Northwest Passages Page 13

  Eventually they turned off the main road on to a dispirited track that wound southwards. The houses—although Eliza could hardly think of them as such—grew more sparse, and some struck her as odd, although they were far enough away that she could not say precisely why. As each one came into view she hoped Peter would announce that they were home, but the houses rose and then fell behind in turn as the oxen plodded on. Just as she was beginning to think that their journey was going to continue forever, Peter coaxed the team of oxen from their straight line towards a small house—what Eliza thought of as one of the “odd ones”—and she felt her spirits lift slightly. This, then, was their home, and she watched with some eagerness as they drew closer. When Peter stopped the cart she sat gazing at the building, her expression puzzled; then she turned to him, eyes wide, trying to take in what she was seeing.

  “It’s made of dirt!”

  Peter, who had jumped down from the cart, looked up at her. “Sod,” he corrected. “It’s made of sod. They’re called soddies. They’re what folk build when they don’t have enough money to buy lumber.”

  “But. . . . ” She tried to find words. “This is our house?” she said faintly. “Made of dirt?”

  “Our house?” Peter looked at her for a moment, puzzled, then laughed. “No! Our house is a little piece on. I just thought we’d stop and pick up a few things while we were here. This was the Olesons’ place; Oleson said I could take what I needed.”

  A wave of tiredness swept over Eliza, and suddenly she felt like crying. Nothing seemed to make sense in this land; everything was changed, all the markers and boundaries she had known all her life swept away in a place where twenty miles was considered no distance and houses were made of dirt and they could help themselves to another’s possessions. There were so many things she wanted to say, so many questions; but all she said was “Why?”

  “Why?” Peter looked puzzled, and Eliza had to stop herself from shouting at him.

  “Why can we take what we want?”

  “Oh.” Peter scratched his head. “Oleson cleared out, went back to Sweden after his wife died. Couldn’t stand being alone, he said, though I don’t think he was cut out for this kind of life. Didn’t know what he was getting himself into. He was having a rough time of it before his wife died. If she’d lived then he might have made a go of it, with her and all—she were the strong one, I reckon—but after what happened . . . well, he just sort of gave up, and soon as spring came, and the roads were passable, he up and left. Said I could take what I wanted.”

  “What happened to her—to Mrs. Oleson?”

  Peter paused and looked at her, as if weighing his answer. “It was in winter,” he said finally. “You’d not think, to look at it now, what the winter can be like here. The snow comes, and it’s like a curtain comes down, and you can’t see a hand in front of your face, it’s that fierce.”

  They walked towards the house, and Peter gestured towards a small wooden outbuilding some thirty yards away. “They had a cow, and some chickens, in the barn there; they had enough wood for that, but not for the house. Oleson used to make a sort of joke of it, that they lived in a soddie but the cow had a proper house.” He paused. “Don’t know what happened, exactly, but I reckon that Mrs. Oleson went out to the barn, and got lost in the storm. There was a fierce one, the day she died. I was glad enough to stay snug inside, myself.”

  Eliza stared in disbelief. “But . . . but it’s no more than a few steps! How could someone get lost?”

  Peter shrugged. “You’ll see, come winter,” he said, and though his tone was resolutely normal, as though he were discussing something of no more moment than the likelihood of another sunny day, Eliza felt a chill strike her. “The wind comes up, and it’s as if the snow was a living thing, trying to beat you down. I told Oleson he should put a line up between the house and the barn, as a guide, and he said he would, but he never got round to it. Near as I can figure, his wife went out and got turned round by the wind and the snow. She wouldn’t have realised until she’d walked far enough to know she’d missed the barn, and then she would have turned herself round and tried to follow her footprints back, but . . . well, they’d have been filled in already, and she’d have been good as blind in all that snow, just wandering, hoping to stumble across the house. Oleson found her next day, half-a-mile away, frozen to death.”

