A Place Called Winter (27 page)

He set his wet boots down beside the stove. Munck’s had a far noisier tread for some reason, as though the wooden heels were hollow.

‘Hello?’ Petra was calling through the barricaded door. ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s me,’ he tried to say. ‘You’re safe now.’

Somehow she realised who it was, perhaps because he had knocked rather than thudded, perhaps because she had unconsciously learnt to be reassured by the rhythm of his footfall around the house over the years. She dragged away the chest of drawers. He heard her gasp at the effort. Then she opened the door. It took her a moment to realise he couldn’t speak, but when he gestured at his throat, there must have been marks there that explained, because she seemed to understand at once.

‘Where is he?’

He led her to the door and pointed. She said nothing for a while, then asked simply, ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

Harry nodded and, leaning close to her ear, whispered, ‘I should ride into town, get word out.’

‘Who would you tell?’ she asked. ‘And what would you tell them? He attacked us.’

‘No,’ he whispered, flinching at the pain. ‘I attacked him.’

‘You killed him in self-defence.’

He was still too confused to think coherently, as though his ordeal had affected his wits. All he could feel was the hot blood dripping on to his neck and face as Munck closed in for the kill. His attempt to explain himself to Petra in throat-clawing whispers was cut short by a cry from Grace back in the bedroom.

‘She’s ill,’ Petra said, flatly. ‘It’s flu.’

‘But how . . . ?’ he started stupidly, only she was running back to the bedroom.

Grace was barely recognisable from the pale-faced little girl who had clung to him earlier. She lay on the bed, blonde hair dark with sweat that shone on her chest and throat.

‘Get cold water,’ Petra told him. ‘And a small towel we can dip in it.’

Frightened, he did as she told him, pumping water into a big saucepan and fetching a towel from the neat pile in the linen cupboard.

‘I’ll ride for the doctor,’ he whispered.

‘No,’ Petra insisted. ‘Even if you could find a doctor, we can’t spread it any further. No one can visit and we can’t leave. Not until it’s over.’

As ever, her resolution was absolute. He pulled up a stool on the other side of the bed and held Grace’s burning hand while Petra repeatedly dipped and wrung out the towel and pressed it to the child’s face and neck and brow.

She had witnessed such things often enough when acting as her father’s nurse in the Toronto slums, but Harry had never watched such a fever at work. Nothing had prepared him for its violence and speed, for Grace’s desperate whimpering and hand-clutching as she was racked by dry coughs that eventually left spatters of ruby lung blood on the sheets, or for the violent spasms that shook her as the flu cooked her brain before his powerless gaze. She lost consciousness in the small hours as the sun was coming up.

Her breathing had become so ragged and wild that its abrupt cessation made the room feel small and very quiet. He brought her hand to his lips as he had done times without number through the night, then reached out to lay it on her chest, where he pressed it once more with his.

Petra was simply frozen, staring at her. He reached up once more and gently closed the child’s eyes, shocked at how hot her skin still felt.

‘Could you open the window, Harry?’ Petra asked at last.

‘Of course,’ he said. He opened the little window and the room filled with dawn bird calls. Turning back, he found that Petra had climbed on to the bed and was clutching Grace against her as though force and need alone might bring her back.

‘Harry,’ she said at last, half turning but still not meeting his eye. ‘Bury her while I’m asleep. I’m not sure I could bear to watch.’

He dug two graves as deep as his strength would let him. The first was fifty yards or so from the house, where the soil was loose but unencumbered by tree roots. As he dug, he kept seeing Munck’s bootless feet, pale in the corner of his vision. It was madness to think of the one death as retribution for the other. He could almost hear Petra scornfully dismissing the suggestion. But every time he glimpsed the feet in the grass, he remembered, and was afraid.

He wrapped Grace in a clean sheet and laid her in the bottom. Shovelling the earth back on top of her, he averted his eyes, but knew that the soft sound of clods falling on her would never leave him.

It somehow seemed fitting that Munck’s grave should be off the property. He dug it to the side of the track that led to both farms, losing the energy to make it very deep. The sun was well up when he heaved Munck’s big body up on to the back of the cart and took it out there to throw it in, and he realised that if anybody came by, he would look every inch the desperate murderer; he would look like what he had become.

