The Lemon Tree

by Helen Forrester

  The wind was quite brisk and the mosquitoes were few. The breeze was whipping the leaves off the trees, and it was through a sudden storm of them that he caught his first glimpse of Leila, barely visible amid shawls and veils. Tom was riding a heavy, black horse and held her in the crook of his arm in front of him.

  Behind him, clutching the reins of a smaller animal, rode a scarecrow of a young girl. She had thrown back the veil of the hat perched on the back of her head, to reveal a sallow face so thin that it seemed to consist of two enormous brown eyes surrounded by masses of newly washed black hair; soft strands of it blew across her hollow cheeks.

  For a second, Joe ignored his grinning friend. As Wallace Helena approached and caught sight of him, he saw the desolation in the girl’s wonderful eyes suddenly replaced by intense fear. It seemed to him that, on seeing him, she reined in her horse instinctively, and half-glanced back along the trail as if to escape.

  Uncertain himself, Joe stopped his own horse and dismounted, to wait until Tom reached him. The infernal shriek of the cart behind slowed and ceased.

  ‘Hullo, there,’ said Joe carefully to the party. ‘Glad to see you.’

  A small hand emerged from the shawls in front of Tom, and Leila smiled shyly at him. Although she looked very wan, Joe understood immediately what had captured Tom. She was a beauty. He turned to look at Tom, whose lined, suntanned visage went suddenly bright red with embarrassment. He managed to say, ‘Hi, Joe. Good to see you again.’ Then he looked down at Leila and said, ‘This is my wife.’

  Joe raised his hand in salute to her, and said to Tom, ‘Congratulations! Du Pont’s son told me the news.’

  He turned towards Wallace Helena, who was regarding him cautiously from under her long fringe of lashes. He grinned up at her, and asked Tom, ‘And this lady?’

  ‘My stepdaughter, Wallace Helena.’

  Joe’s eyebrows lifted slightly at the familiar first name. He then raised his hand again to salute her. His eyes twinkled cheerfully, and he was glad to see her relax slightly, as he said, ‘Nice to meet you, Miss. Hope you and your ma’ll be happy here.’

  She nodded, and replied in a shy whisper, ‘Thank you.’

  Because the path was too narrow to ride abreast, Joe remounted his horse to lead them back to the cabin. The cart resumed its terrible shriek, making any communication impossible. News would have to wait.

  Thanks to Jeanette, her hostess of the previous night, a bathed and tidy Leila managed to walk across the threshold of the cabin which was to be her home for the rest of her life.

  As she entered on her husband’s arm, she paused. The room seemed quite large to her and, except for the hunting and trapping gear hanging on the walls, looked more comfortable than the miserable apartment they had left in Chicago.

  During the night just past, her mind had cleared of the fever, and she had come to the conclusion that, whatever awaited her here, it could not be worse than the traumatic journey she had barely survived. Here were four solid walls to protect her from the jungle outside.

  With timid determination, she surveyed the cabin’s interior. If she could regain her strength, she would make it into a real home for the husband of her choice.

  She looked up at Tom and smiled shyly. ‘You have a nice home,’ she lied.

  Very thankfully, he squeezed her arm, as Agnes Black, another shy person, came out of the lean-to summer kitchen. She was a heavily built, short woman, garbed in a full, printed cotton skirt and a black blouse. On her feet, she wore shabby skin slippers. As she waited for Leila to speak to her, she pushed wisps of grey hair away from a face like a raisin. Her black eyes gleamed in the firelight.

  Leila had not forgotten old Mrs Harding’s remark that she would be no use as a pioneer’s wife, and she realized that she would be dependent upon this quiet, foreign woman to show her how to do practically everything. She smiled at her and said slowly to her, in poor English, ‘I am glad you here.’

  The genuine relief expressed in the words touched the Indian woman. She made a small gesture towards the hearth where a pot of coffee was keeping warm before the fire. ‘I’ve made coffee for you,’ she said simply.

  Leila nodded and smiled again, and Tom propelled her towards a roughly made wooden chair. She sat down thankfully and closed her eyes; tears of weakness eased out from under the lids.

