A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  The little exchange left a sourness, and he hid from the Slaymakers that Sunday when they came calling to drive him to church, and again when Petra rode by during the week with the eggs, butter and milk she had taken to trading with him for firewood.

  He gained a rich satisfaction from finishing the house on his own and worked on it hard and fast, aware that his modest wheat crop was nearly ready for harvesting, just as Paul’s was, and that he had a long list of other neglected farm tasks awaiting his attention. The finer points of the house’s interior could wait, he calculated, for the short days of autumn, but it was with high spirits that he could finally take down his little tent and move the stove and his camp bed to their new home on higher, drier ground.

  He could not hide indefinitely, and Petra found him easily enough one morning by following his fence and the sound of sledgehammer on post. He had barely greeted her when she started talking, lifting off her hat and fiddling nervously with its straps in a way that told him she had been rehearsing what to say as she walked.

  ‘Whatever’s wrong between you,’ she blurted, ‘I hope you sort it out soon, because there aren’t enough people to go round for neighbours to fall out like this.’

  ‘We haven’t fallen out,’ he protested.

  ‘So why is he going around with a face like a bag of knives?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harry said, leaning the sledgehammer against his legs, and he saw she doubted him. She would make a most effective schoolmistress.

  ‘And why’ve you been hiding from us?’

  ‘I wasn’t hiding,’ he said, filleting a lie with the truth. ‘I was busy.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well that’s my mind set at rest.’ She turned abruptly to go, as though embarrassed, but then turned just as abruptly back to face him as though there were now a weight of words that could not go unaired. ‘It’s the only way, apart from his colouring, in which he takes after our mother, unfortunately. He gets these . . . enthusiasms for people. Out of the blue. And then he goes too far.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Petra,’ Harry began. ‘I don’t—’

  She held up a hand for silence. Apparently if he started speaking, she would never haul the difficult words to the surface. ‘I was watching the other night,’ she said, ‘at that stupid bachelors’ ball, and I worried it had started again and he’d . . .’ She broke off, turning aside, turning back, refastening the bonnet ribbons she had nervously yanked loose. ‘Has it started again?’ she demanded. ‘Am I going to have to . . . ? I’m not sure I could face moving all over again.’

  ‘Why on earth should you?’ He had never seen her upset like this. ‘Come where you can sit in the shade and I’ll fetch you a glass of water.’

  ‘I don’t need goddamned water. Don’t be so English!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. I shouldn’t. Forgive me.’

  ‘Petra!’

  ‘I’ll leave you to your work. Goodbye, Harry. I’m so sorry.’ She left, hurrying away, smacking grasses aside, and moments later he heard her urging on the pony she must have tethered to the fence.

  He made a point of seeking Paul out that afternoon. He was as open and friendly as he knew how to be, reiterating his thanks for Paul’s help with the house-building and asking his opinion about when the harvest should begin and whether he would do better to throw a housewarming now, or after the grain was in.

  Paul seemed pleased to see him, showed no trace of the brooding he had displayed on their last day together. He patiently explained the harvest process. He had a binder, which needed one person to drive and one or two more to gather together the bound sheaves it left behind. They then had to rely on a continuation of the fine weather and wait for the fairly expensive and unpredictable services of a travelling team with a steam-powered separator.

  ‘Thought I’d made you cross,’ he muttered just as Harry was leaving him.

  ‘No? Why ever should that be?’ Harry asked, and the matter was dropped.

  Harry took Petra’s sly advice and threw his housewarming before the little place was quite finished. Beer and lemonade were easy – he had a delivery sent down the line from a place at Unity – but he had worried about how to feed the guests until she pointed out that everyone would assume him an incapable bachelor and would bring pies and tarts for the spread. The vicar made an announcement before the Sunday service. After the service several people asked for directions. And that was that.

  Aside from his wedding reception, which arguably had been Mrs Wells’s party and not his, it was the first party he had ever thrown. People came, which surprised him, and asked a lot of impertinent questions, which didn’t. They enjoyed entering rooms and peering out of windows they would never enter or peer out of again. They left behind a quantity of cheeses, pickles and jams and even a side of bacon.