He fashioned a rough cross from one piece of lumber nailed to another and pressed it into the disturbed soil above Grace, then, to allay his uneasiness, did the same for Munck. He could not bring himself to put a name on Grace’s cross but he scratched Munck’s name on his with his knife so that no one could accuse him of keeping the killing a secret.

BETHEL

Geese in flocks above you flying
Their direction know;
Brooks beneath the thin ice flowing
To their oceans go;
Coldest love will warm to action,
Walk then, come,
No longer numb,
Into your satisfaction.

W. H. Auden, ‘Underneath the Abject Willow’

Chapter Thirty-One

Washing in the little riverside bathhouse before breakfast – a room far warmer than his cabin because of the stove heating river water for the bath – he couldn’t help but watch the Athabasca’s swirling currents furling by outside the small window and think with apprehension of what it would soon draw forth from him. He watched it again during an early breakfast, which he ate in companionable near silence with Ursula. It exerted a kind of magnetism on the eyes, as the sea might, but disturbingly so, for breaking waves at least held the gaze in one place, whereas a rushing river drew one’s eyes forever to one side and out of the frame, as it were.

Before taking her place among the gentlemen of the chorus, as Harry had come to think of them, Mabel stood near Harry and Ursula for a minute, watching the river too, and seemed to have read his mind. ‘
Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away
,’ she sighed.

‘What did you make of the reading last night?’ he asked Ursula when Mabel, unable to draw him into conversation, had drifted back to her regular audience.

Ursula was in her black dress with the white cuffs and collar, which, with her cascade of long black hair, gave her the look of a tragic governess in a melodrama. She pulled a corner off her toast in a way that sharply recalled Winnie. ‘I hate that word,’ she said with surprising passion. ‘Berdache.’

‘I don’t remember him using it.’

‘
A man dressed in women’s clothes driven to the most servile and degrading duties
,’ she quoted. ‘I looked it up just now. It’s what the priest used to encourage the others to call me at school.’

‘Is it not a . . . Cree word?’

She smiled kindly. ‘I like it when you stammer,’ she said. ‘I like the way it makes you sound uncertain of yourself. Most men are so certain. No. No, it isn’t,’ she answered him, glancing up as Bruno and Mabel began to leave the room and they all smiled at each other like two couples growing familiar through regular mealtimes in the same hotel. ‘It’s Frenchified Arabic, I think. It means slave prostitute.’

‘Oh dear. What would you rather call it?’

She said something, in Plains Cree presumably, so softly he couldn’t quite catch it, but it sounded like
ayarkwoo
. ‘Translation is impossible, since it could mean either both man and woman or neither man nor woman. Some of us call it
two-souls
. You are a two-souls, Harry.’

‘Me?’

‘I knew it as soon as you first spoke to me.’

Harry smiled in a way he hoped looked benign. ‘I can assure you I have never felt anything but entirely male or felt the slightest desire to wear a dress.’

She merely raised her dark eyebrows slightly, and he remembered wrapping his legs around Paul’s waist in the slough, and how it felt to be lifted and urgently turned by him on a bed. Meeting her eye, he had the uncanny sense that she had put the two images into his mind. ‘You can be two-soul on the inside,’ she breathed, as though imparting a secret charm. ‘You find women easier than men. To make friends with, I mean.’

‘Yes. I suppose.’

‘And they instinctively trust you because they sense the difference in you.’

‘Well I don’t know about that.’

‘I know.’ It was a statement. She sighed. ‘It’s a blessing and a curse. It can make you strong in here,’ she startled him by tapping her forefinger gently to the centre of his forehead, ‘but it can leave you on the outside looking in. You watch so hard you forget to live. You chose the basket willow over the bow, but there’s no rule to say you can’t use both.’

‘I don’t really follow,’ he said. His eyes strayed back to the vanishing waters.

As if reading his mind, she murmured, ‘Time for your session.’

