Rescue at Fort Edmonton

by Rita Feutl

  “Where did they teach you yours?You can’t just go around busting up people’s property! You don’t even know what they’re using those bottles for! And you still haven’t told me who you are.”

  “I am Mrs. Emily Murphy,” said the woman, drawing herself up.“We are the ladies of the WCTU and we’re here to eradicate the scourge of alcohol among these poor foreign families.”

  “Well, did you ask any questions before you went leaping to conclusions?” Janey demanded angrily, jumping off the wagon and approaching the crowd. “This family’s using these bottles for canning.They’re going to make strawberry jam.”

  Sheepishness crept across several of the women’s faces, replacing their indignation. “Well, she should have used the King’s own English and explained it to us!” said one of them, nodding at Mrs. Hirczi, who was clinging to Anna.

  Now Janey was really furious. “That lady already speaks a whole other language. English is her second one,” she said, advancing on the hapless woman. It was for moments such as these that Janey actually appreciated her height. “Just how many languages do you speak?” Janey was now nose to nose with the demonstrator, who seemed, suddenly, to find the sun unbearably hot.

  Mrs. Murphy stepped between Janey and the woman.“Well, Janey Kane, you certainly know how to speak your mind.” She studied her, then turned to the crowd.

  “Ladies, I think our work here is finished. I believe we are needed at the beer parlour up the hill.We will rout evil at its source. Good afternoon, Janey Kane.”

  The group of women picked up its skirts and marched out of the camp and up the hill. “Interesting girl, that Janey Kane,” said Mrs. Murphy as she puffed up the steep incline.“Extremely headstrong, but that can be admirable in its own way. I’ll remember that girl.”

  ONCE ANNA EXPLAINED THE FUSS to her mother, Mrs. Hirczi’s worried face broke into a smile and she came over to hug Janey.

  “You stay and eat with us dinner,” she said. “But first...” she looked dejectedly at the bottles.

  “Oh, Mama, Janey and I will finish these quickly,” Anna said. She grabbed the crate and brought it to the work table behind the tent. Already, makeshift jars stood in the summer sunlight, filled with strawberry jam and covered with white cloth that appeared to be dipped in wax. A pot of jam simmered over the open fire.

  “What are you dipping that string in?” asked Janey.

  “Coal oil,” explained Anna, as she tied the string around the bottle at the point where the glass bent to form the neck. She lit the string with a stick from the fire, then plunged the bottle into a bucket of water beside her. The string sizzled and the bottle snapped, exactly where the string had been.

  “That’s so cool!” said Janey.

  “No, the string is hot and the water is cold. That makes the glass break,” explained Anna. The girls worked together in the late afternoon sun, while Mrs. Hirczi put potatoes on the fire and placed sausages in a cast-iron frying pan.

  Two figures separated themselves from the throng of people moving past on the road and walked toward the tent, casting long shadows behind them. “Peter! Papa! You’re home!” cried Anna, rushing toward them. Her excited tale of the day’s events, babbled in a mixture of English and German, perked up the grimy, tired-looking figures. She introduced her new friend and then urged her father and brother toward the wash basin.

  “Can you fill this with water from the bucket by the fire?” she asked Janey, handing her a pitcher.

  Afterwards, Janey never really could figure out what had happened, but decided her dress had somehow swept too close to the fire. As she brushed by the tent, she heard a crackle but ignored it. Only when she felt the prickle of heat against her legs did she look down and realize her dress was burning.

  Janey leapt away from the table, shouting, “Fire! Fire!” Mr. Hirczi came running with the water from the basin. But instead of pouring it on her, he dashed it against the tent. Beating off the tiny, licking flames on her skirt, Janey realized to her horror that the Hirczis’ home was burning up.

  A flaming hole was also spreading on the side of her dress. She ran past people from neighbouring camps carrying gunny sacks, buckets, and bowls of water, and flung herself on a patch of ground, hoping to smother the flames on her dress.

  Finally, when she was sure her clothes were no longer burning, she sat up and looked at the Hirczi camp.The fire was out, but the tent was a smouldering mass of sodden canvas, draped over awkward bits of furniture. Men from neighbouring camps were stamping out glowing embers, while kerchiefed women gathered around a stunned-looking Mrs. Hirczi.

