by Gail Sattler
Once he was at the bottom and properly balanced on both crutches, John turned to Elliott. “Praise the Lord, I’ll only have to do that once a day.”
Louise and Mrs. Demchuck slipped behind them without speaking and scurried into the kitchen.
“Let me help you down the steps outside, and I’ll wait for you.”
Upon returning to the house, Elliott could already smell bacon and eggs cooking. He sat in the kitchen with John to go over the daily schedule while the women busied themselves making breakfast and setting the table.
Elliott glanced up at the clock on the wall. “According to this, we have three quarters of an hour before the next passenger train. Then we will have two and a quarter hours to do the inspection before church.”
John nodded as Mrs. Demchuck and Louise set the plates on the table in front of them and poured the coffee.
Since they were in no rush, Elliott found it pure pleasure to be able to linger over their breakfast and enjoy their time together. It had been many years since he’d shared such a time with his own family, and it served as a pointed reminder of how much he missed it.
Mrs. Demchuck leaned forward on her elbows, cradling her coffee cup in her palms. “Please forgive me for asking, but we’ve all been so curious about you. All we know about you is that you’re a barber by trade and you come from Katona Falls in Ontario. Do you have family somewhere? Of course, we’re happy that you have a job to go to. What kind of job is it that you have to travel so far?”
Elliott forced himself to smile as the unspoken question hung in the air—what was he doing riding the freight trains?
Mrs. Demchuck’s question was reasonable and expected. He’d stayed with them two nights; he’d eaten their food. Mrs. Demchuck had even washed and repaired his clothing. It seemed wrong to be in this situation, being treated this way by an employee of the railroad after essentially stealing a ride on the train to get there. However, not only did they welcome him as their guest, they welcomed him as their friend.
So far, he’d successfully avoided giving them the more personal details of his life, even fooled himself into believing he could get away with it. Now, he could no longer avoid their curiosity.
He stared into his coffee cup. He would have preferred to share his hopes and dreams with these fine people, not the details of his failures.
“I’m not sure where to start. My father owned a barbershop in Katona Falls. Our house caught fire in 1933 when I was away at university. Both my parents died in the fire.”
Mrs. Demchuck lowered her cup to the table, and rested her fingers on his forearm. “Oh, Elliott. . .I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you for your concern,” he muttered. “It’s been five years, and I still miss them, but as Christians, they’re in a better place than I am.” He paused, snapped his mouth shut, and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry; that came out wrong. Being here with you now is wonderful.”
Louise and her mother smiled at him.
“That’s okay, Elliott,” Mrs. Demchuck said, patting his arm as she spoke. “I don’t think our small home in the country could in any way compare to the golden gates of heaven.”
John quirked up one corner of his mouth and nodded. Immediately, Elliott relaxed, feeling better about his poor choice of wording.
Elliott cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, like so many other people, in order to cut back on expenses my parents had canceled the house insurance. I was only twenty years old and had just entered university. When they died I had to quit school. First, I couldn’t find a job to support myself while I continued my schooling. Also, with our dad gone, my brother Ike needed a partner for the barbershop. So, I left school and started working with him. Since I had nowhere to stay and the house was gone, and since I’m obviously single and don’t need a lot of room, we converted the storage area in the attic of the barbershop to living quarters for me. We made it into a one-bedroom suite, which suited my needs, as long as I didn’t mind sharing my living room with the supplies.”
His cup had long since been empty, but Elliott swirled the last few, cold drops around in the bottom and then drank them. “Ike is a few years older than I am, and he’s married and has a family to support. Business for the barbershop continued to drop off, and then a couple of months ago the bank foreclosed on Ike’s house. Since he needed a place to stay, he and his wife and their two children moved into the suite with me. As you can guess, it became very crowded very fast, with three adults and two children living in a one-bedroom suite above the barbershop.”
They all nodded.
“We can only imagine,” Mrs. Demchuck mumbled.
“By then things were so bad, we were forced to admit that the shop couldn’t support all of us. Ike wasn’t going to kick me out or dissolve the partnership, but then I received an answer to prayer. A letter came from an old friend, saying that if I was interested he could give me a job in a logging camp in British Columbia. He said the work would be hard, but. . .” Elliott paused to grin weakly and shrugged his shoulders. “He said that the wages were good. For now, any steady work would be good, regardless of the amount. So I wrote him back to tell him I was on my way. I’d already sold most of my furniture. I gave what was left to Ike, packed everything I owned in two suitcases, and left.”
He could see their eyes widen at the thought that he could carry everything in the world he held valuable. Even he had struggled with it when it came time for him to pack. Once he’d laid everything out on the bed, he couldn’t believe that everything he owned, except for a couple of pieces of furniture and a few other small items, could fit into two suitcases. As it was, he had to sell his watch in order to have enough money to pay for the bus and train tickets.
With the promise of a job, he’d considered the opportunity a new start, even though he had mixed feelings about moving away from the only place he’d ever known to live in parts unknown. In a way, he felt like one of the three little pigs out to seek his fortune. He had hoped that in the end he would liken to the little pig whose house was made of bricks.
