by Patrick Gale
Then, one Sunday morning, Petra rode up alone. ‘He’s gone down with a summer cold,’ she said. ‘Well, a late summer one, and people won’t thank him for coughing and sneezing all over them at this time of year. How smart you look.’
Harry glanced down at himself. ‘It’s just my thicker suit,’ he said. ‘I thought there was a nip in the air.’
‘Fall comes so fast here,’ she said, and sat beside him on the bench he had set out on his veranda. ‘Shall we not go to church, for once? It’s such a beautiful day and Joel Owen is not the most inspiring preacher.’
‘I need no tempting.’
‘Oh good.’ Warm from her ride, she unbuttoned her dark blue jacket and settled back, taking in the view. ‘If Hopeless Varcoe could see what you’ve done here, he’d be even more demoralised.’
‘I couldn’t have done it without your help. Both of you.’
‘Oh . . . maybe not so fast. But you’d still have gotten there in the end.’
‘It’s not mine quite yet.’
‘Two more years. At the rate you two have been clearing that ground, you’ll have no trouble. Oh, I brought you eggs.’
‘Thanks.’
‘They’re good layers. I was thinking you should build a little run here and a coop, then we could find you a pair so you could raise a clutch of your own.’
‘That would be nice.’
As though unable to bear small talk a moment longer, she just came out with it. Pulling off her gloves, she said, ‘I saw you. Yesterday. By our slough. Wapun, one of the women, had lost her little boy and I came to look for him as he likes climbing the trees by the water.’
‘I . . .’
‘I saw the two of you, I mean. You weren’t swimming.’
‘Oh.’ Harry’s head spun. He saw again Robert throwing the torn pages of an autograph book on the fire.
‘I feel such a fool.’
‘Why?’
‘Harry Cane, so help me God, if you tell a living soul, I’ll take a rifle and shoot you in your sleep.’
‘Why would I tell?’ He felt light-headed. In seconds, he had gone from almost bringing up his breakfast from fear to astonished relief. Could she really be so accepting?
‘Just . . .’ She smoothed her riding gloves together as though she would comfort them.
‘What?’
‘Perhaps not outdoors? Our land is tucked away, but the Cree children love that spot, and for all our fellow farmers would disapprove, we’ve never stopped them coming to it with their mothers.’
‘Of course.’
‘He’s told you about Toronto, presumably? Why we left?’
‘My dear Petra, he’s told me not a thing.’
She closed her eyes, whether to avoid the sun or his curious gaze, it was impossible to tell.
‘He was at the university,’ she said, ‘the lucky boy, studying philosophy.’
‘You sound envious.’
‘I wanted to study far more than he did. I always had more application, but all I could learn was from books and from helping Father. I’d have studied anything if it got me out of the house, away from Mother’s sarcasm and ladylike needling. Paul had been an odd boy growing up. Solitary, quiet, fond of reading. Mother was always on at him, saying he had no vim and no girl would ever give him a second glance because he never had his head out of a book long enough to notice what she was wearing. He didn’t let her bother him the way I did. He’s like a beast of burden – just lowers his head and bears it – whereas I always have to get mad and answer back.’
‘You had the vim.’
‘Quite. And gentlemen don’t like ladies with vim.’
‘I do.’
‘You, Harry Cane, are a great comfort.’ She patted his arm absently, then stared out at his wheat stooks and the birds pecking around them as she remembered. ‘Out of the blue, he got a new friend. Another student. Edward Crosbie. Teddy. He was in a different faculty – studying law – but they sang in the same glee club. His father was a barrister and MP, probably still is, but Teddy insisted on living in digs like the other boys. He was at our house so often, he even got Mother’s hopes up for me.’ She laughed shortly at the memory. ‘They were like reunited twins. Inseparable! I believe Paul would have changed faculties if he could, just to see more of him. It was all Teddy this and Teddy that and Teddy says and Teddy and I.’ She sighed. ‘As I hinted to you earlier, Paul gets these enthusiasms, and in this case, he had absolutely no sense that anyone might think their friendship odd or a little overheated. It was around this time that Mother failed to send us packing to Edinburgh, then headed off to her brave new life south of the border, so at least Teddy could visit Paul without her teasing and sniping.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘If I’m honest . . . no. Not a great deal. There was always something a little febrile about him. And the family had so much money, he was spoilt, used to getting his way and having whatever he wanted. I worried he’d be a bad influence, put Paul off his studies or lead him into debt. But I wouldn’t have wished . . .’ She broke off. A bird was singing nearby. She smiled sadly. ‘The Dvorak bird. This one sings a bar out of the New World Symphony . . .’ She glanced at Harry to see if he was still listening. ‘It was your Troels Munck who broke the news.’
‘He’s not my—’
‘You know what I mean. Munck wasn’t a student, or not any more. He’d had to drop out after one year for lack of funds, which left him bitter as hell. But he lived among them still, eaten up with envy, probably.’
‘Was he friends with Paul?’
‘Not at all. But he met me at a concert when he was still a student and, well, it sounds vain and silly, but there’s no other word for it, he pursued me through every channel he could think of.’
