Читать книгу Peace River Country - Ralph Allen - Страница 3

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To Harold, shrunk tautly into the backward-riding side of the double seat, their going away—like their coming—was a flight. No matter how much Kathleen and their mother tried to make it seem like something else, he was not going to help the pretense or to enter into it. They were running away and in this there was nothing good or hopeful, although he did see its necessity.

Kally was full of oafish, unreckoning excitement. She was kneeling on the other side of the seat, blowing furiously on the window, then blowing on her woolen mitts and rubbing a widening porthole in the window’s thick coat of frost. Occasionally she stopped rubbing, to press her nose against the window and shout back an inventory of the contents of the dark station platform outside.

“There goes Mr. Groton!” she shouted. “Three bags of mail. And one huge parcel, it looks like Eaton’s. I’ll bet it’s the new septic tank for Dr. Finlayson.”

Harold appealed to their mother with a glance of indignation. But Mrs. Sondern seemed not to have heard. She was standing in the aisle of the ancient day coach, with one hand resting on the top of the upended wicker suitcase and the other pressed hard against the scratchy maroon top of the double seat, almost as though she and the two objects were a chain and if she let go of either the suitcase or the railway coach, they would fly apart and leave her empty-handed.

“Mother,” Harold said anxiously, “have you got the tickets?”

“What? Oh yes, of course I’ve got them, Harold.”

“There’s Barb and Lucy,” Kally shouted. The shout mounted to a shriek. “Good-by, Barb! ‘By, Lucy. Barb!” She quieted and gave the window another matter-of-fact rub. “They didn’t hear me,” she reported. There was neither disappointment nor humility in her voice and in a moment it rose again.

“Hi, Barb! Hi, Lucy!” She lowered her tone to an excited piercing whisper. “They see me now.” She pounded insanely at the window and put her face back to it and yelled: “When we get to where we’re going I’ll send you my address and you can write.”

She didn’t even add “if you like,” Harold noted with a shudder. He glanced anxiously down the aisle of the railway car. He saw with relief that the car had only one other occupant, probably a city man, dozing.

“Make her stop that awful noise,” Harold hissed.

“She’s just saying good-by.” Mrs. Sondern gave him an affectionate now-now-Harold smile.

“In a minute she’ll be babbling where we’re going and then the first thing anybody knows ...” He did not complete the sentence.

Their mother, only a little plumper and a little less pretty than Kally and a shade less idiotically shining, turned her head away for an instant. She was smiling when she looked at him again. She stood up, removed her gray woolen mittens, squirmed out of the lightly mottled maroon overcoat that had obviously been dyed, cut down, and once a man’s, and finally eased a knitted green-and-orange toque off her head in a careful, front-to-back motion like the last brushing of a pompadour. Except for a very minor wisp of gray sitting lightly on each bulbous ear bun, her hair was as dark and thick as Kally’s and her cheeks, as they always were in winter, were of the lacquer-smooth redness which is just a few seconds short of frostbite.

She sat down, smoothed her stringy wine-colored knitted suit, and reached across to pat Harold’s hand. “Don’t worry!” she said gently.

The train sighed and humped into motion, its tracks shrieking desolately in the snow.

“We’re going!” Kally yelled. “Good-by, Dobie!”

Mrs. Sondern leaned across Kally’s hunched shoulder and whispered softly through the frost-freed porthole at the lonely squares of light in the freight-shed window: “Good-by, Dobie.”

Kally was chanting the old school yell.

“Dobie Dobie Osky-Zops

Dobie Hit ‘Em in the Chops.

Dobie. Dobie. Dob-ee-ee.”

“Aren’t you going to say good-by to Dobie, Harold?” Mrs. Sondern asked quietly when Kally fell silent.

“I think that gentleman is trying to sleep,” Harold mumbled.

The round mountainous shadows of the water tower and the grain elevator glided past and then they were plunging recklessly into the black empty prairie, unprepared for their coming by the measure of a single gleam of starlight. The gaslit day coach was full of hostile smells: chipped varnish blended with worn plush and used dust, and outside the quietly rattling doorway the cold steam couplings hissed and clanked like the sound of a duel between dragons and men in armor.