  What have I done? thought Janey. Suddenly,Anna’s voice pierced the air. “Henrietta! My Henrietta!” she called and Janey watched as Anna rushed toward the ruins.

  Horrified, Janey got up and backed away from the sight of Anna desperately ploughing through the dripping canvas. This is all my fault, she thought. I should have been more careful! I’ve just ruined their home! Her head ringing with accusations, Janey turned from the scene and ran blindly in the opposite direction.

  The burned dress only hampered her escape, and Janey paused to rip the thing off so she could flee even faster.That old woman was wrong. I can’t stop terrible things from happening. I make them happen. This is horri...

  Janey’s mind went blank as she plunged over the side of the riverbank. She’d forgotten Anna’s warning, and now she was tumbling, falling, head over heels down the side of a clay bank that scraped her back and legs.

  When she finally stopped rolling, she lay on the cool earth with her eyes closed and tried to catch her breath. She should have left the dress on. It would have spared her some scratches.

  “Janey. Janey! Janey, for pity’s sake will you get yourself out of there! You’re not supposed to be in there.”

  Janey opened her eyes. Her grandmother was standing on the other side of a construction fence, worry creasing the lines around her eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  STIFF AND SORE, JANEY SAT UP. THERE, GLINTING MOCKingly in the muck, lay Granny’s locket part of its chain draped casually over her now filthy sneakers. She stared at it in a daze.

  “Janey! Janey!?! What is the matter with you? Will you get yourself out of there this instant?” Granny’s voice had an uncharacteristically sharp edge to it.

  “I’m, uh...I’m coming,” said Janey, reaching for the necklace. The chain rolled off her foot and she felt the earth rumble beneath her. She lunged for the locket and the tremors stopped. Getting to her feet, she looked quickly around the site. No gaping holes; no collapsed earth anywhere around her. Nothing to indicate she’d just dropped through metres of earth and decades of time into another era. Janey checked her watch. That’s odd, she thought; it seemed to be working again.

  She ambled over to the fence and, with an ungraceful leap, landed beside her grandmother.

  “You look as if you’ve fought with a mud monster and lost,” said Granny, trying to keep her irritation in check. The sight of her granddaughter lying sprawled in the mud had unnerved her. “What on earth were you doing there?”

  “I accidentally...no, the locket accidentally fell in,” said Janey. “And I jumped over to get it.” She paused, wondering if she should tell her grandmother the rest of it.

  “It looked like you’d decided to have a nap in there,” said Granny.“A construction site is not the first place I’d think of for a lie-down.”

  “Fine then! The next time the necklace flies off to some weird place, I’ll just leave it there,” Janey snapped. Scowling, she stomped up the wooden sidewalk and headed toward the park’s main gate, trying desperately to sort out what had just happened to her. Or might have happened to her. Or maybe hadn’t happened to her at all.

  “Oh, Janey, for heaven’s sake. Stop making heavy weather about everything. And slow down! I can’t keep up with you if you’re racing off like this.”

  Janey stopped, and turned to her grandmother. “All right then, but I want to go home. This place give
s me the creeps.”

  “The creeps? What on earth for? The stuff around here is just a little old,” said Granny, catching up.“Like me.”

  Janey knew an olive branch of peace when she heard one. “You’re not that old, Granny,” she said, slowing her pace to accommodate her grandmother, who was breathing rather heavily. “I’m just tired from the trip, and the time change and everything. And I think I must have pulled a muscle when I jumped over that fence. So much for being the track and field star in junior high.”

  “You ought to play basketball,” said Granny. “That’s what I did when I was young, and about as tall as you. I was pretty good. I even played on the farm team for the Edmonton Grads.They travelled all over the world. Maybe when we get home I could show you –”

  Hot, grubby, and tired, Janey cut her off.“The only thing I want to do when we get home is take a bath.”

