Swan River (30 page)

* * * * *

At eleven o'clock on my next to last night I stood in a car park outside a steak house and stared at the sky. There were strange colours to the north, and overhead it was blue, shading to grey. A star dropped and vanished near the horizon.

I didn't feel like going to bed or watching Wimbledon highlights on the television in my room. I drove towards Durban – I wanted to see that valley at night; it was only twenty miles. On the way I tuned the radio to country music and saw just two other cars.

I walked north for twenty minutes along a track half a mile from the town. In front of me the sky was rimmed with a pink brown glow, and streaks of two blues, light and dark, stood out higher up, motionless against a dark grey wash that dimmed the brightness of the stars and stretched over my head to the horizon in the south. Dark rod-like trees were silhouetted against the sky, and the fields winked with glow worms; it was so quiet that I thought I could hear them. As I walked back to the Ford I remembered that Bob Glennie's homestead had been next to Stuart's, somewhere close by, in the fields behind me; I wondered whether Tom had ever walked home this way, after a late drink with Glennie – and seen a sky like this.

I felt I had found out a lot about my his life here. The vision I had had for so long had changed almost totally. The man I had imagined to be lonely, freezing and miserable was undoubtedly all those things some of the time, but in a thriving pioneer town there had been cures for those complaints that he would not have ignored or refused – and he had sufficient energy and faith in the future to start a business.

It was unlikely that I could find out more. I had one day left, Sunday, and planned to spend it walking around a lake I had read about in the tourist brochure.

* * * * *

I was woken by the telephone. A voice said, ‘You still there? How you doing?'

‘Fine.'

‘You gonna be there today?'

‘Yes. Who's that?'

‘Harris. Stuart Harris. Thought we might meet and talk.'

I hadn't recognised his voice, but I was pleased – flattered – that he wanted to see me again. He drove over and we had coffee in the breakfast room.

He said he had been thinking about my grandfather and Frank White. ‘I didn't tell you before. Something was bothering me, but I've worked it out now. Your grandfather wrote that he was working on the railroad and sleeping beside the track. He arrived in 1906. The railroad from Swan River reached Durban in October 1905. The next stop is Benito, and the first train arrived in Benito on Christmas Day 1905, so when your grandfather arrived the railroad was already built. It would be possible, but unlikely, for someone to live in Durban and work on the next piece of track, Benito to Arran, but they didn't start on that until 1910. I checked.'

He paused to swallow some coffee. ‘OK. I remembered that when Frank White first came to Durban, he was employed to fence the railway line. They had regulations: the whole line, Swan River through Durban to Benito, had to have a four-wire fence on cedar posts, with upright wires every two feet, on both sides of the line. It was to keep animals – and people – off the track. It was a heck of a job. Four men did it for months, from summer 1906 through freeze-up and on into 1907. Frank was the foreman.'

He pointed his finger at me, and I began to see his drift. ‘Your grandfather said he was working on the railroad in 1906. He was –
fencing
it. And he said he lived for a while with his foreman, who was building a house. He did. Frank White was his foreman. Frank built a house at that time, on First Avenue South; he lived there till he died.' He smiled. ‘And, when your grandfather went into the boot and shoe business, who helped him set up the machinery? Frank White.' He slapped his hand gently on the table and looked up at me. ‘What do you think? Adds up, doesn't it?'

‘Certainly does. That's fantastic… And Frank was a pillar of the community, a popular man, wasn't he? That's the impression I got from your book.'

‘Frank? Oh sure. A lovely man. Great sense of humour. Always telling jokes. A bachelor – at least that's what everyone thought. He ate out every day, in the hotel or the Chinese café… That's another thing I thought: they were both – your grandfather and Frank – escaping from some kind of unhappy marriage. Maybe it drew them together, even if they didn't talk about it.'

