The Winter Helen Dropped By

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © W. P. Kinsella 1995

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

W. P. Kinsella asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007497539

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007497546

Version: 2014-08-07

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

SECTION ONE: Rat Pie and Fireworks

Chapter One

Chapter Two

SECTION TWO: Rosemary’s Winter

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

SECTION THREE: The Reconstituted Wedding

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

SECTION FOUR: The Summer Jamie Damn Near Drowned

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Also by the W.P. Kinsella

About the Publisher

Chapter One

‘Every story,’ Daddy said, ‘is about sex or death, or sometimes both.’

‘What about your baseball stories?’ said I, thinking myself more than passing clever.

‘You know what the word phallic means?’ my daddy asked.

‘Nope,’ said I, feeling less clever than I had a moment before.

‘Well, y’all come back when you do, and we’ll discuss my pronouncement further. No, on second thoughts,’ Daddy said, ‘by the time you understand the word you’ll understand the implication.’

‘Is it something like the women talking about Flop Skaalrud’s blatant male aura, when they think no one is listening in?’ said I, once again feeling passing clever.

‘It is indeed,’ said my daddy. Then after a pause, during which he scratched his mop of black curls, ‘So that’s what they talk about when they think no one is listening in. Your mama and I will have to discuss that matter.’

‘Don’t tell her you heard it from me.’

‘Your secret is safe,’ said Daddy, giving me a large wink.

The area of Alberta where I grew up and spent almost the first eleven years of my life was known as the Six Towns Area. While the town we lived closest to was known as Fark, Fark wasn’t big enough to be a town, consisting of only a general store and a community hall and hardly big enough to be called a hamlet. We lived on a farm sixty miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, a distance that in the early 1940s might as well have been six thousand miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, because travel was, as they say in polite society, somewhat restricted.

Only three families in the Six Towns Area owned automobiles, and only three families in the Six Towns Area had telephones, a situation that limited not only travel but communication as well.

None of the families who owned automobiles (though actually only two families owned automobiles; the third owned a dump truck), and not one of the families that had a telephone was our family, the O’Days.

One of the families with a telephone was Curly and Gunhilda McClintock, who, in the process of letting their inherited eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing go to rack and ruin, also allowed their telephone service to be cut off, so while they technically had a telephone, the Telephone Company being too lazy or economy-minded to travel the forty miles from Stony Plain to collect it, that telephone was, my daddy said, dead as Billy-be-damned. I never was too sure who Billy-be-damned was.

Because of a lack of travel and a lack of communication, time didn’t mean a whole lot in the Six Towns Area. Daddy claimed he once arrived at Flop Skaalrud’s to find Flop holding a piglet up in the air, the piglet eating crabapples off a tree.

‘Don’t feedin’ him like that take up a lot of time?’ Daddy asked.

Flop Skaalrud looked at him kind of scornfully, Daddy said, and asked, ‘What’s time to a pig?’

When the roads were good, which was for about two weeks in mid-summer if it wasn’t raining and if what we traveled on could seriously be called roads, Daddy and Mama and me traveled to the Fark General Store, presided over by Slow Andy McMahon, all three hundred and some pounds of him, where we bought groceries and the three-week-old Toronto Star Weekly which, my daddy said, even though it was three weeks old served to keep our family relatively in touch with reality, unlike some we knew.

The ‘unlike some we knew’ referred to many of our neighbors who either didn’t know or had totally forgotten that there was a world beyond the Six Towns Area or their town in particular, be it Fark, Doreen Beach, Sangudo, Venusberg, Magnolia, or New Oslo, none of which were big enough to be called towns but were anyway, because town sounded large and hamlet sounded small, and village sounded only somewheres in between.

Events in the Six Towns Area tended to be measured in years or by seasons rather than by exact dates, an example being the summer Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, which old timers still argue about, some insisting it took place the summer of ’45, others willing to bet their life savings that it was the summer of ’46. Events I want to tell you about occurred during what became known outside my family as the summer Jamie O’Day damn near drowned, and inside my family as the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though the summer I damn near drowned was actually a spring, so much so that there were little pieces of ice in the water I damn near drowned in, and it was without question the tail end of a spring thaw that all but did me in.

In our family, the summer Jamie damn near drowned was preceded by the winter Helen dropped by, which was preceded by the summer of the reconstituted wedding, preceded by Rosemary’s winter.

