A Prairie as Wide as the Sea

by Sarah Ellis

  William started at the store today. It is two and a half miles for him to walk so he has to go very early. I can’t wait for him to come home so I can tell him about milking and churning.

  May 28

  Mil-Orie

  In my book Catharine and the boys have made a log cabin in the wilderness. It has a chimney, furniture and wooden dishes. Catharine is making clothes from animal skins.

  William told me that Milorie got its name because one of the early homesteaders had two daughters named Mildred and Marjorie. So when he got to name the town he just combined their names. Marjorie still lives in Milorie. At home all the names of places are old, old, old. From Roman or Saxon times or something.

  If we got to name a town from our names it could be Iviam or Gladarry.

  May 29

  Welcome, Daisy

  Daisy has arrived. Now the barn really seems like a barn. Gladys and I made a flower crown for her.

  What would Ethel say if she saw me milking and churning?

  Yesterday night William told us all about his job. He cuts cheese and wraps it. He weighs out flour and sugar. He puts honey and molasses into containers. He puts raisins, biscuits and fruit into bags. When people bring in their cans he fills them with coal oil. He cleans the shelves. When people buy things he does the figuring and writes down the total in an accounts book. On Fridays he will get to go with Mr. Burgess down to the station to pick up supplies. They go with a horse and a big wagon with no sides called a dray. When William learns to drive horses he can do that himself. He says that all the Norwegian people buy this hard dried fish called lutefisk, and he told us about something called peanut butter which he says is absolutely scrumptious. He said most of the grown-ups are friendly but that some of the boys his own age say mean things to him, asking him why he talks so funny and that.

  June 1

  Cotton Confusion

  I’m in trouble again. I think I was born under an unlucky star. It started when we went to visit Auntie Millie. Auntie Millie and Mother were sitting and talking and mending. Auntie Millie’s mending basket was overflowing. I think Mother was trying to get Auntie Millie to buck up. Mother likes people to buck up and buckle down. Especially me.

  But they ran out of cotton. Dad and Uncle Alf were going into town anyway so I went with them to go to the store and buy some. I was a bit shy to go into the store alone but I did. Dad and Uncle Alf went off to the livery stables to see about a job for Dad. (There wasn’t one.) First thing I saw in the store was William. He was wearing a long blue apron and serving a woman and he didn’t see me at first. Just for a minute he looked like a grown-up that I didn’t even know. Then he saw me and grinned and he was himself again. If only he had served me. But he doesn’t do that part of the store.

  Instead it was Mrs. Burgess. When I asked for white cotton she said, “Plain white cotton?” I said yes, wondering if they have some fancy kind in Canada. Then she said, “How many yards?” This seemed like a funny question but I tried to be resourceful so I thought maybe they sell cotton by the yard in Canada, rather than by the spool, so I guessed and said, “Five yards.” Then she reached up to a shelf and pulled down a bolt of white cloth! She began to unroll it on the counter. Wham! Wham! Wham! Then she took out a huge pair of scissors. I knew I should have said something but I got tongue-tied. She began to cut. The sound of the scissors made my blood run cold. Then she folded the cloth into a neat package and said, “Do you also need some thread, dear?”

  Thread! That’s what Canadians call cotton. All I could do was nod. Then she wrote it all in a book and I left.

  I hid the cloth when I got to Auntie Millie’s and gave the cotton, I mean the thread, to Mother. What will happen at the end of the month when they go to pay the bill? I’ll probably have to go to debtor’s prison and live on scraps of bread and only have rats for company. This would never happen to Catharine. I wish I lived in the wilderness.

  June 2

  Summer in Saskatchewan

  Did the milking this morning. Daisy likes me.

  It is getting very hot. I love being warm all over completely. We are all turning brown. (Not Mother. She always wears a hat. She says we don’t need to let our standards fall just because we’re in the colonies.)

  The cloth is hidden under my mattress.

  June 3

  Banana Trick

  Some boys came in the store today and asked William for canned bananas. They waited until he got really confused and nervous because he couldn’t find them, then they just laughed and left. There is no such thing as canned bananas. How was William supposed to know? At home we don’t have bananas canned or any other way. Why are boys so mean? William says they think he is a toffee-nose, just because of the way he speaks. It is not fair. William is not a stuck-up person at all. I asked him if he wanted to quit the store. But he said that he can’t because there isn’t any steady work for Dad and we need the wages.

  June 4

  New Job

  Dad and William have a new extra job. It is cleaning out the grain elevators in Milorie. They have to go in the bottom and scoop out the grain that is left over from last year so that the elevator is clean for this year’s grain after the harvest.

  June 5

  Stinky Men

  When Dad and William came home from the elevators Mother wouldn’t let them in the house because they smelled so horrid. She made them wash in the barn. She said they smelled like the King’s Head pub at closing time. At tea they told us about it. The grain is dirty and wet from the spring floods. And the space to work in is very small. The bottom part is called the boot. The tall part is called the leg. William says the work is like scooping up sludge. But the pay is good. William was so tired he went to bed before dark.

