The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  Estella sat down next to Rose and took out her book, Anna Karenina, which she was counting on to last the whole two weeks. The density of the novel seemed more important now than it had when she’d selected it. Rose already had her knitting out. Estella wondered if she felt deserted by Jack, forced to travel with the family circus while he got to ride with the men. If so, Estella could understand. After all the times she had been her father’s travelling companion, she suddenly wasn’t.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning when the train left the station. It went first to Saskatoon and then farther north to Prince Albert, where they had to change trains for Lake Claire. The stop in Prince Albert was a long one, three hours, and the family stored their luggage in lockers as directed by Oliver and ventured away from the station for a quick supper. Estella took them to a nearby café that she knew about—she and her father had eaten there several times on their way north—and they ordered grilled cheese and Denver and clubhouse sandwiches. After supper, Estella suggested a short walk and almost everyone followed her as she led them around the block. She was wearing her Red Wing boots, the ones Beatrice hated so much. Her sisters-in-law were in leather flats. Halfway around the block Harmony complained that she was getting a blister. The air was cooler this far north, and when they all got back to the station they retrieved their bags from the coin lockers and found their sweaters and blankets for the children in case they fell asleep.

  “I hope we’ve brought enough warm clothing,” Gladys said. “Is there a place to buy things in the village, Estella, in case we need extra sweaters?”

  There wasn’t really. A local woman was planning to open a shop—Dot’s Beach Hut, it was to be called—which would sell bathing suits and T-shirts and kangaroo sweatshirts with “Lake Claire” printed on them, but as far as Estella knew it was still just an idea.

  By the time they boarded the train again for the last leg of the journey, it was evening. Estella tried to make conversation with Rose and then she gave up and returned to her book. The children were fighting over the windows because they were in the bush now and the scenery was a novelty. Her niece Caroline sat down across from her and Rose with a hairbrush and dramatically brushed out her long hair.

  “I hope it’s not too dull at this lake,” Caroline said.

  “I’ve never been bored there,” Estella said, looking up from her book and watching Caroline draw the brush from her part and down, first one side and then the other. She was pretty, and well aware of it. After she finished with her hair, she stuck her brush back in her purse and said, “I wanted to stay in the city but Daddy doesn’t trust me with the boys. If I do meet a boy at the lake, I might need you to talk to him or I’ll never get out.”

  “I don’t think that’s my business,” Estella said, “to talk to your father about boys.”

  “Just remind him how old I am.”

  “You can do that.”

  Caroline gave her the same look she sometimes got from her students and said, “You used to be our fun aunt,” and then she got up and moved.

  Estella tried to imagine what Caroline would appreciate about Lake Claire other than boys on the beach. After all the trips in which Estella had slept in her tent and sat around the fire in the evenings with her father and Allen Foster and the work crew, she was about to hand Lake Claire over to people whose experience would be completely different. People who would move into the finished cottages with running water and shower stalls and never know what had gone into building them, or what the lake looked like in early spring when there was still ice in the bay, and glistening crystals lapped back and forth on the shore as the air slowly warmed and they melted. Everything was about to change, and there would be no going back. What if all these Diamonds on their way to Lake Claire were a mistake? She tried to read her book but it was hard to concentrate.

  It was one of the children who soon after smelled smoke.

  Estella could smell it too, although she didn’t believe it was anything to worry about. This was the bush, after all, and people built fires, Cree and Métis families who had camps in the summertime. But then the smell grew stronger, and you could see smoke through the windows, wisps of grey along both sides of the train. When the wisps turned into long black plumes trailing from the engine to the caboose, Theo’s daughter Goldie jumped up with her month-old baby in her arms and screamed, “Fire!” The baby started to cry, and then all the children were screaming. The train was already squealing to a stop when someone thought to pull the bell cord. Estella ran to the next car and found a young porter, who was on his way with orders to see to the passengers. Smoke was now building in the air outside the passenger cars and beginning to seep inside through the windows.

  The porters got everyone in the two passenger cars off the train, and there they were, the Diamonds, all twenty-three of them, along with the other passengers, standing between the bush and the tracks. Everyone could see smoke coming from the engine ahead. The conductor and porters and brakemen and even some of the male passengers went to work to figure out the source of the fire and what to do about it.

  It didn’t take long until it was out—it had looked worse than it was, the conductor said—but the train was going nowhere. The passengers had all got off in a hurry without taking much with them, and they were soon miserable, swatting at mosquitoes and shivering in the chill that came quickly when the sun went down. Estella felt badly that they were frightened, especially the children. They were scared of wolves and bears, of sounds they heard in the growing darkness. The cracking of a branch. The huff huff someone claimed to have heard. She tried to reassure everyone, but to them she was just Estella. What did she know about the bush?