It will also be helpful to know about Abigail Uppington, the pig who lived in our kitchen; and about Matilda Torgeson being named in honor of a deceased pig (not Abigail Uppington); and about the infamous Flop Skaalrud’s blatant male aura; as well as Earl J. Rasmussen’s courting of the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, the result of that courtship being the reconstituted wedding, the naming of Lousy Louise Kortgaard, and probably twenty or a dozen other events.

I’m just gonna keep my eyes open, watch, and see if all these stories are, like Daddy says, about sex or death, or maybe both at the same time.

It was actually the summer after the winter Helen dropped by that I truly began to measure the events of my life by seasons, in spite of regularly reading the three-week-old editions of the Toronto Star Weekly that were supposed to keep me in touch with reality.

For me, that summer became the summer White Chaps murdered his wife, just as another winter, not the winter Helen dropped by, was remembered for the time when Rosemary, my almost sister, touched my hand.

None of us had ever seen Helen before the winter when she dropped by. ‘None of us’ being the O’Days: me, my father John Martin Duffy O’Day, and my mother Olivia. We lived in a big old house at the end of a trail that was sometimes just a path but was grandly known as Nine Pin Road, a name that didn’t have the least bit to do with bowling. It got named long before Mama and Daddy moved there to hide from the Great Depression, named by a man who, Daddy said, had left the e off of Pine when he wrote to his sister in Norway, so that Nine Pine Road ever after was officially known as Nine Pin Road, even though from our south window you could see a row of nine pines loping across the pasture.

My parents both hailed from South Carolina, though they met in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, which my daddy says has an array of presidents’ faces carved on it. It is in South Dakota, a considerable distance from South Carolina. Daddy was living in South Dakota, a gandy dancer on the railway, Daddy said he was, though he played baseball on the weekends, and when Mama’s train slipped off the track, coming to rest in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, Daddy was on the repair crew sent to put the train back on the track. And, as Daddy says, the rest is more or less history.

Daddy got trapped twice, was how come a boy from South Carolina came to be living in Alberta, Canada; three times if you count marriage as a trap, which my daddy didn’t, but which his friends, Earl J. Rasmussen, who lived alone in the hills with about six hundred sheep, and Flop Skaalrud, and Bandy Wicker, the father of my rabbit-snaring buddy Floyd Wicker, and Wasyl Lakusta, who had a good-hearted wife and was one of the Lakustas by the lake, though the lake had been dried up for many a year, did. Earl J. Rasmussen, who was single, had spent the better part of his life courting the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, trying to get trapped, and letting her know that he was hers for the trapping.

The widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, was the poet-in-residence of the Six Towns Area, and could snap off a few lines of Lord Byron or Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman just in your run-of-the-mill conversation, without being asked to emote or anything of that nature, though Daddy often remarked that it was a shame about Walt Whitman, but that he guessed a few crimes against nature didn’t detract from the fact Walt Whitman was a poet who could touch the heart.

The infamous Flop Skaalrud, as Daddy often remarked, would court anything that twitched. Daddy worded his remarks that way when there were ladies present, but out in the corral he spoke somewhat more directly, as did the women when they were alone in the kitchen of our big old house at the end of Nine Pin Road and didn’t know I was scrunched up in my favorite listening position, squeezed between the cook stove and the wood box.

What the women referred to most often when they thought they were alone was the infamous Flop Skaalrud’s blatant male aura, that term being the invention of the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, the poet-in-residence, though in reality Mrs. Bear Lundquist, who was sixty-two years old and, though she wasn’t arthritic moved like she was, was the only published poet in the Six Towns, having had a sixteen-line sonnet published in the Winnipeg Free Press and Prairie Farmer. When someone had the indelicacy to mention it, Mrs. Bear Lundquist said she knew full well that a sonnet should have only fourteen lines, but she just couldn’t bring herself to cut out that extra rhyming couplet that had occurred to her at the last moment.

The women seemed to be divided into two camps, those who had caught a glimpse (or in one or two cases somewhat more than a glimpse) of the infamous Flop Skaalrud’s blatant male aura, and those to whom the blatant male aura was simply the rumor. It wasn’t seemly for any of the married ladies to admit to more than the rumor, so they had to rely on the memory and experience of the single ladies, who were few and far between, or the memory and experience of some married ladies who when single had twitched sufficiently to attract the attention of the infamous Flop Skaalrud, which my daddy said required a twitch that would hardly be noticeable to the outside world.

The first time Daddy got trapped, assuming you don’t count marriage as a trap, and since Daddy didn’t, I won’t, was when the barnstorming baseball team he was playing for went more or less bankrupt in Edmonton, Alberta. Daddy, who always was a restless sort, had hooked up with the team when they passed through Butte, Montana, which was where Mama had been heading when her train drifted off the track in the very shadow of Mt. Rushmore, when Daddy had been on the repair crew sent to put the train back on the track.

