Читать книгу Clearing in the West. My Own Story - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWhen the first of September came, we began to watch the Portage road. Our men might come any day now. Mother had a pound cake made and set away in a crock, and the bread supply was not allowed to fall below three loaves and the stove got blackened every day.
One Saturday evening, as the sun was going down in a wine red mist, I saw two ox-wagons come over the rise in the Portage road, beyond the McMullen farm. I was sure it was our wagons, but I had been sure so many times before and utterly disappointed when the wagons went past, that I watched and said nothing. I was the only one on guard at the moment, and I hoped every one would stay where they were so I could have the “scoop.” I wanted to run down to the road, but I had done that before and there was no luck in it. So I turned my head away and counted fifty before I looked. They were still coming! I counted another fifty and with masterly self control, refrained from sound or motion even though I could see a red ox, with a red and white ox, a red ox with a black and white ox. It must be them! I had to stuff my sunbonnet into my mouth to keep from raising the glad shout. At last the first wagon turned in—and I lifted the alarm, which brought the other members of the family flying. They thought I had been stung by a bee Jack said afterwards, and then, to lift forever the bad name which was sometimes urged against me that I never did anything without being told, I dashed out into the backyard to pick up chips for the fire, but in the general excitement my good deed was not even noticed.
Father and Will had come, leaving George behind to look after the place. . . .
However the evening had one bright aspect. There was so much talk, I sat up unobserved until ten, by making myself small, and quiet and I heard that we must be on our way in a week, and that father said he was glad we had not come with them in the spring, for between the smoke of the smudges and the mosquito bites there wasn’t much to choose, and that we were going to get a pony and cart for it would save the oxen, and be a quicker way of getting around, when we got home.
There were trips into Winnipeg, to buy supplies and I got a pair of stout shoes with copper toes, so big I had to pad my feet below and around with newspaper. I would grow into them!
The Sunday before we left we all went to church, walking the mile to the little English church of which Mr. Pinkham was the rector. We had attended there all summer and Mr. Pinkham had come to see us. We said good-bye to the friends we had made: Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, Mr. and Mrs. Buckley and the Tait family—Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tait, Herbie, Ellen and Addie. Addie was a little older than I, a tall girl with reddish hair, who always had money and seemed to me like a princess in disguise. I think she bought candy every day at the store and in the mixture, when hard candies with a centre like flour paste appeared she threw them away. Ah me! I would have been glad of them, but of course, I couldn’t take Addie’s “leavings,” so I heaped scorn on them too, but it was hard to forget them, in the candyless years that followed.
We left on Monday morning, early, with the poplar leaves stirring in the light of the rising sun. It was a glorious morning, with a smell all its own, dead leaves, ripening again, coffee and bacon, new boots and something else, maybe just adventure, the magic of the unknown.
The garden from which every last vegetable had been taken lay ruffled and tossed like an unmade bed. We were all ready to start when father declared the garden would have to be levelled and raked. There was some dissension about this, but it was done.
“Sure, and it has served us well,” he said, as he raked the stalks into a windrow, “and it is only common civility to leave it smooth and in order for the people who come after us. . . . I’d rather cheat a person any day, than cheat the land.”
We had two wagonloads of “Settler’s Effects,”—which was a broad term that included anything from a plow to a paper of pins. The little oxen, Jake and Brin, went first, for theirs was the lighter load of the two. In their wagon, wrapped in canvas and tarpaulins, were the things that would not be needed on the journey, flour, bacon, dried vegetables, extra bedding, chairs, tables, boxes of clothing. In the covered wagon, which the big oxen drew were the necessities for the days of travel, bedding, dry wood, frying pans, pots, clothing, ox harness, whiffletrees, a neckyoke, tools, spades for digging out mud holes, an ax, ropes and chains, and one bed made up and ready “in case of sickness.”