  Eliza stared, eyes wide, mouth open to frame words that she could not say. What kind of land is this that you’ve brought me to? she wanted to scream. How can anyone live here, in dirt and snow, and freeze to death in sight of . . .

  Her thoughts broke off. In sight of what? In all the land around there was nothing to be seen save the dirt house and the tiny barn, and a few straggling trees in the distance that would afford no shelter, no warmth, no aid. It would be a simple matter to freeze to death here, she thought, within steps of safety.

  Some of what she was thinking must have been visible in her face, for Peter said soothingly, “Don’t you fret, it won’t happen. I’ll string a line between our house and the barn, nearer to winter; long as you keep hold of that you’ll be right as rain.” He glanced up at the sky, to where the sun was gently dipping towards the horizon. “Best get what we want, and then we’ll be off. I expect you could be doing with a cup of tea after your trip, make you feel better.”

  She looked at him for a moment, and then laughter rose up, unbidden, at the suggestion that a cup of tea would be sufficient to restore her. She saw Peter smile, and then as the laughter continued to spill out of her she saw his face change into something wary, almost frightened, and she wondered for a moment what he could be frightened of, before she realised that it was her; or rather her laughter, which had a cracked, brittle sound even to her own ears. That look sobered her in an instant. She forced herself to stop and draw a few ragged breaths while the echo of her laughter was caught by the wind and whirled away to dance across the prairie.

  “I’m sorry, Peter.” She did not know precisely what she was sorry for, but the words needed to be said, to erase that look from his face. “I’m just tired, is all.” From some half-remembered place inside her she conjured up the ghost of a smile. “A cup of tea,” she said carefully, not fully trusting herself, “would be lovely.”

  He watched her for a moment, thoughtfully, and nodded. “Right then. Best hurry along, in that case.”

  Eliza stood for a moment, drawing another deep breath. A sound behind her made her turn sharply, and her eyes swept the landscape. There was no one, nothing, except the wind, sighing over the bright grass, and surely it was only her imagination which had conjured her name out of the sound, as if someone had called her. She shivered once, then turned and followed Peter into the dimness of the house.

  Peter was proud of the fact that he could afford to build a house of wood during his first year, and Eliza had, at first, been reassured by it. The thought of living in a house made of dirt had appalled her; it was, she felt, something that she could simply not have borne. When she followed Peter into the Oleson house she had felt like an animal creeping into a burrow, and had stood uncertainly near the door, her eyes sweeping around the interior, dim despite the blazing sunshine outside. They had retrieved a few items—some cloth from which Eliza could make curtains; a few kitchen utensils; oddments of clothing left behind—the residue of a life begun in hope, and ended in . . . but Eliza did not want to think of that.

  Her days settled into a routine that was not unfamiliar to her from her past life; what she could not accustom herself to was the intense loneliness of it. Peter was gone for most of the day, breaking more land with the oxen, tending the fields, maintaining the firebreak he had erected away from the house—“Just in case,” he had tried to reassure her—and Eliza was busy around the house; there was so much to do, and no other pair of hands to do it. There were two cows in the barn—one had been the Olesons’, Peter explained—and chickens, and a half-wild cat which stayed sleek on mice and rats but was rarely seen. Eliza had tried to coa
x it into the house, but the cat had glared at her with feral eyes and scorned her attempts at friendship. There was the house to tend, and the vegetable garden to hoe and plant and weed, water to be drawn and carried and wood to be chopped and carried and stacked, and always something to cook, or clean, or mend, or make. She did not mind the hard work—she was accustomed to that—but she could not rid herself of an ache, a hunger for the company of someone or something. Even a dog would have been some comfort, but a dog was not a necessity, not yet, and in this land anything that was not a necessity was relegated to some future day. Even the sight of another house on the horizon would have been enough, she told herself, to provide reassurance that she was not completely alone, unprotected; but no such reassurance was forthcoming.

