Читать книгу The Flying Years - Frederick Niven - Страница 6

Table of Contents

The odours of the new land, before they had sighted it, came out to meet them through a white mist over the sea, odours of robustiously scented forests. The steamer crawled on, calling and calling with her siren till the vapour was dazzlingly infiltrated with sunlight and then, by the sunlight, dissipated away—and there were rocky promontories glittering a welcome.

Further than Lower Canada, further than Upper Canada they were going because of friends in the country beyond, freends, indeed—which is to say, in the Scots sense, relatives. Had it not been for these the Munros would have been much in the condition of some of their fellow voyagers who had merely had their passage paid for them. Landing with scarcely a penny and bound chiefly for the neighbourhood of Toronto (that used to be called York when Angus’s mother was a girl), most of them with no word of English, nothing but the Gaelic, they were in anxious plight. By the charity of their compatriots in the land, given in such a way that the name for it was changed to hospitality, these went on to their journey’s end.

The Munros’ freends in the Red River Settlement—the Frasers—had sent them some financial assistance. In return for that Daniel, before taking up his own land, was to help Ian Fraser on his; and Angus, no doubt, would be working out the while for wages—or such was the suggested plan.

Of the Red River Settlement Mrs. Munro had some woeful stories. She would narrate how the first Highlanders that went there had been hardly used, ordered back by the Northwest Fur Company’s representatives, and might have been all homeless again had it not been for a Macleod—a smith—who made shot out of some chains, loaded it into an old cannon he found there, and defied those who would turn them back, with a handful of men at his side. Her husband had to remind her that that was a while back, in her grandmother’s day, and that the Settlement had vastly changed since then—that here was 1856 and not 1815.

They went by train (not by such wilderness waterways as those people of two generations back had gone, from Hudson’s Bay to Lake Winnipeg), by train to Minnesota, sleeping on the train, eating on the train, a basket of provisions with them for the journey. A young man walked through the coaches now and then with boxes of a crisp sort of biscuit new to them called crackers, and with fruit. Mrs. Munro, after one sampling of his peaches, would resolutely turn her eyes away on hearing him chant his seductive wares. So juicy were these peaches that she had to spread her handkerchief—her pocket-napkin—on her knees when eating them. Never had she known such lusciousness.

“Pea-ches! Or-an-ges!” came the young man’s cry, and her head would turn and she would stare hard out of the window.

“We have our basket of sufficient food,” said she, “and if I succumb to the temptation of these fruits, and this craving for them, we will have to spend all ere we come to journey’s end, whatever!”

Leaving the train at St. Cloud they went on by stage-coach, a four-horse coach, clip-clopping along in a rhythm that at times made the lids droop, sleepy, over eyes that would fain see all the way, clip-clopping and swaying through forests the heady odour of which excited young Angus, and across clearings where stumps smouldered, and by the side of lonely rushy lakes like dropped fragments of blue sky. Minnesota, the driver told Mrs. Munro, was a Sioux Indian word meaning “sky-reflecting water.” Each night they stopped at some rest-house by the wayside. Some of the men at these places Mrs. Munro thought the most fearsome she had ever seen, grim of visage and with revolvers at their belts in big holsters. But if ever she and one of them came face to face in a doorway it was always, “Pardon me, ma’am,” and hats off. And “Ma’am” it was at the tables when they passed her the cruets. They did not wear their armaments when eating, always, she noticed, before they came into the dining-room, as casually as they hung up their hats, handing to the proprietors of the places their ammunition belts with the pistols attached, as in some usage or courtesy of the country.

As she whispered to him her comments on the ways of this region, Daniel thought she was beginning to be eased of the sense of being far from home which clearly had shadowed her hitherto. But when they came to Abercrombie on the Red River and she discovered that there they had still further to go, aboard a boat, she came near to breaking down. Every roll of the train wheels, the drumming of the stage-coach horses’ hoofs, the thrashing of the big stern-wheel on the river boat, told her the same refrain—A far cry to Loch Brendan.

As for the Settlement: each of them on arrival promptly observed it in a different way, and in that difference you have all three measured and weighed. Mrs. Munro saw the houses as alien, they being built of logs. Munro saw them as not altogether strange, they being thatched; and Angus saw them as romantic, they being of log with thatch. The lack of a mountain-side on which to rest their eyes was dreadful to Mrs. Munro, to Mr. Munro odd, to Angus novel and exciting.

Their freends, the Frasers, welcomed them warmly. Ian Fraser, the father, was working out at the time with a wheelwright for wages, toward getting money instead of getting exchanges of goods for his produce. On the steamship International, which had brought them there, he found a job for Angus as deck-hand. Daniel, according to their agreement, began to work on the farm.

