The Lemon Tree
Page 3
Pen in hand, she stared thoughtfully out of the bedroom window. Already, she had casually remarked to Mr Turner, the chemist, that it might be cheaper for the Lady Lavender to buy seed and themselves press the oil they used, rather than import it.
Mr Turner had replied superciliously that to make it pay, they would probably have to find a market for the residual solids.
It was probably the most sensible remark he had made to her that day, but she had snapped him up promptly. ‘The solids can be used for winter food for steers. Don’t your farmers know that?’
Mr Turner had gulped and failed to reply immediately; he knew little about farming. What did women know about cattle?
When he had recovered himself, he pointed out that a new venture like that would need capital. ‘Presses,’ he added vaguely, ‘and – er – men who understand farming, to sell the residue.’
‘Right.’ She had stopped to take a small black notebook and pencil out of her reticule, and made a quick note. She might, she thought, cost it out in years to come, when she understood more about the business.
Playing at her father’s feet in his large silk warehouse in Beirut or cuddled by her mother’s side when the family was gathered together in the evening, she had absorbed a great deal of the discussions going on over her head. Amongst much else, she understood the importance of estimating cost and return – and the ever-present risks of undertaking something new. During her long tour of the soap works, she had felt, at times, as if her father were whispering to her, telling her what to look for, giving her quiet advice.
And then there was the glycerine, which, the chemist had informed her, was left over after the soap was made. He had mentioned that, when properly refined, it was a good base for salves for the skin and for certain medicines; he and Benjamin Al-Khoury were working on a scented lotion for chapped hands, to market alongside the lavender perfume and toilet soaps. At present, he had informed her, the glycerine was sold to explosives manufacturers.
Explosives were used for war, she ruminated, as she enclosed her letter to Joe in an envelope and licked the flap; and she had had enough threat of that round her farm near Fort Edmonton, when the Metis had risen in defence of their land rights. It was only last year that their leader, Louis Riel, had been hanged for rebellion.
Her mind wandered to the problems of her life as a settler. The rebellion had been very frightening; and yet, she considered uneasily, Louis Riel had had a rightful cause. His people were descendants of early European settlers and their Indian wives, and they had been dispossessed of their land further east by the rush of new immigrants from Europe. In despair, they had moved westward to squat on the undeveloped lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Unlike her stepfather, who had himself been a squatter on the Company’s holdings, many of them had not succeeded in establishing their right to remain on the land. She thought smugly that it was thanks to her stepfather’s and her own sagacity that she now owned the land she farmed.
A squatter’s legal rights were tenuous, she knew; she herself had once not hesitated to try to overset a Metis squatter’s right to a riverside homestead which she had coveted.
‘But at least I finished up by paying him for it,’ she had said defensively to one of the Oblate Fathers from St Albert, when he had dared to criticize her ruthless business methods. ‘It cost me all I had at the time,’ she had added, hatred in every inch of her. ‘I could have hounded him off – like the Hudson’s Bay tried to do to my stepfather.’
Her eyes, long, oriental, heavily fringed with thick black lashes, were half-closed and averted from him, as she had continued, ‘When I first came to Fort Edmonton, a young innocent girl, that man shouted obscenities after me, because I’m sallow-skinned and he thought I was a Chinese – a man’s plaything. And I would prefer not to repeat what he used to call my stockman, Joe Black. Why should I care about him, Father?’ She had given a dry little laugh, and had turned and left the discomfited priest standing in the middle of the spring mud of the Fort’s yard.
The priest had sighed. He had been warned by an older priest that this wilful, proud, strayed member of the Christian flock, a lone Maronite Christian survivor of the 1860 massacres in Lebanon, had endured a lot of sorrow. She was now in her late thirties, and, in her business affairs, she had the reputation of being as merciless as an Iroquois woman – and when he considered what Iroquois women had done to captured Jesuit priests in earlier times, a faint shudder went through his thin, bent frame, as if the devil had touched him on the shoulder.
Yet, as he trudged along the trail to his Mission in St Albert, he had to admit that during the Metis uprisings she had been one of the few to remain calm. She had prepared to defend her homestead with more common sense than other settlers, many of whom had panicked – even he and his fellow priests, who ministered to the Metis, had been very frightened.
‘Nobody has to worry about Wallace Harding or Joe Black,’ one of his parishioners in St Albert had assured him. ‘They’re the best shots in the district and she’s got that cabin well defended; the rebels’ll go for easier loot.’
Then, of course, there was Joe Black himself, the priest reflected; Joseph Black, the only negro in the district. Joe had a history, too.
According to Father Lacombe, who knew almost everything about everybody, he was the son of a Cree woman and a freed slave who had accompanied John Rowand on his exploration of the Bow River, further south.
He had been brought up in his maternal grandfather’s lodge and had then gone to work on one of the early ranches. In consequence, he had a wonderful way with horses – with any animals, if it came to that. Later, he had trapped for a time, following the animals northward, and had finally met up with Tom Harding, an American miner. The young priest had never met Tom Harding, but the story was well known; Tom had been a squatter on undeveloped Hudson’s Bay Company land a few miles east of Fort Edmonton.
