“May I have this dance?” It was Gus, smiling his ironic smile.
It was a Hesitation Waltz, sweetly plangent in the cooling air. Flora kept her hand lightly on her partner’s shoulder but felt his own hand tighten at her waist.
“I hoped we might ride together again,” he was saying. “I know that might be difficult to arrange, but if I am able to do so, would you come?”
Flora leaned back to look into his face. She thought of the beauty of his forearms with their golden hairs. It pleased her to think of them lightly touching her dress. He was still smiling, but there was something else, a look in his eyes; she felt it right down her spine and into her knees. She was suddenly a little weak.
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “Yes.”
• • •
It came about because her brother was busy. Too busy to think about a parcel that was waiting for him at a ranch near Savona. And Flora had been asking him if she might ride in that direction to explore a distant bench, to sketch aspens and late brown-eyed Susans. As it turned out, her brother told her, the reliable Gus Alexander had reason to ride to Savona, and she could accompany him, collect the parcel, and have some time to sketch. There was a brief argument about tacking up Vespa, the grey mare, with George saying with some irritation that he would do it and Flora insisting that she was capable of tacking up the horse she would be riding. George gave in, because he was so busy, and Flora put on her riding costume, caught Vespa easily, and led her to the stable, where she gave her a brushing and then slipped a bridle onto the horse’s willing head, fastening the buckles, then placing the numnah, then saddle, onto the mare’s back. She was fond of Vespa, who reminded her of the mare she’d left at Watermeadows, a dark bay Arabian, Seraphim, who had replaced the grey pony of her childhood. She’d ridden with her father; Seraphim was a strong-winded mount for hunting, bold enough to jump a watercourse. Vespa had something of the same ardent spirit. Flora buckled the girth loosely and led the mare out of the paddock to the shade at the front of the house to wait for Gus.
He appeared almost immediately, coming from the direction of the labourers’ cottages, mounted on his calm gelding, Agate. Flora watched him approach, at ease in the saddle, almost like an extension of his horse. He jumped down and held both horses while Flora tightened the girth and mounted her mare.
“All set?” he smiled.
“I think so. I have this small rucksack only and George insists on a canteen.”
They were away, riding towards Savona. The day had not yet become as hot as it would and there was a breeze coming up off the river. Gus knew a route that was shorter than going by road and took them through a small gap in the red hills by the Deadman River.
“There’s a place on this trail where I almost always see snakes. Tell me, Flora, have you ever seen a rattlesnake?” There was a twinkle in his blue eyes.
Flora shivered a little. “No, not really. I’ve seen their tracks in the dirt and I found a skin once, and of course I imagine I hear them every time I go walking alone, but I haven’t actually seen one. I’d like to, though. At least, I think I would.”
“We’ll leave the horses on the trail and just walk up into the rocks. Agate is the most reliable horse on earth—until he smells a rattlesnake.”
They dismounted, and Gus produced a rope, tying both horses to a single pine tree with a little shade. Then he took Flora by the hand and led her up the talus slope, taking each step carefully.
“There,” he pointed. “Look. Three of them, all asleep. That one on the far left is a young one. It doesn’t even have rattles yet, just that little button at the tip of its tail. I think they’re beautiful.”
And they were, Flora decided. Two of them were olive coloured and the young one was more tan. They all had dark brown blotches on their back, with lighter edges. There was something peaceful about the way they slept on the rocks. There was a smell, not unpleasant, like leaves or mushrooms. Gus murmured that it would be best to let sleeping snakes lie, and they quietly returned to their horses.
It seemed to Flora that Gus kept his hand on her back a little longer than necessary when he helped her to mount; the place where it had rested was very warm. For a moment she felt short of breath. When the young men in England had danced with her, their hands encircling her waist for the waltz, she had felt trapped. There was everything in the action, and nothing—a negotiation that had everything to do with land and the certainties of money and nothing to do with this feeling: a response the earth might make to wind, or sun. A little shudder, the passing of a shadow over the light skin of water.