A happy family—Fraser and his wife, Hector, the son, about eleven then, Fiona, between five and six, and little Flora, age four, named after her mother. There was no impression of a cloud over life there as at Loch Brendan, but a sense of freedom to the point of wildness. With the family increasing they had added to the original house, and with a little contrivance there was room for the Munros.

Several times during the days that followed his arrival there, young Angus remembered how his father had spoken of a kingdom of the mind—Scotland, a kingdom of the mind. Surely it was so here, with the Gaelic round them, the burr of the Scots voices, and often the pipes playing about the place from one house to another. Yet looking back on those days later, there was no doubt in his mind at all that as he recalled and was aided by that phrase—a kingdom of the mind—his mother was haunted and vexed by her husband’s cry of To hell with Scotland! Not a word of that had they from her, but she had not forgotten it, and being of a superstitious turn it gnawed in her, first like a recurrent and then, as she did not rout it, like a chronic sickness. Indeed, she was not, as they used the word there, a well woman. It was all, for her, despite the Gaelic and the pipes, far from home.

For Angus one of the great pleasures in the change from Loch Brendan was in the food. One never had to say here, “If that’s my dinner I’ve had it!” They were not limited to potatoes and them, perhaps, none too good because of a wet season. Fine trout could be fished, and all round about they could shoot the prairie chickens, while venison was everybody’s. Hunters came in from the Great Plains with buffalo meat, and Mrs. Fraser taught Mrs. Munro both how to prepare it and to preserve it (as the French and Scots half-breed hunters had learnt from the Indians, beating in with it various berries) so that it would keep for months—for years, if need be, they said. When Ian was reading the Scriptures aloud one night and came to the words Shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, they meant to Angus the new land. He was not going to be one of those who make a god of the wame, but it was good to rise from the table satisfied.

In some ways the people were wilder than at home, in others more kind. A man was much more his brother’s keeper, if ever there was occasion for brotherly help. None asked servility but most practised courtesy. On Sunday there were church services—all in their braw clothes. You would see silks then, silk gowns, and below them the feet that peeped in and out were in moccasins as often as not, moccasins heavily beaded, that could be got in trade with the Indians for a twist of tobacco. Some folks in the Scots settlement had the blinds down all Sunday, but neither the Frasers nor the Munros believed in that.

“Keep the good light of God out on the Sabbath day? Na, na,” said Mrs. Fraser.

There was not much money in the place, though wages were higher than in the east. Almost all was done in trade—which is to say exchange or barter. It was towards getting money against the time when they would be taking up their own land, and building on it and living apart from the Frasers, that Angus had gone to work on the river boat—the International. A month or two later he was offered, and accepted, other work—on what they called the flat-boats—with a Captain Buchanan, from Ayrshire. It was not but an honorary or whimsical title. He had been a blue-water sailor and captained ships round the Horn and there he was, far inland, caught by some call of this great continent’s interior. In Minnesota there was wood and with the Red River settlers there was a scarcity of it, so there was a brisk trade in bringing timber from south of the line. The method of transport was to lash it together into a sort of boat in which a load of freight would be carried. On arrival at the settlements the freight was delivered to the consignees and then the boat taken apart and sold for building material. On the flat-boats, with Buchanan, Angus worked till the river froze.

In the winter there were dances, even those who did not dance at home in Scotland (such as some of Lowland birth, descendants of old Covenanting families) dancing out there. You would hear the fiddles going and from the doorways the voices of those who called the dances: First lady and first gentleman—balance; first lady and first gentleman—both hands; first couple down the line; and wildly went the fiddles. Second couple down the line; and merrily went the fiddles. All hands round—gaily they danced by Red River then. Strathspeys and reels, the Highland schottische and quadrilles they danced, wearing their tartans (that had been prohibited in Scotland in the ’45 but were still worn a hundred years later), and glancing to the door sometimes you would see the dark faces of Indians looking in, coveting the colours. There was a wild jig, the Red River Jig, a great favourite with the Métis—French half-breeds. And now and then some Indians would give their own dances, and when the drums beat and their feet thudded out the rhythms, the queerest thoughts and emotions would come to Angus. He could hardly put a name on it. It seemed he had heard these lilts, and danced to them, too, in a time forgotten that the sound of them set him struggling inwardly to remember—which was a feeling, thought he, too ridiculous to tell to any.

All the winter Mrs. Munro had been none too well, which was a regret to them all—for most people newly arrived found the air a tonic, had a fresh joy in life. She, on the contrary, seemed to lose hold of it. Daniel suspected that much of her trouble was mental. Surreptitiously she brooded, he believed.