  THE WATER IN GRANNY’S CLAW-FOOT TUB WAS steaming when Janey climbed in. She leaned back and closed her eyes, letting the heat do its work on her body while she sorted out what had happened. There was no way she’d just imagined the events of today, Janey thought. Her muscles felt as if she’d plummeted down a deep hole and then crawled out into a world of rock-pelting pinheads and bone-rattling wagon rides. She lifted one leg from the water and examined it. Bruises all over the place.That one must have come when she fell over the cliff and that one, there, wasn’t that just where Anna and that weird woman poked her?

  Her leg flopped back into the water.Who was she kidding? There was no way she’d really fallen back into a time almost a hundred years ago. She wished she could tell someone, talk to someone about it. Granny might listen to her, but she’d probably think Janey was making the whole thing up.

  But that anguished cry from Anna, as she tried to get back to the tent – that all seemed so real. Janey could hear Anna’s desperate shriek again and again in her mind. What were they doing now? Where would they sleep tonight? And Anna’s doll – in that tiny tent it was probably the only thing other than her clothes that Anna owned.A wave of guilt washed over Janey.

  Maybe Janey was just sick, coming down with something, and the whole thing was a feverish dream. She removed her hand from the steaming water and felt her head. Naw. It was cooler than her pruney fingers at the moment.

  “Janey, are the clothes you had on in there with you? I thought I’d throw them in the wash,” Granny called through the door.

  “They’re on the rug in my room,” said Janey, working shampoo through her hair.

  Her dad had promised to come out soon; maybe he could fly out this weekend.Then he could help her sort it out. If there really was anything to sort out.

  But the whole thing had seemed so real, Janey thought, lying back so her hair floated in a soft billow around her head. She could still taste the tang of that buttermilk in the back of her throat, and the incredible sweetness of those tiny wild strawberries. She and Granny had stopped to pick up groceries on the way home and Janey’d convinced her grandmother to buy some buttermilk. But it hadn’t tasted quite the same.

  “Where’s buttermilk come from, Granny?” Janey had asked, as she helped with the supper dishes.

  “It’s the stuff that’s left over inside the churn after they make the butter,” said Granny, pausing to catch her breath as she scoured out the sink. “I used to date a dairy farmer,” she said, grinning. “Well, the son of a dairy farmer.”

  “You mean, not Grampa?”

  “Of course not Grampa. He was petrified of large animals, especially cows. Had a thing about them. Funny, really.We were at a farm once and he accidentally wandered into a field with a whole herd of them. Stood there so terrified I had to get the farmer to shoo them away. Your father never seemed to like them much either.”

  Well, that certainly explained her own thing about cows, thought Janey, swishing her hair back and forth underwater and pretending she was one of those models in a shampoo commercial.“As if,” Janey muttered out loud. “Get a grip, girl,” she told herself, sitting up to slop on some citrus-scented conditioner.

  That was the other thing she’d noticed, she realized. The whole time she’d been in that “other time,” she’d smelled all this weird stuff. Like horse manure and chicken poop and even, under the scent of the flowery perfumes those temperance women wore, the sharp smell of sweat. I’ll bet not one of those hoitytoity ladies had ever seen a stick of deodorant, Janey thought as she climbed out of the tub. How could she have made up those smells?

  Granny was on the phone when Janey emerged from the bathroom in clean shorts and T-shirt. “Hold on,Alex, she’s finished her beauty regimen. I think she can talk to you now.” The older woman could barely move aside fast enough before Janey grabbed the phone.

  “Hi, Daddy!”

  “Hi, sweetie. So. How was your first day in the Wild West?”

  Janey paused.What could she tell him about today? The truth? What was the truth? Would he believe her?

  “Dad, you gotta come out. I need to talk to you.”

  “Whoa!You miss me that much after just one day? I’m touched. Really. And not just in the head.”

  “Daddy, stop kidding. When are you coming out? Can you come this weekend?”

  “I don’t think so, honey. In fact, the meeting I thought I’d be at in a couple of weeks has been delayed. It looks as if I won’t be able to see your beaming smile till August.”

  “August! But that’s, like, months away! Why can’t you come out earlier? You promised.” She dropped her voice. “Besides, this place is just too weird for me. I don’t like it. And I miss everyone back there. I want to come home.”

