The Winter Helen Dropped By

While I had been caught once being totally unobservant, I wasn’t about to get caught a second time, and it was me who pointed out to Mama and Daddy that Helen was pregnant.

I made sure of my ground before I brought the subject to Mama and Daddy’s attention. I cuddled the little mechanical baby and rocked it in my arms, and looked at Helen, and then I pointed at Helen’s stomach and pointed at the baby, and Helen smiled and pointed at her stomach and pointed at the baby. I had noticed that under all the layers of shirts and overalls that Helen’s belly was round and ripe, and her hips were wide. Just to confirm my opinion I got out a book that had pictures of babies in it, and showed them to Helen. Helen patted her belly and pointed at the picture of the baby, indicating with no possibility of misinterpretation that she was building a baby inside her, though the baby she pointed at was pink as a rose petal, with blue eyes. I wondered what Helen thought of when she dreamed of her baby, I wondered if she dreamed of a blond, blue-eyed baby, pink as a rose petal.

‘I do believe you’re right,’ Daddy said, after I pointed out that Helen was pregnant, and Mama also agreed and went and got some of my old baby clothes, and some of the new baby clothes that she had created or acquired during the time she was pregnant with my almost sister, Rosemary. And Helen smiled some more and picked out two pink baby dresses, and a yellow blanket, and put them on top of her dirt-glazed parka so she wouldn’t forget to carry them away when she left.

Leaving was another matter. The good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard just raged on and on. The snow drifted up until the east window was blocked entirely, and the wind was so strong it blew the chickadees right off the branches of the chokecherry tree outside the west window and bounced them off the glass as they tried to pull the dried fruit off the frozen limbs.

Helen continued to eat like she’d never had home-cooked food before, while Mama taught her to wash dishes and set the table and empty the ashes from the cook stove, and, Mama said, Helen caught on quick.

I took to reading to Helen from story books I had outgrown. I read her nursery rhymes and Mother Goose stories, showing her the pictures at the same time, and even if Helen didn’t understand the words she was able to catch the rhythms, and she clapped her hands when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed and blew down the houses of the three little pigs. And Helen pointed at the little pigs and she pointed at Abigail Uppington, and I clapped my hands and Helen reached right over and put her arms around me and hugged me.

Helen particularly liked the rhyme about the three little kittens who lost their mittens, and she had me read that one over and over until I got plumb tired of it, and Daddy said now I knew what I had been like as a little kid and how he and Mama had read those books to me until they were engraved in their brains. The three little kittens rhyme ends with ‘There’ll be rat pie for supper tonight,’ and there was a picture of an ordinary-looking pie but for a rat’s tail sticking out of it. Helen, whenever we got to that part, would cover her mouth and shake her head. I tried to explain that the rat pie was for cats and not for humans, but I’m not sure Helen ever understood.

‘Can’t we keep her?’ I asked Mama. ‘She likes it here and she ain’t no trouble, and she’ll catch on to talking in a few days.’

‘Helen ain’t a pet,’ Mama said. ‘She’ll likely want to get on home soon as the blizzard lets up.’

Which she did. But not before she said her first words. At supper on the third night we had apple pie. Mama had me go to the cellar and get a quart of preserved apples and she hammered out a crust and placed this big apple pie on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table right after we’d finished a feed of side pork and eggs.

‘Rat pie!’ I announced.

And for just one instant Helen believed me. She had her hand halfway to her mouth when she realized I was teasing, and she smiled and shook her head, and then she said ‘rat pie,’ and pointed at the pie and laughed like a little girl.

‘Helen talked,’ I said.

‘Indeed she did,’ said Mama. We all raised our cups to Helen and said ‘Rat pie,’ and laughed like maniacs.

‘In the middle of a blizzard people tend to be amused by relatively simple things,’ Daddy said.

I know Helen would have been talking with us like a regular person in just a few more days, but late that evening the blizzard died down, and deep in the night a chinook swept in, and by morning the powder-dry snow was soggy and the air was warm and moist, and Daddy said he guessed it had gone from -40° to almost 40° above.

