Wildwood

by Elinor Florence

  In 1938 red-backed cutworms attacked the grain, and in 1939 the crop was devastated by tent caterpillars. “Thankfully we have a good house and the ability to grow and hunt our own food, else we would surely fail in our endeavour.”

  Canada entered the Second World War in 1939, and in 1940 she wrote, “the boys have all left and it is impossible to find help.” Thankfully my great-uncle was too old to fight again.

  In 1943, an early frost killed the grain before it was harvested. “We turned the livestock loose into the fields. Better the horses and cattle should paw through the thin snow and eat the oats than let them rot.”

  In 1947 the grain was so heavy that it collapsed. “The wheat is lying on the ground and cannot be picked up by the combine. George is scything the lodged grain by hand. This will produce little yield, but otherwise he will do nought but pace and fret.”

  The difficult years continued. In 1949 they had a good harvest, but the price of oats fell so low that they could barely pay their bills. “We shipped a load of oats by rail and ended by owing for the freight.”

  Three break-even years followed. Then in 1954 there was a catastrophic crop failure in the whole region, caused by some mysterious grain disease called “rust.” Their income that year was zero. Beside the big fat round circle, my great-aunt had written: “Man proposes, and God disposes.”

  I guess Franklin Jones hadn’t been far off the mark when he said farming was unprofitable. This was a long nightmare of financial hardship and struggle, one disaster after another. I remembered how my great-aunt in that first heady year had been so enthusiastic about the future. How they must have broken their hearts over this place.

  But I kept turning the pages, and things slowly began to change. In 1955 the farm showed a reasonable profit. “A new roof for the barn!” The income-to-expense ratio continued to climb. In 1962 they purchased the half-section next to the home place, doubling the size of the farm to 640 acres.

  They acquired a new tractor, then a new combine. There was a bumper crop in 1970 — their income was four times higher than their expenses. They were growing a new type of grain now, something called rapeseed. “Truly this is Canada’s Cinderella crop!”

  The cash was pouring into their savings account, enough to purchase another whole section to the south, doubling the size of Wildwood again to its present 1,280 acres. During the 1970s the assets continued to increase and my great-aunt’s script was bold, almost triumphant.

  But when I got to 1980, her handwriting changed. I knew why it suddenly looked faint and spidery. That was the year George died. Not only had my great-aunt lost her soulmate, she had lost her way of life. Unable to operate the farm herself, she made only three entries on the expense page: for fencing, fuel, and firewood.

  On the income side, my eyes fell upon a familiar name. Mary Margaret had written: “Rented Wildwood in 1980 to Clifford McKay, for a fixed annual sum of $4,800 for both sections based on the number of arable acres. North section: $175/month. South section: $225/month. Renter has option to renew annually. Rental contract on file with Franklin Jones Senior.”

  I read her words over and over while my brain tried to process the information. I understood why there was a different price for the north and south sections. It made sense that the number of cultivated acres was lower on the home section, which contained not only the farmyard but also the creek and the large meadow beside the beaver pond.

  But something else struck me like a fist. The McKays were still paying the same rent today that they paid thirty years ago. I sat motionless, staring at the ledger, unwilling to believe what I was seeing. But the numbers, and it was my business to understand numbers, did not lie.

  Cliff McKay began paying my great-aunt $400 a month when she stopped farming her own land in 1980. For three decades, he had exercised his option to renew the lease for the same amount. And my poor demented great-aunt didn’t have enough sense to ask for more.

  The knowledge flooded through my veins like black ink and my heart began to pound heavily. Five years ago Colin McKay had taken over the lease from his father and continued to pay my great-aunt a paltry $400 a month. It wasn’t illegal, but it was unethical. In effect, he was cheating an old lady, an old friend.

  And now he was cheating me.

  It was only two o’clock, but the pale sun dropped behind the windowsill, and the room suddenly felt chilly. I had thought Colin McKay was a nice guy. To be brutally honest, I had thought he was more than a nice guy. Given my appalling lack of judgment when it came to men, it should have come as no surprise that I had been deceived. Again.