  She increasingly found herself stopping in the middle of what she was doing and listening, straining for the sound of something, anything, which would prove that she was not alone. It was not long before she thought she heard someone calling her name, as on the first day at the Olesons’; but it was the wind, she told herself, which never seemed to end, never rested. She could see it before she felt it, watch the grasses and the crops blowing before the gust swept over her, and if she was outside she would fight an urge to drop to the ground and try to dig her way in, like an animal seeking the safety of its den.

  More and more she tried not to spend much time outside. The cry of the wind, and the sight of the wide sea of land stretching endlessly away, frightened her, and she kept her head down as much as possible, concentrating on the ground immediately beneath her feet, looking neither to left nor right. If she did not look up she could not see how alone she was.

  Their closest neighbours lived two miles away, the house out of sight behind a fold of hill. Eliza walked over one day, not long after arriving, desperate for the sight of another person, another house, but she came away disappointed. Mrs. Reilly, a hearty, red-faced matron, was glad enough to see her, but was largely preoccupied with her five children, who ranged in age from a girl of about ten to a babe in arms of indeterminate sex who seemed to cry incessantly. The older children were scarcely less noisy, and the change from the silence of her own house made Eliza want to clap her hands to her ears. As it was, she emerged with a violent headache and a vague dull pain.

  She started the weary walk back to her house, but before she was halfway there she thought of the Olesons’ soddie. The house was still unoccupied, and Eliza had a sudden urge to see it again, justifying her curiosity with the excuse that there might well be more items which would be of use to her and Peter. She turned her footsteps in the direction of the abandoned house, which looked no less forlorn than the first time she had seen it when finally it came into view, alone on the prairie. Yet as she drew nearer Eliza realised that it seemed less of an intrusion on the land than their own home, of which Peter was so proud. The soddie was built from the land, the soil itself. It might even have grown up there, springing from the earth like the grass which surrounded it: part of the landscape, not an imposition upon it.

  When she entered the soddie, Eliza was struck by how cool it was. Their own house she found stifling, with the sun beating relentlessly upon the thin roof and walls; but the soddie was deliciously refreshing, a welcome respite from the heat. She ran a hand over one of the walls, feeling the roughness. The dirt was dark and wholesome; life-giving, she thought, not like the thin, dry dust against which she waged a ceaseless war in her own home.

  She glanced around the interior of the soddie, noting how compact it was, how well ordered. A few pieces of rough-made furniture remained, and a large trunk was pushed against one wall, where it had obviously served as a makeshift table. Eliza gazed at it, idly wondering why it had been left behind. Perhaps it contained his wife’s things, for which Mr. Oleson presumably had no need after she died. What had they been like, this couple who now existed only as names? Peter had said that Mrs. Oleson had been the strong one of the pair, better suited to the life here than her husband. Would she and Mrs. Oleson have been friends? The answer darted through her mind, sharp and unwelcome, that they would not have been, and she brushed it away, wondering where Mr. Oleson was now. Home, she supposed, wherever that was. She felt a sudden ache at the thought. A picture arose before her, so vivid that she could almost touch and hear and smell it, of her home in England, and she closed her eyes to block out the vision and prevent the tears which she could feel rising.

  She felt, rather than heard, a movement behind her, and whirled round, visions of home forgotten. She was facing the door, which she had left open. Framed in the glare of the sun was a figure: a woman, Eliza thought, although it was difficult to be sure. She squinted against the sunlight, trying to make out details, but the contrast between the dim interior of the soddie and the brightness outside made it impossible to register anything beyond a general impression of someone tall and pale, silent and watchful. She uttered a tremulous “Who is it? Who’s there?” but there was no answer. Then, before Eliza could frame some faltering words of explanation or apology, there was nothing.

  Eliza darted to the door and swept her gaze over the land in front of her. There was no one in sight, no sign that anyone was, or had been, there: no cart or wagon or horse, nothing to break the vastness except the small barn which stood thirty or so yards off to her left, impossible to reach in the short time it had taken her to leave the soddie.

