A Beauty Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY CONNIE GAULT

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-3655-2

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-3656-9

  Frontispiece image: © Taiga | Dreamstime.com

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Cover image: © Jean-Marc Valladier | Moment | Getty Images

  The characters and events in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance they have to people and events in life is purely coincidental.

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For B. T. Hatley

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Trevna

  Addison

  Charlesville

  Virginia Valley

  Gilroy

  Part 2

  Trevna

  Addison

  Charlesville

  Virginia Valley

  Regina

  Gilroy

  Part 3

  Gilroy

  Virginia Valley

  Charlesville

  Calgary

  Addison

  Lawson

  Trevna

  Gilroy

  Trevna

  Acknowledgements

  1

  TREVNA

  On the Saturday evening, the Gustafsons, Mr. and Mrs. and the two children, set out for the dance at Trevna. Mr. Gustafson wore a benevolent beard and Mrs. Gustafson wore a tight, shiny dress. The children had bathed. They weren’t talking. They had hurried to get ready once it had been decided they wouldn’t take the car, and after that fuss they were content to sit and let their bodies get accustomed to the rhythm of the wagon. All around them, landscape of the sort they were used to rolled out to the edges of the sky. The axle creaked, the horses’ hooves clopped, the sun sat in their faces. The children, behind their parents, got locked in a battle involving all four of their hands in a knot. Up front, Henrik scowled for several reasons that must have seemed important at the time, and Maria’s bland countenance reflected nothing.

  After a while Maria said to her husband, “All this sun in our faces. Soon you’ll be sneezing.” A little later she said, “I am happy with my cake. Lemons are expensive, but it’s so much better with the lemon filling than the vanilla, it’s like ice on the edges of your tongue. You must get a piece tonight, my dear. Children!” she called. “Be sure you get a piece of my cake at the supper.” She swung her head back to be certain they were listening. “Stop that,” she said. “Peter, you’re to look out for your sister tonight.”

  The children took their hands back and sat on them, looking out in opposite directions. They had travelled only a short distance and were still crossing their father’s land, so there was nothing to see.

  Maria began to whistle. She often whistled. She felt herself to be purposefully alive. Henrik mumbled something that sounded like an admonition into his beard, but she wasn’t listening; she was whistling “All of Me,” which she’d only recently learned, and she was tapping on the side of the tin cake-taker she held on her lap. She always had something in her hands. Maybe a broom, maybe a rolling pin. On this Saturday evening she was holding her triple-layer cake with lemon filling and glossy, seven-minute frosting, from an old recipe of her mother’s.

  “I take after my mother,” she said.

  “Boundless,” Henrik said, making the word sound gloomy.

  “Boundless? What does that mean?”

  “It’s what sprang to mind when you mentioned your mother.”

  “Fat was what I meant. She was fat, too.” Maria lived in an age when it wasn’t a sin to be overweight, it wasn’t even unfashionable for a married woman nearing forty, and she ate as much every day as she wanted. “And she always got her own way,” she said of her mother. “It’s good, isn’t it? That we’re taking the wagon to Trevna? Gas is such an extravagance. We don’t want to rub our prosperity in others’ noses. And what could be grander than this?” Her hand swept out over the hot August evening and the land they’d bought and paid for and the twin rumps of Bess and Basket and came back to drum again on the fancy tin cake-taker on her lap. It had been her favourite wedding gift. It was whimsically embossed with a formal Italian garden in contrast to the fields that lay around them, as dry and browned as the word forsaken, where cultivation had produced ruin, where dust rose from the earth the way mist would have risen from water in some other place. (But it didn’t matter as much to them as to others, since Henrik was too smart to think he could farm it.) “And there’s room in the wagon for an extra person,” Maria added.

  “I am sure you thought of that. But you don’t think of everything,” Henrik said.

  “Look,” she said.

  They had finally passed the boundary of their land. He followed her pointing finger to the lonely farm buildings of their nearest neighbour and saw something similar to what she saw, although not exactly the same thing, because she saw Elena Huhtala sitting motionless on a swing with a cascading sunset behind her, and he saw Youth and Beauty. He had a poetic temperament that even life with Maria hadn’t dampened.

  “What did I tell you?” Maria said. “Oh, Lord. You’re going to tell me people are complicated. Sometimes, you know, you’re a trial to live with.”

  “You called on her yesterday and she said no.”

  “But Henrik, we have to turn in. We can’t leave her sitting there like that.”

  Henrik didn’t know why they couldn’t leave Elena Huhtala sitting there like that, still as a silhouette on the swing her father had hung from the clothesline post like a gibbet. If it had been up to him, he’d have left her there, looking Symbolic.

  “There is so much dust in the air,” Maria said. “That is why we have such good sunsets.”

  Elena was not moving at all; she was studying her awareness of suspension. The wooden board underneath her supported her weight as it had since she was a little girl, and the ropes, oily from years of being held in her own two hands, felt sturdy, but it was the lowered sun, warm on her back, that held her hanging in its horizontal rays. All around her, as far as she could see, the fields floated in the tricky light. She didn’t think of moving; if she did, the entire world would rock.

