With Love from Bliss

by Ruth Glover

  “I’ve been thinking—” Gladdy began casually.

  “Oh, oh!”

  “I’m serious! It’s this: I want to go West with you.”

  “Gladdy! Don’t even suggest such a thing if you don’t mean it!”

  “I mean it. I did a lot of thinking before I mentioned it. It’s like this, Kerry—my life is going nowhere. Being a maid is not my idea of the way to invest one’s time and energy. There’s only one life to live, and I don’t intend to spend all mine dusting and cleaning someone else’s house. I’m two years older than you are. That doesn’t make me ancient, but it makes me, well, troubled at times as I look around and wonder where I’m going. All my sisters were married before this. I don’t even meet any eligible fellas except maybe a delivery boy or two. This trip, with you, is the only ray of light I’ve seen on a long, dark horizon. And, Kerry, I’ve got enough money to pay my own way. I’ve saved nearly everything I’ve made for ten years. It’ll be an investment!”

  That Gladdy was restless, Kerry knew. They were friends, sharing intimacies, sharing dreams. They had talked about it: Gladdy tied into service as surely as if she were still in the old country; Kerry bound by protocol that bade her wait until some knight in shining armor came along and swept her from Maxwell Manor into another such abode.

  Her hand went out to Gladdy, who clasped it in a pledge that was to carry them many miles through trials and tribulations not imagined by either of them. Babes in the woods they were.

  And that’s what Uncle Sebastian called them. With a shake of his head he conferred that title upon them and withdrew to his study and the comfort of his books and papers. Aunt Charlotte was more outspoken in her denunciation of the plan and less easily appeased. To lose her niece and her maid—it was enough to give one palpitations of the heart!

  Half swooning, Aunt Charlotte submitted to Kerry’s ministrations as she fanned her face, rubbed her hands, and tenderly brushed back her hair. When she was recovered and finally convinced of the departure of Kerry and Gladdy, she sat up sensibly and helped lay plans.

  “Money,” she said. “You’ll have to have money. But fortunately that’s no problem anymore.” She made reference to the announcement Sebastian had made not many weeks ago concerning Franny’s estate, which had been left to Kerry. While it was not enormous, it was not insignificant. “If you have money, you can hire a great many things done that penniless people find so difficult, even degrading. Clothes. You can go through Franny’s wardrobe; some of it can be shared with Gladys.” And Charlotte was off on suggestions regarding things necessary, and useless; sensible, and ridiculous; desirable, and far-fetched.

  Her greatest fear, it seemed, was their health, her wildest recommendation, what to do to take care of it. Where in their luggage—would they pack, and would they ever use—blood builder, mosquito deterrent, nerve steadier, brain cleaner, electrifying liniment, eye water, worm cakes, rat killer, and slippery elm lozenges?

  Eventually the buying was accomplished, the packing completed. The time schedules were checked, the necessary banking done. It remained only for the snow to melt and the weather to moderate.

  The departure of Kerry and Gladdy was accompanied by many tears, many instructions, and many inquiries into what they had and what they had forgotten. Finally the two were seated in the family carriage with Gideon at the reins. He had his instructions not to leave them until they were safely entrained; he was to see that their luggage accompanied them, to inform the conductor that here were young ladies in need of his tender and special care, and to slip a sizeable bill into his palm at the same time.

  Finally, the train carriage vibrating beneath them, seated together with numerous bags around and above them, their color as high as their spirits, Kerry and Gladdy waved good-bye to Gideon from the window. Gladdy threw caution to the winds and, in view of her liberation, blew the staid and proper Gideon a kiss, thereby coloring his cheeks the shade of a ripe plum.

  Hardly had they glanced around at their traveling companions, removed their capes and shawls and settled back, than Kerry said, “Here’s the plan. I’ve got it all worked out but didn’t dare mention it until we were underway.”

  “You mean you’ve finally figured out what you’ll do?”

  “I’m going to make that bushman fall in love with me, Gladdy. I’ll do whatever it takes to make him fall in love with me, head over heels in love with me, even ask me to marry him. And then, Gladdy—I’ll laugh in his face!”

