The plank floor of their tent was covered with Persian rugs Joe had bought at auction in Montreal. He’d ordered their camp beds from Abercrombie and Fitch. Their bed linen was a wedding present from Mr. Spaulding; the Hudson’s Bay blankets were from Grattan and Elise, and Joe’s Montreal bankers had sent a pair of prime buffalo robes, very heavy and almost suffocatingly warm. His two sisters, cloistered in their convent in Ottawa, had sent a holy picture, an image of the Sacred Heart. Early in the summer Joe had raced the two thousand miles to Ottawa to try to see them before they took final vows. He wanted to persuade them to leave their cloistered convent.
“I should never have put them in there, Iseult. They’re asking them to take vows and give up the world — how can you give up what you’ve never had?”
The Mother Superior agreed to speak to Joe through an iron grille, and she told him that his sisters refused to see him. He threatened to return to the convent with a policeman, but he knew no police would dare bust into the Visitations. He was staying at the Chateau Laurier; that night he received a telegram from Head-of-Steel saying that men had been killed in a tunnel blast gone awry, and the next morning he caught a train back to the mountains.
All summer Iseult and Joe had been dining off her mother’s china and using her father’s table silver and candelabra. Oil lamps at night gave their white tent a cozy glow, and a little woodstove kept them warm. Mail came from Tête Jaune and Edmonton on the weekly supply train, and Iseult usually got a letter from Elise, who had delivered her baby in June, a red-haired girl named Virginia.
I’ll spare you gruesome details Iseult but when you go into labor don’t think something’s wrong just because it hurts so much because it does.
There was always plenty of mud at Head-of-Steel. Wolves scavenged the camp’s perimeter. Iseult had seen grizzly bears stalking across avalanche slopes like irritable men, and herds of elk feeding on young aspen, stripping the bark with their tongues. The mountains were no idyll and the risks were momentous, but Iseult, pregnant, shared her husband’s sense of great endeavour. And intimacy with a man like Joe was exhilarating and strange. His legs were powerful. He had rough hands but could be shockingly tender. When the tunnel collapsed in late May and those men were killed on the job, lovemaking gave each of them sustenance through the horribly black mood of that week.
She had slept in her husband’s camp bed every night until her body got too big and she had to sleep in her own. She had nursed injured men and held the hands of men who were dying. She had dug, planted, and passionately defended the kitchen garden, and though most of her beans and onions had been lost to rampaging elk, she was still harvesting beets and potatoes even with frost in the ground. Joe’s men had built a chicken house, and she kept eleven hens, all of them good layers. Early in the season she had paid the camp tailor, an elderly Chinese, Mr. Bee, to make her two pairs of trousers out of honey-coloured canvas duck, she’d knitted her own thick woollen socks, and she had ordered a pair of caulk boots from Eaton’s catalogue in a boy’s size that fit her perfectly. She greased the leather herself with a compound of bear grease and ashes, first warming the leather by the fire, then rubbing in the grease with her hands.
She had made hundreds of photographs. She was learning to see through her cameras, to trust what she couldn’t see, and to trust her powers of touch and feeling in the dark. She had photographed every stage of the work so far. At Joe’s suggestion she had sent to the Star Weekly in Toronto her photographs of men building a trestle bridge, and the magazine had published one of them with the caption “Hard Work Builds an Empire.” Though her canvas trousers no longer fit, she had kept in resolutely good health through her pregnancy by working ferociously in her garden and riding her little mare right up to her eighth month. She had hiked up and down the grade with her cameras and helped Joe pump their handcar along temporary rails to remote stations, where he checked that the drinking water was clean and she delivered her garden produce and eggs to the cookshacks, collected letters for the post, and dosed any men who were sick. It was nothing like the sort of life she had been afraid of settling for in New England or Pasadena. All her loneliness had burned off like a coastal fog.
It had been close to the end of the season when Joe left for Winnipeg on business. Their payroll had to be met each month but the generals paid them according to a fixed schedule: so much per yard of finished grade. When his surveyors and engineers insisted on last-minute variances costing thousands of dollars, Joe knew he would never get accommodation out of the generals without a twelve-hundred-mile round trip to Winnipeg and days of negotiating. He had offered to take Iseult with him, but her instinct was to stay put.
