With Love from Bliss

by Ruth Glover

  Dudley was the first to move. Galvanized into action, he jumped over the outstretched legs of his companions, curveted around the heater, leaped the short aisle in two strides, and turned toward the couple seated at a desk in the center of the room.

  Della’s mouth was stretched in a soundless scream, her eyes staring, fixed on her husband. At her side, Henley was slumped forward, his face pressed onto a much-marked desk, just below the initials JB and RM, which were twined together for perpetuity by some forgotten childish swain and more enduring perhaps than the one who carved it. Certainly the desk’s present occupant—face on its marred surface, hands hanging at his side—appeared to have fled this “vale of tears.”

  Now there was a shifting of the congregation; a tide moved the crowd as though some giant finger stirred in their midst; all eyes were centered on the scene being enacted in the middle of the room. Parker Jones dropped his notes and hurried forward. From the benches at the side of the room two men leaped into action, one to lift Henley’s head and attempt to look into his eyes, the other to take a wrist and feel for a pulse. They were homesteaders in the Bliss area—Connor Dougal and Gregor Slovinski, each tall, powerful, supremely masculine. As they joined Dudley over the form of his father, none of them knew the bonds this day’s business would make between the three of them and the trouble.

  Callused but caring hands were moving Della out of the crowded space, comforting arms were placed around her as the women of the congregation, shocked and pale, reached out with the only help they could give at the moment.

  “Clear a bench,” Connor Dougal directed, and its occupants scattered, to stand against the wall, eyes staring from their heads, lips moving soundlessly, perhaps in prayer.

  “Help us move him,” Connor continued, and willing hands grasped the dangling legs, the limp arms, and heaved Henley from his crouched position in the childish seat to the narrow bench running down the side of the schoolroom. Here he was laid, one hand and arm falling helplessly toward the floor. Gregor Slovinski’s big fingers fumbled with Henley’s shirt collar and tie, loosening them and unbuttoning the front of his shirt.

  Beyond that there seemed little anyone could do. The crowd looked on helplessly as Connor Dougal began chafing Henley’s hands. Gregor Slovinski put an ear to Henley’s chest—his too-motionless chest. The crowd against the wall and in the other seats looked questioningly toward the big Slav as he raised his cinnamon-colored head and spoke through his cinnamon-colored beard the words they dreaded to hear: “Notting, I hear notting. You give a lissen,” and he beckoned forward one figure in the group—Gramma Jurgenson. Bliss’s midwife, and probably the best prepared of anyone in Bliss to deal with sickness and trauma, as well as childbirth, Gramma went through the same procedures as had Connor and Gregor. She too shook a head, having checked the pulse and breath and finding neither.

  “Gone,” she said briefly. “Probably apoplexy.”

  Della sobbed aloud; Dudley, standing off to the side, felt as though the world were reeling and put out a hand to the nearest elbow for support. It was Matilda’s, and for a moment they held onto each other; then, even then, remembering the proper thing, they stepped apart.

  Face-to-face with his first death as a pastor, Parker Jones called for attention and prayer. Whether Della heard him is questionable; her face told the story: disbelief, struggling with panic.

  Between his mother’s stricken countenance and his father’s still face, Dudley felt as though he were in a bad dream. Or a nightmare that was worse, if such could be, than the one of the previous night, a night that now seemed a long time ago and a million miles away. At least he had awakened from that one; there would be no awakening from the horror of this one.

  Connor Dougal was quietly seeing to the removal of the body of Henley Baldwin. “Do you have a wagon?” he asked Gregor. “I rode, myself.”

  “Yah, I got vagon,” Gregor answered, nodding. “And I’ll bring it to d’ gate. Somebody,” and his gaze circled the room, “help wit’ the Baldwin rig, a’right?”

  Parker Jones was administering what solace he could to the colorless Della. Two of the women were rubbing her hands, one on either side; another was wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. Though the day was warm and bright with sunshine, Della was shivering, and the shawl would help.