  Kerry and Gladdy rode a packed train. The gap between Ontario and British Columbia had been bridged, and although the trickle had a small beginning, it would soon increase to a roar of immigration. Here, in the vast West, the immigrant would become a homesteader, on 160 acres he could call his own, and for only a ten-dollar filing fee. The great migration had begun.

  In the beginning, most of them trekked in by wagon. The prairie schooner became the final means of completing the long journey, a journey that had begun across the ocean in a distant part of the globe. By prairie schooner or wagon or Red River cart, they came. They were, almost to a man, fleeing poverty, oppression, enforced servitude to king, czar, landowner. No man was consigned to be a serf in Canada.

  Hundreds of immigrants would draw rein, finally, at a piece of land that was wild and untouched, and they would begin the lifelong task of wresting home and livelihood from soil that had never known the bite of a plow or echoed to the swing of an axe. Eventually, arriving by train, they would climb out of a cramped colonist car at a railway shack, with no friend or family to greet them and no one to direct them about where to go or what to do next. Their gear was unloaded and left at the side of the track, and the train—an encroacher in the wilderness of grass or bush—seemed in a hurry to escape, wheezing quickly away to the horizon and out of sight, leaving only silence and loneliness. At times the pure, lilting song of a bird jarred shocked senses to the grim reality of their predicament. They were cast—totally and irrevocably—on their own devices.

  Some newcomers knew how to tackle the situation, knew how to farm, had a few skills for building, for caring for animals, hunting for food. But thousands did not, never having put hoe in garden or milk in pail. The suffocating heat of summer was unexpected and the hammering blizzards of winters so cold they could snap barbed wire. Still they came, to walk their own land, to live their dream or, in many cases, watch helplessly as it shriveled and died along with their crop.

  The Indians had come; the fur traders and explorers had come; and now it was the time of the settlers. Tiny settlements began to appear in the vast expanse of the prairie and the green tangle of the bush. A trickle of wheat began to make its way to the railway, a trickle that was to cascade into a flood and earn for the prairie provinces the title of bread basket of the world.

  Kerry’s and Gladdy’s tickets said Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, though Saskatchewan was not to become a province for several years. Prince Albert—the heart of the bush and the end of the line. First the prairie, then the bush, then the forests. And beyond—ice and snow and tundra.

  As their train crept across the prairie, Kerry and Gladdy could see an occasional lump or mound of sod that broke the ceaselessly flowing sea of grass. It was identified as the abode of humans by the ribbon of smoke rising from a tin stovepipe. Even Gladdy, raised in poverty in the slums of London, shuddered.

  “Like field mice,” she said, shivering, “or badgers in their hole. At least we had company in our misery. Where is there a store? a school? a neighbor?”

  “I thought you were prepared to be a pioneer,” Kerry teased.

  “I am,” Gladdy defended stoutly, “only please—not on the prairie!”

  “Look at the company you’d have,” Kerry said, pointing out the jackrabbits that flourished in countless numbers.

  “You’d have them in your cook pot. And like as not, be glad of them,” someone said, overhearing the conversation. “Letters from my brother refer to rabbit stew all the time. Rabbit stew, oatmeal, and in an e
mergency, bannock.”

  Gladdy squared her narrow shoulders. “Whatever . . . wherever,” she maintained. “Somewhere I’ll find what I’m looking for. And I’ll recognize it, and I’ll settle there and be happy.”

  “I believe you mean it,” Kerry said. “But first, you have to help me with my plan. Remember, that’s why we came.”

  “Aren’t you going to make the West your home?” the friendly traveler inquired, eyebrows lifting.

  “Absolutely not!” Then, lapsing as she did on occasion, she quoted, to Gladdy’s amusement and the stranger’s perplexity, “‘For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste: who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat.’”

  “Oh, I don’t think junipers are indigenous to the area. And mallows . . . ?”

  Nevertheless, Kerry had made her point—no wilderness for her.