For several days, Gideon made no headway in his sessions with Harry. Something had changed. Had he been fanciful, Harry would have said it was quite as though Ursula had laid a protective spell about him. Harry found the river was just a river, at which he could stare, and stare, while listening to Gideon’s soothing instructions with no effect.

‘You’re resisting me, Harry,’ Gideon said.

‘Forgive me. I don’t mean to,’ Harry told him. ‘Maybe it’s all the rest and good sleep I’ve been getting.’

Instead they talked, with no obvious attempt at hypnosis, about the distant past, his memories of his parents, his schooldays, Jack. Sensing it was the sort of thing Gideon wanted to hear, he talked in some detail about how very handsome Jack was, and about boarding school, about the abuses and devotions he witnessed between the older and younger boys at Harrow. And he told him about Hector Browning and the conflict between the guilty desires fostered by that liaison and his loving duties as a father and husband. Gideon tried to nudge him towards saying that he had written in the autograph book because he
wanted
to be found out and bring an end to the conflict, but Harry insisted that no, it had been an accident, a piece of stupidity, without which he believed the situation could have continued for years without alteration, a sort of parallel marriage like that between any husband and mistress.

He took on more chores, finally convincing Samuel to let him spend a day thinning trees and sawing up logs. Perhaps it was the physical fatigue brought on by this honest labour that made him suddenly open up.

When the last of his tale was done, Harry opened his eyes and saw not the kind, familiar walls of papered timber and the bearskin blanket he had retrieved from Paul’s bed for comfort when Paul went off to fight, but a big window and a view over a fast-flowing river.

Perhaps it was the self-importance of any patient and Gideon actually remained clinically detached, but Harry thought the doctor seemed unsettled, frightened even, an apprentice whose spells were proving more powerful than expected. Gideon retreated from crouching beside him to sitting back in a chair between Harry and the view, as though to anchor him in the here and now. He reasserted his superiority through pity.

‘You poor man,’ he murmured. ‘Poor, poor man. The epidemic reached Jasper too, of course. It followed the rail map across the continent, but we were spared out here. There were many deaths at the asylum. They had to dig a mass grave.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘I suspended my usual visits until it was clear the danger was over; I had to think of the safety of my community here.’

‘Of course.’

‘Your story is borne out by your admission notes from Essondale. They say you arrived with diminished speech ability, if not quite aphasia, and contusions on your throat suggestive of a strangulation attempt. It was assumed, however, that you had failed in an attempt to hang yourself.’

Harry pictured his body creaking back and forth from a rope swung over a beam in his stable, his freed horses snorting uneasily outside the open door. It was entirely plausible. He frowned, looked at his hands, and noticed the marks of ageing beginning to stain and crease them.

‘Harry, how did you come to be on the train?’ Gideon asked him.

‘The train?’

‘You were apprehended by the inspector on a train heading west from Winter.’

Harry stared. He recalled the dread he felt whenever he heard a train’s passage up the valley, but nothing beyond that. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

‘It’s always hard to read between the lines in these curt little reports, but it mentioned
lewd behaviour towards a group of returning soldiers
, and
uncontrollable weeping
. Is it possible you mistook a soldier for your Paul?’

Harry thought about Gideon’s words as hard as he could, but they made no sense to him. Foreboding bubbled through him at the effort, so he said nothing, just looked back at the doctor’s sad gaze. He was learning that disobedience could be misread as sorrow.

‘Why would you have been on the train?’

‘I’ve really no idea. I think I’d have returned Munck’s horse to the livery stables. And that’s near the station, but . . . I’m sorry to be so—’

‘Might you have been going to the mounted police?’

‘Possibly. But the obvious station for us would be Battleford or Lloydminster, and neither is due west from Winter.’

‘Don’t worry, Harry. This isn’t a police interview.’

Chapter Thirty-Two

There was a small drama before lunch as Kenneth the Giggler left them. Perhaps it was not entirely surprising that he was collected by a buxom, respectable wife and a brace of shyly staring children. Bearing himself like a bank manager, suddenly, and giggling no longer, he introduced her to Gideon but not to the rest of them, who watched in friendly curiosity from the terrace.