“I bought my ticket for the bus to Ottawa, where I planned to buy a train ticket to Vancouver. The plans were that once I arrived in Vancouver, I was to contact a friend of Edward’s, who would in turn contact Edward up at the logging camp, and then Edward would come and get me. But, on my way from the bus depot to the train station, a gang of men attacked me and robbed me, leaving me with nothing except the clothes on my back.”
Louise gasped, and her mother covered her mouth with her hands. “That’s horrible! Were you hurt?”
He rested his fingers on his neck. It didn’t take much imagination to still feel the cold steel of the knife blade pressed to his throat. Fortunately, the tender spots and bruises from the beating they had given him were now healed, although his left arm still hurt when he moved it a certain way. “I wasn’t badly hurt, no. But I had to decide if I should go back with nothing, knowing that Ike could barely support his own family, never mind having an extra mouth to feed. I prayed about it, and rather than take the food out of the mouths of my brother’s children, I decided to carry on. And here I am. Apparently, the Lord does provide our needs, just as I was taught in Sunday school.”
Silence hovered over the table and John spoke first. “That’s quite a story, Elliott.”
“Actually, my story is not much different than many of the men I’ve met along the way. Traveling like this is quite lonely. When you have time to talk to someone else in the same situation, there’s an instant bond. I’ve always found it easy to talk to people, and this last week has been no exception. I’ve spoken to many men who needed the hope that you can only have with Jesus Christ in your heart. I only pray that my words have had a lasting impression on some of those men. Unfortunately, I’ll never know, because I’ll never see a single one of them again.”
He only meant to glance up quickly, but his attention became glued to Louise. Her eyes opened wide and she appeared to be staring at a blank spot on th
e wall behind her father. Her eyes became strangely glassy, then she swiped her hand across them before turning to him. “We’ve felt that same way when we’ve given food or clothing to the men who pass through Pineridge. A few will listen openly to what we try to give as a message of hope, but most of them only listen to be polite because we’re giving them something. We’ll never know which of those we’ve spoken to will ever receive the message of hope and eternal salvation.”
Elliott opened his mouth, about to say he understood perfectly, but a long whistle sounded in the background.
Mrs. Demchuck rose quickly. “Goodness! How the time has flown! You’d better get outside, because the train will be through in a few minutes and you have to get that inspection done quickly. We’ll have a quick lunch when you’re done. We don’t want to be late for church.”
John turned toward him. “We should try to make it across the tracks before the train arrives. We have to get the speedster out of the toolhouse.”
Elliott rose, wondering if he should have been trying to help John stand. He hated to see the man struggle, but he didn’t want to continuously offer help when none was required. He wanted to allow John to retain as much dignity as possible in a difficult situation. Instead, he thought about the work involved in pushing the speedster out of the toolhouse and lifting it onto the tracks. He could still feel yesterday’s efforts in his back.
“I must say that speedster is a strange contraption, but it seems quite efficient for its purpose.”
“Yes. But as you no doubt found the hard way, it’s meant to seat only one person.”
Elliott nodded. He’d barely managed to stay on the unit, and the two of them had jostled for position, both of them being quite uncomfortable for the entire time it took to travel down the tracks to do the inspection. He’d also seen the larger jigger in the toolhouse, which would have been more appropriate for more than one person. However, John had told him that it took four able-bodied men to put the jigger on the tracks every day, implying those four men were accustomed to hard work. One look at the huge jigger told him it was not a task for a man with one leg in a cast and another man whose heaviest lifting job until then consisted of occasionally lifting boxes of shampoo.
By the time they were ready to move the speedster, the train had already passed. As Elliott pulled the unit out of the toolhouse and struggled to line it up on the tracks properly, he thought about how difficult the next few hours would be.
It wasn’t the track inspection he was thinking of. The track inspection was a new experience, even if it did mean a rather uncomfortable journey on the speedster. However, compared to riding the boxcars as he had been, trying to maneuver around John on a unit that was really meant for one couldn’t compare. On the bright side, as different as it was from what he was used to doing, he found the experience rather interesting.
As for attending church with the Demchucks, he very much anticipated going. He tried to think of what their service would be like and couldn’t. He’d always attended the same church at home, a grand old stone building with polished oak pews and ornate stained glass windows. He couldn’t imagine a church service being conducted in the small wooden building where the entire structure could have fit into his own church’s Sunday school room.
Regardless of the setting, the purpose of getting together was to worship God with other believers, and that was exactly what he planned to do. While trying to imagine the order of the service, he wondered if Louise would be playing the organ. Part of him hoped she would, because he wanted to hear her play, but part of him didn’t. He didn’t want to participate with her from across the room, no matter how small he knew it would be. He wanted to worship God with her at his side.
Suddenly, the reason for his apprehension about leaving hit him with the force of a tornado.
The reason he didn’t want to leave was because he didn’t want to say good-bye to Louise.
Eight
Louise stood at the window, watching her father and Elliott start off down the track on the speedster.
“It was good of him to stay one more day, wasn’t it?” her mother said from behind her.
