by Ruth Glover
For in her mind a plan was shaping up: She would indeed go to Tierney. But first of all she would go to Pearly, because Pearly lived in or near a town that was on the railway—Hanover. With such a devious circuit, surely Lucian would be stymied, unable to follow, should he care to. And he would care to. His anger was too hot, his shame at her treatment of him too great, to be taken without retaliation.
Then out into the night she went, slipping past the desk when the clerk was absent from it. She was not far from the station; she remembered the way well and trudged toward it through the falling snow and the sweeping wind. Here she bought a ticket for Hanover, set her bags at her feet, and slumped on a bench in a corner of the waiting room among others who came and went.
Hours later, on the train, she relaxed a bit, though she studied everyone who entered the car, before settling back. It wasn’t a great distance to the first stop, which was Hanover—towns were few and far apart on the prairie, but important, and rarely passed without a stop—to let someone off, let someone on, unload supplies, or take on cans of cream.
It was mid-morning; the storm was over, and the day was crisply cold and brilliantly beautiful, with a myriad scintillating diamonds displayed everywhere one looked. The town seemed snowed in and was quiet and peaceful in the storm’s aftermath.
No one else got off the train, and Anne breathed a great sigh of relief. Carrying her bags, she went into the station house, up to the window, and spoke to the man there who was openly watching her. Anne, lovely Anne, drew attention wherever she went. For once she regretted it, knowing that, if he were to be quizzed, he would remember her, perhaps vividly.
She spoke quietly, respectfully . . . still, he’d remember. “Can you tell me where the Schmidts live? The Franz Schmidts?”
“Sure,” the man said promptly, eyebrows raised—after all, the Schmidts already had one domestic. “Out thata way,” and he pointed, “about three or four miles.”
“The road—would it be open?” Anne was prepared to walk a dozen miles, if necessary.
“Not yet. Someone is sure to come in from that way sooner or later. Sit down and keep warm, Miss, if you wish, and we’ll see what develops.”
Again Anne sat and waited, her baggage at her feet. Fortunately she had eaten her supper last night at the Madeleine before Lucian had made his appearance, but she longed for a good cuppa.
Finally, “Miss, Miss,” the same man called, and beckoned. “There’s a team coming now from that direction. Seems to be—yes, it is—Schmidt’s neighbor.”
Anne rose indecisively to her feet, looking out the window at the rig slowly plowing its way toward the nearby general store.
“Want I should talk to him for you?” the man asked kindly, and Anne nodded her grateful appreciation.
Coming back in, stamping the snow from his feet, the stationmaster said, “Duncan—that’s his name—has agreed to let you ride out with him. He’ll be leaving in a half hour or so, probably less. Just needs to get the mail, drop off a cream can, do a little shopping. He’ll give a wave when he’s ready. Keep your eyes peeled. . . .”
Pearly was putting the last touches on a dried apple strudel; Gussie Schmidt sat nearby, comfortably rocking, having taught Pearly the rudiments of rich dough and confident it would turn out well, as did most everything under the quick fingers and alert mind of Pearly Chapel. The little London starveling had learned a lot from the elderly German woman. She had learned a lot from Frankie, the grandson. Learned a lot without many words being said; Frankie was not a garrulous man. But he was expressive in stolid, persistent ways, and Pearly was not slow in reading his eyes, his mind, his heart.
“There,” she said, popping the strudel into the oven, “it’ll be ready for dinner,” and turned with interest toward a window, having heard the sound of sleigh bells.
“It’s Mr. Duncan,” she informed Gussie, who had paused in her sock knitting to raise curious eyes; visitors were rare in winter. “Frankie’s comin’ from the barn to meet him.”
Gussie rose from her chair at the side of the stove, standing with Pearly at the window. So intense was the cold that only a small spot in the center of the pane was clear of the thick riming of frost that made it difficult to peer through, except for one person at a time.
“Look,” Pearly said, relinquishing the viewing angle.
“Dat’s Duncan,” Gussie said. “And zomebody’s mit him—a voman, seems.” She gave the spot to the more bright-eyed Pearly and resumed her place at the side of the kitchen range. Oh, it was good, all right, to have the quick legs and strong arms of a domestic. And not just any domestic—Pearly Chapel of the happy heart, the willing spirit, and the vibrant Christian witness.