Daddy had accompanied Mama on the rest of her train trip to Butte, Montana, where her daddy, who was a mining engineer who had worked in South Africa, was settling in to what was supposed to be a permanent job at a copper mine. Daddy settled down in Butte, Montana, and apprenticed himself to learn how to build fine houses, which he did, for a time, until a traveling baseball team passed through in desperate need of a quality third baseman. This was too much for daddy’s restless heart, so he joined them and, Mama says, sent money home regular as clockwork until the team, due to a misunderstanding, was scheduled to play a girls’ softball team in Edmonton instead of the general high-quality semi-professional baseball teams they usually encountered.

Rather than honor his contract, even if it was a misunderstanding, the owner of the barnstorming baseball team departed for parts unknown, leaving his players to fend for themselves. Daddy was better than average at fending for himself so rather than return to Butte, Montana, which Daddy described kindly as a boil on the posterior of North America, he hired himself out to build fine houses in Edmonton and shortly was able to send for Mama to join him.

Mama and Daddy, to use their own word, thrived in Edmonton, Alberta, and Mama went to work for the Ramsay Department Store in their jewelry department and wore a black dress with a white collar, and Daddy built fine houses, and pretty soon they were able to buy a little house of their own, and they discussed having a family, and I became a glint not only in my daddy’s eye but in Mama’s as well.

There is no reason to believe that Mama and Daddy wouldn’t have continued to thrive, except that Daddy got trapped in Edmonton a second time – by the Great Depression.

All of a sudden there were no fine houses to build, and one of the first things folks stopped buying when they discovered that, like everyone else in North America, they were more or less insolvent, was jewelry. Daddy got laid off at his job, and Mama got laid off at her job, and the only things they owned were most of a house and some furniture. Daddy felt it would be immoral to accept Relief, which later came to be known as Welfare, and later still as Social Assistance. Daddy said in his later years that if Relief had been called Social Assistance in the 1930s he might have accepted it and ridden out the Great Depression in Edmonton instead of trading the house for a mostly worthless quarter section of land.

Mama said Daddy never would have taken Relief no matter how much they buttered up the name of it, and he only made his statement about accepting Relief, in retrospect, because he had mellowed with the years.

Mama always said it was a cruel punishment to live in the general area of a town called Fark, when, if our stony and worthless 160 acres had been located just a little differently, the post office would have been Magnolia. Mama regarded Fark as an embarrassment and hated to put it as a return address on an envelope, but, being from South Carolina, she understood Magnolia.

Our nearest neighbor was Bear Lundquist, neighbors being relative, as the Lundquists lived about six miles away by road, or trail, or path, or three and a half miles as the crow flies, though no one I knew, including Loretta Cake, who lived in an abandoned cabin with about a hundred cats and was said to have if not magical powers at least the ability to soothe rheumatism, could fly, or even travel ‘as the crow flies,’ for to do so would involve crossing muskegs where a person or a horse could sink thigh-deep in moss and water. ‘As the crow flies’ from our house to Bear Lundquist’s farm involved crossing Purgatory Lake, which was deep and gray and too cold all year round to even wade into.

According to Bear Lundquist, who was sixty-two years old and arthritic and named because he resembled a Norwegian black bear, the winter Helen dropped by was the coldest in fifty years, and that in a country where every winter was cold, and every summer too for that matter, and fall and spring as well.

‘In Alberta,’ Daddy said, ‘you take for granted that the weather is always cold even when it’s warm, because even when it’s warm everywhere else is warmer, so Alberta is still cold even when the weather is warm.’

During the winter Helen dropped by, according to the Lundquists, the temperature dropped to 60° below zero, -60° being a point, Bear Lundquist and my daddy both said, where the sap froze in the puniest kind of trees, causing them to explode, making sounds just like cannons firing. My daddy had fought in the First World War and knew about such things as cannons firing. And I had heard the explosions myself, from inside our house at the end of Nine Pin Road.

The winter Helen dropped by was so cold the coffee froze in the coffee pot where it sat on a counter not fifteen feet from the cook stove, and most of Mama’s plants, sitting on the kitchen table not even ten feet from the cook stove, froze stiff as haywire, and little sections of stalk could be snapped off like toothpicks. The kitchen window was decorated in half-inch-thick white frost that looked like the fancy scalloped icing Mama sometimes put on cakes for special occasions.

