by Patrick Gale
Farmer Jørgensen had three daughters and no sons and, like all such farmers, was terrified that one of his daughters would be seduced by a penniless hired hand. Unless, of course, that hired hand proved to be a thoroughly good farmer, in which case he would become a useful son-in-law with prospects and no longer have to be paid a wage.
Troels was not a man who liked waiting and had planned that they would go directly to the Jørgensens on arriving at Moose Jaw. An accumulation of small delays, however, meant that they arrived far too late for that and had to arrange for a night in town.
Moose Jaw was far more developed than its age had led Harry to expect. It already boasted some large brick buildings – a school, a hospital, some hotels and a post office – and the station where they arrived would not have disgraced a small city back home. The buildings’ size and confidence only emphasised the raw, provisional nature of their surroundings, however: wooden shopfronts, more like fairground stalls than real buildings, streets of churned mud and worse, and everywhere vacant building plots carefully outlined with posts and wires but boasting as yet nothing but spring weeds. There was a certain bustle, the tinny sound of a pianola from inside a pub, but there seemed to be no more women in evidence than had been on the train or boat. Harry had not appreciated until now how much hats and dresses adorned a scene.
They passed across the street from the Dominion Lands Office, and it was dispiriting to see a cluster of men around its window, much like the one he had seen all those weeks ago on Piccadilly.
The hotels and inns were inexplicably busy, and there were no free beds at the City Hotel or the next place they tried. Finally they found one free room at the Maple Leaf. After days of not washing and having no privacy, Harry would have cherished a hot bath, a shave and a few hours of solitude in a quiet bed, and would gladly have paid whatever price was asked for them. He enjoyed a peaceful bath and shave, at least, across the corridor, lingering in the soothing grey soup until it began to turn cold. And while Troels took his turn, he lay on the half of the bed he had instinctively claimed, eyes closed, attempting to make out the words of an unfamiliar song some man was singing in a bar across the way, trying not to acknowledge the panic that had been stealing up on him ever since they disembarked from the boat.
They had brought only minimal luggage with them; most of it they had left in the care of the station for collecting the next day. Trained at boarding school to snatch what privacy he could, Harry had been scrupulous in taking from his bag only the articles he needed, and had replaced most of them tidily afterwards so as not to make a small room feel smaller still.
Troels had been under no such constraint, but seemed actively to use his belongings to make his mark upon the place and lay claim to more than a fair fifty per cent of its charmless yardage. Not only were his clothes scattered across floor and bed and shabby bureau, but the savoury, slightly meaty scent of him, not unpleasing but insistent, seemed to have permeated the room while Harry was in the bath. It felt like Troels’ room, into which Harry was intruding, an effect redoubled when Troels strode back in, humming, wearing only a towel, which he immediately tossed aside. He appeared to feel no embarrassment whatsoever at his prodigious nakedness, cheerfully chatting while he selected clean clothes from his exploded Gladstone bag.
They should eat steak, he said, almost certainly, since that was the best thing Moose Jaw had to offer, and with local beer, since whatever wine was on offer would be filthy and expensive. Then they should find women.
Harry reminded him he was a married man, but Troels waved aside his objection. Why had he gone to the trouble of shaving in a town full of unkempt beards? he asked in a bullying tone. Who else was he hoping to impress? Harry began to speak quietly about the maintenance of standards but let the matter slide. Troels, he was coming to understand, was a natural bully, and a man who often said things purely to goad a reaction from others but cared not a fig if one made no answer.
That their own hotel had already stopped serving food when they came down was something of a relief; the boiled cabbage smell in its hall and the purse-lipped little notices about noise, water usage and ‘visitors’ pinned to the back of almost every door did not inspire confidence that it was a place that understood pleasure. Instead, they found a noisy tavern – the one where a heavily bearded tenor was still singing sentimental songs – and were served steaks with fried onion and fried potato. There was far more meat than Harry could eat, but he knew he could count on Troels to finish it for him.
