On Sunday morning Stefan took his family for a stroll to see the site of the train crash, dawdling over the trampled grass so Hilde would not tire. The air was cool and he dreaded the coming winter, which everyone said could be “a killer.” The question of a decent place for them to live still plagued him.
On the hillside above the wrecked train, they sat near another group that had come to watch, the children playing and venturing as close to the tangled steel as they dared before the emergency workmen shouted at them. Stefan leaned back on his elbows, a blade of grass between his teeth.
His father ventured a question in their own language. “What will they do with the broken ones? Will they use the wood and steel again or will it just be thrown away?”
If his father would only go to town now and then, try to talk to a few people, Stefan thought. Such a clever man and now he was confused and afraid of everything. Stefan felt a deep sadness to see him like this.
“I don’t know, Papa. I don’t think they know themselves.” He pointed to the passenger car that had been put right side up. “That car I suspect they can fix and use again. It would be the most expensive one, too, don’t you think? With all the windows and things?”
“Dirty foreigners. Won’t even try to talk our lingo.”
Stefan glanced over his shoulder to see who had spoken, but no one looked their way. He spat the grass onto the ground and stood up, not sure if he was ashamed or angry. He should be used to the cruel things people said, but he wasn’t, and he had less and less patience for the lethargy his parents had sunk into, for the futility of their lives. Knowing full well they would be anxious without him, he stalked down the hill, past teams of horses and groups of people in their Sunday best.
Jake sat on a wooden keg, drinking water from a galvanized dipper. He offered it to Stefan. It tasted warm and stale, but he drank anyway because Jake accepted him enough to drink from the same dipper.
Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he pretended interest in order to make conversation. “We sit up there and think, what you will do with broken cars?”
“Well, they tell us they can salvage the passenger car and two of the boxcars. The other boxcar will be abandoned, I guess. They’ll take the steel off it. Too bad, too. Fine lumber—treated and painted. It would make a good farm building of some kind.” Jake stood and stretched. “We can’t waste our time on boxcars now, anyway. We have to hurry to get the track fixed an’ we’re breaking the law by working on Sunday to do it.”
Stefan looked at the toppled boxcar. Some boards were broken, the door hung off the side and a mess from torn bags of flour and packages of squashed prunes lay around. But the floor was solid and the roof was intact.
He hurried after Jake. “What does that mean? Abandoned?”
Jake shrugged. “Just left behind. It’s on railway property, so maybe someone will come and clean it up some day. I don’t know.”
“They would let me? Like the trees?”
Jake hoisted a sixteen-pound sledgehammer without so much as a grunt. “Let you what?”
“Clean it up? I clean it up, I keep it?”
Jake rested the hammer on his shoulder and looked directly at him. “Could be. I can ask. You want it?”
Stefan felt something like the weight of the hammer lift from his chest. He didn’t know the first thing about how he would do it, but he nodded. “I want it.”
• • •
A crew, including a handful of pig-tailed Chinese, left over from a bygone era and looking too slight for such heavy work, had come into town to fix the tracks. Like everyone else, Ann took a few minutes to watch them work, but unlike the others, she was happy to keep her distance. She tried without success to recognize something familiar in the closed faces and downcast eyes of the men in colourless, loose cotton clothes but a great deal had transpired in the past year and a half.
In four days they had the train running. On the fifth day, Freddy and his mother took grateful leave of the nurse and Aspen Coulee. Ann threw the doors and windows open and set Charlie on the back porch to labour through the last few pages of Huckleberry Finn by himself. She cleaned and polished the dining-room table but the bloodstains on the wooden floor of the front hall were impossible to scrub up.
Sheets and towels whipped on the clothesline; an old hen stewed on the back of the stove. When Elizabeth came through the front door just before supper, she raised her voice over the whir of the carpet sweeper. “You have mail.”
Ann put the large red envelope in her apron pocket and continued sweeping.
By the time the women took their tea and mail upstairs, the sun had slid behind the horizon and Ann needed to light the lamp. Across from her, in the stuffed chair, Elizabeth bent her head over the handful of mail.
“There is an envelope from the Canadian Pacific Railway.” Her bruises had faded to small mauve smudges, like crushed wood violets, in the inner corners of her eyes, and there was a purple cross-hatch of lines where she had plucked the stitches out of her scalp while Ann watched and cringed.
Elizabeth pressed a slim piece of blue paper to her chest. “It’s a cheque, made payable to me for—can you believe it? Forty-six dollars!”
Ann felt an easing of tension in her neck. She rested her head on the curved wooden back of the rocking chair.
“That’s a decent amount of money, isn’t it?” Elizabeth asked.
