The Winter Helen Dropped By

Mama was already pulling on the icy doorknob, trying to make the frosty hinges and the frozen door co-operate. She finally did drag it open a foot or two, and a person was indeed outside, one who pushed itself through that two-foot space and came into the kitchen with a cloud of steam and frost and snowflakes.

‘Why you poor thing,’ Mama said, closing the door with one hand and propelling the visitor toward the baby-pink cook stove with the other. ‘You must be positively froze.’

The visitor stopped about three steps into the kitchen and appeared determined not to advance any further. Daddy and me could tell the visitor was a woman, even with the eyelashes thick with frost, and the lower part of her face covered with a scarf, and it took us about another few seconds to discover that the visitor was not only a woman, but an Indian woman.

The visitor kept looking at the floor, and gave the impression she would rather be almost anywhere else but where she was, except maybe out in the sixty-below weather with the beginnings of a freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard whining across the prairie.

‘Do y’all speak English?’ Mama asked. The visitor let us know by her eyes that she heard, but she didn’t speak a word.

‘Well, first thing we got to do is get you warmed up,’ Mama said, and she guided the reluctant visitor to a chair at our oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which must have looked cheery, for the oilcloth was cream-colored with orange and green tea pots in a pattern, six in a circle, like bright flowers blooming on the shiny cloth.

Mama poured coffee for the visitor, while Daddy stoked the stove, and in a few minutes the snow around the visitor’s feet began to puddle under the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which we had moved even closer to the glowing cook stove.

What the visitor had on her feet were full-sized men’s toe rubbers stuffed with blue insoles made of something very similar to weatherstripping. The whole package was held together by two ochre-colored sealer rings around each foot.

‘It’s what poor people wear on their feet who can’t afford regular shoes and boots,’ Mama had explained to me when I was just little and I had made inquiries about Loretta Cake’s toe rubbers and sealer rings when she had come to call, leading eight square-jawed tabby cats on leashes, and looking like, Mama said, she had just escaped from Gypsyland.

Our visitor also had on a pair of overalls, and over top of the overalls a man’s shirt, looking like it was made from a patchwork quilt. She also had on quite a few shirts and a raggedy man’s parka jacket made of some shiny wine-colored material glazed with dirt. She had a long scarf wrapped around her head two or three times and pulled across her nose and mouth, so what we saw of her was frosted eyelashes and eyes that were deep and dark as a cellar.

The visitor, who I named Helen, though not until late the next day, slept in the kitchen. We started considering what to call her right after we discovered that, as Mama phrased it, she couldn’t say boo in English. ‘I do have a guest room,’ Mama assured the visitor, even though by then it was obvious that Helen didn’t understand a word any of us was saying. ‘But because of this atrocious weather, the kitchen is the only truly warm place in the house, and I use truly warm advisedly. But at least you won’t freeze to death here.’

As soon as Helen was partially unwrapped it became clear that she was not too far from being frozen to death. There were deathly white spots on both cheeks, and Mama had me take a table knife and scrape frost off the kitchen window, and she made a little compress of the frost and showed Helen how to hold it to the frostbite.

Mama also showed Helen the flat, white rocks she was heating up in the oven of the old black-and-silver cook stove with the huge warming oven on top and the water reservoir on the side. Mama would wrap the rocks in flannelette and place them in the bottom of my bed, and in her and Daddy’s bed, and those rocks would make the beds toasty when we climbed in and would keep our feet warm for most of the night.

Helen accepted a cup of coffee, and seemed delighted that there was any amount of sugar and cream to doctor it with. She scooped in three heaping spoons of sugar, then looked at Daddy as if she expected to be reprimanded, and when Daddy didn’t say a word Helen spooned in two more heaps of sugar, then filled the cup right to the brim with the real cream that came from our red Jersey cow, Primrose.

It then occurred to Mama that Helen might be hungry. Mama got a plate of roast pork from the pantry and showed it to Helen, who snatched at the pork like a shoplifter, Mama’s quick reflexes moving the plate away from Helen’s flashing brown hand.