It was on one of those sixty-below nights, while an evil wind sawed at the straw and manure that chinked the cracks between the logs in our big, old house at the end of Nine Pin Road, and the windows had been frosted up for weeks, and icicles ran down the inside walls from the windows to the floor, and there was a blanket hung over the door to curtail the draft, and each time the wind gusted the blanket puffed out a few inches from the wall, and a horsehide robe stuffed against the crack at the bottom of the door at least partially interfered with the draft that kept our feet and ankles frozen even with heavy socks and boots on, that Helen dropped by.

We were never able to figure what Helen was doing in our part of the country anyway, and we guessed that she had passed at least two other farms to get to our place, and that she had been traveling as the crow flies, because in sixty-below weather the muskegs, and even Purgatory Lake, were frozen, as my daddy said, clear down to China.

One of the farms she passed was guarded by a shaggy German shepherd dog the size of a small pony, who thrived on sixty-below weather and killed coyotes just for sport. My daddy said the only time he’d seen the dog immobilized was when he’d raised his leg to pee and the stream froze to a nearby barbed-wire fence. Daddy said the dog was trapped for a couple of hours until his owner came along and cut the stream with a gas-powered acetylene welder.

The other farm Helen must have passed by to get to our place at the end of Nine Pin Road was occupied by Deaf Danielson, a bachelor, whose hearing, my daddy said, had been left behind in Norway. We had to surmise that Helen was afraid of Hopfstadt’s German shepherd dog the size of a small pony, and that Deaf Danielson didn’t hear her knocking, though Deaf Danielson’s door was never locked, and he would have been delighted at a little company, particularly female company, of a sixty-degree below night with the beginnings of a freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard whining across the plains.

Daddy said that Deaf Danielson spent a considerable amount of money on stationery and envelopes, and even more on stamps, so he could answer ads in the lovelorn columns in the Family Herald, the Winnipeg Free Press and Prairie Farmer, and The Country Guide in an all-out attempt to find a little female company. Daddy and Mama sometimes joked about the letter Deaf Danielson might write – ‘I am a deaf Norwegian bachelor who last changed his underwear in 1934, and presently sleep with three collie dogs in a converted granary … ’

My daddy regarded himself as a better than average card player, something my mama said cost him dearly at times, especially if he got in a game with the infamous Flop Skaalrud or the second-oldest Bjornsen of the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers who, when he wasn’t picking banjo at box socials, community dances, sports days, or ethnic weddings, was a wizard at five-card draw. His wizardry, the second-oldest Bjornsen claimed, had a good deal to do with the rhythms of the cards and the rhythms of the banjo being compatible.

When Helen dropped by, the kitchen table had been moved to within four feet of the cook stove, where whatever part of us was facing the cook stove was hot and whatever part of us was facing away from the cook stove was cold, and Mama’s last surviving geraniums were leaning toward the cook stove, which glowed pink as a baby. My daddy was teaching me the basic strategies of seven-card stud, one-eyed jacks and red sevens wild, and since the cold kept Mama in direct proximity to the kitchen table and pink-glowing cook stove, she had joined in the game, even though she had a distinct dislike of gambling.

The stakes were taken directly from Mama’s button box, the advertising for Vogue Tobacco in black lettering on the bright yellow tin which was crammed full of colorful buttons of every size and description. We each started with twenty-five buttons. I liked the big black ones that looked like water bugs and some small red ones in the shape of strawberries, and while Mama didn’t do much but accept the cards dealt to her, and she primarily let Daddy pick out her best five cards for her final hand, and even though Daddy played every professional strategy he knew – and Daddy knew considerable professional strategy, having acquired a good deal of expertise while fighting in the First World War and while traveling with several semi-professional baseball teams after the war and while working as a gandy dancer on the railroad and playing baseball on the weekends in South Dakota – by the time Helen dropped by and interrupted the game, Daddy had three buttons left and I had four, while Mama had sixty-eight buttons piled in front of her in little stacks of five each.

‘That sounds like a knock at the door,’ Mama said, but Daddy said it was only the wind and nobody in their right mind would be out on a night like this with the temperature -60° at most, for at six o’clock when Daddy went to check the temperature he came back to say the thermometer had burst from the cold, and the little blob of red mercury had trickled down the front of the thermometer (which advertised the M. D. Muttart Lumber Co. of Edmonton, Alberta) like blood.

‘Won’t be nobody outdoors with a good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard whining across the fields,’ Daddy said.

I was about to agree when my ears caught the sound Mama had heard, and I decided it was indeed a light knock muffled by the door, the blanket, the horsehide robe, and the beginnings of the good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard.