A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  ‘You don’t say. Munck? What’s he want? Come to see if you’ve taken to drink and a pipe-smoking squaw the way Varcoe did?’ Paul chuckled to himself but did not seem remotely perturbed at the strangeness of Troels’ having arrived unheralded. He was, his sister had pointed out, like a patient and accepting ox at times, not a man who would ever, like Harry, suffer a broken night imagining bad things that might never happen. Paul was given to welcoming life’s blessings when they befell him, whereas Harry would fret about whether he deserved the bounty or would have to pay for it later. In their encounters, all of them taken now in the privacy of his house rather than up at the slough, Harry had said nothing of what Petra had confided in him. As their intimacy deepened, he was finding that he could talk to Paul less and less freely.

  ‘Do you think he’s come to see Petra?’ he asked, before jumping down from the cart – it was his turn to pitch and Paul’s to catch and stack.

  ‘Do you?’ Paul asked, and he smiled to himself. ‘She made it pretty clear that she didn’t want any part of him, I reckon.’

  It amused Harry to compare Robert Wells with Paul, in this one regard. Paul was quietly amused by his sister’s stubborn refusal to countenance the conventional romance of courtship – and the marital bondage that followed – and, if anything, seemed proud of her daring to be different. Faced with a similar rebellion against the accepted order of things in any of his sisters, Robert would have lectured and hectored them into submission.

  Petra had been slaving again and had set out a great feast. She didn’t recognise Troels at first, dusty as he was from the work and disguised by hat and neckerchief. And when she did, as he tossed his hat aside on to the grass, she wrapped her surprise in cordiality, hurrying to lay an extra place for him and asking if he was visiting the area long.

  His response was oddly surly, sulky even. Far from seeming lovelorn, he barely glanced at her in greeting, said he was merely passing through on his way further west, and asked Harry to pass him the potatoes. She did not eat with the men in any case, claiming that cooking meat always dulled her appetite for it, and being kept busy ferrying pots and dishes and gravy jugs to and from the kitchen. From what she had said of their history, Harry assumed she would rather have her former suitor surly than cow-eyed.

  The sulkiness was pointed, however, for Troels rapidly became the life and soul of the table, saying how far Paul had come from the head-in-book Toronto student he had known first, and teasing the threshing team that simply being paid didn’t seem to make them work any faster. Hearing how Harry had already put up a little house like the Slaymakers’, with Paul’s help, he said he would have to admire it another time, as he was due on an English homestead near Zumbro, the other side of Yonker. Another puppy made good, he said, with a wolfish grin at Harry.

  When Petra set down slices of a pie made from one of the bilberry-like local fruits, Troels was no longer surly with her, and said that if it tasted half as good as it smelled, leaving them for a supper of burnt bannock and undercooked jack rabbit was going to be hard indeed.

  A big V-formation of geese was flying south high overhead, their honking a mournful warning of cold to come. As the team prepared to set off down the track to Harry’s place, Paul settled up with the engineer and insisted Troels take something for his morning’s work, but the Dane shrugged it off, almost offended.

  ‘You paid me in ham,’ he said, patting his belly.

  He shook hands with Harry and saw him up into the cart at the team’s rear. ‘I’m glad it’s going well for you,’ he said. ‘A little surprised, but glad.’ And he grinned again. ‘Varcoe never made it home, you know.’

  ‘Is he still in that shack in Battleford?’

  ‘Dead and buried,’ Troels said, and raised his hat. ‘The fool was tubercular.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Harry’s harvest was in tens of sacks rather than hundreds like Paul’s, but it was no less satisfying to see it piling up in the lean-to stable he had constructed against the house and would use as a temporary granary until they could transport their grain to the station. By the time he was paying the engineer for the team’s time and seeing them off, he was ready to fall asleep with his clothes on. Paul, evidently as tired as he was, bade him good night and drove away soon after the team had left.