The morning after he left, the first blizzard of the season blew in from the west coast, shutting off the camp from the world and Iseult from the rest of the camp. For the first couple of hours she stayed in bed, carefully disassembling, cleaning, and polishing her FPK camera, using a set of brushes and small, beautiful tools one of the machinists had made for her, and listening to hard rain, then ice, then wet snow rattling on the canvas walls of the tent. By the time she had replaced the last brass screws in the camera body she was starting to feel restless. She closed up the camera and got out of bed. Peering out of the tent, she saw her favourite little saddle mare standing forlorn in the corral amid the driving sleet.
A young Chinese man, Lee Peng, did all their laundry and most of the housekeeping and cooking. Iseult had been trying to get Lee Peng to teach her to cook, but he seemed shy and uncomfortable when she was in the cook shed, even if she was just chopping vegetables or helping wash up. Lee Peng was supposed to feed their horses when Joe wasn’t around, but the little mare looked awfully bleak and rangy, she thought. A feed of hay might help her withstand the bitter storm. She pulled Joe’s mackinaw over her nightgown and stepped into her caulk boots.
Outside the tent she was nearly bowled over by the force and appetite of the wind. Snow had drifted around the chicken house and she could hear the birds clucking softly inside. The snow was falling so thickly now that it was hard to see the corral, and she could not see the little mare at all.
The blizzard had stripped all the lazy autumn air out of the valley, replacing it with air that smelled active and smoky. The wind was grunting. In New Hampshire, blizzards never came on so fast, with such a smothering of snow.
She figured her chickens were all right. Their water pan might skim over with ice, but that could be dealt with in the morning. She ought to have gone back inside the tent, but the mare had caught her scent and now came ambling up to the corral fence, looking like a grey ghost, ice slabbed on her back.
Iseult struggled through the drifts to the hayrick. Seizing a pitchfork and hoisting a load of hay, she was about to pitch it over the rail when she felt a small, dirty stab of pain in her belly. She tossed the hay, then replaced the pitchfork. With one hand supporting her cramping belly, she staggered back to the tent, closed the flap, and lay down on her bed without taking off the wet mackinaw or the caulk boots. She felt dizzy and nauseated, and furious with Joe for going off and leaving her with the animals. Wind shook the canvas walls.
When the contractions started, she tried to absorb the blows and keep breathing. She had been born at home — most people were — but Joe was in favour of the hospital in Santa Monica. He wanted a clean white place, he said, with the best scientific care.
After the turmoil of the contractions she lay panting and confused. She was struggling to get back to sensible thinking when she heard Lee Peng whispering, “Missus, Missus,” in his soft, beckoning voice. She looked up and saw his head poking through the tent flap. His brown eyes regarded her.
“Sick, Missus?”
She was still wearing the woollen mackinaw and boots. Her sheets were damp from melted snow.
“I’ll get up,” she told him. “You change the sheets, please.”
“You want tea, missus?”
“First help me get these boots off.”
He st
epped into the tent and approached the bed hesitantly. Standing at the foot, he started tugging at her caulks.
She didn’t know how old Lee Peng was. She had asked him but he didn’t seem to know, or perhaps it was just unlucky to say. He might have been seventeen, or twenty-five. Joe’s foremen told her the Chinese practised all sorts of mumbo-jumbo having to do with the power of numbers, and were ferocious gamblers. The gangers said it was impossible for a white person to tell if a Chinaman was sick or well, contented or furious — the Chinese were an inscrutable race. When Chinamen butchered an elk, they ate every part of the animal, even the liver, which they steamed; the antlers, which they ground to a powder; and the hooves, which they boiled in a broth. They were hard workers, the foremen allowed, but unpredictable. They seemed content to live without women.
All the men killed or injured in the tunnel blast, back in May, had been Chinese. The survivors has been loaded into carts and brought to Head-of-Steel, where Iseult tried her best to nurse them. Two more men died before the supply train arrived, and their frightened faces had stayed with her.