As they drank one beer after another, Troels made him talk about Winnie. Hoping that drink and conversation might postpone indefinitely the threat of women, Harry made himself sadder and sadder evoking Winnie’s quiet charms, her prettiness, her sly wit, her kindness as a mother and ingenuity with a needle and a bolt of silk. Troels seemed so keen to hear more about her that Harry began to fear the insanely confident Dane would no sooner have settled him as a hired hand than he’d be sailing back to Twickenham to woo her for himself.
Then Harry began the story of Pattie’s adventures on the stage, which led someone who had overheard to exclaim that her picture was on display. There was an incongruous screen, a thing that belonged in a boudoir, not a bar, which was presumably used to cut down the draughts on bitter nights in winter. It had been painstakingly papered over with pictures cut from some London magazine, all of them of actresses or noted society beauties, Gaiety Girls being prominent among them. The eavesdropper, who was plainly drunk, insisted on dragging the screen across to them, spreading the word as he did so, so that a small crowd of inquisitive, burly men arrived at the table with him.
‘So?’ Troels asked. ‘Which one is she?’
And there, thank God, she was, unmistakably voluptuous in a cluster of coyly draped flower maidens, smiling with her mouth slightly open, her creamy, almost muscular shoulders breaking free of a gauzy wrap.
‘Can she sing?’ Troels asked.
‘She can hold a tune,’ Harry conceded. ‘But it’s not a voice to fill a theatre.’
‘Does it matter?’ someone else laughed. ‘She can fill a dress!’
‘She have a feller?’
‘She . . . she has an admirer,’ Harry told them, and thought, with nostalgic affection, of Notty and his habitual expression of mild bafflement. ‘A minor aristocrat.’ He stuttered slightly on the M.
‘Oh,’ someone else said, mimicking the accent Harry never thought of himself as having. ‘Only a m-m-minor one! Dear me!’
‘He gonna marry her?’ another asked.
‘I . . . I doubt it,’ Harry said, with a pang at his disloyalty, and bit his tongue rather than mention gold watches and villas in Pangbourne.
The men then fell to assessing the girls glued to the screen – their hair, teeth, breasts and, in the saucier pictures, legs – in a way that made Harry think of his father roughly tugging apart a horse’s velvety lips to examine its teeth.
Troels slipped away during the discussion, which made Harry realise how dependent he had already become on his insistent control. Were the other man to have melted away into the night, it would have been days before Harry regained the ability to make decisions for himself.
‘Time to go,’ Troels now called, across the men’s banter.
‘We need to pay,’ Harry told him, standing.
‘It’s done,’ Troels said, and headed out, giving no option but to follow.
The night air was sharp and soberingly clean after the fug indoors, and reminded Harry he wanted sleep not women, but Munck had done his research and paced ahead.
‘They’re nice girls,’ he said. ‘Friendly. Irish. Recommended,’ and he turned down a side street that was abruptly residential. There were low wooden houses, some with small verandas or large porches, where log piles seemed to take precedence over rocking chairs. A dog barked. Most houses were already in darkness. In the window of the one Troels app
roached was a lamp with a pink glass shade, an ugly thing like some fleshy orchid in a winter garden.
Troels knocked on the door. Harry hung back.
‘I really think . . .’ he began at last, but the door opened and a motherly woman in an approximation of evening dress waved them in. She did not introduce herself or ask their names, used, perhaps, to visitors who spoke little English. She gestured to them to sit on chairs that were lined along one wall, as if in a dentist’s waiting room, tossed a log into a pot-bellied stove, then settled across from them in an armchair, where she opened a novel, licked her finger and turned a page.
A baby cried nearby, then fell silent with disturbing abruptness.
Troels was far too tall for his chair, which squeaked beneath him as he tapped a foot impatiently. When a door opened and a man came out buttoning his shirt, Troels fairly jumped to his feet, but the woman flapped her hand to make him sit again and it occurred to Harry that perhaps it was she, not the visitors, who had no English. The other man let himself out and walked away, whistling the same song Harry had heard from their bedroom earlier. Troels sighed so heavily Harry felt it through the floorboards.
