Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  It’s my turn to wait.

  “I admired her more than any woman I ever met. There wasn’t a petty bone in her body.” He looks off at the darkened window. “Perhaps I was a little in love with her. But not ... Neither of us. I can’t imagine us ever having been ... We didn’t touch. Though I used to brush her hair. So dark it was almost black. As the summer wore on, the sun brought out chestnut lights in it. I fanned it over my forearm, hair so thick I felt the weight of it on my arm. I brushed and brushed. A hundred strokes each night. At first she did it herself but one night it was a hopeless tangle. She asked me to help. After that ...” He shrugs. “But I’m certain nothing more could ever have crossed her mind.”

  I look at him and he looks back, studiously bland. “Dad ...”

  Suddenly he smiles. It’s a real smile, eyes and mouth joined by the furrows dug deep in his cheeks. “Sometimes, brushing her hair, I’d picture kissing her on the cheek. She had a creamy smooth skin. The back of my hand might brush her shoulder. But that was all. I felt such a deep admiration for her. I could never have imagined her doing anything”—he hesitates, looking for a word—“smutty.”

  “Oh Dad.”

  “I didn’t imagine. Not really.” He closes his eyes.

  I wait. The skin stretched over the domes of his eyes flutters. Eventually I say quietly, “Enough for today?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  ENOUGH FOR DAD perhaps, but I’m wide awake. Might as well go to bed and read. I stall out on the little square of floor at the foot of the stairs. I’m seeing it the way it was, big crocks and tins in front of me, not stairs. A narrow counter. A cook stove with cream enamel and little black lines. A box of logs. This used to be all kitchen. And Mum cooked everything on the wood stove.

  ‘Dirty old thing,’ she said the day Dad and John and a couple of men from the neighbouring ranches carried it out of the house. It’s probably still in the back of the machine shed, holding up buckets of rusty nails and bolts.

  ‘Dirty old thing.’ I hear Mum’s voice as if she’s standing next to me and I know suddenly she didn’t want to get rid of it at all. It must have been the only way to make room for the stairs.

  Why isn’t it enough, what they gave me? Even if Dad was Charlotte. Even if most of Mum’s stories were lies.

  But it isn’t. Mum’s dead. I can’t hurt her now. And Dad? It was Mum I wasn’t supposed to hurt. Dad was strong. I was supposed to be strong with Dad so we could protect Mum. I shake my head. Where did that come from? Mum was no fragile flower. She was a farm wife, perfectly capable of chopping the head off a favourite old hen.

  I turn to the pantry. Mum’s domain the way the barn was Dad’s. I take a deep breath but it only smells of dust and vinegar.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “SO WHAT WAS it like, this missionary van you drove?”

  “Chassis like a tractor. About as well-sprung. Big curvy fenders. That was it for style. She was a boxy old thing, dark grey, ‘Sunday School Mission of the Anglican Church’ painted on the side in big white letters. We called her Hilary, St. Hilary really, but she was known by a few other names in the towns. The Booze Wagon. The Black Maria.”

  Morning sun’s slanting in through the living room windows. I push aside the oatmeal bowls. He picks up his mug and sips, eyes resting on my face, lines branching from the corners. He’s deciding something.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  The smile reaches his lips. “All right. One day we drove down 3rd Street in Lethbridge. Neighbourhoods by the railway stations, they were often rough. Hotels and bars everywhere. Of course they didn’t have signs out, the bars. Prohibition, you know.” I nod. “It was almost dark and we were lost. Eventually we asked the way. I forget where we were trying to get to. People listening to the man who gave us directions were nudging each other, pointing at the van.

  “The road we were sent on led out of town onto a narrow spit of land, coulees to either side, Belly River far below. Up ahead there were big frame houses, all lit up. They were painted pink and lime green and yellow. As we got closer you could hear music. It was coming through the open doors. All the windows had lace curtains. There were people in the street, milling about. Men whistled, called out to us when they saw the van. Women came out on the porches, some dressed in velvet and satin finery, some not dressed in much at all.