  She wondered how Tom could expose her to such a terrible journey. Yet, when he held a mug of coffee to her lips and she opened her eyes, to see him peering anxiously at her, a warmth coursed through her feeble frame. She drank the coffee slowly, allowing him to continue to hold the mug.

  Wallace Helena and Joe Black had followed Leila and Tom into the cabin. Joe took his boots off at the door, so Wallace Helena did the same. Her eyes were wide with apprehension as she looked round her new home. She felt at a loss, almost unable to cope with anything more that was new to her.

  Joe’s mother poured cups of coffee for them and they sat down, side by side, on a bench to drink it. Most of the attention was focused on Leila, resting in the curve of her husband’s arm.

  Joe said something in Cree to his mother. She nodded, and asked Tom in the same language if his wife would like to lie down. What was her sickness?

  Tom explained about the fever, and Agnes asked if she would like to have a draught which she could concoct; it would help her to sleep and relieve any fever remaining.

  Leila was a little reluctant to take a strange medicine, but Tom assured her that Agnes was known for her ability to heal. She was persuaded to lie on his bed to rest, in a tiny, doorless room at one side of the cabin, and after supper she sipped down the bitter mixture which Agnes brought to her. Covered by buffalo robes, she slept for fifteen hours.

  Meanwhile, Agnes, apparently unruffled by the addition of two females to the household, showed Wallace Helena the summer kitchen and the clay oven outside, in which she baked rough barley bread.

  They inspected an adjacent store house, which had a hole dug into its earthen floor. ‘When the river has frozen, Joe cuts out blocks of ice and lines the hole with them – it lengthens the time we can store raw meat,’ she explained in halting English. The hut also held smoked fish, pemmican and various boxes and barrels collected over the years to store vegetables in.

  Outside the cabin itself, against one wall, was a pile of roughly hewn logs. A middle-aged Indian with long thin plaits on either side of his face was stolidly swinging an axe, as he reduced the trunk of a tree to logs. He paused, put down his axe and leaned on it, as they approached. ‘Simon Wounded,’ explained Agnes. She spoke in Cree to the man, and he nodded understanding. He did not look directly at Wallace Helena, but lifted his axe again and continued his work.

  ‘He lives with Joe and me over there.’ Agnes pointed to a shack on the other side of the muddy yard. She turned and pointed again to a bigger building. ‘That’s the barn.’ They walked over to inspect it and disturbed a flurry of hens.

  Agnes showed her the outhouse behind the cabin, and then they returned to the cabin.

  While Agnes watched her with some amusement, Wallace Helena walked slowly round it to examine the amazing collection of implements, pieces of harness, lanterns, clothes and wraps on the walls. There were guns on a rack over the fireplace, and shelves at man-height were littered with caps, hats, old boots and shoes, tools, a shaving mug, what looked like folded skins, and a series of beautifully woven round baskets. From the beams hung what Wallace Helena imagined must be traps for small animals, side by side with bunches of herbs, several bunches of onions and two flitches of bacon. Agnes pointed to the latter, and said, ‘I finished smoking them a while back. Tomorrow, Tom’ll probably find time to make a space in the store house for them.’

  Wallace Helena nodded. Despite the clutter, the place had a sense of being a home, long-established and cosy.

  As she helped Agnes prepare an evening meal, and Tom went round his domain with Joe, to hear all that had happened in his absence, Wallace Helena began to emerge fro
m the desolation and fear which had gripped her for so long.

  She did not like what she saw, but Agnes’s quiet competence assured her that there was an organized way of life in the isolated homestead, probably a more dependable one than that they had endured in Chicago.

  Sensing the girl’s uncertainties, Agnes told her about life inside the Fort, and that there were other forts strung across the country, with which the Company kept in touch. The boats plying the river brought them news from Fort Garry and York House, on Hudson Bay. ‘And from London, where they say the Great Queen lives,’ she added.

  Wallace Helena was impressed and comforted; they were not quite so alone as she had imagined. Good weather also helped her; the autumn skies were a flawless blue and the leaves on the deciduous trees and bushes flaunted their reds and yellows. There was little hint of the bitterness of the winter to come.

