A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  Paul he found far harder to read. He was quite without that tiresome aggression or competitiveness that even casual male acquaintances seemed to feel bound to display and, compared to his more forceful sister, could keep his counsel to the point of seeming withdrawn. And yet he had a way of smiling that Harry felt sure might be satirical. He believed Paul thought him a citified fool. The more he thought this, the more foolishly he feared he talked in his presence.

  Word reached him that his house, or the makings of it, had finally been deposited at Winter station. With even the larger of his two carts, it would take several journeys to gather every stack and bundle of the kit to the site. Several of the panels were heavy as well as cumbersome. He had to clear a way so that he could bring cart to plot without panels and posts snagging on branches, and then it took him a while to unload.

  It looked very little like a house and every bit like a lumber yard where an explosive had been detonated. His initial resolve to be methodical and stack like with like had crumbled as the day wore on and he ran out of space to unload tidily. He was looking about him in the fading light, knowing he should stop and light the stove to heat up some unappetising stew, when he heard laughter and turned to see the Slaymakers hurrying up from the track where they had just left their cart. They had been to the Battlefords on the train for the day, they told him, and called in to take him with them, but he must have been out fetching one of his loads. Petra insisted on giving him some cheese and a loaf of proper yeast bread – one of the great treats of such a trip – and began to rebuke him for thinking to take on such a big task unassisted, but Paul stopped her.

  ‘Perhaps he’d rather do it on his own,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’s quite capable.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Harry told him cheerfully but said he didn’t like to make any further calls on their good will.

  ‘Oh stuff,’ Petra said. ‘You’ll pay us back in kind some day, you’ll see.’

  He admitted he had tried without success to find hired hands to help him and said the least he could do was pay Paul for his time, as he would have paid them, but he was overruled in that, too.

  ‘You’ll help me enough when our harvests are ready,’ Paul assured him. ‘And I promise not to pay you a bean!’ Before they carried on for home, he showed Harry the pouch of precious instructions and plans tacked to the back of the door. ‘Campfire reading for you,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, keep it in your privy, or somewhere dry where the mice won’t gnaw away something crucial . . . I lost a page of ours and had to improvise.’

  He arrived first thing the next morning with a gunny sack of tools, a ladder and a packed lunch, as he did every day, Sundays included, until the walls were up, the windows in and the doors hung. He helped Harry unroll and nail roofing felt in place but left him the tasks he could complete thereafter on his own: hammering down floorboards and fixing shingles and gutters.

  Their conversation, such as it was, was almost entirely about the matter in hand – the bedding-in and assembling of the house’s wooden frame, the raising and joining of its outer walls and inner tongue-and-groove partitions – yet Harry felt Paul’s character steadily opening out to him and grew to appreciate his gruff commentary on what they were doing, his dry humour at Harry’s expense, the way the softness of his gaze or kindness of his smile could make his pioneer’s beard seem a mask or piece of disguise.

  A more experienced man might have armed himself against such a thing, but Harry was not experienced. So he was charmed, drawn in, and before he realised quite what was happening, he found he was looking forward to Paul’s company in a way Paul surely didn’t intend, and finding small ways to delay his departure each day.

  One morning dawned unexpectedly cold, and Paul arrived in a thick flannel overshirt, which he tossed aside as working warmed him up. Gathering up his things at the end of the day, Harry found the shirt and took it back to his tent with the tools, thinking to keep it from the dew. Lying on his camp bed after the evening’s unvarying supper, however, to read by lamplight for a little, he became aware of the faint scent coming off it, Paul’s scent of nutmeg and woodsmoke, and without thinking, he drew it to him as he never could the wearer, and pressed his face deep into its age-softened fabric.

  It was a ridiculous thing: a schoolboy crush, grotesque in a grown man, which threatened to endanger a pair of friendships he was coming to hold dear. Waking to find the shirt draped across his pillow, he dressed quickly, washed and shaved in bitterly cold water as though it might instil upright sense into a softened nature, and took the shirt back to the emerging house while the kettle heated for his breakfast. He spent the day trying and failing to find his neighbour less appealing, looking in vain for whatever small, unflattering detail he might use to effect a cure.

