THE OLD ROAD FROM Nicola to Kamloops winds through grassy hills which take your breath away in their stillness. Past Stump Lake, Napier Lake, Trapp Lake, Ussher Lake, unseen in the west but remembered for the murder of John Tannatt Ussher by the sad McLean gang in 1879, past sway-backed cabins collapsing gently into fields, fields alive with savannah sparrows, horned larks, coyotes, through Rose Hill and Knutsford, until it finally leads you into Kamloops itself. Each rise and fall of grass slope is like a basket, a coiled burden basket of split root, hooked through with the bark of bitter cherry, the bleached stems of canary grass. The road a handle, a scaffolding, holding the baskets together with their contents of berries, freckled meadowlark eggs, the occasional horse pausing in its grazing. Driving, we are quiet, thinking of the cattle who passed over this ground, the home-steads forged by those paying the ten-dollar fee under the Dominion Homestead Regulations and then building a house, breaking the land, fencing their quarter section. The maps are quilted with the neat stitches of fencelines, threaded with creeks where stock might wander to drink — Campbell, Peterson, Anderson — and jewelled with lakes, blackbirds whistling from the reeds. In old dooryards are lilacs and roses gone wild; lines of Lombardy poplars remember their planting. A girl born in this landscape would know the wind’s quiet voice in the cottonwood leaves and would stop to listen to skeins of geese coming from the south to land on the sloughs. In such ways the world is remembered.
Nicola to Kamloops, May 15-18, 1906
Two days later, the family was waiting for the stage at the Forksdale- Kamloops road. After breakfast, Jenny’s brother August had brought them down from the ranch in the buggy, and he would take care of the home ranch while they were away. Jenny and Margaret waited in the buggy while the younger children watched for the stage and William and August talked about the Miner capture. It was all anyone talked about these days. Many felt that a mistake had been made, that a genial man like George Edwards couldn’t possibly be the notorious train robber the police insisted he was. They were awaiting positive identification by a Pinkerton detective, but his tattoos gave him away, or so the Corporal had told the men at Douglas Lake. A ballet dancer around his right arm, two stars on his left arm, and a heart pierced with two daggers. There was also a bluebird on his hand. These marks had not been noteworthy among the native people in the Nicola area because the Thompsons often tattooed themselves in connection with important dreams or to inspire courage and strength.
The stage announced itself in a cloud of dust, four bay horses at a brisk trot. It drew up, and the horses stood still while the Stuart family said their goodbyes to August. William’s friend Angus Nelson was driving, so after tying the luggage securely onto the roof, the two men sat on the driver’s bench with Tom in the middle; Tom held the reins proudly on the straight stretches of road. Jenny, Margaret and the two girls were tucked inside, Mary and Jane holding on to the edges of their seats for dear life. Jenny looked nervous. Margaret was beginning to understand that her mother was happiest at home with her own children around for company or with other ranch families whom she knew well. She would go with the family to concerts and outings, but she seemed uncomfortable in large groups or in unfamiliar settings. Once Margaret had observed a woman speaking quietly to another as the Stuart family arrived at a Victoria Day fete in Nicola Lake, and she overheard one woman say “klootchie” and nod significantly at Jenny Stuart. Later Margaret asked her father privately what the term meant. Furious, he told her never to use such a word in the presence of her mother, that it was meant to demean Indian women, like squaw, and he would not hear it used in reference to his wife or any other woman.
“But Father, I only asked you because I didn’t know, I’d never heard it until the women at the picnic —”
William pulled her to him. “Margaret, I’m sorry, I know you weren’t being disrespectful. There’s an attitude, though, you will come upon it in your life, possibly you already have, that distinguishes between Indians and whites. It’s hypocritical, you know, especially in this valley where a lot of the families have intermarried — look at the Coutlees and Voghts. I love your mother, and I won’t have her hurt. And, my dear, that goes for you as well. You are as good as anyone alive, you have the blood of the Stuart kings in your veins as well as noble Thompson blood. Keep your head high, and don’t let the small souls of the world hurt your feelings.”
