A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  The necessarily slow journey could have taken anything from half an hour to two. Harry had no sense of time passing, slipping in and out of consciousness as he was. More than once his rescuer brought both arms briefly around him to pass the reins from one hand to the other, murmuring that his arm was falling asleep. Riding bareback, they could move at no more than a walk. May’s rather galumphing trot, which reminded Harry of an old insult of Jack’s that a certain horse he had to treat in Chester was like a sofa with hooves, would have toppled them both in no time.

  At some point night fell and Harry woke to find his head flopped backwards on the other man’s shoulder, his view full of stars and the other’s soft beard tickling his ear.

  When he woke next, it was to see lanternlight and hear a woman’s voice. A figure he soon realised was Petra Slaymaker was now leading May by the bridle. ‘I’d quite given you up for lost,’ she was saying to her brother. ‘I’d all but taken down the rifle to protect my honour.’ And she chuckled.

  Shortly after that, they arrived at the Slaymakers’ homestead, where her brother lowered him back over May’s neck. The sister held him in place while the brother dismounted, then the two of them unloaded him and carried him inside and laid him on a bed. He saw plank walls, framed pictures, and was aware of someone sliding off his boots and soaking outer clothes. A quilt was put over him, up to his chin, a real patchwork quilt smelling faintly of lavender and summertime. Petra Slaymaker held a bony hand against his head, then slipped a thermometer under his tongue. While she waited, she held his wrist and took his pulse, gazing intently at her pocket watch the while. She removed the thermometer, read it, then held a glass of water to his lips so he could drink.

  ‘You’ve a high fever, Mr Cane,’ she told him. ‘Paul will drive over at first light to fetch anything precious and your other horse. Sleep now. Rest.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At the time, he could not have said how long the fever held him, but they told him afterwards that he had been in danger and delirious for two days before it began to break. Day, night, heat and cold were all confused to him, and he was racked by dark dreams that blurred with waking fantasies in which he was being hunted by Troels Munck in league with his former brothers-in-law, hunted with dogs and guns across the empty landscape of Cut Knife, which at one time lay deep in moonlit snow, at another roasted in pitiless sun. So it was that his slow emergence from the fever, and growing understanding that he was not being hunted but cared for, was also the dawning of a friendship.

  He had doubtless said much in his delirium, but the first words he consciously spoke from his sickbed were ‘You are very kind.’

  Petra Slaymaker was in the act of washing his face and arms with a flannel she had been dipping in a basin of hot soapy water. The soap smelled of cedar, or some such bracing wood, quite unlike the harsh stuff he had grown used to at the Jørgensens’. She paused in wringing out the flannel. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Welcome back. I’m not kind. Just ferociously practical. Can you hear this?’ She clicked her fingers to one side of his head.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And this?’ She did the same on the other side.

  ‘Yes,’ he told her.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ve known fever like that leave a person deaf on one side. You were so hot that first night, I thought we’d need a priest! How do you feel?’

  ‘Hungry!’

  She laughed. ‘Thirsty, too, I bet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll bring you some broth.’

  ‘I should get up.’

  ‘Why? Do you need the pot? It’s just here.’

  ‘No, but . . . There are things I should be doing.’

  ‘You’ll be doing nothing for a while yet,’ she sighed. ‘You’ll be far too weak.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Paul brought your other horse back here, and he loaded your things into your cart and drove that here with her. So even if they find your tent, nobody’s making off with your treasures. You read?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We can trade books.’

  ‘Good. I’m a little bored of some of mine.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to wash the rest of you, now that you can. And, er . . .’ She glanced down at the chamber pot, over which a spotless piece of white cloth was draped. ‘Just don’t try standing up yet. Or if you must, do it very slowly. You’ll be dizzy. I won’t be far away. This isn’t a mansion.’

  ‘You gave up your room.’

  ‘Not me. I’m across the way. You’re in my brother’s bed. Paul’s been bedding down on the couch.’

  ‘That’s very kind of him.’

  ‘It is. He’s tall as a pine.’

  When a woman was beautiful but did nothing to show her beauty off, or had no time for fashion or an elaborate coiffure, Winnie would call her fine. Petra Slaymaker was fine. She had sky-blue eyes and good bone structure, wore her auburn hair tied back in a simple plait and was evidently an assiduous hat-wearer when the sun shone, for her delicate Scottish skin was almost unfreckled.

  Left alone, Harry realised he was in another man’s striped nightshirt – the brother’s, presumably. He succeeded in swinging his legs out of the bed, but could only stand to use the chamber pot by clutching at the brass bedstead. His urine was alarmingly dark from dehydration. Lowering the pot without spilling the contents almost defeated him, and he had to sit on the bed’s edge to wash his lower half. To climb back under the covers with skin that was no longer fever-sticky was a delicious sensation, and he had barely begun to look at the little room around him with fresh interest than he fell asleep again.

  When he woke next, the brother was sitting beside the bed, eyes bright above his red-brown beard, wood chips in his slightly wild hair. ‘Brought you some broth,’ he said. ‘But I’m under strict instructions not to hand it over until you’re sitting up and in no danger of scalding yourself.’