  Like the other women homesteaders, of whom there were still remarkably few, Petra’s days were as full as any farmer’s, and she had been obliged to master chores that in Toronto would have fallen to servants. So, like any farmer’s wife, she maintained a clutch of chickens, milked a cow and had a pig to fatten, but she also had to clean the house, wash clothes and cook. She claimed to hate cooking with a passion, an attitude not helped by her having a natural talent for it. Since the nearest doctors were in Unity and Lashburn, her skills as a nurse, for which she would be paid as often as not in bags of flour or sugar, were often called for. All of which left little time for her particular inflammatory interest in bringing basic literacy to a handful of Cree women, and learning in turn from them both their language and the uses of local trees and herbs. Paul always said it was she, not he, who should have been enrolled at the university.

  Still, she found occasion to drop in now and then on the building project, to see how the house was progressing and to hand over some reluctantly produced delight such as jam tarts or the bacon and egg pies that Paul teased would make them rich if only she would be serious and bake batches of thirty. That day she came in the afternoon bringing Harry a bottle of the pungent but effective fly oil the Cree women made, and a brace of muffins made from chokecherry, a fruit those same women had taught her to gather and preserve. There were several local berries, all of them prized, and he had yet to learn to tell them apart. She balanced on two floor trusses to admire the view Harry would eventually enjoy from the veranda, said she hoped Paul wasn’t taking all the most satisfying jobs for himself, and pointed out that they would have to invite everyone from church to a housewarming picnic once the house was done.

  ‘Really?’ Harry asked, alarmed.

  ‘People expect it,’ she said. ‘Normal people, that is. We’ve been to several since we arrived. You need never have them round again, but it satisfies everyone’s curiosity and reassures them that you’re no fancier or better off than they are, which people like. A good trick is to do it before you’ve moved in much furniture; if they can’t sit, they won’t linger so. You boys haven’t forgotten we have to go to the bachelors’ ball at the Haysoms’ place tonight?’

  Paul groaned.

  ‘It’s what the muffins are for really. You didn’t tell him,’ she said, realising.

  ‘Forgot,’ Paul mumbled.

  She flicked a stray nail her brother’s way. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she told Harry.

  ‘Yes he does,’ Paul growled. ‘I’m not going alone.’

  ‘You won’t be alone. You’ll be with me, and I certainly can’t go alone.’

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ Harry said. ‘You both make it sound so appealing.’

  ‘It won’t be that bad, but you’re both to dance with me at least once. Who knows? I might even land myself a rich husband and not just bruised toes.’

  Paul laughed slowly and sarcastically, which earned him another nail.

  ‘I’ll be off,’ she said. ‘Let you gentlemen resume your hammering.’

  Bachelors’ balls, heartily supported by the churches, were designed to lure
women into newly settled areas. Harry had heard the Jørgensen daughters talk of them with longing disguised as scorn, Moose Jaw being too established a place to need such crude affairs. Winter and the next stops along the alphabetical line, Yonker and Vera, were typical in having women still outnumbered by some twenty to one. And, of course, most of those women were only there because they were already somebody’s wife. Such dances would normally be held in a church hall or large schoolroom, but Yonker, the nearest town to the Haysoms’ place, was too new and underpopulated yet to possess either, so the Haysoms had mounted a broad awning on posts – a kind of marquee – on the side of their barn. Because the tracks were so dusty at that time of year, Petra had done as the other women did and travelled with her party dress in a bag so she could change on arrival. The band consisted of a fiddler, a banjo player and a man on a piano that sounded as though it had been jolted many miles on a cart to get there. Rather than have people raise a dust storm by dancing on earth that was powder dry, Haysom had gone to the trouble of constructing a dance floor. The planks nailed across a square framework produced a slightly bouncy and extremely noisy effect.