“I think,” said he to her one day, “you have never forgotten, Kate, what I said when we were leaving——”

She interrupted him with a catch in her voice.

“What makes you think that?” she cried out. “I have never said.”

“It’s just a thought I have,” he replied. Today he might have called it telepathy. “I believe you brood upon it.”

“If the coronach had not begun right on the heels of your crying out so——” she said, admitting he was right in his surmise, but stopped there, left the rest in air.

They did not know Angus had entered, and he, hearing this, backed out, left them, much as he had retreated from them that last day at Brendan when he came on them side by side bowed to the window, peering along the slopes.

In the spring, after the ice had broken and was tinkling and crashing away down river, when the snow was off the plains and flowers were showing, Mr. Munro thought a jaunt or two might help his wife, put the colour in her lips again. So they went, all three, driving west to visit a further Scots settlement out on the prairies. The land was still wet from the thaw, the wheels drawing up mud as they revolved, and it fell in gobbets with a clapping sound, but there was nothing of the snell in the air. A fine fresh day it was to breathe. “This,” thought Daniel, “should do her good.”

Over a little rise (for rises there were, as they discovered on travelling, waves in that sea of grass) they came suddenly to a small lake of the kind called slough. It was not the usual ducks that clucked there but some birds, gray-blue and white, that rose, yammering. Sea-gulls here—and so far inland! Mrs. Munro put chin on chest to hide sudden tears, but her shoulders shook with sobbing.

“What is the matter?” her husband exclaimed, drawing rein. “Are you in pain, Kate? What has taken you?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

“But it must be something,” he insisted.

She looked up at him, biting on her lips and trying to stem the flow by pressing her eyelids closer. That was one of the last pictures Angus had of her—crying like a bairn. Here was a sad downfall for the woman who had talked of going proudly, but a far cry it was for her to home and the sea gulls weaving their silvery reflections in the waters of Loch Brendan. The life at Brendan had been hard—but it was home, and there was an end of it! She seemed like a little girl in grievous trouble.

“The gulls took me by surprise,” she said in a small voice.

No need to explain why the surprise of these birds caused her to sob. Her husband and son both knew the picture that would be in her mind. Daniel put an arm round her.

“If we made money enough we might take you back again,” said he. “It won’t be Loch Brendan, but somewhere in Scotland—in the old land.”

“No, no,” she said, “you should be angry with me, not kind to me. I’m a child and should be whipped!”

That night Angus dreamt that all the blinds were down at the windows and he was trying to raise them but they would not budge. In this dream he went from one to another, from room to room, and for all his trying not a blind could he raise.

The malady that carried her off would today be called pernicious anaemia. She had no appetite, and nothing that she forced herself to eat gave her sustenance. She was always tired, though she never complained of it.

Angus, as soon as the river was open again, only a few days after that drive, had gone back to the flat-boat work, and it was but on the third or fourth trip that he knew, as they sculled into the bank, that something was wrong. It was a boy with a fishing-rod—or a fishing-pole, as they used to say, a slender, sappy tree branch with line and hook pendant—who broke the news to him, the Fraser boy, Hector, tuft of hair sticking out of a hole in his hat. He dropped the fishing-pole as the flat-boat was sculled close to the bank and stared with wide eyes, no smile in response to Angus’s wave. Then he clapped hands to mouth, trumpet-fashion, and began to shout:

“You’re to come home at once! You’re—to—come—home—at—once! I’ve been watching for you yesterday and today, too!”

“Something wrong,” said Buchanan.

“Something wrong,” said Angus.

“You’re to come up at once.” shouted Hector excitedly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Angus as they pulled in and he made passes with a boat hook at their jetty.

“It’s your mother. You’re to come at once.”

“You go,” said Buchanan.

Angus leapt ashore and climbed the bank, Hector leaving his homemade fishing-rod lying there and hurrying after him. On the point of asking the boy for more detail Angus let the inquiries go. Hector seemed to be both youthfully elated over his task of herald and youthfully perturbed. The slapping of his bare feet and, anon, his panting, died away as Angus hurried to the house. At the door was Mrs. Fraser, head lowered, shading her eyes from the low blinding rays of the setting sun. She stepped back as he drew near.

“Go right in to her,” said she, with no greeting save that. “I’ve had Hector waiting for you since yesterday lest you came early.”

He did not ask why she was so anxious for his return. Her face told him. His mother, thought he, must be dying. The bedroom door was ajar, and as he stepped in, his father, sitting by the bed, looked up at him, his life’s great agony in his eyes. Standing at the bed-foot was the doctor, a commiserate man, pity in his bearing, distress. Mrs. Munro was in the article of death.

