A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  ‘You call her she,’ he observed.

  ‘Yes. But I take my cue from her clothes.’

  ‘Was Ursula in . . . that other place too?’

  ‘Only briefly. You won’t have seen any Indian patients because, naturally, they’re kept in a separate section. I was lucky to find her there before the flu epidemic wiped that section out. Before that, she was in one of the Indian boarding schools. Where, of course, she was obliged to live as a boy. I’ve asked her to fetch us provisions tomorrow. I thought you could accompany her, help carry things.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Good. Thank you, Harry. And, er, don’t feel you have to report back everything she says. The important thing is that she’s opening up at last.’

  Harry nodded, and Gideon smiled before leaving him on the bench and turning back to the house. Harry watched him break off to talk briefly with Samuel and then being accosted by the giggler from breakfast whose name he found it quite impossible to remember.

  Harry tried to imagine Gideon without the drooping moustache. The lips it concealed were full, rather girlish, perhaps. It was easy to imagine the good doctor an adored child, praised and indulged so as to give him his placid air of entitlement. They had, none of them, Harry suspected, asked to be there, grateful though they were. They were his human toys, taken from the dirty box on a whim, and could be thrust back into darkness and neglect just as casually if they somehow failed to interest or satisfy.

  Ursula arrived a little late at her separate supper table, having had some business with the servants, by which time Harry had been claimed by the Giggler and his friends with the worrying insistence that he was not to be a stranger to them. Happily Mabel came to the rescue, never one to listen when she could talk, and he found himself drawn instead into a pleasantly impersonal conversation with Bruno about horses and the sad fates of the ones shipped out to the war. When Ursula came in, she caught his eye and gently inclined her head in greeting.

  After supper, they crossed to the library so that Gideon could read to them, a regular occurrence apparently, but not an obligatory one, for Samuel and both the Giggler’s friends absented themselves.

  ‘I want to read you all a recent short article by Edward Carpenter. Mr Carpenter’s socialist outlook might not be to all your tastes, but I believe you would find him sympathetic in other ways. You may remember I read you a piece of his on the inequality inherent in marriage.’

  Gideon made a little bow, cleared his throat, smoothed a page of the booklet before him, and looked around their little gathering quite as though he were about to read them ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ or ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’.

  ‘A curious and interesting subject,’ he began, ‘is the connection of the Uranian temperament with prophetic gifts and divination.’

  It was a fascinating article about the tradition common to so many ancient and enduring cultures, including the Inuit and North American Indian tribes, in which certain boys and girls adopted the characteristics of the opposite sex and were elected as shamans or priests. It leapt back and forth in time, from the Sioux to the Assyrians, to mistranslated references to temple prostitutes and attendants on Ashtaroth or Astarte in the Old Testament and Herodotus. Oddly, it said nothing of the continuing practice among Christian priests of hiding their legs and gender in robes in order to impart mysteries.

  Harry stole glances at Ursula as the reading progressed. Characteristically, she had chosen a hard, upright chair rather than sit with the rest of them, who had sunk into armchairs or shared sofas. She was listening intently but was quick to leave at the end, and he caught the disappointed look Gideon cast towards her as she slipped out. Harry chose not to linger either; he was overwhelmed by sleepiness again, and the Giggler had been inspired by the reading to whip out a pack of Tarot cards and proposed to read everyone’s future, the kind of thing that made Harry nervous.

  A man stood before him in bright moonlight. They were outside the little Bethel cabin, which was how Harry knew this was a dream, but the image was as clear as in real life and the threat as intense. He was a big man, a giant almost, blocking Harry’s view of the moon. Harry knew him at once by his distinctive meaty smell and the mocking tone of his voice. He leaned in closer and said something so repellent that Harry let fly a punch to his jaw that sent him sprawling.

  He landed heavily, knocking his head on something as he went down. Seeing him spread-eagled there, briefly vulnerable in the moonlight, stirred lust as well as fear, which made the fear worse.

  Harry knew the only hope was to drag him to the river before he regained consciousness. He seized him by his boots and began to tug him over the grass, but, of course, the boots came off in his hands. So he took him by the feet, having feverishly tugged off his socks for a better grip, and carried on towards the river, even though he knew it was hopeless. The feet, big and bony and hot, felt impossibly intimate in his grasp and the body heavier and heavier.

  Then, for a second, he knew the man was no longer unconscious but was watching him, smiling at his pathetic efforts before going on the attack. The feet lashed out, as fierce as fists, and soon Harry was sprawled on his back, winded, and the giant was straddling him, pinning his wrists with one hand and gripping his neck with the other. He bent to sniff him, his nose grazing his cheek and the side of his neck.

  ‘When I’ve killed you,’ he said, almost tenderly, ‘I’ll fuck you, real hard, for old times’ sake. And then I’m going to fuck your wife and kill her and then, I reckon, I’ll fuck your little girl.’