It took a further hour to reach the ranch where George’s parcel was waiting for him—books the rancher was lending him about soil health and grafting—and after a welcome glass of lemonade on the shady porch, they continued to the bench above Kamloops Lake where Flora wanted to sketch. They found a grove of pines, surrounded by a profusion of brown-eyed Susans, a fringe of aspens leading to the lake. Gus led the horses down for a drink and then found a place to tie them in shade with a long rope so they could graze on the sporadic bunchgrass. Flora took out the lunch she had stowed in her rucksack—cucumber sandwiches, a pot of Gentleman’s Relish, a few of Mary’s biscuits spread with anchovy paste—and they ate in the shade of a pine, Gus spreading his overshirt first for Flora to sit on. The view up the lake was spectacular, the long blue water still under the sun.
Flora dipped her pen into ink and began to draw the lake and its aspens. The sky in this country always gave her trouble. How to imply its enormity—you felt you could see forever!—and its changing moods made possible only by a drift of cloud or the thunderheads that frequently appeared in late afternoon only to disappear again almost immediately. Thicker lines for cloud, hatching for pines, a place where she used a pencil to indicate possible colours for the wash.
She realized Gus was watching her. She turned to him and began sketching his face on a fresh sheet of paper. It was beautiful, she thought—the strong nose, the well-spaced eyes, and his mouth. She examined it with her pen, the curve and the slight droop of the bottom lip. She paused at the chin, wanting to get the sense of how it jut forward, like a challenge. Before she knew it, he was kissing her. She had never been kissed. Oh, a peck on the cheek by her father or nurse, the Frenchman who brought special water lilies to her father and who kissed her hand, but never by a man whose mouth she had just drawn, whose arms had made her feel light-headed.
His mouth was luscious, like ripe strawberries. Taking his lips from hers, he whispered in her ear, “Do you mind, Flora? I’ve wanted to kiss you since I first saw you walking across your brother’s orchard months ago, looking like a girl out of a painting.”
“Does it seem that I mind?” And they were kissing again.
• • •
It was a Saturday morning. Some of the orchardists were taking a day off, but the Chinese labourers were out in the orchards, hoeing the rows of potatoes between the small trees and making sure that bears had not damaged boughs, some of them propped with forked sticks. One orchardist had among his workers a couple, both Chinese, Song Lee and his young wife, May. The growing community had several businesses run by Chinese, one of them a laundry that was thriving. Song Lee came to Walhachin on his own from somewhere in the Fraser Valley. When his employer discovered he was married and that, unlike the other Chinese labourers, his wife lived not in China but with her parents in Vancouver, he gave Song permission to bring her to live in a tiny shack built of packing cases. She grew vegetables that she’d sell from a basket in front of her shack, a few chickens clucking nervously around her feet. When May first arrived, Flora bought early peas from her, a few lettuces, and some spring onions, and admired rows of tiny cabbage seedlings and the delicate ferny tops of carrots. May was a tiny woman with glossy black hair and a beautiful smile showing even white teeth. It was rumoured she was expecting a baby, though her slight frame revealed nothing. Or perhaps, thought Flora, the faintest swelling under her cotton jacket. It was so
picturesque—the Chinese woman in her dark blue jacket surrounded by chickens, her baskets of vegetables looking exactly like a still life—that Flora went home for her Brownie camera and returned to take a photograph.
“May I take your picture?” she had asked, and after May shyly nodded, she snapped the pretty scene.
On that Saturday morning, when a young boy came running up from the orchards, shouting for help, Flora dropped her needlework and quickly intercepted him on the road.
“It’s the Chinese lady, miss. She’s been bitten by a snake! I’m going to Flowerdews to see if the doctor is at lunch there.”
Flora let him continue on and she called Mary from the kitchen.
“What can we do, Mary? Do you have any experience with snakebite?”
“Put the kettle on the hot part of the stove, Missus,” she said and ran down to the path by the river. She snapped some sticks from a young maple growing there and rushed back.
“This is good but depends on how bad the bite.” She was putting the sticks into an iron pot and covering them with hot water from the kettle. “I’ll let it steep for a few minutes and then we can go.”
Standing on the veranda, Flora could see several people on their way down the orchards. Was the doctor among them? She couldn’t tell. He was a man who liked his drink, and she hoped he hadn’t begun on the many glasses of port he liked as an accompaniment to lunch. He wasn’t a young man either and was semi-retired; most people chose to go to Ashcroft or even Kamloops for medical care.
