by Paul Almond
* * *
Eleanor’s soul, as upright as her body, was sunk in deep repose. She had grown used to the gales of wind that rattled the panes and shook the foundations and rafters. She had never felt such shakings and heavings in New Carlisle, where their house nestled in a clustered settlement. Comfortable lives, she and William had made for themselves and their children in the United Empire Loyalist village, beginning with their arrival in the Brig Polly back in 1784. Yes, and now William was gone. She no longer mourned the bluff, gregarious husband whom she had loved and put up with — and guided, yes, over many years. She was even thankful that he had gone to his rest. He would never, had he lived, accepted this life in another’s house, with another’s rhythm, that of her son-in-law James, much as her daughter Catherine had tried to make it pleasant.
Such a daughter. And what great-grandchildren! It was their faces that nightly populated her dreams. One after another, too numerous to recall in her waking hours, each childlike face and then teenage rascal would swim into her consciousness. What delight as she presented them the socks she had knitted, or scarves, or little chapeaux. What a delight this last new one had been, another Joey, born next door to Mariah and Thomas the twenty-ninth of November. His little cap she had just finished before coming to bed. She had even added blue ribbons cut from a frock she had worn herself in better times.
The nightly litany lulled her into a lazy dreamland. The first: Henrietta Eliza: “Thank you, Grandma.” Janey: “Oh byes, Grandma, you make the best socks!” John: “Now Granny, will you make me a pair of red ones? I seen some fellas in school with red socks. They look terble fine.” Yes, red socks she had made for him, dying them carefully from old red material she herself had worn as a young girl. Lucky she had not passed that skirt on to anyone. Shorn of its colours, it now lay on a bottom shelf of her armoire. So many mothers, so many children, and how polite they had been to their great-grandmother. She smiled in her sleep. Not many great-grandmothers around these days, for sure.
But when the Good Lord above decided to lift her in His strong arms and carry her off to his Heaven, who would make their little sockettes, their scarves, their woollies, their sweaters, then? And on into the night, her great-grandchildren arrived and drifted by, waving and smiling. Always satisfied, mostly well behaved, just as Eleanor preferred.
* * *
Hannah ached all over! Every time she thought of her Edward, she felt like this. How she longed to be with him right now. Perhaps if she thought hard enough, he might materialize right there, next to her, on the lonely bed of her tiny room. She could just feel his hands holding her tight as he whispered his cuddly words. Oh why had she picked such a shy man — two kisses, that is all they had ever shared.
But why else was he building his house? Surely it must be for a wife. She had been careful to keep her ear to the ground: no rumblings of another taking his fancy. No, so it must be her. Momma had told her, “Hannah, just wait, dear, just wait another year. And then, if he hasn’t asked you, I will tell you how it is done. For you know, my dear, such things are best left in the hands of women.”
But how? Ask him into the barn? Show him the loft with a gentle smile, and then climb the ladder first and, from the top beam, motion him up? Ridiculous. She was not that kind of girl. So how to get that shy man into a position to ask the all-important question, even with his slight stutter, perhaps on a bended knee? What frustration! What a hard time a girl her age had — how she wished, but in this case only, to be a boy so that she’d not waste more time. My! But the Devil was entering her. Shut out those thoughts, she told herself firmly, and rolling over, hoped that soon she’d fall asleep.
* * *
“Wake up, Poppa.”
James felt a nudge and opened his eyes. There was Hannah, on her knees before him. Where was he? Downstairs. He looked around. By the deadened fire. He’d fallen asleep in the night.
“It’s over. The blizzard is passed. Sun’s out. I’m putting on wood, and I don’t want ye to get burnt.” She stooped and placed some dry twigs on the embers, coaxed them into flame, added a log or two. “Are you all right?”
“All right? Of course I’m all right.” James reached up for a hand and Hannah helped him up. “I’ll get me things on and I’ll be right out.”