  Her father’s land hadn’t been planted in the spring. He’d given up. It wasn’t farmland; everybody had told him that. You couldn’t grow a decent potato on it. Forget about wheat. Instead of crops, now, or the prairie wool that might have sustained animals, there was only stubble, beaten down by the weather (that is to say, the wind) and lying uneven, like a brush cut on a kid with too many cowlicks. It was dull, dry straw but it gleamed like gold in this light. Maybe it had got to him, maybe looking at that gold one deceiving evening had been his last straw. It was the kind of thing he might have said, if he’d said anything, but she didn’t want to be thinking his kind of thoughts. So she sat on the swing, clearing her mind. This wasn’t difficult since an empty stomach tends to make the mind porous, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. There was no food in the house, and the garden had given up the last of its pale, hairy carrots and wizened cucumbers. Once in a while as she sat there,
a grasshopper looped through her vision, and tiny sounds infiltrated her consciousness, flowing in and out again. These were the familiar summer sounds of a fly buzzing, crickets creaking, and mice or garter snakes – or maybe just the earth’s breath – rustling the grass. A cow lowed way down the road at the Svensons’ place. The past crept into her mind, then, as it does when you’re quiet: the long summer days she’d spent swinging on this swing, as if they still existed, as if they silently existed, alongside her, and if she swung forward, they’d swing back. Then came a rattling of wheels and a clopping of horses’ hooves. She hadn’t gone inside in time. Or the Gustafsons were heading out early for the dance. No, she’d dawdled, lost track of the hours. The sun was setting, for heaven’s sake.

  “Don’t,” she said out loud, but they did; they drove their team into the long driveway, the wagon wheels spinning the turn, all four Gustafsons waving as if they’d just discovered electricity and thought she should know about it. She started swinging, pumping hard, holding tight (she felt so light with the sudden motion). The ropes strained and squawked against the wooden crossbar above. At the top of the swoop, she lifted off the seat. If only, she thought – and she wasn’t given to if-only thinking. But if only she could. Fly off into nowhere while the Gustafsons watched. They would be the perfect witnesses, able to attest to all and sundry that she’d gone, she’d gone so thoroughly she’d never return.

  She didn’t go anywhere, naturally; she plopped down on the seat again and swung back, and the Gustafsons waved some more from the wagon, and the Clydesdales set their relentless hooves down, the white hair on their fetlocks fluttering. Such a romantic picture, as if Time itself was lolloping through a veil of dust to pluck her up and take her with it. The dance was at Liberty Hall. Liquorty Hall, the young people called it, since high spirits were expected in those days.

  She couldn’t go on swinging once the wagon stopped or Mrs. Gustafson would be obliged to heave herself down and make the trek across the yard. She had to hop off in a jaunty, two-footed manner to show she wasn’t sad and then she had to walk sedately over to the wagon to show she wasn’t happy. It was her fate. Only eighteen, and everything she did had to be done in order to prevent something else having to be done.

  With four pairs of eyes on her, it must have been difficult to know how to compose her face as she approached the wagon. The children didn’t count, they were eight and ten, too young to have opinions anyone would listen to, but they might see through whatever expression she put on. In spite of all their parents’ efforts to teach them complacency, they might still be capable of looking beyond the obvious. Luckily for Elena, although Henrik drove the horses, Maria Gustafson drove the family, and Maria’s ego eclipsed anything resembling a nuance. Heartiness carried her over the roughest terrain; she hardly saw or felt the bumps.

  “Come to the dance,” Mrs. Gustafson said and beamed down from the wagon until her cheeks rose up and obliterated her eyes. She might have been praying, or more likely – seeing how pleased she was looking – overhearing a prayer that was being said especially for her. Mr. Gustafson might have been the one saying it; his long, corn-coloured beard trembled on his chest and his moustache quivered as if he had been speaking or was about to speak. You couldn’t tell which it was, if either – the hair curled over his lips. Only his eyes were on display and they said very little. He had practised making them beatific. He gazed down at Elena Huhtala until she looked right at him, and then he shifted his attention to his placid horses, as if it was momentous when one lifted its foot and the other whisked its tail.

  The children’s mouths fell open. It was odd how it happened. They knew what the strange Finnish girl was going to do as soon as she knew it herself. Their surprise was over by the time she’d climbed up and settled in between them and put an arm around each of them for balance.

  As soon as Mr. Gustafson turned the Clydes towards the sunset again, Mrs. Gustafson twisted halfway round in her seat (careful with the layer cake), so she could peer at Elena Huhtala. “Any news?” she asked, just as she had asked the day before.

  Elena shook her head. She lowered her eyes, but Mrs. Gustafson didn’t take that to signify anything. “You’ll hear one of these days,” she said. “He’s likely written and his letter’s gone astray. You know how the post is, it’s not reliable at all, and men – well, you know what men are.”

