They introduced themselves. Their names were Roy and Joy Henderson. They had heard about me, and now that harvest was over they were coming to visit. Joy handed me a dozen fresh muffins in a brown paper bag, and a jar of homemade strawberry jam.
“Thank you so much!” I was touched by their thoughtfulness. “Won’t you please come in?”
They beamed at me with matching smiles, followed me into the kitchen and seated themselves at the table.
“We heard you had a little girl,” Joy said. Bridget had taken herself into the dining room when she heard voices. The door wasn’t quite closed, and I could see one foot sticking out from under the bed.
“Yes, but I’m afraid she won’t come out. She’s very shy.”
Since these were my first adult visitors, I opened the double-sided china cabinet and took out the good tea set. It was a pretty cream-coloured porcelain decorated with green shamrocks. The maker’s mark was Belleek, all the way from Ireland.
“I understand you’ve been taking care of the place,” I said as I spread a fresh tablecloth over the table, white with a posy of pink embroidered roses at each corner.
“Oh, we didn’t do much,” Roy said. “We came around every month to make sure the place was sealed up. I’m real sorry about that hole in the roof. I would have found it as soon as the harvest was finished.”
“It’s so isolated here. Was my great-aunt worried that people would steal things?”
“No, not really. A few years ago, I found the padlock broken, but nothing inside was missing. I went over and spoke to the chief, asked him to keep an eye out for any strangers prowling around, and he promised he would. Mrs. Lee was a real good friend to the local band. A course, they helped out the Lees when they first moved here. Half the settlers in the area wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t been for the Cree, bringing them food and teaching them how to hunt.”
“Didn’t my great-aunt and uncle miss having the modern conveniences?” I added two teabags and poured boiling water into the teapot.
Roy answered again. “George wanted to put in the power, but when rural electrification finally got up here around 1960, the main line was too far away. Mary Margaret said she didn’t care — she was used to fires and lamps by then — so they got along in the old way. Eventually the power line came up as far as the reserve, but by then George was gone. He went out on a hunting trip and caught his death of cold. It turned into pneumonia and he died, just like that. His lungs were never very strong.”
My heart swelled with pity for my great-aunt. I knew only too well what that pain felt like, the weeping wound that never healed.
Joy spoke then. “She stayed out here alone for a couple of years after he died, then she decided it was too hard to get along in the winter, so she rented a little house in town and spent her summers out here. She used to drive back and forth to town in her old truck. She rented her land to the McKays and they’re still farming it. A course, you know that.”
I carefully poured three cups of tea, and sat down at the table. “Who decided that she should move into a nursing home?”
“She did,” Roy answered. “She started to get more forgetful. She knew it was happening, and she was real worried about it. One day, it was back in 1990, she come over to our place and said she couldn’t trust herself any longer. She forgot to blow out the lamp before she fell asleep, and she almost burned down the house. She didn’t care about herself, a course, just the house. She asked us to watch over it, because she didn’t want it going to wrack and ruin. She just walked away and left everything here. A few weeks later she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and she went downhill pretty fast after that.”
I had been twelve years old then, the year my parents died. Since my great-aunt had named me her in her will, obviously she must have known of my existence, although I had no memory of her. But then, I remembered so little of my childhood.
Roy continued. “We used to visit her every Sunday and bring her favourite cake, angel food. She always thanked us for the cake, even if she didn’t remember who we were. She was a happy person, right to the end, never complained, although Lord knows she had plenty to complain about.”
Joy picked up her teacup and admired it. “We’ve drank a lot of tea out of these very cups. Your great-auntie got them as a wedding present from her grandmother back in Ireland.” She gazed around the kitchen with a broad smile on her broad face. “It’s nice to see the place cleaned up and lived in again. This kitchen was her favourite room. I can almost see her sitting in the rocking chair. She had such a strong character that it’s hard to believe she doesn’t exist anymore in the world.”