  ‘There,’ Petra said, when they had waved off the last of them. ‘Now they know you’re just like them, with no more mystery to you than anyone else, and you’ll be left alone.’

  The house possessed no furniture yet except two hard chairs, a table and a camp bed, but the array of jams and pickles on the shelf and the bacon hanging from a hook made it look lived in.

  Harvesting was parching, dusty work. Petra joined them, unrecognisable in her denim overalls, thick gauntlets and a battered broad-brimmed straw hat. They began the day merrily at first, with quips and commentary, but the novelty soon wore off and heat, flies and dust silenced them. Paul and two horses drove the binder, which cut the wheat close to the ground and whose clattering wheel, like a watermill’s, ingeniously bound it into small sheaves with a knot of twine. Harry and Petra fetched the sheaves and stacked them together in regular stooks a few yards apart to await the visit of the threshing team. Sometimes Paul would wait for them, if he had twine to replace or needed to water the horses. More often they’d have to work hard to catch up with his continued progress through the wheat. His team and binder could only come within their own length of the fences, so when he had done all he could in a field, Harry would then walk around it cutting the fringes with a scythe, while Petra followed him painstakingly raking up and binding the wheat stalks by hand, in the old, pre-mechanical manner. The two youngest Jørgensen girls had done the same, and Harry was struck afresh by how this work of scraping together, binding and stacking was immeasurably dustier, scratchier and sweatier than Hogarth’s calm paintings made it look. On the Jørgensen farm they’d been a team of six. Doing the same work with half the people felt markedly less festive. As with any farming task, though, Harry found the trick was not to look up at the enormity of the work ahead, but simply to focus on the ground and task immediately before him.

  He had thought himself now reasonably strong and fit, hardened by regular labour and long since recovered from the effects of fever. Certainly his hands were well callused after his time at Moose Jaw. Harvesting involved repetitive bending and lifting, however, of a sort hardly done through the rest of the year, and the end of their first day saw him so stiff and tired he found he could barely wind his alarm clock before falling on to his bed. On the second day, he felt able to accept Petra’s invitation to join them for wordless stew before his horses, no more lively than he, took him home. On the third, when the sun was sinking and Petra had led the horses aside for their evening oats and water, Paul turned to him as though it were the most normal thing in the world, and they were not all three dead on their feet with exhaustion, and mumbled, ‘Come for a swim?’

  ‘I’ve no costume,’ he said.

  ‘Well that hardly matters way out here,’ Petra said, and Paul added, ‘You’re not in Kensington now.’

  ‘Are you coming too?’ Harry asked her.

  ‘Oh, I like my feet to touch the bottom,’ she said. ‘I’ve too active an imagination. At the worst moment I always think a pair of fairy hands is going to take a firm grip on my ankles. You boys have fun.
I’ll go in and be heating up more of the same.’

  On Harry’s land the sloughs were broad but fairly shallow, ideal for the trout-like fish he was learning to catch, but on the Slaymakers’ property there was one far deeper one, in the lee of the little wooded hillock of such significance to the Cree women. In fact it was the Cree children who had shown Paul how good this was for swimming in.

  Harry was not a naturally good swimmer – a paddler not a plunger – having quite missed out on whatever tuition others seemed to acquire in boyhood. He could swim a sort of breaststroke he had taught himself from watching others and from reading a delightfully illustrated pamphlet, but never for long. That there should be any disparity in their techniques seemed not to have occurred to Paul, who marched down to the water and began stripping his clothes off in a way that left Harry short of breath, but the idea of total immersion after another day of broiling labour was as attractive as the near-perfect circle of water in its private fringe of green.

  He began unlacing his boots, making an effort not to look at Paul, who he could tell from the articles tossed on the grass beside them was now quite naked.