‘You poor thing,’ Mama said. She handed Helen two slices of roast pork, which Helen crammed in her mouth all at once. While Helen chewed, Mama cut four thick slices of homemade bread, using a long saw-toothed bread knife and holding the bread against her apron-covered belly and cutting toward herself, an action Daddy frequently predicted would some day lead to serious injury. Mama then built two roast pork sandwiches, each one about about four inches thick. Mama slathered the pork with homemade mustard, then peppered and salted it. She poured a glass of milk and sat the whole works in front of Helen, who, as Daddy said, dug right in.

‘Poor thing must have been lost for goodness knows how long,’ Mama said.

Especially in the winter time there were no Indians near the Six Towns Area. Those that tented around in the summer on road allowances or unoccupied land always went back to their reserves come fall and lived in cabins (such as they were, Daddy said) in the winter. There was a reserve about fifteen miles north, somewhere between Cherhill and Glenevis, or maybe Glenevis and Sangudo, and Daddy guessed that must be where Helen was from, though neither Daddy nor Mama could guess what Helen was doing out in sixty-below weather, with the beginnings of a freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard howling across the plains.

Mama made Helen a bed on the kitchen couch, after pulling it around in front of the pink-glowing cook stove.

It was a couch Mama herself had made in spite of Daddy being the carpenter in the family. Daddy had promised Mama the couch since before I was born, Mama said, and finally when I was about two, she just got a hammer and spikes and some 2x4’s, and then she stuffed that frame with red clover and upholstered it in gunny sack, and covered it with colorful blankets and pillows. Until I was old enough not to have an afternoon nap I napped on that couch, which had the big cathedral-shaped radio and the black-and-white-striped Burgess radio battery at the head of it, and I’d listen to all of two minutes’ worth of the afternoon soap operas, or as Mama called them, my stories – The Guiding Light, Ma Perkins, Pepper Young’s Family, The Romance of Helen Trent – before I’d drift off to sleep, no matter how hard I fought to stay awake.

Helen smiled when she saw the couch, and smiled again as she laid one short-fingered brown hand on the gunny-sack surface. I wondered if Indians had furniture in the cabins where they wintered. Daddy said he didn’t know, though he did know they didn’t have furniture in the tents they lived in along the road allowances in the summer, just blankets and hides and a few cooking pots.

The next morning, Daddy said that the first time he got up in the night to stoke the stove, he found Helen asleep on the floor in front of the oven door. She had wrapped herself and, he guessed, the hot white rock Mama had planted at the foot of her bed, in the blankets.

The next morning the freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard was raging full steam, though Daddy guessed just by sticking his nose out the door that the weather had warmed up to -40°, because the weather always warmed up when it snowed. The sky was solid as fog and close to the ground, and snow was drifted halfway up the east window. Daddy had to put his shoulder against the kitchen door to push it open enough for him to stick his nose out.

Helen seemed surprised and pleased that there was still sugar and cream to put in the coffee, and she poured in sugar until her cup almost, but not quite, overflowed. Helen ate a big bowl of oatmeal covered in cream and sugar, before she tackled four fried eggs and eight slices of toasted homemade bread, and when Mama pushed the four-pound tin of Aylmer’s strawberry jam, ‘No Pectin Added,’ toward Helen, along with a tablespoon and indicated she should help herself, why, Helen just gave us all a look like she had died and gone to heaven.

Helen was totally surprised by the radio. When Daddy turned the radio on to CJCA in Edmonton to get the grain and cattle prices, Helen looked all around the room trying to see where the music and voices were coming from. The grain and cattle prices were always preceded by a song called ‘The Red Raven Polka,’ what Daddy called a shake-a-leg dance number, that the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers sometimes played at a box social, barn dance, whist drive, or ethnic wedding. I tried to show Helen that the sound was coming out of the cathedral-shaped radio at the head of the couch, and that the power came from the huge black-and-white-striped Burgess battery. Helen finally put her ear up to the front of the radio, then she walked across the room, noting, I guess, how the sound got dimmer as she moved.

‘Can’t put nothing over on her,’ Mama said.

Helen smiled like Mama does when she sees a double rainbow after a thunderstorm.

The blizzard roared on all that day, only Daddy going out to feed the animals, milk the red Jersey cow, Primrose, and carry in more cut wood for the stove.