‘One wonders what his wife was told,’ Harry murmured to Bruno, of whose straightforwardness and lack of theatricality he had grown rather fond.

‘
Nervous collapse due to exhaustion,
’ she said drily. ‘That’s the usual one.’

Ursula caught his eye after lunch and asked if he wanted exercise as, having done her day’s chores, she was hoping to go for a long walk in the woods. He agreed readily.

‘You had a good morning,’ she observed. She looked a little drawn.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And no. I’m seeing more clearly now, but it disturbs me that the memories are so sad and yet I don’t seem to feel anything. It’s as though they happened to someone else.’

‘Perhaps they did,’ she said, accepting the offer of his arm to climb over a log. ‘You have more than one soul, remember.’

‘Ah yes.’ He chuckled. ‘Silly of me to forget.’

For some time they walked in companionate silence. He found it reminded him of Paul, with whom he could work or read without the lack of conversation feeling remotely awkward. And being reminded of Paul hurt, of course.

They reached the clearing in the woods he had visited before, but then Ursula led him confidently onwards. She paused now and then to examine a plant or to listen to a bird singing, quite as though they had messages for her. The further they walked from Bethel, the less she resembled the nun-like Ursula of mealtimes, so refined and modest. Nor was she like the young athlete who had so expertly driven the cart to town and back. Rather, she became an energised combination of the two: her true self, perhaps.

They came upon a clearing where a stream gurgled through a channel in the rock before plunging down the slope to the distant river. She stooped, scooped a little of the water and murmured appreciatively. ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘I think I can help you, if you’ll let me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Trust me. I understand. Gideon has been leading you along a line – so very like a man; so methodical and tidy – but life isn’t made of lines. He is like a traveller who looks left and right but doesn’t think to look behind or above him. Men like that get eaten by cougars.’

There was a little cave in the rock behind them, facing the view of distant mountains. Ursula walked cautiously to its entrance and sniffed the air there. She took a couple more steps into the darkness, still sniffing, then turned back to him. ‘Just checking,’ she said. ‘For animals.’

‘Bears?’

‘Possibly. We passed some scat a while back but it wasn’t fresh. I want us to be able to stay still safely for a while.’

‘What are you . . . ?’

‘Do you need to be back for any reason before supper?’

‘No.’

‘Good. So. First we need a fire, because it’s cold when you stop walking.’ She swiftly gathered dry kindling, bark strips and a few larger sticks. ‘I could do this the old Cree way,’ she said, ‘with two sticks and patience, but . . .’

‘I picked these up in Hinton,’ he said with a smile, producing the matchbox from his inside pocket.

She smiled and took them off him. She flaked one of the sticks into a little heap with a very sharp little kitchen knife she produced from her reticule, lit the heap and, breathing steadily on it, added a few twigs then larger pieces of kindling as the fire grew.

‘This is an old campground,’ she said. ‘Very, very old.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be much room,’ he said. ‘Unless the cave is huge.’

‘Not for a tribe,’ she told him. ‘Just one or two people. People came here alone for a spirit quest.’

‘What’s that?’

She stared at him in examining silence for a minute before answering. ‘We all have turning points in our lives, when we could go this way or do that, sit and weave the basket or go hunting with the bow and arrow. The spirits show you the way to go.’ She laughed suddenly. Not her usual feminine chuckle but a startlingly big, manly guffaw, a sound of triumph. ‘God forgive me,’ she said, ‘but it has been a
very
long time since I did this.’ She reached up to her neck and unfastened her long string of beads with the crucifix on it. She handed it to Harry. ‘Put this somewhere so He can’t watch.’

He slipped the necklace into his coat’s inside pocket, where Jesus couldn’t see her.

‘Now,’ she told him, ‘you stay here and feed the fire and think about who you love, while I do some foraging. I won’t be long.’

Bemused, he sat on the ground, cross-legged, while, clutching her knife, Ursula followed the stream over the edge of the ledge and down the hill. The fire was burning well now, and its warmth and cheerful crackle was welcome, for the spot was in shadow. He fed in a couple of sticks, looked up where the smoke now rose in a blue column, and watched a buzzard impersonate a child’s kite, apparently riding the air currents for the uncomplicated pleasure of doing so. And then he made himself think about Paul.

