W. Kinsella - The Winter Helen Dropped By

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.’