A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Why are you calling her he?’

  ‘I allowed him to live as he chose here so as to observe him while I tried to help him, but Essondale has sterner categories, of necessity.’

  ‘Must he go back?’

  ‘What else would you suggest?’

  Harry was about to suggest that Ursula might come to live beside him at Winter, as a nominal employee, a housekeeper even, but he sensed the idea would be unacceptable.

  ‘You won’t have been aware of it, but James, as he was christened, was released into my care under very strict conditions. He attempted to poison the priest in charge of his boarding school. Ordinarily he would have been tried, no question of it, but there was clamorous testimony from the other children that the priest had been regularly abusing his position of trust and . . . taking advantage of his charges in ways that would have caused a scandal had a court case been widely reported. There were ample grounds for treating James as not of sound mind, not least his recurrent religious mania and persistent compulsive transvestism. It’s unfortunate, but I blame myself. I should not have pushed the two of you together so. While you were walking, did he try to feed you plants?’

  Harry thought of Ursula’s insistence on secrecy. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She only pointed them out to me.’

  ‘He was taken from his tribe when he was barely twelve. He’d not remember with any accuracy what little the shamans would have taught him by that age. I believe his version of shamanism is largely a self-aggrandising fantasy. Your encouraging him to dabble in the teachings of his youth has dangerously broken his equilibrium.’

  ‘But I didn’t en–’

  ‘You didn’t discourage him.’

  ‘No,’ Harry admitted. ‘I’m sorry. I was too interested.’

  Gideon let the apology rest in punitive silence.

  ‘Will you be sending me back to Essondale too?’ Harry dared ask at last.

  ‘Certainly not. You are not ill, as I’ve said all along. At the risk of sounding brutal, you’re a type I’ve encountered repeatedly, so you’re of little clinical use to my researches here. You are traumatised, as I thought, and I believe you have the remedy in your own hands.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I suggest you leave us today and go home. I’ll be escorting James, who should see no more of you, but I’ll have the carter come for you. That will get you to the station in plenty of time for the next eastbound train. You may keep the clothes you have been lent.’

  ‘That’s very kind. I’ll have them cleaned and sent back.’

  ‘There’s really no need. You have no money with you, I take it?’

  ‘None whatever.’

  Gideon passed him an envelope. ‘This should cover the cost of your ticket home and whatever sustenance you need en route. Goodbye, Harry. And good luck.’

  They both rose, and he shook Harry’s hand.

  Harry turned to go, then felt a sudden access of indignation.

  ‘I think you should let Ursula come home with me to Winter. She has domestic skills, is an able housekeeper and clearly discreet. I could employ her safely and the farm is remote. No one would bother—’

  Gideon held up a pale hand to silence him. ‘That’s a ridiculous, unhealthy idea. I was naive to think my utopian experiments here could alter or disprove anything. I shall have no more Indian patients, and Samuel has agreed – with some alacrity, I might add – to take his meals in the kitchen from now on.’

  He dismissed Harry in the rudest way, by simply walking out of the room and leaving the door open as he went.

  Harry ate a late, solitary breakfast. As he was finishing, the others gathered on the terrace to see Gideon and Ursula off. Harry went to the window, where he could peer over Bruno’s tweedy shoulder. He saw Ursula shockingly transformed, not into dashing Little Bear with his tasselled jacket, but into a gaunt Essondale inmate. He had on a plain navy-blue drill suit with a collarless shirt, and black canvas shoes without laces, which appeared not to fit him. With what seemed like unnecessary cruelty, someone had cut his hair to collar length so that, instead of cascading down his back, it sprang out irregularly from his face, making him look the very type of lunacy.

  Harry half raised a hand in readiness to wave, but the thin boy in the suit did not look up. As Gideon flicked the reins and drove away in the trap, Mabel called out, ‘Bye, Ursula dear!’ and it sounded like mockery.

