W. Kinsella - The Winter Helen Dropped By

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.