by Patrick Gale
‘A threat,’ she said. ‘That’s all it is.’ She nudged a stick back on to the fire with the toe of her boot. ‘A little wisp of thundercloud.’
She seemed so relaxed, even drunk; he wondered if she had already been dosed with some narcotic brew the mannish witch had stewed for her. Then he noticed afresh the powerfully herbal fumes coming off the fire. He felt relaxed too, he realised, despite cold, wet feet and a racing heart. It was all so utterly simple. He would marry Petra and the three of them would farm together, alongside each other. With a child.
He found himself remembering Phyllis, the weight of her little hand in his as he stooped to let her walk alongside him by the river in Radnor Gardens, the sweet scent of her skin as he kissed her good night, her furious tears at Strawberry Hill station as he tried to say a meaningful goodbye.
He turned away to lift the cloth that hung across the tepee’s opening and looked out. Lily Thunder was out there, watching and waiting. Petra’s hand stole into his and squeezed.
‘Are you sure?’ she whispered. ‘Dear, sweet man. Are you quite sure?’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Four years passed with a welcome day-to-day slowness that Harry felt might have continued for ever. Just as he usually went to bed too tired in body for sleepless fretting over things that lay beyond his control, like weather or how they would cope with a failed harvest, so the three of them were little bothered by affairs beyond the boundaries of their adjoining farms. Harry had broken fifty-five acres in his first year and cropped five. In 1911, he broke fifty and cropped fifty-five. In 1912, he broke the last fifty-five and cropped a hundred and five and was able to enter his patent at the Dominion Lands Office in Battleford, with Paul and a second, newer neighbour as witnesses that he had done all this, fenced the perimeter and erected a stable, a barn and a dwelling. In 1913, he and Paul harvested to capacity.
And while Harry’s place grew to look less and less like a rough-and-ready homestead and came to resemble first a proper farm and then even a home, with washing drying on lines slung between fruit trees, and chickens hunting grubs around a vegetable patch, so Winter grew from being a few sheds around a railway siding to a place that dared to call itself a town.
Harry and Petra were married after a Sunday service, with Paul as one witness and the vicar’s mother as the other. Petra had grown fond of the house she shared with her brother, but Harry was legally required to reside at least part of the year on the land he was working to claim, so she joined him there. Besides, as she quietly pointed out, it was a house in which Munck had never set foot.
While so many homesteaders’ quarters were still basic, and so many men lived and worked in an isolation that was potentially dangerous in winter, it was common enough for men to move in together for the iciest months, or to lock up their houses and take quarters together in town until the weather warmed. It saved on fuel and undoubtedly saved a few lives. So nobody thought it at all odd that Paul shut up house for the following winter and moved in with his sister and Harry.
Their practice through the winter, by which Paul would begin on the couch but pass at least a sequence of every night in Harry’s bed, had set a pattern for the following spring, when Paul moved back to his own house. The two men would work independently through the day, but Paul would often join husband and wife for supper, and then Harry would ‘see him home’ and not return to his own bed until the early hours. The arrangement was never discussed between the three of them, but it was plain to Harry that, though each was no less fond of the other, both siblings enjoyed their share of independence. Paul filled the conversational space left in Petra’s wake with omnivorous reading. Petra, meanwhile, taught herself to shoot, and joked that Harry should never think of opening her bedroom door at night without knocking.
Petra’s baby, their baby, was born the following June, after a labour long enough to allow Harry time to travel to Unity and back for Dr Routledge. They called her Grace, after his mother. Although the assumption in a farming community was that every parent craved a son, Harry suspected that Petra was as relieved as he was; in a girl, any resemblance to the biological father would be less apparent.
