Surprised, he said, ‘Sure. I’ll try.’
‘Thanks, Joe.’
The big eyes narrowed in a smile of gratitude, as she lifted the latch. ‘Goodnight, Joe.’
He nodded and turned away. Heavy with uneasy thoughts, he went over to his mother’s cabin by the barn. Up till then he had enjoyed his bachelorhood; when food had been in better supply, he had gone to parties and special celebrations given by local Crees and had sometimes roistered with young Metis down at the Fort. Though women were a little scarce, there was usually someone happy to lie with a handsome man for a small consideration. When Tom had married for the first time, it had stretched the resources of the fledgling homestead to its limits, and Joe had decided that since there was no one whom he particularly fancied he would stay single for a bit longer.
That evening, as he sat cross-legged making a pair of snowshoes for Wallace Helena, he began to think differently. As he carefully twisted and knotted the gut in the snowshoes, he sighed. He was twenty-seven years old – getting on – to her fourteen; and, though Tom Harding spoke of him as his partner, he knew that Tom regarded the homestead as his, and Joe got his keep and a small share of any cash that came along – as wages. Only the money he earned from his trapline was his own, and furbearing animals got scarcer every winter.
He told himself not to be a fool.
Chapter Twelve
A few days later, just before Christmas, Leila asked Tom if he would take her down to the Fort to see Jeanette, who had kindly put her up on the night of her arrival at Fort Edmonton. It seemed warmer outside and the snow was not too deep on the trail, so Tom amiably agreed. Joe had gone to tend his trapline.
Eager for a change, Wallace Helena begged to go with them, so the sleigh was got down from the wall of the barn and, with hot bricks to their feet and blankets and a buffalo robe tucked round them, the women were driven in style down to the Fort. It was a bumpy ride, but they enjoyed it.
Leila was consumed with anxiety about her abysmal lack of knowledge, and while she sat by Jeanette’s fire and discussed the duties of a settler’s wife, Tom went to have a drink with the blacksmith, and Wallace Helena wandered out into the yard of the Fort, to see what was happening. Both men and women stared at her; she had thrown her shawl back from her head and it gave them a chance to examine Tom Harding’s new daughter. Some of the women smiled at her and spoke to her in Cree, but she did not understand. So she smiled back, and passed on. The gate of the Fort was open and a number of Metis were hanging around it, smoking and gossiping. She had to pass close to them to go out of the gate, and one of them said to another in French, ‘They’re Chinks, all right.’ He sounded derogatory and presumably believed that Wallace Helena could not understand French. ‘Bit of stuff for a cold night.’
Wallace Helena stopped in her tracks. Slowly she turned to face the speaker. She took a step towards him, and slapped him hard across the face. ‘You dirty bastard,’ she shouted, and told him in fluent French translation of Arabic phrases who his mother had probably been.
Shocked and then outraged, his face contorted, the man would have gone for her, but he was held back by his friends, whispering anxiously to him, ‘Tom Harding will give you hell. Leave her alone.’
Restrained by his friends, he could do nothing but spit at the girl’s feet, as she turned and went hastily back to Jeanette’s quarters. Terribly shaken, she sat quietly by her mother for the rest of the visit. She never forgot or forgave this first insult and the others which subsequently came her way when the Scottish clerks in the Fort decided loftily that she and her mother were Jewish and that Tom Harding should never have been allowed to bring them into the district; it was doubtful, she thought, if any of them could have found Lebanon on a map.
Leila never went anywhere without Tom, so she was spared direct slurs on her origins. She was willing to go to the dance at the Fort at Christmas, feeling that her daughter would enjoy the gaiety of the season there. The place was packed with men, women and children of all ages, though there were no white women. Leila sat on a bench beside Agnes Black and her sister Theresa, who worked in the kitchen of the Fort. She refused to dance because she thought it was unseemly, but she was polite and charming to those women who spoke to her, speaking French when they understood and her broken English when they did not.