Harold looked at the other two, half daring them now to sustain their foolish gaiety and half afraid that they would not.

“It’s a fine little town,” Mrs. Sondern said gravely. “Such fine, friendly neighbors. Not the same opportunities there, of course.”

Kally sat forward eagerly. “Have you decided what we’ll do when we get to the Pea——”

“Mother!” Harold had made up his mind that the city man couldn’t possibly be asleep. “Make her stop blabbing everything. The first thing anybody knows ...” Again he could not find words to finish the bitter thought.

“It’s all right, dear,” Mrs. Sondern said sympathetically. “It doesn’t really matter if anybody knows.”

Kally said without rancor: “What have you decided we’ll do when we get there?”

“Well, now——” In spite of himself Harold could not altogether divorce himself from the buoyancy of his mother’s undertone. “—I meant to tell you today but in all the hurry and excitement I forgot. Mrs. Barbour was in Winnipeg last week and she says needlepoint’s all the rage. I might just try that for a while.”

“Needlepoint!” Kally gasped. “Why, Mother, that’s an inspiration.”

“They sell a little piece hardly bigger than a handkerchief for as much as twenty dollars,” Mrs. Sondern said. She added in a less confident tone, for Harold: “Of course it’s very difficult.”

“Just think!” Kally glowed. “Twenty dollars for a piece hardly as big as a handkerchief. Why, you could make fifty or sixty dollars a month easily—poof! more like a hundred dollars when you get the hang of it.”

Harold did not wish to be enticed into the discussion. He didn’t really want to withdraw from this particular hope until a likelier one offered itself, but on the other hand he did not want to subscribe to it and he felt that in letting it go unchallenged he would be deemed to have subscribed.

“Gosh, Mother,” he said, “isn’t needlepoint that fancy sewing stuff? What would they want to buy it up there for?”

“That’s just it!” Kally cut in. “They can’t get things like that up there.”

“But half of it’s unbroken country”—Harold looked straight across the seat at his mother, trying to ignore Kally’s immature interruptions—“I heard you say that lots of the women up there still do the stooking and help out with the hay.”

“That’s just it, silly,” Kally broke in again. The tender triumphant glance she bestowed first on Harold and then on their mother invited her to join in friendly toleration of his innocence. “That’s just it. They’ve got lots of money. But no nice things. Nice things are just what a lady wants in a place like that.”

“You never can be sure about things like that, Harold,” Mrs. Sondern said gently. “You never can be sure until you try. Now let’s all try to get a little sleep.”

Harold closed his eyes, trying to shut out the light from the prehistoric gas lamp above his head. But he only succeeded in trapping the light and shutting it in, and the more tightly he squeezed his eyelids, the brighter the light became. Across this plane of light a chain of visions raced, sometimes just under its glaring green surface and sometimes just above it, like crazed sea-things chasing each other through a phosphorescent swell. He couldn’t catch any one thing and hold it long enough for study. One moment there was a shape as clear and unforgettable as the face of his father, seen less than half an hour ago. But in the next moment the whitely drooping mask of flesh dissolved completely and in its place there was an image he could only identify by the name of Going. Going was not a new image, but it was a harder one to keep hold of, for it was without corporate limits, a black undulation of mass without form. And then there was Money—not altogether separate from Going and therefore not altogether unlike it, but with many daylight things floating in and out of comprehension on its own dark wave, the laundry wagon, for instance, and his mother’s thin, scuffed black change purse. At last, as he had hoped desperately that it would, the new place, the place where they were going, swept into the center of his ken. For a moment it hung there all alone, green and quiet, but it would not stay. His father’s face began to return and he opened his eyes.

In the seat across from him Kally was already fast asleep in the yellow light, her head cradled above her bundled winter reefer on the swaying window sill. Their mother sat beside her, awake.

“Come over here,” Harold whispered.

His mother smiled as she drew his head close. Harold looked down the car again. The city man was snoring softly.

“Let’s talk about the Peace River Country,” he whispered.

“We’re going to love it, Harold. It’s a very big and splendid place. Everybody says that.”

“Yes,” he said, demanding to be mollified. “But not the way Kally thinks.”

“Perhaps not.” She paused, thinking hard. “But perhaps so.”