  My first impulse was to drive straight over to his house and confront him. But how could I do that with Bridget clinging to my leg? For the first time I wished that I had a cellphone, or even a computer, so that I could send him a scathing email. The patches of eczema on my elbows had shrunk, but now they started to itch. I pushed back my sleeves and scratched viciously.

  And what was the point of talking to him, other than venting my own rage? It was obviously a binding legal contract, one that had been drawn up by my great-aunt’s own lawyer. Why hadn’t Franklin Jones Junior renegotiated better terms when the contract drawn up by his father was due for renewal? Obviously he wasn’t watching out for her best interests. He was probably too busy chasing after the oil companies to worry about whether an old lady in a nursing home was getting paid enough rent. The money wasn’t coming out of his pocket.

  Unfortunately, I understood enough about contracts to know that nothing could be changed until the lease came due again. And by then, we would be long gone.

  It was still dark in the early morning of January 4, the first day that businesses were open after the holidays, when I walked down our long driveway. The thin snow was frozen solid, but fortunately it wasn’t deep, and the gravel road leading to the south was ploughed. A guy from the reserve named Frank Cardinal had the ploughing contract. He hadn’t worked during the holidays, but now the road was open, ready for the school bus.

  The thermometer read -27° Celsius. If we hadn’t needed supplies so badly, I would have stayed home. But by nine o’clock I had chopped the snow away from the barn door. Who knew that snow could be as hard as concrete, so solid that you could cut it into shapes with the blade of a shovel? I lugged the battery to the barn and put it into my trusty Silver, then painstakingly warmed the engine with the propane torch.

  Happily, it started without any extra trouble. We piled into the cab and headed for town. It was a clear day, but the wind was fierce.

  “The clouds are just flying along, Mama,” Bridget said. “The world must be spinning really fast today.”

  Two hours later we turned onto the main street. Juniper looked like a ghost town, swirling with clouds of vapour. Chimneys spewed elongated banners of white smoke. Drivers had left their parked trucks running, the exhaust billowing from the tailpipes. A couple of swaddled figures hurried from one doorway to the next.

  When we entered the lawyer’s office, I squinted in the unaccustomed glare of electric lights. “Molly! I didn’t think you would make the trip today, it’s so darned cold!”

  Lisette rose to her feet. Today she was wearing crimson leggings, ankle boots, and a tight sweater bearing a red reindeer’s head between her pointed breasts. She placed her book face down on the desk, The Sultan’s Touch. The cover showed a dark-skinned man, his arms folded, towering over a woman who was kneeling at his feet.

  For the first time, I felt irritated with her. Why on earth couldn’t she read something besides cheap romances? I should give her a copy of Women Who Love Too Much.

  After I helped Bridget unzip her snowsuit, she went straight to the corner while I gratefully accepted a fresh cup of strong coffee. “I can’t stay very long. We have to get home before dark.”

  Lisette spoke encouragingly. “Molly, try to hang in there for a few more weeks. This is the worst month because the days are so short, and by February everyone starts to get a little crazy. There’s mor
e drinking, more fighting. And of course every marriage in town gets the seven-year itch.” She dropped her eyes to the floor.

  “You make me glad I’m living out on the farm after all! Why don’t people get out of here, take a holiday to someplace warm?”

  “Oh, they do! Everybody who can scrape together the money goes away. Well, almost everybody. Jerry Gerling went to Hawaii one January, and after he came home he said he would never go on another winter holiday because he might kill himself when he came back. So he took up curling instead, and now he’s quite resigned to winter. He even looks forward to it.”

  “Curling? Oh, you mean that game that looks like shuffleboard on ice.”