In daylight, even if the daylight was like dusk all day, I noticed quite a few things about Helen, though it wasn’t until after supper that I named her Helen. I guessed Helen was an adult like Mama and Daddy, though pretty young; I guessed eighteen, Daddy said twenty, and Mama was more inclined to sixteen, though she said she’d reserve judgment for a day or so.

Helen was about as tall as Mama, a height Daddy called big as a minute, a minute not being very big at all, only she was what Daddy called big-boned, so she looked a lot larger than Mama. Her hair was long and black as a crow’s wing, kind of wild and tangled, her skin was maple-colored and her cheek bones very high. Her eyes were so brown as to be almost black and were wide-spaced and deep-set.

The spots of frostbite on each cheek were angry looking, but she wouldn’t have no scars, Mama said, because of us putting the window frost on her cheeks the night before.

Mama and Daddy noticed something I hadn’t, something they wouldn’t have discussed with me, but since our living space had been constricted by the cold, and since I had a good ear for whispered conversations, I was able to pick up on it.

‘Dark as she is, that girl’s face is covered with bruises,’ Daddy said.

‘Poor thing. That’s probably why she was out,’ Mama replied. ‘She must have had to walk clear across Purgatory Lake to get here. It’s a wonder she didn’t freeze plumb to death.’

I decided right after breakfast that it would be my job to teach Helen, who I hadn’t yet named Helen, to speak English, but I couldn’t quite grasp that a person could not have any knowledge of English. I was trying to teach her whole sentences at once and not making any headway when Mama suggested a game, and I got out Snakes and Ladders. By sign language I taught Helen to count the spots on the dice and then she’d count off the same number on the board, and she’d smile and look proud when she landed on a ladder, and she’d giggle like a little girl and whoosh her button down when she landed on a snake.

I tried to get a name out of her. I would point at myself and say ‘Jamie,’ and I would point at Daddy and say ‘Johnny,’ and I would point at Mama and say ‘Olivia,’ and I would point at Helen and wait for her to say something, but the only sound we got from her were giggles when she landed her button on a snake.

Daddy said he figured she understood but just wasn’t ready to share her name with us yet. It was about that time I decided, as we were getting to the end of her first day with us, that she should be named Helen. She was partly named for The Romance of Helen Trent, the soap opera that asked the question, Can a woman over forty still find romance? and she was partly named for one of my toys, a curly-haired little black animal that I had received from Mama’s sister, my Aunt Mary Kaye, the Christmas before, and had already named Helen, for I considered Helen a very exciting name. The toy had deep-set brown eyes and black hair, as dark as Helen’s but not as crow-wing shiny.

‘We ought to call her Helen,’ I said, and not hearing any objections, I went through the naming and pointing again, pointing at myself and saying ‘Jamie,’ pointing at Daddy and saying ‘Johnny,’ pointing at Mama and saying ‘Olivia,’ pointing at her and saying ‘Helen.’ Helen smiled and giggled just like she’d landed her button on a snake. Still she never spoke a word.

The next few days were some of the happiest of my life, and I bet they were some of the happiest days of Helen’s life, too. I was ravenous for a friend, and Helen was willing to be just about whatever I wanted her to be.

Helen, I guess, was surprised about a lot of things at our big old house at the end of Nine Pin Road, which wasn’t much of a road at all, especially in the winter, but I guess the thing Helen was most surprised at was that we had a pig living in the kitchen.

We didn’t, Mama pointed out that first evening, as she was building roast pork sandwiches for Helen, have a pig living in our kitchen as a rule, unlike some we knew. Helen didn’t pay much attention to Mama, but she did laugh the first time Abigail Uppington came tick-tacking across the cold green linoleum from her box under the stove.

Abigail Uppington only weighed about two pounds, and was the runt of a litter that had appeared way too early in the year, having something, Mama said, to do with Daddy’s carelessness about keeping the boar and the sows separated. I bet Abigail Uppington didn’t weigh half a pound when Daddy brought her in, wrapped in a gunny sack. Mama fixed one of my leftover baby bottles, the rubber nipple stiff and kind of decaying, and fed Abigail Uppington, who at first, like Helen, didn’t have a name. It was Daddy who named her, after she’d recovered, and she’d got strong enough to tick-tack across the cold green linoleum from her box.

‘She acts like she owns the place,’ Daddy said.