  But her outlook about the West changed when at last the prairie was behind them and greenery surrounded them, swept past them, all but enfolded them like a green shroud. And would have, if it wasn’t kept cut back from the track. Alongside, cordwood lay piled, six-foot lengths of poplar and birch—grist for the engine’s firebox. Now from time to time a small clearing appeared and in it a cabin.

  “I wonder,” Kerry said thoughtfully, “if the bush, closing one in like it does, wouldn’t be as hard to live with as the grass that goes on forever.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Gladdy reminded her. “You’ll only be here—until fall, is it? What if your plan doesn’t work out by then?”

  “I’m prepared to stay until it does,” Kerry said doggedly. “But it won’t take that long. Have you forgotten, Gladdy, how scarce marriageable women are here? And those letters of that Connor Dougal are very revealing—he’s lonely, all right. And ready.”

  “Maybe not, Kerry. Look how he backed out of his arrangement with Franny. That doesn’t look like he’s very eager, does it? I think he was just toying with her. One can be very safe—from a distance. When it looked like she was going to come and take him up on the relationship, he was scared off.”

  “It would be risky, being pledged to someone you’ve never seen. And he never had a picture of Franny. That’s how come I feel perfectly safe. In all his letters to her I never saw a reference to me, or to you, and only one brief mention of Aunt Charlotte. We’ll be total strangers to him.”

  The girls had lowered their voices, and the friendly traveler beside them had taken herself off to the end of the car and to the kettle boiling there on the stove.

  The colonist car was simply that: a car carrying colonists across Canada. To the dismay of the girls, most everyone was sick. They had disembarked from a nightmare of a sea voyage underfed or poorly fed and stepped immediately onto a train, with no time for recuperation. Consequently there was dreadful coughing, considerable vomiting, with children wailing, adults whey-faced and peaked.

  Kerry and Gladdy were grateful for the large hamper of food Aunt Charlotte had insisted on sending and for the wonderful supply Mrs. Finch had prepared—chicken, bread, raw carrots, pickles, cheese, cookies, cake. When the train stopped long enough to allow the passengers to get off and stretch their legs, there were vendors selling various things, and the girls purchased fresh milk, apples, chocolate, even hard-boiled eggs. Eventually ragged Indians appeared, selling crafts they had made—arrowheads, feathered gewgaws—which Kerry and Gladdy avoided, not scornfully but with pity. For these were ragged, underfed, sad beings who seemed to feel no hope for anything better.

  It was a long, tiresome trip. The seats made of wicker were hard and served as both living and sleeping quarters. Each car bore the name of a Canadian animal; Kerry and Gladdy traveled in Caribou, and when they detrained, this name helped them locate the proper car again with a minimum of time and effort.

  For those folks who needed to prepare their meals, one big stove at the end of the car served everyone. Here they warmed milk for the babies, boiled water for tea, attempted to fry eggs and potatoes, made bannock. The stove was also the only source of heat, and Kerry and Gladdy, most of the time happy to be away from the ruckus and the odors of that area, suffered from the cold at night and on certain days when winter, slow in passing, brought the temperature low again.

  At night babies cried, mothers shushed, men snored, the ailing coughed, and someone chunked wood or coal into the stove every once in a while. The farther they traveled, the more room they had, as family after family said their good-byes and were helped off the car. For some this was in the middle of the night, and the girls, peering out of the window, could see no sign of a station or a person or even a light. Dumped ignominiously on the prairie or in the heart of the bush, families were left to sink or swim, survive or perish, on their own. Sad to say, many perished.

  It was late in the day when they chuffed into Prince Albert. Here a crowd of spectators had gathered, some to meet travelers, most to be entertained. The arrival of a train was always of interest, coming as it did from the “outside” and reminiscent of places and people quickly becoming just a memory.

  Prince Albert, named for the queen’s dead consort, was founded in 1866 by the Reverend James Nisbet, who came from Ontario to establish a mission among the Cree Indians. It was situated on the North Saskatchewan River, and the area’s rich earth and abundant resources quickly attracted settlers; it became a center for river freight travel and a hub for the railroad. Rolling grainfields appeared as the lush forests yielded slowly to the homesteaders’ need to clear five acres a year for three years; the sloughs and meadows watered and pastured the settlers’ horses and cattle; the trees provided building material for cabins and barns.

