Jim napped again in the morning and woke feeling better after his two good meals. By afternoon he was ready to take off again; the weather had cleared. But the distance to the next stopping place was a good day’s walk up the Kempt Road, so Robert pressed him to stay.
He had time to oil the moccasins his father had given him, his heavy boots being inappropriate for the snowshoes made by the Micmac tribe in Port Daniel, whom his father somehow knew. Made of ash that looped around the front, ending in long straight points behind, they cradled a webbing of babiche, strips of dried moose hide. Somebody knocking?
Jim frowned and then decided to go down. Robert and Elizabeth were out in the barn, some hundred yards away, and Helen had gone off for the day. He opened the door.
“How do you do. Daniel Busteed.” The man put out his hand, and Jim was struck by his likeness to Robert. “I was just calling in to see if my sister Helen wanted a ride into Restigouche. I have to pick up medicine at the hospital for a sick woman back in the woods.” Unlike his brother Robert, Daniel seemed slight, almost ascetic, with the air of a scholar, and a slight British accent.
“Helen’s off at a quilting bee,” Jim said. “I’m Jim Alford, from Shegouac.” He hesitated. “But if there’s room in the sleigh, I’d like to see the hospital. I heard tell there was one up at the head of bay.”
Daniel seemed taken aback by his eagerness, but perhaps out of good manners replied, “Come right along.” He waited while Jim put on his heavy boots and clothes, and out they went.
“Not often I get to ride behind a horse!” Jim confessed, as he swung into the sleigh after Dan.
“Not too many down your way?” Daniel sounded a bit supercilious as he slapped the horse with leather reins. They set off at a good pace through the bracing air that had now turned colder.
Jim was glad of his heavy tuque. He noticed that Daniel wore a fur hat in the manner of a Londoner. “Robert told me you studied in London to be a doctor.”
“I did. But it all got rather too much. Amputations, cutting off arms and legs, not for me, I’m afraid. I came back.”
“Weren’t you afraid of your friends making fun of you, I mean, coming back after a big adventure like that? You obviously thought you’d be staying.”
Daniel cast him a surly glance. “Not at all. I worked at Saint Thomas’s Hospital for a time, but I didn’t like it so I came back. Where is the failure in that?”
Aha! Good, an escape hatch, thought Jim, if his own trip to Montreal ended badly. He’d been worrying what to do. Now having upset his host, he kept quiet and just gave in to enjoying the journey.
Such a lovely thing to race over the ice in a sleigh hauled by a horse, bells ringing on its hames. Daniel headed up into the narrows to find safe ice for crossing. The dark spruce were fluffed up like roosters with coxcombs of snow, their branches piled with great perching tufts. Soon the horse headed out across the smooth ice of the bay, and Jim called to mind the grinding, bumpy, muddy miles over roots in their oxcart with his mother, trekking each autumn to the gristmill in Paspébiac for their wheat to be ground. Now, with Manderson’s mill in the Hollow, no need for that boring trip. He remembered that one year they had decided to grind on their own with a mortar and pestle. He used to help his mother; in fact, all the children took turns. That was even more tedious. He made a mental note: the sooner they bought a horse at his farm, the better. But was he not going away? Put the farm out of your mind, he told himself.
“I guess they got a lot of them hospitals in London, then?” Jim asked. “Lots o’ people too, I would imagine.”
Daniel glanced sideways, scorn written in his eyes. “St. Thomas’s built a new operating room up in what they called the Herb Garrett. Mainly for amputations. I watched a couple. That was it.” As they reached the other shore, the horse shied at something in the woods and both men grabbed their seats. “I picked up all I could. Pretty interesting: medicine. Lots of developments recently.”
“My father, he saw lots of blood and gore. Fought against Napoleon on the high seas, over in Europe. But he don’t talk about it much.”
Again, he seemed to have said the wrong thing. Daniel pursed his lips, and then went on, “Since that time, they’ve made quite a few discoveries. Ether’s coming in; you can put a patient to sleep while you saw off his leg. Big help. I just read about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, a magazine just for doctors.”
Jim was suitably impressed. “So you still keep up with the latest?”
“Of course,” snapped Daniel. “The journal began almost forty years ago, and I get The Lancet too; it started around that time. You can even get a full degree in medicine, if you’ve a mind, at King’s College. That’s been going since the thirties.”