  Of course, if the woman had gone round the side of the house, she could even now be waiting, out of sight, for Eliza to follow. But that was ridiculous. What reason could anyone have for such an action? She had imagined the figure, that was all; the darkness within and the light without and her own loneliness had tricked her into thinking she had seen someone where there was no one. Her decision not to walk around the house was not inspired by fear, she told herself; she needed to start back to their house, as Peter would be back soon, and there were chores to do.

  She did not look back at the soddie, not even when the sound of her name was borne to her on the wind. There could not be anyone there.

  She asked Peter, later that evening, what the Olesons had been like; particularly Mrs. Oleson. Peter scratched his head ruminatively.

  “Quiet,” he said finally. “Hard workers. Leastways, she was. They both had fair hair, like all them Swedes seem to, and she were tall; as tall as him, with rough hands, like a farmhand’s, on account of her working in the fields alongside her husband. Oh, not that he didn’t do his fair share; but she were the strong one, I reckon. I saw a bit of them, what with being so close and all, and I got the feeling that coming here were her idea more’n it was his; he’d have been content to stay where they were, but she wanted something else.” He stopped, and shook his head. “That’s why it struck so hard, when she died. If she hadn’t, well, then, they’d have made a go of it; she’d have seen to that. But the heart just seemed to go out of him after. Terrible thing, it was. He came staggering up to the house, more dead than alive, soon as the storm were over and he could get out. Don’t know how he made it; he were half-froze when he got here, and it were all I could do to get the story from him. Well, soon as I heard it I knew what must have happened, and so did he, but he kept saying she were out there, waiting for him, that he could hear her calling. I never heard anything except the wind, but . . . well, I didn’t have the heart to say that, not with him standing there, with a look on his face like he was in hell itself. The way I reckon it, he’d been in hell for a fair time, and this put the cap on it. Soon as spring came he couldn’t get away fast enough. Left most of his things behind; said I could have what I wanted, that maybe they’d bring us better luck than he’d had.”

  It was a long speech for Peter, who generally came back from his day’s work so tired that he had scant energy left to waste on words, and Eliza had listened in horrified fascination. She could picture the scene: Peter, alone in the house, thankful that the storm had ended, and then the pounding at the door; Oleson’s story, gasped out between sobbing breaths; the search for t
he missing woman, which could only end in one way; the broken man, wanting nothing but to leave this hard land which had cost him so dear.

  But he got to leave, came the thought, unbidden, to Eliza’s mind; he was lucky, because he got to go home again. Her hand flew to her mouth, as if she had spoken the words aloud, and Peter stared at her, puzzled. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I was . . . I was just thinking what a terrible thing to happen.”

  “Aye.” Peter sighed. “It’s a hard land, no denying that. I don’t blame Oleson for leaving. She might have, though.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Eliza, more sharply than she intended.

  Peter shrugged. “I mean that she weren’t the kind to back down from a challenge. If it’d been the other way round—if anything had happened to her husband—I’d wager she’d have stayed on, by herself, made a go out of it, just to show she couldn’t be beat. A strong woman—just like the one I’ve got, eh, lass?” He grinned at her. “A good, strong wife; that’s what a man needs here. When I asked you to marry me and you said yes straight off, like, knowing what it meant, without having to think about it: well, I knew then and there I’d made the right choice.”

  “What would you have done if I’d not given you an answer when you asked?” said Eliza in a low voice.

  “Why, I’d have said ‘It’s no good, my girl, I can’t take a wife who doesn’t know her own mind off to Canada with me!’” He laughed. “But you’ve always known your own mind, no fear of that.” He yawned and stretched. “Best think about getting off to bed. You too, lass; you look a bit peaky. You’re not sickening for something, are you, or . . . or anything else?”

  “No,” she replied, “I’m just a bit tired, is all. What else could there be?”