Michael Wynne's Blog: September 2018

NEW LIVES, OLD LANDS

The first in a historical novel series

MICHAEL JOSEPH WYNNE

Get the Word file for free by emailing cmcwynne@yahoo.ca

Posted on this blog on September 12, 2018:

http://www.michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/

WILLIAMS LAKE, CANADA, 2016

REVISED, 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD 3

CHAPTER 1: ORIGINS 11

CHAPTER 2: INTERSECTION 19

CHAPTER 3: BUILDING 26

CHAPTER 4: IMMEASURABLE 38

CHAPTER 5: TRACKS 48

CHAPTER 6: MOTHERS 62

CHAPTER 7: ROCKS 69

CHAPTER 8: BELONGING 84

CHAPTER 9: EDGES 99

CHAPTER 10: BRIDGES 114

CHAPTER 11: BLOOD 128

CHAPTER 12; ROOTS 148

AFTERWORD 160

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 161

FOREWORD

Canada is a colonial land. People from elsewhere came to a land already occupied, seized it, settled it, and subjugated the Indigenous people and their descendants. By the late-1800s, the newcomers controlled all this land, which they named Canada.

Some mistakenly call history boring, but a writer can enliven history by inserting fictional characters and dialogue into actual history. A historical novel might result. A pretentious and tedious literary disaster might also result.

The historical novel that follows spans the years 1871-1917. It happens in, or at least mentions, numerous places in Canada, including Victoria, Edmonton, Montreal, Pointe St. Charles, Calgary, Batoche, Lac Sainte Anne, Frank, Edson, Tete Jaune Cache, Prince George, Kamloops, New Westminster, Lethbridge, Cape Breton, numerous rivers, creeks, and two oceans; and places in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, France, and Germany.

SOME HISTORICAL EVENTS IN THIS NOVEL

Fictional characters in this novel live through historical events. For example, Jennifer Thomas comes from Liverpool to Victoria in 1871 on a Bride Ship. From the 1850s-1870s, such ships brought single, poor women from Britain and Ireland to Victoria, where immigrant men vastly outnumbered immigrant women. Settler colonial leaders discouraged romance between these men and the Indigenous women who had survived the deliberate spread of diseases such as smallpox. Tom Swanky documents this attempted genocide in The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada's War of Extermination on the Pacific.

Other ships brought poor English children, many of them orphans, to Canada and other British colonies as cheap labor, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. The novel's Ray Anderson is one such orphan, an adult by the start of the novel. A Liverpool museum I saw documents these "Home Children," and Liverpool's role in the slave trade, related topics.

The Irish Hunger of the 1840s is another historical event in this novel. Irish people then depended heavily on the potato. A fungus drastically reduced the crop in the mid-1840s, causing widespread hunger. Britain, for centuries the colonial masters of Ireland, provided food relief for the first couple years of the crisis; but a British change of government led to the end of that aid. More than a million Irish died, and about as many emigrated, mainly to the United States and Canada. Canada was then a British colony. My Irish ancestors I know about came to Canada after the Hunger.

The novel's Sean Evans, born in County Galway after his older siblings died in the Hunger, emigrates before this novel starts. Patrick McCoy, born in Montreal of an Irish couple, who walked as children with a group of adults and other children out of starving County Donegal, is another character in the novel.

The Battle of Batoche is a historical event in the novel. In this 1885 invasion of the northern prairies, a colonial army defeated an army of Metis, descendants of fur traders from Europe and Indigenous people. With this victory, the colonizers controlled all the land that became Canada. The historic 2014 Supreme Court of Canada recognition of Indigenous title to an area of 1700 square kilometres about 200 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake, began a hopeful reversal of this historic theft of land. May this reversal continue, and Canada therefore gain legitimacy as a state of many nations.

