A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  Then, of course, there was the sour little comedy of discovering that the new hired hand had no mere canvas bag of basics with him, but a gentleman’s steamer trunk of solid leather embossed with his initials. As Harry helped the carter heave the great, very new-looking object down from the cart, the feminine chatter around Munck ceased and everyone turned to gawp.

  After watching Harry pay the carter, Mr Jørgensen seemed a little abashed at ushering such a piece of luggage into the small, low structure tacked on to the side of the house. ‘This was where I lived while I was building the place,’ he explained gruffly. ‘It’s basic, but it’ll have to do. Gets plenty cold in winter, but we’ll find you some extra blankets for the bed then, and you’ll get some heat through the wall as Esme’s stove is just to the other side of it, and her bread oven. Privy’s around the back. Water from the pump in the yard. The girls’ll bring hot water for your bath on Saturday nights so you’re clean for church. Kerosene for the lamp is down there. You’re not a Catholic or a Jew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. So you can worship with us. You known Troels long?’

  ‘Er, no. Actually I only met him on the boat coming out.’

  ‘Good,’ Jørgensen said with a certain satisfaction, and Harry saw that Munck might be a cherished kinsman of the wife but was no favourite of the husband. ‘I’ll leave you to settle in . . .’ here he threw another glance at the huge, incongruous trunk, ‘then I’ll fetch you for lunch before we put you to work, eh?’

  The lean-to was not so bad. The narrow bed was firm, which Harry preferred. There were two wooden chairs and a table, a little shelf where he set a few books, and a jug and basin for daily washing. And the basic plank floor and spotty blue curtains prevented it feeling too agricultural. From the broom and dustpan hanging on the back of the door, he guessed he was expected to do his own cleaning. And it was private, his own small cell, with a narrow view across the paddock, where the horses were snorting in dismissal as the carter’s nag left the scene.

  Lunch was simple but delicious. A slice of ham with boiled vegetables, a piece of apple pie, a glass of cooler, clearer water than Harry had tasted since leaving England. He ate at the heavy old dining table with Munck and the Jørgensens, but, in a little touch of social demarcation, was allocated a hard chair where theirs were upholstered.

  Mrs Jørgensen bore the traces of the kind of delicate Nordic beauty that would never have lasted long without plentiful shade and city comforts to pamper it. She had a nervous smile, more like a twitch than a thing connected to actual feelings, and looked tired when not appearing apprehensive. The three Jørgensen daughters were very much their father’s brood: big-boned, apple-cheeked, wholesome and plain, as savagely observant of their respective ages and positions as any farmyard hens. Their names, he learnt, were Wilhelmine, Annemette and Gudrun, though they were usually known as Minnie, Annie and Goody. Minnie was humourless and bossy, Annie humorous but spiteful. Gudrun, the youngest, gave him a head-ducking smile when he was introduced, and he suspected she might prove his only ally.

  The conversation at lunch was dominated by Munck and Mrs Jørgensen, who spoke largely in Danish. The daughters spoke English, the older two with something of their mother’s accent. Jørgensen said little beyond firing out an occasional question in either language, concentrating instead on his food.

  Munck made no more attempt to include Harry in the conversation than he would have spoken to a parcel he had just delivered. Harry felt the wretched awkwardness of it all; it reminded him of how boys who had been friendly enough at school could become anything but when they rashly invited one to meet their families. And the lingering pain and shame from what had passed between them that morning made it worse.

  He’d assumed that, after such a journey, Munck would be staying the night at least, and so, it seemed, had Mrs Jørgensen. When her husband rose from the table saying, ‘Well, I’ll set our visitor his afternoon’s task, then drive Troels back to town,’ a startled, then angry exchange followed, from which it was a relief to escape to the fresher air outside.

