The Lemon Tree (12 page)

Over the years, Tom and Joe struggled on, through good harvests and bad ones. They increased their holding and the cattle on it by not asking anyone’s permission to clear land; they felled trees and then ploughed, and argued afterwards with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Company’s Chief Factor finally gave up and decided to ignore them.

Then, in 1879, came the smallpox, sweeping through the west like the Black Death once swept through Europe.

Tom was the first to catch the disease, probably from a family of Crees he had met casually on the trail, who were subsequently wiped out by it. Leila and Agnes Black nursed the stricken man and both of them became infected; regardless of contagion, Leila held her husband in her arms when his pain was greatest, whispering to him to hold on and that he would soon be better. Inwardly, she was torn with anguish, as she watched his well-loved features almost obliterated by the huge pustules the disease produced; they blocked his nasal passages and his mouth so that he could not swallow the sedatives that Agnes brought. He died in a wild delirium, held down by both women, so that he would not roll off the bed.

As his poor racked body relaxed in death, the elderly Indian woman and the suddenly bereft wife stared blankly at each other across the bed as if stupefied. Then
Leila screamed and flung herself across Tom, beating his pillow with her fists.

Agnes hastened round the bed to lift her away, calling at the same time for Joe to come to help her. He heard her and came immediately from the yard. Together, they half-carried the frantic woman into the living-room. She fought them off, continuing to scream and then to tear her clothes in mourning.

‘Stay with her,’ Agnes ordered. ‘I’ll get Wallace Helena – and something to soothe her.’

Not attempting to stop her rending her garments, Joe spoke softly to her and gradually persuaded her to sit down. Wallace Helena came running from the vegetable garden, where she had gone for a few minutes to get vegetables to make a soup for the invalid, a soup he would not now need. She knelt by her mother and wept with her. Then she persuaded Leila to sip the cordial Agnes brought for her and this helped to calm her.

When symptoms suggested that Leila herself had caught the disease, she shuddered inwardly and quailed at the thought of the suffering she must undergo. Secure in the belief that Tom would be waiting for her, she was not afraid of dying; without her husband, she felt she had no reason to live. While her mind was clear, however, she gathered up her courage; Wallace Helena was a woman now, but she needed to be able to continue on the land that sustained them. She sent Joe post-haste to bring a priest to her.

Two Oblate Fathers came from a nearby Cree encampment, where they had been tending the sick as best they could. They were surprised to find a woman who did not want to confess or receive extreme unction; she wanted them to write a Will for her and witness her signature.

‘I may die, Father. I want to make sure that everything
that belongs to me – including anything my beloved husband has left me …’ Her voice broke as she struggled through her increasing pain to convey her sense of urgency to the priests. ‘He wrote a Will when we were married – I haven’t had the heart to look at it yet – but it’s probably in his cash box.’ She stopped, to gather what strength she had, and then continued, ‘Everything to go to my darling daughter, Helena – Wallace Helena.’

It was arranged before the disease engulfed her completely. The priests did not stay; they returned hurriedly to the stricken encampment, only to die of the same disease themselves a short time later.

As Wallace Helena tended her mother, she wept openly for her well-loved stepfather, and she faced, with terror, the prospect of losing Leila as well.

Joe dug Tom’s grave, near that of his old friend’s first wife, and himself carried the body wrapped in a blanket down to it, and laid him in it. After throwing the rich, black earth back over him, he stood alone in the starlight, grieving for his boon companion of so many years, while in the cabin his mother and Wallace Helena strove to alleviate the death pangs of Tom’s second wife.

The following day, Joe’s mother showed signs of having the disease and took to her bed in their little shack, to be nursed by Joe. He had to order a terrified Simon Wounded to dig a grave for Leila, though, to save Simon from being infected, he left his mother for a few minutes while he took Leila gently from the arms of a shocked Wallace Helena and laid her in her last resting place.

