Back Roads to Bliss

by Ruth Glover

  “When you write,” Brother Dinwoody said with a mix of anxiety and pride, “do you report on the services here . . . the, uh, the sermons, for instance?”

  “I do,” Angus replied. “Or Mary does. Between us we keep them informed of how things are going.”

  “Does Parker, uh, ever ask for sermon notes?” Brother Dinwoody continued with an innocent face. The further removed he was from the cataclysmic day of his preaching, the more time pulled a blanket over the sorry aspects and magnified the good, such as a picture of himself standing boldly before a congregation, expounding the Word of God. A high and holy calling, and he had attained to it—once. He was convinced now that there were certain redeeming features to the discourse; perhaps Parker Jones would benefit from them. And Molly—Molly’s hair was often left free; the modest bun, suggested delicately, was certainly appropriate for a minister’s wife. His sermon might yet bear fruit.

  “Not yet,” Angus replied with a straight face, “but you must remember mail takes a long time going and coming. I’d hang on to those notes, if I were you.”

  Mollified, Brother Dinwoody headed for home. It’s funny, he thought, how things have a way of turning out all right, if you just wait. He suspected he could feel another sermon coming on. Perhaps something about “let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap.” One thing he knew for certain—there’d be no more mention of women’s hairstyles.

  As it turned out, Angus was not the only member of the welcoming committee. Several families of the Bliss congregation were represented the following day, few men among them, it’s true.

  When at last the train, much overdue, chuffed its way into Prince Albert, scattering cinders far and wide, shrieking its welcome to the skies, shooting steam in great gusts, the crowd on the platform—many of them having come just to marvel at this amazing example of modern inventions—included a dozen or more Bliss people, eagerly waiting, anticipating; they had been a long time without a pastor. Ben Brown might look like a gargoyle and waddle like a duck, but they would be happy to see him.

  As it was, framed in the door of the car, awaiting his turn to step down, was a fine-looking, clean-cut, upstanding young man. Sturdy of build, one had the impression that he may have outgrown his clothes all his life. Nevertheless, his suit fit him fairly well, though it was considerably wrinkled. His shirt collar was rumpled, his narrow tie awry. His hair, obviously just wet, had been slicked into place. And not a mother in the group but what had her heart go out to him and longed to launder his clothes, iron his shirt, feed him.

  His eyes—curiously taking in everything, from the wide, stretching sky to the raw settlement rapidly becoming a full-fledged town—settled on the eager faces lifted toward him, and his square face broke into a smile. Recognizing that they were there to greet him (the rapt gazes were fixed on him), he lifted a hand in greeting.

  Stepping from train to Saskatchewan turf, Ben Brown could only dream what Bliss might hold in store for him.

  She awoke to the sound of drumming; it was not a sound typical of the train car.

  Allison was having difficulty opening her eyes; her eyelids seemed too heavy to lift, as if they were inclined to remain shut forever.

  “Shhhhh—stop that! Put your spoon away! You’ll bother the pretty lady!” The tone was hushed but urgent. It was cross, a harassed mother-voice. “Don’t you see she’s asleep?”

  “Why don’t she wake up?” a child asked fretfully, giving one final whap with his spoon before the sound subsided.

  “I’m awake!” Allison said, and she thought she shrieked but uttered nothing aloud.

  “Now sit up and eat your supper,” the mother-voice continued, and there was the scraping of a chair, the tinkle of tableware, the bustle of movement.

  The smell of fresh-baked bread. The smell of fresh bread? Allison was puzzled. Fresh bread—it was a fragrance not smelled aboard ship nor on the train ride.

  And what had happened to the movement of the train—the swaying, the jolting?

  Allison struggled to sit up only to fall back with a groan. Her head! What had happened to her head? Gropingly she raised a hand, encountering wrappings.

  A further fumbling disclosed the reason for her sightlessness—the bandages not only circled her head but covered her eyes.

  Panic rose in Allison’s heart. Was she blind? And why? Where was she?

  Ebenezer . . .

  That name—why was it wrung from her subconscious?

  Obviously her movements had been noted. There was the swish of clothing, the tap of a foot, and a gentle hand took hers and laid it down on the coverlet.