The survivors had built a bone-house for their dead, because no Chinaman wished his bones to be buried in a strange country, according to the foremen. Friends or relatives were expected to retrieve the bones after a couple of years, clean them, and carry or send them back to the home village in China.
The first time she noticed Lee Peng he had been standing alone outside the bone-house, weeping, both hands wrapped in bloody bandages. She learned his older brother had been one of the men killed in the blast.
With his tender hands, Lee Peng was no longer much use for station work, but instead of letting him go, Joe had sent him to help Iseult with the kitchen garden. After Lee Peng had been working alongside her in the garden for a few days, Joe said they might as well hire him to do the housekeeping. “The boys up there say he is a pretty fair cook.”
She had replied that she didn’t need a servant, she could manage by herself. She was already worried that Joe didn’t think much of her cooking. She’d not spent time in any sort of kitchen before coming into the mountains; Joe was a more experienced cook, since it had so often been his responsibility to feed his brothers and sisters. But when he came back to the compound after a long day in the office or up on the grade, she liked to have something ready for him, even if it was just bacon and eggs — though she often burned the bacon.
“In a few more weeks you might not feel like doing quite so much,” Joe had argued. “And I don’t like to send him back to the tunnel. I think his head got shaken up. Some men are never the same after a blast.”
Iseult had gradually grown fond of Lee Peng, despite his impermeable silences. When the wildflowers appeared in late summer, he went with her to the high alpine meadows and they gathered flowers in bunches, which they left at the bone-house or brought back to the camp. They scattered mothballs around the garden perimeter in a vain attempt to keep away the ravaging elk, porcupine, and skunks, and were constantly mending and patching the wire fences. By August they were harvesting more beans, spinach, parsley, and carrots than they could consume, and every few days she was delivering baskets of produce and fresh eggs to men at one or another of the remote stations.
Every Saturday night Lee Peng took a basket of greens and a couple of dozen eggs up to the station where he and his brother had worked, and where the other men were all from the same village back in China. On Sunday he returned to Head-of-Steel and another week of cooking, cleaning, gardening, and laundry.
Lee Peng was helping her stand up when a sharp pain tore her insides. She grunted and clung onto his arm. Looking down, she saw that her nightgown was soaking wet. Her head suddenly felt light and she would have fallen down, but Lee Peng supported her, got the heavy mackinaw off her shoulders, and helped her into Joe’s bed.
The blizzard was growling outside the tent and she could hear Douglas firs creaking. The odour of birth fluid on her soaked nightgown was sweet, dark, and strange.
Lee Peng found a fresh nightgown in her trunk but she was too weak to even sit up. He found scissors in her sewing basket and began cutting away the wet nightgown, then pulled it off her. Underneath she wore a flannel chemise and a pair of Joe’s drawers stretched over her pregnant belly. The drawers were soaked with water and blood. Scowling, Lee Peng cut them away too. Using a towel, he began cleaning the mess from her thighs. He helped her to sit up, got the fresh nightgown over her head, and fitted her arms into the sleeves. The sheets on Joe’s bed were a mess; the young man quickly stripped Iseult’s bed, made it up again with clean linen and helped her back into it, where she lay feeling like a package with something smashed and broken inside.
She watched Lee Peng jab wood into the stove. She wasn’t thinking of her baby in any distinct way. Mostly she was conscious of the low, determined snarl of the wind. The storm and the sight of her own bloody trace had put Iseult into a kind of trance, but she was aware enough to feel abandoned when Lee Peng left the tent abruptly without saying a word to her, carrying dirty sheets and towels in a bundle under his arm.
A second flurry of contractions arrived some time later, much less violent than the first. Lee Peng had deserted her, and where was Joe? She could hear the fire crackling in the airtight and smell the oil burning in the lamps. Her thoughts resisted coherence. She wanted her mother. She had also lost control of her bowels and made another, worse mess in the bed.
She did not know how much time had passed when she became aware of a girl in the tent, watching her. The girl was stocky, with a red, plump face and a man’s body, or maybe it was just the thick clothes she wore: padded jacket, woollen muffler, weather-beaten hat.