  “Smell that?” Kerry breathed, stepping down from the odorous car onto the platform. It was a mix of invigorating air, new-budded trees, wood smoke, and pine. Even the smoke from the stack of the train could not mask the freshness. Kerry breathed so deeply and so often, she felt giddy.

  “Now this is more like it!” Gladdy exclaimed, glancing around. “It is quite civilized. For a frontier, that is. I can see several stores, and that looks like a lawyer’s sign . . . and there’s some kind of mill over there on the hillside—”

  “Can you see a hotel, Miss Bright Eyes?” Kerry was staring up at the bowl of a sky that seemed to defy description for color and size.

  “Oh, say, young man—” Gladdy was calling in her new voice as mistress of herself and director of her own life, “over here, if you please!”

  A towheaded youth, cap askew, boots clattering on the station platform’s planks, galloped their way, a grin of willing cooperation on his freckled face. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Can you tell us, my good lad, if there’s such a thing as a hotel in this, er, city?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am, you can tell us, or yes, ma’am, there is?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I can tell you, and yes, ma’am, there is—and it’s right up Main Street. In fact you have your choice—”

  “Take us to the one that you would want your sister to stay in if she needed a room.”

  “Ain’t got no sister.”

  “Your mother . . . your aunt, anybody you feel responsible for,” Gladdy explained patiently, obviously enjoying the role of being in charge. “Now these are our things, here, and here, and over there.”

  “I’ll get the wagon, miss,” the young man said, still grinning but a little more respectfully now to Gladdy’s satisfaction and Kerry’s amusement.

  With their goods and chattels loaded and Kerry and Gladdy seated on the high spring seat of the wagon, the young man standing in front with the reins in his hands, they bounced their way up a very rutted street toward town.

  “Wait!” Gladdy ordered, and the driver hauled back on the reins with a surprised look on his face. Kerry’s face was as surprised as the lad’s.

  “Look, up that side street—isn’t that a boarding house? We’d be better off there,
Kerry, if there’s room. It would be more homelike, and we could probably take meals there, too. How about that place, young man?”

  “If’n you want to, we’ll drive there and ask.” So saying, he turned the wagon and in a matter of moments hauled it to a halt in front of a large, three-story house, well-built, freshly painted, and with crisp curtains at every window.

  “Pilgrim Boarding House for Men,” was the sign’s discreet disclosure. The young man’s grin widened.

  Perhaps it was the grin; at any rate Gladdy said, “Hold this rig still, young man. I want to get out.”

  Kerry looked on in amazement as Gladdy clambered down, smoothed her hair, straightened her skirts, and marched up the walk to the front door. There she knocked, and Kerry watched while Gladdy engaged in a brief conversation with an aproned woman.

  “‘The stranger did not lodge in the street; but I opened my doors to the traveler,’” Kerry murmured, quoting the ancient Job, while the young man’s freckled face grew puzzled, a reaction Kerry was prepared for, having conjured it up in many faces across the years of Scripture quoting.

  To Kerry’s surprise, Gladdy was counting money out into the landlady’s open palm.

  “Well, what are you gawkin’ at?” she demanded as soon as she had marched back to the rig. “Get out and come in.”

  “How did you do it?” the lad Gus asked, obviously awed. “That’s for men only.”

  Gladdy only sniffed. Kerry refrained from asking at the moment, but Gladdy could see the question in her eyes. When Gus opened the tailgate and began carrying their bags toward the open front door, Gladdy explained.

  “I offered to work in the kitchen. She’s short of help right now. That way, we can have the hired girl’s room on the third floor. I don’t imagine you’ll refuse the lodgings, will you?” Gladdy gave Kerry a keen look.

  “Not at all,” Kerry said quickly, remembering her roots and the boarding house of her early years. Life had made a circle, it seemed.

  As she paid off the young man, Kerry asked, “Gus . . . do you know the community of Bliss?”