“None of them doctors down on the Coast, that’s for sure.”
“Pretty small potatoes hereabouts.” Daniel lapsed into silence, then broke it with a hint of excitement. “You know, nowadays they can vaccinate children against disease? Stops the pox. Been doing it in England for some time. I read that it just became compulsory for babies there. Vaccination, it’s going to arrive over here some day.”
“We got no small pox on the Gaspé, for sure. But we have diphtheria. My uncle died of it.”
“No vaccination for that. Nor cholera, which is taking a terrible toll.”
“My father’s mother died of it coming over the Atlantic. Lots of that over in Europe and England, I heard. They bring the plague here in ships, but make them stop outside Quebec.”
“Yes, Grosse Ile.” Daniel slapped the reins as they turned onto a more beaten path. “When I was leaving England, they were coming to the conclusion that it was the squalor caused those epidemics. With all the space we have here, we avoid that. You have no idea of the overcrowding in London, and in the North. All that dirt and filth — the report claimed that was the cause. It’s probably what got those Poor Laws passed, not so long ago.”
Jim found himself enjoying the ride in spite of his companion’s frosty attitude. “Pretty rough time if you’re poor in the Old Country. Poppa told me when he came down from the North one time, people were hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. I could never believe that myself.”
“Well, perhaps not for a loaf of bread, but for five loaves, or anything like that. But they stopped most of the hangings thirty years ago, and fifteen years ago they stopped it all, except of course murderers and those with treason on their mind.”
So times were improving, Jim thought. “Did you work among the poor?”
“My intention precisely. I wanted to end up at St. Thomas’s Hospital as a general practitioner. But then, I found out that a patient had to have money to get admitted!” Daniel snorted. “And you have to be adjudged curable, and what is more, you must prove that you have enough money to buy your own burial shroud!”
Jim whistled.
“Yes, that did it for me. I didn’t go across and do all that studying just to look after the rich.”
Perhaps he was not such a bad sort after all, Jim was beginning to think. “So now, you look after the likes of us on the Gaspé Coast? You still get paid, though?”
“Well, they bring me eggs, they bring me flour, whatever they can, so I don’t do too badly. In England, they brought in laws stopping the Truck System, you know, trading jobs for goods and so on, back around thirty-one, I believe. Certainly wouldn’t work here, that law.”
Jim chortled. “That’s for sure.”
“Probably better it doesn’t, for a while,” Daniel murmured.
I can write all this to my father, Jim said to himself: medical journals, ether, so many changes. When I get to Montreal, that will be my first letter. He thanked heaven that he’d applied himself when his father had schooled him and his brother Joseph; his sisters could neither read nor write.
They reached the hospital and after what he’d heard about St. Thomas’s in London, the plain square wooden building in Restigouche seemed to Jim a bit of an anticlimax. But Daniel was anxious to get to his patient and come back home before dark, so he did no more than show Jim one of the wards. Jim was happy just to glance in at the door, afraid of those epidemics he’d heard about. The hospital could be full of disease after all. Better get back to the sleigh ride he loved so much.
* * *
The next morning Jim would be setting off, all alone. So why not throw himself into enjoying this last evening with his hosts? “That was one of the best suppers I’ve ever been served!” he said as he finished his bread pudding. “You’re a fine hostess, Helen.”
Across the table through the candlelight, Helen smiled. “I’ve had a lot of training, I suppose. As you might imagine, being close to the Kempt Road, we do get a goodly number of visitors.”
“You should open a hostel.”
“Oh no,” Robert replied quickly. “This way we can refuse whom we like, and invite in only those we feel partial to.”
Jim accepted the compliment with grace. “Well, our family in Shegouac will always be in your debt.”
“You do seem to have a distinguished father.” Elizabeth finished her pudding, and sat back.
Jim looked up quickly. It was the first word she had spoken, though she had been watching him closely all through their supper. Not a greatly pretty woman, but striking, with broad almost manly features. She apparently helped Robert with the barn work, leaving the cooking and quilting bees to her unmarried older sister, now nearing forty.
