Northwest Passages Page 12

  Peter’s own brown eyes, however, were fixed on the wagon. A cheerful agent, his ruddy complexion and clear eyes a testimony to the healthful Canadian air, his accent strikingly at odds with what Eliza was used to, was busy handing out leaflets to all who were interested. Peter stood, listening intently in a way that he had never managed in the schoolroom, where he had always seemed constrained, hemmed in, his clear eyes and strong body wanting to be out of doors, working, doing. He even overcame his habit of silence enough to ask the occasional question, referring often to the papers clutched in his hand. Eventually Eliza, bored, moved away towards the tea tent, where Peter found her a few minutes later.

  “Look at this!” he exclaimed, holding up one of the leaflets. “Free Land!” it cried, and “Cash Bonuses!” Peter’s eyes gleamed with an excitement Eliza had never before seen. “It says here”—he fumbled open the slender leaflet with his large, rough farmer’s hands and found the passage he wanted—“that the government of Canada will give 160 acres of land to any man as wants to claim it!” His face filled with wonder. “Can you imagine that, Eliza? One hundred and sixty acres of land, free for the taking?” He shook his head. “And they say it’s a grand land for growing; all you need is seed and a bit of water, and any man can have as fine a crop of wheat as you can imagine, and ready markets for it too. Look.” He shuffled through the assortment of papers until he found the one he wanted, and held it out to Eliza, who hesitated a moment before stretching out one of her small, delicate-looking hands—of which she was inordinately proud—to take it. Emblazoned across the front were the words “The Last Best West”, and a hand-tinted image of a field of wheat, stretching out endlessly under a clear blue sky until both were halted by the white border around the picture.

  She thought of that image now as she gazed out at the reality before her. It had looked so safe, so placid, neatly contained by the leaflet’s cover: manageable, knowable. Eliza had been here for three months, but already she realised how wrong she had been. It had been presented to her as a Promised Land, but she saw now that it was more akin to Egypt under the Pharaohs, a place where fire and hail, drought and insects could wipe out the work of a summer, a year, a lifetime in an instant. She would never know this land, never feel content here the way Peter did. He did not feel the pressure of the sky bearing down upon him until he wanted to scream; he saw only the clear blue immensity of it, felt the life-giving sun. He did not feel as if he were drowning when he gazed out across the land, lost in its immensity; he only realised the opportunity it afforded, a rare chance for a man to make a new life. He did not hear the ever-present wind calling his name; he only raised his face to it, welcoming its cooling breath.

  And he never saw Mrs. Oleson.

  Eliza turned sharply, suddenly, in a gesture that had become so habitual she scarcely noticed it anymore, and looked back at the house which was her entire world. It stood alone and unprotected, its unweathered wood harsh against the backdrop of prairie. It might have fallen from the sky, dropped by some god’s careless, uncaring child who had tired of a plaything. For a moment a vision came to her of the low stone farmhouse in which she had spent her whole life; in which the lives of generations of her family had been spent, so that every room, every piece of furniture, even the stones themselves were as familiar to her as her own name, were infused—or so it seemed to her now—with the unseen presences of many people, of births and deaths, the commonplace, the everyday, the normal. Here, in this alien landscape, there was nothing familiar, no landmarks, nothing to guide her, nowhere to hide.

  She shivered, feeling exposed, naked. Nothing had prepared her for this. She had spent most of the long sea voyage in the tiny cabin which she had shared with three other girls—strangers, all—and had seldom ventured up on deck. The first time she had done so the vastness of the ocean had made her hang back from the railings, afraid that she would fall into those endless depths and be lost forever. A fragment of a poem that Mr. Jenkins had read to them came, unbidden, to her mind:

  Alone, alone, all, all alone,

  Alone on a wide wide sea!

  And never a saint took pity on

  My soul in agony.

  She had almost hoped that she would be seasick, so that she would have an excuse to stay safely in her cabin, a reason for avoiding the deck; but her body was as robust as always, and she had not felt the slightest twinge of sickness. She knew that this was one of the reasons Peter had asked her to marry him; he had said as much, the evening of the country fair, when he had walked her home. It was their first chance to be alone and, while he had still said nothing about her bonnet, she had wondered if he would hold her hand, or at least take her arm when they skirted the field where Mr. Miller’s bull glared out at the world from angry eyes and pawed the ground in fierce jabs. But Peter had merely said, “You aren’t afraid of anything, are you, Eliza?” and she had tossed her head and said, “Of course not. Why?”

  Peter stopped and faced her. “Because if I do this thing, I’ll be needing a wife who isn’t afraid. I’ll be needing a wife who’s strong, who won’t turn away from a hard job; because it will be hard, I don’t want to lie to you, but we’d be starting a new life, a better life than we could ever have here, in a place where there’s room to breathe, room to grow, room for any man with a fire in his belly and a good strong wife by his side.”