In the novel, Orkney-born John McNab comes to Canada to work for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), which dominated the North American fur trade for generations. Some cynics redefine HBC as "Here Before Christ" or "Horny Boys' Club." During the mid-1980s, I worked for the HBC in Canada's Northwest Territories. I bought furs, sold food, dry goods, snow mobiles, guns, and much else, ran in-store banks, post offices, and store accounts, and lost my virginity, which I haven't regained. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

As my second novel, Michael Wynne: My Youth notes, I had my first sexual intercourse while a Bay manager. The Indigenous woman, older, with a Metis surname, did not work for The Bay, so I didn't abuse my power for sex. Still, another expression incriminates me. "A Bay man has the keys to the kingdom," a building full of food and supplies vital to local people, most of them poor. I benefited from the patriarchy which Europeans imposed on the matriarchal Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State explains this imposition. Perhaps the feminist novel you are about to read is my effort to atone for some of my past misdeeds.

The Metis, despite their Indigenous-European heritage, self-identify as Indigenous. A Metis family is in this novel: Batoche veteran Emile Boucher, his spouse Marie, their surviving children Elise and Louis, Elise's son Emile, and Louis' son Pierre.

Railways crisscross this novel. By 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) linked the Pacific Coast to the rest of Canada. This dissuaded the new province of British Columbia from joining the United States, which had seized from British control the Columbia River Valley south of the 49th parallel in an 1846 treaty. The United States stole land that Britain had stolen from Indigenoug people. By 1891, a railway linked Calgary and what would become Strathcona, on the North Saskatchewan River about 300 kilometres to the north. By 1912, a railway linked Edmonton, on the other side of that river, to the Pacific Coast at Prince Rupert, several hundred kilometres north of the CPR terminus. By novel's end in 1917, a railway from Tete Jaune Cache to Kamloops, 350 kilometres south, linked the two western railways in British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province.

Railway locomotives burned coal in that era, so coal mines opened along rail lines. For example, after a CPR railway traversed the Crowsnest Pass, southwest of Calgary, in 1900, coal mines sprouted along the route. These were mainly underground mines, including one at the new town of Frank. The Frank Slide of 1903 is in this novel. Turtle Mountain fractured and buried the town of Frank, buried to this day. I have seen the area's interpretive centre that details the slide.

I was born in 1961 in Edson, a few hundred kilometres north of Frank. Coal mines, mostly underground, opened in my area after the Edmonton-Prince Rupert railway reached Edson in 1910. These mines and nearby towns closed by the late-1950s, when diesel had replaced coal to fuel trains. I sometimes went on my dad's "road trips." His provincial government job included assessing property in "The Coal Branch." He warned me not to fall down the coal shafts. All were idle but some were still open. In the mid-1960s, surface coal mines opened, to export coal to Asia. My older brother and I worked in such mines during summers between university years.

Wilfrid Laurier, Canada's prime minister from 1896-1911, is in the novel. In 1905, Laurier went west to inaugurate the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. In Prince Albert, a boy named John Diefenbaker told Laurier that he wanted to be prime minister one day. Diefenbaker would be prime minister from 1957-63. In the novel, the girl character Adeline McCoy tells Laurier during his speech by the Alberta Hotel in Edmonton that she wants to be prime minister one day.

Industrialization of the newly-colonized West brought harsh working conditions, and therefore labor unions. The prominent union in this novel is the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the "Wobblies." This revolutionary union organized rail, mine, and forest workers in Western North America from around 1900 until its violent suppression during World War One (1914-18) and after this war. A few Wobblies are still around. The blind, deaf, mute scholar Helen Keller was a Wobbly, as was U.S. singer Utah Philips, and is Canadian singer Joey Onley. The novel also mentions the Knights of Labor, a union in late-1800s Canada and the United States. Adeline McCoy and George Kiel are two pro-union characters in the novel.

The novel ends in 1917, during World War One. The novel notes the First and Second Battles of Ypres in Belgium, the Battle of Vimy Ridge in France, and the Easter, 1916 Irish rebellion against British rule. During World War One, Canada interned people born in countries it now fought. German-born character Heinrich Lida is interned in the novel.

