The Age of Water Lilies (8 page)

There was the time in the mown grass of the farthest orchard, the two of them lying down to the song of meadowlarks, clothing pushed aside, and there was this time, a naked embrace on the sweetness of new fir boughs covered over in homespun. The weight of their bodies, turning and lifting, released balsam from the crushed fir, a rustling of branches as though they lay among trees. Wind came in through the screened openings and cooled their bodies after they had made love in the early evening. They had now a small history of such encounters accumulating in their hands, the way they sought an area that responded eagerly, a particular texture of skin, a rough patch on a heel, the soft hairs of an area unknown to Flora before the time in the orchard. She was drowsy with pleasure.

They ate a meal on the cabin steps, balancing tin plates on their laps. Gus had taken care of the cooking, heating stew and a few biscuits on the stove, and pouring them each a measure of whisky in the cups they had used for their tea. By now the loon had come to their shore and drifted in and out of the reeds. Goldeneye could be seen out in the middle of the lake; bats were beginning to swoop from the trees. Flora had never felt so far from what she knew. When darkness came and the air cooled considerably, Gus brought out a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. She leaned against his legs. She could hear the horses snuffling in the corral and wondered if they, too, experienced displacement or whether it was all the same to them—home pasture or a corral in the Back Valley, river water or lake water in their buckets, human voices or loons.

She had never known anything as nice as talking after love-making. Face to face on the narrow bed, Flora offered the details of her childhood to her lover like a series of small gifts. The rocking horse saga, riding lessons, walks with George's tutor over Roman roads with appropriate fragments of poetry being recited, in Latin of course, as they scrambled over fields and along the river with the faint echo of old campaigns in their ears.

Hic tamen hanc mecum poteras requi

escere noctem fronde super viridi. Sunt nobis mitia poma,

castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis,

et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant

maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae . . .

. . . remembered Flora, having been taken by the tutor's ability to evoke those earlier times. She loved Latin for its hard, clean sound, even if she had difficulty in understanding exactly what it meant.

“Ah, Virgil,” murmured Gus, “my favourite poet. I had so much of him memorized when I was at school. There was always a line or two of Virgil appropriate to an occasion. As now. Let me translate that.

Here still you may lie with me this night

on the green foliage. There are ripe apples for us

sweet chestnuts and an abundance of milk . . .”

He broke off for a minute. “
Pressi
is a bit of a problem. It's a genitive participle that goes with
lactis
and the phrase literally means “milk having been pressed.” So cheese, I suppose. To go with those apples. Anyway, let's say an abundance of fresh cheese, then,

. . . and now in the distance the high gables of the farms smoke

and greater shades fall from the high mountains.”

“How beautiful that is,” murmured Flora as Gus translated the lines she had called up from memory.

“And poignant,” replied her lover, “when you think that the subjects of some of the
Eclogues
are shepherds who have lost their farms to soldiers. Sleeping on green boughs instead of their regular beds! Though they sound quite happy with it, don't they? As we have been. At least they have apples and cheese and some chestnuts to roast, and though wine isn't mentioned, there is almost always drink in the Latin poetry!”

Gus shot a grouse for their midday meal next day, using an old gun hanging from the log beam. He cooked the bird with some chanterelle mushrooms he had hunted for in the woods beyond the lake and then in the rich fat, fried potatoes he had packed in his saddlebags. He swam in the lake, gliding through the rushes and out into the open water at the lake's centre. Flora watched him splash and plunge under the surface, wondering if she had ever been as happy as she was, sitting on a stump under blue sky, long skeins of geese passing overhead on their way south.

“Did you really say ‘Dame's Bottom,' did I really hear you say that?” Gus laughed as Flora repeated a bit of history from her village. It was the second evening of their sojourn in the cabin; Gus had come up from checking the horses for the night to find Flora wrapped in a blanket on the porch, two glasses of whisky poured, eager to talk.

She slapped his arm. “I most certainly did not. I said ‘Dane's Bottom.' From the Battle of Edgington, where Alfred stopped the Viking expansion and saved Wessex and England from the barbarian hordes. Dane's Bottom was the place where it all happened, or so we were told. A little hollow near the Kennet Avon Canal. You'd know that if you'd paid attention instead of trying to reach under the blanket!”