He tried thinking about him not as a cruel memory would do it, reliving specific scenes, like waking beside him in the night, or swimming with him across the slough at evening. Instead he simply conjured up the pleasure of his physical presence, his kind brown eyes with the little lines about them, hinting at mischief, the small scar on the back of his left hand, the smell of him, bread-oven warm before waking, the breadth of his shoulders.

Oddly, he found that this conscious remembering did not make him sad but only – how to put it? – lambent with love. When Ursula returned, it was as though she saw this at once, for she reached out a quick bony hand to touch his cheek.

She had gathered a plant, some kind of flag or sedge, it seemed to him, though she called it something that sounded like
wickers
. Sitting across the fire from him, she trimmed it, throwing what she didn’t need to sizzle in the flames. She retained the long, thin roots, which she had already rinsed quite clean in the stream. Using the knife, she cleaned off any fibrous hair and much of their skin, quite as though she were preparing salsify for the table. When she spoke, she was no longer Ursula but Little Bear. Grave. Manly.

‘This is not the way,’ she said. ‘You should have been fasting for at least a day, and so should I. But it may be effective and the spirits won’t mind.’

‘Is it poison?’ he asked, a powerful recollection of Lily Thunder fed by the fire smoke. Lily, who he finally saw, hadn’t been entirely female either.

‘No,’ Ursula told him. ‘It does aid constipation, but for us, it will bring visions. Here.’ She passed him two lengths of root. ‘It’s bitter,’ she warned him, ‘like ginger mixed with cinnamon, but you must keep chewing it, even if you can’t swallow. You need the juice.’

She raised a piece to her mouth and chewed on it, fast and hard, as a squirrel might. Then she tucked in a second piece. ‘God forgive me,’ she muttered.

‘Ursula, please. Don’t do this if it bothers you so.’

The look she threw him was utterly serious. ‘I
must
do this,’ she said. ‘This is who I am. But what we do here, Harry, you will never speak of. Never.’

Startled, Harry nodded.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Chew.’

It
was
bitter, like biting directly into memory itself. It also rapidly had the odd effect of numbing his mouth, so that he became worried about accidentally biting his tongue. He certainly couldn’t have spoken clearly, even if he swallowed first. Ursula dribbled slightly but did not seem to notice. She had shut her eyes and was rocking gently, crooning some Cree song under her breath. Thinking about Paul again, Harry swallowed the piece of root in his mouth and hurriedly pushed in the second, as though eager not to be left behind. He pictured the buttons on Paul’s flannel shirts, and how the upper ones had a way of falling teasingly open on their own.

Unused to him sitting cross-legged, his knees were complaining, so he uncrossed his legs, lay down on the rock, cushioning his head on his arm, and closed his eyes. Over the crackling fire, he could hear Little Bear and Ursula apparently in conversation. They were talking Cree. Quite suddenly she fell silent, then a man’s voice, which sounded far older than hers, spoke to him from very close at hand.

‘Three men,’ it said slowly, almost in his ear, and he felt a hot hand press hard against his heart. ‘Three men haunt you.’

The ground seemed to sway rhythmically beneath him, inducing a momentary nausea, and Harry saw the inside of a railway carriage crowded with men. It was like being in a dream, only the physical details were a hundred times sharper. He could smell wet wool from soldiers’ uniforms and the stale sweat off their shirts, and here and there as he moved through the unresisting crowd a sour-sweet gust of tobacco. The youth of the soldiers was astonishing. They were so much younger than the men he had seen waved off at Winter. Some were little more than schoolboys, with down, not bristles, on their jaws. And as they parted for him, he saw, to his amazement, Jack, lovely, handsome, perfect, sitting there in a captain’s uniform, with his back to him, talking to Paul. He was sure it was Paul. They were talking happily, laughing.