‘Flattering.’
‘Frightening, you mean. I got the impression he’d decided we were rich, which we weren’t, but Mother was so very airs-and-graces with anyone she could impress, she’d possibly made him think she was an heiress or that Father had left us a big legacy. Whatever the case, he clearly felt that, as a doctor’s family, we represented . . . I don’t know what exactly. A cut above the merchants and trappers his parents mixed with? So he decided he wanted me, even though I certainly did not want him. I didn’t want anybody, but especially not Troels Munck. And after two or three unendurable visits, he proposed.
‘I said no, but he couldn’t accept it. He went on and on. Cornered Paul. Even wrote to Mother, who of course was furious I’d mentioned nothing and thought I was lucky to receive a proposal at all. And he wrote to me. Sent flowers. Out-of-season fruit he couldn’t afford. Poems he’d copied from God knew what dire miscellanies. So when he showed up that morning, on our doorstep, naturally I thought it was me he was after. I hid in my room and had Paul see him, but then I heard Paul shouting and came out. Teddy had taken poison.’
‘Was he dead?’
‘No, thank God, or things would have been even worse. Munck had found him and saved his life. Unwelcome cause of eternal debt! He’d carried him bodily up the road to the infirmary, where they knew to make Teddy sick.
‘When we got there, the father had all but stationed sentries at the bedside. Not only would he not let us see Teddy, but he wouldn’t so much as acknowledge Paul. He took me aside and told me the whole sorry tale. He had found letters, passionate letters, love letters. He called them unnatural communications. They gave ample proof that the friendship had, how can I put it, progressed to the point of illegality. And the night before, he had confronted his son and told him it must cease, and that he was removing him from the university forthwith.
‘We were to consider ourselves lucky. Had Teddy taken a more efficacious dose, had Munck not been alerted by hearing him fall off his chair . . . had Teddy died, Mr Crosbie would have gone to the police with the letter
s. As it was, he was motivated only by shame and disgust, but he retained all the . . . persuasion in the matter. Paul was to quit Toronto, ideally quit the country, within the month, never to return, on pain of arrest.’
‘And you gave up everything.’
‘Oh, I gave up nothing,’ she insisted. ‘A handful of snot-nosed piano pupils, partial access to a society with which I had neither the funds nor the inclination to pass muster, and the unwanted attentions of Troels Munck.’
‘He knew you were here. He stumbled on your surname in the Domain Lands Office when finding homesteads for his English puppies.’
‘I can’t believe he’d still be interested.’
‘That’s why he urged me out here,’ Harry told her.
‘At least out here I can hold a rifle when I tell him his suit is conclusively rejected.’
‘Was there much talk?’
‘A scandal, you mean? No. The wretched boy’s father was true to his word, and he spirited Teddy away before we had begun selling the house and making the necessary reductions in our life. I still have childhood friends who write to me. Had there been “talk”, at least one of them would have been honest enough to tell me. As it is, all they express is abiding astonishment at, and not a little envy of, my liberty.’
Harry laughed. ‘The only sure and legal way of shaking him off is to take a husband.’
Petra snorted. ‘Even if I were interested . . . You make it sound as simple a matter as picking out a candy from an elegant boxful. You saw the region’s finest on offer at that bachelors’ ball.’
‘Well . . .’ he teased her. ‘There was the one with the barrel chest who offered you some chewing bacca. He’d keep you safe.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
They were granted several weeks’ fine weather, so the stooks were still dry when word reached them that the threshing team was only a day or two away, working its way from the homesteads of Vera to those at Winter.
With the tracks and farm access so basic compared to those on the Jørgensen farm, Harry had expected a far smaller, more elementary arrangement, so was surprised when the procession arrived. The traction engine was perhaps a little smaller than the one at Moose Jaw and was drawn by a team of four labouring horses rather than progressing under its own steam, but its great steel wheels seemed no less as they gouged their way through the Slaymaker turf. The water tank was towed behind it. Another team of horses pulled the separator – the all-important threshing machine – and the men not driving rode behind in a big wagon.
Certainly the process was as frenetic as he had experienced before, with the sooty-faced engineer a kind of shovelling, nut-tightening potentate amidst his court of labourers. These were a cheerful babel of nationalities, Harry discovered when they broke for lunch – Norwegians, Ukrainians, Irish, Scots and even Dutch – and all of them homesteaders earning cash to buy materials, grain or livestock for their own acres.
Their dedication made Harry feel guilty at his own good fortune, that he had sufficient money not to have to spend the winter in a tarpaper shack or leaking soddy, and enough set by that he could focus on doing his own work rather than another man’s. He had overheard comments at the store soon after his arrival that made him realise he had to work extra hard to win local respect if he wasn’t to be dismissed as little better than a remittance man.