  Dismissing the altercation by simply walking away from it, Jørgensen joined him, suggested he leave his jacket and tie in his room, then equipped him with waders and a shovel and led him to one of the ditches alongside the farm’s main track. He showed him how muck running off from track and field was blocking the water from flowing away to one of several big ponds, which he called sloughs, pronouncing it sloo. Harry was to wade in and dig the muck high on to the ditch’s banks until the water ran freely again. That done, he was to repeat the task with every ditch in turn.

  It was hard work but pleasantly thoughtless and, as the smelly water began to rush away between his legs, immensely satisfying, somewhere between building dams and making mud pies, two activities he had only ever watched in envy as a boy. His shirt was soon bathed in sweat and splashed with filth, his palms beginning to grow sore from the unwonted friction of the shovel handle on their soft skin.

  He thought only of the job in hand and its repetitive rhythms, but hoped, if this were a test, that he was passing it. He was clearing his second ditch when Jørgensen drove Munck up the track beside him in a nimble little gig a fraction the size of the cart they had ridden out on that morning. Munck exchanged a quick word with Jørgensen, then jumped down.

  He laughed at Harry’s appearance. ‘Less the little gentleman now,’ he said.

  Harry was too out of breath to do more than smile.

  ‘Well, I shall see you in a year and a day, Windy. If the bears don’t get you first.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I’ll find you a homestead in the meanwhile, yes?’

  ‘Well . . . Why should you?’

  Munck met his eye. ‘Because you interest me,’ he said seriously. ‘Be good. Don’t forget me.’

  And laughing again at Harry’s appearance, he jumped back up into the gig and the two men clattered off up the track, which was so long and straight that the gig had shrunk to the size of a toy before it disappeared from view entirely.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The ditch-digging he had done all afternoon until the light fled came to seem shockingly hard, and he had been spoken to little more at supper than he had been at lunch. Collapsed on to his bed for the first time, he thought he might weep, but was smothered in sleep too rapidly for that. Neither was there any emotional release in dreams, for he was too tired for dreaming.

  As a rule, to lie in a strange room would have been to wake at restless intervals throughout the night, but he woke only when the cockerel crew close by. He felt so stiff and unrefreshed, it was as though the night had mysteriously passed in seconds.

  He washed and shaved in icy water, ate, worked and slept, and did so for barely varied days, dimly registering that his usually lively emotions had been numbed, as though by shock, and just as dimly aware that this was one of the mind’s mysterious pieces of mercy. It was another mercy that the Jørgensens neither gave nor expected anything from him socially; he was an unregarded nothing.

  There were times, many times at first, when Harry thought he had made a huge mistake. Quite unused to hard labour, for all that he was fit, his muscles and back never seemed to stop aching. His city-soft hands blistered and split so that he was obliged to bandage them every morning. When it was wet – and it rained so little that he would come in time to long for it – he found it impossible to dry his clothes out properly overnight. When the weather warmed up, he was no more comfortable, on account of the clouds of biting black flies and mosquitoes that seemed to rise from the grass as he walked across it, and feasted maddeningly on any skin left bare, so he was obliged to labour in several layers and a hat, however hot it made him.

  The work was repetitive and tended to consist of doing one thing all day, or for days on end, be it ditch-clearing, fence-mending or clearing ground.
As the weather warmed and the Jørgensens’ small herd could be turned out to pasture, Harry worked for days clearing their barns of the mixed straw and dung the animals had trodden down to the consistency of hard cheese over the winter, carting it out to the fields and there scattering the sticky clods by hand. And then there was ground clearance, the no less laborious process of ridding a sizeable patch of land Jørgensen wanted brought under cultivation for the next season of its coarse prairie grass and larger stones. The stones almost defeated him. Few were small enough to lift free of the soil without some kind of lever. Once freed, they had to be rolled – he soon learnt not to try lifting them – on to a stone-boat, a kind of flat sledge constructed for the purpose, which he would then harness with chains to one of the horses, to lug it slowly clear of the site and over to a slope where Jørgensen said Indians used to drive buffalo to slaughter them, and where Harry would now roll stone after stone.