  WINTER

  Henry came from England to Moose Jaw, where he worked on a farm. He came in to the homestead in the autumn of 1908 . . . He was secretary of the school, succeeding John Parker, a secretary of the Grain Growers’ Local for several years . . . Has batched it all these years.

  Jennie Johnston, on her former neighbour, Henry Cane, A Glance Back

  ‘Bachelor’ has the technical meaning of a man living by himself or with other men, with no woman in the house. A widower or grass-widower ‘batches’, an unmarried man with a sister or housekeeper does not.’

  Elizabeth B. Mitchell, In Western Canada Before The War: Impressions of Early 20th Century Prairie Communities

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Time and again the train passed small farmsteads that had all too obviously been abandoned, either because a homesteader had deserted the attempt to wring a living from the prairie or because the war had claimed him. For several hours of the journey, Harry was accompanied by a man who was some kind of demagogue or would-be politician, full of directionless anger and bewildering facts and figures. After such human losses as it had sustained, he said, Canada’s economy would founder without a fresh burst of immigration. The whole glorious experiment could fail, he said, and the prairies go back to the Indian.

  He said it as though it were the worst prospect imaginable for the territory.

  Harry numbly wondered what he should do. After his nearly ten-month absence, his land and the Slaymakers’ would be neglected. The harvest had been brought in before he left, at least, but the fields were all unploughed and unharrowed.

  He was terribly concerned about the animals, and cursed the effect of powerful sedatives on his memory. Had he left the horses in livery all this time? If he had, they might have been sold or ridden into the ground. The hens, pig and cow would not have survived the winter, and he knew he must prepare himself for the grim task of dealing with their remains. But just possibly someone had called by when the worst of the epidemic had passed, some kind busybody from the church congregation, or even a friend of Grace.

  In one of their soothingly factual mealtime conversations, Bruno had told him all she knew about what the flu had done, decimating households the war had already maimed. Especially damaging was the way it had not carried off the elderly, as flu usually did (Mrs Wells had called it spring’s undertaker), but had killed young adults, precisely the people on whom the burden of rebuilding the population rested.

  He finally arrived in Winter faint from hunger, as the money Gideon had given him for the fare barely left enough over for a cup of tea. He determined to deal only with the immediate necessities. He needed money, provisions and a horse; he would settle back into the farm, discover the worst, and only then would he lay plans. His savings account, at least, would be intact, quietly accruing some paltry interest. He dreaded dealing with all that. Money was such a cold thing. The war and then the epidemic must have left countless legacies, little and less so, cold benisons falling on the numb and distraught, every bit as cruel as all those love letters overtaken by War Office telegrams.

  Winter was never a large enough place to be called bustling, but it was still shocking to emerge from its station on a fine spring afternoon to see men and women going about their business on Main Street. He feared running into anyone he knew, feared their inevitable surprise or well-meant concern, feared the questions. I have been ill. He had rehearsed various responses in his head,
but decided that was the best, because it was the truest.

  He steeled himself going in to withdraw his first cash in months. The clerk was notoriously talkative, but there was a different, much younger one in position. He greeted Harry by name, although Harry didn’t remember him, and issued his money with no inquisition other than an ordinary ‘How are you?’ to which Harry answered with a rather tense ‘I haven’t been well, but I’m better now. And you?’

  Flu had cut the town’s population in two, filleting out many in their twenties and thirties. The store had lost both its young proprietor and his hawkish wife. In their place, their son and daughter, both barely old enough to have left school, were scurrying earnestly around, watched over by their grandparents, who had come out from the east to supervise.

  What hadn’t changed was the little gaggle of people hanging around the post office counter in hope of ‘news’. The place was surprisingly busy. Most people bought provisions in the morning, which was why, being shy, Harry had always favoured doing it in the quiet of the afternoon. As he assembled his little heap at one end of the counter, asking the grandmother for things from the shelves behind her – bread, cheese, eggs, tins of corned beef, a packet of tea and one of coffee – there was a commotion outside. Someone had pulled up in a motor car. Everyone abandoned what they were doing and sped over to the window to look, except, apparently, for the grandmother and Harry.