Though both Tom and Joe encouraged Wallace Helena to join them in the mixture of Indian dances, Scottish reels and French folk dances, she was apprehensive and shy and was glad to go back to her mother and stay close to her. The Scots passed her with a scornful look. None of the Metis came near her, having heard the story of how one of their number had been slapped in public by this forward little piece who, if she wasn’t Chinese, was indubitably Jewish.
Defiant and insulted, Wallace Helena stonily refused to go down to the Fort again. Since she would not give either Joe or Tom a reason for this, it was some time before the men heard the story and identified the man concerned. Tom was furious and wanted to ride down to the Fort straight away to give him a sound beating. Joe, more cautious, pointed out that the man was a Company employee and that the Factor would probably take his part against a pair of illegal squatters like themselves. It was possible that if they created a fracas, the Factor would make a much greater effort to drive them off the land they occupied. Better to wait and if anybody else insulted either Leila or Wallace Helena to immediately file a complaint with the Company. Meanwhile, one of them should always be close beside them, and not let them out of sight.
A fuming Tom was finally persuaded to agree to this, and Leila continued to visit Jeanette whenever Tom had business at the Fort. Jeanette did not return the visits, mainly because her growing number of small children tied her to her home. It was months before Wallace Helena was persuaded to accompany her mother, and she stayed with Leila in Jeanette’s quarters until Tom collected them.
Slowly, the young girl learned Cree from Joe and Agnes. It was learned verbally, because there were no books in Cree, and she often made amusing mistakes, so that the three of them laughed together over them. Tom had a smattering of it, but Leila felt she had enough to learn anyway, without wasting time on another language, and she never learned to speak it, though through constantly hearing it, she often understood what was being said. The language opened the door to communication with friends and relations of Joe’s who sometimes arrived in the course of their seasonal migrations. It was another new world to Wallace Helena, and, because she was respectful and a good listener, some of them became fond of her in their undemonstrative way.
As the winter passed and the spring sent the men out on to the land again, Leila discussed with Agnes the tremendous list that Jeanette had given her of the duties of a homestead wife. Neither spoke English very well, but Agnes understood quickly enough Leila’s doubts that she would be able to fulfil them all.
Agnes said comfortably that there were two of them, which cheered up Leila a little. The Lebanese proved to be a good organizer; she had been used to supervising servants in her Beirut home. She could cook, and learned from Agnes how to make the most of what food was available to them. Between the two of them, they looked after the all-important vegetable patch and the precious hens, milked the cows, scrubbed clothes and sewed garments for all of them, either out of trade cloth, bought from the Hudson’s Bay Company, or from skins that Agnes cleaned and tanned.
Prompted by Jeanette, Leila discussed quantities with Tom and Joe. How much wood, how much meat, how much grain should be ground for the winter? How many hens should they kill in the autumn? How many pigs – how much bacon? They soon learned to be thankful for her forethought.
As her health was restored to her, she used her own experience in Lebanon and made better use of the milk they had by preserving it for a few days as yoghurt, then making butter of it. She got Joe to make a small churn to her design and, later, a rough copy of a cheese press that she had seen in Chicago, so that she could make cheese.
The men got used to her shril
l voice scolding Simon Wounded or Joe, reminding Agnes, calling in Wallace Helena to do something. Her daughter grinned, as she heard the familiar tones of an Eastern lady asserting herself in her domestic sphere. Leila was, however, generous with praise, as if, at times, everyone was a miracle worker, and she would croon tenderly over those who suffered the inevitable knocks, cuts and burns of their hard life, learning from Agnes something of local cures and sedatives.
Agnes, Simon and Joe often laughed at her privately, and occasionally cursed at her insistence on jobs being finished when she said they were to be. She treated them, however, absolutely as friends and equals and she often took their proffered advice. When she found their friends hanging round her door, she would always find something in her storeroom to feed them with.
