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 s
hawl 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?’
‘That’s the way life is.’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
They heard Simon Wounded clump into the cabin and ask Emily where everybody was. Joe hastily swung off the bed and sat a little dizzily on the stool. ‘We’re here, Simon,’ he shouted. ‘Wallace Helena isn’t too well. I’ll be right out.’ He got up.
‘Now, you stay here. I’ll get Emily to bring you some supper.’ He bent down and kissed her. ‘You’ll be better tomorrow.’
‘Somebody’s got to milk the cows.’
‘We’ll manage.’
He left her, closing the door softly after him. The cabin smelled of the bread Emily had taken out of the oven. He said to her, ‘She’ll be all right now. She was crying for her mother.’
Seated in his favourite corner by the fire, Simon Wounded packed his pipe and nodded agreement. Emily gave a heavy sigh. She had been through weeks of fear of the smallpox and day upon day of overwork. She said, ‘I cried when my mother died; I thought Wallace Helena never would. She’s never shed a tear that I know of, before this.’
‘She’d everything to see to – including me,’ he snapped. ‘Tell me when supper’s ready.’ He staggered in to Tom and Leila’s old room, where Simon and Wallace Helena had nursed him, and threw himself onto his bed. He thought about the woman on the bed in the next room, and wondered what he had started.
Much later, when Emily was snoring comfortably in her bunk in the corner of the living-room, behind a curtain made of sacking, and Simon had gone over to his cabin, Wallace Helena got out of bed. She was garbed in the old petticoat she used as a nightgown and, as she picked up her candle and went out of the room, she shivered slightly.
She slipped into Tom’s room and eased herself quietly under the bedclothes beside the sleeping man. She never afterwards slept anywhere else and, once he had regained his strength, he saw that she never regretted it.
The few white women in Edmonton gossiped about misalliances. But Joe knew that he and Wallace Helena were like two halves of the same coin; they belonged completely to each other.
Chapter Sixteen
When it seemed that the smallpox had run its course, Joe’s aunt, Theresa Black, who had for years worked in the kitchens of the Fort, came to Joe and Helena’s cabin to take her sister Agnes’s place; they were very glad to welcome her into their devastated home.
The Fort she left slowly spawned a hamlet, and the first small signs of federal government replacing the old Hudson’s Bay Company rule became apparent. A few stores, a hotel, a telegraph office and a postal system of sorts made their appearance. The Roman Catholic priests of St Albert, who had served the early inhabitants of the Fort, were joined by Methodists and Anglicans. Government surveyors arrived to subdivide the Territories into districts. Instead of bartering, the inhabitants were tending to use money. Land ownership had to be registered.
When the Hudson’s Bay Company finally handed over jurisdiction to the government in Ottawa, Wallace Helena claimed the land which she and Joe had continued to farm. Tom had left everything to Leila and Leila to Wallace Helena. Joe was still technically an employee.
Thanks to a first-class lawyer, her claim to have been resident on it since 1862 and her stepfather for many years before that, and that between them they had cleared and developed it, was accepted.
Once she was assured that even though she was a woman, the land had been truly registered in her name, she ordered the lawyer to re-register it in the joint names of Joe Black and herself, as being a married couple according to the customs of the country. If one of them died, the other automatically inherited the whole.
Wallace Helena met the lawyer when she rode over to St Albert to return some books to the Oblate Fathers. They had brought him in to help them establish the claims of Metis to land along the Sturgeon River, and Joe often laughed at the dislike she had expressed at their having to part with every cent of the cash they had hoarded in her mother’s old trunk, in order to pay the man’s bill. But it was the best bargain they had ever made.
He had been surprised and touched when she told him that she had arranged to share the ownership with him.
Now she had undertaken this tremendously long journey to the place where her Uncle James had lived, and Joe was missing her badly.