  Eliza caught her breath. She tried to make some sense of what he had just said, but one fact stood out clear and firm, like lightning ripping through a dark sky.

  “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Yes.”

  Eliza opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. She had thought, from the moment Peter had first asked her to walk out with him, that this day would come, but she had pictured it as something entirely different. He would not go down on bended knee—that, she suspected, only happened in novels—but it would be in her parents’ front room, Peter dressed in his best, at some vague point in the far future, and Peter would stammer a little, as befitted a man asking a woman to marry him and unsure of her answer, even though Eliza knew that she would say yes, with one younger sister already married and the prospect of spinsterhood looming ever more strongly before her. She had never pictured it happening so soon, though, in a darkening lane, Peter’s face glowing with a passion which—the thought came and went quickly, but was there nonetheless—had more to do with the wagon and the stranger than with her.

  Her mind had now put his words into some kind of sense, and she realised with a shock the full implications of what he had said. He was asking her to marry him, yes, but he was also asking her to go with him to this vast new land, to leave behind everything and everyone she knew and trust herself to a place about which she knew nothing, to join him in a grand project about which they had both been ignorant a few hours before, and which, she could see, was now consuming him like a flame. An answering flame of resentment flared up within her for a moment; an anger against this place which had, in so short a time, inspired in him an ardour which she had imagined would be reserved for her.

  Peter was looking at her anxiously, and Eliza realised that she needed to answer. There was no time for prevarication, for coyness, for protestations of how sudden this was, even if she had been inclined to indulge in such luxuries. She knew, as clearly as if Peter had shouted it to the heavens, that he was bent on doing this thing, and that he would only ask her once; if she refused him now, or hesitated, then all would be lost, for he would see that she was not a woman who could be trusted to be strong, unhesitating, fearless. She allowed herself one quick moment of calculation, a survey of her bleak prospects should she demur; then she met his gaze firmly, strongly, and said “I will marry you,” and hoped that the flame that burned inside him would one day warm her too.

  Now, almost two years later, she stood under the pitiless eye of the prairie sun against which there was no defence, and which had turned her face, once so fair and fresh, first red and then brown. They had not married immediatel
y; Peter had no home of his own to which to take her, and they had agreed, after due consideration and much discussion, that it would be best if they were married shortly before Peter left for Canada. He would go out alone to that new land. He did not expect Eliza to come until he had a home for her, and she had not argued, although when she said goodbye to him—her husband of three days—she had wondered, for a brief moment, if he had secretly hoped that she would argue with him, insist on going, on taking her place beside him, even though neither had any real idea of where that place would be or what it would look like. It had been too late, then, even had he or Eliza wanted it, and the last sight she had of him was his head looking at her from out the window of the train as it pulled away, and his arm waving, before his train vanished.

  There began a curious, almost dream-like year in which Eliza felt as if she were two people living the same existence, each aware of the other but having little in common. She lived as she always had, performing her chores around the house and farm, walking to the village, sharing a room with her younger sister Jane, and there were times when she could almost feel that what had happened between her and Peter had been little more than a dream, a fancy spun out of her imagination. Then she would catch sight of the thin gold ring on her finger, and realise with a shock that she was now a married woman, her husband—the word sounded odd, almost nonsensical, like a child’s made-up assortment of letters—far from her in a strange land. His occasional letters were a reminder of him, and she scanned them eagerly when they came, paying scant heed to the details of his new life, his new home—soon to be her home too—looking instead for anything more personal, more private, something of the man himself; but in this quest she was more often than not disappointed, and she would fold each new letter, once it had been read and remarked upon by her family, and place it with the others in the bottom of the large chest which she was slowly filling with clothes and linens and her few personal possessions, realising as she did so that when the chest was filled it would mark the end of all she had known of life until that point, and the beginning of another life which she was not even sure would be her own.

  Occasionally, as she passed through her day, she would notice some small detail to which she had never really paid heed before; something which she had accepted as being a part of her life that would never change, and which she now realised would continue, unseen, without her. It seemed impossible; but she would look at the chestnut trees in bloom, their flowers creamy against the rich green leaves, or the bluebells carpeting the ground, or the redstarts and nightingales nesting in the hedgerows, and think for a moment “I shall not see this again,” and the enormity of what she was about to do would well up inside her. Each detail she noticed marked the passage of time, every one reminding her inexorably that she had started down a road from which she could not turn back, and she would go back to the house and look at how full the chest now was, how little room there was in it, and realise how few were the days remaining to her in her old life.