Then one of the inner doors flew open again, the woman nodded, and Troels sprang up and went through it. Before his silhouette quite blocked the doorway, Harry saw past him to where a skinny girl, little more than Kitty or May’s age, it seemed to him, was arranging herself on a bed improvised from packing cases. She turned towards the door a face devoid of expression.
As soon as Troels had closed the door behind him, Harry seized his opportunity to escape, taking his leave of the reading woman with a stammered apology as he fumbled some coins into a little brass saucer apparently set out for the purpose. Retracing his steps to the hotel, thanking his stars he had pocketed their key before Troels had, he found he was in a kind of terror, so walked slowly to the end of the main street and back again until his heart had stilled.
He fell asleep within minutes of climbing into their creaking bed. When he woke, in darkness, it was to a commotion he realised was Troels dropping on to the mattress beside him.
‘You left early,’ Troels said, putting out the light.
‘Yes. My heart wasn’t in it,’ Harry told him.
‘You did well. She was too thin and, I think, diseased.’
‘Ah.’
‘I left too. Sleep now.’
Harry had observed on the train that Troels was a man seemingly capable of sleeping by effort of will. ‘Sleep now,’ he would say, and he slept. Far from slipping back to sleep himself, Harry was now utterly alert, roused by the consciousness that he was sharing a bed with a man so big he had to hook an arm over the bed’s edge to stop himself rolling against him. Exhaustion overcame him eventually, but he seemed to lie there, wakeful, for an hour, smelling the mix of sweat, steak and soap that radiated off Troels’ skin, aware of his every breath and shift of posture.
Light was filtering through scrappy curtains into the room when he next opened his eyes.
Trying to move slightly, he found that Troels had flung an arm across him and had pushed a thigh so firmly against one of his own that it was possible to tell that, even had he come to bed in his long johns, he was no longer wearing them.
Assuming it was a mistake born of sleep that would mortify Troels when he woke, Harry hooked his arm over the mattress edge and made an effort to haul himself slowly free. He had thought the other man was fast asleep because his breathing was so heavy, so jumped when Troels held him all the harder and said clearly,
‘No you don’t.’
The pleasures he had tasted in bed with Browning had been deep and sometimes bruising, but never violent. What Munck proceeded to do to him was savage and degrading, without affection or even curiosity. The pain was so intense that he felt torn open. When Munck suddenly thrust into him, the burning sensation was so intolerable, he cried out, at which Munck slapped a gagging palm across his mouth so that he had to fight for breath. He bit in response, which only saw his mouth clamped the harder and the assault intensify, as though Munck found invitation less exciting than resistance. In the confusion of extreme pain, fear and being only half awake, Harry believed he was about to be murdered. The ordeal was all the more horrible for his treacherous body gaining an animal satisfaction from it, which Munck could not fail to notice.
But then, with a few final thrusts and a furious Danish curse, it was over.
Munck rolled off him and got out of the bed. Harry made himself turn towards him; if he was to die, he would look his killer in the eyes at least. But Munck barely glanced at him as he snorted, ‘Huh! Too tight! You’ll be better at it next time,’ and tugged a towel about himself before slouching across the landing to wash.
Which was when Harry saw the red streaks where Munck had been wiping himself on the bed sheet as he spoke.
They snatched a breakfast so greasy Harry had to fight the urge to vomit rather than swallow, and paid a carter to fetch Harry’s luggage and drive them out of town to the Jørgensen farm. Munck behaved as though nothing out of the ordinary had passed between them.
Harry could not play the game of normality. Indeed he found he could barely speak. Munck showed no concern at this, merely a passing petulance, like a boy’s towards a defective toy.
‘Your friend doesn’t talk much,’ the carter observed at one point. ‘He’s not simple, is he? Old Man Jørgensen won’t like that.’
‘He’s homesick,’ Munck said, whereupon the two of them laughed.