Never had I experienced as great a moment as came to me, when the oxen’s heads were turned west on Portage Avenue and the long trail received us unto itself. I felt that life was leading me by the hand and I followed on light feet. We would travel with the sun, until we came to that flower starred prairie where no stone would impede the plow; where strawberries would redden the oxen’s fetlocks; where eight-hundred acres of rich black soil was waiting for us, and a running stream would stir the cat-tails in the current and I would have a little boat on it, with white sails and on hot days I could wade in its cool waters, and there would be shady pools and big trees, where I could build a seat and go there and read, when I learned to read, and it would be far enough away from the house, I could not hear any one calling me, and it would be almost the same as having a room of my own. . . .
We walked as much as we could, riding only when we got tired. I believe my mother walked all the way, for she liked to have her eye on the whole procession and she could only do this from the rear.
It was hot when the sun climbed higher in the sky, but there came heavy banks of clouds that gave us periods of shade and the faithful oxen plodded on, at their own unhurried pace. Wild geese passed into the south to remind us that winter was on our heels, but nothing could dim the radiance of that day of high adventure.
White-washed, Red-river frame houses, set in wide farm yards, well back from the road, stacks of hay and fields of ripe grain with men cutting it down with reapers, and in some fields with sickles and cradles—then long stretches of meadows, growing brown with autumn and then more houses. Over all the odor of wild sage, and golden rod, that grew beside the road, and in the air flights of crows and black-birds visiting the scattered grain fields, and sitting on wire fences, like strings of jet beads.
I wondered how these people could be content to stay on their little farms when there was better land ahead. Perhaps they did not know. Will had said their land was too heavy with gumbo and alkali to ever make easy farming, but they liked living close together with the river at their front door; and had their little circle of friends, and simple pleasures.
Part of the glow I felt in beginning this journey, came from the sense I had that we were well dressed for the occasion. We had dark print dresses and straw hats, lined with the same print as our dresses and banded with a fold of it, dark gray ribbed woolen stockings, hand knit, and good stout boots. Then we had olive green coats, made of homespun, mother’s own weaving, with smoked pearl buttons. I remember these coats well, as well I may, for when I grew out of mine I stepped into Hannah’s and when it proved inadequate, I got Lizzie’s, so that olive green homespun with pearl buttons was my portion in coats until I was fifteen years old. My Aunt Ellen had made them and they were good-looking coats.
The bad roads began at Baie St. Paul, a great swampy place, dreaded by all prairie travellers. We met there, a tragic family who had turned back, discouraged and beaten. It was the wife who had broken down. She wore a black silk dress and lace shawl and a pair of fancy shoes, all caked with mud. She would have been a pretty woman if she would only stop crying. She hated the country, she sobbed, it was only fit for Indians and squaws and should never have been taken from them. Her two little girls were crying too. They had broken their garters and their legs were a mass of mosquito bites.
Mother was very sorry for their distress and tried to calm the weeping woman.
“You’re not dressed right for a journey like this,” she began. “No one can be happy going through mud in a fine silk dress and thin kid shoes.”
“But these are the oldest things I have,” she protested tearfully, “and I don’t care if they do get spoiled.”
“But your shoes are not comfortable,” mother said, “and they are no protection to your feet, and you should have made yourself some print or gingham dresses.”
“But I can’t! I never made a dress in my life, mother always did my sewing,”—and from her eyes came another freshet. “I want to go back to her; she never wanted me to come, but I thought it would be fun, and Willard was so crazy to get land of his own, but he can get his job back at the store.”
Mother’s zeal began to flag, “Take her back,” she said to Willard, “she’s not the type that makes a pioneer.”
Willard nodded his head grimly, “I see that,”—he said.
Mother invited them to stay and eat with us, for we were stopped for the noon meal and while she was making a bannock in the mouth of a flour sack, Will fried the bacon and made coffee; and Lizzie put Balm of Gilead salve on the little girls’ mosquito bitten legs and mended their garters.
“Poor Willard,” mother said, as we saw them drifting down the backward trail. “He’ll go on selling papers of pins and yards of tarleton, but all his life he’ll dream of the yellow wheat fields that might have been his and his heart will wither with longing. But he made the mistake many good men have made—he married a painted doll, instead of a woman.”
“She’s a pretty little thing too,” my father said, looking after the wagon receding in the distance—“did you ever see a neater ankle?”