  Blankets were collected from someone’s wagon and placed on the bottom of Gregor’s wagon, with one reserved to cover the staring face of the dead man. One of the Jurgenson boys held the horses, and someone brought around the Baldwin buggy and horse, with Dudley’s horse tied behind.

  Though Connor Dougal was prepared to lift the lifeless form of his neighbor and carry it to the wagon, Gregor was the likely one for the job, and he knew it. Making his way back through the crowd and shouldering the younger man aside with a grunt, Gregor bent his mighty frame, gathered Henley into his arms as a child would cradle a rag doll, and made his way through the stunned crowd to the wagon.

  The congregation followed silently as Della was half led, half carried by Parker Jones and Connor Dougal, helped into the buggy (no foolish babble now about assistance—without it the half-fainting woman would never make it home).

  “Will you drive, son, or shall I?” Connor asked Dudley. Not that he was of an age to be a father figure to the younger man, but the gentle term was offered as a measure of comfort. Indeed, Connor Dougal was only in his mid-twenties, but he was a vigorous, hardened man of the soil, one of Bliss’s best advertisements.

  Having come from Scotland and homesteaded next to the Baldwins as soon as he was old enough to stake a claim, Connor Dougal had carved his small domain from the thick bush as they all had and were still doing. Only a “bee” at the time of the raising of his buildings—cabin and barn—had given assistance. In turn, that same help was offered readily to other settlers in their time of need. It was a system that threaded the frontier with strong bonds—they needed each other, and no one knew when that need would arise. Here was one example: Henley Baldwin, alive and singing a hymn one moment, stone-cold dead the next. Shivers of fear touched the good folk of Bliss—how quickly, how unexpectedly tragedy could happen. If Parker Jones were smart, the deacons thought to a man, he would strike while the iron was hot and, next Sunday, warn sinners that they were in imminent danger of facing their Maker. Religion was serious business on the frontier.

  But Parker Jones, too compassionate for devious tactics, walked back to his small log parsonage with heaviness of heart. Had he been—to the dead man—all that a pastor should be? Ordinarily taking Sunday dinner with Molly Morrison and her family, he had made his excuses and walked alone to face his responsibility or the lack of it. Feeling the call of God on his young life, preparing himself at Bible school in the east, answering the call of this small rural congregation in the northern reaches of Saskatchewan, Parker quaked at the accountability that was his. Needing a wife, wanting a wife, still he hesitated, wondering how he might divide his attention and feeling that God might come off second best. It was a decision of mammoth proportions, to Parker Jones.

  “You’re too serious about this, Parker,” Molly was to tell him later that day as they walked together in the evening’s coolness. “Death is a matter of course. And especially here among so many who have spent themselves and their strength just to get a home started and gather together a few bits and pieces. They literally wear themselves out.”

  “But I have the feeling that Henley Baldwin was not a happy man,” Parker said heavily. “And did I ever talk to him about it? No, I let it lie, trusting my sermons would be a help, I guess. I’m going to have to be more involved than this, Molly. Jesus said, ‘They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.’ I have a feeling that was one sick man. And I did little or nothing about it!” Parker’s eyes were dark with the pain of self-flagellation.

  “Is God whipping you like this, Parker, or are you whipping yourself? Surely you can do your best and leave it there.”

  “But that’s the point,
” Parker responded. “Did I do my best?”

  In his heart of hearts Parker Jones had a feeling that he had been intimidated by Della Baldwin. Perhaps he was afraid that any interference, no matter how well intentioned, would be seen as meddling and would result in making life harder for Henley, as Della retaliated.

  Parker sighed. It was hard to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

  Molly slipped her hand in his and, uncharacteristically, said no more. Waiting, hoping, longing to be Parker Jones’s “helpmeet,” Molly often curbed her tendency to impatience, willing to learn the lessons she needed to do the job and do it right. She wanted to say now, “He’s well out of it, Parker! Everyone knew he was miserable. Can’t you see God’s good hand in this—for him?”