In the box of her life, a length of bone, some photographs, a program. How do I balance the composition of what might be expected of a young woman of her time and place with what might be remarkable? What have I learned from dreaming her shape into my life, and how can I know what is memory and what is desire? One person struck by a stone, said Pliny, forgot solely how to read and write. Another who fell from a very high roof forgot his mother. And as sleep gradually steals over one, it restricts the memory and causes the inactive mind to wonder where it is. But what if the mind has not forgotten, exactly, but has remembered a girl who might never have been? Not a mother, not a sister, but a younger earlier self? What if the mind carries her as imagery of nostalgia, which is only a longing for home? And what is home but the cradle of the self? Carried in the wild rye, the bunch-grass, the yellow feathers of rabbitbrush, in soft wind, the subtle seeds pause and attach.
Thinking on what her father had said, Margaret remembered a certain coolness on the part of some of the girls at school, but she’d put that down to the fact that she didn’t attend regularly and hadn’t made friends as easily as the others. And there had been lots of children who were either fully Indian or who had one Indian parent. Oddly, Margaret had never really thought about this before in any meaningful way. She was who she was, they were who they were. Sometimes you liked a person, found her congenial, sometimes you had nothing in common. Many were eager for male attention and talked endlessly of who was sweet on whom and whether their affection was returned. Little tokens were exchanged carefully, so the teacher wouldn’t catch on. Margaret had never received a token from a boy or a girl, nor had she given one. Because she came to school infrequently, she was intent on learning as much as she could while she was there. She couldn’t remember taunts specific to her Indian blood, though. Or would she have recognized a taunt if she heard one?
None of it mattered this fine May morning on the road to Kamloops, but it did make Margaret feel a protective tenderness toward her mother, and she linked her arm through Jenny’s and put her head on her mother’s shoulder. Her mother patted her hair with one gloved hand. Jenny Stuart wore a dark blue gabardine skirt she’d made that winter and a jacket of soft grey wool. At home she never wore a hat, but for the trip she’d trimmed her navy straw boater with a piece of grey velvet ribbon. It was soothing to sit by her and smell both the unaccustomed fragrance of clothing stored in a cedar-lined trunk and the familiar scent of her hair and skin.
The ride to Kamloops took twelve hours. The usual stage from Forksdale was spread over two days, but Angus Nelson told William he was trying a one-day run, and this fit nicely with William’s plans. Stops were made along the way, one to change horses at Rockford on Stump Lake, where tea and hot biscuits were provided. Later, Angus stopped to water the team as needed at lakes near the road; he untied a bucket from under his seat and dipped it into the cold water, letting each horse drink its fill. Everyone stretched their legs and disappeared behind bushes to relieve themselves on the warm ground. It was a beautiful drive, the road rising high and passing hill after hill of blowing grass. Marshes alive with blackbirds could be seen as the horses clipped along, and once Tom called out for them to see coyotes at play in the sunshine.
It was growing dark when they arrived in Kamloops, but the city was vibrant with life. The stage took them directly to the Grand Pacific Hotel, its entrance on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Lansdowne Street lit by a street lamp. The manager was expecting them and directed a boy to take their bags up to the suite of rooms Father had reserved. The children were thrilled to see that the window of their room opened onto a balcony overlooking the street. They kept calling one another to see the lively scene below — two men laughing loudly as they left the hotel’s saloon; a Chinese family hurrying in another direction, the mother dressed in bright clothing and walking in small steps behind the father; a group of men seated under the trees outside the hotel talking of the Miner gang. Phrases of their conversation rose up to the family leaning out the window, screened by darkness and the new leaves. Father explained that the train robbers were being held in the Kamloops prison awaiting their trial on May 28. The manager, who had come up to make sure all was in order, told him that he was lucky he’d booked the rooms early. Now, what with Madame Albani’s concert and the Miner trial, most hotels were full to the brim. People were coming from as far away as Vancouver to attend the trial and to get a glimpse of the notorious Bill Miner.
“He may be the fella, all right, but I hear over and over again that George Edwards wouldn’t hurt a fly, everyone likes him, and there seem to be irregularities about his arrest. They say the Pinkerton detective, a weasely sort called Seavey, led him to believe he was an attorney. False pretences, I say, and so say many others, too. Ah, Stuart, you’ll find this town fairly buzzing.”