  “She’s restless,” a voice above her said, and another, farther away, suggested, “Perhaps she’s waking up. Try speaking to her, Mother.”

  The gentle hands took both of Allison’s; the gentle voice asked, “My dear, can you hear me?”

  Allison licked dry lips.

  “I do believe she’s coming ’round.”

  “Try lifting the bandages. I notice they’ve slipped down over her eyes. The poor dear can’t see a thing; now hush, Petie, and eat.”

  Gentle hands worked at the wrapping, lifting the edges, folding them back.

  Allison’s eyes opened to look directly into a kindly, aging face.

  “Where am I?” she whispered. There was nothing trainlike about her surroundings. Bare boards stretched overhead, and the smell of tar paper vied with the bread fragrance.

  The face bent above her was not a face she knew—the face of a stranger worn with years of living, compassionate with years of kindliness, concerned.

  “You’re in my home, dearie. It’s nothing but a tar-paper shack, I’m afraid, but it gives us shelter, and now you, too.”

  “What . . . what happened?” Allison asked in a dazed tone, raising a hand again to the curious wrappings on her head—a bandage, insofar as she could determine.

  Ebenezer . . .

  The name, coming from she knew not where, slipped away into the shadows of her mind.

  “I’ll tell you all about it; but right now, perhaps you should rest—”

  “Where is the train?” Allison insisted and struggled to sit up. “Where is . . .” Who was she asking about?

  An arm went around her shoulders, lifting, shifting, arranging a pillow at her back.

  “There now, is that better?” the woman asked. “Just be still for a bit, my dear.

  “You’ve had quite an injury. As soon as we know you’re not going to faint again, we can talk, if you wish. Dora,” she raised her voice, “pour a cup of that tea, if you will, and bring it over here.”

  Dora brought the tea. The angel of mercy—with lined face, wise eyes, gray hair—held it carefully to Allison’s mouth, allowing a sip or two. “There now,” she said again. “That should be what the doctor ordered. Trouble is, there’s no doctor within a hundred miles, maybe more. And that’s why you’re here, my dear; it was the only solution. Do you remember receiving the injury to your head?”

  Allison shook that member, or tried to, shut her eyes momentarily, and waited until the pain subsided.

  “Of course you have a massive headache,” the tea-offering lady said. “I had to . . . well, I had to sew the gash—”

  Allison put her hand to her head again. “Maybe you better start at the beginning,” she said. “I need to hear what happened. The last I remember, I was on the train, talking . . .” Her voice trailed off, uncertain.

  “You haven’t asked who you are,” the woman said with a small smile, “so I trust that means you remember. We determined, from your belongings, that you are Allison Middleton, apparently come from England.”

  “Midbury,” Allison said, “and heading for Prince Albert—a long, long trip.” A strange trip, an unbelievable journey that had brought her to a strange bed in a tar-paper shack in the middle of nowhere.

  No one, no one in the whole world, knew where she was. Perhaps no one cared.

  In the midst of desolation, bright and
clear came the consolation she needed, the reassurance: “He calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them” (John 10:3b–4a).

  Quick tears beaded Allison’s eyelashes. She blessed, and not for the first time, the governess who had insisted on memorization in the classroom and had chosen the Bible as a convenient source.

  She wasn’t lost from the care of the Shepherd.

  “I’m Ella Dabney, mother of Dora and grandmother of little Petie over there,” the woman at the side of the bed said, dabbing at the tears in Allison’s eyes, not thinking them strange after what the young woman had been through.

  What had she been through? Allison was not to know for another minute or two as Ella digressed to explain that her husband, as well as her son-in-law, Dora’s husband, were out on the homestead, breaking sod, planting a crop.

  “Potatoes,” Ella explained, “are the best first planting and can be dropped into the ground as soon as it’s turned over. Though we haven’t been here long, we should get some sort of crop this first season.

  “Now then—as to what happened. Is it possible you don’t remember?”

  “I remember being on the train . . . talking—” Again Allison’s memory faltered.

  “The blow knocked all memory of the accident out of your head,” Ella said.