Abigail Uppington was a character on a radio show called Fibber McGee and Molly, a character who was kind of like the widow, Mrs Beatrice Ann Stevenson, the artsy-craftsy person of her town, Wistful Vista.

Helen and I played with Abigail Uppington, and Helen laughed and hugged the little pig, and Mama pointed out, even though Helen didn’t understand a word and couldn’t, as Mama said, say boo in English, that pigs were extremely clean animals, cleaner than dogs certainly, and possibly even cleaner than cats. One of Mama’s chief worries in life was that someone, anyone, would think she was a dirty housekeeper.

Mama even got out some doll clothes she’d saved from when she was a girl, and she took a minute out of her work while her and Helen tied a pink bonnet on Abigail Uppington, and when Daddy came in from tending the animals he thought Abigail Uppington in a pink doll’s bonnet was about the funniest thing he had ever seen, and he laughed his laugh which was really a guffaw and could never be mistaken for anything else.

I got out a jigsaw puzzle, which Mama and I both decided would transcend the language barrier. Helen caught on real quick and giggled every time she found a piece that fit, though the way she looked at me and the puzzle, which was of a group of dogs sitting about a table playing poker, the two English bulldogs cheating by passing cards to each other, I bet she wondered why we were doing what we were doing. Mama said she expected Helen spent most of her time just foraging for a livelihood and didn’t have time for putting pink bonnets on pigs or passing the time with jigsaw puzzles.

On the night Fibber McGee and Molly came on the radio, sponsored by Johnson’s Wax of Racine, Wisconsin, Daddy pointed to the radio when Abigail Uppington came to call on Fibber McGee, and said ‘Abigail Uppington,’ and then pointed at the pig Abigail Uppington who was on Mama’s lap drinking from my baby bottle.

I don’t think Helen understood, but she did like the radio and laughed whenever Daddy laughed, which was about two to one for every time me and Mama laughed.

When Fibber McGee and Molly was over Daddy told Helen the story of how Matilda Torgeson of the Venusberg Torgesons was named for a dead pig. Seemed that Anna Marie Torgeson, when she was about seven years old, had adopted a runt of the litter, just like Abigail Uppington, only Anna Marie Torgeson named her pig Matilda. The runt survived and prospered, but Anna Marie’s daddy, Gunnar Torgeson, was a practical man, and when it came time for Matilda to go to market, off she went, in spite of Anna Marie’s wailings and weepings. To ease her pain, Anna Marie’s mama promised that Anna Marie could name the next critter born on the farm Matilda.

‘Well,’ Daddy said, ‘the next critter born on the farm was Anna Marie’s little sister, so the new little sister got named Matilda, in honor of a dead pig.

‘It’s a good job Anna Marie didn’t name her pig Runty or Big Snout,’ Daddy said, and guffawed again.

Helen turned out to be a wonderful playmate. She enjoyed playing with my stuffed toys and with my motor cars, and she was particularly taken with a tiny baby with celluloid arms and legs wearing a blue polka-dot dress. That tiny baby had a key in her belly, and when she was wound up she crawled across the floor, making a kind of crying sound just like a real baby. Helen hugged that little baby and she leaned way back in her chair and let the baby climb right up her from her waist to her chin.

While I had been caught once being totally unobservant, I wasn’t about to get caught a second time, and it was me who pointed out to Mama and Daddy that Helen was pregnant.

I made sure of my ground before I brought the subject to Mama and Daddy’s attention. I cuddled the little mechanical baby and rocked it in my arms, and looked at Helen, and then I pointed at Helen’s stomach and pointed at the baby, and Helen smiled and pointed at her stomach and pointed at the baby. I had noticed that under all the layers of shirts and overalls that Helen’s belly was round and ripe, and her hips were wide. Just to confirm my opinion I got out a book that had pictures of babies in it, and showed them to Helen. Helen patted her belly and pointed at the picture of the baby, indicating with no possibility of misinterpretation that she was building a baby inside her, though the baby she pointed at was pink as a rose petal, with blue eyes. I wondered what Helen thought of when she dreamed of her baby, I wondered if she dreamed of a blond, blue-eyed baby, pink as a rose petal.