Having complained roundly at the discomforts of pregnancy, especially with the onset of warmer weather and flies, Petra had given worrying signs that she might resent the baby as much as its gestation, and prove as little like other mothers as she resembled other wives. Motherhood answered some deep-seated need in her, however. She was unsentimental with the child, but fascinated by her, warmly patient with the incessant routines and repetitions of child-rearing and interested in every facet of Grace’s emerging intellect and personality. She sent off for books on the latest paediatric theory and began to keep a journal in which she recorded her observations of the child’s development.
Phyllis never thanked Harry for the moccasins, nor did she respond to the letters he still occasionally wrote her, so that he began to suspect they were destroyed before they could reach her. Vaccinated by this cruel loss of his first daughter, he approached fatherhood the second time round with a certain reserve. He did not consciously harden his heart, but he loved with hands metaphorically behind his back.
The unforeseen response was Paul’s. Though appreciative of the way the marriage shielded Petra, he kept brooding about the idea that she was having Munck’s child. ‘What if he comes to claim it?’ he asked Harry as they lay together. ‘What if it looks like him and hates us on sight?’ He was thus completely unready for the gust of love that swept over him when the baby, wrapped in a shawl, was first put in his arms. And if she looked like anyone, as her face began to uncrumple and fill out, it was him; she had a sternness about her when she was concentrating that was remarkably like his, and when she began to laugh, towards the end of her first year, it was with a childish version of his slow rumble of a chuckle.
He was incapable of passing her without touching her head or sweeping her up, and the adoration was mutual. As soon as she was old enough to appreciate them, he was forever bringing her things: a flower, a feather, a peg doll or a toy boat carved with his penknife. And when she was teething or fretful, Paul could soothe her as neither parent could, simply by holding her against his chest and murmuring. Before she could quite say his name, she called him Papa, which amused Petra no end.
The circumstances of this second fatherhood were entirely different from Harry’s first. The first time, he had not been working. Now, he did almost nothing but work, and when he came in at night, Grace was often asleep. His snatched lunchtimes, along with Sundays, were his main time for seeing the child. Phyllis had been guarded by a nursery maid and then her mother, whereas Grace had only Petra, who was always happy to hand her over, if only to admire her from the other side of the table. Both the house in Herne Bay and Ma Touraine had boasted nurseries – airy rooms far distant by design, where the less palatable aspects of babies and infants, along with their noise when unhappy, were kept far from scenes of adult serenity. In a wooden house, however sturdily built, there was no such luxurious dividing-up of living space. One was either in bed or not. Internal walls of wooden panels nailed on either side of a frame, even when the frame was stuffed to cut down on draughts, did little to dampen the cries or happy shouts only two rooms away.
They were none of them especially hungry for news, even Harry, who while still in England had maintained a daily routine involving newsprint. Newspapers came their way very occasionally, usually days old, left behind in some hotel bar or station waiting room by a recent arrival. News of another kind arrived by letter, although Paul rarely had the time or inclination to write to anyone, so received little mail, and Harry’s correspondents had both forsaken him. Petra maintained several correspondences with former school friends, although the change in her circumstances had opened a gulf between them. On getting married and preparing to become a mother, she joked that finally she had news that the simpletons could understand, and
sure enough, a little rush of parcels ensued, wedding presents and then items for the baby’s layette, most of them far too fine for a child on a dusty prairie farmstead.
As a Londoner, Harry had marvelled that there could be country dwellers so parochial they cared about nothing beyond their farm gates, but now he came to understand perfectly that local news, picked up after church or in the dry goods store or on the railway platform, about whether a lumberyard was to open or a new poison for gophers had come on the market, was actually far more important than news from Toronto or London.
The coming of war changed that, even though war was declared in August, when harvest preparations were at their height. The news was sown swiftly, shaken from pulpits and scattered by posters and threshing gangs. The message from on high was confused. As a loyal dominion, Canada would, of course, support her mother country and send men, even if many of those men were not English by birth, but as her mother country’s principal bread bowl, she was also pledged to send wheat. And wheat could not grow, harvest, thresh, bag and transport itself.
