Rescue at Fort Edmonton

by Rita Feutl

  Anna pulled the pony up short.“I do not want you here beside me any more. I like Mrs. Henderson, but you are just making me trouble. Go. Get out!”

  When Janey didn’t move, Anna pulled out the switch fastened to the side of her cart. “All right, all right,” said Janey grumpily, putting her hands up in mock surrender. “I’m sorry I said you were crazy or...or rude. Look. I’m lost. I’ll sit here and be quiet and good until we get to somewhere familiar.”

  “Then put at least the dress back on,” said Anna, pushing her advantage. Janey sighed, and tugged the dress toward her.“And put this button away.You must sew it back before you can return the pinny.”

  Janey shoved the button into a pocket in her shorts, and put the navy dress back on. This was just the weirdest, craziest place she’d ever visited. She sighed and glanced at her watch. It still showed the same time she’d seen in the tunnel, which meant her watch had stopped working. She must have damaged it in the fall.

  “A very fine watch you have,” said Anna, obviously trying to be friendly.

  “Thanks. But it doesn’t seem to be working.What time is it anyway?”

  “It is before noon,” said Anna, “because I am hungry.We will eat when we get back.”

  Noon? It was past three when she jumped into that construction pit. All these people were just too weird for words. Her friends would never believe this. Nothing like this had ever happened to her in Toronto. The girl beside her was so into her role that it was a bit scary. She even spoke with an accent; did they teach you this stuff before you started working here? How old was she?

  “Same like you – almost. In July I am twelve,” Anna said, when Janey asked.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be working at a job?”

  “Oh, this is not working.We need the bottles in the back, and Mrs. Henderson, she will give us some butter to pay. But this is no job. My brother Peter, he has a job with Papa in the coal mines. Peter is very proud – only ten years and already wages, but Mama and I, we do not like. Nobody like the mining now.”

  “Only ten years old?” Janey asked, caught up in this story despite herself.

  “Yes, ten years, but as big as me,” said Anna, smiling proudly. Then her face sobered. “We had also a little sister, Liesl, just four. But she died – a fever, very bad – in the Old Country. I think that is why we come here. Much land, no bad memories.”

  This girl was really playing her part, thought Janey, looking at Anna’s sad face. She prodded her companion.“So what’s wrong with the mining? I guess it’s kinda dirty.”

  Anna snorted. “Pah. Dirt shows you work. Dirt is good. No. It is the fire. Do you remember?” She paused.“Ach, yes.You are from Toronto.When did you come?Yesterday? Then you did not see the fire, or hear it... It was terrible...” Anna kept her eyes on the placid Rosa’s rump, but in her mind she was seeing something else.

  “Tell me,” Janey prodded.

  “It was very late – all of us sleeping,” Anna began. “Suddenly the bells from the churches, they were ringing and ringing.We came out from our tents and we could see, across the river, a big fire, and the sky was bright like the middle of the day. At first, it looked, somehow, beautiful.

  “But right away the men knew it was a coal mine fire.Then we were all afraid, because there are so many mines and we did not know which one. And then we heard it was John Walter’s mine and four men were trapped inside.

  “From across the river we heard wives and mothers crying, screaming.” She shook her head and looked directly at Janey. “Papa’s friend, Mr. Lamb, he tried to go down to rescue them, but they could not climb back up the ladder. Mr. Lamb, he climbed out again, but the fire, it burned him very bad.”

  Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.“Papa says he screamed all night before he died.”

  The wagon paused while a goat and several chickens meandered across the path. Anna urged Rosa forward again and continued. “Mr. Lamb’s sister will receive a medal from the English king because her brother was so brave, but Mama says if the owners made the mines more safe, he did not need to be brave. Now, we worry every time Papa and Peter go to work.And sometimes, the wind, when it blows, I think I still hear Mr. Lamb – his screams...”

  Severely spooky, thought Janey, as Anna lapsed into silence. They were nearing the river’s edge; the trees and bushes fell away and they passed small shanties and ramshackle lean-tos. Chickens pecked in the dirt and the occasional dog warned them about coming too close to a shed. Woodsmoke scented the air. Rosa plodded steadily toward a bridge in the distance. Janey was nearly lulled to sleep.