“No Poppa, Momma said you’re not to come. I can do it all myself. I’m used to it. Don’t you trouble.”
“What you mean, not go out?” Something stuck in James’s craw. “I’ll do what I bloody well please!” he shouted. He stood firm on his two stockinged feet and looked after his daughter who had gone into the back kitchen where they stored the firewood. Woodshed in winter, kitchen in summer. In hot July days, so much handier to make a fire back there, cook the meals, heat gruel for the pigs, even do the baking when they didn’t want to fire up the outdoor oven.
Hannah came back in with more wood and looked at him in alarm.
“If I want to feed the animals, then feed the animals I shall.” His voice carried upstairs and he heard Catherine call down, “James! Are you all right?” He heard movement on the rough boards above.
“Damn right I’m all right,” he shouted. “I’m going to feed the animals with Hannah.”
“No James, it’s too dangerous.”
He knew his eyes were flashing. He looked to Hannah for encouragement.
“The storm’s over, Momma,” she called. “I think it’s all right. If Poppa wants to come with me, let him come. I’ll be beside him.”
Not often Hannah stood up to her mother, James knew, but he could see that she was alarmed. As his anger subsided, he motioned. “Let’s go.”
Hannah threw her wood down beside the fire and followed as he went to the back door and struggled into his heavy coat and tuque.
The dazzling snowdrifts swooped over his farm in contours, reaching up against the hill behind, looped and whorled around the barn, lying in drifts about the stable doors and at the woodshed. James turned. The house itself was banked high, in some places over the windows. Hannah moved ahead, beating a way on snowshoes to the stable. They had been careful, some years ago, to build partitions on each side of the stable door to shield it from the snow so that it could open, and to place a peg for a shovel in case it didn’t. But the partitions now, after this heavy blizzard, were of little use.
James watched Hannah shovelling, and stooped to fasten on his snowshoes. Not as easy as when he hunted back in the caribou highlands with the Micmacs. How he resented his aging frame not responding. But be thankful, he reminded himself, give praise to God that you are still alive and have everything you want.
He looked up and saw high, high above, the delicate streaks of cirrus wafting across the crisp blue sky, delicate whorls crafted by the Almighty, spreading out as if to extend a winter welcome. He was beginning to feel better: the worst had passed. He even felt guilty for his earlier outbreak. But how else could he have come outside, strapped on these snowshoes, and stood in his own farmyard in all its cloaked glory to behold yet again another winter?
Once in the loft with his two-pronged wooden fork pitching straw down onto the thrashing floor below, James felt cheerful. The motions of his arms, the rustle of straw, the barn smells of old hay and fresh manure, the occasional bleat of a penned sheep, all spoke to the notion that he’d go on for many more years. Comforting.
“I bet Jim is missing all this,” Hannah called up. “I bet he feels pretty lonely in that there big city.”
“I bet he does too, Hannah.” Yes, how easy it had been for Jim to just take up and leave. His daughters, they could never do such a thing. They were dependent upon marriage, upon husbands, some of whom could even read and write. And why should that be? What about all his neighbours, who had not been schooled, as he, in the Old Country? Mind you, he’d run errands for the elderly scholar who tutored the children of the Earl so that he might learn from him. And learn he did. How much James had loved those sessions.
And then, the thought struck him: why not put y
ourself into a new project, one that indeed might live on? A school! Yes, build a school, right here in the centre of Shegouac. It could be used for church services, too, instead of way down in Port Daniel. What an idea!
Would that not encourage his son’s return? The community would have its own school, and produce children proud of their learning everywhere.
Yes, he decided, set about building a school.
Chapter Five
At long last, Jim reached Lévis, opposite the capital city of Quebec. Below him lay the great Saint Lawrence River, heaving with all manner of ice pans, jagged, topsy-turvy, some an acre across, heaped with the remnants of many collisions on their way down from Three Rivers and Montreal. Below him on the flat shore lay three or four trunks of hollowed pine. A couple of horses waited at a hitching rail where a scattering of travellers had tramped the snow flat.