  Not daring to rest, for fear he might fall asleep in a chair, and worried that the weather was about to change for the worse, Harry worked on, shouldering the last twenty sacks of grain on to his cart and driving them up to the stable. The relative quiet, now that the relentless machinery had been silenced, felt like a blessing. The harsh crying of birds, marking out their territories or whatever they were doing, as the shadows lengthened, was now the only sound. The answering calls, from further off, emphasised the emptiness and breadth of the fields around him. More than the wild flowers, crocuses, roses, lupins and tiger lilies, which to his untutored gaze so often resembled English-garden equivalents, the songs of birds here were the daily reminder that he was living on a different continent. A mixed flock of them had descended on his field to feast on whatever spilled grain or unhomed insects they could find among the new stubble, but they rose up like so much wind-blown soot at the sound of a cantering horse.

  Paul rode up, hatted and coated as though for a long ride in bad weather. Rain was beginning to spot the dry earth as Harry hurried out to him.

  ‘He attacked Petra,’ Paul said, his voice tight. ‘I’m heading towards Zumbro. See if I can catch him or find where he was going next.’

  Harry saw he had his rifle slung in the scabbard below one side of his saddle. ‘What can you—’ he started.

  Paul cut him off. ‘She shouldn’t be alone,’ was all he said and kicked his horse back the way he had come and down towards the railway road.

  Kitty and May were both still fairly fresh. Threshing was harder on humans than it was on them. Harry quickly saddled up Kitty, who was marginally the quicker of the two, and rode her up the track. For use in broad daylight, or if one of them were walking after dark with a lantern, they had established a neighbourly path that led more directly from one homestead to the other, but on a horse, and with little light, the public route was the safest, quickest way.

  There was a lamp burning at one end of the house but the kitchen, the first room one came by, was dark. The few spots turned to rain in earnest as he pulled up, so he led Kitty into the stable and tied her up there. Petra’s white pony snorted at her and stamped in her stall. Kitty merely sighed and resumed the supper Harry had interrupted.

  Neither householder was in the habit of locking doors, Harry because he believed he had nothing of value in the house to steal, the Slaymakers because they said nobody was ever passing such a remote spot who wasn’t a friend or trusted, at least. He wasn’t even sure their door had a keyhole. So, out of force of habit, he turned the doorknob after knocking, and was surprised to find the door bolted against him.

  He knocked again, worried now, and called out, ‘Petra?’ Paul had said attacked. Perhaps her injuries were worse than he’d realised, and instead of cantering after her attacker, Paul should have gone for a doctor. Still, she had a well-stocked medicine chest and he could administer if she were sufficiently conscious to say what she needed. A window opened. Her bedroom window.

  ‘I’m not injured, Harry.’ Her voice was strained and high. ‘You needn’t have come.’

  ‘Petra, it’s really quite wet.’

  She closed her window and he saw the dim glow of her lantern travelling past the intervening window and into the kitchen, where she pulled back the bolt. The wind was mounting, whipping straw fragments into a frenzy by his feet.

  ‘Quickly,’ she said, and she closed the door behind him as soon as he was inside and shot the bolt afresh.

  Seeing her made his heart race. She had a black eye, the lids so swollen they had closed. There was also a cut ne
ar her mouth.

  ‘I fought back,’ she said. ‘With a broken plate.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He’ll have quite a scar,’ she said.

  ‘Good. Petra?’

  ‘What am I thinking? Take off that coat. You’re soaked through.’

  As she set down the lamp on the table and took his coat to hang where the warmth of the stove would dry it, he saw that the things from lunch were still all around the room, cleaned plates stacked for putting away, dirty crockery still awaiting attention. She had been interrupted in her work and been too hurt, or shocked, to return to it. Then he realised she was in her nightclothes and must be cold. She did not even have a shawl around her shoulders. As she turned from him to slide the kettle forward on the stove to heat, although he’d said he wanted nothing, he saw a long, dark stain on her dressing gown’s rear, near the top of her legs.

