A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  The night was still cloudless, and he could see every detail of Munck’s long legs sprawled away from the slough and on to dry land. The silence was broken only by his own ragged breathing. His throat was so crushed, it hurt when he swallowed, as though he were swallowing sharp little bones. It even hurt like that when he breathed. At last, light-headed, he dared jump off the body and made a clumsy landing on grass. He pulled off his filthy boots and the soaking socks beneath them, then seized Munck’s boots to tug them free. He felt a primitive need somehow to incapacitate the menacing body before him.

  Munck’s boots were a little too large but they were dry. He put them on and staggered back to the house. He tried to call out to Petra but found Munck’s grip had all but killed his voice, and he produced only a silent yelp at the pain of the attempt.

  He set his wet boots down beside the stove. Munck’s had a far noisier tread for some reason, as though the wooden heels were hollow.

  ‘Hello?’ Petra was calling through the barricaded door. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s me,’ he tried to say. ‘You’re safe now.’

  Somehow she realised who it was, perhaps because he had knocked rather than thudded, perhaps because she had unconsciously learnt to be reassured by the rhythm of his footfall around the house over the years. She dragged away the chest of drawers. He heard her gasp at the effort. Then she opened the door. It took her a moment to realise he couldn’t speak, but when he gestured at his throat, there must have been marks there that explained, because she seemed to understand at once.

  ‘Where is he?’

  He led her to the door and pointed. She said nothing for a while, then asked simply, ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

  Harry nodded and, leaning close to her ear, whispered, ‘I should ride into town, get word out.’

  ‘Who would you tell?’ she asked. ‘And what would you tell them? He attacked us.’

  ‘No,’ he whispered, flinching at the pain. ‘I attacked him.’

  ‘You killed him in self-defence.’

  He was still too confused to think coherently, as though his ordeal had affected his wits. All he could feel was the hot blood dripping on to his neck and face as Munck closed in for the kill. His attempt to explain himself to Petra in throat-clawing whispers was cut short by a cry from Grace back in the bedroom.

  ‘She’s ill,’ Petra said, flatly. ‘It’s flu.’

  ‘But how . . . ?’ he started stupidly, only she was running back to the bedroom.

  Grace was barely recognisable from the pale-faced little girl who had clung to him earlier. She lay on the bed, blonde hair dark with sweat that shone on her chest and throat.

  ‘Get cold water,’ Petra told him. ‘And a small towel we can dip in it.’

  Frightened, he did as she told him, pumping water into a big saucepan and fetching a towel from the neat pile in the linen cupboard.

  ‘I’ll ride for the doctor,’ he whispered.

  ‘No,’ Petra insisted. ‘Even if you could find a doctor, we can’t spread it any further. No one can visit and we can’t leave. Not until it’s over.’

  As ever, her resolution was absolute. He pulled up a stool on the other side of the bed and held Grace’s burning hand while Petra repeatedly dipped and wrung out the towel and pressed it to the child’s face and neck and brow.

  She had witnessed such things often enough when acting as her father’s nurse in the Toronto slums, but Harry had never watched such a fever at work. Nothing had prepared him for its violence and speed, for Grace’s desperate whimpering and hand-clutching as she was racked by dry coughs that eventually left spatters of ruby lung blood on the sheets, or for the violent spasms that shook her as the flu cooked her brain before his powerless gaze. She lost consciousness in the small hours as the sun was coming up.

  Her breathing had become so ragged and wild that its abrupt cessation made the room feel small and very quiet. He brought her hand to his lips as he had done times without number through the night, then reached out to lay it on her chest, where he pressed it once more with his.

  Petra was simply frozen, staring at her. He reached up once more and gently closed the child’s eyes, shocked at how hot her skin still felt.

  ‘Could you open the window, Harry?’ Petra asked at last.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He opened the little window and the room filled with dawn bird calls. Turning back, he found that Petra had climbed on to the bed and was clutching Grace against her as though force and need alone might bring her back.

  ‘Harry,’ she said at last, half turning but still not meeting his eye. ‘Bury her while I’m asleep. I’m not sure I could bear to watch.’

  He dug two graves as deep as his strength would let him. The first was fifty yards or so from the house, where the soil was loose but unencumbered by tree roots. As he dug, he kept seeing Munck’s bootless feet, pale in the corner of his vision. It was madness to think of the one death as retribution for the other. He could almost hear Petra scornfully dismissing the suggestion. But every time he glimpsed the feet in the grass, he remembered, and was afraid.

  He wrapped Grace in a clean sheet and laid her in the bottom. Shovelling the earth back on top of her, he averted his eyes, but knew that the soft sound of clods falling on her would never leave him.

  It somehow seemed fitting that Munck’s grave should be off the property. He dug it to the side of the track that led to both farms, losing the energy to make it very deep. The sun was well up when he heaved Munck’s big body up on to the back of the cart and took it out there to throw it in, and he realised that if anybody came by, he would look every inch the desperate murderer; he would look like what he had become.