Jim then looked up at his first sight of Quebec City. A clutter of houses lay on the slope below great cliffs that held the rest of the town. These were the very ramparts that brave General Wolfe had scaled with his British troops less than a hundred years ago when he defeated the French General, Montcalm. Jim had learned something of that battle from a military man who had given him a ride with his entourage the last fifty miles. A decisive battle, although that Seven Years War had not really ended until 1763, when the Treaty of Paris ceded Canada to the British.
History was not something his father had focussed on in his tutoring. Jim knew about the Revolutionary War of 1776 that brought his maternal grandfather, William Garrett, and other United Empire Loyalists up to the Gaspé Coast in 1784, where they had founded the settlement of New Carlisle. But most of the events of the past were hidden from him, because after all, when had any farmer time to indulge such fancies? Reading, writing, and arithmetic were what he learned, and that was quite enough.
Earlier on during the trip, he had watched the far shore seep into view across the mighty river. As that distant bank drew closer, he grew accustomed to the dark, fearsome waters between. He had walked, and hitched rides, two hundred or so miles along this south shore, but now he was finally staring the great river barrier in the face.
Several burly, heavily dressed men in hip-length boots sat on the edges of the great dugouts, for these now appeared to be canoes, twenty-five to thirty feet long, hollowed out of specially selected trunks. Did these men intend to manoeuvre them across that violent river? The black roiling surface would vanish and reappear as floes of all shapes, jagged and alarming, slammed against each other and then separated as the current crowded them together and swung them apart.
Terrifying images of the time he and his brother Joey had been out fishing through the ice near shore and an argument had developed. He had fallen and then broken through the ice crust. Down Jim went, the shock of the bitter cold water expelling all his breath — he choked and gulped a lung full. Frantically, he had clawed upward through the water, beat his fists on the jagged underside of the ice, found the opening, but almost immediately began losing consciousness.
His brother clutched him, grappled his coat, hoisted him up and out, then began to pump his lungs to expel the water. And there it was again before him, all that icy, black water. How on earth would anyone dare cross that?
His three other travelling companions began walking down and Jim found himself following. The burly canoe-men, or canotiers as they were called, rushed forward to solicit business: “Allons-y, let’s go, n’ayez pas peur!” The other travellers standing around appeared rightfully hesitant, and looked to these newcomers for guidance. That wide and fearsome river flowing between this shore and the desired Quebec City did look dismaying in the extreme. A terrible grinding and roaring issued from the floes crashing into each other, heaving up others like giant white turtles in a love-fest, backing off, bumping into others. He stared at the open, black wastes of water that kept closing into glistening plains.
Much as he wanted to get to Montreal, fear blocked all progress and brought him to a halt. I’ll never try that, Jim said to himself. Why not just keep to this side of the Saint Lawrence? I might bushwhack my way, though the only road lay along the north shore. But then, he remembered that Montreal lay on an island. The north coast probably offered a better crossing; so he realized, nothing for it but to try and cross here with the others.
As he reached the flat, his fear grew. But it would worsen the longer he waited so he decided quickly. “Let’s go.”
He asked how much fare they wanted, and seeing it was reasonable for the danger undertaken, he divested himself of his heavy pack. The biggest canotier grabbed it and threw it in the centre of his own shaped log, or canoe. At once, a half-dozen canotiers rushed to the other voyagers and grabbed their packs, whether they liked it or not. Soon, a good eight people had come to sit down in the hollowed trunk. Unstable on the flat ice, it rocked as each entered. They brought a horse rapidly forward, with growing excitement all around. When the last person, a woman, quite well dressed, got in near the bow, they hooked the single tree into the chain at the front of the log and the canotiers, two on each side, ran along as the horse dragged them towards the threatening black current, eddying and boiling a scarce fifty feet ahead. Jim scrunched his eyes shut, but the jolting ride made them fly open. No escape now.