It was difficult to get to sleep that first night in Kamloops. The beds were unfamiliar, the pillows deep and soft. Margaret woke in darkness and couldn’t get her bearings. Where she was accustomed to seeing the moon through a lattice of ponderosa directly in front of her bed, there was a wall. Then she remembered where she was; she could hear her parents talking quietly in the other room, which reassured her, and she sank back into the pillows to make the morning come sooner.
I have slept in old hotels, not the Grand Pacific (famous for its bathrooms, among the first in Kamloops), which burned in the thirties, but others, in Paris, in Dublin, in the Nicola Valley itself. I know she listened to the creak of timbers beyond the dark ceilings as the building adjusted its weight, the sound of pulleys, the quiet voices of the kitchen help at first light, taking a moment to enjoy a smoke before beginning their day. And the peach-skin softness of the sheets in their folds, the smell of soap and the wind of Kamloops, a different wind from the one she was accustomed to, bringing with it train fumes and commerce and the faint odour of the North Thompson tumbling from its headwaters down through Avola, Clearwater, McLure. All over Kamloops while she slept, the city waited for morning. In the jail, the three accused robbers slept fitfully; in the Fulton household, the family of the Attorney General dreamed of his successful prosecution of Bill Miner, still to come; in the newspaper offices, the typesetters wiped inky hands on their aprons and held up chases of type to place in the presses, pulling a proof of the headlines, excited at playing a small part in history. And on the road from the Cherry Creek ranch, a hopeful wrangler rode a pretty bay mare at a quick trot, not wanting to miss an appointment with William Stuart.
Rising before the others, Margaret went to the window in her nightdress to look out at the street. Sounds of the morning filled the air — a rooster, even in the city, crowed the hour; buckets clanging in the livery stable told her that horses were being fed; a boy carried newspapers down the street and dropped them at many of the doorsteps, including the hotel’s. Two men in suits were striding down the road, and one looked up to see her in the window, her shoulders bare and her hair still unbrushed. He raised his hat and called out to her — she was a lovely sight to behold this fine May morning. Margaret’s hands flew to her face and she left the window in a hurry, her cheeks burning. By now the children were stirring, and she could hear her father cough. She put her clothes on and went down the hall to use the bathroom. A maid just coming out the door told her that the towels were fresh, and there was lots of hot water should she care to bathe. What luxury, thought Margaret, as she ran a tub of water and stretched out in comfort. At home, they heated water for baths on the stove and then emptied the tub, bucket by bucket, after. But this was lovely, hot water up to her chin, and then big towels to dry off with as the water ran down the drain, whirling like an eddy on the Nicola River. She returned to the suite of rooms to find her family waiting for her so they could go down for breakfast.
A table had been set for them, and a newspaper was folded beside the plate William Stuart sat to. He unfolded it, shook out the wrinkles and read the headline aloud: THE CHASE, THE CAPTURE AND THE COMMITTAL. A waitress served coffee to William and Jenny and looked inquiringly at Margaret, who started to demur but then impulsively held out her cup. The newspapers made the capture of George Edwards seem heroic, she thought, as though a dangerous criminal had been caught at great risk to the team of men and dogs who had tracked them down. She saw again the three men around a campfire preparing a meal, the approach of the posse, the questions, Mr. Edwards’s calm replies, and then she heard the sound of gunfire and screams as she galloped away over the spring grass, the meadowlarks silent in the pauses between gunshots. The coffee tasted good, and she breathed in its aroma as she raised the cup to her mouth.
“Margaret, if you’re going to drink coffee, you should at least take cream. There’s no need to drink it black, as though you’re in a cowcamp.” Her father smiled and then returned to the newspaper. He didn’t stop reading until plates of eggs and slices of pink ham, mounds of potatoes dusted with parsley, and high golden biscuits were placed in front of the family. Margaret thought she couldn’t possibly eat such a huge breakfast, but each mouthful tasted wonderful, and before she knew it, her plate was clean. Her brother and sisters, too, had made similar short work of their breakfasts and were eager to be excused to explore the street. Jenny Stuart took them out into the morning after conferring with her husband to find out what plans he had for the day. He told her he’d arranged to meet someone at a stable down the road in order to inspect a mare. He’d take Margaret, if Jenny could spare her, because he wanted her opinion.