  Leila stayed in bed for most of the first few days in her new home. Then, as her strength returned, she got up and slowly explored the immediate environs of the cabin. In her soft, poor English, she asked quiet questions of Agnes Black and Simon Wounded about their daily tasks and listened respectfully to their replies. She asked Tom details about what was required to prepare for the winter, which, she had gathered from Agnes, was very severe.

  Once it was apparent to Wallace Helena that her mother was beginning to take charge of her new domain, she thankfully left her in the stuffy cabin and went out with Joe and Tom. She had ridden once or twice in the mountains behind Beirut but it took her some time to control the pony on which Joe mounted her. With a good deal of laughter, she learned to stay on it and became devoted to it.

  Being short of labour because of Tom’s absence, they were late in getting in the last of the oats and potatoes, so Wallace Helena fetched and carried for all three men, who worked from dawn to dusk. She also helped Agnes raise water from the well, a long, slow job of lowering a bucket on a rope and hauling it up again. Agnes assured her that it was easier than carrying bucketfuls on a yoke, from the river.

  She slept in a bunk in the living-room, so tired that she was not even haunted by her usual nightmare about the little boy she had seen dying in a lane in Beirut.

  Though almost overwhelmed by the length and harshness of the journey, Wallace Helena had, throughout, followed Sally’s advice with regard to her new stepfather; she had set out to make a friend of him.

  A kindly man, worried to death about his new wife’s health, Tom Harding thankfully met her half way. It was not an easy adjustment; they sometimes found themselves at loggerheads. Wallace Helena was understandably resentful that she had been replaced by the quiet American as first in her mother’s affections.

  For his part, Tom remembered his own terror of the empty wilderness, when he had become lost en route to Fort Edmonton. He sympathized with Wallace Helena’s obvious fear of the strange, primitive world in which she now found herself. To help her in adjusting, he asked Agnes and Joe Black to be particularly patient with her. Though Wallace Helena was largely unaware of their solicitude, she began to relax with them and to talk to them.

  It dawned slowly on Wallace Helena that, though everybody in this untamed land was subject to the vagaries of weather, forest fires, angry Indians and clouds of insects, she was herself much more free than she would have been as the daughter of a Beirut silk merchant. When she considered what her life would have been like had she returned to Lebanon after living in Chicago, she knew she would have found it difficult to endure such a protective environment. Yet, like other immigrants, she often wept, and longed to hear her own language, her own music, have books in Arabic to read, and be able to wear her soft, light native dress. The extraordinary lack of people also bothered her, and she once asked Joe lightly, ‘If all the people in all Rupert’s Land met together, would they form a decent crowd?’

  ‘Well,’ he drawled softly, ‘there’s plenty of Indians – only they don’t build forts or homesteads; they can pack up a camp and move on – and a few months later you wouldn’t know they’d been here. You’ll see some of them, when they come in to trade at the Fort.’

  She asked him what they traded, and so began a long period of learning the background of Indians, Metis and Europeans, now face-to-face in the land which she had, at first, believed to be empty. It was also the beginning of a great friendship with the big, dark man.

  Chapter Eleven

  The outdoor work in pure cool air acted as an anodyne to Wallace Helena’s sense of loss, yet again, of her roots. Being young, she had begun to be accustomed to Chicago; faces of fellow immigrants had become familiar to her and she had made a devoted friend in Sally. Her father’s little shop had begun to prosper. Within their tiny apartment they ate Lebanese food and spoke Arabic. The day her father died her small hopes had shattered; yet there remained the familiarity of place and neighbours.

  Now, she and her mother had to start again. Leila had Tom to console her. Wallace Helena mourned for her father, and wondered if she would ever know again a peaceful life such as they had enjoyed in Beirut until the day of the massacre.

