A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  Physical exhaustion mastered a racing brain and he soon put out the lamp and slept, but when the cockerel’s crowing woke him to a room already filled with light, he remembered her letter even before he saw it lying unfolded where he had dropped it.

  He would not answer her directly, he decided. He did not want Whitacre to feel everything going too smoothly his way. But he would write in a day or so, apologising for any awkwardness caused by his previous letter and giving her his blessing, just as he must swiftly write to Jack so that he and George should not be wounded at hearing the news second hand. If he withheld consent, he imagined it was only a matter of time before his consent would not be needed, since the desertion would have become a legal fact. Besides, he had no wish for anything to nudge Robert into making revelations that might overshadow Phyllis any more than a hopeless, absent father would already be doing.

  He worked harder that week than he had since his arrival, but did so with a kind of relish at being nothing more than a fit body in the service of a tidy aim. Spring was sufficiently upon them for it to be the week when Jørgensen taught him how to plough, first with the team of horses on land already worked, then, far more challengingly, with the oxen on land cleared but not yet broken. Ploughing through centuries of roots left by scrub and tough prairie grass was like ploughing wood, like some impossible task set the innocent hero of a fairy tale. Even with the strength of two oxen to assist him, his progress was as slow as forgetfulness, but Harry was light-headed with relief, absolved of responsibility and guilt, if not quite freed of nostalgia for a lost Eden of marriage and fatherhood.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The year and a day did not pass swiftly. Living what was in effect an antique existence on the farm, rising and retiring more or less with the sun, labouring six days in seven, the height of entertainment consisting of an occasional family visitor or borrowed novel – read with exceeding slowness because he would fall asleep after two or three pages – Harry felt his days pass at a fraction of the speed with which his calendar had unfurled in town. And yet, deprived of choice or variety, he was happy and healthy. He passed twelve months, through broiling summer, an astonishingly beautiful autumn and the shocking dry freeze of the long, long prairie winter, with only one negligible, three-day cold; if one dicounted the odd attack of indigestion brought on by Annie’s cooking.

  The Jørgensens, who grew in kindness towards him while never quite abandoning the distance politic between employers and worker, were his chief entertainment, along with their melancholy dog and glowering cat. Mrs Jørgensen took to doing his laundry along with that of the rest of the household, and at her prompting, Jørgensen advised him in the purchase of two sets of denim dungarees, which were infinitely easier to clean than the stiff wool suits sold him by the outfitters on the Strand.

  Minnie, always grave to the point of rigour, surprised them all by marrying a rector from south of Moose Jaw she met at a combined church social that summer. He was reassuringly middle-aged, but she became quite girlish as the wedding approached, despite Annie’s efforts to make her fat. With Minnie gone to a distant parish, not only did Harry graduate to an upholstered dining chair and better cutlery, but Annie underwent a subtle alteration, her spite turning by degrees to wit, and instances of kindness entering her behaviour.

  In one of the talks they often enjoyed while she worked nearby, Goody astonished him by admitting that Minnie had tormented Annie all their lives, physically when they were little, and psychologically when they grew older. The parents had no idea, apparently, and thought the sister’s thriving in the other’s absence was yet more proof of her unpleasant nature.

  The divorce proceeded in Harry’s absence. He assumed Winnie would be married to Whitacre without delay but had no way of knowing. She could hardly continue writing to him once he had agreed to her terms; it would have made a nonsense of her desertion claim.

  Then a letter came from Jack. This is not going to be pleasant, old man, he wrote. Probably as hard for me to write as it will be for you to read, but here goes. We had an unexpected visit from Pattie last week. As you can imagine, she has become so very sophisticated that poor George had rather given up on her ever deigning to visit Chester and a house that might smell of horse. Tears and lamentations and she was immediately closeted with George while I was banished. Turns out Notty has announced he can have no more to do with her since an unfortunate business involving you, old man, and an autograph album and some pansy attempting blackmail. George relayed it all, simply livid, couldn’t believe Pattie had known about it and kept it quiet for so long, though relieved, of course, that Robert and Notty had seen that the police weren’t involved.