Helen had her parka on when she sat down to breakfast and we could tell she was anxious to get to wherever she was going. Mama packed her a big lunch with four meat sandwiches and a quarter of an apple pie, and Mama packed up a whole bundle more baby clothes and forced them on Helen. I gave Helen my picture book with the story of the three little kittens, and said ‘rat pie,’ as I gave it to her, and Helen said ‘rat pie,’ as she accepted it. And we all laughed like maniacs.

Daddy and me and Benito Mussolini, my cowardly dog, all walked Helen as far as the barn, where Daddy sent me in to pick up another gift for Helen, which she accepted, and Daddy shook her hand and I hugged her, and she went on her way. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t keep big tears from rolling down my cheeks.

‘I know about how you feel,’ Daddy said. ‘You’ve had your first taste of being a parent. In spite of Helen being an adult, expecting a baby of her own, she was out of place and more or less helpless while she was with us. It’s awful easy to love someone who’s helpless.’

Chapter Two (#u437e8620-f9a1-5b06-b37f-0aa4dcc01fb8)

The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was not named for one specific event, but for several, unlike the summer following the winter Helen dropped by, which was forever after known as the summer Jamie O’Day damn near drowned except in our family where it was simply the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though the season really was spring and there was ice in the water I damn near drowned in.

The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was known in some circles as the summer Earl J. Rasmussen and the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, officially tied the knot, and then officially retied it in a reconstituted wedding, and in other circles as the summer my daddy took on the bureaucracy to straighten out the life of Lousy Louise Kortgaard.

Both of those events had their beginnings, I believe, at the Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day at Doreen Beach, it being the turn of Doreen Beach to host the annual Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day, Fark having hosted it the year before, and Sangudo being scheduled to host it the next summer. The Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day was the high point of the social season in the Six Towns Area, a fact often pointed out by the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, our poet-in-residence, and Mrs. Edytha Rasmussen Bozniak who, as Mama frequently said, was lurking in the wings waiting to become the person of artistic integrity in the Six Towns Area, should the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, ever falter. Mama said marriage to Earl J. Rasmussen, who lived alone in the hills with about six hundred sheep, would be considered by many to be faltering.

The Fourth of July, while admittedly an American holiday, was what was celebrated in the Six Towns Area of Alberta. The first of July was celebrated in Canada as Dominion Day, but, Daddy pointed out, and so did people like Earl J. Rasmussen and Bandy Wicker, both of whom had emigrated from the United States, and Wasyl Lakusta and Deaf Danielson and Adolph Badke, who had emigrated respectively from Ukraine, Norway, and Germany, that everyone had come to Canada to be free, which they were, but they resented that Canada wasn’t really an independent country, and each and every one of them resented that the King of England was officially the head of state in Canada, and that Canadians sang ‘God Save the King’ at official celebrations, and didn’t have a real flag but one with the English flag, the Union Jack, sitting in its corner and some kind of gold lion or griffon that made it just reek of royalty, something every one of them immigrants had come to North America to get away from. So no one much objected when the official celebration in the Six Towns Area took place on the Fourth of July. Loretta Cake, who lived in an abandoned cabin near to Doreen Beach with about a hundred cats, said something about it being unpatriotic, and so did a family named Baskerville lived up Glenevis way. He had been a major in the British Army and walked around wearing a monocle and hired Indians to work his land because he described himself as a gentleman farmer. But it was generally agreed that English people didn’t know how to have a good time, and that was the deciding factor.

‘If the English was running the celebration,’ my daddy said, ‘we’d all have roast mutton, give a hip-hip-hurrah for the King of England, and go to bed early.’

Earl J. Rasmussen said he didn’t see a thing wrong with folks eating mutton, and if more did why he’d make a better living.

Daddy said, ‘Mutton tastes like wool,’ and that Earl J. Rasmussen should have settled in England where people eat sheep, wool and all.