  But it was while engaged in this work, pestered by blackfly that were biting the tender skin on his eyelids to rawness, sweating so hard he had to tie a handkerchief around his brow beneath his hat to stop the sweat from blinding him, that he realised he was no longer resenting his labour but was strangely enjoying it.

  He liked working with the horses, of course, though his dealings were largely with the big black-and-tan ploughing pair, not the handsome bays that pulled the family carts and gigs. Cleaning out their stables and giving them oats was the sleepy start to his days, usually performed before he was summoned in for breakfast. He was ashamed that, in a lifetime of riding, he had never fed, groomed or even put the bridle on the horses he rode, and grateful that he had watched grooms at work often enough to be able to pass muster the first time he took a curry comb to one of the big black-and-tans with Jørgensen watching.

  There were chickens, which wandered freely around the yard and had been known to hop up the step into his room if he left the door open, and a farm cat, a stern yellow-eyed tom mysteriously called Mr Schulz. Jørgensen’s handsome flat-coated retriever was rarely more than a few yards from her master but occasionally came to watch Harry at work, scathingly immune to his friendly overtures. She grew less suspicious once Jørgensen, having decided, perhaps, that Harry wasn’t as soft as his luggage might have suggested, began to give him jobs alongside him so that they worked as a team. Finally, after a long morning of watching them worm, debud and castrate some calves, the dog actually approached Harry with a tail wag and consented to being briefly petted.

  ‘Hates that cousin of my wife’s,’ Jørgensen explained. ‘Reckon she had you guilty by association . . .’

  Jørgensen was a man of firm opinions and few words, and was not a seeker of confidences. Seemingly it was enough for him to have a hired hand who was reasonably fit and keen to learn. Harry’s predecessor had not been a success. ‘Thought he knew how to do everything, so the grødhoved did it wrong half the time. I’d always rather you ask a thing than do it all wrong so it has to be done twice.’

  With no son to work alongside him, it must have been hard, Harry considered, to have to make do with a succession of unsatisfactory substitutes. The obvious solution would have been to find the perfect hired hand then have him woo one of the daughters . . .

  The serious eldest, Minnie, was clearly marked by a lifetime of failing to impress her father. She looked after the geese and chickens and was an excellent shot, regularly bagging wild duck, of which there was a plentiful supply on the farm’s sloughs. She also shot rabbit and the occasional hare. These she would pluck or skin herself in an efficient fury all the more self-righteous for being unapplauded and unregarded. Annie had made her realm the kitchen, which suited her as she was hot-tempered and cruel and food gave her an arena in which she could exert control and make her feelings abundantly clear by indirect means. Goody had the obliging sunny nature so often found in youngest siblings. Her sphere was the dairy, where she milked, churned butter and produced a bland, salty cheese.

  Harry woke in quilty darkness in a thrashing panic because he thought he was wetting the bed, then realised that he was merely experiencing a forceful wet dream. He lay clutching a fist between his thighs as he joylessly spent himself, and remembered the dark violence of the dream that had woken him in such a state. As though thinking to leave it behind him with his seed on the sheets, he swung himself upright and stumbled from the bed, stubbing a toe on the heavy boots he had discarded as he undressed, and instinctively making for the door.

  He opened it, welcoming the cold night air, and stared out at a landscape transformed. There were stars, a seamless spangled fishnet of them from horizon to horizon, coldly lighting the land and lending the farm buildings, outlined sharply against them, an eerie loveliness.

  Harry looked on the scene and felt himself to be nothing, to be less than dirt. He felt a sense of self-disgust keener than the draught blowing in across his bare feet and sperm-splashed thighs, and knew Troels was not to blame. Troels had merely shown him what he was. And the feelings that shock had been mercifully holding in check were released in such a flood that he had to cover his mouth to stop himself crying aloud. He stood, leaning in the doorway, weeping, gasping, looking at the transfigured scene that was like a snowless Christmas card, until his feet hurt.

  The next morning, his eyes were glued half shut with tears, and he had to bathe them open.

