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.
One of the farms she passed was guarded by a shaggy German shepherd dog the size of a small pony, who thrived on sixty-below weather and killed coyotes just for sport. My daddy said the only time he’d seen the dog immobilized was when he’d raised his leg to pee and the stream froze to a nearby barbed-wire fence. Daddy said the dog was trapped for a couple of hours until his owner came along and cut the stream with a gas-powered acetylene welder.
The other farm Helen must have passed by to get to our place at the end of Nine Pin Road was occupied by Deaf Danielson, a bachelor, whose hearing, my daddy said, had been left behind in Norway. We had to surmise that Helen was afraid of Hopfstadt’s German shepherd dog the size of a small pony, and that Deaf Danielson didn’t hear her knocking, though Deaf Danielson’s door was never locked, and he would have been delighted at a little company, particularly female company, of a sixty-degree below night with the beginnings of a freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard whining across the plains.
Daddy said that Deaf Danielson spent a considerable amount of money on stationery and envelopes, and even more on stamps, so he could answer ads in the lovelorn columns in the Family Herald, the Winnipeg Free Press and Prairie Farmer, and The Country Guide in an all-out attempt to find a little female company. Daddy and Mama sometimes joked about the letter Deaf Danielson might write – ‘I am a deaf Norwegian bachelor who last changed his underwear in 1934, and presently sleep with three collie dogs in a converted granary … ’
My daddy regarded himself as a better than average card player, something my mama said cost him dearly at times, especially if he got in a game with the infamous Flop Skaalrud or the second-oldest Bjornsen of the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers who, when he wasn’t picking banjo at box socials, community dances, sports days, or ethnic weddings, was a wizard at five-card draw. His wizardry, the second-oldest Bjornsen claimed, had a good deal to do with the rhythms of the cards and the rhythms of the banjo being compatible.
When Helen dropped by, the kitchen table had been moved to within four feet of the cook stove, where whatever part of us was facing the cook stove was hot and whatever part of us was facing away from the cook stove was cold, and Mama’s last surviving geraniums were leaning toward the cook stove, which glowed pink as a baby. My daddy was teaching me the basic strategies of seven-card stud, one-eyed jacks and red sevens wild, and since the cold kept Mama in direct proximity to the kitchen table and pink-glowing cook stove, she had joined in the game, even though she had a distinct dislike of gambling.
The stakes were taken directly from Mama’s button box, the advertising for Vogue Tobacco in black lettering on the bright yellow tin which was crammed full of colorful buttons of every size and description. We each started with twenty-five buttons. I liked the big black ones that looked like water bugs and some small red ones in the shape of strawberries, and while Mama didn’t do much but accept the cards dealt to her, and she primarily let Daddy pick out her best five cards for her final hand, and even though Daddy played every professional strategy he knew – and Daddy knew considerable professional strategy, having acquired a good deal of expertise while fighting in the First World War and while traveling with several semi-professional baseball teams after the war and while working as a gandy dancer on the railroad and playing baseball on the weekends in South Dakota – by the time Helen dropped by and interrupted the game, Daddy had three buttons left and I had four, while Mama had sixty-eight buttons piled in front of her in little stacks of five each.
‘That sounds like a knock at the door,’ Mama said, but Daddy said it was only the wind and nobody in their right mind would be out on a night like this with the temperature -60° at most, for at six o’clock when Daddy went to check the temperature he came back to say the thermometer had burst from the cold, and the little blob of red mercury had trickled down the front of the thermometer (which advertised the M. D. Muttart Lumber Co. of Edmonton, Alberta) like blood.
‘Won’t be nobody outdoors with a good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard whining across the fields,’ Daddy said.
I was about to agree when my ears caught the sound Mama had heard, and I decided it was indeed a light knock muffled by the door, the blanket, the horsehide robe, and the beginnings of the good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard.
Mama was already pulling on the icy doorknob, trying to make the frosty hinges and the frozen door co-operate. She finally did drag it open a foot or two, and a person was indeed outside, one who pushed itself through that two-foot space and came into the kitchen with a cloud of steam and frost and snowflakes.
‘Why you poor thing,’ Mama said, closing the door with one hand and propelling the visitor toward the baby-pink