“Yes, and she’s gettin’ down and comin’ in.”
Pearly let the curtain fall back into place and hurried to the door, opening it to the bundled female form that turned out to be—Anne Fraser.
“Annie! Annie! I can’t believe it! Come in, come in.”
Pearly pulled Anne into the house, and in spite of her bulky clothing, wrapped her in loving arms, laying her warm cheek alongside the icy one, blending tear with tear until, at last, they stepped back from each other, laughing and weeping at the same time.
“It’s Annie, Oma! Annie, who came across the ocean with me. Annie, this is Gussie, Frankie’s grandmother—Oma.”
Noting the surprised look on Anne’s face, Pearly laughed and explained, “I call her Oma, same as Frankie does . . . she asked me to. Oh, Annie, it’s good to have a grandmother. You know—I told you all about it. And here comes Frankie—”
Pearly began the task of unwinding Anne from the scarf around her face and neck and removing her heavy coat and snowy galoshes.
Frankie had bidden the neighbor good-bye and followed the figure of Anne into the house. Anne! Anne, who had refused to come with him to Hanover. Anne, who had sniveled at the very idea of riding across the prairie with him. Anne!
Frank Schmidt stepped into the warm, cozy kitchen of his grandparents’ home, with its gay curtains at the windows, its coffeepot bubbling on the range, the aroma of apple strudel sweet in the air, and with the precious form of Pearly Chapel in the midst of it all, and could only thank God that Anne Fraser had crept her way out of his life and future.
And so he too was able to greet the newcomer with a welcoming, if cold, hand, and a tentative smile. Anne, shamefaced only for a moment, recalled all the good things Pearly had said in her letters, and immediately was released to feel at home, accepted, even loved, perhaps for Pearly’s sake.
Nothing would do but that Anne should sit up near the stove alongside the grandmother’s rocking chair and accept a good cup of hot tea, Pearly knowing it alone would warm the depths of her friend’s being, seeping into her very heart, if such were possible.
“Soon,” Pearly promised proudly to her friend’s blissful face, “there’ll be fresh strudel. It’s Oma’s recipe, but I made it.”
Following the noon dinner hour and the doing up of the dishes, in which both girls shared, talking lightly the while, Gussie kindly encouraged Pearly to take her friend to her room, to do the serious talking that was necessary to get to the root of this business! For it was most unusual for anyone to brave the winter weather for a social visit alone; there had to be something serious behind it all. Gussie dozed beside the fire, content with her life and the wonderful turn of events a good God had brought her way in the thin figure and winsome face of Pearly Chapel.
At the table that night, as soon as supper was over, and with cups of coffee and tea in their hands, Pearly, with Anne’s permission, made the necessary explanation to the family. She had already told—long ago, in the quiet, comfortable moments when she and the family sat of an evening around the stove, eyelids heavy, shoulders drooping, bodies wonderfully relaxed following a hard day’s work—all she knew about her friends.
Now she had but to take up the tale: “That man that treated her so bad? That Lucian? He’s showed up again! In Saskatoon! Righ
t in the hotel dinin’ room! An’ in front of everybody, he threatened her. Yes, he’s after her again! Of course she had to git away! I told you how he nearly kilt her before, and that was why she decided to come to Canada. Oh, he’s evil, that ’un. Looks like a civil gentleman, acts like the worst of blackguards. He’s a scurvy scoundrel—”
Poor Pearly; her vocabulary simply wasn’t enough to express her feelings. Collecting herself with some effort, she remembered—a little belatedly, it’s true—her teaching on compassion, and added, rather lamely, “I just hate the sin, you understand, but I . . . I—” Pearly paused a moment, and plunged on virtuously with what she thought to be right and proper, “but I love the sinner.”
Pearly looked quickly around the table, fearful that her tirade of condemnation had exceeded her attempt at justification. As indeed it had.
“Well,” she said, drawing a deep breath and being honest at last, “I’m trying to love the sinner.”
