The Lemon Tree

by Helen Forrester

  Thank goodness for old Simon Wounded, thought Joe; he, at least, seemed to be happy to stay put. In addition to him, they were currently employing two drifters, who lived with Simon in the bunkhouse. They had come up from the States, single men who had tried mining, whisky-running and being cowhands on a ranch south of Calgary. Wallace Helena was not very satisfied with them and said sarcastically that they were probably wanted by various sheriffs south of the border. She would not have them in the house, and they cooked for themselves; it was obvious that they were not happy sharing the bunkhouse with an Indian and resented Simon’s privileged position in the household. Joe hoped they would last until Wallace Helena returned.

  Emily was scared of them and, at first, they teased her. Joe noticed, and told them that if they touched her, he’d see that they were not much use to a woman after it. Because he was bigger and tougher than they were, they sulkily heeded him; they also bore in mind that behind Joe stood a woman like a ruthless witch, noted in the district for her almost superhuman abilities to get her own way and to pay back an insult.

  ‘She’ll take her time,’ a labourer in the village had told them, ‘but sooner or later, if you cross her, you’ll find yourself run out of the place on some excuse – if you’re not struck dead.’

  Though they laughed at the old man, they bore the information in mind.

  Wallace Helena had never killed a person in her life. But, once, she had had such a fearsome row with a Metis, who had tried to settle on a corner of her land, that the man had had a stroke and had subsequently died. The incident had been more frightening to the British inhabitants, in that the row had taken place in fluent French on the main trail through the settlement. Finally, she had poked him in the chest with a long forefinger and had sworn at him in Arabic. He had stormed back at her, and then he had suddenly clutched his throat and fallen to the ground.

  Burning with rage, Wallace Helena had remounted Peggy and had ridden away, leaving him lying in the dust of the trail.

  Though the more educated people understood what had happened, many did not. They knew that Wallace Helena came from some strange Middle Eastern country, and nestled in the back of their minds there remained the idea that she might have mysterious powers on which she could call; such powers could account for Joe’s and her success as mixed farmers.

  Joe and Wallace Helena grinned at each other, when the latter rumour reached them. They both knew that their thriving farm was due largely to Joe’s and Simon’s profound knowledge of the country, of its weather, its animals and the customs of the Crees. To help them further, Uncle James had sent them a steady succession of books on animal husbandry and grain farming, particularly in cold climates, like Russia. Tom had loved his land and had broken the sod; Wallace Helena and Joe were devoted to making it blossom, come drought, come bitter winter.

  Though Wallace Helena was a proud, fierce and tetchy woman, she had not been so proud that she could not face picking the brains of the Manager of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s own farm, in order to avoid repeating any mistakes they had made. She also talked to the Oblate Fathers, when they came south from Lac St Anne or St Albert. None of them liked her very much; she did not belong to their flock and she lived in sin with Joe Black. She had the advantage, though, that she spoke fluent, educated French, and in their work of settling the Metis, they were just as interested as she was in good farming; so they exchanged ideas with her like scientists, regardless of their personal feelings, and, with a similar sense of rivalry, watched each other’s experiments.

  After breakfast, Joe Black went out into the yard to inspect a sapling he had brought up from Calgary, after seeing Wallace Helena onto the train. He had been told that it was almost impossible to grow apples so far north – the cold spring wind blew the blossoms off before they had set; he had expected that the tree would die during the several days he had taken to ride the two hundred miles home from Calgary, with it tied to the back of a packhorse, beside a couple of new pickaxes. The tree, however, was looking quite healthy; it had retained its leaves, and its branches were stretching upwards. In the hope that rabbits would not be able to get at it, he had fenced it round with a precious piece of chicken wire.

  He smiled grimly to himself. Wallace Helena never wanted anything to be planted that could not be either eaten or traded. He had noticed that some of the white women now settling round Edmonton had planted little flowerbeds near their cabins or clapboard houses. He had asked Wallace Helena if she would like him to bring in some wild flower seeds, to start such a garden.