  ‘It’ll be cold,’ Paul said. ‘Even in this weather, as it’s deep and the sun hardly reaches it except around midday. The trick is not to paddle in but to jump. Like this.’

  Harry looked up from his unlacing just in time to see Paul’s big body, arms comically tanned like evening gloves, as he guessed his own must be, flying through the air before crashing into the water. He hurried to undress too, wheat-numbed fingers fumbling with his shirt and trouser buttons.

  Paul surfaced, hair and beard rendered sleek, swam a few strokes, then turned, treading water and watching. ‘Great to wash the dust off,’ he said.

  Harry found he was hesitating to pull off his underwear.

  ‘No mystery there,’ Paul called out. ‘We nursed you through a fever, remember!’

  Feeling even more self-conscious now, Harry tugged the sweaty garment off and stepped into the water’s edge. He flinched at the cold.

  ‘No paddling!’ Paul shouted. ‘Take a run-up and jump. You’ll be fine.’

  Assailed by memories of countless sports-field humiliations around bigger, fitter boys, Harry took a few steps away, then ran towards the water and jumped. It felt even colder than he had expected, because his body was so hot from working in the unshadowed sun all day. The slough was very deep. He plunged so far in that he could look up and see Paul’s slowly thrashing legs white against the water’s green, and even so, Harry’s toes made no contact with weeds or mud. He was gasping for air as he surfaced.

  ‘So deep!’ he exclaimed, and thinking he was struggling, Paul touched him on the shoulder, which made him more breathless yet. The pressure of his hand was warm in the water’s spangled chill.

  ‘The Cree children say it’s bottomless. Are you all right?’

  ‘Cold. Not sure how. Long I can. Stay in.’

  ‘You’re too thin, man. Their mothers think swimming here aids fertility.’

  ‘You’d think it would have the opposite effect. Don’t you find it terribly cold?’

  ‘I’m an otter,’ Paul said with a grin, and letting go of Harry’s shoulder, he struck out backwards, briefly pressing the soles of both feet against Harry’s chest to push off. He seemed to have shucked off a layer of maturity with his clothes.

  For all that he was rapidly growing numb in his extremities, Harry felt relieved of constraint, as though the mysterious pool and the privacy offered by the trees and bushes around it had somehow transformed them into other men, in another, easier time. For a few seconds he felt able to hold Paul’s gaze without shame as Paul drifted slowly backwards, big legs lazily kicking at the water just enough to hold his body on the surface. Watching him in turn, Paul smiled like a small boy about to demonstrate a magic trick, then executed an athletic backwards flip and disappeared into the depths.

  There were too many reflections and floating leaves for Harry to see more than a couple of feet beneath the surface, so he was startled when Paul came up close behind him, tickling his back with his beard as he rose. Harry splashed around to look at him. Paul wasn’t smiling now, but seemed grave.

  ‘There’s . . .’ he said. ‘Let me just . . .’ And he reached out to remove a strand of weed from Harry’s hair. ‘You’re really cold, aren’t you?’ he said.

  Harry nodded, teeth chattering.

  ‘I’ll be out in a moment. The best place to dry off is that rock over there.’ Paul gestured towards a high outcrop catching the last of the sun, then dived again.

  Harry churned his way to the water’s muddy fringe and clambered out. He held the dusty bundle of his discarded clothes in front of him and made his way around and up. After the cool softness of leaf mould, the stone was warm underfoot, giving back the heat it had absorbed through the day. He began to pull his undershorts back on, but realised he was still far too wet. Instead he sat, then tried lying back, using his clothes as a pillow, but felt self-conscious so turned around and lay on his belly. That way he could enjoy the sight of Paul swimming around the pool in a steady circle. He swam strongly, in a way Harry had never mastered. Harry marvelled that he could find the energy necessary, then reflected with a touch of asperity, as many harvesters must, that Paul had been riding the binder all day, not ceaselessly cutting, bending and stacking in its dusty wake.