  June 8

  Hail the Conquering Chickens Come

  The Weatherall family just got about eight times bigger. Fifty chickens have arrived. Edna Crank, the Chicken Lady, brought them. She is scary. She wears so many layers of clothes that you can’t tell what the clothes used to be. Is that a kind-of-old cardigan or a really-old frock? Also, she is smelly. Also, she doesn’t like children. When she looks at me I feel like she’s wondering if I’m a good layer or what I’d be like plucked and roasted. But Mother says she knows everything about chickens and we have a lot to learn.

  Here are some things we learned today:

  If you whistle a tune when you go in the chicken yard the chickens go quiet.

  Chickens are easy to fool. If they can’t figure out to lay their eggs in the proper place (the nest box) you can give them the idea by putting china eggs into their nests. Maybe.

  Do not feed them raw potato peels.

  Warning: This is a bit horrid. Chopping off a chicken’s head with an axe is not the best way to kill it. It will slap and twitch after it is dead, spattering blood around. The Chicken Lady just started to tell Mother how to dislocate a chicken neck using a broom handle when Mother said we were mostly interested in eggs. Thank goodness.

  Chicken manure is very good for gardens. Of course Mother got all excited about this. Mother gets excited by very peculiar things.

  The best thing about chickens is that they are comical. They run around, jigging back and forth and going “Braaaac, braaaac, braaaac,” as though they have some terrible news to tell you RIGHT NOW. Whoever made up that story about Chicken Licken sure knew chickens. To me they are always saying, “Help, help, the sky is falling.”

  The Chicken Lady seemed to really enjoy telling Mother about loathsome things like chalky shell and sticktight fleas and the various forms of chicken cannibalism. When she said “vent picking” I stopped listening.

  Finally the Chicken Lady said we should not name our chickens. “If you’re going to eat it don’t name it.” But Harry started to anyway. Harry has just learned the alphabet and here is what he named the chickens:

  Ahicken

  Bhicken

  Chicken

  Dhicken

  Ehicken

  Fh
icken

  etc., etc. The flaw in his plan is that all chickens look alike, except for the rooster. You can’t tell Qhicken from Whicken, even if they are part of the family.

  June 9

  First Chicken Morning

  Woke up to the sound of the cock crowing. Whoever thought cocks said “Cock a doodle doo”? More like a rusty hinge on a door ending with the sound of somebody being strangled.

  June 12

  Letter from Home

  Today I got a letter from Ethel. My first letter in Canada. She told me that there is a new family at 107 Halley Road and they yell a lot. Sometimes her father has to go next door and ask them to be quiet. Big news at school is that Toad Eyes has disappeared. There is a new maths master and nobody knows where Toad Eyes has gone. Ethel thinks either to hospital with a wasting disease or to prison for some dreadful crime. Chivers is just fine. There was a smudge on the bottom of the page that is a pawprint.

  I started a letter right back to Ethel but there was so much that I needed to explain, just to tell her about chickens or anything. My hand got tired after a page. I wish I could just talk to her.

  I’m thinking of the story of the country mouse and the city mouse. I used to be a city mouse like Ethel. I knew about the Underground, and feeding pennies in the meter for the gas and where the mummies are in the British Museum. But now I’m a country mouse and I know about milking and churning and chickens.

  June 14

  A Sneeze That Is a Show

  Went into town today with Elizabeth’s mother (and Ruby). We collected Elizabeth after school and went to the general store. A poster in the window had this strange word on it: Chautauqua.

  I asked Elizabeth what it was and she said the word. It sounds like a sneeze. It is a kind of big show in a tent, with music and plays and lectures. Elizabeth says it is the best thing of the summer and I must come. It lasts for three days and there is a parade to start.

  I finally got to see Elizabeth’s father. He looks stern. He has lines down his cheeks and thick eyebrows that stick way out over his eyes.

  June 15

  Fiddlesticks

  We’re not allowed to go to the Chautauqua. It costs $2.25 for adults and $1 for children and Mother says that $8.50 would buy a lot of chicken scratch.

  How can I get a dollar? I could churn butter and sell it to the store but one dollar is a lot of butter. Elizabeth says another way to make money is to kill gophers. You get one cent each for gopher tails, but mostly only boys do it. Even if I were a boy I would NEVER do it. It would be murderous blood money.

  Oh. Just remembered. When I think about money, I think about the cloth under my mattress and the bill coming up at the end of the month.

  June 16

  Good News Day

  We’re going to the Chautauqua after all! Dad came home with tickets. Mother was a bit grumpy. But then Dad said that the Chautauqua is the poor man’s university, brings the world to our door, and that we would remember it all our lives.

  (Dad likes to say that we will remember something for the rest of our lives. If we remember all the things he says this about, we will spend the second half of our lives just remembering the first half. Once I asked Dad what he has remembered his whole life and he said that when he was a wee nipper he went to the opening of the Tower Bridge in London. It was opened by the Prince of Wales. He didn’t remember the Prince of Wales. He remembered that when they raised the centre span of the bridge all the horse manure slid down the roadway.)

  Mother got less grumpy when she looked at the programme. Some baritone singer is going to do opera. That was her first choice. William and I can go one day. The twins can go one day. We have to choose.

