Wildwood

by Elinor Florence

  Colin broke into a run, too. We were running through the field toward each other like two people in a romantic movie, except this movie wouldn’t have a happy ending. We reached each other and stopped abruptly, inches apart.

  “Molly, what’s the matter?” He looked over my shoulder toward the house. “Is it Bridget?”

  I shook my head. I was crying too hard to speak. I took one involuntary step toward him just as he stepped toward me, and then his arms came around me and I was howling into his big, sweaty shoulder.

  He soothed me as if I were an animal, stroking my hair and making shushing sounds. It was so comforting that part of me wanted to keep crying. I knew as soon as I told him the truth, he would shove me away like a diseased thing. But I drew back, determined to look straight into his green eyes while I made my confession.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought you were cheating me, and I just found out the truth. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am!”

  It took me a few tries to explain, between my sobs and confused questions from Colin, but finally I saw the light of understanding dawn on his face. He stared at me blankly for a few seconds, and then his face darkened with rage and he stepped back, his fists clenched. I braced myself.

  “That fucking bastard! He left you and that little girl out here all winter with no money! I’m going to kill him!”

  He looked around wildly as if searching for the nearest weapon, but I put a restraining hand on his arm. “There’s a warrant out for his arrest. He might even be in custody by now.”

  Colin turned back to me. “So all the time you were almost starving out here, and I thought it was your own fault. I was so angry with you for putting your kid through this. At first I thought you were just greedy, and finally I decided you must be crazy!”

  His face softened. He put his big hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes intently. “Molly, I’m the one who should apologize. I should have known better. I misjudged you, too. I thought you were an ignorant American who didn’t give a toss about this country, a spoiled city girl who was here to make a quick buck.”

  I flinched. His words had struck pretty close to home. He was describing me as I had been one very long year ago. But I wasn’t that person now.

  Colin gripped my shoulders, and then slid his hands down my back and drew me against his chest again. He bent his head and kissed me, and I kissed him back, not like the timid girl I had been when I arrived, but like the woman I had become. I flung my arms around his dirty neck and responded with my whole body and heart. It was the best kiss I had ever experienced.

  July 31, 1925

  If I needed a reminder of our mortality, it lies in the discovery that I unearthed today in the garden, a stone hammer with a groove worn around the middle where a leather strap once held it to a wooden handle. This prehistoric tool carries a powerful message: that we are far from the first humans to pass this way, and perhaps even further from the last. Thousands of people have walked this land before us for thousands of years. Each new generation rises like the young green plants in spring, shedding their sweetness in the summer air before they ripen and return to enrich the soil below our feet.

  The Indians understand this better than anyone: the land belongs to no one. Man may drill for oil and dig for gold, yet the earth’s true riches lie right here on the surface, in the fields and the forests and the lakes. For all my pride of ownership, I understand that in the truest sense we are only temporary tenants, stewards for all future generations.

  The thought is a sobering one. George and I have a terrible responsibility: to guard our little patch of earth and preserve its abundance for our descendants and all the generations who come after them. It is the great central task of our lives. In the words of John Greenleaf Whittier:

  He who blesses most is blest

  And God and man shall own his worth

  Who toils to leave as his

  An added beauty to the earth.

  I could no more return to Ireland now, as I could return to the moon hanging in the sky above the barn roof. My life is as welded to the soil as the plough, the earth of Canada is mine and someday I will lie in it and become one with it.

  It was the final entry on the final page. The diary was finished. I closed the book and cradled it to my chest.

  Days remaining: six.

  27

  August

  It was the hottest day of the year in Wildwood, twenty-five degrees Celsius.

  With housewifely pride, I pulled two fragrant rhubarb pies out of the oven, their crimped edges tinted with gold, their crusts marked with the letters B and W, for Bridget and Wynona, and set them on the kitchen counter to cool. Then I grabbed a towel and left the house, heading toward the beaver pond for a refreshing dip. As I was crossing the yard, a little red car pulled up and a woman emerged.

  “Lisette!”

  If I hadn’t recognized the car, I wouldn’t have known her. She was wearing a smart black linen pantsuit with black patent flats — a replica of the outfit I had worn when I first arrived. It seemed that we had traded wardrobes. Today I was wearing denim shorts and a sleeveless top.

  Even more startling than Lisette’s clothing was her hair. It was cut to shoulder length, smooth and sleek, dark ash blonde with lighter streaks. It looked like we had traded hair, too, since my curly hair had now returned completely to its wild natural state.

  Lisette took off her dark glasses and shoved them onto the top of her head, revealing her pretty face. She looked like a petite fashion model.

  “Hi, Molly!”

  “You look fantastic, Lisette. I love your hair!”

  “Thanks! My hairdresser, Brittany, almost wept for joy when I told her to go ahead and have her way with me.”

  “Did you come out here to show me the new and improved Lisette?”

  “No, I came to say goodbye. I couldn’t leave without seeing you again.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m leaving Juniper at last, moving into the city.”

  “Oh, Lisette. I’m so glad. You’re going to have the most wonderful time.”