“And I’m very grateful to your brother, sir, for taking me on his sleigh. I did learn much about England, and saw a little more of your countryside up here. Fine way to travel. Nothing as pretty as a horse in harness. I hope one day, the Alfords will bring the first to Shegouac.”
Elizabeth wiped her lips with her napkin, put it down, and looked boldly across the table. “We have two fine horses and one young filly in the stable. Would you like to see them? I’ve got to go out and do the chores.”
“I surely would, ma’am,” Jim said. “Nothing’d suit me better than giving you a hand. Least I can do, after this fine day, with all the food and lodging. If only there was something more I could offer.”
“Not at all,” Robert replied, “you’ve given us quite enough. We get little news from down your way. Most travellers come through from Halifax, or Fredericton, and perhaps from our own New Brunswick coast.”
Once out in the stable hanging their heavy outer coats on pegs, Jim was mildly shocked to see Elizabeth wearing a pair of rough trousers. She noticed his look. “I can hardly muck out a stable with a skirt on, now could I?”
That said it all for Jim. She stood squarely, taking in his tall form. Could it be that she had eyes for him? After all, they were alone now, with little chance of being interrupted.
She must have read his mind, because she said roughly, “First we’ll need some straw down from the loft for the cows and a bit of hay for the horses. If you climb this ladder and fork it down, I’ll feed them.”
Up in the loft forking down hay came so naturally, he realized how much he would miss the farm when he got to the city. But he put away any doubts; now was not the time: he had a long trek ahead. So he enjoyed helping and in short order they had the animals fed.
Elizabeth threw some grain in to the chickens and got dishes of oats for the two horses and filly, which Jim duly admired. She spent some time giving one a bit of a brush down, and encouraging him to start on the other. He enjoyed it. “Guess I’d better learn how to do all this if we’re gonna have a horse one day. We sure don’t brush down Keen and Smudge.”
“Keen and Smudge?” Elizabeth laughed. “What delightful names for oxen! You know, you’re one of the first travellers recently who knows what he’s doing in a barn. I like that.” She came out of the stall to put the brushes and curry combs on a ledge. Then she faced him.
Did he see desire in her look? Well, give it a try. He grabbed her, just the way he did with other girls.
She froze. Then she smiled. “I forgot. You’re from way down the Coast. And probably, a bit new to all this, from what I’ve heard.”
Jim didn’t know what to make of that. He dropped his hands to his sides. She turned, took his strong fingers in her no less leathery hand, and led him to an empty pen at the back of the stable. “We butchered our yearling bull a month ago. This is empty.” She opened the large, wooden plank door, and ushered him in.
“Now,” she said, “is there any reason to be in a hurry?”
“I’m going nowhere tonight.” But then Jim added, believing it was incumbent upon him, “In the morning I have to be off for Montreal, ma’am.”
She looked at him boldly. “Ma’am? Don’t you think, in these circumstances, you should call me Lizzie? Or even, my love?”
This was certainly a new turn of events. Jim couldn’t for the life of him say “my love,” but he certainly could blurt out, “Lizzie, I think you’re some attractive woman.”
“Good,” was all she said. She took a step forward and then pressed herself firmly against him. He grabbed her again. “Uh-uh!” Firmly, she placed his hands at his sides. “I thought we weren’t in a hurry.”
Maybe not, but he felt such a rush of blood he found it hard to restrain himself.
“Are you cold?” she asked
Jim shook his head. Stables were even warmer than the house, with all the heat of the animals and the low roof insulated by its loft of straw.
“Good.” She took off her own garment. He doffed his heavy shirt, and stood, uncertain, in his woollen underwear.
She pulled him down in front of her. Then she admired his body with big, appraising eyes. Oddly, he felt no shame, only curiosity.
She eyed him. “Have you done this before?”
Jim shook his head.
She smiled, nodded to herself. “Not often I get, well, one so young, and so alone.” She fondled him. “Something very special, you know, your first time. You’re likely not to forget this.”
“I guess I won’t, ma’am — I mean, my love.” It sure sounded funny, but right now, he’d say anything to please.
She undid her own clothes and underthings. With wonder, Jim watched her white body as she lay back in the shadow of the wooden partition between the stalls. She reached up to his face, fondled his cheeks, and then brought his head slowly down, pressing it against her breasts. “You may kiss me — but gently.”
And kiss her he did. That, and much more.