  She had looked up at him from her account book, and had asked in a bemused voice, ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, the white women seem to plant them. Would you like some?’

  She had caught his great hand and squeezed it, while she laughed up at him. ‘I’m not white – any Metis would be happy to tell you that I’m yellow.’ Her lips met in a thin line. ‘I’m Lebanese. Flowers might seed amongst the vegetables – and we’ve got enough weeds already.’

  ‘O.K.’ He turned to leave her, but she still held his hand firmly. She said suddenly and very wistfully, ‘I wish I could get a lemon tree.’

  He had never heard of or seen a lemon, so he asked, ‘What’s that?’

  She shrugged her shoulders, and laughed. ‘It’s a fruit tree – the blossoms have a heavenly perfume. We used to have one in my father’s courtyard, at home.’

  As Joe digested this, he looked down at her. She rarely mentioned Lebanon and he had tended to forget that she came from anywhere else but Chicago. He wondered where he could possibly obtain such a tree.

  She laughed, and pulled his hand playfully. ‘The fruit’s awfully sharp. But its flavour is delicious in drinks – and in cooking.’ She sighed, and then smiled up at him. ‘But it couldn’t live in this harsh climate.’ She tugged his hand again, and ordered, ‘Bend over, so that I can reach you.’

  Clumsily, he bent his head towards her, and she kissed him soundly on the lips. He had gone away laughing, wondering for the umpteenth time exactly where Lebanon was. Some time, he must ask the priest who taught school in the village to show him on a map. It was further away than England, Wallace Helena had assured him of that.

  After he had gone, Wallace Helena had sat staring at the rough logs of the old cabin’s wall, her face drawn and infinitely sad. She saw, in her mind’s eye, a country of beautiful mountains and rushing rivers, and, tucked along the coast and on the plateaus, orchards, flowering orchards, of oranges, lemons and apricots with a perfume so sweet that it hurt to think about it.

  Well, he’d done his best, Joe considered. He had brought her a Macintosh apple tree.

  With a half-peeled potato in her hand, Aunt Theresa had come out to view the tree when it had been planted. She had assumed he was planting it for shade.

  ‘What kind of tree is it?’ she had asked.

  ‘It’s a fruit tree – an apple tree.’

  Aunt Theresa had never seen an apple, and she fingered one of the leaves with interest. Then she said circumspectly, ‘It has always seemed to me that trees – and plants – need others exactly like them round about, before they’ll propagate.’

  ‘I never thought of it.’ He looked glumly at the little sapling. ‘Will it flower?’

  ‘If it lives, it probably will.’ Then, to cheer him up, she added, ‘You could watch out for a chance to get another one or two. Then you might get some fruit.’

  ‘God knows where I’d find them. This one came on the train from the east, in a pot.’

  ‘Trains bring lots of settlers. They bring plants they like with them,’ prophesied Aunt Theresa shrewdly.

  Next time he was in the little village outside the Fort, he dropped in on a member of the Agricultural Society, and explained his first effort at planting a tree. ‘Usually, I’m felling them, to get them out of the way or because I need timber. I never thought of planting one before.’

  Pleased to be asked for advice, the man confirmed Aunt Theresa’s information.
/>
  Joe’s face fell, so the man kindly went on to suggest how the sapling might be kept alive through the winter, until Joe had the chance to buy some more. ‘I doubt you’ll get many apples,’ he finished up. ‘Our winter’s so cold, and the wind’ll strip the blossom off in no time.’

  Joe shrugged, and thanked his adviser. ‘I’ll nurse it along,’ he said. And as he got on his horse and rode away, he thought of the young girl he had nursed along through her early years at Fort Edmonton. She’d turned out strong enough, God knows. Maybe the tree would, too.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wallace Helena ate without comment the third English breakfast provided for her by her landlady, Mrs Hughes. The breakfast consisted of oatmeal porridge followed by two boiled eggs served with thick slices of toast. Though she enjoyed the luxury of wheaten bread, she found she lacked her usual appetite, and she realized that she did not need so much food. After days of train travel and the confines of an immigrant ship returning to Liverpool, she was now penned up in the odiferous soapery all day. She politely refused Mrs Hughes’s offer of more toast with some home-made marmalade.