Not everything went perfectly. In the first years, there were often domestic disasters, like the awful day when Leila clapped her hands at a skunk when it came into the summer kitchen and the skunk sprayed everything. Leila would cry passionately on Tom’s shoulder, venting her frustration for all to hear. Yet he never regretted his marriage.
Under the weight of work in a harsh climate, her beauty soon faded. They became dear friends and often laughed at secret jokes, which sometimes made Wallace Helena feel left out.
Wallace Helena not only inherited Tom Harding’s son’s name, she also learned to do the work that he would have done, had he lived. It was as well that, though not large-boned, she was lithe and, as she grew older, she acquired considerable physical strength.
Joe Black reluctantly decided that he was much too old for her and continued his bachelor ways, visiting the obliging women who lived in a shack not far from the Fort when he felt the need for feminine company. As they worked together, however, he did shyly share with her his profound knowledge of the wildlife round them and of the sorely distressed aboriginal people who were beginning to feel the pressure of the white settlements in the east. She learned to speak enough Cree to enjoy a joke with them, and one young man asked Tom for her in marriage. She turned him down.
Though so hard-worked that she had little time to think of herself as a person with needs of her own, she was not unaware of the stirring of desires in her that, as far as she could see, could not be met. She nursed a terrible resentment of the men in the Fort and it became a latent bitterness as she grew older.
She thought of Joe as being of the same generation as her stepfather, though in fact he was much younger, and considered him the equivalent of an uncle.
Often dressed in an Indian woman’s moccasins and gaiters, she would ride alongside him and became nearly as adept as him in caring for the livestock. She left the slaughter of pigs and steers to him, but she soon got used to cutting the throats of chickens, snaring and skinning rabbits and catching fish and gutting them.
Leila was, at first, shaken at what her daughter was doing, but Agnes Black laughed and told Leila she was lucky not to have to do the butchering herself. Leila cheerfully cooked whatever the others brought in, learning from Agnes the art of reducing a beaver, a lynx or, once, a bear, to edible stews. The skins of the wild game were carefully cleaned by Agnes or Tom and were sold into the fur trade, providing either much-needed cash, or credit at the Hudson’s Bay trading post.
As Wallace Helena grew into a tough independent young woman, rejecting the people in the Fort as ignorant and uncivilized, Agnes Black, quiet and observant, worried a little about her son. Sometimes, after shutting the yard gate after them, she would stand and watch Joe and Wallace Helena race out along the rough lane which strung Tom’s and Joe’s holdings together, the girl nearly as skittish as the mare under her.
Joe should have got married years ago to some decent Cree girl, she thought. But she had never persuaded him to do anything he did not want to do; and his grandfather was too distant to exert his influence. Now, she sensed Wallace Helena’s attraction for him; she saw it in the careful way he always dealt with her, keeping just sufficient distance between them to discourage intimacy.
On summer evenings, before they all went to bed, they would sometimes sit outside to catch the evening breeze, Leila and herself on the cabin step, Tom, Joe and Wallace Helena on the nearby fence. The men and Wallace Helena would smoke. Joe had taught the girl how to use a little Indian pipe or roll a cigarette for herself if papers were available. When she first arrived, she had been so on edge that Joe had feared she would be ill, and he had suggested that she learn to smoke, to calm her. Now, she could not imagine being without tobacco, and she looked forward to this quiet half hour when sometimes they talked and at other times were glad simply to relax under the wide, darkening sky.
Once the afterglow had faded, Leila would call them in, because, ever since the brush with the skunk and a later encounter with a porcupine, she had been afraid of wild animals straying in after dark. Wallace Helena never demurred and went in with her mother, and Agnes saw her son’s eyes follow her.
‘If he wants her,’ she thought fretfully sometimes, ‘why doesn’t he ask her?’ And she answered herself by saying that Tom would not tolerate it.