  But Parker Jones was grieving over the family members left behind, and their misery. What had been an unhappy home, would it—now that Della’s apparent reason for complaint was out of the picture—be one of contentment at last? With all his heart Parker Jones hoped and prayed so, for her sake as well as for the young man Dudley. To be as miserable as Della was—there must be some reason for it. Parker felt himself ignorant and inexperienced and despaired that prayer, by itself, wasn’t enough. Faith without works is dead, he reminded himself grimly.

  “God ‘hath given to us,’” he quoted, “‘the ministry of reconciliation.’ Could that mean bringing about peace and harmony in that home? I wonder.”

  “Everyone feels sure that with Henley’s passing, Della’s source of irritation is out of the way,” Molly said.

  “I wonder.”

  Gramma Jurgenson laid out the corpse. Della could barely face laying out the necessary clothing.

  Della’s initial near-collapse passed, and she went doggedly about her household duties. But she was so uncharacteristically restrained and quiet that Dudley, coming and going—with milk, chicken feed, and the responsibilities of the working farm heavy on his young shoulders—felt uneasy. There was, in the home’s atmosphere, a sense of calm before the storm.

  “I’m just tired,” he excused himself later to an anxious Matilda.

  The Baldwin quarter-section backed on Hooper land; to the left of Baldwin land was the homestead of Connor Dougal, and the Dougal land backed on the quarter-section of Gregor Slovinski. In other words, the section’s four quarters were homesteaded by the Hoopers, Baldwins, Connor Dougal, and Gregor Slovinski. Of them all, Gregor was the most lately arrived, having emigrated from Waldeck—an almost unheard of area lying between Westphalia and Hess-Nassau, eventually to be absorbed by Prussia—and purchasing the homestead of a homesteader who, at his wife’s insistence, was returning to “civilization.”

  No one knew much yet about Gregor, excepting that he was a hard worker, honest in all his dealings, and willing to be neighborly; this was the general opinion, and it was enough for now. It was rumored that he had been married, lost his wife and son in a bitter European winter, and was not interested in female companionship now. The sad story only served to melt the hearts of several young females. But he was a little overage, concerned parents pointed out, and that was a bit sobering. No girl wanted to be a bride who would, all too soon, become a widow left with a passel of children and no man’s strong back to make a living for them. It happened more times than anyone liked to think about. Just look now, they pointed out to one another—here’s another widow, and with a crop in the ground and unharvested. Ah but, someone was quick to say, there is a son, fully grown if not matured, and he can carry on.

  Matilda knew all this when she met Dudley. And Dudley certainly looked burdened; “carrying on” was obviously not an easy task. “I’m sure you’re tired,” Matilda soothed the tense Dudley, so different from the usual care-less boy she knew. Matilda’s red lips and milk-white throat had been offered temptingly and distractingly, but even those could not arouse a flicker of manhood in the woebegone Dudley. Something . . . someone? . . . was making him extremely uneasy.

  “Matilda,” he said tightly, “will you wait? What if I should be . . . delayed in carrying out our plans?”

  “Delayed?” Matilda’s tone was not reassuring. “What do you mean delayed? Naturally we’ll wait a reasonable time because of your father’s death. Is that what you mean?”

  “Never mind,” Dudley said. “Everything will be fine; you’ll see.”

  “Surely, Dudley,” she said thoughtfully, “your mum will go back east to her family now. Won’t she? The homestead is yours, isn’t it? After all, you’re eighteen. If you’re man enough to farm, you’re man enough to get married, it seems to me.”

  Apparently unsure of anything, Dudley hesitated, and they parted with him more tense and troubled than before and with Matilda nourishing a touch of impatience.

  At bedtime, Della called Dudley from his room to the table where she was sitting, certain papers spread before her. The coal oil lamp had been lit, casting flickering shadows over the room and adding a touch of fantasy to the proceedings, making them seem unreal. It was unreal! It was a bad dream! And surely, the boy part of the man struggled to believe, he would wake in his own bed, with another night and another nightmare behind him.

  “It was your father’s wish that the homestead be yours and mine, together,” Della began. “I suppose that means half of it is yours, and half is mine. Since it really can’t be divided—eighty acres each would be silly—it means we share and share alike in all of it. I could have managed it very well by myself.