  ‘Noisy things,’ she told him. ‘It’s just that flash insurance man. Now a tractor, like Mr Slaymaker is said to be ordering, that makes sense.’ And she totted up in her head what Harry owed her.

  He had never been terribly good at listening to the chat of strangers in public places, so took a moment or two to digest just what she had said. Something about a tractor . . .

  ‘Mr Slaymaker, you said?’

  ‘Yes. Assuming I’ve got his name right. I’m still learning who everyone is here. The gentleman over there.’ She pointed with her pencil over Harry’s shoulder.

  Paul was standing among the cluster of people admiring the car. Harry had to lean on a shelf of tinned fruit, feeling short of breath. It was definitely him, a little thinner, touches of grey in his beard and sideburns. He was holding a walking stick.

  He sensed someone standing there, and turned.

  ‘Harry?’ he said. ‘Is that . . . is that you under there?’

  They could only shake hands, of course, surrounded as they were, but Harry held on as long as he dared. Paul couldn’t stop smiling, and Harry worried he must be looking half crazed in his turn.

  ‘I’d given you up for dead,’ he told him.

  ‘That’s my line,’ said Paul. ‘Where . . . ?’

  ‘In a sanatorium. I’ve been ill. I’ve been near Jasper.’

  ‘But you’re back.’

  ‘Yes. I just got in. That’s why I look a bit . . .’ He glanced down at his unseasonably warm coat and the ill-assorted borrowed clothes beneath it.

  ‘You always were dapper,’ Paul teased.

  ‘You’re walking with a stick.’

  ‘Lurching, more like. I . . . I lost a foot.’

  ‘God!’

  ‘I was lucky. The Hun had good surgeons. Eventually.’

  ‘You were a prisoner?’

  Paul nodded.

  ‘Why weren’t we told?’

  ‘I wrote. I wrote via the Red Cross.’

  Harry stood just outside the doorway, where there was a cooling breeze. He forgot all about his odd appearance and smelly clothes, and watched Paul post a letter and buy this and that. Seeing him perform such ordinary actions made Harry feel more than ever like a ghostly revenant in his old life. And when Paul returned to his side and muttered, ‘Drive you home?’ he forced himself to sound neutrally polite, as a woman with a baby was standing directly beside them. ‘Yes please,’ he said.

  The familiar cart was just outside. Paul’s cart with the jaunty strip of red paint that Petra had applied when repairing its bench. The horse was new, but Harry could not believe he had walked right past the cart on his way in without noticing it. Paul stowed their purchases and climbed up nimbly enough, good foot first.

  ‘You look like a hobo with that beard on you,’ he told Harry cheerfully. ‘People will say the English gent has finally gone native.’

  Although able to talk unreservedly at last, they were each, for their own reasons, beyond words as they drove out of town and up the familiar road towards their homes. The spring leaves and lush grass had a new-minted intensity to them. The chestnut coat and bouncing white mane of Paul’s new horse shone in the sunlight, as though brushed by an attentive groom for just this moment. Paul pulled them to a halt at one point, jumped down, leaving his stick behind, and stooped to pick handfuls of newly opened Black-eyed Susan, the first Harry had seen that year. Climbing back up, he passed them to him, and Harry remembered that the cheerful yellow flower was one of Petra’s favourites.

  Paul drove to Harry’s house first. For a while, Harry just sat there, looking at the place from the cart. The shutters were all fastened. More astonishing still, Kitty and May were grazing in the little paddock beside the stable, hens were clucking around the place and his fields seemed all to have been ploughed, if not sown.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’ve been gone ten months.’

  ‘I can’t have missed you by more than a week,’ Paul said quietly. ‘The earth on the grave was still fresh.’

  Harry climbed down, still holding the flowers, and looked about him.

  ‘The only casualty was the cow,’ Paul said, ‘and I reckon that was old age or grief.’