Chapter Thirteen
Though Leila sustained a friendship with Jeanette, she never became close to anyone else. The Harding homestead was less than five miles from the little Fort, but it was too far for frequent contact, particularly when the narrow trail along the river was often very muddy or, in winter, choked with snow. Except for the Indians and a few trappers, most of the activity of the Fort was with its connections downriver; what small traffic there was went that way and did not pass the Harding place. Even with Jeanette, both Leila and Wallace Helena sometimes found themselves at a loss, because they had had some education – Jeanette could not even read – and, further, they had had the experience of living in two other countries. On Jeanette’s part, she could not understand Leila’s disinterest in children – or her lack of them.
When Tom first married his pretty Lebanese, he had hoped for another son, but when he saw Leila collapse during her journey to Fort Edmonton, he realized that, as his mother had warned him, she had not the strength a pioneer life required. He began to fear that he might lose her in childbirth, as he had done his first wife. So, as the months went by and his new wife did not become pregnant, he was relieved. He soon tumbled to the fact that the few days each month during which she refused to make love, on the grounds of religious observances, had a twenty-eight-day cycle, and probably had something to do with the avoidance of pregnancy. Haunted by the fate of his first wife, he humoured her and settled down to being cosseted by a wife trained, since the day she took her first tottering steps, to please a man.
He appreciated the tremendous effort she made to do her part in running the homestead as well as a Metis woman would have done, except that she did not give much help in the fields or garden. He knew he was fortunate in having three women on the place who got along very well together; they rarely quarrelled and soon made up again; and, as he said one day to Joe, ‘Between the three of them, they shift a hell of a lot of work.’
Joe grinned. From the hill that sloped upwards behind the cabin, he could see how far they had extended their cleared land since the advent of Leila and Wallace Helena. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘and you and I’ve shifted a lot, as a result of being freed up a bit by them!’
Tom nodded agreement. ‘We’ll fence this section before the fall,’ he said.
‘The Company’s not going to like it – it’s still their land.’
‘The Company won’t last forever. They can’t hold the land, as it is. If they could, they would’ve tipped out every Metis who’s built himself a cabin and dug a vegetable garden, not to speak of running me out of town.’
‘Well, mebbe you’ll have a son who’ll own it.’
‘Humph.’ Tom flicked the reins of his horse and started it down towards the cabin. He had been married three years, and Joe must be wondering why he had no more family. Well, he could keep on wondering.
Wallace Helena was seventeen. She had
fully expected that by this time she would have some small brothers and sisters, and one day after visiting Jeanette and her brood, she asked her mother why none had arrived.
Her mother smiled secretively, and said, ‘I’ll explain it next time the boys are out and Agnes has gone to visit her sister at the Fort.’ It was time, she felt, that Wallace Helena should understand these things.
Seated by the fire, one cool autumn evening, some mending in her lap, she said frankly to her daughter that, once she had seen the lonely little Fort and the still more lonely cabin, she had decided that she did not want to bear infants in such a deserted place only to see them die.
‘An awful lot of them do die round the Fort, I know,’ Wallace Helena agreed, holding up the sock she was knitting to see how she was getting on.
‘I lost both your little brothers and that was enough. Thank goodness I have you, my darling, and that you are strong and healthy. And I have dear Tom, bless him.’
‘I would hate to see my babies die,’ Wallace Helena said. ‘I felt awful when the boys died.’
‘I know, dear.’ She looked suddenly old, as she sat with needle poised over the patch she was sewing and stared into the fire, to visualize the world from which she had come, the warmth, the vivacity, the sophistication of it – and the two small graves.
She shook her head and forced herself to attend to what she wanted to say. Smiling gently, she said, ‘One day, perhaps some nice Lebanese will find his way here – and he’ll marry you and take you away to a more civilized place. Then you can give me some grandchildren.’
Wallace Helena smiled back at her mother, but said nothing; Mama was entitled to her little flights of fancy.
Bored with knitting, she got pen, ink and paper down from a shelf, to write a thank-you letter to Uncle James for the small box of Arabic books he had sent them. The wonderful present had taken nearly a year upon its journey, and Leila had cried when she had lifted out the works of her favourite poet
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