  “It’ll mean a lot of hard work, and I trust you are up to it. We can’t afford a hired man, and to have someone work it on shares would simply eke away any proceeds we might have. Both options are unthinkable. No, it will have to be your responsibility, and mine. We have the summer to work at the idea; by fall you’ll have fit into the harness fine, I’m sure. You’re at the age where you are ready to muscle out . . . there’ll be no more boyhood days; it’s time to grow up and grow up all the way. Now, do you have any questions?”

  “Selling, Ma . . . Mum. It is possible to sell—either of us, say, wanting to? Sell our half, maybe to the other one?” Faint hope flickered desperately, before being snuffed out.

  “Why on earth would we want to do that? Think straight, Dudley. This is your father’s legacy to you and to me. We must do our best, and we must do it in a united way. I need you for the outside work; you need me for the homemaking part and for the wisdom and experience I can bring to the union. Pick up and go on—that’s all we can do.”

  Della pulled a large handkerchief from her apron pocket and buried her face in it. With a shuddering sigh she seemed to put grief aside, even as she had apparently put away the condemnations and self-recriminations—those horrid feelings—that had plagued her earlier immediately following Henley’s collapse. Why, she consoled herself, she could clearly remember Henley telling her that he would be a poor stick of a man without her. Well, here sat another—Henley’s son. It was a challenge.

  With his homestead next to theirs and his house not more than a half mile away, it fell to Connor Dougal to stand by the bereaved mother and son until the time of the funeral. Bodies could not be kept more than a day or two, depending on the weather. The preferred day for funerals was Sunday; that way, no one lost any work time. But Henley having died on a Sunday, a week’s wait was impossible. Tuesday was the day settled on. Monday Connor took Della to the homestead of Jack Sweeney, carpenter by trade, who augmented his meager farm income by the making and selling of certain hand-crafted items, coffins among them. Here she made her purchase, and it was trundled back to the Henley home in the back of Connor’s wagon. Gramma Jurgenson and others lined it with treasured bits of cloth from their trunks and made a small pillow.

  But it was Gregor Slovinski who showed up to put the body in the box. Once again his mighty arms came into play, rippling through the tight shirt sleeves as he lifted Henley’s remains and laid them in the coffin, straightening and smoothing the Sunday suit that Henley would wear for the final time. He should not meet his
Maker in rough farmer garb, and all involved nodded agreement to the arrangement.

  At the appointed time rigs began assembling in the Henley yard, carrying the faithful folks of Bliss, brothers and sisters in this another tragedy in the populating and taming of the frontier. Some brought flowers, probably gathered along the way from the side of the road. Mason jars were filled with water from the trough, the blossoms and greenery were thrust in, and the simple arrangements took their places beside and around the rude catafalque.

  The coffin sat on sawhorses under a poplar tree, a kindly acquaintance standing alongside the entire time, keeping flies from the deceased’s face with a rolled-up newspaper. Della and Dudley sat before it on kitchen chairs that had been brought out for that purpose. Others sat on the ground or stood in a ragged semicircle around the coffin, and the minister.

  The solemnity of the occasion was not lessened by the fact that Mik Loricz was, discreetly but obviously, recording the occasion on camera, his aim being to sell pictures to any who would buy, and satisfying a frontier craving for likenesses to send loved ones “back home.” His Baby Hawkeye turned out pictures only two by two and a half, often too small to make out features well, but with care, decent pictures were obtained, and Mik made himself a little extra cash.

  Parker Jones took his place at the side of the coffin and looked at the stalwart figures of the bush grouped before him; all seemed resigned in the face of this newest tragedy—a man struck down in his prime, a widow left defenseless, a son bowed too soon with responsibility—and did his best.

  Standing in a small area cleared from the penetrating bush, beside a rude log home made with a man’s two hands, Parker Jones spoke of a mansion prepared by Jesus himself, awaiting the faithful. He spoke of a rest where man has ceased from his own works. Many an eye misted and many a heart determined to do more about laboring to enter into that rest and being less occupied with the weary body’s rest after a day of toil here on earth.