  ‘Petra, stop,’ he said. ‘Please. You should be in bed. You’re bleeding.’

  ‘Oh. This again?’ she asked, turning to pat at the cut by her mouth. ‘He bit me.’

  ‘Er. No. Lower down.’

  She didn’t grasp his meaning immediately, then she gasped an apology and swept off back to her bedroom. She took the lamp with her, plunging him into darkness, but he had taught himself, back in his days at the Jørgensens’, always to carry a matchbox in the relative dry of his inside breast pocket. He struck a match to find his bearings and, with a second, lit the handsome brass lamp that hung from a chain above the kitchen table. The kettle began to whistle, the whistle almost a shriek by the time he had found a dishcloth to cover its hot handle so he wasn’t scalded in moving it to the back of the stove again. As the sound subsided, he heard a soft sob from Petra’s room.

  ‘Can I bring you anything?’ he called out, cursing the lack of salient facts in a male education. ‘Some hot water? A towel?’

  ‘No, no,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll live, thank you. But don’t go. Please don’t go now you’re here.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he assured her, not quite touching the door to her room. ‘I’ll be staying until Paul gets back.’

  She fell silent after that. He hoped she had done whatever needed to be done then taken to her bed and fallen asleep. She was evidently suffering from shock and needed complete rest.

  Female hygiene was not quite a mystery to him; after being married and having lived for a while in a houseful of women, he knew about monthly bleeding and that rags were involved and bad temper and sometimes pain. Winnie, however, had drunk in her mother’s philosophy that if women were to be delectable to men at all times, then there were things concerning which men were best left in ignorance.

  Harry cleared the clean things off the draining rack, then plugged the sink, threw in a handful of soap flakes and emptied the kettle over them, refilled it and set it to boil again before he continued washing up the lunch things where Petra had left off. Washing of anything – oneself, clothes or crockery – was a long-winded task in a house where water had to be drawn from a well or, in Harry’s case, a stream, then heated on a stove. At Harry’s, where he had yet to incorporate such niceties as a sink or a drain, because the imperative of harvesting had called him away from indoor work, dirty water also had to be carried out and tipped away. Paul and Petra had only recently plumbed in a pump to fill an overhead tank, which – until everything froze, of course – then supplied well water to the deeper of two sinks. Once winter came and all the well water and streams froze for months, both households would be reduced to the hand-numbing tedium of fetching in snow to melt in a pot on the stove. For now, Harry worked as he had seen Petra do it, rinsing soap from each article in a chilly splash from the tap before setting it in the wooden rack to drain and dry.

  In the mess on the table, he came upon a crescent of broken blue and white plate. It had what could have been gravy caked around one extremely sharp point. He rinsed it instinctively under the tap before tossing it into the bucket where they collected dry waste the hens and pig wouldn’t eat.

  Adding more hot water, and moving on to scrubbing pots and pans, he thought back to lunch and how cheerful Munck had been with them all. Had he come among them expressly to do Petra violence, or had he simply been passing and then seized on the opportunity fate and his hosts offered him? Insofar as Harry had felt any misgiving it had been that Munck might once again pester her with his unwelcome love, nothing more threatening.

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’ Her voice so startled him, he dropped a pan lid with a splash into the soapy water. She had dressed, cleaned up the cut by her mouth and tidied her hair back from the wild state it had been in when she opened the door. Apart from the black eye, she looked almost herself.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘But I do. Come and sit. I need a whisky and I never drink alone.’ She fetched a bottle and two glasses. ‘It’s only bourbon, I’m afraid, not the real thing, but it will have to do.’ She poured them each a splash of golden liquor and nudged his glass towards him as he sat across from her. ‘I’m so sorry about earlier.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘You must have thought me crazy.’

  ‘Not at all. I was worried, that’s all. Are you sure you don’t want a doctor?’