Margaret changed her shoes and they walked the short distance to the stable, arriving there before the man they were to meet. William knew the owner and went into the barn with him to see some saddles, and Margaret remained on the bench in front of the stable, reading the newspaper that had been left there. Each player in the capture of the train robbers had a tale to tell — the provincial constable who first met the three near the Stevens ranch and raced back to Douglas Lake for help, the Royal North West Mounted Police sergeant from Calgary who approached the three men by the fire and accused them of the crime. The paper was full of the story from all possible angles, from notes of the preliminary hearing two days earlier to an account of Bill Miner’s connection to the Aspen Grove and Nicola Valley communities. Margaret was engrossed in reading every word when her father came out. She tucked the newspaper into her handbag and rose from the bench as her father said, “Margaret, come see this mare. Tell me what you think.”
William led her through the barn to some holding pens behind. A bay mare was waiting there, pushing her nose curiously in Margaret’s direction. She blew air into the flat palm the girl offered her, then lowered her head to smell Margaret’s dress, allowing the girl to stroke her ears and run her hands down the mare’s neck to the muscular chest. She removed a twig from the forelock, which was short and brushy, like a thistle. The mare was not big, Margaret judged her to be about fifteen hands, maybe fifteen-one, but she gave an impression of vitality because of her broad chest, strong legs, healthy coat and wide clear eyes.
“She’s from Cherry Creek,” William explained. “They’ve got a good breeding program right now, and I’d like to have a purebred mare with her size and strength. I think she’d throw a good foal if we bred her to the Bonny Prince.” The Bonny Prince was the stud that William had acquired a few years earlier, a handsome stallion gentle enough to use as a saddle horse. Margaret thought the prospect of a foal from the two was excellent, and she told her father so.
“Her legs look good, Father, no splints or spavins that I can see. Does she mind her feet being held?”
“Why don’t we try her?” William climbed over the fence and approached the mare’s left side. She looked at him curiously but didn’t move, even when he lifted each foot in turn, examining the inner foot for thrush or damage. He ran his hands down her legs to feel for lumps or sensitive areas and was pleased to find none, pleased that the mare stood quietly for this. Putting his fingers in the sides of her mouth, he opened her jaw so that he could examine her teeth. When he’d finished she blew so hard that her lips vibrated, but still she was calm.
The horse’s handler, sensing that a deal was imminent, went into the barn to leave William and Margaret alone.
“I think we’ll take her, Margaret. What do you think?”
“She’s lovely, Father. Do you intend to ride her home?”
William had thought about this and wondered how best to do it. “She’s not in foal now, they weaned her last colt a few months ago, and she’s in good condition, I’d say. What about you riding her along with the stage to the stopping house at Trapp Lake, then continuing home in the stage with the others? I’ll stay overnight at Trapp Lake and finish the journey the next day. I don’t want to strain her; it would be better to keep her pace a little slower than the stage’s, I think.”
“But Father, I’ve nothing to ride in. I didn’t bring clothes I could wear to ride all that way.”
William looked at his daughter, cleared his throat once, then twice. “Margaret, I was wrong about the trousers. I shouldn’t have let my sister’s comments make a difference in the way we conduct our lives. When she and my mother were visiting, I wanted them to approve of what I’d done, the life I’d made with your mother, and Elizabeth’s outburst reminded me so much of our father and all that I’d wanted to leave behind. Not the people, if that makes sense, because I did and continue to love them, but their attitudes. And then I behaved just as they wanted me to, I don’t know why. I suppose old habits are hard to break. Anyway, girl, you’re seventeen now, a young woman, and it’s time you stood up for yourself. I’ll give you some money and you can buy yourself comfortable clothes for riding. Fair enough?”
Margaret hugged her father and then the mare. The wrangler returned and William bargained a little to bring the asking price down, then the two men walked to the Inland Club to seal the deal with a gentleman’s whiskey. Margaret went shopping.