  Elena did not raise her eyes to admit to any knowledge of men.

  “He wouldn’t think you’d be worrying,” Mrs. Gustafson said, explaining.

  “I’m not worrying, Mrs. Gustafson,” Elena said. The horses picked up speed and the wagon lurched, but nothing changed her calm demeanour.

  “Of course you are,” Maria said. “What are you supposed to do with yourself, left like this on your own? You know you can stay with us. We’d be more than happy to have you. I hate to think of you out here all by yourself. We have an extra bedroom, you know, especially set aside for guests.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “At your age. What was your father thinking?”

  “He’s gone to look for work,” Mr. Gustafson said. His wife went on regardless. The cake rocked on her lap. She had several theories to explore. She’d heard of a note left for the girl on the kitchen table. The Mounties had begun an investigation. Everyone had questions, no one knew the answers, unless the daughter did.

  Elena squeezed the children’s waists and watched the orange sinking sun to avoid looking into Mrs. Gustafson’s pale, peering, guileless eyes. As for the children, they leaned into her on either side and seldom spoke except once in a while in a furious, whispered code behind her back. They giggled whenever one of the horses passed gas, and their mother shook her head each time and glanced indulgently at her husband. He ignored them as he did most of the time, since they provided him with as little opportunity for wit as for poetry. He was fond of being witty.

  “I realize people are different,” Maria said to Elena Huhtala. “Henrik often reminds me of it. Life would be so much easier if they weren’t. Then they wouldn’t be doing things you couldn’t imagine.”

  “Your Clydes are beauties, Mr. Gustafson,” the girl said. Her voice was low and she spoke with a slowness that made those few words sound earnest.

  “They’re only workhorses,” Henrik said, trying for a modesty to suit his beard.

  “But they’re standouts,” she said, looking down at their braided, beribboned tails and their shifting haunches and their deep, dark, leathery sheen, knowing that Mr. Gustafson bred them and would talk about them for a long time if ever allowed. He raised Aberdeen Angus cattle as well as Clydesdales. “My animals have made a Scotsman out of me,” he liked to say. He appreciated the chuckle he sometimes got in response. Clydesdales were generally not as big in those days as they are now, and he liked their friendly height, but he bred them to be taller, as everyone did, because otherwise what was the point?

  As for bigness, all around them the glowing sky was as huge as it could possibly have been if they’d been any place else, and it went on forever, as it does if you really look at it. But they didn’t look; they were used to it and they had other matters on their minds, Maria in particular, who was going to have to answer to the ladies of her community when she got to Liberty Hall. How could she drive all the way to Trevna with Elena Huhtala wedged in between her offspring, and gather such a pitiful dribble to tell them? How could she let talk of the horses interrupt a full discussion of the possibility of an act she couldn’t imagine? They’d be more annoyed with her than if she hadn’t persuaded the girl to come. There was no excuse for it, so she patiently went at her from a creative variety of angles, while Henrik clucked at Bess and Basket until he heard himself and denied himself that comfort.

  Behind them, the children swayed with the wagon’s movement, either side of the strange Finnish girl, and fell almost into a trance. So forgetfully comfortable had Ingrid become that she tucked her cheek in along the plushy side of Elena Huhtala’s breast and brought
her hands up almost to her chin and whispered to her thumbs. Sometimes she made them whisper to one another, and they always said compelling things. Peter squirmed, on the other side, but didn’t extricate himself from the arm that lay warm and lightly supportive and uniquely feminine along his back, even though it gave him the occasional shiver as he delved further into a story he was telling himself, a story in which old Mr. Huhtala’s skeleton was discovered in a shallow grave in his own cellar. For a little while even Maria stopped talking, but she was only thinking what to say next, she was only moving from her inquest into the past to her advice for the future. “Now, Elena, you must make some plans,” she said. “You can’t go on like this. How will you support yourself? One good thing is you’ve got your grade twelve, now that’s something most girls don’t have, and you can thank your father for that. He was a man who valued education.”

  “Is,” Henrik muttered.

  “Oh. Yes, I meant that, Henrik, for heaven’s sake. Although I don’t know what good it does you to have your grade twelve out here in the middle of nowhere. He likely hoped you could go to college. In better times. Being an educated man, himself. But you’ll probably marry soon, anyway, won’t you? I don’t like you on your own in the meantime. People talk, you know. It’s not meanness, it’s only natural, they wonder, and they talk.”

  “Look,” Peter said, behind Elena Huhtala’s back. He pointed up. It was a hawk, flashing light from its wings. “Seen something.” Peter turned to watch it. “There,” he said, satisfied, when it dove, beak down, to the earth.

  “As I was saying,” Mrs. Gustafson continued, but Mr. Gustafson started talking, too, and stopped her.

  “What do you call those pictures on our bedroom wall?” he wanted to know. “Sentimental things. Pretty couples painted in black on glass, with a paper landscape behind them.”

  “I don’t know that they have a name,” Maria said. “Why do you ask?”