s to stop me telling people about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘What you d-d-d . . .’

‘Spit it out, man.’

‘Did to me that time in Moose Jaw.’

‘You begged for it. You took advantage. Just as she did.’

It was the mention of Petra that caused Harry to crack. Up to that point, Munck’s threats and insinuations had only induced shame in him, and panic. Munck was standing only a little further away than would a dancing partner. With the instinct of a predator, he’d sensed the effect his proximity had on Harry so had moved closer, the better to loom over and demoralise him. Harry had never hit a man in anger in his life but had been obliged to take boxing lessons at school, horrible things on a square of bloodstained canvas, fenced in by yelling boys.

Now his fist flew out and struck Munck on the temple so hard, he felt he had broken every bone in his hand.

Munck staggered backwards and tipped over the veranda rail. There was a cracking sound as he landed, then silence, not a curse, not a groan. Harry’s only thought, overriding all sense, all the carefully inculcated morality of his youth, was that he had to kill him.

He jumped down. Munck was out cold. There was a lump hammer somewhere nearby. Grace had been using it to break nuts for her mother the previous afternoon. He had noticed it on the ground that morning and made a mental note that it should be tidied away. Finding it swiftly in the dark would be impossible. Instead, he seized Munck by his trouser bottoms and, hauling so that he thought his back would give out, began pulling him down to the nearby slough. If he could only get his head beneath the water, he could pin his arms behind his back and sit on him until the deed was done.

He glanced over his shoulder to judge the angle by which they were coming to the water. The easiest thing would be to stop a little short and then roll him. They were nearly there.

The kick to his ribs was so savage, he heard a distinct crack as it took his breath away. He was too winded to cry out. He felt freezing cold mud beneath his hair when he landed, so knew the water was close. Munck’s weight settling heavily astride him winded him afresh before he could recover, and then Munck had both his hands pinned above his head beneath one of his fists, and had brought his face close, a bear sniffing meat.

It was a myth that grizzlies killed one with a blow of a paw or a bite to the neck or face; the truth was that they were interested in eating, not killing, so were known to waste no time in dining on one’s liver.

Harry could see nothing of Munck against the moon except the outline of his big head with its short, thick fuzz of hair, but he could hear his furious breathing and smell the bootleg brandy on his breath and the heat of angry animal coming off him. His face was so close, his nose tip brushed the side of Harry’s neck. Harry felt something hot dripping off him. He couldn’t be weeping, and the night was too cold for sweat, so he must have cut his head when he fell.

‘Harry Cane. Harry Cane,’ Munck murmured. ‘Little,
fierce
Harry Cane.’ His fingernails dug into the soft undersides of Harry’s captured wrists. His other hand stroked the side of Harry’s face, then his neck, then began to press against his Adam’s apple in a way that would soon begin to hurt.

‘When I’ve killed you,’ he said, ‘I’ll fuck you again, real hard, for old times’ sake. Then I’ll fuck your wife and probably kill her because she’s a handful, isn’t she? She was so good last time. So grateful to have a proper man inside her for a change. And then I reckon I’ll fuck your daughter.’

He doesn’t know
, Harry thought.
He doesn’t know Grace is his
. And the insane idea possessed him that if he could only impress on Munck that the frightened child in the back bedroom was blood of his blood and not Harry’s at all, he might at least spare her.

But Munck mistook his struggle to speak for a struggle to break free, and started to strangle him. The terror of not being able to breathe was outweighed by the tearing pain of the fingers on his windpipe and Adam’s apple. Munck was putting all his body weight behind it now. It felt as though something were breaking in there. Was there a bone to break – some sort of gristle? – or was the pipe like a length of hose? Petra would know.

But just as his thoughts were drifting and he began to lose consciousness, the agonising pressure stopped and was replaced by a sense of being smothered and the painful pressure of something cold and metallic against his chin. He opened his eyes, to see nothing, for Munck was sprawled on top of him, and it was a belt buckle digging in so sharply.

With what remaining strength he could muster, he rolled Munck off him on to the grass and sat up gasping for air, one hand to his painfully bruised throat.

Had Munck suffered some sort of seizure? He was staring up at the moon. He groaned once, very softly.

‘Munck!’ Harry suspected a cruel feint, a cat briefly pretending to have been overcome by a mouse before resuming its torture and execution. He tapped him roughly on the thigh with the toe of his boot. ‘Munck!’ he repeated, more roughly.

There was silence. The eyes had closed.

With no thought beyond his own survival, Harry seized Munck under the shoulders, crying out with the effort needed. He had to lean all his weight backwards to tug the man into motion across the remaining five feet to the water’s edge. Mud sucked at his boots then he felt the shock of icy water around his feet.

The eyes reopened and were staring up at him; moonlight caught their glitter. Munck let out a gentle whimper. ‘Harry?’ he breathed. It sounded tender, as if doubt were entering his manner for the first time in their acquaintance.

Here Harry dropped him into the shallows. At first he held him under with his hands, one on either shoulder, arms held straight. Munck fought a little, kicking up with his legs, but he was at the wrong angle to make contact and only thrashed himself deeper under the surface. He gripped Harry’s wrists furiously, glaring up at him through the water, but then he could hold his breath no longer and let it out in a last great bubbling convulsion that almost shook Harry free. His enraged grip became more like a firm hold, then a caress, and then his hands drifted free.

Still not trusting him, still disbelieving and afraid, Harry heaved first one then the other sodden boot free of the water to stand on his chest. He almost lost his balance as Munck’s upper half sank deeper, so that Harry ended up with one foot pressing on his tormentor’s face.

The night was still cloudless, and he could see every detail of Munck’s long legs sprawled away from the slough and on to dry land. The silence was broken only by his own ragged breathing. His throat was so crushed, it hurt when he swallowed, as though he were swallowing sharp little bones. It even hurt like that when he breathed. At last, light-headed, he dared jump off the body and made a clumsy landing on grass. He pulled off his filthy boots and the soaking socks beneath them, then seized Munck’s boots to tug them free. He felt a primitive need somehow to incapacitate the menacing body before him.

Munck’s boots were a little too large but they were dry. He put them on and staggered back to the house. He tried to call out to Petra but found Munck’s grip had all but killed his voice, and he produced only a silent yelp at the pain of the attempt.