The Winter Helen Dropped By. W. Kinsella P.
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visitor stopped about three steps into the kitchen and appeared determined not to advance any further. Daddy and me could tell the visitor was a woman, even with the eyelashes thick with frost, and the lower part of her face covered with a scarf, and it took us about another few seconds to discover that the visitor was not only a woman, but an Indian woman.
The visitor kept looking at the floor, and gave the impression she would rather be almost anywhere else but where she was, except maybe out in the sixty-below weather with the beginnings of a freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard whining across the prairie.
‘Do y’all speak English?’ Mama asked. The visitor let us know by her eyes that she heard, but she didn’t speak a word.
‘Well, first thing we got to do is get you warmed up,’ Mama said, and she guided the reluctant visitor to a chair at our oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which must have looked cheery, for the oilcloth was cream-colored with orange and green tea pots in a pattern, six in a circle, like bright flowers blooming on the shiny cloth.
Mama poured coffee for the visitor, while Daddy stoked the stove, and in a few minutes the snow around the visitor’s feet began to puddle under the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which we had moved even closer to the glowing cook stove.
What the visitor had on her feet were full-sized men’s toe rubbers stuffed with blue insoles made of something very similar to weatherstripping. The whole package was held together by two ochre-colored sealer rings around each foot.
‘It’s what poor people wear on their feet who can’t afford regular shoes and boots,’ Mama had explained to me when I was just little and I had made inquiries about Loretta Cake’s toe rubbers and sealer rings when she had come to call, leading eight square-jawed tabby cats on leashes, and looking like, Mama said, she had just escaped from Gypsyland.
Our visitor also had on a pair of overalls, and over top of the overalls a man’s shirt, looking like it was made from a patchwork quilt. She also had on quite a few shirts and a raggedy man’s parka jacket made of some shiny wine-colored material glazed with dirt. She had a long scarf wrapped around her head two or three times and pulled across her nose and mouth, so what we saw of her was frosted eyelashes and eyes that were deep and dark as a cellar.
The visitor, who I named Helen, though not until late the next day, slept in the kitchen. We started considering what to call her right after we discovered that, as Mama phrased it, she couldn’t say boo in English. ‘I do have a guest room,’ Mama assured the visitor, even though by then it was obvious that Helen didn’t understand a word any of us was saying. ‘But because of this atrocious weather, the kitchen is the only truly warm place in the house, and I use truly warm advisedly. But at least you won’t freeze to death here.’
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