  He woke shouting, to find he was in a muck sweat with the top sheet somehow twisted crazily about him. Moths fluttered around his still lit lamp. He remade the bed, climbed back into it, established that the dream had been just that and turned the lamp out. But now he couldn’t sleep because a tremendous wind had blown up out of nowhere and was causing his loose screen door to tap with maddening irregularity. He slipped out of bed again and opened the inner door so as to fix the screen door back against the outer wall of the cabin.

  The wind had made the night magical. There were stars, but the air was full of the sound of rattling leaves. Moonlight picked out the river’s stealthy motion. He watched for a while, reminding himself that he must go for a bath in the morning. There were quaint ladies’ and gentlemen’s bath houses built beside the river, and he had heard the Giggler say that someone lit the stoves at dawn so the water was always beautifully hot by about nine.

  Then he saw a door open. It was the one to Samuel’s cabin – the last in the crescent of them laid out on the gentle slope down to the river. He stepped back into his doorway and watched as Gideon came out, returned a lingering embrace to the black man half in shadow, then padded away across the grass towards the house. Samuel emerged fully into the moonlight. He wore only pyjama trousers, with a blanket over his bare shoulders. As Harry watched, he lit a cigarette and enjoyed a lingering smoke, leaning against his cabin wall.

  MOOSE JAW

  A subject like this is generally held to be an unspeakable one, as it would soil both him who talks of it and those who listen.

  George Drysdale, Elements of Social Science and Natural Religion

  Chapter Thirteen

  He saw little of Troels for what remained of the voyage and only found out later he was spending time on the next deck down from theirs, where he had business with several of the migrant families Harry had glimpsed on the quay in Liverpool. The weather and seas grew calmer – or perhaps they were all acclimatised finally – and their fellow passengers began to gather for meals again. Harry found himself taken up by the ladies in black, respectable Torontonians who were indeed in mourning, having returned to England to bury a father. They had recruited a card-playing parson and needed Harry to make up a four for bridge.

  When Troels re
appeared, he was once again in the thick of the only slightly chastened English puppies. He caught Harry’s eye, even raised an unsmiling glass to him, but Harry began to wonder if he was regretting his boisterous friendliness of the night they dined à deux. Then Troels found him in the crowds on the deck, when they finally came in sight of land again.

  Had Harry considered, he wondered, the suggestion of learning farming skills for a few months or a year even, before taking up his homestead? When Harry said that he had indeed and that it seemed eminently sensible, Troels said that in that case a plan had taken shape. En route to the prairies – ahead of the puppies, who were to linger in Toronto, wasting their allowances – he planned to visit a cousin by marriage, who, having only daughters, always needed a hired hand on his farm.

  ‘You don’t wish to see Toronto, do you?’ he asked with an off-putting air, and Harry, whose conversations with the card ladies had made him want to see Toronto very much, lied and said certainly not, he was keen to save his money and be on his way.

  Which was how, within a day of their landing in Halifax, he came to be boarding a train with a one-way ticket to a place called Moose Jaw.

  The train was a shock. The card-playing daughters had declared it marvellous but had never actually ridden it and, he suspected, valued it as much for its symbolic value. The train was colonisation, civilisation even, embodied in steel, timber and two steam-belching locomotive monsters. It needed two of these, Troels assured him, not only because of its great size and weight but because of the distinct possibility that not all the snow in their path would have thawed yet.

  There was a large first-class section but Troels vetoed this at the ticket office, saying it was for rich tourists and fools and that they would be better off merely visiting it for meals. Instead they were housed in one of a long, long sequence of carriages apparently adapted with the express purpose of settling the western prairies as cheaply and swiftly as possible. The seats were wooden, as unyielding as any church pew. Beds folded down like so many outsized tea trays from cupboards ingeniously cut in the ceiling. These beds were almost immediately taken up, either in simple preference to the wooden seats, because men and women were exhausted after sleepless nights in even greater discomfort below decks, or for fear that, with such a crowd on board the train, there would not be enough berths available come sundown.

  At either end of each long carriage was a stove. These stoves never went out and were rarely without some passenger frying chunks of fatty sausage on them or cuts of other, equally anonymous meat. The air was thick with the scents not just of cooking, but of dirty clothing, alcohol, tobacco and underwashed person. They had been told to stow all luggage, clearly labelled, in the luggage vans, but inevitably there were things people were too nervous to part with, so there were bundles and boxes in every direction, clutched in laps or used as footstools or even pillows.

  Schooled in conformity, and flustered by Troels’ impatient efficiency, Harry had stowed everything except his passport, money and the agriculture manual. He had read the last through once already and now, mistrustful of its confident simplicity of tone, began reading it again, alert to crucial detail he felt sure he must have missed first time through. His attention strayed repeatedly. There was a constant hum of conversation around them, much of it in languages he did not know, which made it no more distracting than birdsong, but his eyes were drawn to people.

  More specifically, they were drawn to relationships. The majority of their fellow passengers were men between twenty and forty, some of them clearly travelling with a brother or father, but there were some women with children too, and these wives and grandmothers were the focal points of small, ordinary family dramas – the telling of stories, the soothing of anxiety, the imparting of wisdom, food or punishment – which seemed to Harry heightened in their significance for being surrounded by so much undiluted masculine harshness. He was not the only man watching these scenes with a kind of hunger. When a wizened old Welsh woman sang a lullaby to her grandchildren, the whole carriage was briefly hushed and there was such an audible sigh of appreciation when she had done that she laughed, self-conscious suddenly, and did not sing again.