“He’ll get to the coast faster with a ticket, even leaving one day later,” Louise muttered, continuing to stare down the track, even though the men had disappeared from sight.
“Did you tell him he doesn’t need to know the address, just Pineridge?”
Louise spun around so quickly her skirt billowed around her knees. “Mama!”
Her mother didn’t even have the grace to blush. Fortunately, she didn’t comment further.
“I think we should do the dishes and make lunch; then I’ll change into my good dress.” Without needing instructions, Louise pushed the plates to the side, took the basin down from its hook on the wall, carried it to the cookstove, and filled it with warm water.
“For lunch, we’re going to use the rest of yesterday’s roast beef for sandwiches. The bread should be ready to come out of the oven in a few minutes. I was also thinking we might make some donuts for dessert.”
Louise nearly dropped the basin of water on the floor. “Dessert? At lunchtime? And donuts? Before church? Doesn’t that take too long?”
This time, it gave Louise great satisfaction to see her mother’s cheeks darken.
“Hush, Girl. We’ll have time if we hurry. You carry that water, and I’ll go get the flour and sugar out of the cellar.”
Louise chatted very little with her mother as they worked to complete their tasks. The long periods of silence allowed her to think. She could tell her mother liked Elliott. She couldn’t help but like him, too. However, Louise suspected there was more to her mother’s words than had been said aloud. She deemed this was her mother’s unstated approval to keep in contact with him.
Aside from Mr. Farley’s son Johnathan and William McSorbin, one of the local farmer’s sons, there were no other young men in Pineridge. The only times she had opportunity to meet other young men her age was when their family traveled to Winnipeg every month and stayed at the homes of friends or relatives in the city.
So far, she had not met anyone specifically to her liking beyond a simple friendship. However, at nearly twenty years of age, it was time for her to start thinking of her future and getting married. Louise would have liked to take the time to see if Elliott could have been that special man God had chosen for her, but she would never know. Later that day, he would be gone and living over a thousand miles away.
Just as she finished frying the last donut, she heard the squeal of metal wheels on the track in front of the house.
“They’re back, Mama!”
“Quickly, Louise. Go change your dress now, and I’ll finish putting the donuts on a plate.”
Obediently, Louise ran up the stairs and quickly selected her favorite dress and, along with it, a hat with lace bows that her mother had made to match her dress. She picked up the hand mirror from atop her dresser, appraised herself quickly, adjusted one of the bows, returned the hat to the dresser until it was time to go, and ran back downstairs.
Since the men had not yet come inside the house, Louise slipped her apron back on to protect her good dress and poured the coffee into the cups already on the table.
Behind her, the door closed with a bang. “Wow. Something smells great!”
“Mama made donuts.”
Elliott’s eyebrows raised, and one hand settled on his stomach. “Homemade donuts? Wow.”
Louise smiled. “You’ve never had homemade donuts?”
“Never.”
“Mama makes the best donuts in Pineridge.” She beamed.
“Hush, Louise. You can make them just as well as I can.”
Across the table, Elliott remained standing while her papa inched his way toward his chair and slowly began to lower himself, leaning on the crutches for support with one hand and steadying himself with his other palm on the tabletop. “I must be getting old. I’m so tired, and we haven’t even had lunch.”
&nbs
p; Without warning, the crutches slipped on the linoleum. Her father’s eyes widened as his unsupported weight on the edge of the table caused it to shudder, and suddenly, as his side of the table started to go down, the other end started to go up.
In her mind, Louise pictured all their dishes and their lunch, hot coffee and all, flying through the air, and her father crashing to the floor. She sucked in a deep breath to scream, but before a sound came out, Elliott pushed all his weight on his corner of the table to steady it. With the table held firm, her father regained his balance, half leaning and half hanging onto the edge of the table.
The dishes clattered and settled. Some dribbles of coffee ran over the surface of the table, but the cups all remained upright.
Her father dropped himself into the chair and covered his face with his hands. “I’m sorry, Anna. You can’t believe how difficult this is.”
Her mother turned away and busily tucked the sandwiches back into good order. “Hush, John. I know it’s hard. The nurse told me when we left you for the night that little mishaps would happen, and she was right. It will take time to become accustomed to moving around on crutches, plus she said your balance will be off. Now, everybody, let’s eat. We don’t want to be late for church.”
This time, Elliott prayed over the food, and because of the late hour, they ate more quickly than at breakfast.
“Thank you for a wonderful lunch, Mrs. Demchuck.”
“Hush, Elliott. I haven’t done all this by myself. Louise has done more than her share. Louise is a very good cook, isn’t she?”
Louise stiffened in her chair. “Mama!” she hissed quietly, then quickly turned to force a toothy smile at Elliott.
He blinked twice and stared back. “Yes, she certainly is. I’ve never in my life eaten so well as these last two days.”
Thankfully, instead of saying more, her mother rose. “If you’ll excuse me, I must change my dress before church. John, I’ve left a clean shirt for you by the washbasin, and Elliott, I’ve taken a few tucks in one of John’s shirts, so you can also have something to wear, although I’m afraid your own trousers will have to do.”