  Pattie – who I gather can’t quite bring herself to return that splendid gold watch – has retired from the stage forthwith and resolved to train as a nurse.

  Naturally I don’t believe a word of all this, Harry. It’s simply too incredible and disgusting, and I think you’re little short of heroic to have moved out there rather than involve the family in a scandal in trying to clear your name. But you must understand that now George is insisting I have nothing more to do with you, I have to knuckle under and do as the lady asks. She is my wife, old man, and pretty peppery when crossed. At least this way she can’t complain if I continue to keep a weather eye on Little Phil for you.

  Harry read the letter several times before burning it in the stove. He wrote several drafts of replies, now protesting, now beseeching, and burnt those too. In the end he wrote a very short one simply acknowledging receipt, saying that it was plain that nothing he said would alter the painful position, and thanking Jack for his continued guardianship of Phyllis. Not surprisingly, his response went unanswered.

  As summer turned to glorious autumn, Harry bought himself a gun and learnt to shoot rabbit and duck, which Jørgensen showed him how to prepare for the kitchen, and his wife and Annie how to cook. He had worried that Jørgensen might renege on their handshake and ask him to move on with the coming of winter, not wanting an extra mouth to feed when there was less for a hired hand to do about the place, but his fears were groundless. Jørgensen still made good use of him every day. Until the snows came, there remained ditches to keep clear, fences to mend, and winter supplies to collect and store. And once snow lay thick around the place – shoulder deep or more where it blew into drifts – the animals still had to be fed and bedded in the barns, and ice melted for them so that they could drink. There was dung to be forked from the barns before it froze like rock, and logs to be piled for the kitchen stove. And of course there was always snow to shovel, snow of a texture and depth he would not have thought possible.

  As for the cold, he had never experienced anything like it: a dry, iron clamp upon the land, like death itself, full of unexpected beauty, like the hard crystals that formed on the inside of the windows. The cold did something strange to the quality of sounds around the farm, deadening all background noise so that the smallest scratching or whisper was emphasised. It was easy to see how the unwary settler could die in such a scene, lulled into marvelling at its deadly beauty even as his blood began to freeze. Just once Harry lingered outside as a blizzard got under way, amazed at the scale and savagery of it, but was furiously dragged indoors by Jørgensen and given a lecture about losing fingers and toes to frostbite and the impossibility of getting a doctor out until spring.

  As winter progressed, he came to understand the hunger with which Goody had eyed his meagre library when she first saw it. He had soon read everything he had with him, rereading much of it, and fell to trading books with the Jørgensens. With so little choice of entertainment and such long nights amid the stupefying silence and snow, far from any neighbours, the usual demarcations of books for women and books for men, books for children and books for their elders became irrelevant before the imperative of diversion. He read Jane Austen, which he had never thought to do before, and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Black Beaut
y as well as Jack London, Fennimore Cooper and Hans Christian Andersen. He even found himself, just like his employers, slowly turning the pages of the latest Eaton’s catalogue, which displayed everything from wooden house kits (up to eight bedrooms large) to cream separators, from guns to underwear, the latter modelled by coyly simpering women. (Men’s underwear, he noted, was listed but unmodelled, the men in the catalogues rarely appearing in anything less than evening dress.)

  Winter had come on them suddenly, whereas spring arrived by slow, unconvincing degrees, far later than he’d have expected. What Jørgensen called chinooks, warm winds from the western mountains, arrived and began to shrink the snow into patches of dirty ice rather than melting the lot overnight the way warmer weather would have done at home. A thaw was announced with loud cracks around the place before it turned all Harry’s laboriously cleared ditches to so many little canals. With the spring melt came a flurry of unexpected visitors, as neighbouring households emerged from the long freeze like so many bears, hungry for news and less familiar faces and other people’s baking. Mrs Jørgensen cursed these visitors, who often arrived at the least convenient moment, when she had her hands full of chores or nothing but leftovers to set before them, but she welcomed them, too, being as hungry for faces and talk as anyone else.