There were so many establishments in Kamloops that Margaret spent a good part of the morning window-shopping. In a druggist’s window, a mannequin held a package of headache powders in one hand while the other hand was raised to her forehead as though to massage the pain away. A little pyramid of the powders sat conveniently on a table to her right, should she need more. Passing a bakery, Margaret’s mouth watered at the sight of the new loaves arranged in baskets in the window. There was also a shop with photographs in its window, and she stood there for some minutes, looking deep into the images displayed against a background of painted cloth. A wedding party, solemn faces staring out, all except the bride, who was smiling a secret smile, her pale shoulder touching the dark shoulder of her new husband. Various groupings of men in formal suits being handed keys or certificates. One she found almost unbearably sad, the Chinese camp, located a distance from the main part of Kamloops. Margaret guessed that most of the residents were railway workers, but she was shocked at the rows of tents shown in the photograph, the crouched figures in their muddy clothing, one of them looking at the camera with desolate eyes, even some children to one side, up to their ankles in mud. The photograph captured lives lived in squalor and despair, all the more poignant for its placement among the weddings and civil ceremonies of Kamloops. She looked at it for some time, wondering why she felt the way she did. She hadn’t known that photographs could do more than provide a picture, but this one seemed to speak a language whose vocabulary she could almost understand.
Margaret found the store she wanted at last, John T. Beaton, Clothier. A sales clerk, dressed in a lovely dress of plaid taffeta with a velvet ribbon tied at her throat, helped Margaret find riding pants of soft green whipcord and a printed broadcloth shirt to go with them. Margaret inhaled the crisp scent of sizing or starch as the clerk led her to a room where she could try them on.
“You look dashing,” the clerk told her as she came out of the room in the outfit. “Not many women have been buying trousers, but that will change. There’s a lady photographer in town who wears them all the time, and I think she looks wonderful, but some people look at her as though she’s committing a terrible sin. Do you need anything else?”
Margaret changed back into her shirtwaist and paid for the clothing, waiting as the clerk wrapped her purchases in brown paper and tied the parcel with string she cut from a huge roll suspended from the ceiling. She wondered if she’d be able to find her way back to the hotel, but with directions from the sales clerk, she was soon walking up to the entrance. Her mother and sisters and brother were sitting outside on chairs set under the trees, the children drinking sarsaparilla from tall glasses beaded with moisture. Jenny ordered one for Margaret, too.
“Father bought the horse, Mother, and he wants me to ride her part of the way home. She’s lovely, quite the nicest mare I’ve seen in a long time, as nice as Daisy in temperament. And you’ll never guess! He gave me money to buy proper trousers for riding.”
Jenny smiled. “So he’s come to his senses about that, has he? I hoped he would.”
They sat in the dappled shade for a time, talking quietly of what they’d seen on the streets of Kamloops. Then Jenny took the children up to their rooms to help them get ready for the midday meal, which they ate in the pleasant dining room, joined by William.
“What would you like to do after dinner, Tom? Shall I take you down to the river to watch the sternwheelers?”
“Oh, yes, Father!” cried Tom, and then Jane and Mary asked if they could come, too.
“Certainly,” replied William, in an affable mood because of his new horse. “We’ll give your mother and sister a break from your chattering.”
He took the children to the river, Mary and Jane each holding one of his hands and Tom racing ahead. Jenny and Margaret decided to shop for dress lengths and some notions needed for sewing, and the two walked out to the store Jenny was accustomed to dealing with.
On an autumn trip to the Nicola Valley to celebrate a wedding anniversary, my husband and I stay in the Quilchena Hotel in a room facing the golf course beyond a row of Lombardy poplars. High ceilings and a tall window make the small room feel airy and light. Because I want to know how it feels to ride a horse to the tree line, urge it to a gallop along the ridge I can see from my window, look back to the lake in its bowl of afternoon light, we arrange to rent horses for a few hours.
I have dreamed of a girl, have seen her shadow among the pines.