One of the many highlights of the Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day was the fireworks display, which came at dusk. The fireworks had to be ordered, something that was usually done in March or April, or whenever the annual spring flood of Jamie O’Day Creek, which my daddy had named after me, receded sufficiently for either Daddy or Earl J. Rasmussen or Bandy Wicker to ride horseback as far as Fark and accompany Curly McClintock in his inherited dump truck, along with Curly’s son, Truckbox Al McClintock, who once almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, riding shotgun, to Edmonton where the fireworks were ordered at the Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store, on 114th Street, just north of Jasper Avenue.

Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store also rented merry-go-rounds and carnival games of skill, like over-and-under and ring toss and the one with cement milk bottles and soggy baseballs and a genuine roulette wheel that had once spun in front of the crowned heads of Europe. Acme was owned by a Mr. Prosserstein, who, it was rumored, was Jewish, though no one from the Six Towns Area, even my daddy, who had traveled widely, had to the best of their recollections ever encountered anybody who was Jewish. Mr. Prosserstein did drive a sharp bargain, they said, but not an unfair one, and he was dark complected, Daddy said, and did speak with an unfamiliar accent, and was disinclined to work on Saturdays, all of which considerations pointed to the likelihood that he was Jewish.

The widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, whose only knowledge of Jews came from a play by William Shakespeare, pointed out that Seventh Day Adventists didn’t work on Saturdays either, and that maybe Mr. Prosserstein was a Seventh Day Adventist. She suggested that they carry a roast beef sandwich with them and offer it to Mr. Prosserstein, and if he turned it down why it would prove he was a Seventh Day Adventist, because Seventh Day Adventists were vegetarians.

Daddy said that a roast pork sandwich would be equally enlightening, because if Mr. Prosserstein refused, it would prove he was Jewish because Jews didn’t eat pork.

Mama said that the only thing a refusal of either beef or pork would prove was that Mr. Prosserstein wasn’t hungry, and what did it matter if he was Jewish or Seventh Day Adventist anyway?

Nobody could answer Mama that and the subject got dropped.

Daddy told me Mr. Prosserstein had offered in strict confidence that for a small extra fee he could line them up with a freak show consisting of a bearded lady, a fat man, and a strong man who could lift a plowhorse off the ground with only one hand, or for an even larger fee he could supply dancing girls along with their own tent and a saxophone player. The men of the community called a Farmers Union meeting in our kitchen in order to discuss the dancing girls, but it was decided that the opposition from the women of the Six Towns Area would be too strong if the offer were brought into the open, and if the show were presented surreptitiously, it was agreed that reprisals by the women of the Six Towns Area would be too loud and too lengthy for the small amount of pleasure derived.

Several times a year, whenever the subject of fireworks came up, Bandy Wicker would have to tell the story of how in his home town of Odessa, Texas, the Fourth of July fireworks display once took on a certain air of tragedy.

‘My cousin Verdell had come home especially for the Fourth of July celebrations,’ Bandy Wicker said. ‘Cousin Verdell, he’d been working way out in Deaf Smith County, doing something simple enough for his mind to grasp. Cousin Verdell was kind of like a turkey, you had to keep his nose pointed down during a rainstorm, or he’d have stared at the sky until he drowned.

‘What happened,’ Bandy Wicker went on, ‘was that the mayor of Odessa, Texas, touched a match to the fuse of the rocket held in place by the length of sewer pipe, and a whole passel of people prepared to ooooh and aaaah at Old Glory lighting up the night-time sky for a guaranteed thirty seconds.

‘People waited and waited, and the mayor walked back and made sure the fuse of the rocket in the upright sewer pipe was burning. We all gathered around the rocket when it appeared that the fuse had burned itself both out and off. No one studied the problem more closely than Cousin Verdell, who was leaning directly over top of the rocket and peering down at goodness knows what.

‘It was about this time the rocket decided to fire itself off, an unfortunate occurrence because Cousin Verdell was still standing directly above the rocket, as if it had some mystical significance. The rocket, filled with Old Glory, including forty-eight silver stars, one for each state, terminated Cousin Verdell, instantly.

‘While there was a certain degree of tragedy involved in Cousin Verdell’s being called to his reward, it was agreed that he had lived longer than anyone that dumb had a right to.’