While the engineer fired up the engine and worked up a head of steam, and his second-in-command positioned the threshing machine far enough away that the huge canvas drive belts linking the two in a figure of eight were at precisely the right tension so the belts would neither overheat nor become dangerously slack, the others laboured along the nearest row of stooks, using forks to pitch the bales up to the luckless fellow on the wagon who had to race to catch and stack the things. When the wagon was full and the twin beasts of machinery set in roaring motion, one man continued as pitcher, tossing down bales from the wagon to a kind of table where two men with sharp knives cut their bindings and threw them into the thresher. Grain emerged from the separator by a chute at waist height, where other men queued to catch it in sacks that they had rapidly to tie with wire then heave on to a cart. The whirling canvas sails of the machine flung the straw high above it in a golden, sneeze-inducing torrent. It landed in a heap, which was periodically dragged aside to a bigger heap by a pair of horses harnessed to a big wooden rake. The grisly tales one heard of threshing injuries and deaths seemed no exaggeration when one saw this scene full of driving belts, flying steel wheels and exhausted men jumping here and there, half blinded by dust, laying about them with pitchforks.
Boys and girls from the Cree encampment watched for much of the day from the farm margins, drawn by the noise and excitement. Harry hoped they would have more sense than to come any closer.
With such a team of men at work, some might have been tempted to let them do everything, but on the basis that the threshers would work most efficiently if they could concentrate on the task in hand without having to move from the spot where they were established, relatively close to the house and to water for engine and horses alike, Paul and Harry took a cart off to the neighbouring field and fetched the crop from there, breaking up the stooks to stack the cart as high as they dared before drawing it slowly back to the team, by which time they didn’t have to wait long before there was another cart they could take off to fill.
As it was fine, and there was more room outside the house than in it, Petra served lunch on a table that was actually a barn door unhooked and propped up on empty fruit boxes. She had been baking in a bad-tempered frenzy all the previous day, and set out such a tremendous feast it was hard to believe it had all been produced by one reluctant cook on the one stove. There were roast chickens, broken into golden-skinned segments, jugs of onion gravy, mounds of the scones the Canadians called biscuits and which she improved with the addition of cheese and some thyme-like herb she gathered; then there were cauldrons of buttered potatoes, platters of roast ham and an array of home-made pickles. Harry was astonished, not only to see her single-handedly produce something like a Christmas lunch but to witness how complacently the team sat down to eat it. All of it. Petra meanwhile carried a laden tray down to the engineer’s second-in-command, who had to keep the engine stoked, heating the water tank for the afternoon. By the time the deafening whistle shrieked to summon them all back to work, there was barely a biscuit or potato left, and only two slices of ham. And the team had devoured an array of lattice-topped fruit pies slathered with thick cream.
Harry complimented her on the cooking that the others had appeared to take for granted, and she sighed.
‘The woman who leaves the threshers hungry or stints on their dessert is as far down the social scale as the one without a yard of flannel in the house when her baby comes!’ She would, she assured him, be laying on exactly the same menu the next day, and then producing nothing but crackers and jam for a month.
The team slept out in an improvised tent slung between two carts. They all collapsed into bed soon after dusk. The engineer’s deputy woke not long after three to light the fire, and roused them with the engine’s brutal whistle shortly after five. Petra served them bacon, head cheese, sausage and boiled eggs (quicker to make in large numbers than fried ones), and Harry stumbled out to join Paul on a cart, feeling as though he had not slept at all. Paul was determined they could finish his fields before lunch so as to fit in the threshing of Harry’s far smaller harvest that afternoon.
A sharp little wind had arisen overnight, with the sting that threatened colder weather. It raised a storm of blinding dust around the separator, fed by the muck and fragments blowing free as bales flew from fork to catcher, and soon all the men apart from the engineer, who was either superhuman in his powers of endurance or keen to maintain a distinction from the mere humans working under him, had masked their faces with grubby neckerchiefs, like so many rustic highwaymen. Grey clouds rol
led across the sun and a scene that the day before had seemed the picture of summer industry, like an image off one of the Domain Lands posters presenting the Western prairies as a place where wheaty plenty tumbled into the outstretched hand, was transformed into something quite the opposite, lent a hellish aspect by the flashing prongs of the workers’ pitchforks.
Harry was travelling in and out of the scene with cartloads of wheat, and could not, in any case, have said with certainty how many men the engineer had working under him, but even masked in a spotted neckerchief, their unexpected visitor stood out, being a head taller than the rest.
He was standing on the top of the heap of unthreshed wheat bales. Seeing Harry as they pulled away with an empty cart for the final load before lunch, he raised an arm in greeting, but immediately turned aside to carry on stabbing the bales and hurling them at the luckless men on the separator, as though determined to trip them up in their work. It was so typical, Harry thought, so characteristically odd that Troels should throw himself into unpaid labour among men he had never met, compelled to impose himself and to prove himself their equal or better. He was like some relentless younger son in an old German tale, fighting everyone he met when he might simply have greeted them and passed by on the other side. It was a wonder he hadn’t pushed the engineer aside to demonstrate a better method for winning the best performance from his machinery.
Harry nudged Paul as they drove out of the field, seizing as he always did now any licensed excuse to touch him. Paul glanced at him, sleepily flirtatious. His reddish hair and beard were so full of bits of straw, Harry longed to brush them with his fingers. ‘Troels Munck is back there,’ he told him.