The Lemon Tree (17 page)

Wallace Helena had expected to be away from home not more than two months. But July inched into August and she had still not mentioned a possible date of return. In August, a depressed and overworked Joe Black asked her in his letters to name a date. But he finally got a letter explaining that she was held up by some nonsense called Probate. The fact that their letters crossed constantly added a note of confusion to their communication with each other.

In one letter which Joe received in mid-August, she inquired, ‘How would you feel about living in Liverpool? It’s such a marvellous city – it has everything. I believe I could manage the soapery and that it would provide a good living.’

The very idea of being penned up in a white man’s city made Joe shudder. Born in the Bow Valley when first it was explored, and brought up within his grandfather’s usual hunting grounds, he had never been further than Fort Benton in Montana, to the south, or St Albert in the north. He had never seen a city. He had heard about the human swarms in such places and he had no desire to become a human ant. He told his beloved to come home.

In another letter, she mentioned that the previous night she had dreamed of Lebanon. ‘For once it wasn’t a nightmare,’ she wrote. ‘I was gazing up at the mountains, and I saw the anemones shedding their red petals in the wind – my nurse once told me they were drops of blood shed by a
beautiful god called Adonis, who was killed in a fit of jealousy. Then I found myself floating along the narrow seashore and I listened to the singing of the water. It felt very strange.

‘I am told that a number of refugees have returned to the country. It reminded me that between the mountains of Lebanon and those of the Anti-Lebanon lies the Buka’a Valley, good farm land watered by two rivers – the air there is as pure as that of the prairies. If we could buy such land, darling … but it would mean that you would have to learn yet another language as well as accept another culture.’

Joe began to worry, and told her again to come home as soon as she could. They were beginning to do fine in Edmonton. Why go anywhere else?

Twice a week, he rode the five miles down to the post office in Edmonton village. Though the post office had not been established very long, collecting the mail from it had become a bi-weekly social event for the whole district; it was a chance to meet neighbours one did not otherwise see. Everybody stood patiently gossiping in the queue, while they waited for the mail to be sorted by the slow meticulous man behind the counter at the far end of the long narrow room.

For the most part, Joe would lean silently against the office wall, his empty pipe cradled in his hand, unlit out of courtesy to the few women present. He did not invite conversation and did not get beyond a remark about the weather or the state of the harvest. He was, as ever, regarded with respect by those who knew him well, because of his knowledge of livestock breeding and also for his ability to talk sense into angry, despairing Crees and Blackfoot; as settlers slowly increased, face-to-face confrontations were more common with Indians, who did not think much of their limited treaty rights.

Being half-Cree himself, Joe was often furious at the treatment of his relations by both Government and settlers. But he knew that on the homestead he had to live with whites around him who disliked a negro owning land, so he was extremely wary in what he said. Friendly overtures had always been treated by both Wallace Helena and himself with reserve; and he never forgot that Wallace Helena faced prejudice because of her race and was solidly hated for the contemptuous arrogance with which she had countered it from the day of her arrival.

As he waited for his letters, Joe sometimes thought how strange it was that both he and Wallace Helena had learned to love Tom Harding, an American of almost silvery fairness. There was nothing saintly about Tom, he ruminated with a grin, but the man had always played fair; if he promised something, he did his best to keep that promise. And he never seemed to see what colour a man was. He looked straight
into
you, as if judging what you were really like, and, if he liked what he found, he was generous and open. Joe missed him like he missed his Cree grandfather; both men had had in common an inner wisdom sadly lacking in others. The only time Tom had seemed unwise was when he had fallen in love with Leila and had brought the poor woman to the Fort. She had made him happy, though, and Joe hoped suddenly that she had known a little happiness. If she had not come, he would never have known the bundle of vitality that was her daughter.

Now, he was beginning to sweat with anxiety that he had lost Wallace Helena to a damned soap works.

He shifted his feet and wished the post office clerk would hurry up with his sorting.

If Wallace Helena could not be dissuaded from leaving Edmonton, Joe worried, he would be as lonely as he was when his grandfather died. Without her, he felt, the
struggle to keep the farm going would be pointless; almost everything he did was for her sake.

It had been different when he and Tom first set out to establish the place. He had been young and adventurous and it had been a great joke to cock a snook at the heavy-handed Hudson’s Bay Company.

At a New Year’s Day party, he had found himself drinking with Tom Harding, and the white man had inquired if the negro had come up from the States. Joe had replied tartly that he was no American slave; he had been born free in Canada.

They had gone on to an amicable, though drunken, exchange of reminiscences, Tom about his not very successful trapline and his desire to put in a vegetable patch and, if possible, plant a crop of barley. Joe confided that he hated working on the Hudson’s Bay’s farm a few miles north. He said his father had also been a Company employee under Factor John Rowand.

It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and a long, not uninteresting, vendetta with the Hudson’s Bay Company, the latter ending only when Wallace Helena got title to the land.

The two men might both have died the first winter they lived together in the old cabin, had it not been for Joe’s mother and his Aunt Theresa, both of whom were working in the kitchens of the Chief Factor’s house. They stole barley and oats for them, to eke out the rabbits the men snared and the fish they got by fishing through a hole in the ice of the river. Tom had the dream of owning his own farm to sustain him, and Joe found it a welcome relief to be treated as a friend and equal.

Joe brought his own small mare with him to the cabin, and, later, he stole two horses that appeared to have got loose from a Blackfoot encampment some distance away. He hoped that by leading them through the shallows of
the river, the Blackfoot would not be able to track them down, and they never did.

‘Our need’s greater than theirs,’ Joe affirmed stolidly. It was true that the partners were quite as thin as the hungry Indians. The horses, very unwillingly, pulled the plough they had persuaded a friendly blacksmith in the Fort to make for them.