He would not allow Wallace Helena near Agnes; the girl had, as yet, shown no sign of illness, and he hoped to save her from it. So Wallace Helena, wide-eyed and unweeping, cooked and brought food to the door of the shack, while Emily, whimpering like a lost kitten with
nowhere safe to run, fed horses and hens, milked the cows, and, somehow, kept things together.

The night before Agnes Black died, it was obvious to Joe that he had become the next victim. He shouted to Wallace Helena that she was not to come near him, just bring water to the door.

She shouted back, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool; we’ll live or die together.’

She marched into the little cabin, clean sheets over her arm, and helped the almost incoherent man out of his clothes in the hope of easing the pain when it came. She bullied a quivering Simon Wounded into helping her move Agnes’s body outside, and sent him off to dig yet another grave. She shouted to Emily to take the bedding off her mother’s bed and burn it outside. She was to remake the bed with clean bedding. Then she was to wash herself and boil her own clothes.

Simon Wounded did not have to be asked to take Agnes Black to her grave; pale and shaken, he silently did it, and took himself off to bed in the hayloft over the barn, to mourn alone.

The next morning, he helped Wallace Helena move Joe into the main cabin. The man was burning with fever and understood little of what was being done. Between them they nursed him through it. Emily was not allowed near him, but she kept the four of them fed, and, with unexpected stoicism, faced the fact that she might get the disease.

Wallace Helena, Emily and Simon worked to the point of exhaustion to prepare for the winter, none of them wishing to suffer near-starvation during it.

It was a shadow of Joe who survived, and it was months before he was able to handle his chores.

When, one night, he thanked Simon and Emily for not deserting them, Simon responded dryly, ‘There was
nowhere to go – everybody’d got it, except the Fort – and they weren’t going to let anybody in from a homestead that had had it!’ And he exchanged a toothless grin with Emily.

The family had been fortunate in being able to bury their dead. Amongst the terrified Indians, whole groups had died, their bodies torn apart and eaten by wild animals, their only monument a teepee centre pole bent by the uncaring wind.

Nobody really knew why Wallace Helena, Simon and Emily had not caught the disease. Simon said he had been through a plague of smallpox before on the prairies, and perhaps he and Emily had gained some immunity from it. Wallace Helena remembered a number of unnamed fevers she had survived as a child in Beirut, where smallpox also existed, and wondered if she had had some milder form of the disease which gave her immunity.

Wallace Helena burned Agnes’s and Joe’s hut, and as soon as they could get some help to do it, a new one was built with room for three helpers on the homestead. Joe stayed with Wallace in the main cabin, their devotion to each other, as yet, not verbally acknowledged. Joe had seen his face in the mirror and was shocked by the sight. Wallace Helena, with so much unexpressed grief penned up within her, hardly knew how to continue; she blundered on from day to day, simply trying to keep the farmstead going.

When Joe was fit to sit on a bench outside the cabin door, she said dully, one early spring day, ‘I’m almost out of fodder; it’s more than time I put the cows out to pasture. If we don’t get any more snow, they should be all right. I’ll do it tomorrow – Simon must plough.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Joe said suddenly.

‘You’re too weak yet; you couldn’t even mount.’

‘I could – and I will. I’ll never get right sitting here.’

The next morning, he got Simon to give him a heft onto his horse and he rode out with her, to move their small, lowing herd through the mud in the yard and into a fenced pasture, beyond the field that Simon was ploughing. They would move them further out on their land when the possibility of spring snowstorms lessened.

They were silent as they rode. Wallace Helena’s tired brain was filled with lists of neglected tasks, and Joe was concentrating on staying on his horse.

Though they were not out for long, the fresh spring breeze did them good. Wallace Helena began to unwind a little and talk desultorily. As they approached the yard again, however, her conversational efforts petered out, and she suddenly burst into violent tears.

‘What’s up?’ Joe forgot his own weakness in the shock of seeing her acute distress.

