Winter Shadows

by Margaret Buffie

  Old Maples was set well back from the steep riverbank – two stories high, with tall chimneys, but still managing to look wide and low at the same time. Its roof was slate, smeared with green moss in the summer. A stone wall stretched across the yard facing the road. It ended at a low wood fence, which sloped past a large stand of trees and staggered down to a wide flat river shelf, where it encircled a huge vegetable and flower garden. The house was surrounded on three sides with wide lawns ringed by pines, oaks, and maples. Old Maples’ actual farmland lay across the road. Uncle Bart’s family worked it from the late 1800s right up to the 1970s. Since then, a local farmer rented it for growing hay.

  Dad used the old barn for Jean’s car, our truck, and things like sleighs, gardening tools, firewood, and now our old furniture.

  I slid off the bed and stood looking out the half-frosted window. Maybe it was time to visit Aunt Blair. Sometimes, after school, I’d catch a lift to her place and have supper there. Sometimes I’d spend the night.

  When Mom was told that, as the eldest, she would inherit Old Maples, my grandfather, Duncan Andrews, willed his house and antique business near Selkirk to Aunt Blair. He’d died seven years ago of a heart attack in Scotland, and that’s where he was buried. Most of his final years were spent in Scotland, in a cottage he’d inherited from his family, so I didn’t really know him. Blair had been running the shop on her own for years, anyway.

  Usually I felt a bit better after seeing Aunt Blair, but sometimes the opposite happened. Blair didn’t like Jean any more than I did, but she never talked about her – or Dad. So I couldn’t really let her in on what was going on at Old Maples. Besides, I figured she might do or say something that would only make things worse.

  When Dad married Jean this fall, I felt a lot like I did after Mom died – restless, with an irritable exhaustion that never let up. Except for school, where the work was pretty easy and distracting, I just couldn’t focus on anything for long. All my favorite books lay unread. I couldn’t even watch TV. I was either twitchy and on edge or plain dog-tired – no in-betweens. Old Maples felt alien, not like home anymore. I didn’t tell Dad. He would’ve gone all defensive on me or insisted I take the antidepressants I was given after Mom died – which, by the way, I secretly threw away because they made me even more tired.

  Before Jean and Daisy moved in, all I wanted was to keep my own room, but Dad sat me down and said, “Can’t do it, honey.”

  “But there is a spare bedroom. Dad … please?”

  I could see he was struggling. He knew that Jean snagging that third bedroom was wrong. For just a moment, he looked right at me. He knew what was going on. When he sighed, I felt a surge of sad tenderness for my tall thin father, with his receding hairline, small paunch straining against his gray flannel pants, and boring blue school shirt. Mom always bought him greens and rusty oranges and bright checks that suited his pale freckled skin and dark red hair. But Jean liked him in what she called a more classic look. He seemed washed-out and old now.

  Dad looked down at his hands. “Jean needs the smaller one for her music lessons. That’s a big room you girls will be sharing. Takes up almost the entire front of the house. I don’t want to divide it into two rooms. We’re all going to have to try and shake down together the best way we can, Cass. Even if it means making compromises.”

  “But compromises that never include Jean, right?”

  He couldn’t look at me this time. Any warmth I’d felt shriveled up. He was betraying Mom in the worst possible way. By forgetting her. How could he live with stiff, unfunny Jean after the bright quick warmth of Mom? Of course, he didn’t really love Jean. How could he? But what made him bring her and her demented twelve-year-old kid into Mom’s house? Beats me.

  The day of the wedding – I don’t know why – I’d blurted this out to my dad’s sister, June, from Toronto. She’d looked at me witheringly from under the brim of her huge hat and said, “You want him to be happy, don’t you? Your father’s had a tough time, Cass. Accept the rules of good behavior today, and don’t look so annoyingly miserable.”

  Aunt Blair, who to my shock turned up that day, gave June a scowl and put a hand on my arm, but I shook it off. Why couldn’t she have stayed at home? Why was she here with Mom’s clear blue eyes and her own tight concerned face?

  As I walked away from both of them, I thought, Who but the annoyingly miserable would ever want to do anything else but break the rules?