We talked a while longer and I walked with him to his car. I asked why the place was called Swan River. I had strolled in the sun along the river at the edge of the town, but had seen no swans; the town's emblem seemed to be a crested bird called a loon. He shrugged and said he hadn't seen any swans here in all his eighty-four years, but that an early explorer had called the river Swan River because he thought he saw some swans on Thunder Hill. He laughed. ‘And who are we to say he didn't?' We parted saying how much we had liked each other's company. He seemed to have enjoyed talking to me and puzzling over my grandfather, but I knew that my gain was far greater.

* * * * *

The next afternoon, on my way to catch a plane from Winnipeg, I stopped by a lake in Duck Mountain Provincial Park. A pair of loons drifted back to back, the only living creatures in a mass of rippling greys and silvers that mirrored the washes in the sky. As I watched, one of the birds turned and aligned itself in the other's wake, and together they set off in slow procession towards the further shore. My father came into my mind, how he would have enjoyed this trip, driving on empty roads and gazing from the tops of hills, and how much he would have had to say to Stuart, about yields and straight ears and the big grain companies. And then I thought about my mother, who had died only four years before, in 1994, after a long, somewhat uneventful, second marriage; and about my daughters and what I would tell them about their great-grandfather.

I found again that I was silently thanking Tom for bringing me to the north of Manitoba. He had been desperate to prove to my father that he was a man of good character, perhaps because he thought that he had nothing else to pass on. And now, without knowing me, he
had
passed something on, of which his story was just a part. And I thought that I could see what Uncle George had had in mind.

Acknowledgements

The content and shape of this book owe much to the wisdom of Peter Straus at Picador, and to that of his colleague Becky Senior who has been tremendous, providing copious cogent insights and pivotal suggestions. William Styron, a master of euphemism, describes a fictional editor in
Sophie's Choice
as having a sharp eye for the ‘onanistic dalliance'. He could have been describing one of Becky's many editorial skills. Any onanistic dalliances that remain are my fault entirely.

My daughters, Martha, Grace and Rose, delivered wholehearted enthusiasm when I left my job to complete
Swan River
and write for a living; they should already know that they are a large part of my inspiration. I thank them, and their mother, Philippa Campbell.

My half-sisters, Madeline and Ann, and my half-brother-in-law, Adrian, dug deep into their memories and spent many hours talking with me about the past. My half-nephew, Geoffrey Rippingale, wandered with me for hours through the streets and graveyards of East London, uncomplaining and in all weathers, as we speculated about our forebears. For this he has been rewarded only with a drink at the Norfolk Arms in what is now called Cecilia Road; his companionship, insights and painstaking research have been a pleasure and a boon.

My longest-serving friend, David Hunt, has given much energy to stimulating my memory and to reading and making suggestions, and his specialist knowledge of knees – he is now a leading orthopaedic surgeon – has thrown much-needed light on La Frascetti's acrobatic talents. For reading, commenting and encouraging, I would like to thank Camilla Elworthy, Ruth Logan, Liz Calder, Tony Peake, Patrick Walsh, Sarah Beal and Ira Silverberg.

I have been helped by seven Canadians, four of whom, Candace Savage, Marilyn Biderman, Rob Sanders and Colleen Macmillan, have never been to Swan River, but knew that I should go and encouraged me practically and spiritually. Shauna Jackson-Osatchuk, editor of the
Swan River Star and Times
, and Anne Dubreuil, curator of the remarkable Swan Valley Museum, helped me greatly and graciously when I was there. Stuart Harris gave me time, wisdom and the benefit of an increasingly rare and valuable possession, a lifetime's local knowledge. He also gave this story an ending and in so doing has become a treasured friend; to him I owe something truly incalculable.

I am blessed with a third professional editor. Penny Phillips has been ever-present, dispensing love, humour, encouragement and the willingness to read and comment at all times of day and night. But for her, Swan River would still be only a town in Manitoba. I owe her so much that it is fortunate that she is my wife, and that I have the rest of my life in which to attempt to repay her.