  A good, savoury smell coiled up in the steam from the mug he was holding.

  ‘Chicken?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Pigeon,’ he said. ‘Sit up.’

  Harry hauled himself upright against the pillows.

  ‘I guess we never met properly,’ the brother said.

  ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . I’m Paul Slaymaker. Petra’s brother.’

  ‘How do you do? Harry Cane.’

  ‘Were you teased about that at school?’

  ‘Of course. I was called Hurry and Windy. I . . . I don’t know how to begin to—’

  ‘Drink your broth. And there’s a piece of bannock, if you’ve the teeth for it. A bit stale, I reckon.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m sure it’s delicious.’

  ‘Ssh. Eat.’

  Harry had assumed Paul Slaymaker would leave him to eat, but the strange young man sat while he drank the broth and ate the rather dried-out piece of bannock, wrinkling his eyes in a smile whenever Harry caught his gaze.

  ‘The children were staring in at your window earlier. You’re an object of veneration,’ he said, as Harry was finishing.

  ‘Your children?’

  ‘No. Little Crees. There’s a camp of non-treaty Cree a couple of miles away. Our little patch of wood has a significance for their women. Men in town wouldn’t like our letting them, but . . . They often make the journey there and bring the younger children with them. Much against my better judgement, Petra is doing her best to teach the mothers to read and write. She’s also studying to speak their language. She says it’s harder than Ancient Greek. Horrifies the women at church, who probably have her down for a rebel and a witch. All done? Good.’ He took the mug and little plate. ‘Sleep now. I’m back to my plough. I’ll be back at sunset and you can tell me all about yourself then. Assuming that what you said in your fever was just crazy dreams talking.’<
br />
  ‘Oh dear. Did I talk much?’

  Paul Slaymaker stood. He was so tall, his hair seemed to brush the ceiling. He grinned down at Harry, teasing him. ‘Oh, not so very much. But you did hold my hand fiercely at one point and kiss it so hard I thought I’d have a bruise.’

  ‘Oh! Oh I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Most flattering attention I’ve had since we left Toronto,’ he said. He had to stoop as he passed through the doorway.

  At some point in the afternoon, Petra slipped in with a cup of tea and a ginger biscuit.

  ‘Mr Cane?’

  ‘Oh please call me Harry,’ he told her.

  She smiled to herself. ‘My father always said to treat patients with extra respect to compensate them for any loss of dignity caused by their afflictions.’

  ‘I believe I left all dignity behind in Halifax,’ he assured her.

  ‘Harry, then. Might I ask you an impertinent question?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She glanced out of the little window, her sharp attention momentarily snared by a bird swooping down from a tree. ‘I was simply wondering how you came to be friends with Mr Munck.’

  ‘Oh but we’re not really friends,’ he told her. ‘We met on the boat and he rather adopted me as a project or an experiment. He found me work on his cousin’s farm near Moose Jaw all last year and he steered me out here because he knew a good quarter-section was mine for the taking if I moved swiftly. He frightens me rather. If I fail here the way poor Varcoe did, I think he’ll swoop down and claim my soul, like Mephistopheles.’

  ‘So it’s you, not he, who’s the homesteader down there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re not . . . close?’

  ‘No.’

  His denial brought a pungent recollection of having his face pushed into a hotel mattress, but it was quite true, he reflected: he had not so much as a forwarding address for the man.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘He said you knew each other back in Toronto.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, her lips tightening in distaste. ‘And I never thought to see him again.’

  ‘And you probably won’t,’ he assured her. ‘He’s constantly on the move. I expect spring has seen him sail back to England to shepherd out another clutch of trusting young puppies.’

  She looked confused.

  ‘Rich young men,’ he explained, ‘looking for adventure.’

  ‘Remittance men?’ she said with distaste.

  ‘Is that what you call them?’

  ‘When they live on money sent from home instead of by the sweat of their brow.’

  ‘Ah.’ She was looking severe, so he added, ‘I have some savings but I don’t live off money from home.’

  She smiled a little at that and asked if it would trouble him if she practised her piano.

  They were Toronto born, to Scottish parents. Their father was a doctor, unworldly and impractical in his tireless devotion to the poor of Cabbagetown and the teeming slums peopled by settlers – many of them driven from the Highlands by landlords or from Ireland by hunger – who had neither the means nor the wits to move on into Canada’s promising interior. The elder, with far more in common with their father than with their snobbish, dissatisfied mother, Petra had trained in all but a certificate as his nurse, but it was to his undisguised disappointment that Paul proved both squeamish and without scientific ability, interested more in Schiller than in test tubes. Their father died unfairly young, of cholera contracted from drinking tea with one grateful slum patient too many. Moving swiftly towards a second marriage to a wealthy Chicago meat merchant and city councillor she had met on a trip south of the border, their mother was keen to be rid of two hulking reminders that she was not quite as young as her hair colour would have her fiancé believe.