My husband rides Chief, a tall pinto gelding with the narrow chest of a thoroughbred, and I am given Brownie, a quarter-horse mare with a brand on her left shoulder and a sleek bay coat. While the wrangler is saddling her, I untangle a length of wild rose stem from her mane and smell alfalfa on her breath. Riding her is both familiar and exotic, my muscles remembering the shape of a horse’s body but aching in the memory. Crossing Quilchena Creek, her feet toss up little sprays of cold water, but she doesn’t stop to drink. Her eyes are fixed on the trail and the rump of the wrangler’s horse, Minnie. Along the side of the hill, working to the top, pausing to look out at the perfectly clear sky and the patchwork of hayfield and pasture, green and gold, gold and green, threaded by tawny dirt roads on the valley bottom. Southernwood and dust are in the air, and I can hear magpies and crows squabbling down by the barn when a breeze carries their argument up. A girl riding this slope would have heard the crows, smiled at their quarrel. Her horse’s feet would have turned up dust and tiny seeds, her heart might have strained as mine does with longing. My horse is willing to jog, eases into a gallop at the tree line to take me across the ridge until I’m breathless with the beauty of the air and sky. At this high point we see piles of bear scat flecked with rose hips, and there are tall firs dangling cones and aspens on the edge of turning. A hawk hangs in the sky below us.
I have so many questions and no one to ask. How bears can sustain themselves on roses, how wind can make such a subtle perfume of dust and leaves, how a young girl can age in the blink of an eye and never understand, until she is a middle-aged woman in red boots riding a borrowed horse, that something irreplaceable is lost and no one else recognizes the loss. A girl to shadow the woman, to take her hands as they walk into brilliant sunlight or under stars, to sleep beside in darkness, her back unbearably tender in her delicate nightdress. Or to dance with, alone in the grassy field, seeds caught in a strand of hair, the hem of a dress. I swing that girl by the hands, letting her fly out with her long skirt floating in wind. I don’t know I’ve let her go until it’s too late to bring her safe into my arms and she is flung into memory.
Eating dinner in the restaurant that evening, I watched from the window, hoping to see her return down the golden hill, swim up from the depths of Nicola Lake, float from the sky in the arms of the wind. No one came, though the little bats swooped under the generous eaves and geese settled in the rushes for the night.
The suite of rooms at the Grand Pacific hummed with excitement as the Stuart family dressed for the concert that evening at the Opera House. Margaret had taken her rose muslin gown out of its case when she’d arrived the night before, and its creases had been eased out with the help of a hotel chambermaid. A simple dress, it suited her dark colouring, and the single strand of milky pearls she wore at her throat was a comely touch. Jenny wore her one formal gown of grey taffeta, sewn from a length brought from Astoria by Aunt Elizabeth, with a cameo on the high collar, a gift from William’s mother. She had coiled her long braid into a coronet around her head and fixed it with tortoise-shell combs.
“You will be the loveliest ladies at the concert,” William told them, admiring the two as they finished dressing.
“What about us, Father?” Jane and Mary had been ready for some time, having bathed upon their return from the river. Each of them wore a dress of fine white organdy, Mary’s gathered at the waist with a blue sash and Jane’s with a pale pink sash dotted with rosebuds. Margaret had brushed out their hair from their customary braids and held it back from their foreheads with bands of velvet ribbon she had purchased with her mother that afternoon.
“You look like wild flowers on the slope of Hamilton Mountain, fresh and sweet,” he assured them.
Tom wore a suit given him by a Nicola Lake family whose son had outgrown it, and he fidgeted and pulled at the tie which William had helped him to knot. Since returning with his father from the river, where he’d seen the SS Peerless beached on the bank, he’d been dreaming of the sternwheelers. William had explained to him that the boats were long past their heyday, the railways had taken over the work of carrying cargo and passengers from one community to another from Shuswap to Savona, and now the sternwheelers were mostly used to move logs. But Tom loved the look of the boats and imagined himself as captain of the Peerless, venturing down the Thompson River, as Captain Irving had, taking flour to the Canadian Pacific Railway crew at Spences Bridge. He was allowed to climb on the Peerless in Riverside Park, and his father had paid a man to take Tom’s photograph, posed on the portside deck like a sailor.
It wasn’t far from the Grand Pacific to the Opera House, just one block south on Fourth Avenue and then west on Victoria Street for slightly more than two blocks. But William had arranged for them to go by carriage so they could arrive in style. Margaret was speechless with excitement as the carriage proceeded along the wide road, past the Fire Hall, the Federal Building, the Bank of Commerce with its ornate stone window headers and rosy brickwork, until they arrived at the Opera House. The driver had to wait his turn to pull up in front of the building, there were so many conveyances delivering concert-goers.