  He fashioned a rough cross from one piece of lumber nailed to another and pressed it into the disturbed soil above Grace, then, to allay his uneasiness, did the same for Munck. He could not bring himself to put a name on Grace’s cross but he scratched Munck’s name on his with his knife so that no one could accuse him of keeping the killing a secret.

  BETHEL

  Geese in flocks above you flying

  Their direction know;

  Brooks beneath the thin ice flowing

  To their oceans go;

  Coldest love will warm to action,

  Walk then, come,

  No longer numb,

  Into your satisfaction.

  W. H. Auden, ‘Underneath the Abject Willow’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Washing in the little riverside bathhouse before breakfast – a room far warmer than his cabin because of the stove heating river water for the bath – he couldn’t help but watch the Athabasca’s swirling currents furling by outside the small window and think with apprehension of what it would soon draw forth from him. He watched it again during an early breakfast, which he ate in companionable near silence with Ursula. It exerted a kind of magnetism on the eyes, as the sea might, but disturbingly so, for breaking waves at least held the gaze in one place, whereas a rushing river drew one’s eyes forever to one side and out of the frame, as it were.

  Before taking her place among the gentlemen of the chorus, as Harry had come to think of them, Mabel stood near Harry and Ursula for a minute, watching the river too, and seemed to have read his mind. ‘Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away,’ she sighed.

  ‘What did you make of the reading last night?’ he asked Ursula when Mabel, unable to draw him into conversation, had drifted back to her regular audience.

  Ursula was in her black dress with the white cuffs and collar, which, with her cascade of long black hair, gave her the look of a tragic governess in a melodrama. She pulled a corner off her toast in a way that sharply recalled Winnie. ‘I hate that word,’ she said with surprising passion. ‘Berdache.’

  ‘I don’t remember him using it.’

  ‘A man dres
sed in women’s clothes driven to the most servile and degrading duties,’ she quoted. ‘I looked it up just now. It’s what the priest used to encourage the others to call me at school.’

  ‘Is it not a . . . Cree word?’

  She smiled kindly. ‘I like it when you stammer,’ she said. ‘I like the way it makes you sound uncertain of yourself. Most men are so certain. No. No, it isn’t,’ she answered him, glancing up as Bruno and Mabel began to leave the room and they all smiled at each other like two couples growing familiar through regular mealtimes in the same hotel. ‘It’s Frenchified Arabic, I think. It means slave prostitute.’

  ‘Oh dear. What would you rather call it?’

  She said something, in Plains Cree presumably, so softly he couldn’t quite catch it, but it sounded like ayarkwoo. ‘Translation is impossible, since it could mean either both man and woman or neither man nor woman. Some of us call it two-souls. You are a two-souls, Harry.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I knew it as soon as you first spoke to me.’

  Harry smiled in a way he hoped looked benign. ‘I can assure you I have never felt anything but entirely male or felt the slightest desire to wear a dress.’

  She merely raised her dark eyebrows slightly, and he remembered wrapping his legs around Paul’s waist in the slough, and how it felt to be lifted and urgently turned by him on a bed. Meeting her eye, he had the uncanny sense that she had put the two images into his mind. ‘You can be two-soul on the inside,’ she breathed, as though imparting a secret charm. ‘You find women easier than men. To make friends with, I mean.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose.’

  ‘And they instinctively trust you because they sense the difference in you.’

  ‘Well I don’t know about that.’

  ‘I know.’ It was a statement. She sighed. ‘It’s a blessing and a curse. It can make you strong in here,’ she startled him by tapping her forefinger gently to the centre of his forehead, ‘but it can leave you on the outside looking in. You watch so hard you forget to live. You chose the basket willow over the bow, but there’s no rule to say you can’t use both.’

  ‘I don’t really follow,’ he said. His eyes strayed back to the vanishing waters.

  As if reading his mind, she murmured, ‘Time for your session.’

  For several days, Gideon made no headway in his sessions with Harry. Something had changed. Had he been fanciful, Harry would have said it was quite as though Ursula had laid a protective spell about him. Harry found the river was just a river, at which he could stare, and stare, while listening to Gideon’s soothing instructions with no effect.

  ‘You’re resisting me, Harry,’ Gideon said.

  ‘Forgive me. I don’t mean to,’ Harry told him. ‘Maybe it’s all the rest and good sleep I’ve been getting.’

  Instead they talked, with no obvious attempt at hypnosis, about the distant past, his memories of his parents, his schooldays, Jack. Sensing it was the sort of thing Gideon wanted to hear, he talked in some detail about how very handsome Jack was, and about boarding school, about the abuses and devotions he witnessed between the older and younger boys at Harrow. And he told him about Hector Browning and the conflict between the guilty desires fostered by that liaison and his loving duties as a father and husband. Gideon tried to nudge him towards saying that he had written in the autograph book because he wanted to be found out and bring an end to the conflict, but Harry insisted that no, it had been an accident, a piece of stupidity, without which he believed the situation could have continued for years without alteration, a sort of parallel marriage like that between any husband and mistress.