  But when she glanced across the river and up the opposite embankment, a sudden shiver stole up Janey’s neck. “Anna, is this Edmonton ahead?”

  When the other girl nodded, goosebumps joined Janey’s shivers. The impressive skyline of tall, modern buildings built with concrete and chrome that had consoled her yesterday on her drive into the city had disappeared. Instead, a few rickety wooden buildings clung to the top of the embankment, while the slopes leading to the river teemed with horses, pedestrians, and ramshackle housing of every sort.

  Where were the paved roads, the traffic lights, the cars and trucks she’d seen yesterday? Prickles crept up her sides and her hands grew clammy. Janey panicked. What’s going on here? she wondered. Maybe those boys did hit my head. Or maybe I was hurt in the tunnel, without realizing it.

  “I fell into that hole...” said Janey, almost to herself.

  “What’s that?” asked Anna.

  “I said, I fell into that hole, and it was terribly dark and maybe I’m really still there. Maybe I’m just dreaming all this.What year did you say this was?”

  Anna snorted and pinched Janey on her leg. “Ow!” shrieked Janey. “What’d you do that for?”

  “When you dream, a pinch does not hurt so much,” said Anna smugly. “You are here, and Edmonton is before you and the time is 1907.”

  Slowly, with a creeping sense of dreadful certainty, Janey came to a horrible realization – against all the laws of physics, Anna was right. Somehow Janey had travelled almost one hundred years into the past.

  What was she doing here? How was she going to get back? The cart had made it down to the bridge and Rosa was clopping steadily across. Maybe Janey should jump out, go back? But she didn’t want to face those awful boys again, and how was she supposed to find that tunnel? Hadn’t Anna said the area was riddled with mines?

  Desperately, she cast her eyes over the embankment ahead. She was shocked to discover that many of the buildings were tents, made from dirty canvas in various shapes and sizes. Many were fronted by garden plots, and a few had goats and even cows tethered to a corner of the tent. Women sewed or cooked at small firepits while children with balls and hoops dodged the pegs and tethered animals.

  “Anna...these people...they live here? In these tents?”

  Anna giggled.“Yes.We also live in a tent. Papa says there are thousands of us here in Edmonton, making camp like cowboys.”

  “But why don’t you just get a house? How long have you lived like this?”

  “Since we came in the fall we are living in a tent. Building supplies cost great money and are hard to find.”

  “But all winter?”

  “Oh, yes, but Papa and Peter, they put straw bales all around the walls and we are warm like – how do you say? – bugs.” She grinned triumphantly at Janey, then pulled Rosa to a stop. “Here we are.”

  A woman with a brightly coloured kerchief over her head appeared from behind a large canvas structure. “Gut gegangen, Anna?” she asked before her eyes landed on Janey.

  “Mama, this is Janey Kane. She was at Mrs. Henderson’s and she is coming with me to the market.”

  Mrs. Hirczi held out her hand and smiled.“You are welcome,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Janey, awkwardly shaking hands.

  “Please eat, then go,” said Mrs. Hirczi. She turned to Anna. “Ich habe heute viel Erdbeeren gesammelt. Komm doch schne
ll wieder nach Hause.Wir haben viel Arbeit.” She disappeared around the side of the tent, where Janey had noticed a small work table and an open fire ringed by stones.

  “Mama is not comfortable with English yet. But she says there are many strawberries in the tent. We can have some, but first, please help with these bottles. When we are finished, I take you and Mrs. Henderson’s butter up to the main street.”

  Yeah, but then what, Janey wondered, hauling a crate to the side of the tent. How on earth was she going to find her way back into present-day Edmonton? She’d fallen into a hole and landed in a time zone with no guidebook to help her out.

  Anna interrupted her thoughts.“Would you like to see the doll Papa and Mama gave me last Christmas?” she asked shyly.

  Janey nodded, puzzled. What was an eleven-year-old doing getting a doll for Christmas? She followed Anna into the tent, which was divided into two rooms by a sheet hanging across the back. The scent from three baskets of strawberries, warmed from the sun’s heat on the canvas, perfumed the flimsy structure.