  “Dorothy was driving. She stared straight ahead, going as fast as she could. Just past the houses the road ended. Land dropped away into the darkness. We had to turn around, come back through it all, men stepping out in front of us, laughing. She kept us moving, Dorothy, but only just. I was trying not to gawk. The men were just drunken men but the music that drifted from the houses—piano mostly—from the grandest house, I’d swear it was Schubert. It was like a dream. After all the dusty thrown-together little towns, the colours and lights and music. The fancy clothes.

  “Once we were clear Dorothy pulled over, her face white. ‘You’d better drive.’

  “‘Are you all right?’

  “‘It’s degradation of the worst sort. Those women. Girls. Ruined. And where are the police? It’s a disgrace. The law is nothing but a laughing stock. You saw. The authorities turn a blind eye. It’s evil. And they laugh. They laughed at us.’

  “I tried not to stare at her. She was usually so imperturbable. Suddenly I understood what she was saying, what we’d seen.

  “‘I thought it was different,’ she said. ‘I thought it was different here.’

  “We changed places. I got directions from a sober-looking elderly man. Dorothy just stared ahead.

  “At last I asked her, ‘Aren’t men the same the world over?’

  “She gave an angry shrug, as close to tears as I ever saw her. Truth was, red light districts went up right alongside the banks and sawmills and hotels when a town was settled. But you’d never have guessed from the papers that places like The Point—that’s what it was called—existed in Western Canada. Once in a great while you might find a reference to ‘the social evil’ but that was about it.”

  “Weren’t you shocked?”

  “I suppose. A little.”

  He sounds so blasé. “You never were interested in judging, were you?”

  “Never saw the point.”

  “Whereas Mum.”

  “Ah. Your mother was very interested in Judgment.”

  I wait but he doesn’t say anything more. Eventually I say, “You’re going to tell me about, about crossing over one of these days, aren’t you?”

  “‘Crossing over’? I think you’d better make us more tea. A wraith like me, it might be too much.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Perhaps. Just a little. But I should warn you, it’s not very dramatic.”

  “I like hearing about your life before. It helps.”

  “And I like telling you.

  “By late September we’d covered close on three thousand miles. If we hadn’t driven up every single track to every last settler’s house in the southern half of those two dioceses, we’d come awfully close. Dorothy had signed up any number of prospects for the Sunday School by post, and left each child with some nugget of Christian learning. She was aglow with the success of the mission. The Bishop of Calgary congratulated us. There was a special service to welcome us back.

  “I don’t suppose it came as much of a surprise to Dorothy when I told her I’d decided to stay on in Canada. The Women’s Auxiliary would be happy enough not to have to pay my fare back. The Bishop of Calgary assured me the Bishop of Saskatoon would be only too happy to enrol me in The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, a high-minded outfit he had started to entice British women to come to Western Canada. He was looking for women who were willing to do more than they were paid to do, quote, ‘for the sake of Church and Empire.’ They were to go out to the prairie schools to teach the children of the New Canadians, many of whom couldn’t even speak English. But the women who came had a way of evaporating before they reached the schools. In England, after t
he war, there were many more women than men, but that wasn’t the case here. I could have had my pick of husbands.”

  “But you didn’t want a husband?”

  “Shall we have some fresh tea?”

  “Do you have anything without caffeine? I don’t know how you get to sleep at night.”

  “There’s a jar of dried mint leaves in the pantry.”

  Waiting for the kettle to boil, I’m thinking about all the different worlds sliding past each other. It’s not that they’re invisible. More like everyone’s agreeing not to notice, until some joker gives the Sunday School bus directions to the wrong world.

  “So you didn’t want to get married.”

  “And I didn’t become a schoolteacher. Dorothy and I spent a week at the Bishop’s when we got back to Saskatoon. I spent most of it in the garage. In between spirited discussions of the van’s assorted mechanical travails I mentioned I needed a job. The owner of the garage’s brother was looking for a secretary/book-keeper down in Regina. He was having trouble finding a reliable man so he took a chance on me. It paid a lot better than The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf.