  The conductor seemed to be the one in charge, and he eventually turned his full attention to his passengers, some of whom appeared to be terrified of this unknown outdoors. He allowed them back onto the train long enough to retrieve sweaters and blankets and jackets to protect themselves and the children from the insects and the cold, but he wouldn’t let them stay onboard. They all sat in the growing darkness, having been warned that under no circumstances were they to go into the bush. Estella could see the train staff conferring in a huddle, and then the conductor came back and informed them that he couldn’t radio ahead or back to Prince Albert because the radio had been damaged in the fire. They would have to wait, he said, until the station at Lake Claire became concerned and sent a crew to look for them. And they would have to wait outside because of the danger of another train coming along and slamming into them in the darkness. The chances of that happening were next to none, he said, but they would have to wait for help outside all the same. It wouldn’t be long. A few hours at the most.

  Estella did a calculation in her head. It was an hour and a half from Prince Albert to Lake Claire by train. They had been on the train for most of that time before the fire. They couldn’t be far from the village. She could walk the rest of the way, she thought, by following the tracks. It would be impossible to get lost. If another train was coming, she would hear it in plenty of time and get out of the way. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to do this, but she did. She knew this place. She was not afraid of bears or other wildlife.

  She told the conductor what she was going to do. Less than ten miles, the conductor told her when she asked how far it was, but it was not a wise idea. It would be difficult walking along the tracks. The bush was thick and the rail line was not much more than a narrow path through the trees. What would she do if she did run into a bear on the tracks?

  “Be patient,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

  “I think I’ll walk,” Estella said, making up her mind.

  “I can’t let you do that,” the conductor said.

  “I don’t see how you can stop me,” she said.

  Beatrice tried to intervene. “Don’t be ridiculous, Estella. You heard him. It won’t be long before we’re rescued.”

  “I’m not waiting,” she said, already tightening the laces on her Red Wings and
zipping up her windbreaker. She had a canvas pack with her and she removed her small flashlight before adjusting the pack on her back. She asked the conductor if he had a better light she could take. She wasn’t sure how long her batteries would last.

  The conductor left, shaking his head, and then he returned with a coal oil lantern and the same porter Estella had sought out for help, whom he insisted on sending with her if she couldn’t be talked out of making the trek on foot. The porter’s name was Eugene and he had red hair and looked to be about her age, thirtyish, or perhaps a few years younger. He was dressed in his uniform, a dark jacket with brass buttons and red piping, and a matching cap with a brim. Estella thought it made him look like an organ grinder’s monkey. The conductor gave strict instructions to the porter to get Estella off the tracks if he heard another train coming.

  “I’m not brainless,” Estella said. “I know enough to get off the tracks, and I don’t need a babysitter. Just give me the lantern and I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be lucky if you’re not killed,” the conductor muttered. “But I’m sending my fellow along with a motive other than your safety. Someone needs to tell the station what’s happened. It might speed things up.”

  “I can do that,” Estella said. Then she said to Eugene, “Give me the lantern.”

  “Under no circumstances do you give her that lantern,” the conductor said. “She’ll set the bush on fire.”

  The porter looked as though he might be more afraid of Estella than making the trip on foot through the dark woods, but he held on tight to the lantern.

  Beatrice begged her one last time to listen to reason, but her mind was made up. She didn’t wait for the porter’s lead; she set out ahead of him, and he followed her. Once they were out of earshot of the conductor, she stopped and tried to make him return to the train, but he wouldn’t go, and he wouldn’t give up the lantern. She told him she could just as easily inform the stationmaster in Lake Claire about the fire, but he said that was his job, not hers, and he could be as stubborn as she was.

  She could see that more arguing was not going to get her anywhere, so she turned away from him and began to walk. The porter started after her and stayed close enough that the lantern lit the way for both of them. The tracks ahead created a dark tunnel through the forest. Estella tried to walk on the ties, but they were too close together so she tried the gravel, attempting to find a comfortable rhythm between the ties, but she couldn’t pace her footsteps in a way that would allow her to avoid tripping on the boards. She tried the gravel bed outside of the ties but it sloped away from the rails and was not comfortable either. She went back to walking on the ties, as awkward as that was, and found a way to step: tie tie, gravel, tie tie, gravel. Her footsteps made a hollow sound, and then a crunch. Thud thud, crunch, thud thud, crunch. The porter stepped along behind her, trying to do the same. Synchronization seemed important to keep them both from losing their rhythm and tripping up. She could hear every time one of them missed and broke the pattern.

  The porter began to talk. At first, he had trouble walking and talking at the same time, but then he figured it out. He was, he said, completing a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the university in Calgary. The railroad was a summer job. It paid well, enough to cover his upcoming year at school. He had been lucky to get the job. Before he’d gone back to university he’d worked for a construction company, but he’d hated it. He’d decided he could do some good in the world if he became a psychologist. He liked to write and had even considered newspaper journalism as a career rather than psychology, but he thought the chances of anyone paying him to write were pretty slim and he needed a job. His father wasn’t the kind to put up with an unemployed son. Of course, the same might be true of psychology. It would turn out to be a bad choice if that was the case.

  Finally he seemed to have run out of things to say, and was silent briefly, until he said, “What do you do? You must have a job. I didn’t see a ring on your finger.”

  Estella ignored him.

  Thud thud, crunch, thud thud, crunch.