  Once the roads reopened, albeit with a few floods where sloughs had overflowed, the Jørgensens headed into town, trusting Harry with the guardianship of the place now they had passed a winter with him there. He was glad to be left behind – relishing having only the dog and horses for company as he set to work continuing to plough the patch of ground he had begun working over when the frosts arrived.

  When they returned, shortly before dusk, Jørgensen’s greeting was a little tense, even by his standards, and Harry wondered if the hoped-for lunch with Minnie and her husband had displeased in some way, or failed to materialise. The explanation emerged at supper. They had brought back quite a bundle of post, including a clutch of long-overdue Christmas cards, one of which was for Harry, clumsily painted by Phyllis. (This made him feel bad, as he had been taken by surprise by their long winter confinement so had been unable to send the child either card or present.) There were letters from their friends and relations and one brief one from Troels. And this was the source of Jørgensen’s gloom, for Troels confirmed the date a year and a day since his departure when he would be coming with the carter to collect Harry, for whom he had identified a choice piece of land on a quarter-section two days’ ride beyond the Battlefords, in northern Saskatchewan. He would bring another greenhorn to take Harry’s place.

  ‘You don’t have to go with him,’ Jørgensen said. ‘I can’t afford to pay you more than I do, but . . .’

  ‘The man needs his dignity,’ Esme Jørgensen said, which earned what sounded like a Danish curse from her husband.

  ‘She’s right,’ he conceded later. ‘But you could find land on your own. You don’t need his help. You’re not a grønskolling any more.’

  ‘But he says he has the perfect place in view.’

  ‘Canada is big. There are many such places.’

  ‘Where are the Battlefords?’ Harry asked, thinking they sounded charmingly like English villages in Sussex or Hampshire, and already knowing enough of Canada to understand they would almost certainly be nothing like.

  Goody fetched the map of Canada from her father’s desk and unfolded it on the cleared table. It was no use, however, because so much of the western prairie had still been ‘empty’ at the time of its printing. But Annie had a map of the Canadian Pacific Railway system Troels had given her on his last visit, and after much poring over that with a magnifying glass, she found Fort Battleford. Another, lesser railway went on from there to stop at places called Unity, Vera, Winter, Yonker and Zumbro. ‘Troels says the sidings are named in alphabetical order because there’s nothing else to call them in such a vast, empty space.’

  ‘It’s miles away,’ Goody announced gloomily. ‘Miles and miles from civilisation.’

  ‘Civilisation will follow the railway,’ her father told her. ‘It just takes time.’

  Before he joined the women in retiring for the night, Jørgensen went outside with Harry on the pretext of checking the henhouse fence, as Harry had spotted a coyote prowling in the distance that afternoon. They talked in the codified language men used at such times. They spoke of oxen and horses, of the respective merits of log-built houses over lumber ones, of the need to sharpen the ploughshares before Harry continued breaking ground in the morning. The unmistakable sense, however, was that Jørgensen would miss having him about the place and was wary of starting again with whoever Troels was bringing with him in exchange.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Troels arrived exactly when he said he would. ‘The Devil come to claim a soul,’ Jørgensen muttered as, alerted by the dog’s barking, they gathered in the yard to watch his approach. The new apprentice looked little more than a schoolboy and made Harry feel gratifyingly labour-toughened by comparison, something Troels seemed to notice, for he grinned as he jumped down from the cart and shook Jørgensen and Harry’s hands and said, ‘You made a man of him.’

  ‘Stay a few more months,’ Jørgensen growled under his breath, as Troels went on to embrace the women, ‘I might do the same for you.’

  Harry knew he didn’t need to go with Troels. He knew he could find his own way to a piece of land and make an entirely independent start for himself. But in a country so vast, offering so many options, it was surely as well to exploit an informed traveller’s recommendation.