Mary soon appeared with a basket on her arm. She and Flora walked as quickly as they could to where a small crowd was gathered around the moaning form of May Lee on the newly hoed earth of a potato bed. Someone had cut the lower part of May’s skirt and had used some of the cloth as a makeshift tourniquet on her upper calf.
“It was a rattlesnake,” a man whispered to Flora. “Evidently she was hoeing close to the rocks on the edge of the potatoes and it struck her hard on the leg.”
Flora could see where the fangs had punctured the skin. The bare feet—for someone had removed her black cloth shoes—looked unbearably fragile, side by side on the dry earth. No one should have been looking at those bare calves and knees, pale and smooth, apart from a young husband. Already there were blotchy red patches all over May’s lower leg, beginning to reach up past the tourniquet. Mary took out a flask from her basket and soaked a clean flannel with the tea of maple sticks she had made in that moment of quick-witted attention while Flora had wrung her hands and wondered what on earth might be done. Gently pushing Song Lee away from his wife, Mary applied the cloth to the punctured skin, pressing while May tossed her head and cried out. Flora knelt down with her and began to wipe May’s forehead with another flannel. Her skin was clammy and cold. She was moaning and shuddering and she had vomited. Flora cleaned her face. She murmured reassuring words, but it seemed that May was beyond hearing, her eyes fearful and her pulse, or what Flora thought must be her pulse, a slow and distant measure against her finger as she held May’s wrist. Flora gently laid her hand on May’s abdomen and felt the briefest of fluttering, a butterfly on milkweed.
“Is the doctor coming?” she asked one of the bystanders. “And has someone asked that a car be available to take May to Kamloops?”
“He had to go to his house for his bag,” was the answer. A car was in fact on its way. And then the doctor was there, puffing and brisk, his face flushed. Others were arriving too, Gus among them.
“Well, then. Snakebite, eh? Let’s see what I have for that.” The doctor reached into a battered leather bag and brought out a vial and a case that he fumbled open. A glass and steel hypodermic syringe lay in a bed of blue silk. He pushed Mary aside and bent down, wheezing with effort. He was very red.
“Calmette’s serum,” he announced to the group, as he filled the syringe from the vial. “It’s an anti-venom for snakebite. We used it in India. Terrible snakes there.”
He injected the serum into May’s arm and, untangling a stethoscope from the bag, he listened to her heart, breathing heavily as he did so. He looked up.
“This young woman is in serious trouble. Has someone sent for . . . Ah, here it is. I will accompany her of course.”
A car had arrived. Several men lifted May from the ground and arranged her in the back, where the doctor found room for himself. He located a respiration mask in his bag and fitted it over her face, pumping its bulb as the car pulled away. There had been no gesture to poor Song, who stood watching the vehicle leave with his wife inside, his hands helpless at his sides. He followed slowly on foot, uttering a single cry as the car disappeared over the bridge and up the hill to the main road to Kamloops.
Mary was putting the lid back on the flask and the others were leaving to return to the community. Flora felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Gus.
“What an awful thing for Song. Why couldn’t they take him along?” she asked him.
“Well, at least she was taken,” he replied. “I’ve been present when medical attention has been refused to Chinese workers because no one believed they could pay. But I have to say that this doesn’t look good for May. Calmette’s serum won’t work for this.”
“What do you mean? He said it was for snakebite and surely that was what bit her. Look, they’ve killed the snake. There it is, right there!” She pointed to a big rattlesnake, its head sliced off with a hoe, left on the side of the potato bed. Flies had already found it.
“Oh, yes, I believe that snake struck her. But Calmette’s serum was devised for cobra venom. I know from my father that it is useless against rattlers. What Mary prepared will sometimes work. Later in the year, a poultice of baneberry might have been more effective, but there’re no berries on the plants yet. We’ll just have to hope that they get her to Kamloops in time for treatment. Dr. Aspern is a bit past his prime, I’d say, and the port has befuddled what sense he might once have had.”