  “Janey, there’s nothing weird about Granny or her house. She may be sick, but I think she’s holding together pretty well,” her father said sharply.

  “Granny’s sick?”

  In the silence that followed, Janey thought she could hear her blood pounding against the receiver, then her father’s sigh. “I thought she’d told you yesterday,” he said. “Granny’s been having treatments for cancer. She says she’s fine, but I thought you could keep an eye on her for me over the summer.”

  “So you just send me out here and don’t tell me any of this?”

  “Well, I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. And we thought Granny might want to tell you herself.”

  “Well, she hasn’t,” said Janey, her voice rising.“And now while you guys are having a great time in Toronto and Turkey, I’m stuck out here? This is so unfair.Why do I have to do your dirty work?”

  “Honey...”

  “I’m not your stupid honey. I hate you. I don’t care if you don’t come!” Janey smashed down the phone, turned, and saw Granny standing in the doorway.

  “Hey, kiddo...”

  “Just leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with some old sick woman!” Janey yelled, and instantly regretted it as she saw her grandmother’s face. Horrified, she put her hand to her mouth. Then, for the second time that day, she fled the scene of a disaster.

  THE LANE BEHIND HER GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE ended with a stand of trees, dressed in the bright green leaves of early summer. But Janey hardly noticed; she was just running blindly toward the cool dark shade beneath.

  Why, oh why, couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut? And why hadn’t anyone told her that Granny was sick? And why had she said such horrible things? That last question churned up the guilty knot already growing in her stomach.

  She plunged into the cool darkness of the trees and realized she was heading downhill toward a ravine. Wait a minute, she thought, clutching a thin poplar tree to stop her descent. I’m not being thrown into some weird time warp again. Especially now that I’ve just had a bath.

  Janey stepped gingerly forward. Nothing happened.Assured of her footing, she continued downhill, and noticed a path past a row of scraggly bushes. Reaching it, she waited for a cyclist to zip by (modern helmet, she noticed, and at least twenty gears; definitely present-day) before she followed.

  Joggers and do
g walkers ambled or zipped past while Janey tried to put her thoughts in order. No wonder Granny’s hair was so blonde. She’d bet anything it was a wig. She’d heard about this cancer stuff. Wasn’t that what Rachel’s bossy grandmother died of? Rachel had missed more than a week of school, and Janey could still remember her friend complaining about how dumb the wig had looked on her grandmother as she lay in the coffin.

  Janey’s eyes misted over.This was all so stupid. Her own granny drove a cool car and wasn’t bossy and had had a whole life with boyfriends and everything, stuff Janey was only starting to know about.

  Everything was so unfair. Why hadn’t her parents told her about Granny being sick? And why did she have to be the one to deal with it?

  Her blind rambling was interrupted when a golden retriever puppy loped toward her, tongue lolling. Without thinking, Janey stooped to pat it and the tears overflowed, dripping on the animal’s muzzle. It snuffled up and licked the rest off Janey’s face, until Janey was half crying, half laughing, on the pavement.

  “Sammy! Sammy! Get down, girl! Stop that!”

  A dark-haired boy in a ripped pair of jeans grabbed the back of the dog’s collar and yanked her back.“Sorry about that. Sam’s just a bit over-friendly.”

  “It’s okay. Really. She’s cute.” Janey got to her feet, wiping tears from her face, hoping he’d think it was just dog slobber. But before her eyes were dry, the wiping had changed to batting. It was only now that Janey realized a cloud of mosquitoes had gathered around her.

  “Man, these bugs are vicious,” she said, swatting away frantically.

  A grin spread on the boy’s face.“You can’t be from around here.You oughtta know that if you go into the ravine just before the sun goes down, you’ve gotta be bug-proofed.”

  Janey eyed him through the swatting. “You’re right. I’m not.What’s your secret?”

  “Piles of bug spray. My mum says it’s full of cancer stuff, but she doesn’t walk the dog down here at dusk.”

  At the mention of cancer, the small lift of Janey’s spirits collapsed again. She glanced around, thinking she’d go home and face the music, then realized she wasn’t sure of where she was or how to get back. “Look, I think I’m lost. How do you get out of here?”