Entering the building and ascending the stairs, Margaret could hardly breathe at the sight of the electric lights, the luxurious wall coverings, and the beautifully dressed people waiting to be shown to their seats. Such gowns and jewels! Margaret had not supposed the women of Kamloops she had seen on her explorations that morning would possess such finery. She felt humbled in her simple muslin dress, but then she remembered how excited she’d been when Father had told the family of the concert and resolved to enjoy every moment of the evening.
William helped them to their seats with the assistance of an usher and then excused himself to return to the lobby to speak to several acquaintances he’d nodded to as they’d entered. Returning just before curtain time, he held a brief whispered conference with his wife and then leaned across Mary and Jane to Margaret.
“Would you like to be presented to Madame Albani later this evening? An old acquaintance, William Slavin, invited me to a reception after the concert. Your mother feels the children should return to the hotel, and she doesn’t want to come herself, but she suggested that you might like to accompany me. We wouldn’t stay late, and God knows you have so little of this sort of thing that you might like the opportunity.”
“Father, how wonderful!”
So it was with doubled excitement that Margaret waited for the curtain to rise upon Madame Albani. The concert was everything she had dreamed it would be. The adored soprano sang a variety of songs from Tosti’s “Goodbye” to the poignant “Crossing the Bar.” The haunting lines Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! sent a delicious shiver through Margaret, reminding her of late April evenings when blackbirds fell silent as the darkness settled down on the little valley of the home ranch. This was like poetry or the language of the Bible, this kind of singing. And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark. Madame Albani’s voice was high and true, and she sang with complete poise. She was stunning to look at in her formal gown, her eyes dark and heavy-lidded, her pale throat covered with necklaces. A young singer, the contralto Eva Gauthier, was only able to sing two songs because of the effects of a bad cold, but Margaret marvelled that someone so young could be so accomplished. She sang one duet with the baritone, the closing number, “A Lover and His Lass,” and it was wonderful to see them address one another so artfully. And then the baritone sang a rousing encore, “Land of Hope and Glory,” which thrilled Margaret to the bone.
After the applause had died down, William leaned to his daughter to ask if she’d enjoyed the concert, but one look at her enraptured face told him all he needed to know. He led his family out to the waiting carriage and returned to the Grand Pacific. “Wait here for me. I’ll help your mother up to our rooms,” he told Margaret and left her in the carriage to muse and remember. She wondered when the performers, both the experienced and professional Madame Albani and the younger contralto, knew that they would be singers. Had they always loved to sing and pursued it as an avocation, or had someone overheard them and realized that they had the gift, persuading them then to devote their lives to the art of music? If you had a gift, would you know? Margaret wondered about her own life. Apart from horses and the ranch, there was nothing she knew or did well, as far as she knew. She could train young colts, track coyotes, spot the nests of cranes. But was there something she could do for the rest of her life? Oh, why hadn’t she thought of it before? Here she was, seventeen, and with no real idea of how her life would proceed. When her father returned to the carriage, she was deep in thought with her face pressed to the window.
Be calm, I want to tell her. Something will come to you, will take you by your shoulders and shake you with its rightness. It will hone your eyes and give you a shape for your stories. But in her seat by the window, Margaret mourned the ordinariness to which she believed she was doomed.
The Slavins’ turreted house on Hill Street was brilliant with light, the sound of music floating down to the street. A tennis court to the east of the house was strung with lights, and many people gathered there in the mild evening air, laughing and talking. William introduced his daughter to Mr. and Mrs. Slavin, and Mrs. Slavin led her to the receiving line and waited with her until it was her turn to be presented to Madame Albani.
The great lady was kind and held her hand as she asked her if she lived in Kamloops. She had a way of smiling deep into your eyes and making you feel as though you were the only person in the room, thought Margaret.
“No, we’ve come from our ranch in the Nicola Valley just to hear you sing,” Margaret told her.
“The Nicola Valley! What a lovely name. And you must be the wild rose of the valley. That colour suits you admirably, my dear.”
Margaret felt her cheeks go warm. “I loved the Tosti piece that you sang,” she told Madame Albani. And ‘Crossing the Bar.’ It was all so beautiful.”
“I’m delighted you enjoyed it. This is my farewell tour of Canada, you know, and when we’ve completed it, I shall sail to England again where I always feel so much at home. But it is very moving to have been able to sing in such diverse places as your Kamloops and Vienna, one of my favourite cities.”