Ann nodded.
“I wonder if Father ever made this much real money in, I don’t know, weeks and weeks.” She turned the cheque over and over. “It won’t be enough to get me out of here, though, will it?”
“No.”
Elizabeth sagged in the chair. “Whatever will I do? I can’t stay here. I won’t stay here!”
“Have you considered . . .” Ann began, not sure her suggestion would be well received, knowing full well that she was thinking more of herself than of Elizabeth.
“Considered what?”
“Well, considered the fact that you have a valuable service to offer the people here, that you could stay and . . .”
“Stay? Here?”
“Just through the winter,” Ann hurried to say. “Or until someone who can afford to buy your house arrives in town.” She lowered her voice and pointed downstairs in the general direction of Mr. Bedlam. “Like a bank manager? We need to make an effort to have Mr. Bedlam leave us, and the town, with a pleasant impression—or at least as pleasant as possible.”
“Another winter here?”
Ann went on quickly. “Jake was willing to pay you whatever you asked to have his tooth taken care of. I have seen at least a half dozen women in town who appear to be in the family way. You could continue with your father’s work, in whatever capacity you are able, and get paid for it. It’s just something to think about.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to argue.
Ann decided to let the subject rest. “And now it’s my turn to read my mail.”
Her diversionary tactic worked. “Are you going to share your letter? Why is it red? And with that huge wax seal? You don’t see them much anymore, do you?”
“Red is for good fortune. Good joss, in Chinese. It’s a long story.”
Elizabeth kicked off her slippers and tucked herself into a cross-legged position on the chair.
Carefully, Ann ran her forefinger under the flap and cracked the seal. A chip of wax fell on her skirt and she scooped it up and warmed it in the palm of her hand until it gave off the faintest whiff of beeswax.
She took a deep breath and read aloud. “Daughter. I sit on this foul box with this miserable letter writer and tell him the words to send to you. He is very young and foolish, I think, but he makes the ugly English words crawl across the paper and they look almost pretty when he is done.” Ann held the thick parchment toward Elizabeth. “She’s right, isn’t she? It is a pretty hand. I can just see her, you know. Such a little tyrant with a tongue as sharp as a knife. I’m surprised that she can still find someone to write her letters for her.”
“Daughter? I thought your mother had passed away. And why can’t she write her own letters?” Elizabeth asked.
Ann took time to think through a cautious answer. “As I said, it’s a long story. Her name is Jingfei Chiu and she’s at least ninety years old, although she tries to pass herself off as twenty years older or younger, depending on whom she is manipulating and why.”
The face across from Ann was full of curiosity, so she continued.
“I lived and worked in an apartment over a warehouse in Chinatown in San Francisco. It was a very lonely time for me. I had no family left and my work, well, it kept me from having many friends or meeting new people. So I got into the habit in the afternoon, when I had time off, of walking through the lanes and alleys, into the pokey little shops with strange, foreign goods and that’s where I met Jingfei. She was alone by then, too, and she decided that I would become something of a daughter to her. If you saw her, you would think she is the most unlikely-looking mother in the world. Small, shrivelled and dressed in one outlandish costume or another. But she has been good to me.”
An owl called outside the window. Both women jumped, then relaxed. Ann felt lighter for having revealed this much of her past, and heavier for not being able to tell it all. “She doesn’t write either English or Chinese. In fact, she told me she has never been to school, even though she’s something of a genius with numbers and figures. No one could ever cheat her with money, although I have a strong suspicion that she has cheated a few people herself.”
She sat up straight and read the rest of the letter, her heart sinking with the next few words. “This old lady does not stay well. Much pain. Probably dead when you get these words far away there where you are. That is the will of the gods.”
“Pain?”
Ann looked up from the page and took a chance. “She had been a concubine since she was little more than a child and suffered severe beatings that plague her still.” At Elizabeth’s shocked stare, Ann went on, “A concubine is . . .”
“I know what a concubine is.” Elizabeth tried to sound sophisticated, but her voice cracked. “You befriended a concubine ?”
“Yes,” Ann answered. “But then, she was willing to be my friend, too.”
Elizabeth squinted from Ann to the letter and chewed on the inside of her lip thoughtfully, but said no more.
At the end of the letter, just below the spot at the bottom where Jingfei made the Chinese characters that indicated her name, was a single sentence. “With much respect, this miserable letter writer would like to say, Venerable Mother very sick old lady.”
Ann took a deep breath, almost a sigh. It was not unexpected.
“What will you do? Will you go?” Elizabeth asked.
“No. When we parted, we knew we would never see one another again. She can’t travel anymore and I will never return. We said our goodbyes.”