  “Yeah, it’s really popular here. And then there are the intellectual types, like Dave Sutherland. He spends all winter reading encyclopedias and last year he made it onto Jeopardy! The whole town watched it in the Excelsior lounge on the big screen TV. Unfortunately, Dave bet everything on Final Jeopardy and lost, but it was very exciting to see someone from Juniper chatting with Alex Trebek. Alex is Canadian, you know.”

  “It certainly helps to have an indoor hobby,” I said, recalling my own reading and sewing and baking. In spite of myself I remembered Colin’s orchids, how beautiful they were. I was trying my best not to think of him, but my mind had a mind of its own.

  “Lisette, haven’t you ever considered moving away from Juniper?”

  “All the time.” Her pretty face looked wistful. “But I’m such a hick, I’m afraid I’d make a fool of myself. A couple of years ago I went to Edmonton and took the city bus to the mall, and I didn’t even know how to make it stop! A little kid told me to pull the cord. I was so embarrassed. And I can’t imagine driving around in the city. I’m used to a town with two stop lights.”

  “Believe me, you would learn.” I thought of all the new skills I had mastered in the past four months, doing things I had never imagined were possible. While I finished my coffee, Lisette kept talking, as if trying to convince herself.

  “I have such a good job here. Besides, it would be hard to make new friends. It must be so strange to meet people who don’t know who your family is. And I wouldn’t know where they came from or anything!”

  “It’s not that difficult. You don’t have to know someone’s family to decide whether you like them. You’re so friendly and outgoing that you wouldn’t have any trouble. If you had a job in the city, you’d meet people through your work.”

  People other than Franklin Jones, that is. I wanted desperately to come right out and tell her to dump the guy and run away. When I thought about him — and all the other men who took advantage of women — my blood started to boil. But she probably wouldn’t listen to me, and I was hardly in a position to give advice about men.

  “What’s your boss up to these days? Working on any big deals?” I heard the sarcastic inflection in my own voice when I said the word boss, but Lisette didn’t seem to notice.

  “Well, I’m not supposed to talk about work, but I guess there’s no harm in telling you. Maybe it will give you new motivation to stay. He’s working on a really important contract right now, one that could transform the whole area. A big company wants to do fracking on a huge piece of property, and it takes in Wildwood. So if you can stick it out, you’re going to be in for a real nice surprise when the oil company makes you an offer.”

  While we purchased our usual bulk supplies at the grocery store, with a couple of treats thrown in because it was Town Day, I wondered why I didn’t feel more excited about the idea of selling out to an oil company. Likely they would pay top dollar. Once I had the cash, I would be on my way back to Arizona, never to return. Recklessly I threw a head of lettuce and two tomatoes into my cart. I was longing for a bowl of salad.

  Besides, it would be the ultimate revenge to sell the farm, to see the look on Colin’s face when he realized he wasn’t going to continue his sweetheart deal with a senile old lady or an ignorant outsider.

  I didn’t feel like quite so much of an outsider now, though. Tina was working the till, and she greeted me as if I were an old friend although I had seen her only three times. She studiously avoided looking at Bridget. “See you next month!” She waved cheerily as we left the store.

  After stowing our groceries in the truck, we hurried down the street to the small brick Juniper Public Library. Virginia the librarian beamed at us. Lisette was right about one thing: it was easy to make friends here. It seemed like the rule of three applied. First meeting, friendly curiosity. Second meeting, smiling recognition. Third meeting, old friends. Since this was our fourth visit, we were practically bosom buddies.

  I smiled back at the librarian. “It’s busy in here today.”

  “It’s winter,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  There were two public terminals. One of them was occupied by a man who looked like a stereotypical lumberjack, down to the plaid overcoat and the sheepskin cap with earflaps sticking straight out like Dumbo the flying elephant.

  “That’s Buddy Nesbitt. He comes in every day to write letters,” she whispered. “He writes to our politicians and harangues them about everything from greenhouse gases to the war in Iraq. But you can use the other public terminal — it’s free right now.”

  I settled Bridget behind a shelf unit in the children’s section and seated myself at the terminal. It took me less than five minutes to find what I was looking for: the annual rate for renting arable land in the Peace River country was $30 an acre.