Once the horse had got them up to speed, the lead canotier, “Je m’appelle Pierre,” unsnapped the harness with amazing dexterity and the canotiers on each side used the momentum to race the canoe toward the swirling water. Everyone tensed, not knowing what to expect as the black edge loomed closer; the well-dressed woman screamed. Not a lot of help to Jim, for sure.
Ahead, that threatening lip of ice might break under them at any second; Jim had an urge to leap out, and his gorge rose. Don’t vomit, he told himself, as Pierre shouted, “Venez monter!” and the two canotiers leapt in at the last second.
They were off, paddling furiously; Jim had never seen such energy. The canoe gathered speed through the black water, and Jim began to relax slightly, until he saw a large ice floe coming at them. It would tip them into the river. He couldn’t swim. He gripped the rough edges of the log — what now?
The great flat ice-pan struck the bow, but then simply turned the canoe downstream. A second time Jim’s fear rose. A cheerful order from Pierre urged his men to back-paddle, and after Herculean strokes, they managed to swing the prow upstream and now aimed for a spot above Quebec City.
Paddling against the current, they dodged the ice floes in their unwieldy craft, but each minor crisis brought on new torture. Jim had never dreamed he’d find himself in a situation so fraught with terror. Heading upstream, the craft lost ground as dangerous chunks of ice swept past, but it managed to edge ever closer to the opposite shore. Clearly, the canotiers found it exhilarating, although the other passengers were just as terrified as Jim, gripping the rough edges in white-faced anxiety.
As they were paddling furiously around a large pan, Jim pointed. Another flat floe, forty or fifty feet across, headed downstream directly for them. Would it not crush them? Pierre shouted loud exhortations in French. Jim grabbed up the extra paddle again and threw himself into stroking, for even the canotiers showed apprehension. Jim could well imagine what would happen when the ice-pan jammed them against the other one.
And so it did, with a great grinding crash, striking their craft with immense force so that Jim was sure the trunk would break in two, dropping them into the icy depths. But he stifled the urge to cry out. The canotiers on the right leapt onto that floe and tried to haul their massive canoe out onto it. But no, it was jammed solid, and cracking. They would all be done for.
James said a prayer: at least he’d have died trying to fulfill his dream of getting to the big city — a worthy end. Pierre leapt out on the upstream floe, and also tried to lift the canoe out. No luck.
“Débarquez tout le monde!” he cried.
Everyone out? How? Onto the lip of this ice? Was Pierre crazy? It would crack. “We’ll all drown!” someone
yelled.
“Non, non — vite, vite!” came the reply.
Better do as he was told! Gritting his teeth, Jim clambered out with another canotier and three passengers. Right away, the shelf cracked.
Yelling, they all grabbed at their craft and dove back into the hollowed pine, which so far was holding up. One elderly man didn’t make it and fell backwards. Jim froze, heart beating. As the man was almost sucked under by the current, two canotiers leapt across and grabbed his coat at the last second, managed to haul him out, sopping with ice-laden water, and flopped him back into the canoe.
Now what, Jim thought? Stay in the boat while it splits apart?
“L’autre côté,” Pierre prompted, and clenching his teeth, Jim lurched out. A portly peasant woman reached, arms out, and Jim pulled her across the gap, though in a moment she fell on the slippery ice. But the shelf held. He helped her up and one after another, the others struggled onto this firmer floe.
Then every canotier and a few of the passengers tried lifting and pulling the log amid exclamations of encouragement and delight from Pierre. Finally, they got the canoe beached up onto this ice floe, itself moving inexorably downstream.
“Allez!” Pierre called, and the canotiers managed to pull the canoe toward the next ominous patch of black water, the passengers trudging behind, faster this time, with the woman who fetched up last hurrying as best she could, slipping and falling on the bare patches of ice.