Disregarding the splutters of rage from the Hudson’s Bay Factor at the Fort, who was rapidly becoming less and less able to enforce his company’s rights to the immense territory they were supposed to control, Tom Harding and Joe Black had, with sporadic aid from Joe’s Cree relatives and a couple of temporarily stranded miners, slowly opened up several square miles, much of it forest. Based on what he had observed in the United States, Tom Harding sowed grass and clover, as well as barley, oats and potatoes. It was backbreaking work and, in addition, they had had the difficult task of protecting their first few animals and hens, not only from predators but also from increasingly hungry parties of Indians.
Despite Joe’s abilities as a hunter and trapper, game was scarce and in the early years they were often hungry themselves. Each year, when the ferocious winter descended on them, they would ask themselves why they bothered and would become irritable with each other. But the first sound of water dripping from the snow-covered roof would raise their spirits, and they would begin to plan the coming year. The Hudson’s Bay Factor, aware of whispers from eastern Canada and from London about the Hudson’s Bay mandate being withdrawn, gave up on them and was thankful, occasionally, to buy or trade for some of their crops, to feed the increasing number of people living in and around the Fort.
The trust between the two men became absolute.
As the early winter cold bit into the priest’s own underfed body during his long walk back to the Mission, he secretly envied Joe Black’s physical strength. Over six feet tall, Joe was, and built to it, with wiry grey hair, teeth discoloured by tobacco, and big black eyes surrounded by innumerable wrinkles; those eyes, thought the priest, could be cold and watchful, like those of a cougar he had once seen; at other times they could dance with amusement, and his deep rumbling laugh would roll across the room. An old clerk at the Fort had told him that Joe had been a fine, handsome man until he had caught the smallpox. The dreadful disease had left its marks on his cheeks and forehead, the priest reflected with compassion, and probably on his character as well.
To the priest, Joe seemed qu
ieter than his general reputation at the Fort would indicate. Men always said that he and Tom Harding were formidable in a fight, but it did not seem to the young priest that he ever tried to pick a quarrel.
He’s very astute – and he’s older now – perhaps that’s why, guessed the priest; he must be at least fifty. But whatever a hard life had done to him, he was alert and quick to grasp a concept; you never had to explain anything twice to the man. And his looks did not seem to bother Miss Harding, Tom’s stepdaughter; it was said that she slept with Joe every night.
They were always together, riding their range, branding, setting traps in the autumn, sowing, reaping, or out shooting for the pot – not that there was much left to shoot these days. Sometimes they would be down at the Fort bargaining for sugar, coffee and tobacco, anything they could not grow or get from the Indians, the tall woman with the marks of suffering on her face and Joe with his wide grin like a steel trap.
Wallace and Joe were notorious for never parting with a penny, if they could do a deal any other way, ruminated the priest, though it was said they often gave food from their slender store to hungry Crees and Blackfoot. Tom Harding had owed his life to a Blackfoot; and his half-Cree partner, Joe, fed his own people.
Now, one of the subjects of the priest’s idle thoughts undressed slowly in a damp, cold bedroom in faraway Liverpool. She thankfully unlaced the tight corset she had bought in Montreal on the advice of the daughter of Mr Nasrullah, with whom she had stayed whilst waiting for the boat to Britain to arrive. She shivered in the unaccustomed dampness as she slipped on a cotton shift. At the washstand, she poured cold water from a pink, flowered jug into a matching bowl and slowly washed her face and hands with a piece of Lady Lavender toilet soap.
Earlier, her Welsh landlady, Mrs Hughes, had kindly put a stone hot water bottle in the feather bed, and when she climbed into the bed it was still warm. The British summer was abominably chilly, Wallace thought irritably, and she pulled the hot water bottle up from her feet and clasped it against her stomach. It was hard and uncomfortable. Fretfully, she pushed it away from her.
Without thinking, she turned over and opened her arms to the other side of the bed. But there was no one there; and again she felt encompassed by an overwhelming loneliness. What was she doing here? Her life was with Joe, she told herself.
Still shivering slightly under the linen sheets, her mind, nevertheless, wandered to the new world of the soapery and its all-male managers and workers.
From her father she had learned that employees were to be treated like family. You scolded them and kept them in line with threats of unemployment; but you looked after them, and they looked after your interests. In fact, most of her father’s employees had been blood relations, distant ones, sometimes – but related all the same.
Were some of the men in the soapery related to her? Or, regardless of that, did they think of themselves as being equivalent to her family? To be protected and cared for by her through good times and bad? It was a formidable thought.
She felt fairly certain that Benjamin Al-Khoury was a blood relation. She remembered vaguely, when her family had been living in Chicago, her father tut-tutting that her Uncle James appeared to be living with an English woman, without benefit of marriage. Such a misalliance would cast a bad name on the Lebanese community, he felt. She believed that he had written to Uncle James, saying that he should marry the lady. Wallace Helena could not recall that her uncle had ever replied to that particular point.
When, after her father’s death, Uncle James had offered her mother and herself a home, her mother had explained that he was not married to the lady who lived with him; and this could make life difficult for them, if they joined his household.