At High Bluff we bought a pony and cart, a Red-river cart that had not a nail in it, and whose wooden axle had never known the soothing touch of axle-grease. It rumbled and mourned, and creaked, and whined, as it turned protestingly. We bought the pony from a Methodist minister there, the Reverend Mr. Bray.
Ten miles was a good day’s travelling. One day we made only one mile.
At Poplar Point we camped beside the home of Chatsworth people, who had left our neighborhood years before. Mother had written to Mrs. Lance, but no reply had come, but Margaret Lance was the sort of woman who would not write and mother was not offended. Margaret Lane she was before her marriage and the belle of the country side, who could have married any man she wanted; but mother said, “you can go through the woods and go through the woods and pick up a crooked stick at last.” So when Johnny Lance came back from the North West, black as an Indian, and his hair hanging down to his shoulder, bragging that he had come to pick out a wife to take back with him, Margaret Lane, (engaged to be married to Billy Spicer, who owned the farm next to her father’s), spoke right up and said she would go. Everyone thought it was a joke, but in a week they were married and away—and word drifted back that Margaret said it was the best day’s work she had ever done for herself.
We knew they were now living at Poplar Point, so we would go to see them when we were so near.
They lived half a mile from the trail, in a long log house on the bank of a creek. We stopped our wagons on the other side of the creek which was running swiftly under the rough bridge and waited there on the bank opposite their house, while mother and father went across the bridge and up the bank to the house, attended by three barking dogs.
When Mrs. Lance came out of the kitchen door, there was a flurry of wings in the farm yard and hens and ducks raced toward her. Watching from the wagons we saw the meeting, though we could hear nothing above the uproar. A few black haired children came out of the house, the eldest boy vainly trying to quiet the dogs. There was a large duck pond on the side of the creek next the house, where a flock of ducks were feeding, but they, hearing the commotion, climbed out of the water and waddled up in a body to find out what it was all about, making raucous comments as they went.
We were taken into the house and there we saw that although Mrs. Lance had not written she was expecting us. The kitchen table held a fresh baking of bread, and after the greetings were over, the eldest boy was sent out to catch and kill two chickens.
I remember the pattern of their farm buildings. The house was on one side of the creek; and the hen house and stables on the other. When we asked why they had built them this way, Mrs. Lance said she thought it best to keep the animals across the creek by themselves and while she said it, a hen and chickens walked in the door of the kitchen. “We keep her in the woodshed,” Mrs. Lance said, “she’s late with her chickens; this is her second flock and I’m trying to build them up before winter. It’s just time for her boiled wheat and she knows it.”
The hen cackled and stormed, sounding a hawk-alarm when she saw us.
Mrs. Lance apologized. “She doesn’t like strangers,” she said, “but don’t mind her, she is really a very friendly hen when she gets to know you.”
On the top of the high oven a tin milk pan lined with hay contained three young ducks that had been drenched with rain, Mrs. Lance said, and had nearly died, but if she could just get them feathered out before the cold weather, they would be all right.
“Don’t you find it a long way over to the stables, down one hill and up another, with the creek to cross?” mother asked, “how do you manage in the spring when the water is high?”
“Oh! Johnny has a raft and it never lasts very long, maybe a week—he likes it—” she said, “Johnny does like a bit of excitement, and the boys are the same. He’s so fond of animals—and he likes them around him. He’d have the house full of them, if I would let him. . . . I don’t believe we’ll be long here, there’s people coming to settle near us and he doesn’t like to be crowded.”
We made our camp across the creek and stayed that day and night. Mrs. Lance roasted chickens, boiled potatoes and filled our food boxes to overflowing, when we left.
Johnny himself arrived home in the afternoon, with a bag of wild fowl—he had been away shooting on the marsh, and gave us a riotous welcome. Why couldn’t we stay a week, and go shooting prairie chickens on the plains? They were as thick as you ever saw black-birds in the oat fields in Ontario, and so tame, it was a crime to shoot them.
We could not stay. The weather might break any day and we were only half way on our journey.