“So much more interesting if it
had
been a dame's bottom. But I suppose a pretty girl would never have been told such a thing by her brother's tutor.”

“You really are incorrigible. Will you pour me a little more whisky, please?” She watched the amber liquid arc gracefully into her mug. Then: “We really could be at the end of the earth, couldn't we? So far from people. No lights. If you'd told me when I was packing to leave England that I would be spending a night in a cabin in a forest without a soul within miles, the only sounds being loons and . . . well, something large moving towards us . . . Oh, it's only Agate! Hello, Agate. Gus, you must have left the gate open. Would you like a little piece of my biscuit, Agate? Anyway, I don't know if I'd have believed you. I wish we didn't ever have to leave.”

Gus leapt up to lead Agate back to the corral and then returned to trace the shape of Flora's face with one finger. “And if you'd been told that you'd be sharing a bed of fir boughs with a man, what would you have said then?”

She turned to him and kissed his ear. “I'd have dropped the blanket, just like this . . .”

She stood up naked in the moonlight.

“. . . and I'd have led him back into the cabin.”

SEVEN

May 1914

Many of the Walhachin men were taking part in training exercises as part of their involvement in C Squadron of the 31st British Columbia Horse. George would saddle his gelding, Titan, and Gus took Flight, his lovely chestnut mare, though Agate would be a more reliable mount, Flora thought. Both men sat tall and steady among the others in the village square, ready to head out in formation to one of the fallow fields where they would wheel and turn in the dust. A platoon of small boys, armed with lengths of stick held like bayonets, followed them on foot. Some of the men had been training for several years now, going to Vernon or Kamloops to join the other squadrons, coming home with stories of mud, bivouacs, and saddle sores. And dust! In Kamloops the training camp was located near the racecourse, rumoured to be the dustiest place in the entire Dry Belt. Hay rakes had to be employed to comb articles out of the deep drifts at the conclusion of the camp. A few men had been members of
hrh
Duke of Connaught's cavalry escort when he'd come to Vancouver in September 1912, and the Governor General had sent an official document professing his great satisfaction with their performance. Rumours of war were circulating throughout the Empire; C Squadron was determined to be ready.

An invitation came for Flora to spend a few days on the McIntyre Ranch in the Upper Hat Creek Valley. She'd met Jane McIntyre at a social in Ashcroft, and the two had become friends, sending letters and little mementos through the mail. Like Flora, Jane loved needlework and often described a new project, many of them inspired by the wildflowers of the valley where she lived. She was clearly enamoured of her home there; when the invitation arrived, Flora was excited at the prospect of a few days away. A vehicle from the ranch would be coming to Ashcroft for supplies, and if Flora could arrange to be there on the Wednesday, then she could travel up the Oregon Jack Creek Road with the ranch foreman. She took the train to Ashcroft and found a laconic Pete Richardson waiting for her in front of the harness-maker's shop, where various items were being left for mending. Pete hoisted Flora's valise into the back of the truck, along with a saddle, two sacks of flour, a small chest of tea, and various other parcels and boxes.

“I'd like to get us going, Miss,” Pete said in his quiet voice. “It's a long piece of road and I want to drive it in the daylight. I always allow time for a flat tire or breakdown—that road, she's a rough one. Mrs. McIntyre asked me to make sure you used the pillows she sent.”

He indicated a little stack of cushions on the seat where Flora would ride. She climbed into the truck and arranged the pillows at her back and bottom. She tied her straw hat firmly under her chin, and they were off.

Flora was surprised at how the climate changed as they proceeded up the long road that rose dusty from the sagebrush flats and feedlots by the Wagon Road near the Ashcroft Manor, up into forest, then above the valley formed by Oregon Jack Creek, cliffs on one side of the road and the green meadows below. Aspen shaded the road and the wildflowers were all later than down below, sticky geranium and penstemon and balsam-root brightening the verges of the narrow way. No wonder Jane's embroidery was so lovely, thought Flora, with this wild beauty as inspiration. Richardson was a man of very few words but occasionally pointed out birds—a kestrel sitting on a fence post, killdeer flying up to take attention away from their nests. Down below the road, they saw a black bear seated among the grasses with two cubs at play nearby. The bears looked up at the sound of the truck but didn't leave their patch of sunlight.