  The front room looked crowded but remarkably cosy, furnished with a rocking chair, benches, and several elaborately carved and painted wardrobes. At one of them, Anna pulled the bottom drawer open gently and carefully lifted a china doll from a bed of blankets. “This is Henrietta,” she said tenderly, crooking the doll in her arm. “Her name, I think, sounds like the wind blowing soft in the springtime. It is a good name for her, no?”

  The doll had a china face, blonde hair, and blue eyes the colour of a summer sky.“She’s beautiful,” said Janey solemnly, thinking of her own box full of dolls stashed away in her Toronto closet.

  “Henrietta does not like to be alone for so long, but I do not like to take her in the wagon. She could fall and hurt herself. She looks very much like the doll I must leave in the Old Country.” Anna stroked the china cheek tenderly.

  “Back where I come from, girls our age don’t play with dolls anymore,” said Janey.

  “Not at all?” Horrified, Anna clutched Henrietta to her chest.

  “Well, yeah, when you’re little, but by the time you’re ten...” Once again the clash of shame and loyalty welled up inside her as she remembered sweeping her two favourite dolls from her bed when Becca and Rachel came to play.

  “But that is terrible! Who do you sing to, or whisper your dreams or worries to at night?” asked Anna.

  Brusquely, Janey changed the subject.“We’d better get Mrs. Henderson’s butter to where it’s going.”

  Anna tucked Henrietta back into the drawer and carefully closed it.“I wanted to call her Liesl, the name of my sister,” she said softly, “but Mama said it would make her too sad.”

  As they got ready to leave, with pockets full of strawberries, Janey asked about a bathroom. “Oh, that is inside the tent,” said Anna. “On Saturday nights.”

  It took a few seconds for Janey to understand.“No, not the bathroom. I meant the toilet. The...the...outhouse.”

  “Ah. That is at the very back, by the cliff. Be careful you do not go over!” Anna warned, emerging from the tent with what appeared to be a page torn from a catalogue and handing it to her.

  Janey stared at the sheet, nonplussed. It had black- and-white drawings of little girls in ridiculously frilled dresses on it. “There is no paper in the privy,” Anna explained.

  Aha! Janey took the paper, and headed toward the cliff ’s edge, where a strange woman was just emerging from the outhouse. A little girl was waiting her turn, clutching a small sheet of newspaper, when Janey finished. Whoever invented toilet paper ought to get a medal, thought Janey as she climbed back into the wagon.

  Once Rosa made it to the top of the hill, they turned onto Jasper Avenue, easing into a flow of wagons, horses, and pedestrians making their way along the wide, dusty road.Wooden storefronts selling everything from hardware and ladies hats to linens and legal advice lined the avenue. The planked sidewalks were crowded with men in suits or overalls and women in trailing skirts dragging straw-hatted girls and long-stockinged boys behind them.

  “Where are we going?” Janey asked, finishing the strawberries.They were tinier than any she’d ever seen at a grocery store, but sweet and bursting with flavour.

  “I must take the butter to the farmers’ market, and then we will find your grandmother, yes? Where will we look?” Anna asked, as she handed her a thick slice of bread and some sausage.

  How about ninety years down the road? thought Janey, wondering again how she could get out of her predicament. While Anna pulled up to an open area filled with stalls and produce, Janey swallowed a big bite of sausage and began, “Anna, look, I’m not really...” She paused in surprise when a short, round, Cree woman, her black eyes alive in a face wrinkled with age, reached into the wagon and grabbed at Janey’s skirt.

  “You are not from here,” said the old woman, giving Janey’s dress a tug.

  Anna jumped from the wagon and said cheerfully, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Black Bear.This is Janey Kane and you are right, she is from the East.” Anna tied Rosa to a post and dug the butter crate from its nest of straw.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she called, already halfway through the stalls before Janey could even move from her seat.The woman still had a hold of her skirt.

  “I know you.You are not from this time.You are looking for your home,” said Mrs. Black Bear, drinking in Janey’s face and hair. Janey nodded, stunned. Perhaps this old woman with the sharp eyes and round cheeks might know a way for her to return.