“Mother,” Harold said abruptly, sitting forward so that he could look straight into her face, “did you think Dobie was a good place? Really?”

Her sure, quiet expression did not waver. “Why, yes, Harold. Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “What about Regina?”

“Yes, I always liked Regina.”

“Then why didn’t we stay?” The image of his father leaped at him from the yellow gaslight hanging overhead and he shrank back against his mother’s breast to take refuge from his own despicableness. “I mean, if we could have,” he blurted. “I mean, is the place we’re going so much better?”

“Oh yes, Harold,” she whispered. “Yes. Yes. Dobie and Regina are good places, but they’re not famous for being good. They’re not famous all over the world.”

“I never heard you say much about it before today.” Now he wished above everything else to share her intensity and enthusiasm and he said the words in such a way as to make it clear that he was merely pointing to a curious deficiency in his background.

“That’s only because it’s so far away.”

“How long will it take to get there?” Again he was careful that no hint of skepticism or unease should enter his voice.

“Oh, goodness.” His mother’s tone indicated it was a triviality but an interesting enough triviality over which to pass the time. “Perhaps a month. Perhaps two.”

“Gee, that’s not so long, is it?”

“Back in ‘32, or perhaps ‘31—the drought was even worse then, or it seemed worse because it was so much newer; that was quite a while before we came to Dobie—well, a few years back—one family went all the way up there with a team of horses and a wagon.”

“Two thousand miles with one team and wagon!”

“It took them nearly two years. But they wrote back that it was worth every bit of it. Every bit of it and more. They wrote back that they never have droughts there, or grasshoppers or rust or anything like that. And the land is cheap. In some parts they can still get homesteads. The strangest thing, the thing nobody could believe when the country was opened up, is the climate. Even away up north like that the weather is away better than the weather here. It’s the chinooks.”

“I don’t think the chinooks go up that far, do they?” Harold was offering light conversation, rather than an argument.

“Then it must be the monsoons. It’s a much better climate anyway.”

“It’s a pretty big country, isn’t it?” The talk was rolling beautifully now.

“Absolutely huge. Right from here, right from Dobie and Carsdale and Collington, just from this one little corner of Saskatchewan, nearly fifty families went up there in the bad times. Counting the people from other places there were thousands and thousands of people that went and there was room for everybody and there’s still room for lots more. Why, it’s so big it’s in two provinces. It starts in Alberta and goes right over into B.C.”

“How come you know so much about it, Mother?” Harold mumbled lazily.

“Oh, I’ve been thinking about it for years. Your father and I always wanted——” She paused, and went on quickly. “—I used to read about it a lot. I used to get out a map and look at all the towns and try and see which one I’d pick out if I ever went there.”

“What one will we go to?”

“I always thought Grande Prairie. That’s the biggest town.”

“It’s a nice name.”

“Names! If you want names! You never heard such names. The first people that went up there saw it was a different kind of country and when they started picking the names ...”

“What are some of them?” he asked, suddenly almost eager.

“Oh, let me see. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to remember all of them. Well, just to take some of the other Prairies, there’s a Rose Prairie, and a High Prairie and a Clear Prairie.”

“Mmuh?”

“Oh and there’s a Progress and even a Rio Grande. And a Valhalla and I think, yes, I’m sure, there’s a Bonanza.”

“Gee, and down here the best names they can think of are names like Dobie and Oxbow and Carnduff.”

“There’s a Heart Valley too, Harold. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It was always my favorite. There’s a Lone Star and a Sunrise Valley.”

“Any more?” he murmured.

“There’s a Cherry Hill.”

“Cherry Hill!”

“Oh, and a Blueberry Mountain.”

Harold thought briefly of asking whether anybody who was trying to find a person up there would have trouble finding them if the person didn’t want to be found. He now believed the question to be unnecessary.

He yawned happily and then said importantly: “When we get to Elevator I’ll get a job. In a place that big I’ll bet they need all kinds of delivery boys and things. I’ll get a job and then we’ll be able to get moving again just that much faster.”

She gave him a gentle hug. “We’ll see about that. Anyway, we always make out somehow, don’t we?”

“Sure we do,” he said staunchly. He squeezed her soft hand and in a moment he was sleeping, placidly and undreaming.