Benjamin Al-Khoury was an employee like any other employee. Yet, if he were her cousin, should she treat him differently? If he were highly resentful that she, instead of himself, had inherited his father’s Estate, how could she placate him, without losing her status as employer?
As she lay amid the unaccustomed softness of the feather bed, she began to think very carefully about how she could retain her authority and yet convey to him that she understood his probable unhappiness.
To her knowledge, she had no other blood relative and that would make him unique to her, someone very special in her estimation. It would put him on a completely different level from everyone else connected with the soapery.
A tiny thrill of hope went through her. To have a real relation implied a reciprocal obligation. Here might be a person of whom one could ask help and reasonably expect assistance as a duty, as from a brother. One could hope for consideration and affection, given freely. It was a wonderful idea to a woman who had faced as bravely as she could her uprooting from her native soil. And, when she had put down tenuous new roots in alien Chicago, she had been uprooted again, to face a life in Canada so harsh that she had expected to die. But, somehow, she had lived, a lonely refugee, misunderstood and disliked.
‘And why I should survive, God only knows,’ she thought wearily, with an odd sense of having been left out.
Amid the turmoil of new impressions collected through the day, it did not strike her that she had been thinking of the Lady Lavender Soap Works as an enterprise she would run herself. She had simply been annoyed when her lawyer, Mr Benson, had suggested that she should leave the selling of the works to him; she had brushed the suggestion off as an insult to her as a helpless woman. The fact that the original reason for her visit had simply been to assess the value of the business had been pushed to the back of her mind by the thrilling possibilities she had immediately seen, as she walked soberly round the buildings.
The straggling collection of sheds, which made up her late uncle’s factory, suggested to her not only a means of livelihood but also the chance to live in a city again, a place of fine new buildings, and homes full of lively enterprising people – literate people. They might even know where Lebanon is, she considered soberly – even have commercial ties with Beirut; Liverpool ships probably docked in Beirut sometimes.
Could one visit Beirut from Liverpool, she wondered suddenly. By this time the city might have settled down again and be safe for a Christian to visit.
As she lay staring at the moulded ceiling of the bedroom, a tightness from a long, sternly suppressed anguish seemed to grow in her chest. She breathed deeply in an effort to stop it engulfing her, and gradually, like some threatening shadow, it retreated.
She sat up and took a sip of water from a glass on the bedside table. Then she lay down again and curled herself up into a tight, foetal position, as if to protect herself from feelings too painful to be unleashed.
Chapter Four
She slept uneasily and suffered a familiar nightmare, though some of the hazy, sadistic faces which seemed to peer at her out of the darkness were, this time, reminiscent of the men she had met in the soapery.
She cried out frantically to them, ‘I’m not Wallace Harding, I’m not! I’m Helena Al-Khoury – and I hate the Territories. I want to go home to Beirut. Let me go! I want to go home.’
It seemed as if she pulled herself away from restraining hands, and floated easily along a seashore; and then she was in her father’s courtyard amid the perfume from the blossom of the lemon tree. Uncle James was picking her up and saying she was as sweet as the flowers on the tree. She laughed in his swarthy, cheerful face, and he was gone. Instead, her mother was there, her blenched face beaded with sweat, as she held Helena’s hand and pulled her along. ‘Hurry, my darling. Run!’
1860 and she was nearly twelve. As her terrified mother pulled her along behind her father, Charles Al-Khoury, she heard his startled exclamations at the hideous sights which each turn in the narrow streets revealed, the carnage left by a mob gone mad.
Before turning into a narrow alley leading down to the waterfront, they crouched close to the side of the blank wall of a warehouse, to catch their breath, while Charles Al-Khoury peered down the lane to make sure it was clear.
Almost numb with fear, his wife and daughter followed closely after him. Suddenly, he half-tripped over a dark shape lying on the ground. His women bumped into him and clung to him.
They stared down in horror. A woman had had her clothes torn off her. She had been butchered like a dead cow, and the child of her womb lay smashed against a house wall. A horribly mutilated, decapitated man lay near her, and further down the alley were other pitiful bundles, blood-soaked and still.
Leila Al-Khoury vomited, the vomit making her fluttering black head veil cling to her face. Young Helena began to scream in pure terror.
Her father clapped his hand over her mouth. ‘Helena!’ he whispered forcefully. ‘Be quiet.’
She swallowed her fear and nearly choked with the effort.
As they continued to scurry down narrow lanes, leading seaward, her father held her close to him, so that she would see as little as possible of the carnage; dogs were already nosing cautiously at the corpses of the Maronite Christians and being challenged by venturesome birds. One or two dogs had entered little homes through smashed doorways and could be heard growling over the spoils inside.
Wallace Helena, the grown woman, stirred in her bed, and cried out to the only person left to assuage her nightmares. ‘Joe, darling! Joe!’ But she was not heard and plunged again into her scarifying dreams, her heart beating a frantic tattoo.
Much later on, when they had established themselves in Chicago, she had asked her mother how the massacre had come about. She had been sitting cross-legged on her parents’ bed, watching her mother struggle into Western clothes.