My daddy would always top Bandy Wicker’s fireworks stories with his baseball stories. My daddy had a million baseball stories. ‘Folks around Doreen Beach,’ he’d start off, ‘were not noted for their baseball prowess. For several years there were only eight men in the Doreen Beach district who could play any kind of baseball. To show the lengths folks around Doreen Beach would go to to field a team, one Sunday when there had been a Holy Roller church service at Doreen Beach Community Hall, the ballplayers hid Brother Bickerstaff’s horse until he agreed to be their ninth player, while on another occasion a group of men rode over to Loretta Cake’s cabin, where she lives with about a hundred cats, with the intention of convincing her to stand in right field as the ninth body on the Doreen Beach White Sox baseball team.’

Loretta Cake, who was at best considered eccentric and at worst somewhat mad, confided to Mama on one of the infrequent occasions when she dropped by our house leading eight square-jawed tom cats on leashes and dressed to resemble a middle-aged Englishwoman playing Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, that she harbored secret rape fantasies, a confession that embarrassed my mama no end, and, Loretta Cake went on, she felt that her secret fantasies were about to be fulfilled when she peeked out her window of a Sunday morning and saw several young men on horseback, wearing mackinaws and slouch hats, resembling for all the world the Dalton gang.

I thought Loretta Cake’s confession to be somewhat humorous, hearing it scrunched up in my favorite listening place between the wood box and the cook stove, as I didn’t understand the implications, rape not being a dinner-table topic of conversation in our household, or any household in the Six Towns Area, except possibly that of Loretta Cake and her cats.

The reason I didn’t understand the implication was because, the summer before, one of the Osbaldson boys from around New Oslo had planted five acres of rape, which grew the most beautiful yellow color I had ever seen, looking for all the world like a five-acre canary squatting in the midst of the Osbaldson boys’ green grazing land.

I thought Loretta Cake’s rape fantasies humorous on two levels, one being that Loretta Cake, even if she did go around dressed like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, should have secret fantasies about a field of yellow grain; and two, that Loretta Cake’s secret fantasies about a field of yellow grain should embarrass my mama.

I did not have the sense to keep my mouth shut, so of a Sunday morning on our way to a Sports Day and Picnic at New Oslo, as we were passing by the Osbaldson boys’ five-acre-canary-sized field I suggested I pick a bouquet of the rape to present to Loretta Cake when she appeared at the New Oslo Sports Day and Picnic.

Across the buggy seat, Mama and Daddy exchanged some of the strangest looks I ever saw them exchange in their entire life together, before Daddy explained to me that the word rape had more than one meaning. By the time he finished I wasn’t sure exactly what the other meaning was, except that I had no call to know of it until I was at least twenty-one and living on my own.

My wanting to take a bouquet of rape to Loretta Cake found its way into letters to Mama and Daddy’s relatives in Montana, South Carolina, and South Dakota, and the ears of the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, which was the same as broadcasting the story on CJCA in Edmonton, the radio station most available in the Six Towns Area to those of us who owned radios.

The story passed through the crowd at the New Oslo Sports Day and Picnic even quicker than pinkeye, and I got my hair rumpled and my cheek tweaked for most of the afternoon and evening, though no one ever mentioned to Loretta Cake, who was there, big as life and twice as ugly, Daddy said, why everyone was rumpling Jamie O’Day’s hair and tweaking Jamie O’Day’s cheek, for a secret is a secret, and Loretta Cake’s secret rape fantasies were safe with everyone in the Six Towns Area.

Even though the proposition by the Doreen Beach White Sox did not match her secret fantasy, Loretta Cake agreed to accompany the Doreen Beach baseball club and to sit behind the saddle of the handsomest ballplayer, who, she said, bore a startling resemblance to the outlaw Wade Dalton. Just as she was mounting the horse it stepped on the tail of one of her cats, and the screech the cat set off made the handsomest ballplayer’s horse rear and throw Loretta Cake onto her posterior and the handsomest ballplayer onto his neck, both on the ground.