  A year after Peter departed, Eliza made her own voyage, by train to Liverpool to board the Numidian, accompanied by her father, who was nervous of the city in a way that Eliza would never have suspected, and who stood twisting a large white handkerchief in his hands as he waved goodbye to her from the dockside. Then the long trip across the endless ocean, and the first blessed sight of land, of Halifax, swelling up out of the water until it filled her sight. Another train journey, longer than she had thought possible, to Montreal and then Toronto, and then through country which at first inspired Eliza with memories of home: there were towns and villages, farms and fields, if not quite of the shape and design to which she was accustomed then at least familiar, known, knowable. Then the train had swept north, around the great inland seas of which she had read, and slowly, inexorably, the traces of the world she had known at home, and half-glimpsed in this new land, vanished, and her only link with it was the iron rail under the wheels which bore her onward.

  She gained her first glimpse of the prairie when they left Winnipeg, and she pressed her face to the glass of the carriage, first wiping away the dust which streaked the windows and coated everything else with a fine layer of grit. She had been unprepared for the vastness of it; another ocean, with an occasional town or farm doing nothing to make it seem any less implacable than the sea she had crossed. She began to have some dim sense of what she had taken on, and pulled back from the window with a small stifled gasp.

  Her destination was, she knew, a place called Moose Jaw. The name had seemed impossibly foreign, even faintly exotic, in a way that Halifax, Montreal, Toronto had not when she read of it in the Wiltshire countryside in a letter from Peter; now it sounded almost sinister, hinting at something on which she dared not let her thoughts dwell. As the train drew in to the dusty station Eliza peered out the window into the harsh sun, looking for Peter, and for a moment did not see him. Her heart fluttered in something like panic. “Let him be here, please, let him be here,” she heard herself say in a low voice that almost did not tremble; and then she saw him, standing beside a curious-looking cart drawn by a pair of massive, ungainly, dirty brown oxen, and she was off the train and into his arms, heedless of the people watching and Peter’s faint air of embarrassment, burying her face in his shirt so that she could block out, if only for a moment, the vast blankness which surrounded them and that seemed to be searching for a foothold within her, the relentless wind which she could feel pushing at her, the dry, dusty air which filled her nostrils.

  They would not stop in the town, which seemed bustling and purposeful. Peter was anxious to be away, explaining that he wanted to arrive home before dark. “But it’s only noon!” said Eliza, puzzled; “how far away is our home? Can’t we walk from there to town?”

  Peter stared at her. “It’s not far,” he said slowly, after a pause. “Not here, at any rate.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not here’?” Eliza said.

  “Well——” There was another pause. “Things are different here, bigger,” said Peter at last. “You have to realise that. Places aren’t so close together. I told you, in my letters, that we weren’t in the town. You knew that.”

  “Yes.” He had said that their house was outside town; not far, he had added, but she realised now that he had never been more precise than that, and she had pictured the town, and their farm a short distance away, within an easy walk certainly, the town, or some of it, visible from where she was to live, full of the promise of life and noise and people. Memories of the land she had just passed through—of that wide ocean of grass and hills stretching away forever, unbroken, untouched—made the bright day seem chill. “How far?” she asked in a low voice.

  “About twenty miles,” replied Peter. She stood motionless, silent, taking in those three bare words. “I tried to get land closer to town,” said Peter defensively, “but it was all gone, and what was left wasn’t worth having. It’s a fine spot, where we are; there’s water, and a few trees, and I’ll plant more, soon as I have a chance, around the house, make a wind-break, and some shade. It’ll be the prettiest, snuggest spot you ever saw, Eliza, I promise.”

  He was almost cajoling, now, as if she were a child who had turned away, disappointed, from a gift that was not to her liking, and Eliza felt ashamed. He had worked so hard—she could see that in his hands, his face, the lines of his body, harder than they had been—and she knew that she had to say something to take away the hurt from his voice, his eyes. She said faintly, “Twenty miles; it’s not so very far, is it?”

  Peter smiled, relieved. “Course it’s not. That’s my girl.” He hugged her clumsily, and Eliza hoped that he would say something else, add words of comfort, anything to chase away the thoughts which were prowling the corners of her mind. But he did not, and as he turned away and busied himself with her cases she realised dully that there was nothing he could say. She watched as her entire life was loaded into the back of the ungainly wagon, then took a deep breath and climbed up beside Peter, to start
the final, and longest, stage of her journey.

  The town was soon a distant blur behind them. Eliza kept turning to watch it, straining her eyes until it vanished altogether, and they were alone on the prairie. She tried to make some note of where they had come from and where they were going, but there were no signposts or markers—nothing except the road itself, a dusty, hard-packed, rutted ribbon, and the occasional homestead with small, huddled houses, a few outbuildings, and perhaps a straggling row of young trees, full of the promise of future shade and shelter but for the moment a reminder of how recently this old land had been settled. The high clouds overhead did little to dispel the glare of the sun, and all looked harsh, brassy beneath its rays, with not even the green and gold of the prairie grasses, the dark brown earth, or the occasional flowers—what looked to her like buttercups and pale crocuses—able to soften this first impression, and utterly unable to provide the familiarity which she suddenly craved.