  “Accident,” Allison repeated, trying to remember.

  “It may all come back to you at some later date. It happens that way at times. At any rate, somewhere back down the line a man showed up beside the train, sort of popped up from nowhere, I was told—perhaps he had been sleeping, waiting; trains are so often way off schedule. He was waving a flag, wanting the train to stop for him. The engineer put on the brakes quickly, too quickly, I guess, or else they froze up. Anyway, the train stopped far more abruptly than it should have. People were tossed around, bags and boxes fell, and that’s how you got injured. The sharp corners of a big box fell on your head.”

  “Heavens!” Allison said faintly.

  “Scalp wounds tend to bleed heavily. You were unconscious and blood-soaked, and the railroad personnel couldn’t determine just how seriously you were hurt. And they didn’t know what to do about it. I understand there wasn’t even room to lay you down decently. The decision was made to stop at the next place and see if someone could help.

  “That’s how you came to be with us. We—Joe and I and Jerry and Dora—when we arrived, made the decision to live alongside the tracks rather than go off to the other end of the homestead. We felt we wouldn’t feel so isolated, somehow. And the noise of the train doesn’t bother us one bit. We step outside and wave, and just the sight of another face, even though it goes by so quickly, lifts our spirits. And who knows, perhaps a town will spring up here someday.

  “Anyway, the train stopped here, and as soon as they found out we were willing to take you in and do what we could for you, they carried you off the train, with your possessions—”

  “My trunk?” Allison asked.

  “Yes, it’s here—over there in the corner. A woman came off with you . . . said you’d been sitting with her and her family; she was upset and hated to leave you. A young man was carrying you,” Ella recounted. “He seemed very concerned; would you know who I mean?”

  “I remember a couple who made room for me . . .” Allison put a hand to her head. “But—” Memory stirred, struggled, and subsided.

  “You said,” Allison continued finally, “you sewed me up?”

  “That’s right. One has to be prepared to do a lot of things here on the prairie. The gash was just above the hairline, and it bled dreadfully. As you see, Dora and I removed your garments—Dora’s been soaking them to get the blood out—and when I was through stitching your scalp, we bound you up and put you to bed. It’s been several hours; I’d begun to wonder.”

  Ella paused, shaking her head, and Allison understood how helpless she had felt in the face of such an emergency. And how kind she had been to agree to keep her, tend her, mend her.

  Ella tipped the cup of tea, now cooling slightly, and Allison drank gratefully.

  “I’m afraid we have little or nothing to put on open wounds,” Ella said with some concern. “We came with some medicine in case the baby got colic, liniment for burns and frostbite, tablets for sore throats, headache remedy, things like that. But the only thing I have for an open wound is Wire Cut Remedy—and it’s a veterinarian concoction. It seems we are more prepared for our animals’ injuries than for our own. Of course, there are no wire fences in sight nor will there be for ages, if ever.

  “Wire Cut Remedy sounds fantastic if you can believe what they say about it, guaranteed to heal without leaving a scar—somehow I doubt that—destroying all germs and foul odors—”

  “Foul odors?” Allison said weakly.

  “Some sores turn bad. But not this one, I’m sure!” Ella sounded too positive, as though assuring not only Allison but herself. “Anyway, I was reluctant to use the Wire Cut medication. I think the best thing is to leave the wound open to the air. This good clean air should be a healer.”

  Thus saying, Ella carefully unbound the bandages, found the bleeding stanched, and left the puffy, purple wound open to the air.

  “Hopefully it will soon form a scab,” the good woman said. “I had to cut a little of the hair back, of course, but your hair is abundant, and you’ll be able to pull it over the spot until it grows out again.

  “Now I must help Dora fix some supper; the men will be in soon.”

  Thus saying, Ella Dabney rose from the side of the narrow bed, patted her patient, and went to the other end of the small space where her daughter was peeling vegetables and her small grandson was eating, occasionally giving a tentative rat-a-tat-tat on the tabletop with his spoon.

  Allison’s first thought: It’s time to take it all to the Lord in prayer. Closing her eyes, lying back, she found comfort, and probably healing, in simple but earnest petitions lifted heavenward.