“She will tak’ nae nourishment,” the Scots physician’s voice came huskily. “If she could but have taken into her blood some nourishment ...” His voice dropped, and in a tone of sad complaint he ended, “but she will not assimilate.”

She seemed to be in a coma and yet, thought Angus, there was a recognition in her eyes through the new opacity that he could not but observe with piercing concern. It was as though the candle of her life guttered, flared—and sank. She drew a breath of content, or of restfulness, then another, desperately.

“Can ye lift me?” she asked in the merest whisper. “Can ye lift me that I could see the hills?”

Munro looked at his son, Angus looked at his father. To see the hills! They bent over her to do as she asked. As they raised her she had again knowledge of where she was, lost, apparently, these last moments.

“There are no hills,” she murmured. “I forgot I was here,” and tears came to her eyes.

It was then, as they laid her back, that her spirit, her shadow passed, tears in her eyes that she could not see the hills of home. Someone at a distance began an evening’s practice on the pipes. Perhaps she heard it and, slipping away toward unconsciousness, thought that she was back in Brendan and falling asleep there.

It had been their intention on arrival, after discussion of plans with the Frasers, to take up their own land that spring, but the death of Mrs. Munro caused that to be deferred. Daniel had no heart, as well they realized, to go on with that matter for some time. So, though Ian had not continued with the wheelwright, Daniel continued to work on the Fraser farm. There was enough for them both to do.

But Munro was never to take up land there, no more than six feet of it beside his wife. Only three months after Kate had gone her husband followed her. Just a year to the day from the day of their arrival he passed away after a stroke in the hot field where he was working.

The bearers, at his funeral, made up for the abstemiousness with which, in deference to her views, they had carried Kate kirkward. There were but four of these bearers, two to a side, and with them walked four others to relieve them from time to time. Seldom was a coffin taken in a cart and the Fraser home was some way from the church. There were oatcakes and whisky before the start, and when they carried him out all were rosy. Daniel was a big man, and sooner than usual Ian Fraser, master of the ceremonies, seeing the bearers were hunched to the handles, gave the cry:

“Relief!”

The two on each side who had been but keeping slow step took their places, and the four who fell out had their dram before all moved on again. A few hundred yards on there was again the chant:

“Relief!”

The bearers fell out, and had their dram, as did the mourners, halted behind, and on went the procession once more.

“Aye, he was a great man,” one remarked. “I believe he weighed twa hunner wi’ the breath o’ life in him; and with the kist weighing——”

“Wheesht!”

It did not matter to Angus, though. Even then there was that in him which developed in the years till the time came when he could hear what would have irked, angered, or hurt him as a lad and pay no heed.

“Relief!”

“No, no, I’ll have nae mair now till we get him bedded. For the credit of the corp I mauna stagger.”

“Wheesht!”

There was a great turnout, of Highland and Lowland, and when they met any French half-breeds upon the way these stood to one side and, uncovering, crossed themselves. Even some Indians, encountered riding into the settlement, reined in and sat by the road wrapped in their blankets, like men turned suddenly to painted effigies, with heads all bowed.

“Relief!”

There were two pipers ahead, at the kirk gate, and as the procession drew near they began to play. Angus felt he might have been spared that. To him death needed no pageantry, no music. He feared then that he was about to make a fool of himself, but there came into his mind, “We’ll go proudly,” and he took hold of himself and saw his father to rest like a man, then came away to a consciousness—temporarily muted, as a new wound is often accompanied, at first, by a stunning of the nerves—of being alone (father and mother taken from him within three months), which, many friends though he had, was never rightly to leave him all his days.

The first to speak to him was Captain Buchanan, for whom he had been working on the flat-boats. Buchanan was very drunk and when he was drunk he seemed to be aware of all the sadness of life. Never did Angus see him taciturn in liquor, only plaintive and fuddledly compassionate, never what they call greeting fou. He came with a lurch alongside of Angus, who was walking home with Ian Fraser, and said he, with a hiccup:

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. We have all got to come to it. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Aye. But what I want to say tae you is something practical.”

He flapped a hand in air before his eyes.

“Some other time maybe, whatever,” suggested Ian gently.

“You’re richt! This is not the moment,” said Buchanan. “I’ll come and see you the morn’s morn. I want to see you special.”

With a hiccup he dropped behind again. In silence Angus and Ian walked on, a faint murmur, a faint whisper of voices and shuffle of feet in the dusty road to rear. Ever and again came also the hiccup of Captain Buchanan, and when that bounded, Fraser would glance at Angus and mutter, embarrassed, “Aye—aye,” or “Indeet, indeet. Yess, yess,” very sad for the lad’s sake.