  She manoeuvred for them to move to Edinburgh, where she had cousins who would take them in, but they rebelled, waving her off to her new life across the border and setting up house modestly together. Petra took in piano students, while her brother enrolled at the university, studying philosophy with a vague view of then training as a lawyer. But then some crisis had arisen, obliging them to move out to Winter and to make a dramatic new start.

  Neither said as much. The subject was changed and a passage in their history skirted over, and Harry, with shameful secrets enough of his own, had no intention of pressing them for details or explanation.

  It was a fine day, with a real hint of spring warmth to it. Drawn by laughter, after he had dressed, and stripped Paul’s bed to air, Harry emerged on to the little veranda and was startled to find Petra at a table with three young Cree women. The women were working at copying letters with chalk on little home-made blackboards, while a crowd of children of different ages either hung around their necks or played back and forth between the nearby trees. The children hid when Harry appeared and the women looked wary until, in halting words of their own language, Petra reassured them. Then, as if to emphasise what she had said, she pointed at him and said in English, ‘Our friend Harry.’

  ‘Friend,’ the women repeated while Petra wrote the word down for them.

  ‘Our friend. My friend. Your friend.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Inspired by the Slaymakers’ example, Harry drew on his savings to order a house not unlike theirs from the Eaton’s catalogue. It would not come intact, of course, but as a kit of preconstructed wooden panels, windows, doors, floorboards and roof shingles. It still took two men a week or three to hammer the thing together. Paul had hired a couple of railway workers to help build his, but he reassured Harry that it was still far quicker and easier than building a traditional log house, and the walls could be packed with wool for insulation and papered or painted to taste. It was also easily extended should one’s needs expand.

  While waiting for delivery, Harry allowed himself an hour a day to clear a site, choosing the high ground that would have a good view over his land and would not, he judged, be at risk of flooding in the spring thaw. Once he had cut down a few trees, he would be able to see one end of the Slaymaker place from one end of his, which would, he judged, be reassuring without feeling intrusive to either household. Petra joked that they could establish a signalling system with coloured flags.

  Reluctant to continue digging small holes in the ground any longer than he needed to, now that the season of biting flies was upon them, he dug himself a long, deep pit for a privy on the edge of the building plot – far enough away for hygiene but not too distant for battling to in deep snow. With Paul’s help, he built a little pointed-roofed tarpaper shed over it and constructed a seat using the top of a broken-down deal table fallen off the back of some luckless immigrant family’s cart. With a roof light for ventilation and an improvised bookshelf, it felt like a promise of civilisation to come, even though it was some distance from his tent.

  The time passed when he could sensibly plant any further wheat, but as his first tiny crop’s shoots began to be distinguishable among the inevitable weeds sprouting alongside them, he maintained his punishing schedule of clearing, ploughing and fencing off his territory. He was too tired of an evening to do much more than eat and sleep, but the Slaymakers sought him out occasionally for a trip to Winter for provisions, or to catch the train somewhere for a day out, or to join them for supper to stop him going quite crazy. And they all went to the nearest Anglican church on Sunday, even though it was a round trip of nearly two hours by cart. The Slaymakers were no more God-fearing than Harry was; they certainly weren’t pious Lutherans like the Jørgensens, but went, he suspected, for the same reasons he did, for the reassurance and continuity represented by familiar words and well-known hymns, badly sung with no sturdier accompaniment than a wheezy little harmonium. And they went for the chance to meet people.

  The Slaymakers were in ma
ny ways as self-contained and aloof as Harry was shy, and there was a tacit understanding between them never to linger much when the service ended or to commit too often to church socials or picnics at Manitou Lake. But, as Petra said, even in such a small and scattered community, it was better to be known a little than to be thought odd and avoided entirely.

  Another reason they found for seeing him was books. Harry wrote to his bookseller in Piccadilly, where he had never thought to close his account, and ordered Petra a complete set of Dumas in translation and Paul a set of Dickens, to thank them for caring for him in his sickness when he would surely have died without their intervention. Once the books arrived, they lent him volumes as they finished them, and borrowed books of his in turn. The Dumas, especially, were so preposterously removed from the reality of their lives, with their silks and jewels, swordfights and conspiracies, that to read them was to be briefly transported, but they were fustian stuff for the most part, and he sensed from Petra’s response to them that she would rather he had given her something less sedate. She retaliated with historical novels by William Kirby and John Richardson and with adventure fantasies by R. M. Ballantyne and the like, which made their prairie lives, with the Cree marginalised and faintly pathetic, and few encounters with wild animals larger than a coyote, seem tame and unadventurous.

  Since meeting Winnie, Harry had come to realise that he found the company of women easier than that of men. Or perhaps it was since his fateful involvement with Browning. Was it simply that women presented no danger of temptation? Whatever the reason, he found that Petra’s initial guardedness with him rapidly gave way to a frank and easy friendship. She knew his partial history, that he had a wife who had divorced him for another man, and the sorrow of a daughter effectively lost to him, but she was without feminine guile or game-playing and seemed to accept with something approaching relief that he was not about to pay court to her. She felt uncomplicatedly like a sister to him, as George had done before her affection had turned to disgust.