  He lost his footing for a moment when he climbed down, but Harry steadied him, feeling shy in the face of his unfamiliar disability. ‘Come,’ Harry said.

  Paul watched as Harry knelt to arrange the flowers in a pickle jar set into the grave’s now level, grassy surface. ‘I was all set to order a headstone for them,’ Paul told him. ‘By the time it’s ready, the ground will be firm enough, I think. But now you’re here . . .’

  ‘We can choose one together,’ Harry finished. Standing again, slightly nudging Paul, who stood so close beside him, he looked at the crude wooden cross, pushed askew from a winter deep under snow and turning green now, and felt far removed from the man who had scratched two names on it before pushing it, sobbing, back into the mud.

  ‘I wasn’t in my right mind,’ he said quietly. ‘It must have been a horrible homecoming for you.’

  ‘My brain can’t seem to accept it. In war, you see bodies all the time – naked, half flayed, burned, blown apart – to the point where they become meat. The frankness of it is . . . well, I mean, it means death is unremittingly a fact, ever before you. But this. I think if I’d seen their bodies, I would have accepted it more readily, because I’d have had to. Harry, can you bear to tell me?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Just this once. So I know.’

  ‘Petra caught the flu nursing Grace.’ Instinctively Harry began to walk back to the cart, unsure this was a story he could tell standing at a graveside. ‘In the morning, her legs gave way when she tried to stand up.

  ‘I nursed her exactly as I had seen her nurse Grace, bathing her with cold water I refreshed every twenty minutes, encouraging her to drink water, too, and catching it in a basin when she brought it back up again. She was formidably strong, and . . .’

  He broke off. Paul had been leaning against the front of the cart, looking up at him, but now he climbed up to join him on the bench. He gently bumped his knee against Harry’s. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  Your speech is air-starved, Browning said again, like a bird in a box. Breathe!

  Harry breathed, swallowed, breathed again. ‘She took two days to die,’ he said. ‘She really did battle with the fever. Grace lost consciou
sness hours before her little body gave out. Petra stayed conscious and coughed so hard and savagely. She was always so brave, Paul, but dear God, she was whimpering from the pain of it. When she finally slipped away, it was hard to say . . .’ He stopped.

  ‘Tell me,’ Paul said. ‘I need to know, man.’

  ‘It was hard to say if she had . . . drowned in blood or died from an overheated brain. The last bowl of water was scarlet. The bed looked like a murder scene.’

  Weeping freely as he had not done all winter, daring to hold Paul’s hand between their thighs, Harry told him falteringly how he had stripped the mattress, rolled her to one side to get a towel beneath her, then washed her once more from head to toe, seeing her lovely, naked limbs for the first time in their marriage. He explained how he had then dug up Grace’s body so as to bury her afresh, wrapped in her mother’s arms in the one shroud.

  For a while they simply sat on the cart, not speaking, just wiping their eyes, while the horse equably cropped the nearest greenery to hand, and birds called around them. I miss you. I miss you.

  Petra, Harry saw, Petra and Grace, had, by their presence, made possible a fragile happiness that might now crumble from exposure, under the simple hopelessness of men without women. Petra gave permission and, indeed, a kind of blessing. Without her, what would they become? Two grouchy bachelor neighbours, a prey to every single-minded, organising widow of the parish.

  He must have sighed audibly, because Paul sat up, took the reins again and said, ‘Don’t let’s think about all that for now.’

  They drove on along the track linking the two properties. Harry jumped down at the boundary between the farms to open the gate that he and Petra had set up.

  ‘Might as well leave that tied open,’ Paul said. ‘Now you’re back . . .’

  It was still broad daylight and there were a hundred tasks to do about the place, but they closed the door behind them and went without a word to Paul’s bed. There they lay, fully clothed, boot rubbing boot, nose touching cheek, each seeking no warmer pleasure than the simple knowledge that the other was there, and holding him again.