“Well, the North West is the place to live,” Johnny said, as he drove the hen and chickens out and shut the door. “The Garafraxa would choke me now, if I went back. A man needs freedom! That’s what drove me out, and will drive me out again. It’s different with women! They never had freedom and so never miss it. I’ll have to sell this place pretty soon and move on. There’s been two or three land lookers around this summer; wouldn’t you like to buy this place John and settle down, and we’ll go on to the Souris? It’s about time for us to move isn’t it Maggie?”
She shook her head.
“The trouble with me is, I won’t take dictation from anyone,” Johnny said. “Over here two miles away they’re startin’ a school. That will mean taxes and what do we need a school for?”
“What about your children, don’t you want them to go to school?” mother asked indignantly.
Johnny was pressing tobacco into a black pipe, with his broad thumb.
“My boys can get all the education they need from me,” he said. “And what good is it for girls? Makes them want to read books, when they should be patchin’ quilts; Maggie here, would be a happier woman if she couldn’t read at all.”
Mother untied her apron before she replied to this.
“The only thing we live for is our children,” she said in her Scotch voice, “and if we fail them, we have failed altogether. Every child has a right to an education and if you do not get that for them, you have cheated them.”
“You’re movin’ the wrong way,” he said, “if its education you’re after. There will be no schools out west where you’re headin’, for years. It will be like the bush in Grey County forty years ago when my folks went in. The schools came too late for me, and when they came, I was too big to go, but I don’t know as I mind. I’ve done all right. One generation gets missed out in every new settlement, and you’ll find that out too. The thing is not to get too much education in the next. It makes too wide a gap. I don’t want my kids to get feeling they know more than I do; not that it would hurt me, but it wouldn’t be good for the kids. You women are all the same—all for learnin’, but I want my boys to stay with me, and this is one way to keep them. Ignorance holds families together.”
“You don’t mean it Johnny!” mother said at last. “No one could be so selfish as this, or as foolish”. . . .
“I do mean it! Look what education does for people! A man in the Portage forged a cheque and is in jail for it, a good fellow too, would he have done that if he had never learned to write? He had an idea he was smart—knew a little more than the rest of us. And if you do read a newspaper—what do you get? Murders, horse thieving, devilment of one kind or another. What good does her readin’ do Maggie, here? Upsets her that’s all. Gets her feeling too big for her boots.”
That was too much for mother to stand. “Johnny Lance!” she said, “you married the prettiest girl and the best liked girl in Sullivan County. She jilted a good man to marry you—and she has roughed it with you, in this new country, and put up with you, done without things, and met all sorts of hardships and you would begrudge her the little bit of pleasure she gets from reading a book when her day’s work is done and you want to move on again, thinking always of your own wishes, your own pleasure, and not of your family. I wonder at you, Johnny!”
“You got me wrong, Mrs. Mooney,” he defended, good-naturedly, “I don’t begrudge it to her, if it did her any good, but I claim it don’t. She reads in a paper that a man stole horses in Winnipeg and got away, and she’s runnin’ out all the time countin’ ours. Or she reads a story about a man that left his wife and took up with a younger woman, one with yalla hair and I see her eyin’ me, and I know she’s afraid she might lose me. That’s what I mean. My claim is it’s a mistake to know more than you need to know; and that’s why I like animals so well. They ask no questions, tell nothing, have no ambitions or regrets, or complaints, and take things as they come.”
Mrs. Lance was making motions behind his head, and no more was said.
Before we left, Mrs. Lance defended her husband’s wild talk.
“Johnny just talks to hear himself, but he doesn’t mean it. He feels bitter about not ever being to school and covers it up by pretending he does not care. He’s a good man to me, Lettie. I don’t regret giving Billy Spicer the go-by. I’d have had an easier life, maybe, a good house and near town, but Johnny suits me, for all he’s rough in his ways and he likes to talk big. He’s a child in some ways, would rather be scolded than not noticed at all. He just loved having you pitch into him. I couldn’t let you go thinking that Johnny is mean, for he isn’t. He voted for the school and wants the boys to get an education as much as I do. I think most men take a little knowing, Lettie.”
They promised to come to see us some summer, when the roads were better. Distances were long in the early eighties and friendships languished in the long silences.