There was no question among them that Harry and Paul would stay to farm land that was just coming into its own rather than fight in a distant war that meant nothing to them. Besides, at thirty-nine and thirty-six, they considered themselves a little old for soldiers. They knew of other farms, with menfolk to spare, where younger sons had enlisted at once, happy to do their bit rather than continue as slaves to acres they would never own, but most farmers were staying put.
A notable exception was the remittance men, for whom the war came as an abrupt bugle call interrupting a carefree round of hunting, shooting and boyish play. Rumours were rife of them having ridden away leaving neglected land and houses packed with belongings ripe for thieving. A sadder rumour had it that they could not bear to abandon their fine hunting dogs to be taken on by Indians, who were said to be notoriously harsh towards their hounds, so they set up a macabre relay in which each shot his neighbour’s dog before departing to fight for their county regiments at home. This might have been a final piece of satire at the ridiculous Englishmen’s expense, but hunting dogs had certainly been abandoned. For a week or two their howls punctuated the night, markedly different from the wilder yelps and yodelling of the coyotes.
Paul took one on, a handsome pointer bitch called Bella, who showed up on his doorstep and refused to leave. She had clearly been a much-loved hunting companion, if not pet, for her trust and loyalty fixed on him the moment he read her name from her collar, and she took to following him everywhere, investigating the nearby ditches while he worked in a field but alert to his every gesture and swift to join him the moment he threatened to move on. Petra ribbed him that he now looked quite the English squire, but she liked the sense that they had acquired a family guardian. Grace was smitten with her rival for Paul’s affections and had to be persuaded not to offer up the contents of her plate the moment Bella entered the kitchen.
The immediate problem presented on the farms by war was manpower. The threshing gangs had to be awaited with even greater patience than usual. So many of Canada’s less rooted workers had enlisted with the Expeditionary Force, either from patriotism or a sense of adventure, that many of the engineers had trouble recruiting a team of eight and hanging on to them for the full course of a harvest season. Men in the prairies argued that farm or fight presented two equally noble options, but for the moment at least, exchanging dungarees for khaki seemed the more heroic one.
Harry had heard nothing from Jack in years now. He had written to him when he arrived in Winter, writing to their lawyers too, as it seemed only responsible to keep them informed. The lawyers drily acknowledged receipt, but from Jack there came nothing. The continuing silence was hurtful, but he strove to understand it from Jack’s viewpoint, bound round by a large family to which Harry had become an unmentionable. He comforted himself that for someone as fundamentally fair-minded as Jack was, the taking of sides could not have been easy, and, for all the sorrow it caused him, decided it was kinder not to heap coals on his head with further letters. He did not even write about Petra or the birth of Grace, assuming such news would only seem incendiary to his former in-laws.
News of the war stirred this all up again. Jack had enjoyed every aspect of his time in the Harrow army corps, the marching, the uniform, the boot-polishing and gun drill. If he was not at the front already, he would surely be on his way. He would have signed up at once with the Cheshires. He might even have been enlisted as a vet. The army used horses by the thousand and would need specialists to care for them. Harry could picture the eve-of-departure photograph George would have boastingly circulated to her sisters: Jack looking splendid in uniform, one reassuring hand on George’s shoulder as she perched bravely on a stool before him, somehow symbolic of what he was fighting for.
It was a bitter October morning. The threshing gang had finally reached them, and there had been finger-numbing frost on the sheaves as they gathered them from the stooks to the roaring separator. It was Harry and Paul’s second day of ferrying cotton sacks of grain from their farms to the agent at Winter station. There were plans afoot to build a grain elevator here – a high structure where grain could be loaded in bulk into silos and thence into waiting trucks for transport by rail. Loading it in sacks was unwieldy and time-consuming, and would soon be outdated.
