The Stubborn Season

  Lauren B. Davis

  The

  Stubborn

  Season

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my husband, Ron, who never falters in his encouragement, his support, and his love;

  and to my mother, who planted the seed for this story with a story of her own.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part II

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Part III

  14

  15

  Part IV

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Part V

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR The Stubborn Season

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  1

  Toronto—October 1929

  Sometimes ten-year-old Irene MacNeil lay in bed at night and listened. It was a weird trick of the house that the radiators and air vents acted as a kind of amplification system, conducting every sound, no matter how subtle, to every corner of every room. The heart-jumping thud of coal settling in the furnace. The gurgle of water in the pipes. The hum of the refrigerator. Her father’s snore. Her mother’s body turning, making the coils of the bedsprings squeak. She imagined the house was a creature in whose body they all lived, and the sounds were like those her own stomach made when she’d eaten something hard to digest.

  For all the seeming order in the layout of the rooms it was a narrow, jumbled-up house, where even their small family of three felt like more. They were forever excusing themselves to pass in the hall, both people pressed up against the wall; or feeling as though a window should be opened to let in a little more air.

  A concrete path led from the sidewalk to two wooden steps and the porch that ran the width of the house. The door opened into a small vestibule with hooks for coats, facing the steep stairs to the second floor. To the right was the living room, made cheerful enough by a rose-and-violet chintz sofa on one side of the green-tiled fireplace and a matching chair on the other. In the corner a radio stood proudly next to a potted split-leaf philodendron, and next to that, Douglas MacNeil’s orderly desk, with neatly piled papers and envelopes and a little brass clock. In the dining room, no more than a dark nook behind the living room, was an imposing walnut table and a hutch containing the good dishes and two Toby jugs, which had been wedding gifts. The kitchen was in the rear of the house. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one for Irene at the back with a window that overlooked the yard, and one for her parents in front, as well as a summer sleeping porch.

  This morning Irene was in the upstairs bathroom brushing her teeth. She was a deceptively sturdy little girl, her wrists thick and her face square and determined. Her nose was pug, her eyebrows sparse and her eyes nut brown. When she was finished brushing her teeth she ran a comb through her wavy hair, the colour of reddish earth. She thought her hair was pretty. It might even be what magazines referred to as a “best feature,” except that her mother insisted on cutting it blunt and no longer than the bottom of her ears. It was parted on the side and held tightly with a hairpin so that it did not get into her eyes, although a stray wisp or two always escaped and sat rather ridiculously on her forehead. Such a curl now straggled out, no sooner than Irene pressed the pin into her scalp, and she hurried to wet it and pat it into place. Her parents’ voices floated through the vent from the kitchen below, along with the smell of coffee and bacon.

  Irene did not want to walk in on what was clearly one of her parents’ “discussions.” If she did, they would stop talking, and her mother’s mouth would set in that way that made Irene feel as though she were a bother. So rather than interrupt, she brushed her teeth a second time, and although she knew it was wrong to listen to other people’s conversations, she listened anyway. What choice was there? Sometimes she felt they were all mushed up together in the house and it was unclear where one of them ended and another began.

  Douglas read the day’s headlines. The news was bad, but he saw no need to alarm his wife further. She was far too easily alarmed as it was. The early-morning light made the red-walled kitchen look downright angry. It hurt Douglas’s eyes, as he knew it would even when he had, on a benevolent whim, agreed to the colour two months ago. He held the newspaper up to block a shaft of light knifing through the black venetian blinds.

  “We should have invested while we had the chance,” Margaret said. “The boom’s all over now, isn’t it, and we’ve lost an opportunity.”

  A banner across the front page of the Toronto Star read: “Stock Prices Crash.” There were stories telling how the streets around the Montreal and Toronto exchanges were filled with crying men and women who pushed and shoved each other, losing their hats and bruising their shins, hoping to salvage something of their evaporating fortunes.

  Douglas did not respond and so Margaret tapped the paper. “Put that down and talk to me, please, Douglas. We’ll never get rich now, will we?”

  Margaret’s insistence upon wealth puzzled Douglas, for it was not as though they lacked for anything. They had an electric refrigerator as well as an electric cooking range. They had a radio. He’d given Margaret a fox stole for Christmas last year. They’d recently modernized the kitchen and painted it the garish red she’d insisted on. Douglas was a pharmacist, a professional man with a well-respected business. They lived a better life than their Scottish immigrant parents had ever dreamed of.

  And Douglas loved his wife. She was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, with her sleek bobbed black hair and smoky eyes and Clara Bow mouth. When he’d married her she was twenty, a tiny girl with a waist his hands could nearly span, and even now, ten years after Irene’s birth, she had kept her figure. He wanted to make her happy. He had never given her the impression he would ever be anything except exactly what he was, take it or leave it. By marrying him he assumed she’d decided to take it.

  “Margaret, there’s a story here in the Star about a woman, a Lottie Nugent, who lost her entire life savings and went home and turned on the gas. Would you rather we had put all our money in the stock market and lost it? I don’t understand you, my dear.”

  “No, you don’t. I don’t know if you ever have,” she said and marched out of the kitchen, her heels clacking on the new linoleum floor.

  Douglas carefully folded his newspaper. He ran his fingers along the crease, making it sharp. It was time to go to the drug store.

  “Irene, stand still!” Margaret rubbed furiously at a spot on Irene’s chin with a handkerchief on which she’d spit.

  “Ow! Mum!”

  “Oh, don’t carry on. How you manage to get as much toothpaste on the outside of your mouth as you do on the inside, I’ll never know.” She stepped back and surveyed Irene, who squirmed uneasily. Margaret hated it when Irene fidgeted, but bit her tongue. After all, she was annoyed at Douglas, not Irene.

  “I’m going to be late, Mum.”

  “Hurry up, then. Hurry up! Get your books. Where’s your sweater?”

  Irene grabbed her sweater and dashed down the stairs. She picked up her books from the chair by the door.

  “Daddy? Are you ready? I�
�m going to be late.”

  “Coming, Pet.”

  As he put on his coat, Douglas checked the inside pocket for his flask. Its smooth cool solidity reassured him. A little dram of rye whisky now and again kept him steady, especially after a spat with Margaret.

  It was the habit of father and daughter to walk along the street together every morning, until Irene came to her school and they parted 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 operate 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 bed. I am an ungrateful woman, she thought.

  But Douglas was so easy to nag. Why had she mistaken weakness for gentleness? Margaret’s father had been a big, brusque man, all whisky and rough hands and a voice that could shake the windows. She loved him, but he was hard to handle, and her mother had always looked drawn and tired. In fact, she had never really seemed relaxed until after her husband died. It was a terrible thing to say, but it was true, wasn’t it? Her mother had changed then, with a deep contentment in her widow’s face that had never been there when she was a wife. With no disrespect to her father, Margaret had been glad to find a well-mannered man like Douglas, with his freshly pressed shirts and shiny shoes.

  He had seen her at the Methodist picnic on Toronto Island and asked her brother, Rory, with whom he’d played a game of horseshoes, to introduce them. It was three months after John Carlisle had left for New York. Douglas seemed so refined, so unruffled, standing there in his straw hat, looking down at her. She now believed his calm masked an unmasculine timidity. He’d been thirty years old then, a whole decade older than she, and she found this reassuring. Surely a man, full-grown and responsible, with his own business, would never just up and leave. He had not been to war (an honour he said he was swindled out of by virtue of his age), and so did not wrestle with John’s demons. She became engaged to Douglas six months later, although she had to admit that she hadn’t taken the engagement altogether seriously.