  As if reading his mind, Paul chose that moment to roll over on to his back. By now Harry’s head was over the edge of the rock and he had no time to withdraw it. Paul floated there, hair fanning in the water, and stared directly back at him. Then he turned again and swam decisively for shore. He bundled his clothes in turn but did not carry them prudishly before him as Harry had done.

  Harry stayed as he was, facing down, but heard Paul drop his things and settle on the rock beside him. Paul nudged his shoulder with a cold, wet foot. ‘Warming up again?’

  ‘Yup,’ Harry said, not liking to roll on to his back in case his pleasure in the moment had become too evident.

  Paul sighed heavily. ‘We should get started on your wheat tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘What little the gophers have left of it,’ Harry said, but he did not want to be diverted into a talk about wheat yields and the threshing gang. Not yet. He half twisted around, propping himself on one elbow. Paul’s hairy calves were inches from his face. ‘What did Petra mean?’ he asked. As he said it, he realised it would make no sense to Paul. Harry had been thinking so hard about the conversation with Petra that he had momentarily forgotten Paul hadn’t been a party to it.

  ‘How do you mean?’ The low sun was directly in Paul’s eyes and he was holding a hand across his face, so Harry couldn’t read his expression.

  And now I wreck the friendship, Harry thought. ‘She said you sometimes got enthusiasms for people and went too far. What did she mean?’

  Paul sighed again and, forgetting modesty, Harry turned properly so he could see him. ‘She clearly regretted having spoken,’ he went on. ‘I probably shouldn’t have—’

  ‘She meant,’ Paul said, ‘I’m prone to doing things like this.’ And watching Harry all the while, he deliberately kissed the part of him closest to him, which happened to be Harry’s toes. Harry felt his beard and the extraordinary warmth of his lips.

  ‘You’ll get muddy,’ he murmured.

  ‘Don’t care,’ Paul rumbled and kissed again, the sole of Harry’s foot this time, gently at first and then, sensing Harry encouraging him, more firmly, grasping his foot with both hands. He stopped, lowered Harry’s foot and gave a little frown. Harry reached for him. And then Paul had come forward and was kissing him on the face and eyes and open mouth, pinning him against the rock inches from its edge.

  When they had done, seconds after, it seemed to Harry, he felt Paul shaken by silent sobs in the half-light. He tasted his tears.

 
They washed themselves quickly in the now black water and then, of course, had to dress without drying. They walked to the Slaymaker house in silence, bumping limbs as they went, and when Petra waved them in, Harry’s teeth were chattering as much from elation as cold.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They cut and bound all of Harry’s relatively small first wheat crop the next day, and were now utterly at the mercy of the threshing gang and how soon it would reach them. The previous year, Petra said, they had their first snowstorm the night before the gang came. The hope was that, with more homesteads established in the region, there would be extra gangs and a greater incentive for them not to leave the remoter areas until last.

  Harry filled the interval by pressing on with clearing land, and being unable to plough up fields still covered in stooks, Paul helped him. Superficially the ground was baked hard by the summer, but its dryness made it that much lighter than the sodden soil of spring for the levering-out of large stones and the plough’s slow progress, and the sight of his first stooks in the patch they had recently harvested was a powerful incentive.

  The thing growing between them, which, with the superstition of new happiness, Harry hesitated to name, went undiscussed and barely acknowledged in a way that put him in mind of the pragmatic arrangements he had seen spring up at school. At the end of a day’s labour, one or other of them would suggest a swim, and swim they did, the pleasure of it boosted by its teasing delay of what followed. Their embraces were often gentle, especially in passion’s dying fall, but neither gave the gentleness words. The delight in all this was quite unlooked for. Harry had accepted that he was extraordinarily lucky even to have found friends in such a remote spot. His bitter experience with Hector Browning had taught him not to ask for what was not on offer. It was enough to catch Paul’s eye occasionally, as they worked side by side, enough to enjoy the thing for as long as it lasted. He had noticed the way the few single women in their church looked at Paul and had seen his friendly responses to their attention; he doubted he would remain a bachelor for another harvest.