Nevertheless, Harry enjoyed this work for the simple satisfaction of being handed a ticket after each load was weighed and then exchanging the tickets at the delivery’s end for a cheque that could be cashed within the day or simply handed over at the store as credit against his account. It felt a part of the pleasing process of preparing for winter. Petra said it was the only time of year she noticed him humming songs to himself.
‘Your father’s like a squirrel laying in hazelnuts,’ she told Grace.
A train was in, filled with boys and men heading off to war and fluttering with suddenly ubiquitous flags. Wrapped against the cold, families had gathered to wave, or, less cheerfully, to see their own menfolk off. A boy with a cornet struck up a tune out of a carriage window, and a gang of people sang along to a song Harry had rapidly come to loathe.
Come on Sandy, come on Jack.
We’ll guard your home till you get back!
Down your tools, and leave your benches.
Say goodbye to all the wenches.
In their midst an impromptu recruiting office had been set up. Two smart officers at a table hung with the sort of posters that, through post and railway, had spread across the country, like those flags, in a matter of days, and now fluttered on church noticeboards and at post office entrances. Back him up! Your chums are fighting. Why aren’t you? Even the blameless Canadian beaver had been pressed into service to sell Victory Bonds with the slogan Keep Canada Busy!
King and country, like the peculiarly pro-empire version of God encountered every Sunday, were simply part of life’s accepted fabric, like lawns and buttered toast. Since emigrating, Harry had come to see he had not a shred of patriotism in him, and the display of it in others brought on in him a hunted feeling. Luckily he was among kindred spirits. Paul said he felt more Canadian than Scottish or British, and Petra was disgusted by all wars and suspected the motives of those who waged them. She believed the key element to patriotism was display; that it was all about being seen to support a cause, being seen to wave a flag. But she had not, he noticed, said any of this outside the security of their two houses.
Harry turned away and heaved another sack on to his shoulder. He caught Paul’s eye as they passed between cart and weighing machine. They had spent the entire night together, by an accident of exhaustion rather than romantic design, but waking to dawn light in Paul’s room, with Bella curled up on their discarded work clothes, and to find Paul unguardedly tender while still half asleep, had transformed the day that followed and left Harry slow and stupid with love, not just for Paul, but for Petra and Grace, who wer
e still sound asleep when he rode home and fired up the stove to make their porridge.
‘Come on, lads! There’s time before we leave. No one loves a coward.’ The voice was familiar, even if the accent had been modified to sound more Canadian.
Harry turned from loading his weighed sack into the truck to see that the taller and bigger of the two recruiting officers was Troels Munck. Paul had seen, too, and was already striding up the platform. ‘No!’ Harry called out, and ran to catch up with him, grabbing his coat sleeve.
‘Where does he get the nerve?’ Paul growled. ‘I swear I’ll break his face.’ He was so angry, he was shaking.
‘He’s not worth it,’ Harry said. ‘Maybe it’s not even—’
‘Oh, it’s him. I’d know that smug fuck anywhere.’ The uncharacteristic profanity cut across the crowded platform like a whip-crack and earned them a glare from a coarse-featured woman wearing a Union Jack as a shawl.
The stationmaster’s whistle had blown and the recruitment team were boarding the train when Paul shook free of Harry and ran after them. ‘Munck!’ he shouted.
Scared that he was about to try jumping on to a moving train, Harry seized his shoulder. The larger recruiting officer turned on the top step as the train began to slide out past them. It was unmistakably Munck. He saw who had shouted, saw Harry with his hand on Paul’s shoulder.
As his carriage pulled past, he smiled and mouthed coward through the open window.
A black mood descended on Paul that in a less complicated man one might have dismissed as a sulk. He was not a sulker, though, and people sulked when they didn’t get their way or felt martyred or misunderstood. This was like a savage anger turned inward, to which he could not, would not give voice. When Harry tried to break through the storm cloud with calm reason, Paul merely said, ‘Stop it,’ not unpleasantly, but with a decisiveness Harry had learnt to respect.