  ‘Quite, thank you. The eye will heal in time and so will the bite mark. The memory will take a little longer. I’m going to tell you, I’m afraid. I have to tell someone and it can’t possibly be Paul. Did he . . . did Paul have his gun with him?’

  Harry nodded.

  She exhaled fiercely. ‘Pray God he doesn’t find him.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I go to the police?’

  ‘Dear, sweet man. You forget where we are. And even if there were a mounted policeman to hand, or a whole posse of them, what could they do?’

  ‘Catch him?’

  ‘And then what?’ She started to pronounce a word she then found no power to say, so sighed and started afresh. ‘When a woman out here dares to accuse a man of . . . assaulting her person, she is nearly always disgraced by the process. While the man walks free to attack again.’

  ‘But why?’

  She laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, so many reasons. Not the least of which is that the law is a blind woman and the judge usually an unloved old man. The lack of proof or witnesses. The embarrassment of the judge and jury. Her failure to scream loud enough to show she took no pleasure in the proceedings.’

  Only now did Harry understand that Munck’s assault had not been limited to her face, and in his shame at his stupid innocence, he gulped his bourbon and had to suppress a choking fit.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty rough stuff, isn’t it? Strictly for medicinal purposes. Like assault and battery.’ She sighed again. ‘Quite pointless! There was a horrible case only last year. An Irish girl on a homestead to the other side of the Battlefords attacked by her father’s hired hand. He said she had encouraged him. She said she fought as hard as she could but that when she saw it was hopeless, she submitted, thinking to have the ordeal end the sooner. When the judge asked her why she hadn’t screamed, she politely pointed out that screaming would have been useless since her father was away on business and the nearest people were some six miles away. Case dismissed with her name thoroughly blackened. I heard she was sent back to Ireland since no one here would marry her now.’ She met his eye. ‘Don’t feel bad, Harry. Even if I’d been able to shriek loud enough for you all to hear me down at your place, the noise of the separator and the traction engine would have drowned me out. You wouldn’t have heard even a gunshot.’

  He swallowed more burning liquor and, with it, the human urge to say something, anything, to offer specious comfort. He simply shook his head slowly and waited for her to continue.

  She looked down at her lap and smoothed the fabric of her skirt. ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had romantic dreams, even as a
young girl. I think Mother was too efficacious an inoculation for that, as were the glimpses I had, through Father’s patients, of the realities of what man could do to woman. But I was curious all the same, to hope I might . . . experience everything, in due course, some day, and with a man I respected. Now I feel a bit stupid, like a miser who has saved up a precious jewel in the dark only to have it stolen.’

  All animation went from her frame just then and he thought back to the day of his arrival at the Jørgensen farm, and how then, and for weeks afterwards, Munck’s assault had left him feeling dead on the inside.

  ‘You’re still you,’ he ventured. ‘He took nothing of wh . . . what makes you you.’ His stammer sounded doubly feeble in the silence of the room, and she did not honour his words with a reply.

  ‘Tell me about your wife,’ she asked instead. ‘Winifred?’

  ‘Winnie.’

  ‘Yes. Was she . . . when you married, was she . . . ?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I rather wish she hadn’t been. It somehow assumes the man knows what he is about.’

  ‘And you didn’t.’

  ‘Pure as driven snow,’ he said.

  At which she smiled.

  ‘She was in love with someone else, though,’ he said. ‘A man they hadn’t let her marry.’

  ‘So she didn’t belong to you?’

  ‘She never did. No.’

  ‘And did she know about . . . your . . . ?’

  ‘No. But back then, neither did I.’

  She widened her eyes slightly in surprise at that.

  ‘Innocent, as I say,’ he added. ‘May I?’

  She nodded, and he splashed a little more bourbon into both their glasses.

  ‘May I ask one more question?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he told her, happy that her mind should think of other things rather than brooding on the attack.

  She tapped her glass with her fingernails, shy of meeting his eye. ‘Is it . . . is it emotional or simply a physical need the two of you are answering?’