  Mrs Hughes was uncertain whether or not she approved of Wallace Helena. In repose, the visitor’s face was almost forbidding, though she was gracious enough in a foreign kind of way. While the Lebanese ate her breakfast, the puzzled Liverpool lady fluttered round the dark, high-ceilinged dining-room, straightening ornaments and pictures and commenting on the raininess of the day. She hoped to overcome Wallace Helena’s uncompromising reserve and learn a little more about her.

  Mrs Hughes considered that, despite her stuck-up looks, Wallace Helena was no lady. In justification of this observation, she had already told her next-door neighbour that Wallace Helena licked the butter off her fingers after eating her toast. ‘Mr Benson told me,’ she added, ‘that she’s a colonial from Canada – but she looks real foreign to me.’

  In an absent-minded way, Wallace Helena was aware of her landlady’s reflections, though she did not know that, from being much outdoors, her skin was dark enough, and the sweep of her black’ eyebrows and eyelashes was great enough, to make Mrs Hughes wonder if she were harbouring an East Indian, like the lascars she sometimes saw in the city.

  Wallace Helena was used to being disliked – because of her dubious origins, as one Scottish clerk at the Fort had once put it – and also because, around Edmonton, few people got the better of her when bargaining. She had become stiffly proud, and particularly quick to take offence if anyone cast a slur on Joe Black. She accepted that the pair of them were outcasts, and, in consequence, they owed no special loyalty to anyone except each other and those who shared their home. They took tender care of each other, and minded their own business.

  As she drained her last cup of tea, her thoughts strayed for a moment to Joe. Despite her fascination with the new world into which she had plunged, she would have given a lot, today, to skip going to the soap works and, instead, to ride out with him under hot sunshine to the boundaries of their land, to check that the fencing was still in place; they could do with another hand to give most of his attention to fencing, she felt, and she wondered if the Liverpool business could provide her with enough money to invest some of it in the homestead. If a railway finally came as far as Edmonton, she might be able to sell grain to Europe – or even steers; amid the turmoil of coping with a Liverpool soap works, it was a cheering thought.

  Stiff from lack of exercise and fretful from weeks of sleeping alone, she rose awkwardly from the breakfast table, aware of her heavy black skirt and petticoats dragging at her. She longed for the soft, worked skins of her old Indian tunic and leggings. Even her boots, newly cleaned by Mrs Hughes’s maid-of-all-work, hurt feet normally encased in moccasins. Ordinarily, she wore formal clothes only when going down to Edmonton or to visit the priests in St Albert.

  ‘I’ll walk down to the Brunswick Dock, Mrs Hughes,’ she announced. ‘I need the exercise. Would you kindly tell Mr Benson, when he arrives with his carriage, that I have gone on ahead. I’ll meet him by the dock gates – I presume the dock will have a gate?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a gate, Miss. But it’s no district for you to walk by yourself, Miss. I wouldn’t advise it.’

  Wallace Helena laughed shortly. ‘Don’t worry. I’m used to being alone in wild country. Mr Benson says that he has to take me into the dock, because otherwise they won’t let a woman in. Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

  Mrs Hughes ran her tongue round her teeth before replying. Then she said carefully, ‘I appreciate your comin’ from Canada and being used to all kinds of strange things, Miss, but Mr Benson’s right to escort you. You could get accosted, like. We got worse ‘n Red Indians round them docks, believe me. It’s no place for a lady by herself.’

  ‘Mr Benson will probably catch up with me in his carriage long before I reach the dock.’

  ‘Well, if you get there first, you tell the Customs Officer or the policeman at the gate who you are, and you stay close to him till Mr Benson comes.’

  Wallace Helena promised, and went upstairs to put on the black straw gable-brimmed hat which she had bought in Montreal; it suited her much better than the beaded bonnet she had bought in Mr Johnstone Walker’s newly opened store in Edmonton. She reflected with amusement that Mr Walker had not thought much of a woman who tried to beat down the price of his millinery, so painfully freighted up by ox-cart from the railway at Calgary.