Roy took a noisy slurp of tea. “We know about your great-aunt’s will, a course. It’s the talk of the town. The Bannisters used to deal with old Franklin Jones Senior; he was the very first lawyer in Juniper. Franklin Junior took over the practice when his father died. He’s a big noise around here. A course, he’s just in bed with oil and gas.”
I realized that he was referring to the ubiquitous oil and gas industry.
“The oil companies want to put down pipelines all over our good farmland. The farmers don’t own the mineral rights, but plenty of them are happy to rent their land so the oil companies can drill wells and build access roads. Those durned wells are a nuisance if you’re trying to drag your machinery around them, but they do bring in revenue. And plenty of farmers are happy to sell up altogether. One Way Energy has been after us to sell, but I reckon our feet are nailed to the back forty.”
“You don’t want to live somewhere warmer?”
They shook their heads in unison. “There’s no better place in the world, not that we’ve seen anyhow. We usually go someplace warm for a few weeks after Christmas. How do you think you’ll make out this winter?” Both looked at me with the same doubtful expression.
“I think we’ll manage,” I said, hearing the hesitation in my own voice. “That is, as long as the road stays open.”
Roy answered. “The road is ploughed out regular, because the school bus has to get out to the reserve, but the problem is this long driveway. In the old days, farmers built their houses right up against the road so they wouldn’t have this problem.”
Joy chimed in. “Your great-aunt wanted to see her own fields and her own creek, so a course George went ahead and did whatever she wanted.”
I couldn’t blame my great-aunt for wanting the view, but ever since that terrifying day when Bridget had followed Fizzy into the forest and given me the fright of my life, I desperately wished the house were closer to the main road.
“Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got global warming,” Roy said. “I’m telling you, the weather is a lot milder than it used to be. The last few winters it didn’t even get below minus forty. That’s both Celsius and Imperial, you know. Minus forty is the same on both scales.”
I tried not to let my dismay show on my face. Minus forty. Dear Lord. Nobody in Arizona wanted global warming, but I could see why it would be welcome up here in the north.
“That’s not including wind chill, a course.”
“Wind chill? What’s that?”
“When the wind is blowing, it sucks the heat right out of your body, makes you feel even colder. It doesn’t affect things, only people. If the temperature is minus forty, and you’ve got a light wind, say twenty kilometres an hour, that means the wind chill makes it feel like minus fifty-five on the human body. At one time Juniper had the record coldest temperature in Canada, minus sixty-two. Then some durned place in the Yukon beat us.”
He shook his head regretfully, as if he had suffered a personal loss, and drained his teacup. “Well, Missus, we should hit the road.”
Joy spoke then. “Oh, we almost forgot. Mrs. McKay wants you and your little girl to come over for Thanksgiving dinner. She knows you don’t have a phone so she asked us to invite you.”
“Thank you, that would be very nice.” I hadn’t even thought that far ahead.
“Two weeks from toda
y. Come early, because she wants to eat at four.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“Canadian Thanksgiving is the second weekend in October,” Roy explained. “It’s because our growing season is shorter. Harvest is usually finished by the end of September. But a course we have just as much to be thankful for as the Americans, if not more.”
Bridget would never agree to eat dinner at a stranger’s home. As I walked out to the truck with my visitors and said goodbye, I wondered how to get out of this invitation.
While I washed the Belleek teacups, I thought about the kindness of the Hendersons, visiting my great-aunt all those years, watching over this house. I wished I had been raised by people like them instead of my own foster parents.
When I finished high school, the Sampsons attended my graduation ceremony and applauded politely when I received an award for the highest mark in mathematics. Then they sold their house and retired to Palm Springs. At the age of eighteen, I was on my own.
With a full scholarship, I moved into the student residence at the University of Arizona in Tucson and began to study accounting. Throughout those lonely years, numbers were my salvation. I loved the way numbers couldn’t get away from me. They were independent of weather or world events or my own loneliness.