When times got better, Tom acquired his first wife, a plain, amiable Cree, and discovered that she was a gem of a helpmate. When she died in childbirth, both men mourned her.

Two years later, Tom had brought home Leila and her daughter. They belonged to neither the white nor Metis world of the Fort, nor were they Indians. They were, like Joe, outsiders.

The Scots in the Fort publicly called them Chinks or Jews, as they jeered at them if Tom was not with them. Both women looked down at them with silent contempt. Tom had not expected such reciprocal dislike. He became truculent and defensive of his womenfolk, fearing that they might be raped by men who obviously regarded them with such odium. He knew he could not hope for protection for them from his long-standing antagonist, the Chief Factor.

Leila regarded the Fort’s inhabitants as clodhoppers, peasants, men without origins or history. She loved her fair-haired American husband and respected Joe Black for his courtesy and knowledge. The ill-assorted little family turned in upon itself; they were like bison anticipating an attack, forming a tight, protective knot.

When, many years later, Wallace Helena successfully acquired title to a piece of land much larger than others, and had then made Joe her equal partner, the locals again began to call her a bloody Chink. Their jealousy was very great. It did not help her to make friends.

Joe loved her with an intensity which sometimes scared him; it was the only part of his life over which he was not in complete control. ‘Prickly as a porcupine,’ he would warn himself – and then he would laugh.

When the postmaster finally handed him several letters from her, he grinned his thanks and stuffed them inside his old wolfskin jacket.

Without a further word to anyone, he pushed his way through the small group still waiting. His horse was hitched to a post outside. He absently undid it and mounted. With the stiff envelopes crackling against his chest, he rode the old trail along the river escarpment, splashing through a couple of creeks, regardless of the fact that by then part of the track ran over lots owned by others. Alder and scrub oaks brushed him, as he passed, and flies buzzed crossly round him, but it was the easiest route home and he wanted to read his letters. If Wallace Helena was right in her predictions and if the railway came to Edmonton, there would soon be roads criss-crossing the whole district. There would be hordes of people glad of land and space, and they would form a ready market for everything a mixed farm could produce. But then, she had always been a bit of a dreamer, he considered wryly. He hoped that she was wrong; there were too many white folk and Metis around already.

Aunt Theresa stood expectantly at the cabin door and Emily ran out to open the yard gate for him as he rode in. Simon Wounded, out in the fields, saw him from a distance and came running to hear any news of Wallace Helena. They crowded round the scrubbed table in the old cabin, regardless of the fact that it was August and there was an immense amount of work to do.

Joe had been taught to read by an Oblate priest, and he read the letters slowly and accurately, translating into Cree some phrases which were difficult for his listeners to
understand. He omitted paragraphs that were personal to him. Some parts of the letters were almost incomprehensible to them; they were too far removed from city life.

As he put down the last page, he felt a little forlorn himself. As if she understood, Emily brought him a hot cup of coffee from the kitchen lean-to. He nodded, and then sent them back to their work. ‘Barley’ll be ready for cutting,’ Simon warned him.

Joe nodded again. ‘We’ll start tonight – it’ll be cooler. And start again at sun-up. I’ll be out to have a look at it soon.’ He picked up the letters again and turned them over. Simon sighed and went to look at the pigs. He felt suddenly very old and was not looking forward to the long, arduous days of harvest without Wallace Helena’s help.

Joe read parts of the letters again while he drank his coffee. Wallace Helena sounded too damnably comfortable amongst her lawyers, soap masters and accountants. Unlike the men in Edmonton, these men seemed to be treating her with some respect, though she had admitted flatly that being a woman was a disadvantage to her. He felt a strong twinge of jealousy.

He leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe. Until he had begun to receive letters from her in Liverpool, he had never felt himself to be less than she was; he had his own wide areas of knowledge and experience – she had hers. He knew how to foretell the weather with some accuracy and he decided when they should sow and when they should reap. He could hunt and trap as well as his grandfather had. Ahead of the other settlers, he knew the movements of the dispossessed Cree and Blackfoot, understood the desperate frustration of the Metis – hadn’t he foretold the Riel rebellion long before it happened and prepared himself for it as far as he could?

Mr Tasker in Liverpool might have a
feel
for soap, but I
have a
feel
about this land, he argued. Wallace Helena may do the bargaining with agents buying food for the railway gangs building further south or for the Indians, poor devils; it’s me – me – who delivers steers and grain safely to their camps – and that’s no mean feat, lady, in a country riddled with rivers and creeks and bogs to be crossed.

Frustrated by distance, by the strangeness of the world she described in her letters, he was vexed and confused. She wrote with affection and consideration for him – but she appeared far too happy!

Feeling sullen and resentful, he went to join Simon Wounded in the fields.

That night, he wrote asking her to come home as soon as possible; he needed her. He gave her no news of the harvest or the excellent contact he had made with a railway surveyor nosing round Edmonton and in need of provisions. He continued to reply to her letters, giving no news but simply asking when she expected to return.

The replies he finally received in answer to his campaign of near silence were positively acerbic. He chuckled with satisfaction. The epistles were full of inquiries about the homestead and himself; not one of them mentioned soap. Had he arranged for the threshing crew? Was he reading the
Edmonton Bulletin
and keeping in touch with its editor, Frank Oliver? Mr Oliver was a ready source of news of surveying or other parties passing through, who might need to be victualled. And he should keep up his contacts with Mr Taylor, the telegraph operator, who was in a better position than anyone else to have early news which would help them sell the crop or the animals they did not want to winter over. How was the vegetable garden doing?