  Dancing was already under way as they arrived, and Harry was startled to see, by the light of lanterns slung on poles around the dance floor’s edge, men dancing with other men, not cheek to cheek admittedly, but holding hands.

  While Petra hurried grim-faced to the farmhouse to change into something more feminine than her overalls, Paul turned to Harry and said, ‘Will you do me the honour?’

  It took Harry a moment to understand him, and then, assuming he was joking, he just laughed and fetched them all drinks because the dusty journey had left him parched. When he returned from the bar, which had been set up at one side of the barn, he saw brother and sister dancing a waltz. They had no sooner finished than Petra was claimed for a polka by a short man who whirled her off as a boy might a beribboned tombola prize.

  Paul found Harry and drank Petra’s drink as well as his own. ‘Thirsty,’ he explained. ‘You’ll have to rescue her or she’ll be worn out.’

  The only woman not dancing was a white-haired matriarch, who had made someone bring her out a chair so she could preside without participating. There were even children dancing, pigtails flying as they concentrated on the serious matter of not being crushed by partners large as bears. And still, throughout the little gathering, men were dancing with men.

  Paul saw him watching.

  ‘Strange sight,’ Harry said, feeling he must say something, and worrying lest his stifled excitement was coming out as a deep blush.

  ‘Well, it’s just numbers, if you think about it. If we all had to wait for a woman to partner us, there’d be a big crowd watching and very few dancers, and the poor women would be worn to a ravelling and would have to stay until dawn to work their way through everyone.’

  The polka finished and a Dashing White Sergeant was announced – a sensible choice, since it paired each woman with two men. Petra hurried to their side, face flushed and eyes bright.

  ‘Rescue me,’ she hissed

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Harry said. ‘Some fresh air? A jelly?’

  ‘I want to dance,’ she said. ‘With a couple of humans,’ and she took their hands and led them both out so they could join a set.

  As they progressed around the crowded little dance floor, they met and danced with several all-male trios, each of whom gave a little cheer when they encountered Petra, as though celebrating her femininity, and Harry wondered how it must make her feel.

  When the dance finished and they had all clapped one another, Paul was claimed by a stately young woman from church and Harry insisted Petra take a break for a drink. They stood to one side, watching Paul become hopelessly muddled in a reel.

  ‘It is hard,’ she admitted, ‘with so many male couples. Dresses give one a sort of signpost as to which shoulder to turn.’ In some remote communities, she had heard, where there were no women settlers at all yet, but where people could not forgo the pleasures of a dance, men who elected to dance as women would wear an apron or a knotted kerchief to facilitate tidy choreography.

  As they watched, first one man, then another, both quite handsome, approached Petra to book her for the two next dances. She grinned at Harry. ‘I should have brought something to use as a dance card,’ she said.

  ‘And there was I thinking you regarded this as a grim duty to be got through.’

  ‘Oh but I love dancing.’

  ‘I thought you scorned romance and the marriage market.’

  ‘This is quite unromantic,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s good exercise and a great deal more amusing than baking muffins on a hot day. But yes, I suppose it’s pleasant to be needed.’

  Her next partner was loitering, evidently anxious that Harry might be about to claim her. Harry took a turnaround in the dusk. For all the rusticity of the music and the even greater rusticity of the dancers’ feet thumping in the improvised ballroom, there was a kind of charm to the scene, with the lanterns and brightly coloured bunting rocking in the warm air sent up by the merrymakers. The big horizon, which could seem oppressive by day, took on a charm by night, and he had yet to cease marvelling at the wonder of prairie starlight, undiluted by the man-made glare of town.

  For a while he shamelessly held himself outside, enjoying the scents and darkness, but then he startled an old man making his way back from relieving himself behind a hedge and returned to the party. Suddenly unable to find a familiar face, he was assailed by shyness. Had he not been there with others, he would have left. Yet more revellers had arrived – he had heard their horses on the track minutes earlier – and he would not be missed. But then he spotted Petra, dancing with the second of her suitors, and soon saw Paul, watching him in turn from across the space. Paul stepped back into the crowd then shortly appeared at his elbow, gently nudging Harry to let him know he was there.