Gussie, “Oma,” patted the heaving shoulder. Frankie reached a sympathetic hand toward her. Franz, “Opa,” smiled tenderly. Only Anne was left with flaring nostrils and heightened color as she contemplated the knavery of the absent Lucian.
“Aye, it’s true,” she finally added in a strangled voice, “he came nigh to killin’ me. And the fear he has put in me is even worse. It’s a cruel thing, is fear. I dinna know why I’m here, except that I had to get awa’, and my first thought was to go to Tierney, who helped me before, in Binkiebrae. Weel, I hae nae family here, ye ken. An’ e’en if I did,” she added bitterly, “they’re afeard o’ the MacDermotts.”
Many clucks of sympathy, several clearings of throats, a surreptitious wiping of Oma Gussie’s eyes.
“You’re velcome to stay here, liebchen,” Frank Schmidt, the patriarch of the family said and meant it. “You’ll be safe here.”
“Thank you! Oh, thank you! But I feel like I want to be wi’ Tierney. She’s havin’ a hard time herself. Perhaps Pearly has told you that the lady where she works—Mrs. Ketchum—died several months ago, and Tierney isna supposed to be there withoot another woman. And yet she feels such sympathy for Mr. Ketchum, and willna leave until someone cooms along to take her place, maybe a relative from Bliss. You know Bliss?”
Anne meant the town and district of Bliss, of course, but, looking around the loving circle, felt that this family, in the truer sense of the word, did indeed know the meaning of bliss.
Being assured that they all knew Bliss, a town north of here, in the bush, Anne continued.
“It’ll ease the situation there, for Tierney, if I can be wi’ her now. An’ surely Lucian won’t go way oot there. Think?”
“Surely not,” Pearly “thought.”
“But,” Pearly continued, “how is she to get there?” Pearly, wise Pearly, did nothing but look around the room, and at Frankie in particular, with her pansy/purple eyes and, as ever, the heart of young Frankie turned over.
“I’ll take her! Whattya say, Opa?” Frankie looked expectantly toward his grandfather.
“Shall I take her? There’s not that much work to do here, being winter and all, and Pearly will be here to help. Right, Pearly?” Frankie, wise Frankie, looked at Pearly trustingly, and her heart turned over.
“Right. I can help outside, as well as in,” she said eagerly. “I can help with the chickens—I feed ’em anyway—and I can even help with the milkin.’” Pearly had learned much more than baking since she had been on the homestead.
Mr. Schmidt looked properly persuaded. “Da veather iss goot now,” he said sagely, “and I tink iss gonna be fine for a few days, dough ve neffer can tell . . .”
“It’ll just take two days, Opa. A day over and a day back. Whattya say?”
Frankie’s strong, square face was confident. His broad shoulders straightened; he loved a challenge in his own quiet way. His heart, once testy with this Anne Fraser, had, in the space of a few minutes, come full circle, and he was ready to defend her with his dying breath.
Would he be called upon to give it?
The wind was muted, but still loose snow skirmished over hard-packed drifts, curiously resembling the breath that curled from the mouths of the team as Anne and young Frank left the homestead and headed out across the prairie.
As the cutter passed through Hanover, they could see children on their way to school, romping and playing, running up the frozen banks and sliding down with great glee and much shrieking, breath also curling in white mists around their tightly and brightly capped heads.
“It’s a glorious day,” the usually taciturn Frankie commented, having learned a new appreciation for his wintry surroundings from an ever-awed Pearly. Pearly thought Hanover, in winter, was almost as fine as in autumn, when the grain covered the fields in countless stalks of bound sheaves soon to become wagonloads of golden grain. Such bounty! Forgotten the long days of summer and the burning of a sun that came early, stayed late, and poured out its heat tirelessly, only occasionally routed by dark skies and enough rain to ensure a good crop for the hardworking people of the prairie lands. It had been a good year. Thank God! And thank Him they did, being, for the most part, God-fearing people, well aware of their puny ability and their heavy dependence on divine providence.
