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 that the sound was coming out of the cathedral-shaped radio at the head of the couch, and that the power came from the huge black-and-white-striped Burgess battery. Helen finally put her ear up to the front of the radio, then she walked across the room, noting, I guess, how the sound got dimmer as she moved.
‘Can’t put nothing over on her,’ Mama said.
Helen smiled like Mama does when she sees a double rainbow after a thunderstorm.
The blizzard roared on all that day, only Daddy going out to feed the animals, milk the red Jersey cow, Primrose, and carry in more cut wood for the stove.
In daylight, even if the daylight was like dusk all day, I noticed quite a few things about Helen, though it wasn’t until after supper that I named her Helen. I guessed Helen was an adult like Mama and Daddy, though pretty young; I guessed eighteen, Daddy said twenty, and Mama was more inclined to sixteen, though she said she’d reserve judgment for a day or so.
Helen was about as tall as Mama, a height Daddy called big as a minute, a minute not being very big at all, only she was what Daddy called big-boned, so she looked a lot larger than Mama. Her hair was long and black as a crow’s wing, kind of wild and tangled, her skin was maple-colored and her cheek bones very high. Her eyes were so brown as to be almost black and were wide-spaced and deep-set.
The spots of frostbite on each cheek were angry looking, but she wouldn’t have no scars, Mama said, because of us putting the window frost on her cheeks the night before.
Mama and Daddy noticed something I hadn’t, something they wouldn’t have discussed with me, but since our living space had been constricted by the cold, and since I had a good ear for whispered conversations, I was able to pick up on it.
‘Dark as she is, that girl’s face is covered with bruises,’ Daddy said.
‘Poor thing. That’s probably why she was out,’ Mama replied. ‘She must have had to walk clear across Purgatory Lake to get here. It’s a wonder she didn’t freeze plumb to death.’
I decided right after breakfast that it would be my job to teach Helen, who I hadn’t yet named Helen, to speak English, but I couldn’t quite grasp that a person could not have any knowledge of English. I was trying to teach her whole sentences at once and not making any headway when Mama suggested a game, and I got out Snakes and Ladders. By sign language I taught Helen to count the spots on the dice and then she’d count off the same number on the board, and she’d smile and look proud when she landed on a ladder, and she’d giggle like a little girl and whoosh her button down when she landed on a snake.
I tried to get a name out of her. I would point at myself and say ‘Jamie,’ and I would point at Daddy and say ‘Johnny,’ and I would point at Mama and say ‘Olivia,’ and I would point at Helen and wait for her to say something, but the only sound we got from her were giggles when she landed her button on a snake.
Daddy said he figured she understood but just wasn’t ready to share her name with us yet. It was about that time I decided, as we were getting to the end of her first day with us, that she should be named Helen. She was partly named for The Romance of Helen Trent, the soap opera that asked the question, Can a woman over forty still find romance? and she was partly named for one of my toys, a curly-haired little black animal that I had received from Mama’s sister, my Aunt Mary Kaye, the Christmas before, and had already named Helen, for I considered Helen a very exciting name. The toy had deep-set brown eyes and black hair, as dark as Helen’s but not as crow-wing shiny.
‘We ought to call her Helen,’ I said, and not hearing any objections, I went through the naming and pointing again, pointing at myself and saying ‘Jamie,’ pointing at Daddy and saying ‘Johnny,’ pointing at Mama and saying ‘Olivia,’ pointing at her and saying ‘Helen.’ Helen smiled and giggled just like she’d landed her button on a snake. Still she never spoke a word.
The next few days were some of the happiest of my life, and I bet they were some of the happiest days of Helen’s life, too. I was ravenous for a friend, and Helen was willing to be just about whatever I wanted her to be.
Helen, I guess, was surprised about a lot of things at our big old house at the end of Nine Pin Road, which wasn’t much of a road at all, especially in the winter, but I guess the thing Helen was most surprised at was that we had a pig living in the kitchen.
We didn’t, Mama pointed out that first evening, as she was building roast pork sandwiches for Helen, have a pig living in our kitchen as a rule, unlike some we knew. Helen didn’t pay much attention to Mama, but she did laugh the first time Abigail Uppington came tick-tacking across the cold green linoleum from her box under the stove.
Abigail Uppington only weighed about two pounds, and was the runt of a litter that had appeared way too early in the year, having something, Mama said, to do with Daddy’s carelessness about keeping the boar and the sows separated. I bet Abigail Uppington didn’t weigh half a pound when Daddy brought her in, wrapped in a gunny sack. Mama fixed one of my leftover baby bottles, the rubber nipple stiff and kind of decaying, and fed Abigail Uppington, who at first, like Helen, didn’t have a name. It was Daddy who named her, after she’d recovered, and she’d got strong enough to tick-tack across the cold green linoleum from her box.
‘She acts like she owns the place,’ Daddy said.
Abigail Uppington was a character on a radio show called Fibber McGee and Molly, a character who was kind of like the widow, Mrs Beatrice Ann Stevenson, the artsy-craftsy