  ‘She’s enjoying herself,’ Harry said.

  Paul watched too for a while. ‘Oh, she’s hating every minute,’ he said. ‘A martyr to social duty and the tyranny of men, can’t you tell?’ He sipped his drink. ‘I’m so deeply in her debt that sometimes I . . .’ He let his sentence drift. Such a low thing could not be heard above the din of dancing, but Harry could see from the slow rise and fall of his shoulders that he had let out one of his ursine sighs.

  ‘You’re in her debt?’ he asked.

  ‘She gave up everything to come with me,’ Paul explained. ‘I wouldn’t have coped well without her. Well. I’d have managed . . .’

  ‘But without thriving.’

  Paul smiled and nodded. The dance ended. Harry was just raising a hand to catch Petra’s attention when the first of her two recent partners claimed her for a second dance. Seeing her glance around for him, Harry bent his knees slightly so as to be hidden from view behind her brother’s bulk.

  ‘Ever the gentleman,’ Paul said.

  Harry laughed. ‘Hardly. My father dealt in horseshit.’

  The next dance started up. A slow waltz.

  ‘Come, sir,’ Paul said, attempting an English accent. ‘I will be denied no longer.’ And before Harry could resist, he seized his hands and tugged him on to the dance floor. There were so many couples, most of them male and rather drunk, many of them taller, that Harry knew he wasn’t conspicuous, but he felt as if there was a spotlight on them. ‘I hope you can dance backwards,’ Paul said. ‘Because I have to lead.’

  ‘Oh. I was often the girl at school,’ Harry blurted.

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘I mean . . .’ But he couldn’t explain that he meant in long-ago dance classes at his first boarding school, and besides, Paul wasn’t interested. Harry stifled the urge to chat or laugh, in his nerves, and let Paul steer him in slow circles around the floor. He breathed in the scent of him, which brought back the night of his rescue in the rain. At times,
there were so many people, so close about them, that Paul’s big chest bumped into his or their thighs brushed. The music was hardly audible above the shuffling of boots, but was being supplemented by several people singing along to it as they circled. Petra was nowhere to be seen.

  Cheeks burning, Harry fought the reflex to look into Paul’s eyes and instead kept his gaze lowered as though monitoring the distance between them. When the dance finished, he made to step away, but Paul said, ‘Not so fast, coward,’ held his hand tight in his and, by wordless agreement, claimed another male partner on his other side for the Britannia Two-Step, another dance for circulating threesomes. Throughout the dance floor, women were taking the place usually danced by a man, with a man to either side of them. When they shortly passed by Petra, who now had two new partners to hand, brother and sister laughed as though showing off booty.

  The dancing broke up for a pot-luck supper, after which Harry was careful to withdraw lest his inappropriate happiness be noticed by others. He took himself off to the Slaymakers’ cart, and sat there enjoying the sound of horses snorting to one another in the semi-darkness and feeling his soaring spirits sink back into something like realism. Paul was already dancing with one of the younger women, a bright-smiled, confident thing with flaxen hair wound round her head like a victor’s wreath. Harry could not imagine such a man would be single for long, especially one whose homestead was established and who came ready domesticated by a pleasant, intelligent sister.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The next day was the last where he needed Paul’s help on the house, and his neighbour seemed uncharacteristically quiet, sullen even, as they worked. Perhaps some girl at the dance had disappointed him, perhaps he was simply feeling the effects of too much beer, but it was the first time Harry had found his company oppressive. Here, at last, was the flaw he had sought in his attempts to cure himself, and it was with a guiltily light heart that he shook Paul’s hand and thanked him as he saw him off at the afternoon’s end. He made sure he repeated his insistence that Paul call on him for help in the coming harvest. Paul’s response was something like a shrug, as though to imply he’d be of more help to Harry than the other way around.