The girl’s nose wrinkled at the stench and she turned and spoke sharply in Chinese to Lee Peng, who had mysteriously reappeared. How long had he been standing there? Iseult watched him hand the scissors to the girl, who sat down on the bed and began cutting away her second filthy nightgown. The girl’s fingers were almost unbearably cold to the touch. Iseult wept.
Taking off her padded jacket and pushing up the sleeves of her sweater, the Chinese girl started bathing Iseult’s legs, using a pan of water heated on the stove. The girl’s face softened and the harsh red burn of cold on her plump cheeks softened too. She helped Iseult across to Joe’s bed once more. Lee Peng bundled the ruined sheets and threw them out into the storm.
Pain came in staccato chops. Iseult heard herself whimper, “Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.”
The girl stayed sitting on the bed and Lee Peng stood near the doorway, both of them watching her as though they were expecting her to do something more, say something more. What more did they want of her? Why couldn’t they help her? Couldn’t they see she was dying?
The birth was not particularly painful, perhaps because the infant, a girl, was so undersized, as small as the smallest red baby in the Incubatorium on the pier at Venice. Smaller. The Chinese girl washed and bundled her and kept putting her on Iseult to nurse, but the little thing would not take the breast. Lying on her mother’s stomach, she died after a little while.
~
Joe’s chief clerk said that from what he’d been able to understand, the child, a girl, had not lived two hours. The Chinese girl was now looking after Mrs. O’Brien.
“A girl? Where did she come from?”
“One of the coolies must have brought her in. She was down on the timesheets as a man, apparently.”
“The little girl . . . Where is she?”
“I set the carpenters to make a wee coffin, sir, and had one of the storerooms cleaned out. We’ve put the bairn there, awaiting your instructions.”
He would keep hold of himself. There were things to be done and he would do them. “I want to send a wire to New York the moment the line is up.”
The chief clerk quickly took a notebook and gold pencil from his waistcoat pocket. Joe dictated the telegram, then left the room and strode out through the office quickly, daring anyone to offer condolence, da
ring anyone to meet his eye.
CNCPYELLOWHEAD WU BALTIMORE
4085813-13332 CNCP
9 NOVEMBER 1912
TO: T O’BRIEN
WOODSTOCK COLLEGE
WOODSTOCK MD
REGRET TO INFORM DEATH OF INFANT. CAN YOU ADVISE FUNERAL RITES. WILL ARRANGE TRAIN PASS. PLEASE INFORM. JOE
~
Lee Peng said the girl was the widow of his brother. She had been working alongside her husband when he was killed in the tunnel blast.
“Offer her our condolences, if you please,” Joe said. “If her husband had any wages coming, she’s due whatever it was plus fifty dollars widow’s benefit. Ask her if she will stay here and take care of my wife. I’ll pay her two dollars a day.”
He found Iseult in bed, staring at a book. Bending over, he kissed her cool forehead. “How are you feeling?”
Holding the book open, she looked at him but didn’t speak. Someone had brushed her hair, differently than her way of brushing it. The tent was warm, dry, clean, with a fire knocking in the airtight stove and an aroma he recognized, of roasted herbs — his mother had also burned herbs when there was sickness or trouble in the house. A tray beside the bed was untouched: milk, honey, tea, slices of lemon in a little dish, and a biscuit.
“We’ll have another baby,” he told her.
She shook her head. Tears started down her cheeks. He reached for her hand and she pulled it away. She stared fixedly at her book. It wasn’t possible that she was reading, but she stared at the book with tears shining on her cheeks, and even turned a page.
“Iseult, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.”
He wanted to take away the book and comfort her, but she wouldn’t look at him and he didn’t know how to proceed. She was only protecting herself, he figured. Grief was a rough blade. While he searched the tent for the prayer beads and Catholic missal the Little Priest had sent him for his twenty-first birthday, the girl held a steaming cup to Iseult’s lips and, cooing in Chinese, tried to persuade her to drink. Iseult had carried their child in her womb; her pain must be even sharper, deeper than what he was feeling.
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