  She did a skip and switched legs just as the porter chose to switch the lantern to his other hand, and she lost the light and almost stumbled.

  “Are you all right there?” he asked. She recovered her balance and kept walking.

  A raptor of some kind screeched in the air above them.

  “What the hell was that?” the porter asked. “It sounded big enough to eat a moose.”

  She bit back the temptation to answer and tell him that, in fact, it might have been a relatively small bird, or an owl perhaps. People assumed all owls said whoo whoo, but that wasn’t true.

  Then the porter began to sing. “I love to go a-wandering . . .”

  “Oh, please,” Estella said. They were the first words she’d spoken to him since he’d refused to return to the train.

  “Finally,” he said. “She speaks.”

  “Do not sing,” she said.

  He quit, but instead began to talk in a long diatribe about the popular music of the day and how misguided it was that people thought Bill Haley and his rock and roll were going to ruin the minds of a generation. Estella happened to agree with him, but she kept her opinion to herself so as not to encourage him.

  Moments of blessed silence except for their footsteps, and then he said again, “What do you do? You must have a job.”

  Estella stopped walking and the porter almost ran into her. She looked at him then for perhaps the first time, his face lit by the lantern, framed by his ginger hair and topped by his porter’s cap. He was not bad-looking even in the eerie light, and she couldn’t help but be flattered that he had noticed her and wondered if she was married.

  “Never mind what I do,” she said. “And what were you doing, looking at my ring finger? I wouldn’t have thought you’d have time to be looking at women’s ring fingers. And shouldn’t that be against the rules of your job?”

  “You can’t stop a guy from looking,” he said. “All men like to look, but it’s innocent, at least in my case. And it’s a compliment, in case you didn’t know that.”

  She didn’t believe him that looking was completely innocent. She’d grown up with four brothers who had been fiercely protective, especially Jack, because they knew what boys were driven by. And there were all those young men in uniform she had danced with.

  When she started walking again, the porter hurried to catch up, and this time he positioned himself beside her instead of behind, and she found herself telling him that she was a high school mathematics teacher.

  “So you like kids,” he said.

  “Probably not as much as I like math,” she replied.

  Then she told him that her family was on the way to Lake Claire for a two-week vacation. That she was not sure she was looking forward to it, even though they were her family and she wanted them to have a good time, but it was her lake, and she felt that it was like a piece of music or poetry that only you can appreciate, as though it were written just for you. Once she started talking she couldn’t seem to stop, and at some point she stumbled and the porter grabbed her arm to steady her, and then his hand found her hand, and he didn’t let go when they started walking again. She didn’t pull hers away, even though she thought it was daft, the two of them holding hands like a couple of fatuous teenagers, like something Caroline and a boy she’d met on the beach would do. The air around them had grown cool, and the porter’s hand was warm.

  Twenty minutes later, they saw the first sliver of light through the trees, and soon after they emerged from the bush and saw the train platform and the small station house with the village of Lake Claire behind it. The stationmaster and the Diamond men were all standing on the platform, pacing around and waiting for the train. When they saw the swinging light emerge from the bush, the stationmaster called, “Who’s there?” and Estella realized the people gathered on the platform couldn’t see them in the darkness, but she pulled her hand away just the same.

  Eugen
e called out, “Hello, everything’s all right, but there’s been a little problem with the train.”

  Just then, they heard something in the distance behind them, and everyone’s attention turned to the sound. Estella and the porter stepped off the tracks, he on one side and she on the other, and they watched as the swath of the engine’s headlamp slowly approached, and then the train itself emerged from the trees, the passengers in the windows, cheering and waving at the station. The train was limping along, but moving nonetheless, having been repaired at least to the degree that it could make the last seven miles, which was all the distance had been in the end.

  Estella had to walk around the train to get to the platform and she watched as the Diamonds and the other passengers spilled out of the two passenger cars, thankful to have arrived and anxious to get to their beds. Oliver and his sons began to ferry the women and children in the Oldsmobile and Allen Foster’s car and Lake Claire’s one taxi, and they all temporarily forgot about Estella. In her head she was still saying, Tie tie, gravel, tie tie, gravel.

  The porter had gone into the station, and when he came out again and joined her on the platform she told her teenaged nieces, who were waiting for the next ride, that she was going to walk to the cottages. Without being asked, the porter accompanied her, and she saw her nieces exchanging glances. If they had been younger, they would have chanted, Auntie’s got a boyfriend.

  She easily knew the way, and she and the porter walked to the village and then along the familiar shortcut through the bush—the path that the boy Peter Boone had shown her four years earlier—and when they were into the bush and out of sight they held hands once more, even though the path was really too narrow for two people to walk side by side, and one of them was forced to fall back every ten yards or so by a tree branch. Estella thought how completely out of character it was for her to encourage this man she barely knew, who would have to leave on the train as soon as it was repaired and would not likely return. The train from Prince Albert to Lake Claire ran only twice a week, and it was not his regular route. In fact, he had no regular route, he had told her. As a student with a summer job, they sent him hither and yon, filling in for permanent staff on holiday or away sick. That very week, he was scheduled to travel to Montreal.