Back home after the 200-mile ride to Edmonton, after seeing her onto the train at Calgary, he had slept the clock round, and now he crawled out of bed in a cabin already overly hot. He peered out of the small, glazed window to look at the yard. Emily was already plodding across the well-trodden bareness of it, towards the barn. She was carrying two milk pails.
Good harvesting weather, he thought. Hope it holds.
He shaved himself with a cut-throat razor, in front of a small hanging mirror, much prized by Wallace Helena because it had been her mother’s. The mug of hot water which Aunt Theresa had brought in to him a few minutes earlier was already cool and the home-made soap was not lathering very well. He succeeded in nicking himself with the razor. Cursing softly, he pressed a finger on the bleeding cut, and unexpectedly chuckled; the scar would hardly be noticed amid the pits left on his face by the smallpox. In the sixteen years since he had had the disease, the dreadful scars had not improved. He remembered clearly the moment when he was better and had wanted to shave, and Wallace Helena reluctantly handed him a mirror, as he sat up in bed. The appalling shock had been no joke, he considered more soberly; and still, people who didn’t know you stared at you as if you might still be a source of contagion. ‘It sure didn’t improve your looks, Joe Black,’ he said.
He was only one of many in the district who carried the marks of the dreaded disease, and all of them would have been thankful for a salve to remove the ugly scars.
He made a face at himself in the mirror. A lot of Indians looked worse than he did. Funny how few men in the Fort had caught it. Wallace Helena and Simon Wounded had nursed him through it, and neither of them had caught it. He remembered how they had tied his arms to his sides so that he could not scratch the horrible pustules on his face.
He leaned forward to peer at his teeth. Though he still had a full set, they were stained by tobacco and coffee. He made another wry face at himself. Then he poured water from a jug into a tin bowl to rinse his face and splash the water up over his grey, tightly curling hair. If there were time, he might go down to the river, later on, for a quick swim. He had a sudden memory of Wallace Helena’s slim, pale body flashing through the water beside him on other occasions, and his spirits fell a little. God, how he missed her lively presence.
As he dried his face, he shouted, ‘Hey, Aunt Theresa, what about some coffee?’
‘Comin’,’ responded a muffled, cracked voice from the direction of the lean-to which still served as a summer kitchen, though Joe had recently added a third bedroom for E
mily and Aunt Theresa.
His aunt shuffled slowly into the bedroom, carrying a coffee mug in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. Her face was as wrinkled as an apple held too long in store, and she grumbled that tomorrow he could come to the kitchen and get his coffee himself; she and young Emily had more things to do than wait on him. She said this to him most mornings.
The corners of his mouth twitched, as she put the mug down on the chest of drawers beside his razor. He knew very well that she would be put out by any alteration in this morning routine, so he didn’t reply. He picked up a wide-toothed comb which he had carved for himself and ran it quickly through his bushy hair, while she retreated to the kitchen. He’d better hurry, he considered. Simon Wounded and the jinglers would be in for breakfast soon.
Later on, that hot summer morning, he rode over to survey the barley crop. As the merciless sun beat down on him, he wished heartily that he could find a couple of reliable labourers to help him. Now that the railway had reached Calgary, some Metis from Manitoba and a few white families had felt it worthwhile to come the two hundred miles further north by wagon to Fort Edmonton to take up land for themselves; there were few who would work for someone else for long. Over the years, he had seen a lot of miners pass through on their way to search for gold. One or two of them would have been good employees, he thought; but the lure of gold was too great, and they passed on west or north, or, in a few cases, preferred to pan for gold in the nearby river, or to mine the coal in the valley.
There were the Indians, of course. Some of them would sometimes work a season with him to oblige a friend, or if they were hungry enough. They were, however, still largely nomadic; they did not take kindly to settling in one place. Further, their numbers had been pitifully depleted by the smallpox. Many of their usual lodges were overgrown by bush; there was no one left to use them. Other white men’s diseases, like measles and diphtheria, picked off their children. The buffalo herds on which they had depended had been wiped out by over-hunting, leaving them famished and destitute, with all the apathy that hunger brings in its train.
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