  Troels did not read and paid little attention to the men and women around them. Sprawled directly across from Harry, who had let him face the direction of travel because he said he felt uneasy when facing ‘the wrong way’, he ate up the passing landscape with his eyes as though willing it to move by more swiftly. He was a tour guide of no charm and few words. Where the pattern of dark forest and eerie lake gave way to human habitation, he would rouse Harry from his reading or reverie, knocking a knee against his and pointing out, with a faintly admonitory air, a place name or some dry detail in the way a man stored his straw or stacked his logs.

  Harry tried watching the passing landscape too, felt he should as he had been lucky enough to secure a seat by the window and to have a measure of control over precious draughts of fresh air. Once they had left the bustle and dirt of Halifax behind them, however, he began to be overwhelmed by the lack of variety in the outlook of forest, lake and yet more forest, and the sense it gave of just how enormous and underinhabited his new country was.

  He was not alone in this response. People exclaimed in their various languages at the size of the trees, the depth of the forest, the beauty of the lakes, and shouted when they thought they saw a bear or a moose. But they grew quieter and quieter as it dawned on them, perhaps, how unlike this landscape was to the imagery of golden wheat fields that had been used to lure them there, and they began to fear that Canada was nothing but forest, forest, forest, lake, lake, lake. They passed a section of wood where sunlight seemed barely to reach through the trees, and the ticket inspector pointed out that the sound they took to be birdsong was the calling of frogs. As his words were relayed, translated into Russian, Welsh, French and German, the carriage fell briefly silent and something like dread seemed to steal among them until an oblivious card-player broke the tension by laughing in triumph.

  Though unused to the continent’s great distances, Harry was also aware that it would take them Canadian days, not mere English hours, to reach Moose Jaw, and that he needed to slow himself down, dull his senses a little and numb his anticipation in order not to find the monotony of the journey insufferable.

  Periodically he and Troels would leave their seats – Troels securing their places by wielding stern-sounding Russian against the Ukrainians around them – and make the long journey through several carriages identical to their own, though each was colonised by slightly different racial groupings, to the relative magnificence and luxury of first class and the dining car. There they lingered as long as the harassed waiters permitted, even though the indifferent food served in high style put Harry in mind of condemned men and their last wishes. Beer was a shilling a bottle and he allowed himself two with each meal, one for thirst – because he did not care to drink the water on board – and one to help him doze when they returned to their hard seats.

  With each passing meal, he became more and more conscious of his increasingly grubby, unshaved appearance. Harry had never been a dandy, but he had always been clean. He was mortified, on their second visit to the dining car, to find that his own fingers left an unpalatable grey streak on the white linen.

  Come sundown, there were not nearly enough fold-down beds to go round. There were several children – who presumably had been counted by the ticket office as riding on adult laps – whose parents early on tucked them into beds, from which no adult had the heart to eject them later. Muttering that the next night they would insist on their rights, Troels commandeered their corner of the carriage and established a ‘bed’ on the floor between their seats, which he carpeted with their coats.

  ‘If we lie like spoons in a drawer, it will work,’ he said.

  It was a coffin-like space and their feet and ankles stretched out into the passageway, where a careless passer-by
might have trodden or tripped on them. Harry lay down stiffly, hesitant about being quite so close to his travelling companion.

  ‘On your side,’ Troels commanded, ‘so we fit.’

  Harry rolled on to his side, facing away under the line of wooden seats.

  ‘There,’ Troels said, as someone dimmed the already dim carriage lights and a child began to whimper, and he threw his left arm heavily across Harry, pulling their bodies closer together. ‘Now we fit.’

  ‘Good night,’ Harry told him.

  ‘Sleep now.’ Almost at once, Troels’ breathing slowed and he fell asleep.

  Harry remained awake, gaining an unlooked-for comfort from the weight of the big man’s arm around his chest but troubled by the tickling of his breath on the back of his neck and the knowledge that he was, in effect, sitting on Troels’ lap in a public space.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The farmer for whom Harry was to work was a Dane who had elected to move north from the American Midwest in search of cheaper land and better prospects when his older brother inherited the family farm in Wisconsin. His wife was a second cousin of Troels, and relied on him to bring her news of their wider family when he passed through, and rare treats such as European magazines and catalogues.

  Troels found hired hands for her husband and for several farmers across the region. Inexperienced newcomers like Harry were ideal, he said, because they knew nothing and were keen to learn, so did as they were told without showing too much initiative. Initiative could be irritating to a farmer who liked things always done in a certain way. Troels did not hide the fact that this was a business transaction, for which his kinsman would pay.

  Harry didn’t mind in the least. He saw the sense in learning farm techniques from an experienced farmer and hoped that the family connection, and being introduced as a sort of friend, might prevent his being too harshly exploited. Troels had warned him his accommodation would be basic and away from the main house.