  He took on more chores, finally convincing Samuel to let him spend a day thinning trees and sawing up logs. Perhaps it was the physical fatigue brought on by this honest labour that made him suddenly open up.

  When the last of his tale was done, Harry opened his eyes and saw not the kind, familiar walls of papered timber and the bearskin blanket he had retrieved from Paul’s bed for comfort when Paul went off to fight, but a big window and a view over a fast-flowing river.

  Perhaps it was the self-importance of any patient and Gideon actually remained clinically detached, but Harry thought the doctor seemed unsettled, frightened even, an apprentice whose spells were proving more powerful than expected. Gideon retreated from crouching beside him to sitting back in a chair between Harry and the view, as though to anchor him in the here and now. He reasserted his superiority through pity.

  ‘You poor man,’ he murmured. ‘Poor, poor man. The epidemic reached Jasper too, of course. It followed the rail map across the continent, but we were spared out here. There were many deaths at the asylum. They had to dig a mass grave.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I suspended my usual visits until it was clear the danger was over; I had to think of the safety of my community here.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Your story is borne out by your admission notes from Essondale. They say you arrived with diminished speech ability, if not quite aphasia, and contusions on your throat suggestive of a strangulation attempt. It was assumed, however, that you had failed in an attempt to hang yourself.’

  Harry pictured his body creaking back and forth from a rope swung over a beam in his stable, his freed horses snorting uneasily outside the open door. It was entirely plausible. He frowned, looked at his hands, and noticed the marks of ageing beginning to stain and crease them.

  ‘Harry, how did you come to be on the train?’ Gideon asked him.

  ‘The train?’

  ‘You were apprehended by the inspector on a train heading west from Winter.’

  Harry stared. He recalled the dread he felt whenever he heard a train’s passage up the valley, but nothing beyond that. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

  ‘It’s always hard to read between the lines in these curt little reports, but it mentioned lewd behaviour towards a group of returning soldiers, and uncontrollable weeping. Is it possible you mistook a soldier for your Paul?’

  Harry thought about Gideon’s words as hard as he could, but they made no sense to him. Foreboding bubbled through him at the effort, so he said nothing, just looked back at the doctor’s sad gaze. He was learning that disobedience could be misread as sorrow.

  ‘Why would you have been on the train?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea. I think I’d have returned Munck’s horse to the livery stables. And that’s near the station, but . . . I’m sorry to be so—’

  ‘Might you have been going to the mounted police?’

  ‘Possibly. But the obvious station for us would be Battleford or Lloydminster, and neither is due west from Winter.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Harry. This isn’t a police interview.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  There was a small drama before lunch as Kenneth the Giggler left them. Perhaps it was not entirely surprising that he was collected by a buxom, respectable wife and a brace of shyly staring children. Bearing himself like a bank manager, suddenly, and giggling no longer, he introduced her to Gideon but not to the rest of them, who watched in friendly curiosity from the terrace.

  ‘One wonders what his wife was told,’ Harry murmured to Bruno, of whose straightforwardness and lack of theatricality he had grown rather fond.

  ‘Nervous collapse due to exhaustion,’ she said drily. ‘That’s the usual one.’

  Ursula caught his eye after lunch and asked if he wanted exercise as, having done her day’s chores, she was hoping to go for a long walk in the woods. He agreed readily.

  ‘You had a good morning,’ she observed. She looked a little drawn.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And no. I’m seeing more clearly now, but it disturbs me that the memories are so sad and yet I don’t seem to feel anything. It’s as though they happened to someone else.’

>   ‘Perhaps they did,’ she said, accepting the offer of his arm to climb over a log. ‘You have more than one soul, remember.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ He chuckled. ‘Silly of me to forget.’

  For some time they walked in companionate silence. He found it reminded him of Paul, with whom he could work or read without the lack of conversation feeling remotely awkward. And being reminded of Paul hurt, of course.

  They reached the clearing in the woods he had visited before, but then Ursula led him confidently onwards. She paused now and then to examine a plant or to listen to a bird singing, quite as though they had messages for her. The further they walked from Bethel, the less she resembled the nun-like Ursula of mealtimes, so refined and modest. Nor was she like the young athlete who had so expertly driven the cart to town and back. Rather, she became an energised combination of the two: her true self, perhaps.

  They came upon a clearing where a stream gurgled through a channel in the rock before plunging down the slope to the distant river. She stooped, scooped a little of the water and murmured appreciatively. ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘Harry?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think I can help you, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Trust me. I understand. Gideon has been leading you along a line – so very like a man; so methodical and tidy – but life isn’t made of lines. He is like a traveller who looks left and right but doesn’t think to look behind or above him. Men like that get eaten by cougars.’

  There was a little cave in the rock behind them, facing the view of distant mountains. Ursula walked cautiously to its entrance and sniffed the air there. She took a couple more steps into the darkness, still sniffing, then turned back to him. ‘Just checking,’ she said. ‘For animals.’

  ‘Bears?’

  ‘Possibly. We passed some scat a while back but it wasn’t fresh. I want us to be able to stay still safely for a while.’