I wasn’t any more popular at college than I had been at high school. One girl shared my passion for math and we studied together, but the friendship never went any further.
Shockingly, I did lose my virginity at the age of nineteen. This unlikely turn of events began when I developed a burning crush on one of my instructors, a handsome middle-aged man with a leonine mane of silver hair.
Suddenly I paused in the act of drying a saucer. That’s who Franklin Jones reminded me of. Maybe that’s why I felt such an instinctive dislike for him. Like the lawyer, my professor was both arrogant and eloquent. I sat in the front row in his classroom and gazed at him with eyes like those of the doe outside.
One day he asked me to stay after class and then suggested coffee. After an hour of my fawning and flirting over a Starbucks latte, he invited me back to his apartment and seduced me. I was so anxious to please him that I kneaded his back with my hands and moaned with pleasure. Actually it was pain, but I tried to assume an expression of ecstasy. When it was over, he gazed at me suspiciously and then gave me a ride home.
The semester was soon over and I never saw him again. The pain of his rejection ate away at the edges of my emotional crater, which grew wider and deeper yet.
I hung up the damp tea towel and shook my head vigorously, in an effort to displace the memory. Why was it so easy to remember the bad things, and so difficult to remember the good ones?
I walked into the dining room. Bridget had emerged from under the bed, and she was colouring at the handsome oak table with the barley twist legs. With so much natural light from the bay window, it was perfect for reading or writing or sewing. Mary Margaret had probably cut out her patterns here.
I pulled out the chairs and admired each seat cover again. There was the tiger lily, the wild rose, the wood violet, the bouquet of ferns. Bridget was perched on a cluster of bluebells. They were so beautifully stitched that it was almost a shame to sit on them.
The treadle machine in the corner was covered with a fringed silk shawl. Likely it had been sitting in the same spot since 1924. I folded the shawl and hung it over a chair, then sat down at the machine. I had learned to use an electric machine in high school, but I had no idea how this one worked.
I opened the trap door in the top of the cabinet, pulled the machine into a standing position, and locked it in place. After rummaging through the drawers, I found a little green instruction manual with a big red S for Singer on the cover and studied the black-and-white drawings. There was a tiny oil can in the centre drawer, still half-full of oil. Following the diagram, I squirted oil on each moving part.
It took me a while to thread the machine, but I read the instructions aloud while I fumbled the thread through all the openings. Then I pressed my foot onto the broad wrought-iron pedal underneath. Nothing happened. Was it stuck? I got down on my knees and tried wiggling the pedal back and forth with my hands, but it refused to budge.
After ten minutes of increasing frustration, I sat down on the chair and tried again. I just happened to have my right hand on the wheel, pulling it toward me, when suddenly the machine started racing along like a hot rod, the needle flying up and down.
So that was the secret! I had to move the wheel with one hand and press the foot pedal at the same time. It took some practice, like driving a car with a manual gearshift.
Then I found the rhythm. Right hand on the wheel, the ball of my right foot on the top right corner of the pedal, and my left heel on the lower left corner. The needle rose and fell smoothly, and the machine made a satisfactory whirring sound.
I was ready to try sewing on a scrap of cotton. At first the bottom thread was too tight and it bunched up in a hopeless knot. Then I loosened the tension too much, and the upper thread lay along the fabric in a row of loops.
I resisted the urge to swear, at least aloud, since Bridget was in the room. Finally, I managed to adjust the tension so that the upper and lower threads pulled together evenly. I held my fabric up to the light and admired the flawless stitches.
But how should I use my new skill? I fetched a frayed dishtowel from the kitchen, folded over the edges and stitched all the way around. I tried to finish off the seam by backstitching, but there was no reverse mechanism. Instead, I had to pedal my feet backwards, so that the needle moved in the opposite direction.
“Bridget, let’s go up to the attic! I want to see if I can find any sewing things.”