  “I’m still nervous, but you’re my inspiration. I decided that if you can live out here like a wilderness woman all winter, surely I can figure out how to ride a city bus!”

  She held out a large brown envelope. “Also, I wanted the pleasure of giving this to you in person.”

  Puzzled, I opened the flap and pulled out a certificate with a red seal, issued by the Alberta Registrar of Land Titles.

  It was the deed to Wildwood.

  I clutched it to my chest so hard that my heartbeat made the paper jump up and down. Then I held it away and studied it eagerly. Here was the legal description of the land, listing the sections, township, and range. Here was the handsome Alberta coat of arms pictured on the provincial flag, showing the wheat fields, prairie, and mountains, topped with the red cross of St. George.

  And best of all, these words: “Owner: Mary Margaret Bannister.”

  “Your great-aunt would have been proud of you, Molly. In fact, she’s probably watching you right now.” Lisette glanced around, smiling.

  I followed her gaze to the flourishing garden, the windbreak, the log barn, the old cabin, and finally to the house itself. It hadn’t changed. The shingles were still faded, the verandah still shrouded with overgrown lilacs. But it no longer looked forbidding. Instead, its bulk was as comforting as a pair of broad shoulders, our shelter and our refuge from the stormy blast.

  Lisette spoke again in a hushed voice. “I always think these old homesteads carry the ghosts of the pioneers who settled here. You can almost hear their voices if you listen hard enough.”

  “Thank you for coming, Lisette. You don’t know how much this means to me.”

  “I have to run now. Give my love to Bridget.” Lisette turned toward the car then stopped.

  “I almost forgot. There’s a cardboard box on the back seat for you. Ted Ratcliffe found it
when he was searching the office. It’s a stack of personal diaries that your great-aunt wrote all the time she was living out here. She must have given them to Mr. Jones for safekeeping. The poor dear obviously thought she could trust him.”

  So Mary Margaret’s voice wasn’t lost after all! How fortunate that she had forgotten the first diary in the bookcase. Or perhaps it was fate that she left it for me to discover!

  I retrieved the precious box and carried it to the back steps before we hugged and said our goodbyes. I waved as Lisette’s car disappeared around the corner, then returned to the house, still clutching the title.

  Reverently, I walked through the rooms, looking at everything as if for the first time, basking in the pride of ownership. I ran my hand along the back of the brown velvet couch, I admired the stone fireplace, the stained glass windows. I went into the hall and gazed at the family photographs on the wall. George and Mary Margaret were smiling at me approvingly. I held up the title and showed it to them.

  I climbed the stairs to the bedroom where we slept, where my great-aunt and uncle had also laid their heads. From the front windows I marvelled at the view that would never weary me. I saw the silvery curve of the creek below, the rows of swathed grain ripening in the sunshine, and the forest beyond. My creek. My fields. My Wildwood.

  I went downstairs and into the kitchen. Bridget’s orchid was sitting on the windowsill, still in flower. Its fragile pink blossoms had survived the cruel winter. More than survived — a new shoot was laden with buds, ready to bloom. Perhaps it wasn’t so different after all from its wild cousin, the lady’s slipper.

  I set my foot on the worn back steps, imagining the feet that had gone before. A flash of indigo caught my eye as a mountain bluebird flitted from the barn to the lilac bush. I headed down the bank toward the creek. The silver leaves of the wolf willows turned inside out in the warm breeze, and their tiny four-pointed yellow blossoms filled the air with a musky-sweet odour. I passed Fizzy chasing something in the long grass.

  As I approached the beaver pond, I heard laughter. Wynona and Bridget were standing knee-deep in the water, catching minnows in a saucepan. Riley jumped out of the water and shook himself, covering both girls with a shower of cold droplets. They shrieked with glee. Colin was lying on a patchwork quilt sunk into the lush grass, propped up on one strong brown arm, grinning as he watched them.

  I paused for a minute, wishing that I could freeze time. The tall spruces behind us were sighing with contentment in the breeze, as if life were good. I looked up at their pointed tips, and beyond them to the great domed sky, and thought that no cathedral could match this grandeur.

  I remembered a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, that “grief stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life.” At one time I had believed this. Now I felt that my happiness was staining forward instead, vanquishing the old pain and painting my future with all the colours of the rainbow.

  Colin smiled up at me with his green eyes, squinting into the sunshine as I approached. I sat down beside him on the quilt, smiling back. We held each other’s gaze for a long moment, as if neither of us could bear to tear our eyes away.

  I held up the land title with both hands, triumphantly, and showed it to him. “How much money do you think I could borrow against the farm?”

  “Probably quite a bit. Why?”

  “I’m going to ask Old Joe to come out tomorrow and give me an estimate on what it would cost to have the house plumbed and wired. Do you think he could have it finished before winter?”

  Colin gazed into my eyes again, smiling with all his heart.

  “Be sure you tell him to make room for my orchids.”

  Days remaining: the rest of my life.

  Epilogue

  Juniper Gazette, July 10, 2010

  COMMUNITY PIONEER DIES AFTER LENGTHY ILLNESS

  Mary Margaret Bannister Lee, a well-known pioneer who arrived in this area in 1924, has died in hospital at the age of 104 years.