The parting from Pearly had been brief. Wrapped in their heavy outside garments, Anne and Frankie were too warm to linger in the house and too cold to linger on the step. Pearly had spent as much time fussing over Frankie’s scarf as Anne’s, and her farewell waves, if they but knew it—and perhaps they did—were as much for the man she saw every day as for the friend she hadn’t seen for the best part of a year. Frankie drove away feeling like a king in his royal carriage and flourished the reins as happily. Anne departed feeling a warmth of family closeness she hadn’t known . . . perhaps ever. That it was because of the Lord they loved and served, Anne recognized, and it made her own empty heart yearn for the same satisfaction and contentment.
“It worked out well, dinna it,” Anne offered tentatively, finally. “For Pearly to coom work for ye instead o’ me, I mean.”
The younger Frank Schmidt, called Frankie to differentiate from his grandfather, looked down on the fair face of Anne Fraser and counted himself blessed that usually it was the thin little face of Pearly Chapel beside him. Consequently his answer was generous.
“Yah. Yah, it has. Pearly was God’s choice for the Schmidt family. I—that is—everyone loves her.”
“I ken that; I can tell,” Anne said humbly, adding after a moment, “forgive me, Frankie, if ye will, for being such a . . . such a gowk. Please?”
Frankie slapped the broad backs of the team with the reins and his laugh soared out over the prairie, happy and content.
“It may just have been the best thing you could have done for me,” he said, pale eyes alight, “and, I hope, for Pearly. Of course I forgive you. I thank you!”
Well! Anne thought to herself, slightly taken aback by his enthusiasm for her bad behavior, he doesn’t have to be that happy about it!
The barriers between them, however, if they did indeed exist still, were broken, and the remainder of the day passed in harmony.
It was the northland at its best—shimmering in its beauty, snapping with cold at first, slowly growing milder as the day advanced, until Frankie was moved to say, “I feel the first hint of the coming spring in the air. Oh, it’s not yet a chinook or anything like that, but it’s definitely warming up. And it sure helps us get across this old prairie—not having to fight wind and weather, that is. We should be in Fielding by midafternoon. Then we’ll ask where the Ketchum farm is and be there by supper time. Whattya think of that, Annie?”
His use of “Annie” set the seal on their new friendship, and Anne’s heart, still feeling the faint touch of shame over her previous behavior, was finally absolved and cleared.
A sandwich at noon, as they drove, and a sip of milk from a bottle they had kept under wraps, and the miles slipped away almost happily. Anne was going to Tierney, and there she wo
uld be safe.
The proprietor of the general store in Fielding gave them clear directions to the Ketchum place. It wasn’t difficult; there was only the single track to follow out across the vast expanse of white, turning right at the tenth meridian road. Ten meridian roads laid out precisely—ten miles.
“You’ll pass the Brokaw place about two miles from here,” he said, “then nothing, at least on this road, until you get to Will’s. Say, you want land, young feller? I’m also a land agent, and there’s still plenty abeggin’ to be taken—”
Frankie proudly assured the man that he had a place of his own. “My Opa’s,” he said in an aside to Anne. “It’s to be mine. That’s why I stay and take care of the place, and of Opa and Oma.”
“Strange, your asking about the Ketchum place,” the man said thoughtfully to Frankie as Anne studied the candy counter and made a decision to take some licorice to small Buster. “Just finished directing another feller out there. But I guess he decided not to go. He went over to Swiger’s Stopping Place; guess he got himself accommodations there.”
“Come, Annie,” Frankie called. “Best we get on our way if we want to pull in for supper. I could eat a horse and chase the rider, myself.”
Annie laughed, admitted she would welcome a good meal, and followed Frankie back out to the cutter, where they crept back in among the cold quilts and blankets and shivered their way back onto the proper road out, once again, onto the broad prairie.
Jingling along through the otherwise silent landscape, they might as well have been on the moon, so remote were they, and so bleakly barren was the terrain. Thinking of the warm fire ahead and the warmer welcome, Frankie and Annie found their expectations rising, and their laughter rang out from time to time.
Eventually Anne took the opportunity to nap a little, her head bobbing in time with the horses’ gait and the slipping and sliding of the cutter’s runners on the road over which, it was apparent, only one or two other rigs had passed since the last snowstorm.