  So, after that, I just kept on breaking them.

  Now, Christmas was looming, and I still had no privacy, no life, no old friends, no new friends and … I jumped when someone turned the door handle. I put the star brooch in my pocket.

  “Let me in!” Daisy shrieked, kicking the heavy slat door.

  “Hang on!”

  “Mommeeee! Cass locked me out agaaain!”

  I swung the door open and glared at the oversized glasses and elongated Pippi Longstocking braids. “See? Open. You can come in now.”

  “You – you did that on purpose!”

  “Of course I did,” I said. “Anything to get five minutes of privacy from you!”

  “That’s enough!” Dad was there to do Jean’s dirty work again. “Daisy, go wash for dinner. I want to talk to Cass.”

  “Nooo,” she whined. “I want you to be really mad at her. I want you to spank her!”

  You’d think she was five years old, not twelve. Dad gave her a gentle push, which she shrugged off, but then decided to let it propel her down the stairs so she could cry to her mommy that Jonathan had pushed her.

  “Don’t lock the door again, Cass.”

  “I opened it right away. Gawd.”

  “Look, just try to be nice. She only wants to be friends.” I looked at him steadily. “Yeah, okay. She’s giving me a hard time as well, but this is all new to her – and it’s new to Jean too, remember that. Just try, okay?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “That girl of mine who got me through the last two years seems to have gone completely AWOL. Do you know where she is? ’Cause I don’t.”

  “Just leave it, okay, Dad? We both know there’s no point in going over it all again.”

  “I’ll try harder to understand if you will. Come on. Dinner. And please don’t bait Jean tonight.”

  I opened my mouth, but he held up one hand. “If you can’t be nice, at least be quiet.” Then he tried to put his arm around my neck like he used to do, but I ducked quickly past him. I could hear him moving slowly down the stairs behind me. I didn’t look back.

  3

  BEATRICE

  I wasn’t going to keep a diary on returning to the parish, in case my father’s new wife, Ivy, got her grasping hands on it, but I have found a perfect hiding place. Not even she will find it. On the inside, I’ve written Meditations of a St. Cuthbert’s Parish Daughter, December 8th, 1856, Old Maples.

  I won’t keep day-to-day notations – just the things that compel me to write. I hope that recording my musings will help me get through the long winter months ahead, with Ivy as mistress of the house. After Mama’s death, caring for the house and Papa had been nôhkom’s and my job. But now my grandmother is too old and frail, and I have once more become the daughter of the house, not its mistress.

  As I look out into the dark night, my spirits drift down like the ragged snow falling thick and fast past my bedroom window. I will soon be a woman of eighteen, yet I can’t seem to stop these feelings of despair and sadness. I become angry at myself for allowing them.

  The rush of the rapids sound to my left in the distance, while directly in front of the house, the Red River is silent, smoothed to a blanket of muted blue-white. Beautiful. Cold. Remote.

  The winters in St. Cuthbert’s, encased in ice and snow, are endlessly long. How I yearn for summer, even with its torment of mosquitoes and black flies. For then the river will be busy with York boats, canoes, and other craft plying the waters between the Upper and Lower forts, some on their way to northern places, ot
hers delivering goods to parishes like ours, dotted along its banks.

  Summer brings with it picnics, visits to the settlement down the river, and social calls to Papa’s friends at the Lower Fort, where I can buy much-needed thread, beads, and luxuries like sugar or tea. The post is more reliable in summer, too, with the possibilities of new books to read and family letters to answer from England and Scotland.

  When the lilacs against the house are in full bud and the days grow longer and warmer, some of nôhkom’s kin will once again arrive on their yearly visit, dragging their canoes into the tall grass and setting up camp under the maple trees along the riverbank. I will hear the crackle of their fires at night through my bedroom window. Each day, they will quietly climb up the trail to take sage tea with nôhkom. I learned Cree as a child, and I love listening to their stories. Unlike so many in our staid parish, Grandmother’s wîtisâna find much to laugh about despite their hard life – the women covering their mouths with their fingertips, their eyes filled with easy enjoyment. After offerings of smoked fish, beaded moccasins, and other things to nôhkom, Papa, and me, they will leave as silently as they came.