  Born Mary Margaret Bannister in County Cork, Ireland, on April 23, 1906, she was the daughter of a country doctor. Always spirited and eager for adventure, it was her dream to visit western Canada. Accompanied by family friends, she first set foot in Juniper on May 1, 1924, at the age of eighteen years.

  A week after her arrival, Miss Bannister attended a dance at the Juniper community hall where she met George Alfred Lee, an army captain who filed on his homestead in 1919 after his return from the First World War.

  After a brief romance — typical of the time — the couple was married at the local Anglican Mission on June 15, 1924, and took up residence on their farm, named Wildwood, located 140 kilometres northwest of this new and thriving community.

  Captain and Mrs. Lee ordered their foursquare-style farmhouse from the T. Eaton Company Ltd. This arrived in pieces and was assembled by a team of local carpenters. Over the next five decades, this handsome home was the scene of many church picnics and Women’s Institute teas.

  Captain Lee broke the sod on his own property using horses and later purchased the first automated threshing machine in the district. Mrs. Lee was instrumental in the foundation of the public library and was a long-time board member of St. James Anglican Church, the Juniper Public School Board, and the Juniper Horticultural Society.

  Mrs. Lee was one of the province’s first environmentalists. She spoke out frequently on the importance of preserving farmland and resisting the interests of oil companies. “We have here the priceless possession of a rich, living soil, and it is our duty to keep it so for future generations. We must cherish our heritage and leave this world a better place,” she said in her last public address.

  Unfortunately, Captain Lee suffered from a lung condition resulting from his service in the Great War and succumbed to pneumonia in 1980. After his death, Mrs. Lee rented a house in Juniper but continued to spend her summers at the farm she loved so dearly.

  In a previous interview published in this newspaper, Mrs. Lee said she left the farm for an extended period only once. In 1928 the Lees suffered a terrible loss when their two-year-old daughter, Matilda, drowned in the beaver pond near their home.

  Following that tragedy Mrs. Lee returned to her parents in Ireland.

  “For a time I truly felt that the wilderness had bested me. But it continued to call my name from across the ocean, and eventually I realized that I had lost my heart to this lovely, smiling land,” she said. She returned to the farm the following year, and never left it again except for brief holidays.

  In 1990 she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moved into the Juniper Extended Care Hospital, where she spent her winters knitting afghans for charity. In summer she enjoyed sitting in the garden and listening to the birds. She remained cheerful to the end, remarking frequently: “I have had my day, and no one can take it from me.”

  As well as her husband, Mary Margaret Bannister Lee was predeceased by her older brother Macaulay Bannister and his wife, Dora, her nephew, Fergus Bannister, and his wife, Cynthia.

  At her request, Mary Margaret Bannister Lee was cremated. Her ashes were mingled with those of her husband and interred under the honeysuckle tree in the garden at Wildwood, near the unmarked grave of their daughter Matilda.

  Author’s Note

  I have no personal connection with the Peace River area, that broad, beautiful blanket of field and forest that sweeps through northern Alberta and British Columbia, but I fell in love with “The Peace” four decades ago, when I was an agriculture reporter for the Western Producer newspaper in Saskatoon.

  I travelled to northern Alberta on assignment, and one of the flying farmers took me for a ride in his small airplane. As we swooped down the river valley just as the sun was setting, I thought I had never seen anything so lovely.

  One can only marvel at the miracle of growing grain there in Canada’s northernmost agricultural area. The rich soil, coupled with the long summer daylight hours, casts a magic spell over all living things.

 
; There are unique challenges, too. The pioneers who settled here in “The Last Best West,” after the treeless prairie sod had been claimed by others, had to battle the boreal forest before sowing their crops, and then ship their grain to a distant marketplace. Above all, they had to survive the long, dark winters.

  My own family tree is populated with pioneers. My paternal great-grandparents, Peter Florence and Annie McRobbie, emigrated with their baby daughter from Aberdeen, Scotland, and staked their claim at Balmoral, Manitoba, in 1881. Eight years later my maternal great-grandfather, Frederick Light, arrived from England, joined the North-West Mounted Police in Regina, Saskatchewan, and married Phyllis Young, another English immigrant who was living on her brother’s homestead.

  Long before those first settlers arrived, my forefathers sailed from the Orkney Islands to trade furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company and married Cree women. My great-grandmother Jessie McDonald and her four sisters were registered as “half-breeds” — the legal term at that time for people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry — and granted scrip by the Manitoba government on July 23, 1875. It is through her that I proudly claim my Cree heritage.

  In this novel I wanted to shine a light on the overlooked contribution of Indigenous peoples to the very survival of these newcomers. They shared not only their food and shelter, but also their hard-earned knowledge of the natural world. It was often these women who kept their white husbands alive in this savage wilderness.

  Wildwood, the farm inherited by my heroine in the book, is entirely fictional, and so is the nearby Cree reserve. The community of Juniper, Alberta, is also fictional but was inspired by Peace River, Manning, Beaverlodge, and other early settlements.