  That meant my thousand acres of arable land should be earning $3,000 a month rather than a paltry $400.

  I stared at the screen, my breath coming rapidly. My cheeks were burning as if they had been slapped. Secretly I had been hoping that there was some mistake, that farmland didn’t draw that much rent. After all, I didn’t know the first thing about farming in Canada, or any other country for that matter.

  But now there wasn’t any doubt. Because of that antiquated agreement, we were shopping at the thrift store and eating macaroni.

  Three thousand dollars a month! If we had that kind of money, we could drive to town every week, eat in restaurants, wash our clothes at the laundromat. I could buy my own damned snowplough!

  I just couldn’t get my head around it. Even if Colin McKay didn’t care about me, how could he make my child suffer? He was practically stealing the bread out of her mouth! So much for the Canadian reputation for niceness. The man was unethical and immoral. Possibly even criminal. I gave an audible moan.

  I was thinking about Colin so intently that I started violently when he appeared right beside me. Quickly I reached for the keyboard and clicked off the rental website. He was leaning over my shoulder, wearing the green parka that made his shoulders look so big.

  He was smiling. How dare he smile at me? “I saw your truck outside and I thought I might find you in here.” His face was so close to mine that I could see golden stubble on his jaw. “Catching up on world events?”

  I turned and stared at the black screen, refusing to meet his green eyes. “Actually, I’m doing a little research on the current rental rates for farmland.” I spoke between clenched jaws. “I was thinking that maybe I’m not being paid enough.”

  Colin straightened and the smile left his face. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think I’m getting enough rent for my farmland. You should know that better than anyone.”

  There was a short silence. The colour rose into his throat under the collar of his jacket, and I realized that he was very angry. “I see you’re living up to your reputation. You Americans — always chasing the almighty dollar. Maybe you should think about what’s going to happen to Wildwood after you leave instead of bleeding it dry.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?” My tongue was thick, and through my anger I felt something cold creep into my bones, something like sorrow.

  “Well, aren’t you? Isn’t your plan to sell out to the highest bidder, no matter what happens to your great-aunt’s f
arm, the one she loved so much? She poured her blood, sweat, and tears into that place! She didn’t have it easy like you, with your fancy accent and your … your … your fancy boots!”

  His words were so close to the mark that I hesitated for a moment. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that I might want to do something else with the farm rather than sell it to the highest bidder.

  But then, it hadn’t crossed my mind, either.

  “You have no idea what I’m planning to do!” I sputtered, furious that he was trying — and succeeding — to put me on the defensive when he was the one at fault.

  “No, I don’t. Clearly I don’t know you at all.”

  That was the end of the conversation. I hated to let him have the last word, but I was speechless. I snapped off the computer and jumped to my feet.

  “Bridget, let’s go!”

  I went around the corner and grabbed her by the hand, then stomped out of the library without a backward look. Virginia was staring at us, and even Buddy ceased his furious typing and glanced up from his keyboard. I didn’t care if we had made a scene. I would probably never see any of these people again.

  My heart felt as if it would burst with sorrow.

  January 4, 1925

  We are surrounded by a dumb frozen hostility, waiting to pounce. Each night I am wakened by the nasty whining of the wind around the eaves. When the wind dies, we hear the trees cracking like a volley of gunshots as the frost bites deeply into their sap-filled veins. In the words of Rudyard Kipling: “We hear the cry of a single tree that breaks her heart in the cold.”

  Just when we think we’ve seen the worst, winter deepens our misery, plummeting the mercury to minus forty, fifty, even sixty. The wind lances down from the Arctic like a meat cleaver. Step outside and two icy fingers pinch your nose shut. Tears burst from your eyes and instantly freeze your eyelashes together. To avoid “frosting your lungs,” you must take a shallow, cautious breath and warm the air in your mouth before inhaling. Not an inch of skin can be exposed without instant frostbite.