  After living in cities, the immensity of the empty land appalled and terrified her; even the mountains of Lebanon did not have the close-packed, silent forests that the Territories had. Her journey by York boat had given her an idea of the hugeness of the country, and, though Agnes had comforted her by telling her of other forts and other settlements further east, she could, for a long time, be suddenly seized by an unreasoning terror of the unknown. When, once or twice, she rode along the old trail following the river bank to the Fort and saw it from a short distance as they came to land that had been cleared, it looked too puny to survive, a tiny anthill liable to be blown out of existence by the merciless gales. Closer to the river, below the Fort, there were usually a few small boats drawn up on the beach, and when she considered the hundreds of miles of river she had seen, they looked like little cockleshells, too small to take her back to civilization, even if she had a place to go to.

  The days became sharply colder; the mud of the yard froze to an uneven lumpiness; the breath of men and animals hung like a mist in the air and the snow drifted down on the roofs, first a skiff of it, then short flurries and then the occasional storm. It did not melt but piled high enough for it to be necessary to dig paths to the barn, to the windbreak where the steers huddled against the rough shelter to keep warm, to the privy and to Joe’s and Agnes’s shack.

  Fearing that the roofs might collapse with the weight of the snow, Joe and Tom several times during the winter climbed up to shovel some of it off. They were watched by both Wallace Helena and Leila with some apprehension for fear they would fall; broken bones could spell disaster for all of them. As the cold increased, their world became the yard and the buildings round it and the steers nearby. Occasionally, Wallace Helena would struggle down the slope to look at the white expanse of the river. Sometimes, there were the marks of a sleigh in the snow covering the ice, and once she saw one and waved to the musher, thankful to greet another person. He raised his whip in salute and she stood and listened to the occasional yap of the dogs as they vanished upriver.

  Though she tried to keep a bright face for her mother and Tom and Joe, her courage sometimes failed her. In the privacy of the barn, when she went to feed Peggy, her piebald pony, she would, now and then, lay her head against the animal’s blanketed flanks and weep.

  Joe found her there, one night, sobbing quietly as she shovelled manure away from the animal, in the light of a lantern flickering on a shelf. He took the shovel away from her and leaned it against the wall. Anxious to stem the passionate tears, he put his arm round her. She put her head against his wolfskin jacket and cried, innocently unaware of the feelings engendered in him, ‘It’s so lonely, Joe.’

  He patted her back as he held her. ‘It’s not so lonely as you think,’ he assured her. ‘You’ve got your ma and Tom and me – and Agnes and Simon.’ He rocked her gently from side to side, and his voice was a little thick, as he co
ntinued, ‘This cold spell will pass and we’ll get a chinook wind; that’ll send the temperature up.’ The sobs began to ease, and he lifted her chin with one hand to look at her face. ‘Don’t cry, honey. Christmas will soon be here, and if your ma’s well enough, we’ll get out the sleigh and go to the dancing at the Fort.’

  She smiled wanly at him, and said, ‘Sally used to call me Honey.’

  She felt the great barrel of his chest shudder, as he laughed down at her. ‘Did she? Who’s she?’

  He let her go as she began to tell him. While she spoke, he took up the shovel and finished the job of moving the manure.

  ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘you could write to her, if you know her address. Mail goes in and outta here twice a year at least. Mebbe she’d write back to you.’

  ‘Really? Could I write to Uncle James in Liverpool – in England?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. The Bay carries letters for Tom, down into the States.’ He hung the shovel on its hook and prepared to help her across the yard.

  He had caught her interest. She rubbed the tears out of her eyes, and her expression was suddenly animated.

  ‘I’ll ask Tom if he can spare a piece of paper to write on. Mama might like to write as well.’

  ‘Sure. Tom’ll spare you a sheet – he keeps some to write his ma.’

  He opened the small side door of the barn, and they fought to shut it again after them, while the wind tore at it. The cold hit them, and he put his arm round her to steady her across the yard.

  Wallace Helena had been quiet as they battled their way to the cabin door. Now with her hand on the latch, she turned to Joe, and asked him without preamble, ‘Joe, could you teach me Cree? Then I could talk to the Indians. When that band came through in the autumn, you and Tom had a good laugh with them. But I couldn’t understand a word.’ She pulled her scarf up over her mouth against the cold, though they were standing in the lee of the cabin.