And Harry should have felt homesick, crossing this cold prairie that meant nothing to him, apprehensive at the thought of his ever more forbidding-sounding new employer, and angry at the carter’s impudence, but all he felt, apart from a shaming soreness whenever the cart’s wheels crossed a rut in the muddy track, was a numb acceptance that a few hours had seen him become of no account. He stared at fields where there were still traces of morning frost, at the myriad small, bird-haunted ponds, at barns that looked quite unlike barns at home in either shape or colour, at tracts of uncultivated wilderness in between, and at tiny sod houses seemingly sprung from the tidy plots around them, registering what he was seeing yet feeling no more than if his head had been a camera or his eyes cold chips of mirror.
The road they were on barely resembled a road, much less a major one, which the carter assured them it was. The Jørgensen farm lay down an even less convincing narrow track to one side. The track was rough but the fields to either side were neatly fenced with posts and wire, the deep ditches at their edges still nearly filled with the waters of the spring thaw. The first acres they passed were all ploughed.
‘What does he grow?’ Harry asked, his words emerging as a kind of croak.
‘He speaks!’ the carter laughed.
‘Wheat, of course,’ Munck said. ‘Some oats too, probably, for his horses.’
‘And the hired hand’s porridge,’ the carter added, and they both laughed at him again.
As they progressed, the ploughed fields gave way to similarly fenced and ditched pasture on which cattle grazed. The land was bowling-green flat, broken only by the fences, and equally tidy lines of willows and some hazel-like tree planted to yield shade and shelter. Even on this calm spring day, the breeze seemed constant.
Harry had plenty of time to take in the farmhouse and its barns, which lay at the end of the long, straight approach, all of them wooden, all painted the same distinctive brick red with white trim. The inhabitants had plenty of warning, too. A group of white-aproned women appeared on the veranda, a large, black-coated dog galloped out from one of the barns to escort the cart in, barking all the way, and by the time they had drawn up, a weather-beaten, unsmiling man in a tweed suit and felt hat had emerged from one of the barns. Harry remembered he was here to be hired for work, so made an effort to look less pathetic than he felt; though had the man – Jørgensen, he as
sumed – drawn himself up, shaken his head and sent him back to Moose Jaw, he would not have been entirely sorry.
Then Munck raised his hat and shouted out some greeting in Danish and was recognised, and at once their onlookers were all smiles and hurried forward. Munck jumped down to shake hands with Jørgensen and be embraced by his kinswomen. Harry held out his hand and saw, from Jørgensen’s glance at it and momentary hesitation, that he was no longer this man’s equal.
‘Harry Cane,’ he said, introducing himself.
Jørgensen laughed drily. ‘Hurricane? We’ll have to call you Windy!’ unwittingly hitting on the nickname Harry had suffered as a frightened boy in flannel shorts. Jack had been nicknamed Sugar, a neat illustration of the greater affection he had always inspired.
‘Can you farm, Windy?’
‘Not yet,’ Harry said, ‘but I’m keen to learn. I know about horses,’ he added, spotting two carthorses and a pair of handsome bays that were watching from a paddock beside the house, apparently suspicious of the carter’s nag.
‘You ride?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Last man we had was a kryster – terrified of them.’
Jørgensen explained the terms of Harry’s employment, which, as in an old fairy tale, was to be for a year and a day. He would have full board and lodging and every Sunday off.
‘You look a little fancy for a hired hand. Do you have any rougher clothes?’ he asked, adding, when Harry hesitated, ‘Overalls and boots we can find you, but I’ll take the cost off your first wages, all right?’
‘All right,’ Harry said, and they each nodded, which seemed as binding as a handshake.
The talk of wages, the whole business of being, for the first time in his life, employed, was so novel as to feel virtually meaningless.
‘Good,’ Jørgensen went on. ‘You’ll meet the family over lunch. Let’s settle you in. Where’s your bag? Charlie?’ he called to the carter. ‘Throw down Windy Cane’s bag.’