  “I need to know how to get back,” she said urgently. “Can you help me? Do you know the way?”

  “You should not go back, but you must know more about what has happened,” said Mrs. Black Bear. “You must go forward.”

  “Forward, backward, what’s it matter? I need to get home. How do I get home?” Janey asked, becoming nervous under the woman’s stare.

  “You are asking the wrong questions,” Mrs. Black Bear said carefully.

  “The wrong questions! I’ve got nothing but questions! How on earth did I get here? Why am I here? What...ow!

  Mrs. Black Bear stopped her by jabbing her finger in Janey’s leg, exactly where Anna had pinched her. “Now you are asking the right question, girl.Why are you here?”

  “I don’t know,” Janey wailed. “I didn’t want to be here; I didn’t want to be in Edmonton at either end of this century. I just want to be at home. I don’t know why I’m in this stupid place, stuck in this dumb dress, sitting on a wagon that’s rattled loose every bone in my body...”

  “I think,” said Mrs. Black Bear, cutting Janey off, “that you are here to prevent a terrible thing. A disaster.”

  Janey stared at Mrs. Black Bear, letting the words sink in. “But how am I...”

  “We will meet in another time. Remember the mines. It was good to see you again, Janey Kane.” Mrs. Black Bear grinned and stepped into the crowds, the small white head lost in a sea of bowlers and straw hats.

  Anna’s elbow in her side brought Janey’s attention back to the wagon. “I said, where do we go now? Where does your grandmother live? I hope it is not too far.”

  “Look Anna, I think I’m in way over my head. I think I’m lost.”

  Anna looked at Janey anxiously.“I think you really did hit your head. Those Jameson boys, they are a big trouble. Well, then, we will go back and help Mama with the bottles. Then, when Papa returns, he will know what to do,” she said briskly, urging Rosa forward.

  “What’ll you do with those bottles?” asked Janey, glad to change the subject.

  “We use them to keep food for winter. There are not enough jars for preserves – these days there are shortages of many things – but with the bottles you take off the top, I think you call it the neck, and then it is good.This morning I traded with the Henderson neighbours, bottles for coal.”

  As they neared the Hirczi tent, Anna frowned and urged Rosa to pick up some speed. Following Anna’s gaze, Janey noticed a small crowd gathered in front of her friend’s
home.

  “What you see here is the downfall of the Canadian West!” shouted one woman from the knot of oversized hats and long dresses.“No decent Christian home – not even the flimsy shelter of this poor woman here – is safe until the evils of alcohol are eliminated!” She stooped to pick up one of the bottles the girls had stacked earlier.

  “Who are these women?” Janey asked as they pulled up to the tent.

  “The Temperance Ladies – they hate liquor because it makes many men drunk,” said Anna, jumping from the wagon.

  The woman brandished the empty bottle. “Here, here is the evidence! How can these immigrants become productive members of our society when they are infected with Satan’s drink? Look at the number of bottles here! Oh, for shame! For shame!” With a great heave, she flung the bottle over the side of the cliff.

  “Stop! Stop! Do not do this!” cried Anna, rushing toward the crowd.

  Anna’s mother ran toward her daughter, crying. “Anna, ich verstehe nicht! Was ist da los?”

  “We are the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and we will not stop until the evils of liquor are driven from our fair city,” called another woman, reaching for a second bottle. A piercing whistle stopped her in mid-grab.

  From the top of the wagon, Janey took her fingers from her mouth and sent a small prayer of thanks to her dad, who’d taught her how to whistle properly.

  The group of women turned to her in surprise. “Now, just wait a minute,” Janey called.“Why are you doing this?”

  The crowd of elegantly-hatted females took in the tall, brown-haired girl in the ill-fitting blue dress with the straw hat hanging down her back. One of them stepped forward.

  “Well. Who, may I ask, are you?” she demanded regally.

  “I’m Janey Kane.Who are you?”

  “My goodness, Janey Kane, where did they teach you your manners?” inquired the woman.

  Not once had this woman answered her questions, thought Janey, as annoyance and the confusion of the day boiled up inside her. She’d had just about enough of everything.