Wallace Helena made a small hopeless gesture towards the cabin. ‘Mama – Tom – they’re not there,’ she wailed, bending over her saddle, as great sobs racked her.

Joe leaned over and took her horse’s reins in his hands, as they entered the yard. ‘Emily,’ he shouted urgently, ‘Emily!’

The young woman flung open the door almost immediately and peered out, quivering like a rabbit scenting danger.

‘Come here and help Wallace Helena – and help get me off this damned horse – and shut the gate behind us.’

Wallace Helena sat her horse, her head bent, and cried as if her heart would break, while a shaken Emily steadied Joe as he laboriously descended.

She held his horse, while he moved to take hold of Wallace Helena’s mount’s bridle; he wondered how long he could stay on his feet.

‘Come on! Down you come, girl,’ he ordered her as firmly as he could.

Though her grief seemed beyond control, Wallace Helena dismounted obediently and Joe put his arm round her, as much to steady himself as to comfort her. He said to Emily, ‘Hitch the horses and then shut the gate. And go make some coffee.’

‘I’m in the middle of making the bread,’ Emily protested.

‘To hell with the bread. Do as I say.’

He took the distraught young woman into the cabin and sat her down in a chair. She wept on. He pulled up another chair facing her, and sat in it, while he unlaced her boots and took them off. She made no move to stop him. He untied the scarf she was wearing round her head, and he realized, with a pang, how thin her face was, the sallow skin etched with new lines.

‘You’re tired out,’ he told her very gently. ‘Come and lie down.’

Still moaning, she allowed herself to be led to her room and onto her bed, a bed which Joe had hastily constructed for her soon after her arrival at Fort Edmonton. It had a bearskin over it, from an animal he had shot during an unexpected confrontation on their trapline. She lay down on it, her face to the wall.

Joe pulled a stool close to the bedside, and thankfully sat down on it. He understood very well her need to cry. In the privacy of the night, he had wept himself, at his own weakness, at the loss of his friends and, not the least, for the loss of his mother. He was surprised that she had not expressed her grief at her mother’s death long before.

Emily brought in two mugs of coffee and hovered beside him, looking down at the tightly curled-up figure on the bed. ‘Put the coffee on the floor by me, and give me that shawl off the hook over there. And get out!’

Shocked by his snarl, Emily did as she was bidden; and, over the bread dough, she burst into tears herself. Joe had
never been so sharp with her before, and added to that was the fear engendered by Wallace Helena’s sudden collapse. In a burst of self-pity, she felt, quite rightly, that nobody had considered what
she
had gone through during the smallpox epidemic.

Joe laid the shawl over Wallace Helena and sat, for a while, watching her, while he quickly drank one of the coffees which Emily had brought in. Then as the passionate sobs did not seem to be decreasing, he leaned over and tentatively put his hand on her heaving shoulder. To his surprise, one of her hands emerged from under the shawl and clasped his tightly.

A surging need to weep himself hit him. Still holding her hand, he eased himself off the stool and onto the bed. He lay down on his side and folded himself round the curve of her back, his face half-buried in the mass of her hair. She felt the comforting warmth of another human being and sensed his own despair. The sobs faltered as she turned over to face him.

‘Oh, Joe, darling Joe,’ she wept. ‘It’s been pure hell, hasn’t it?’

He nodded, and folded her into his arms.

They lay together for a long time, two exhausted people who loved each other with the deep devotion of years, made humble by a load of trouble they could not bear alone.

When, finally, Wallace Helena ceased her crying, she said, ‘I’m sorry to inflict this on you.’

He managed to grin at her. ‘I’m not in much better shape myself,’ he confessed.

There was silence between them for a while, and then Wallace Helena said, ‘You know, Joe, I don’t understand why some are taken and some are spared. Do you? Mama came through that terrible time in Beirut – and it was no
fun in Chicago either – simply to die out here – in nowhere. Why her? Why not you and me?’