  ‘He’ll take advantage of your trust,’ Jørgensen warned, but it was hard to see what advantage there could be for Troels in helping him. For obvious, unvoiceable reasons of his own, he would dearly have liked to see Troels on to the train in Moose Jaw and then go his own way. Unable to sleep because of a full moon, he had passed much of the night before Troels’ return picturing scenes of trite but satisfactory revenge in which he did just that, or, better yet, contrived to leave him behind as the train pulled away, literally to leave him standing while he rode away to dizzying freedom and anonymity. And then he slept and had confusing, shaming dreams about welcoming his tormentor.

  Troels was no sooner off the cart and standing before him again, unchanged except for a small scar on one temple, just as tall and remorseless as Harry remembered, than Harry found time spun savagely back and himself abruptly unmanned again. With Troels there, he felt his will and new skills ebb away and he was once again the English innocent who would go meekly where he was told, as though the man were his whip-clutching master and he his dog.

  After a year of the modest, homely Jørgensens and their limited conversation, however, a year of dung and cows, of fence posts and ditches, Troels, with his height and worldliness and well-cut clothes and piercing stare, had all the glamour of a cruel god, and his smile, when he bestowed it, felt like sunshine after sodden February.

  The new boy climbed down. He had only a small canvas rucksack for his belongings. ‘You travel lighter than I managed to,’ Harry told him, and the boy stared back rudely, saying nothing. Harry was surprised to find he could shrug and turn aside where he would once have felt bound to flounder on politely.

  He returned to his room to finish packing. Half the possessions in his trunk had never left it. Now he found two neat piles of freshly laundered clothes into which Mrs Jørgensen had discreetly added a few extra items her husband could spare. On the table was a stoneware jar of Annie’s excellent cucumber pickle, which she had teased him was the very thing to make a diet of gopher palatable. Beside it lay a large handkerchief that Goody had been painstakingly hemming, night after night – he had not realised for him – and had embroidered on one corner with a blue silk H emerging from a clump of a flower he guessed was meant for a forget-me-not.

  The evening was noisy. The catching-up on Danish family news, and the fact that his you
ng replacement turned out to be a native Swede with little English, meant that Harry found himself linguistically excluded. The night that followed was much interrupted because the Swede, who claimed half Harry’s little bed, was a snorer.

  Jørgensen sent the greenhorn to work cutting up and splitting a pile of logs, then drove Harry and Troels and the famous trunk to the station in Moose Jaw. Having gravely led Harry to one side in the crowded ticket office, he handed him an envelope packed with his wages for the year: sixty dollars, to which he had added an extra twenty, ‘Because you proved better than most and didn’t make fools of my girls.’ He advised him to bank most of it in Battleford once he had paid any fees at the Dominion Lands Office and bought lumber and a plough and horses. ‘You’ll find there’s not much call for cash. Men out there will prefer to trade: labour for tool hire, oats for fence posts and such. I’ve made you a list in there of what you need to get started. I’ve done this before. Troels never has. Remember that . . .’

  Shaking Harry’s hand and taking his leave, Jørgensen looked him full in the face for what felt like the first time in their acquaintance, watery eyes bright in his round, battered visage, and Harry had the uncomfortable sensation of being momentarily known for what he was.

  On Troels’ railway maps – he had one for each of the different companies they might travel with – the Battlefords did not seem so very far away. The map gave no sense of terrain or true distance, however, truncating a broad slice of the continent to fit in all the stations in a convenient, comprehensible form. The Grand Trunk Pacific was the only service between Moose Jaw and Regina. Then they picked up the Canadian Northern as far as Saskatoon, where there was a long enough delay to leave the train and find a hot meal. Then they headed on via Clark’s Crossing to Warman, where they had to change and wait for another train west to Battleford Junction, where they had yet another change, and a wait, for the short ride into Battleford.