  For all that he was given the least good cutlery and a hard chair at mealtimes, there was no question of his being left behind when the family attended church or went into town for provisions. He thought this a small kindness at first, until it occurred to him that he was still in effect a stranger to these people and therefore not trusted to be left alone with their house and possessions.

  Jørgensen took the reins, of course, with his wife beside him, and the girls squeezed together on a little padded bench behind them. All four women were unanimous in their scorn of the social possibilities of Moose Jaw, full as it was of Norwegians, compared to Waverly, Wisconsin, which had offered reassuring touches of Danish culture; but Moose Jaw was all they had, so they got dressed up a little for trips into town, however mundane their errands, because as Goody repeatedly said, you never knew.

  Harry’s place was on the cart’s rear, so he could prevent anything from falling off and so anyone could see at a glance that he was of the household but not of the family. With a couple of burlap sacks folded up into a sort of cushion to guard against splinters, it was pleasant to sit dangling his legs and watching the landscape unroll behind him, emptying his thoughts, much as he did when working.

  The journey to the little clapboard Lutheran church they attended or into town was the part he enjoyed. Once arrived at either destination, he felt at a loss, a prey to inquisitive stares and satirical comments only half understood. He had never felt especially manly. He had been raised to believe that what mattered was to be unmistakably a gentleman, and the very question of manliness had never much concerned him. Among these people, though, these tough, bearded men and their lean, travel-hardened women, he felt, for the first time in his life, unmanned or, even, less than human.

  He encountered his first Indians on these trips. Their movements and access were strictly controlled, it seemed, so they were usually seen waiting outside buildings on ponies or on foot, or, on the rare occasions when a priest’s missionary work had hit home, standing at the back of the church. Most had been encouraged on to reservations further afield, the girls told him, but evidently there were unofficial or ‘non-treaty’ Indians left behind, possibly on an encampment some way outside the town. They came to Moose Jaw to find work or to trade.

  Their presence made Mrs Jørgensen exceedingly nervous on account of some terrible experience in her youth about which she would not be drawn. Obliged to pass an Indian on the street, she would encourage her daughters to hurry on ahead of her, as though the mere glance of a native man could sully them. The older two would make silly, untrue comments abou
t how Indian men smelt bad and were usually drunk and stared at them. Goody, being younger and kinder, once rashly sprang to the Indians’ defence, praising their women’s skill at basketry and beading, but was shouted down by her sisters, who said she was a fool and that everyone knew Indian women were as drunk and hopeless as their men and little better than children in their lack of moral sense.

  Harry was required to help load any bulky purchases from the dry goods store or agricultural depot, and then was at leisure while Jørgensen caught up with friends in the very bar where Harry had eaten supper on his first night, while his wife and daughters made their critical round of Moose Jaw’s shops.

  On this particular morning, he had no wish to revisit the bar and none to waste his money in shops, so he followed his usual habit of visiting the library – a puritanical approximation of his old Mayfair club – where he would read newspapers and write letters to Jack and Winnie, keeping an anxious eye on the clock so as to allow himself enough time to go to the post office.

  Writing to Jack was easy: he kept his tone ironic and light and presented the facts as a kind of adventure, with himself as the unready, untrained hero, asking Jack questions about the care of horses and cattle. Writing to Winnie was much harder. His mind kept wandering back to the scene of his degradation. He was wary of sounding pathetic, but he found it hard to sustain the light, amusing tone he used with Jack. He described for her the unexpected beauties of the countryside, the surprising lack of birds, and how the flowers were like, and yet on closer inspection, exotically unlike, their English equivalents. He described his chilly little room, with its bed made of fruit crates that he had cunningly turned cavity outwards so as to create bookshelves and storage. And then, all at once, in the course of writing how he was sure she would soon be able to run up some curtains that kept out the night chills more effectively than the skinny piece of unlined spotted cotton with which his window was currently shielded, he began to miss her terribly.