  “My boss was building up a fleet of trucks, hauling grain to the elevators. Mostly he needed someone to keep the books straight, keep track of the trucks and the drivers. He was nice enough. His wife kept an eagle eye on him. She viewed me with the deepest suspicion. Convinced I’d scandalize her any moment. I was a great disappointment. Young men courted me all right but I wasn’t interested.” He shrugs. “After a while I was known to be stuck up. Thought too much of myself for the local boys.

  “It was a penny-pinching, respectable little place, Regina. Started out as a village called Pile of Bones. From the piles of buffalo bones. But that name wasn’t grand enough. By the time I was there it was about as far from the Wild West as you could get. It had become the Mounties’ headquarters for the whole Northwest Territories. As a result the flesh-pits and saloons had all moved to Moose Jaw, an hour’s train ride away. Moose Jaw was what was known in those days as a wide open town. Railway ran cheap day excursions there every Saturday. At work I overheard the drivers talking about it but they clammed up when they saw me. I remembered the music, the houses all lit up, down in Lethbridge. I wanted to go to Moose Jaw, see for myself. I had a couple of friends but I could never talk them into it and I couldn’t quite bring myself to go alone.

  “I’d walk for miles across the prairies, Sundays after church.” He shakes his head. “I wasn’t much more of a believer then than I am now but I didn’t have the nerve to skip it. The war, the Sunday School van, Dorothy, head thrown back, laughing on whatever godforsaken track we were stranded on, all that seemed further and further away.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “The next summer. She came out with a different driver. Milli-cent Jones. I didn’t much enjoy it”—he glances at me—“seeing those two drive off together. But I needed a job that paid. Time went by. Here I was in Canada. A land of opportunities. At work I’d listen to the farmers complain, the way farmers do, and I’d wish that I had the chance to do what they were doing. But the only way a woman could get homestead land was if she were a widow with dependent children. And I can tell you the bureaucrats in the Department of the Interior scrutinized every one of those applications. There’d been a move before the war to extend the Dominion Land Act to single women but it didn’t go anywhere. I haunted the second-hand bookshop. Read whatever I could find about farming on the prairies. One Saturday afternoon the man who ran it took a book from under the counter. ‘Thought this might interest you.’”

  Dad nods at the bookshelf that makes a half wall between the front door and the living room. “Top left. Would you mind? Wheat and Woman.”

  A plump, faded hardback, dust jacket long gone. Well-thumbed pages open to a folded sheet of paper.

  “It was by a woman farming her own land right there in Saskatchewan. A single woman. Georgina Binnie-Clark. I bought the book, rushed home and read it. At first I was disappointed. She was a well-bred Englishwoman with a small private income. An income that allowed her to borrow money to buy the farm. Five thousand pounds, she paid for land a man could have got for nine hundred and seventy pounds under the homestead act. Nobody was ever going to lend me money to buy a farm. Not that she had an easy time of it, strapped by those mortgage payments in a way the men weren’t. She’d bought the best cropland she could find but it was dirty. Wild oats and French weed.

  “Sorry. This probably isn’t terribly interesting. The thing is, the farm she bought was near Fort Qu’Appelle. She claimed she was writing the book to encourage other women who dreamed of farming. I wrote to her that Sunday. Wrote and rewrote my letter so many times I still remember it.” He glances at me.

  “Go on.”

  Dear Miss Binnie-Clark,

  I came upon your book, Wheat and Woman, yesterday and devoured it at a sitting. I am a single woman currently working in Regina in the office of Burbidge’s Grain Transport. I drove an ambulance in the closing weeks of the war. From Suffolk originally, I came into the country in 1921, intending to stay for a summer, and never left.

  I very much admire all that you have accomplished and would like to meet you and to see your farm. I have a week’s vacation coming up in mid-July. If it would be convenient, might I pay a visit?

  Yours sincerely,

  Charlotte Hunt

  “This was her reply.”

  He passes me the folded sheet.

  Dear Miss Hunt,

  If you can drive an ambulance I expect you can drive an automobile, a contraption I view with disdain, but a necessity nonetheless.