Together we climbed the narrow staircase to the third storey. Bridget let out a shriek when she caught sight of the dressmaker’s dummy in one corner, looking like the headless horseman. She clung to my hand fearfully as I explained what it was used for.
I opened the steamer trunk sitting beside it, still covered in travel stickers from Ireland. Inside, neatly folded, was a buffalo robe. It was in such perfect condition that it looked as if it had covered the living animal a few short days ago. Under the robe was a cream-coloured woollen blanket with four broad stripes across one end, in green, red, yellow, and dark blue. A tiny red and white label in one corner bore a fabric crest marked “Hudson’s Bay Company.”
Next I pulled open the flaps on a dozen cardboard boxes and found them filled with magazines: yellow-covered National Geographics; Saturday Evening Posts with Norman Rockwell illustrations on the covers; Life magazines. My gosh, here was one dated 1963, the week after John F. Kennedy was shot.
There were unfamiliar Canadian magazines called Maclean’s and Chatelaine. My great-aunt and uncle had even saved newspapers: bundles of yellowing farm newspapers called the Family Herald, the Western Producer, and the local Peace River Times, all addressed to Mr. and Mrs. George Lee.
There were several boxes of old Reader’s Digests. I picked up one magazine dated 1938. The headline on the cover read: “What in the World Shall We Do About Hitler?”
Another howl from Bridget: “Mama, a spider!”
“Spiders are harmless, Bridget. Look at her; she’s spinning a web in the corner. That’s so she can catch the other insects that might bother us — flies and mosquitoes.”
Bridget edged closer to watch the spider at work. “Mama, if she spun a web around the whole world, would it be called a worldwide web?” Now wherever had she heard that term?
After some more searching, I found the sewing trunk. “I knew she would have one!” I exclaimed. Like seamstresses everywhere, Mary Margaret had saved a trunk full of remnants, from small scraps to pieces of fabric several yards long. Most of them were serviceable cotton, but there were also scraps of satin and velvet and embroidered lace.
We went back downstairs with an armload of fabric pieces. I decided to start by sewing a crazy quilt so my seams wouldn’t have to be straight. Bridget helped me by
laying out the scraps on the dining room table, moving them around to find the most pleasing arrangement. She talked to herself in a low voice: “Green go over here. No, pink go here, and green go here. Yellow, wait your turn.”
Listening to Bridget’s murmurs along with the rhythmic whirring of the treadle machine was wonderfully relaxing. My mind emptied of all care and I felt the same peace as I did when rocking my baby to sleep.
“Mama?”
“Yes, Mavourneen?” I was shaken out of my trance. I had used my own childhood nickname, forgotten for all these years. My father had called me Molly Mavourneen, which meant “Molly, my darling” in Irish Gaelic.
The pain that clutched my heart was a beautiful thing because it meant I had recovered another memory that I thought was forever gone.
September 24, 1924
We have few visitors here, but this is no hardship when we have each other. I hope to become friends with Julia McKay, our nearest neighbour, although she lives fully eight miles away. When we first met, she greeted me with tears of joy at the sight of another woman. This gave me a better idea of our isolation than any of George’s dire warnings.
There is an interesting assortment of settlers in “The Peace.” I suppose it is only natural that homesteading attracts those who follow what Robert Service calls “the lure of little voices, the mandate of the wild.” They come from every country in Europe. We even had a Polish count drop in one day. He was a very nice fellow and said: “At home I am a count, but here I’m a no-account!”
One industrious young Irishman has cleared eighty acres on his own. It is refreshing to live in a place where my fellow countrymen are admired for their work ethic. Indeed, it is the English who are not always well liked. They fall into two broad categories: the uneducated poor who are good workers; and the educated wasters. The latter are astonished when people do not bow and scrape as they are accustomed! They dislike taking advice from anyone and must learn the hard way. One can’t help feeling sorry for their wives and their animals, especially the animals.
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