  Since it had been raining and the air felt clammy, she put a black woollen shawl round her shoulders, and, when she went downstairs again, she accepted the loan of a long black umbrella from Mrs Hughes.

  Mrs Hughes followed her uncertainly towards the front door. ‘Now, you be careful of yourself, Miss. Turn left at the bottom of the hill and keep walking. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Hughes. I do know the way. Mr Benson drove me past it yesterday.’

  Thankful to be out in the air, temporarily washed clean by the early morning rain, Wallace Helena ran down the wide stone steps of the house. Sunlight was creeping through the lifting clouds and the damp pavement shone in its rays. Two little girls were skipping towards her. She smiled at them and they smiled shyly back at her. She passed a number of women dressed in black, carrying shopping baskets on their arms. They stared at her as she strode past them, her unfashionable gathered skirt swinging round her a couple of inches above her ankles. Even to a city accustomed to immigrants of all kinds passing through, Wallace Helena seemed eccentric; her rapid, masculine walk, her almost scornful expression and an aura of great energy, barely suppressed, aroused casual interest

  As she walked, Wallace Helena concentrated on the day before her. Though she had made a list and it was safely tucked into her reticule, she went over all that she had learned from the Canadian lawyer who had secured her homestead for her, all she knew from her father about contracts, bookkeeping and running a business in Beirut, and her own limited experience, as first Tom’s Will had been laboriously proven and then her darling mother’s. Lastly, she thought of all that her father had done to reestablish himself in Chicago. Surely, she considered, between the lot of it, together with running the farm, I have enough experience to cope with the Lady Lavender Soap Works; it’s not that big, really.

  She felt a nervous excitement at the challenge she had been presented with. She had come to check what was being done by Mr Benson, the Executor of her Uncle James’s Will, to make sure that selling the business was in her best interests and that she was going to get the right price for it. Now, already in the back of her mind, she itched to get her hands on it, to run it herself. She had not yet faced all the implications of this sudden desire.

  Though its owner had died, the works seemed to be functioning fairly well under the care of Mr Bobsworth, the bookkeeper, and Mr George Tasker, the Soap Master, who had been with the company almost from its inception. Despite their devotion to their duties, however, she had noticed in some sections a lackadaisical air, a lack of good housekeeping which
she would not, for one moment, have tolerated on her homestead; she sensed that the general discipline of the place had slipped a little.

  Even when she, as the new owner, walked in, there had not been that quick shuffle to appear busy, which she would have expected. ‘Perhaps they reckon I’m not going to be their new employer, since I’m a woman,’ she thought with a wry grin. Then she muttered to herself, ‘Little do you realize what is going to descend on you, my boys.’

  If Joe Black could have watched her during that brief walk, he would have grinned lazily and would have sat back and watched the carnage she would subsequently wreak amongst the slothful. And then, had he been there when, drained and hungry, she had returned home, he would have encouraged her to eat plenty and afterwards spread herself before a good log fire, while he rolled a cigarette for her and listened to the successes and failures of her day. In their intimate enjoyment of each other, they would have found much to laugh at in the soap works.

  The tightly packed rows of town houses, each with its shining brass doorknob and letterbox, past which Wallace Helena strode, seemed to shut her in, enclose her like some long narrow box. They soon gave way to humbler, even more closely packed homes, and then to small works and warehouses.

  Over the stone setts of the street, huge horses pulled drays loaded with bales, barrels, boxes, and sacks of coal, all the needs of a great industrial country. The horses’ big hooves splashed through puddles left by the early morning rain, spattering the passersby. Sometimes, they stood patiently slavering by the pavement while being loaded or unloaded; and clog-shod men in flat caps and sackcloth aprons shouted upwards to others peering down at them from behind blocks and tackle used for hoisting goods to the upper floors of the warehouses.

  Suddenly, a black shadow passed over Wallace Helena. She looked up quickly.