The Stubborn Season. Lauren B. Davis
ways. As they left the house, neither of them mentioned that Margaret had gone upstairs into her room and closed all the curtains against the day’s bright sunshine.
1929
The boy rests his head against the warm flank of the cow. His name is David Hirsch. He is half asleep still, as is the cow. Her name is Sophie and she smells of hay and manure and cream. The kerosene lantern throws a small pool of yellow light around them. Beyond it, the two horses, one dapple grey, the other roan, paw softly at the ground as they chew the feed he’s poured in their trough. His hands work reassuringly on Sophie’s teats, rhythmically, the milk hissing into the bucket. His breath and the cow’s mingle in a steamy cloud, for the early-morning air is chill. Sophie lows and shifts her weight.
“Sophie-girl, there, there, Sophie-girl.” David mutters the words as though speaking through dreams.
It is dark outside and will not be light for another two hours. The nights have grown longer, and it is harder each day to get up to tend to the cow and the horses and the chickens and the dogs and chop the kindling and start the fire and tend to the other thousand things a farm morning brings. Winter comes early on the Saskatchewan prairie and the wind warns the farmer of what’s to come. This morning it is a slap on the cheek, delivered by a harsh hand, although it doesn’t yet shock his breath away, as it will in deep December. He’s already spotted the first few flakes of snow, dancing in a thin wisp along the side of the farmstead roof. The coming of the dark time, and perhaps another hungry time. There have been droughts before, but this has been a dusty year and the harvest was meagre and the cellar is not full enough to let them rest easy in the knowledge of plenty.
The wind has blown hot and dry and relentless all summer. Perspiration left a salty grit, drying on the skin before cooling it. Sand began to drift under farmhouse doors. The men whispered at the grain silo, at the feed store, at the barber’s. “The crops are failing,” they said, but did not say it loudly. They remembered other bad years. It will pass, they said, and turned their eyes to God.
The prairie sky is vast and moody and restless in the fall. The granite-coloured clouds shift and blur, the grey land, drifting to sleep beneath the thin blanket of frost, rises up to meet the air and the two become indistinct, inseparable, a huge arc of seamless space. Distance is distorted; everything seems farther away, while the soul longs for a warm, snug corner by the stove.
David is restless too, and moody, ill-fitting in his fourteen years. He is outgrowing his hand-me-down jackets and pants and pushing up against the tight seams of Sonnenfeld as well. One hundred and thirty-seven Jews on twenty-nine farms. It had been one hundred and thirty-eight, until his mother died two winters ago of the influenza. There is only one road out of the settlement and it leads to the nearest railway stop in Estevan, fifty miles away. He lives on the farm with his father, Herzl, and his brothers Jacob and Isaac, and Isaac’s new wife, Toba. Toba will have a baby in the spring. Then they will be one hundred and thirty-eight again.
It is a misconception that boys grow up more slowly in the country than in the city, or that they are more innocent. Death is kin. Accidents, the loss of an arm or an eye, not unfamiliar. Because the population in Sonnenfeld is so small, births and deaths, tears and pain, rage and despair, all are shared, and no one is too young to shoulder his or her burden. And they come from strong stock, these refugees from Eastern Europe, from Lithuania, from Galicia, from Russia. They have fled, or survived, the massacres of Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev. They do not let their children forget.
David’s father came from Bialystok to Canada with his parents in 1881, when he was six. His father’s baby brother did not go with them. In the slaughter that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander, a soldier took little Asher by the heels and dropped him down a well where he drowned. The family buried him and, still mourning, fled.
It was a long journey, but they are settled now, here in the plains of western Canada, for the time being at any rate. But movement is in the blood, and the boy is distrustful of a place too-well loved. He has been taught that a boot can kick down any door, if there is enough hatred in the foot, and that hatred is also a creature that roams. The Ku Klux Klan operates in Saskatchewan now.
He pats Sophie and she turns to look at him, her great eyes trusting and calm. He takes up the pail of fresh milk and leaves the barn. The planks of wood laid down as a walkway across the yard creak beneath his boots as he walks toward the house. It is small. Three rooms. Kitchen, two sleeping rooms. Since the death of his wife the boy’s father has slept alone in one, but now that Isaac has married, he sleeps with his other two sons, and Isaac and Toba have a room to themselves. The roof is steeply pitched and the chimney rises from the centre. There are four poplar trees around the house, and by the door are two wild-rose bushes his mother transplanted from the prairie. His father cares for them now. Chickens peck at the ground in their wood-fenced pen. The dog, a yellow hound of indeterminate parentage, pads out from the shadows to meet the boy, its body wriggling with happiness as he reaches down to rub its ears.
He stops, picks up a stick and tosses it for the dog, who runs after it with a joyful bark. He watches the dog and then looks up to see the morning star in the charcoal sky. The earth sweeps out in a gently rolling sea to a sliver of silver promise on the horizon. He holds his head up and sniffs the air. Eggs and coffee from the kitchen, but more. David Hirsch is a child of the land and the scent is familiar. Something harsh and dry and brutal as a brush fire, rolling in across the earth on the northern wind.
2
It was so sweet to lie in the dark and pretend the day was ending, not beginning. Margaret arranged a cool cloth on her forehead and kicked off her shoes. The room smelled of the oranges treated with orrisroot, studded with cloves and hung in the closets to keep the clothes fresh. She closed her eyes.
Over the past few months she could count on her fingers the number of good days when she didn’t need to escape to the dark refuge of this room. It used to be the other way around. Most days had been good. In fact, she’d been the Laughing Girl, hadn’t she? Always ready for a party, ready for a lark?
She hardly recognized herself as that girl now.
Reverend Fuller said you should start every day with a commitment to God and that, should this commitment falter, you could start the day anew whenever you liked. You could simply say to yourself, This day begins now. Margaret knew that if she could make herself believe this then she’d stop obsessing about every harsh remark, every shrewish tone. She’d put whatever bad thing she’d done behind her and pretend the sun had just risen on a clean slate of possibilities.
It was as though some other woman lived inside her. The true Margaret was sweet and loving and caring, but this Other Margaret was a nasty, bitter piece of work who couldn’t be controlled. She just popped up, no matter how Margaret tried to keep her under wraps.
She tossed the cloth onto the floor, rolled to her side and pulled the comforter over her face. She would not cry. She wouldn’t think of the awful news in the papers this morning. She’d think of good things. Something to make her laugh. She closed her eyes and remembered a party long ago, before she’d married. The old gang had gone to a jazz joint and danced to the music of the saxophones and clarinets until three. Flat-chested Anne Franklin, tipsy on gin and lemonade, stuffed melons down her camisole and persuaded her brother to try on high heels. Why, she’d had fun that night, hadn’t she? She’d laughed and laughed. Swirled and twirled and shimmied and shone, a glass of champagne in one hand and her arm around John Carlisle. Poor John. She thought about how the war had changed him. He had such terrible nightmares and couldn’t seem to ever be still. He broke out in a sweat at every loud noise.
Margaret grit her teeth, the taste of frustration like iron in her mouth, and she clutched the comforter, willing herself not to tear it to shreds just to see the feathers fly. She must control herself.
Life had turned out to be so small. She’d had such high hopes and now it was all pinching pennies and saving for the future and not living beyond their means. A small house. A small savings account. A small future.
She twisted on the