Overjoyed, Harry plunged forward to meet them. He would sweep Jack into a tight embrace, understanding all, forgiving all as everyone cheered and clapped them on the backs. But just as he reached him, Jack turned and it wasn’t Jack at all, and it wasn’t Paul with him. Harry was driven forward by crazed momentum so seized the one who was nearly Jack anyway, hugging him tight, planting kisses in his dirty hair, then reaching out to grab the man who was nearly Paul. Which was when the other soldiers stopped being cheery and stared at him in disgusted silence. He tried to stammer out an apology before anyone hit him, but his mouth was full of swollen magic root and disobeyed him.

The train was passing through Unity and he saw himself through the window, slight and timid-looking, being pinned in place outside the shop by Munck. Handsome but really rather sad, Troels had been drinking brandy to overcome the shame of not being with the proper soldiers on the train, or in the parade. And looking from outside, as it were, Harry could understand how, for all his mockery and bullying, Munck saw in Harry things he wanted and could never have: Englishness, certainty of position, education in all the little things whose absence could make a man feel unacceptable. Troels, he now saw, wanted Harry’s approval and affection but was not equipped to win them. Drawing closer, he could hear his drunken words.

‘I had a fever, a bad one. It weakened my heart. They said I was more use recruiting than fighting; a mock soldier, a
toy
.’

There was a gentle pressure on Harry’s elbow. He turned away to see Little Bear in real Cree clothes, time-worn and authentic, with feathers on a necklace around his neck like the one Lily Thunder had worn. He lifted Munck’s arm off Harry’s shoulder, showing neither fear nor hesitation. Then he led Harry along the front of the shop and up an alleyway. At its end he pointed.

The wooden sidewalk ran out and they stepped off it on to a patch of rough ground, such as so often lay behind the buildings in small prairie settlements. All the building energy went into the fronts, into a line of stores and banks and hotels that would convey prosperity and stability to the new arrival, but beyond the facades, which often were just that – high structures like stage flats nailed on at the front of low tin sheds – this was what one found. Grass. Mud. A pile of lumber. Perhaps wooden stakes optimistically marking the quadrants of a second street not yet built.

‘Why?’ Harry began, and found that Little Bear was no longer beside him.

The noise of the street had gone with him. The alley had gone. Harry turned back. An ox was lying off to one side, contentedly grazing whatever it could reach without moving. It was dark brown, with a black nose, its coat quite shaggy, suggesting it was shaped by life in a cold climate. Seeing Harry, it rose by lumbering degrees to its feet and tried to take a step towards him. But one of its front legs was wounded, snagged twice around with a piece of barbed wire. Harry felt no fear of it. In his experience, oxen were usually placid; it was cows that one had to approach with caution.

‘Hey, boy,’ he murmured in the low tone he had learnt from Jørgensen. ‘You’re in trouble, aren’t you?’

It collapsed heavily forward on to its injured leg, smothering the wire as its knees bent, then sank heavily down so that the wire must have been cutting into it in several places. As Harry came closer, he realised the beast had a ring through its nose. He took off his belt, slipped it through the ring as an improvised rope and gently pulled.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come on, boy. If you stand again, I can help you.’

But the ox only pulled back on the belt, shaking its head from side to side and snorting snottily. Then it mooed at him, bellowed almost, only the sound wasn’t the full-throated, belly-clenching cry he knew cattle could produce, but wretchedly muted.

He dropped the belt, crouched down close and reached out to touch the poor creature’s noble face and run his fingers through the shock of black-brown hair between its massive felty ears.

‘Come on, boy. Let me help you. Please,’ he repeated.

But all it did was moo sadly up at him.

He opened his eyes to see smoke rising from the dying embers that glowed just a couple of feet from his face. The Dvorak bird, or chickadee, or whatever it was called, sang so close at hand he fully expected to find it perching on his knee as he slowly sat up. As the confusion of visions left his head, he heard Petra’s voice pointing the birds out to Grace.

‘I miss you,’ she sang on the bird’s three melancholy descending notes. ‘Hear that? I miss you. I miss you.’

The sun was low in the sky. Very low. Could they have slept all this time and missed supper? After only a few weeks at Bethel, he was already sufficiently institutionalised by the place to suffer a flare of boarding school panic that he might have broken the rules. He stood, expecting to find Ursula lying on the other side of the fire, but there was no sign of her.