  I sigh as I write this. Last summer is but a distant memory, and in this icy heart of winter, I see no glimmer of warm light ahead. In a month, we’ll have a brief exciting week when the dog team, horse, and carriole races take place on the frozen river. But then, the short cold days and long dark nights will close around us once again. Christmas used to offer a short happy time as well, but I don’t hold out much hope for it this year with my stepmother, Ivy, and her puritanical Presbyterianism at the helm.

  Earlier this morning, I dressed in a similar darkness to this. To brighten my spirits, I pinned Mama’s star brooch on my collar for the first time this year. Having it close always takes me back to happy Christmases with my tall and cheerful mother, Anne, who died the Christmas Eve I turned ten. But as I tied my moccasins, I knew Christmas this year would be anything but cheerful.

  A soft cough from nôhkom reminded me there was no time to indulge in worries or sad memories. I tightened my resolve not to give in to the shadows hovering nearby.

  Wrapped in a goose-down comforter by the lowering fire, she spoke in her raspy voice, “The sun is rising, nôsisim. You will be late for your teaching.” She had coughed often during the night. I had to make sure she had plenty of rosehip syrup and hot spruce tea beside her before I left.

  “I still have time,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Downstairs, the kitchen was unusually warm. My stepmother stood by the fire, ladling porridge into a bowl. Our little maid, Dilly, a girl of twelve years or so who had recently joined the household, glanced shyly at me and left the room with a broom and dustpan. She was the daughter of a poor farmer and his deceased Indian wife. The farmer had left St. Cuthbert’s when Dilly was five, taking his two sons with him and leaving the girl child with a neighbor, who had allowed Dilly to go to school until she was ten. After that, she demanded the child leave in order to help on the farm, training Dilly as a scullery maid and letting her out to people who needed cleaning or outside work done – for a price. Papa had heard from others that the girl was being treated badly and asked the farm wife if she might come to us on a full-time basis. The neighbor received money from Papa, of course – how much, I do not know – to release Dilly. As I looked at Ivy’s stiff disapproving back, I wondered if poor Dilly had leapt from one sizzling pan right into another. I decided to watch over her and make sure Ivy didn’t take advantage.

  A man sat, arms on the table, waiting to be served. Ah, I thought, so that explains the large fire snapping in the grate. The Big Fellow has come for his breakfast. Ivy’s son, Duncan Kilgour, glanced at me, then peered into his thick mug with an irritating half-smile.

  While I was away at school in Upper Canada, Kilgour had arrived from Scotland to visit his widowed mother. He now lived on his mother’s farm – the small Comper place, farther along the river road. A coarse fellow, with black curly hair hanging in greasy coils around his thickly bearded face, he wore a woolen jerkin over a flannel shirt, rough wool pants, and knee-length moccasins. His arms and shoulders were heavy with muscle – like one of the broad pale oxen in our barn. Boorish in his manners, he was either rudely silent or talked too much, with a loud laugh that grated horribly on my nerves.

  He and some of the local farmers had been away hunting when I arrived home. Papa said the October hunt was late getting started because early snow slowed their progress. They returned a few weeks back, with buffalo meat and hides as well as deer and smaller game. Of course, trapping will continue all winter in the bush around the village.

  I could see Ivy was making another pot of her venison stew for dinner tonight, sparsely dotted, as usual, with exhausted vegetables from the root cellar. Out of necessity, the best of the meat, already stored in the ice house, must be sold off. I cannot abide her thin and greasy stew, so I eat little of it. I suspect Ivy deliberately makes these miserly meals to show her displeasure at Papa for holding the best cuts back from her.

  As for Kilgour, he has barely said two words directly to me since I arrived home. Not that I care, as I am still adjusting to finding his widowed mother installed in our house as my father’s wife!

  “Good morning,” I said. “My grandmother needs more wood placed on her fire.” I looked at Kilgour. “I wonder if you would –?”