“A farewell tour? Is that why all the songs, or the ones in English anyway, were all about leaving? And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark. And ending with ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ as though to point to your new home?”
“Indeed! And what a clever young lady you are to notice. Your Nicola Valley has taught you to be perceptive. Incidentally, Tosti, who wrote ‘Goodbye,’ a song I love to sing, is the singing teacher for the Royal Family, and I shall no doubt encounter him in my new life in London. I shall tell him you liked his song, shall I?”
After a few more words, Margaret took her leave, and Mrs. Slavin returned her to her father. He smiled at her.
“Did she speak as beautifully as she sang?”
“Father, to think that such people exist! To be able to sing as she does and to think of something kind to say to girls like me. This is her farewell tour of Canada, she told me, and we won’t hear her sing here again.”
William took a glass of champagne from a tray offered by a maidservant and put it carefully into Margaret’s hand. “Only one, mind you, but the evening seems to warrant it. I wonder if the ranch will be able to hold you now that you’ve met the Great Canadian Songstress.”
Dawn saw the Stuart family settling themselves into the Nicola-Forksdale stage and Margaret mounting the new mare to ride alongside. The mare was well trained but skittish, dancing around as Margaret tried to adjust her stirrups. To get accustomed to the horse and settle her down, the girl decided to ride around the block. South on Fourth, west on Victoria, not a soul to be seen, only a few birds in the small trees newly planted at the edges of the streets. Looking west towards the Opera House, she wondered if last night had been a dream. There was no sign that anything unusual had happened on the quiet thoroughfare. The buildings cast shadows that divided the breadth of street into bars of light and dark, some of the carriage tracks across the smooth dirt in darkness, some in early morning light. Which track had been made by the carriage that had taken her family to such an enchanted evening? And could it really have happened here, in this western town, the golden hills visible even now in the distance?
And no memory in her heart of yearnings for a life different from this one, on a spring street in a western town, the little trees pulsing with their green expectations. Shuttered windows were silent in the morning light. Returning to the waiting stage, Margaret told her father she felt confident enough to set out, the mare having settled. The long road home to the ranch was waiting.
At times on the ride to Trapp Lake, Margaret gave the mare her head and let her gallop along the soft dirt road. The horse was sound-winded, and they made good time. Margaret stopped a few times, once to let the mare drink at a roadside slough and once to stretch her legs while the horse nibbled on a clump of sainfoin in bloom on the edge of a pasture. Sometimes they were ahead of the stage, sometimes behind it, but the day was fine, and when they finally reached the stopping house at Trapp Lake, Margaret felt she could go on until home. Her father wanted to stay with the original plan, however, and rest the mare overnight. After a meal and some conversation about the Miner trial — the police bringing the prisoners to Kamloops had broken the journey at Trapp Lake, and the family who ran the stopping house had stories to tell of the three men sitting on the backboard with blankets around their shoulders in the pouring rain — the stage proceeded towards Forksdale and August Jackson, who awaited the family’s return at the Douglas Lake road.
In such ways is the world remembered. A box of slatted wood containing photographs, letters, the program from a concert in an unlikely place, as unlikely as David Daniels singing “Ombra mai fu” in a hall on a remote bus line. Driving through Kamloops nine decades later, I try to see the streets as she would have seen them, at dawn, riding the new bay mare. Although some of the houses remain, the vistas — the river, the golden hills rising from the town’s western reach — are flattened somehow, and the sound is traffic, shrill machinery, not the soft burr of voices as people walk to work in the shadow of sleeping buildings or harness horses in the stableyards. No young woman in plaid taffeta glides through the quiet streets to her job at John T. Beatton, Clothier, where she would spend the morning folding petticoats of fine lawn and dream of the young assistant at the Bank of British Columbia; instead, a girl in tattered jeans with a golden ring through her lip, sipping from a paper cup, head-phones clinging to her ears. I listen for the sound of the printing presses issuing news of the bank robbers and reviews of a concert in the Opera House and hear only a motorcycle accelerating as a light turns green. And dust, yes, descendent certainly from the dust that settled as Margaret rode, as the stars shed their outer skins and windowsills flaked in the weather.