“He did have his case and came quite quickly,” said Flora in defence of the old doctor. He had once been kind to her when she had been laid low with a fever.
“But he has no idea where he is, Flora. Surely that is evident? A medical man who doesn’t know that snakes from the Far East are not the same as those in British Columbia? Or who seems unaware of the knowledge of people like Mary who live here and have some sense of how plants have medicinal value? I’m surprised, though relieved, that he didn’t pull out a kit to cup and bleed poor May. It confounds me beyond belief that people have so little interest or knowledge of the actual place where they live. In India, I’m sure his feeling was that it ought to be more like England and that would suit everyone and solve the dreadful problems created by the natives. He is like something out of Punch.”
May did not return to Walhachin. She was dead by the time the car arrived in Kamloops. Arrangements were made for her body to be returned by train to Vancouver, for her family to bury her in their own way. Song went down to the city for a week and then returned to work. Flora wondered about the child. It had died with May of course, but had it been mourned as its mother must have been mourned by her family in Vancouver?
Flora took Song flowers. She had been told that white was the colour for Chinese funerals so she made a bouquet of yarrow and traveller’s joy, long tendrils of it, along with pearly everlastings, daisies, and a few pale asters. Song’s eyes were as sad as anything she’d ever seen; he carried the flowers into the shack and then returned with four brown eggs, wrapped in a bit of newspaper with Chinese characters on it. On the wooden box where he had been sitting, she saw a little bamboo flute. Some nights Flora would rest on the veranda, eager for a little of the cool air off the river, and she would hear quavery notes coming from the direction of Song’s shack. It was lonely music, a series of longing phrases but no response.
SIX
October 1913
George was away in the Okanagan, looking at orchards and talking to their owners now that the main harvest was over. He had been reluctant to leave Flora unchap
eroned, but she insisted he go.
“Whatever could happen to me here with the community at hand?” she asked him. “I will draw and perhaps bottle some applesauce. If I ask her, Mary will stay overnight, in the box room behind the kitchen, though I can’t think why I’d need her to.”
And so he left, catching a ride with another orchardist. After his departure, Flora let it be known that she herself was going away for a few days. To Vancouver, someone suggested, and she didn’t correct that impression. She packed her small valise. She was given a ride to Pennies and then left to wait for the train, which was due within the hour. As the car disappeared down the road towards Ashcroft, Gus appeared on Flight, leading his gentle gelding, Agate. Under her travelling skirt, Flora was wearing her jodhpurs, so she removed the skirt and folded it into her valise, which held only her nightdress, an extra blouse, and a sponge bag of toiletries.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she confessed to Gus as she mounted Agate after tying her bag in among the saddlebags.
He smiled and released the reins he’d been holding while she arranged herself in the saddle. “I don’t know when I’ve looked forward to something as much as this,” he replied. “Now let’s be off before the train comes and you’re spotted from the window by a matron from Kamloops.”
They touched their heels to their horses’ sides and were off at a lope, up a trail along the flume and over the hill by the time the train slowed down for Pennies. Luckily it stopped to drop off freight so that anyone listening would think that Flora had boarded. Out of sight of the bench and its community, Flora felt hugely, wildly free. She removed her gloves and tucked them into one bag and flexed her fingers on the smooth leather of the reins.
Gus had asked to use the cabin that Agrippa’s parents wintered in, up in the Back Valley. Over the summer he had become very friendly with Agrippa and had gone hunting with him earlier in the fall. The men stayed in the cabin then. Gus told Flora about its placement on a little lake, saying they’d fish for trout and walk barefoot in the sweet grass. To get there, the pair rode for a good part of the day, through grasslands, then aspen forests, the turning leaves trembling on their stems; finally they went up into higher country where the air already smelled of approaching winter, though it was still warm. Gus called it “flinty,” a tang of rock in icy water, and noted the frost-damaged wildflowers they passed along the way. The cabin was waiting, its lake fringed with reeds and bulrushes where the remnants of blackbird nests clung to the tall stalks. Tattered leaves of water lilies floated on the lake’s surface like saucers, stung by dragonflies. A loon watched from the opposite side, curious at the sight of horses.
The Age of Water Lilies Page 5