At various points along the journey, Pete would stop the vehicle and get out to figure out the best way to navigate a difficult section of road. In some places, rain had created washboarding; in other places, rocks had tumbled down a cliff-face to create obstacles that had to be pushed over to one side. Pete explained that he'd come down to Ashcroft from the other side of the valley, the lower side, collecting some equipment from an outfit at Cargyle, before driving down from Bonaparte. Every time he stopped, Flora got out of the truck and took deep breaths of the clean high air. How lovely this was. She was lately accustomed to take pleasure in the small beauties of the desert landscape—the brief yellow flowers on the prickly-pear cacti that surrounded Walhachin, and the pink bitterroot. She loved the dry heat and the low grey vistas or distant tawny hills, but this, oh this, was a kind of Eden, and but for Jane's invitation, she would never have known it existed.

When they reached the ranch, Jane was waiting at the gate on a tall black horse with a spotted rump. She was holding the reins of a saddled mare, a dun. Quickly dismounting, she tied each horse to a post on either side of the gate. She embraced Flora and told Pete to go on ahead; Allan was waiting for him by the barn to help unload the truck.

“Flora, I'm so happy to see you! We could see the dust of the truck for ages, and I thought how nice it would be if you could ride up to the house with me. I can show you things as we go and no doubt you have had enough of that truck!”

She reached into her saddlebag for a flask of cold water from which Flora drank gratefully. The ranch lay on the eastern side of the valley, its pastures sloping down to the road. Soft wind rustled through the aspens and pines growing in small groves to provide shade for the horses grazing there. The two women mounted their horses, Flora wishing she'd worn a divided skirt but managing to tuck up her gabardine in such a way that she was able to find her stirrups without too much difficulty.

“That mare has a very soft mouth. Just use your reins against her neck and don't pull her up too quickly,” Jane advised.

Opening a gate into the side pasture with her riding crop, Jane led them away from the driveway and after closing the gate again, they let their horses lope up the gradual hill to a place fringed with pines, offering a view of far-off snowy peaks that Jane said were on the coast. Everything was so clear and fine that Flora felt her throat constrict. A magpie swooped down from a tree, followed quickly by another.

“It's as though we're on the spine of the world,” Flora said quietly.

The ranch house was made of logs, covered in areas with clapboard; sunny yellow shutters framed some of the windows, and vines had been trained to grow up the southern side of the house to cool that exposure. White clematis tumbled in great frothy swaths from trellises while deep green Virginia creeper wound around the chimney. Jane's husband, Allan, greeted them as they rode up to the house, then took their horses away to unsaddle and turn loose. Jane showed Flora to a small pretty room on the second floor, tucked into one gable. Faded chintz curtains hung in the window, a white-painted iron-framed bed was spread with a quilt pieced from tiny squares of summer dress materials, a wicker chair waited by the window for reading or dreaming, and two small watercolours of the valley decorated the whitewashed walls. Looking at them, Flora was surprised to see them signed with Jane's name.

“I didn't know you could paint,” she commented, looking closely at one of the pictures.

“My first winter here was a little lonely, I have to admit,” Jane told her. “I wondered if I'd made a mistake in marrying Allan and leaving the bustling hub of Ashcroft! But then I found paints that had been his mother's and every day I saw those mountains and the pastures going on forever and far off, the coast mountains with their crowns of snow. And the birds—oh, Flora, the birds are extraordinary here. I've begun to keep a list, a life list I suppose it would be, and most days there's something to add. Perhaps not a new bird but certainly a new behaviour, a nest, a moment that seems, well,
momentous
somehow! Of course we go down to see my parents in the town, and others too, and one day there will be children, God willing, so for now I have this luxury of space. My heart feels twice as wide as it did when I first came here with Allan after our wedding. I feel it expanding as we come over the rise on the Oregon Jack Creek Road.”