  June 17

  Parade

  Today we went to the Chautauqua parade. It was children and animals. It was ever so funny. There was a marching drum band which was boys with dishpans. There were two boys on stilts. There were some small children riding hobby horses. There were all sorts of costumes like train conductor, clown and fairy. The animals were ponies, dogs, cats, a rabbit, two mice in a cage, and a pig. The animals started off with costumes but mostly they got rid of them by the end. The pig in the baby bonnet just lay down in the road about halfway along and refused to move. So they moved him into a wagon pulled by boys pretending to be horses.

  Everyone laughed.

  Elizabeth told me the names of everyone. It was very muddling. The boy with the pig is called Abel Butt. One of the fairies was a very pretty girl called Nyla Muir. Elizabeth told me that she is a terrible show-off. I said was she a toffee-nose? Elizabeth didn’t know what that meant, so I told her it means that you act so superior that your nose is stuck in the air. Elizabeth said that was a perfect description of Nyla.

  Lots of the girls have bobs. I HAVE to get my hair bobbed before I start school.

  At the end of the parade there was a group of children chanting the Chautauqua yell which goes:

  C-H-A-U T-A-U Q-U-A

  This is how you spell it!

  Listen to us yell it!

  CHAUTAUQUA!

  CHAUTAUQUA!

  CHAUTAUQUA!

  Elizabeth wanted to just join in on the end of the parade but I felt too shy.

  Whilst the parade was on, men were putting up a big brown tent in the field next to the school. Tomorrow the talent arrives and it really starts.

  June 18

  Deep Sea

  Today was my day at the Chautauqua. That’s it. I’ve decided. I’m going to be a deep-sea diver. William is too. Today we went to “The Bottom of the Sea” at the Chautauqua. Mr. Robert Zimmerman looks ordinary, like a bald Dad. But he has done amazing things. He competed in the Olympics and wrestled for his life with a deadly shark. (Not at the Olympics. At the Olympics he was in the swimming competition.) If you have even one little cut on your body sharks smell the blood and go for you. He dived for the sunken treasure of the last Spanish galleons. He helped make the picture Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I would give anything to see that picture. He talked about seas as warm as a bathtub, and huge manta rays, and water that shines in the dark, and rainbow-coloured fish and octopusses.

  After the lecture part of the talk he asked if we had any questions. Toffee-Nose was there, wearing new hair ribbons. Some people ask questions because they really want to know something. And some people ask questions because they want to show off. Toffee-Nose is the second kind of someone.

  After the questions everyone got to go up on the platform and look at all the sea things. There were barracuda teeth, sea sponges, stuffed fish, a turtle shell (so big that you could hide Baby Jack under it), shells, starfish, beautiful coral and all Mr. Zimmerman’s diving equipment.

  On the way home William and I started to talk about the Ausonia, about how much was going on in the water under the ship and we never thought about it. There we were, floating along, and under us was a whole world, miles straight down of swimming, eating, attacking fish families, and jellyfish dancing. I also thought of a question, too late. If you are standing in Milorie, Saskatchewan, Canada, and you hold a shell to your ear and you hear the sea, what sea are you hearing? Anyway, William and I are going to be the deep-sea diver brother-and-sister team and we’re going to discover many new kinds of fish and along the way we’ll pick up some sunken treasure to get the money for our expeditions.

  June 19

  People on Strings

  Today the twins got to go to the Chautauqua. It was a marionette show. Dad and I met the twins at the end and they told us all about Jack and the Beanstalk. Harry said that he wasn’t afraid of the giant because he only smelled the blood of an Englishman, and he wasn’t an Englishman anymore, but a Canadian. Then Dad said, “So I suppose you don’t want your tea then because Canadians don’t have tea, only supper.” And Harry said, “I shall have my tea and call it supper,” and then Dad pretended to box his ears. Then Harry and Gladys recited “and he climbed and he climbed and he climbed and he climbed” and so on, all the way home, unti
l Dad and I had to run ahead with our fingers in our ears. I wish I could go to the Chautauqua every day. Every day until I grow up and become a deep-sea diver.

  June 21

  Family Expands Again

  Baby Jack has come to live with us. Mother brought him back from Uncle Alf and Auntie Millie’s. He is sleeping in a drawer at the end of my bed. He is making a tiny little popping sound as he sleeps. I’m not supposed to know why he’s here, but I do. I heard Mother telling Dad. There’s a hole in the floor where the heat comes up in winter but the sound of voices comes up all year long.

  (True confession: Actually you have to lie on the floor and put your ear to the grate, which I happened to be doing.)

  Mother went to visit Auntie Millie and when she got there Auntie Millie was just lying on the bed and staring and Baby Jack was crying and his nappy hadn’t been changed in ever so long. Mother says that Auntie Millie is sick but I know it isn’t like the flu or something. Mother says Auntie Millie should never have left England, that she isn’t the pioneer sort. But then Dad said that living with someone like Uncle Alf would drive anyone round the twist, what with the lies and the debts. Then Mother got quiet. After all, Uncle Alf is her brother. I wouldn’t like anyone to say bad things about William.