‘I do believe you’re right,’ Daddy said, after I pointed out that Helen was pregnant, and Mama also agreed and went and got some of my old baby clothes, and some of the new baby clothes that she had created or acquired during the time she was pregnant with my almost sister, Rosemary. And Helen smiled some more and picked out two pink baby dresses, and a yellow blanket, and put them on top of her dirt-glazed parka so she wouldn’t forget to carry them away when she left.

Leaving was another matter. The good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard just raged on and on. The snow drifted up until the east window was blocked entirely, and the wind was so strong it blew the chickadees right off the branches of the chokecherry tree outside the west window and bounced them off the glass as they tried to pull the dried fruit off the frozen limbs.

Helen continued to eat like she’d never had home-cooked food before, while Mama taught her to wash dishes and set the table and empty the ashes from the cook stove, and, Mama said, Helen caught on quick.

I took to reading to Helen from story books I had outgrown. I read her nursery rhymes and Mother Goose stories, showing her the pictures at the same time, and even if Helen didn’t understand the words she was able to catch the rhythms, and she clapped her hands when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed and blew down the houses of the three little pigs. And Helen pointed at the little pigs and she pointed at Abigail Uppington, and I clapped my hands and Helen reached right over and put her arms around me and hugged me.

Helen particularly liked the rhyme about the three little kittens who lost their mittens, and she had me read that one over and over until I got plumb tired of it, and Daddy said now I knew what I had been like as a little kid and how he and Mama had read those books to me until they were engraved in their brains. The three little kittens rhyme ends with ‘There’ll be rat pie for supper tonight,’ and there was a picture of an ordinary-looking pie but for a rat’s tail sticking out of it. Helen, whenever we got to that part, would cover her mouth and shake her head. I tried to explain that the rat pie was for cats and not for humans, but I’m not sure Helen ever understood.

‘Can’t we keep her?’ I asked Mama. ‘She likes it here and she ain’t no trouble, and she’ll catch on to talking in a few days.’

‘Helen ain’t a pet,’ Mama said. ‘She’ll likely want to get on home soon as the blizzard lets up.’

Which she did. But not before she said her first words. At supper on the third night we had apple pie. Mama had me go to the cellar and get a quart of preserved apples and she hammered out a crust and placed this big apple pie on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table right after we’d finished a feed of side pork and eggs.

‘Rat pie!’ I announced.

And for just one instant Helen believed me. She had her hand halfway to her mouth when she realized I was teasing, and she smiled and shook her head, and then she said ‘rat pie,’ and pointed at the pie and laughed like a little girl.

‘Helen talked,’ I said.

‘Indeed she did,’ said Mama. We all raised our cups to Helen and said ‘Rat pie,’ and laughed like maniacs.

‘In the middle of a blizzard people tend to be amused by relatively simple things,’ Daddy said.

I know Helen would have been talking with us like a regular person in just a few more days, but late that evening the blizzard died down, and deep in the night a chinook swept in, and by morning the powder-dry snow was soggy and the air was warm and moist, and Daddy said he guessed it had gone from -40° to almost 40° above.

Helen had her parka on when she sat down to breakfast and we could tell she was anxious to get to wherever she was going. Mama packed her a big lunch with four meat sandwiches and a quarter of an apple pie, and Mama packed up a whole bundle more baby clothes and forced them on Helen. I gave Helen my picture book with the story of the three little kittens, and said ‘rat pie,’ as I gave it to her, and Helen said ‘rat pie,’ as she accepted it. And we all laughed like maniacs.

Daddy and me and Benito Mussolini, my cowardly dog, all walked Helen as far as the barn, where Daddy sent me in to pick up another gift for Helen, which she accepted, and Daddy shook her hand and I hugged her, and she went on her way. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t keep big tears from rolling down my cheeks.

‘I know about how you feel,’ Daddy said. ‘You’ve had your first taste of being a parent. In spite of Helen being an adult, expecting a baby of her own, she was out of place and more or less helpless while she was with us. It’s awful easy to love someone who’s helpless.’

Chapter Two

The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was not named for one specific event, but for several, unlike the summer following the winter Helen dropped by, which was forever after known as the summer Jamie O’Day damn near drowned except in our family where it was simply the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though the season really was spring and there was ice in the water I damn near drowned in.