  Ivy pushed the bowl of porridge at her son, and he sprinkled it, not with precious sugar, but with lake sîwîhtâkan, the brown salt sold to us by Indians every fall. He nodded at my request, the spoon moving back and forth.

  Ivy’s eyes narrowed when she spotted the brooch on my dress collar. She had followed me to my room when I unpacked from my long trip home and saw the pin when I placed it on my table. She’d asked me if it had once belonged to my mother. When I’d said yes, to my shock, she snatched it up and darted off to Papa – with me, outraged, following behind.

  “As your wife, it should rightly be mine!” I’d heard her cry through the door of Papa’s study.

  On entering, I could see him teetering on the edge of giving the small jewel to her, but I said, “That brooch was given to me on my mother’s deathbed. I shall never part with it, Papa. Never.”

  He nodded, returned the brooch to me, and left the room, Ivy skittering after him, talking all the while. Her shrill voice was cut off by the loud bang of the kitchen door. She ran up the stairs, gasping and huffing with indignation. Later that evening, Papa asked Kilgour to help him move a truckle bed into his study. Ivy now slept alone in their room upstairs. The next morning, she had claimed it was all her idea, as she was tired of hauling that man upstairs every night, but we all knew the truth of it.

  “I’ll get the wood.” Kilgour pushed away his empty bowl, filled a basket from the wood bin, and left the room.

  I began to count … one, two, three.… With perfect timing, my stepmother snarled in her thick Scottish accent, “No reason why you can’t fix the old squaw’s fire yourself.” She held the bread knife in front of my face. “If I had my way, she’d be living in that Indian town of St. Anthony’s with her own kind. It’s bad enough I have your ailing father to attend to.”

  I finally threw the gauntlet down after three weeks of holding my tongue. “My grandmother is with her own kind, right here. Do not speak of her this way again!”

  She bridled, sucking in a sharp breath. Up to that moment, I’d steadfastly refused to rise to her bait, although I often felt as if I’d swallowed its sharp hook. I knew if I fought back, Ivy would only make things miserable for nôhkom when I wasn’t around. But let her try her worst now! With trembling hands, I piled a bowl with porridge for Grandmother. As I reached for the bannock, the flat of Ivy’s knife slapped hard across my knuckles. I let out a yelp.

  “What’s this, what’s this?” Papa stood in the doorway, gripping his pronged walking sticks.

  Ivy ran to help him into the kitchen, simpering, “Goodness, can you believe it, Gordon? My k
nife accidentally tapped Beatrice’s hand. No harm done.”

  She settled him into a chair at the table, picked up her weapon, and handed it to me, handle first. With unsteady hands, I took it and cut slabs of cheese and Ivy’s hard bannock for Grandmother’s midday dinner, covering them with a damp cloth. I then filled a heavy jug with fresh cold water and a stone foot warmer with boiling, which I slid into a fur cover. Ivy served Papa his breakfast, chatting cheerfully. I knew Papa wanted me to get along with Ivy, so to keep the peace and protect nôhkom, I kept my anger to myself.

  As I left with the tray, she returned my cold stare with one of sneering satisfaction.

  When I reached the upstairs hall, I heard nôhkom’s tittering giggle and Duncan Kilgour’s deep chuckle. He was stoking the fire in our room. “And will you tell me more if I come again, nôhkom?”

  How dare that oaf call her Grandmother in Cree! And what was so funny?

  “I will,” Grandmother replied, “for I have many to share. “

  He grinned at her and, with a quick nod toward me, walked out.

  “What will you share with him?” I asked.

  Grandmother’s dusky crumpled face peered out from under her gathered bonnet. “Can I have no secrets? You will be late, nôsisim. Go to your teaching. It will help you be content away from this unhappy house.”

  I’d accepted the teaching position at Miss Cameron’s School for Girls a few days after returning home. Following the incident with the brooch and other unhappy events, I knew I could not stay in the house with Ivy every day. I now have a plan for the small wage I earn. I hope to save enough so that one day nôhkom and I can go to the settlement at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers and find a small house or a few rooms to live in. I’ve heard that teachers are needed more and more in the growing center. We must get away from here!