  Might I request that you drive my new old motor car from Regina when you come to visit? It is possible another woman interested in farming will be visiting at the same time. If so, I’m afraid you’ll have to bunk up. Fortunately my sister Ethel is away so her room is available for guests.

  In other words, please do come. I look forward to meeting you.

  I look across at Dad. He’s smiling. I still can’t quite grasp it, how long he was a woman.

  “I’ll tell you all about that visit, but let’s have lunch then take a walk before the wind picks up.”

  Somebody’s running a saw inside the old machine shed.

  “That’ll be Manfred,” Dad says. “He said he’d make some more of those benches. I’ll just let him know you’ll be here for supper again.”

  “I can cook us something. It feels funny ...”

  Dad’s shaking his head. “Victor told me yesterday he’s slow cooking a shoulder of lamb with rosemary and garlic. I can promise you, you don’t want to miss it.”

  I open my mouth but Dad’s already pushed open the door of the shed. The noise inside stops. What’s my problem, anyway? That all those years he was just putting up with Mum’s cooking? He could have done some of it himself. Only Mum wouldn’t have liked that. She had very clear ideas about men’s work and women’s work. Jesus. It’s still the weirdest part of this whole weird story. The bit I can’t make sense of.

  “It was a long dusty drive. The car was a beast. When I pulled in at last someone came around the side of the house to greet me, a tall woman in a big floppy hat and britches, a bevy of cats at her ankles. She took off her hat and I was startled to see her hair was shot with silver.

  “‘Hello, hello.’ She’d a warm, firm voice, the voice of someone used to talking to horses. There were horses all around, some grazing, some by the water-trough, windmill turning steadily overhead. The breeze kept the heat off but it was still a pleasure to step into the shade of a couple of apple trees next to the house. The house itself felt small and hot.

  “As soon as I put my bag on the bed she asked, would I rather rest or would I like to ride out on the land? I sensed a lot hung on my answer so I replied without hesitation that I should like to ride, not mentioning that it was ten years since I’d been on a horse.

  “She must have seen my hesitation when I was faced with mounting
the horse she led out. Or perhaps it was my skirts.

  “‘You can ride?’

  “I grimaced. ‘Side saddle, I’m afraid.’

  “She threw her head back and laughed. ‘Anyone who can stay on a horse side-saddle will have no trouble astride. As ever, custom confers the tougher task on the supposedly gentler sex.’ She measured me with her eye. ‘I’ve a pair of britches should fit you.’

  “As easy as that I was wearing britches for the first time in my life.

  “She held my stirrup, showed me how to grasp the horn of the saddle.

  “It was true, it was much easier. We rode and I drank in the prairie with a woman I’d never met but instantly admired. She discoursed as if I were on the cusp of owning my own spread and must be spared unnecessary expense and labour.

  “I listened but mainly I soaked it in, a woman riding her land, assessing, planning, doing. Doing, my God. The impatience of my whole life boiled up in me. This, this is what I want, I thought, and in that moment, in that company, believed with all my heart it could be mine. Would be mine.

  “I learned over supper that she was in the habit of inviting women to come to the farm so that they might learn the skills necessary to farming without the condescension of men.

  “I immediately pledged all future vacations. Though honesty compelled me to tell her it was unlikely I would ever acquire land of my own.

  “That set her off on the Homesteads for Women movement, of which, it transpired, she had been a prime mover. Its supporters hadn’t only been women. In 1913 they’d got up a petition to extend the free lands provision to women. It was signed by 11,000 voters, meaning men. The men had their own motives of course. If single women were allowed to homestead they thought more families with daughters would settle the West. It was a real issue, the shortage of women in Western Canada.

  “Meanwhile in England ‘The Superfluous Woman Question’ was a matter of public debate. By the early twenties there were 800,000 more women than men in the old country. But would they extend homesteading rights to women? No. The government’s response was that for a man to homestead successfully he needed a wife. If they extended the act to single women it would only serve to encourage women’s independence.