  The wound healed rapidly. Ella was gratified with the sewing job and her decision to leave the wound open to the air. Allison was grateful to Ella, giving praise to the Lord for His healing and Ella’s ministrations.

  Sitting up in bed by the second day, then rising to play with small Petie and walk around the tar-paper shack, out to the sod barn and wire chicken run, Allison didn’t take long in deciding the prairie was not for her; its huge spread, its vast spaces, overwhelmed her.

  This place called Bliss—where was it? Was it another such as this wayside stop known as Dabney’s Place?

  “Bliss? Bliss?” the Dabneys and Goffs repeated when she inquired; they shook their heads. It wasn’t until a creaking wagon of weary travelers came by to rest, to eat, to talk, that Allison learned that Bliss was in the heart of the bush country.

  “Bush,” the strangers said, describing the area to the north. “And thick bush, at that. Or at least that’s the report we’ve had. Some people, defeated by the work of clearing it so’s they can prove up their land, say it’s too thick to take. Still, it’s the place of our choice. We like green; we like the idea of lots of trees. We like the idea of bush. We’re only sorry we have to plod through this flat land to get there.” Here, in the face of their hosts’ choice, drinking their water hauled many miles from a distant coulee, sitting in the shade of their tar-paper shack, their voices faded.

  Bliss—whatever it was, wherever it was—was Allison’s destination. That’s where Georgina and David Abraham were, and they had extended a sincere invitation for her to join them. Surely such an invitation—considering all that had happened and was happening—had been prompted of the Lord.

  She was eager to move on. She needed to move on for the sake of the Dabneys and Goffs. Having given her the bed in the small shack, Ella and Joe, whose bed it was, had joined Dora and Jerry and Petie in a tent in the yard. Allison was sure their provisions, which they shared with her generously, were scant, and the trip to replace them would take a day going a
nd coming. Their cooking was done over a campfire in the yard, their supplies kept in boxes.

  A sod house was in the offing, they explained to her; after showing her where it had been staked off, they led her to the prairie area where they were, as time allowed, cutting and stacking sod for its walls. Allison had seen inside the sod barn and shuddered, thinking of humans living in a duplicate of it—a burrow, in her estimation, fit only for rabbits or gophers or hibernating bears.

  With some hesitation the travelers who had stopped at Dabney’s Place offered Allison transportation. “You’re welcome to go with us as far as we’re going,” they said. “If this Bliss is where you think it is, near Prince Albert, you’ll be nearly at the end of civilization, at least for the time being. From there on it’s Cree country—”

  “Oh, thank you,” she answered quickly. “But you see, I have a ticket, and surely I’ll be allowed to finish the trip. After all, the train was responsible for the injuries I suffered.”

  She, the Dabneys, and the Goffs bade the visitors good-bye and watched the wagon, followed by a cow, trundle off across the prairie, growing smaller and smaller until it slipped over the curve of the earth and disappeared as surely as though the earth had opened and swallowed it. Once again Allison could look east and west, north and south, and see nothing but blowing grass.

  The train tracks were a thin ribbon seemingly stretched from nowhere to nowhere. And yet, in a day or so, as soon as the bruising receded from her face, Allison would ride them to the horizon and beyond. Her heart, for some unaccountable reason, yearned for the beyond.

  Ebenezer . . .

  The sturdy oak-framed looking glass—hanging from a nail in the rough stud of a tar-paper shack after being transported west in lieu of the handsome but heavy French Pier mirror that was Ella Dabney’s pride and joy—revealed a less-than-exquisitely dressed Allison.

  Having worn borrowed clothes for a few days, she had now donned the clothes, the blood-stained garments, that had needed soaking in order to be wearable again. The white waist had fared well enough, the suit much less so. In spite of pulling and stretching, steaming and ironing, it showed sad signs of having shrunk, of being twisted out of shape. The skirt, of first-grade cheviot lined with taffeta treasured for its distinctive rustle and interlined with crinoline, and the bolero, trimmed all around with mohair-and-silk gimp and lined with “changeable” silk, simply were not intended to be submersed in water, let alone soaked and scrubbed.