The weather broke the day we left the Lances and the real trouble of the journey began. Fortunately there were many travellers on the road and the mud-holes were the drag nets which brought them all together. Sometimes it took three yokes of oxen to draw a wagon out of a bad spot and even then the long grass beside the road had to be cut and thrown into the slippery, gummy mud to give the oxen a foothold.
The men wore long boots of leather and overalls of brown or blue duck, but I do not remember seeing any rubber boots. If the holes were not deep, Hannah and I were left in the wagon for our small weight would not make much difference. But it was like a nightmare to see the oxen go down, down into the mud, sprawling helplessly in its treacherous depths. But they did not get excited as horses would have and they did their best, without urging. In the worst part of the road we were fortunate to have Lord Elphinstone and his traders on the way to Fort Edmonton, and they gave assistance to all the wagons on the road. The traders who had been travelling the trail for years, were always serene and cheerful and said the road was not as bad as it used to be, and that no wagon had been actually lost in the mud for quite awhile.
We stopped at another friend’s house, and made our camp in the yard. They were Chatsworth people too, who had come the year before. They had a little girl just my age, named Abigail, a pallid child with faded hair, who seemed browbeaten and sad. She sat stonily silent in a little rocking chair hardly moving, and yet her mother and the older members of the family, often reproved her. “Abigail behave!” is all I can remember of any of the conversation. Hannah and I played the “Abigail behave,” game many times, adding interesting variations. I liked to be Abigail, and added to her air of sadness, by letting my hair fall over my eyes and looking cross-eyed while Hannah shouted at me to “behave.” Our nice game fell under the ban at last for “mocking is catching,” and “people who make faces will find they cannot change back, if the wind changes.”
I had a nightmare one night on the trail, when the whole world roared around me like a bursting sea. Only it was a sea of mud, black and greasy, licking me under. All night long, or so it seemed to me, I fought against it, unable to cry for help, and the next day I was not able to walk and so was put in the wagon, which lurched and groaned and writhed over the rough roads.
My head ached and I was very miserable. Every jolt of the wagon increased my pain, although I was packed in between pillows, and everything that could be done for my comfort had been done. I was quite sure my last hour was approaching, and I was going to be buried by the trail, like Linda. We had seen a little grave marked by a board taken from a wagon box, on which the name “Linda,” was printed in white chalk on the green paint. A handful of blue fringed gentians, faded and withered lay on the fresh black earth.
I did not mind dying if it would stop my head from beating—I would be glad to die! The ground would be cold, but it would lie still. Maybe they would take me back and lay me beside Linda.
The wagon suddenly stopped and someone picked me up. Maybe I was dead. . . . Now I thought I must be, for I felt no pain. I had only a great desire to sleep.
“Better let Willie carry her, John,” I heard mother say, “she’s quite a good weight and your shoulder may ache again.”
I felt myself being comfortably laid on my father’s broad shoulder.
“Her, is it? A good weight? Poor child! I could carry her to the Tower of Hook. She’s just the weight of two dried lamb-skins.”
I opened my eyes then, but the light dazzled me and I was too weary to talk. I drifted down into a deep sea of contentment but vaguely through my dreams, I thought of Linda under the blue flowers at the side of the trail. I hoped she liked her grave and did not mind the dark, and I was sure God would send an angel for both of us, before the winter came. If this was dying, it was far nicer than riding in the wagon.
Vaguely through my dreams I could hear my father singing:
“Shule, shule, shule, agra
Its time can only aise me woe
Since the lad o’ me heart
From me did part,
Schedate, avoureen, schlana,
I’ll dye me petticoat
I’ll dye it red,
And through the world
I’ll beg me bread,
I wish in me heart
That I was dead. . . .”
I roused at that, and squirmed in sudden fright.
“Don’t say that, dad,” I called down to him. “I don’t want to die, now!”
“No more did she!” he laughed. “No one does, though it’s often said.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t say it though,” I was wide awake now. . . . “Does God know we don’t mean it?” I asked fearfully.
“Oh, God knows right enough. He hears a lot that He lets go in one ear and out the other. He knows we all like to rave once in awhile.”
I settled down then, relieved and satisfied. God wouldn’t take a short turn on me. He wouldn’t even remember what I said. God was like Lizzie and good at forgetting.