The Canadian Expeditionary Force's Vimy Ridge effort, far from baptising Canada as a nation, as national chauvinism claims, confirmed Canada as a servant of empire. Canada was a colony of France and Britain, and is a colony of the United States. Empires rise. Empires fall.

Canada continues internal colonial rule over Indigenous people, a system partly copied by South Africa when it concocted apartheid ("separate development" in Afrikaans) in the late-1940s. The non-Indigenous formed a minority in South Africa, and apartheid there ended by the mid-1990s, although another unequal society, with Indigenous rather than settler overlords, emerged. The non-Indigenous form a minority in Canada and post little threat to Canadian colonial rule, yet.

Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Franz Fanon, in Black Skin White Masks, describes African collaboration with European colonial rule of Africa. Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard, in Red Skin White Masks, describes Indigenous collaboration with Canadian colonial rule, in government, education, child welfare, and policing and prisons, among other areas. Indigenous collaborators have aided colonial rule since Ancient Greece. Indigenous people aid colonial rule in the geographical area I inhabit today.

The Irish long resisted British colonial rule, but few supported the 1916 rebellion against the British, until the victorious British executed many rebels, and increased oppression of the Irish. A growing Irish independence movement ended British rule in most of the island by 1922, although a rump state loyal to England remains in the northeast. As in Canadian colonialism, many of the subjugated in Ireland helped, and many still help the colonial masters.

My dad's mother, for example, had relatives in the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Irish colonial police invented by Britain. In 1916, Granny left what would become the rump colony, Northern Ireland. Granny died before I was born. I don't know which side Granny was on, nor the sympathies of my other Irish relatives; but I think that life and loyalty during historic events is more complex than we later imagine. In the novel, the character Brigid Kerr is a republican refugee from Ireland.

Irish colonial police were the model for Canada's Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP), invented in the 1870s to enforce unfair treaties that confined western Indigenous people to small areas. The anti-communist scare of the World War One era helped this paramilitary police force justify its continuation. This anachronism is today the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, still oppressing Indigenous people, and others who benefit little from colonialism.

CHARACTER AND ACCURACY IN A HISTORICAL NOVEL

A novel requires character development. A historical novel might merely develop characters from birth to adulthood, to produce static adults. In this novel, some characters change in other ways besides by aging. Ray Anderson and Gloria Samson are two such characters.

Childhood changed in the decades since the era in which I set this novel. Being 15 was different in 1889 than it is now. Most 15-year-olds were in the workforce then; most are in school today. In one culture, then and now, a person of 15 might head a rural or urban family. In another, a person of 15 might idle over iced drinks waiting for a sinecure or trust fund. A sinecure can be burdensome, readers of Jane Austen novels know. Trust every iced drink?

A historical novel requires historical accuracy, but it permits fictional characters and fictitious dialogue. Who knows what Scottish-born fur trader, explorer, and mapmaker David Thompson, his Metis spouse Charlotte Small, and their children discussed in the wilderness in 1803? She wrote no memoir; his memoir was selective, as memoirs are, mine included. Thompson respected Indigenous people more than most non-Indigenous people did. A historical novel about Charlotte and David could be entertaining and progressive, and might already exist. Whatever one writes about the past should be believable. Writing centuries or even decades later, we cannot represent an era's speech or action perfectly. Eras influence the people living through and after them.

THE APPEAL OF HISTORY

History appeals to many people, including me. I grew up among people who told tales from history. I studied history in university. I lived among people who saw history differently from how I saw it. I live among such people now. For example, where I now live, memoirs continue to distort history by ignoring or insulting the Indigenous, other people of color, and women and the poor. Who tells history determines what history gets told, and how it gets told. Oral or written, it is all history, with varying degrees of accuracy and bias.

The history in this novel I tell from a bias different than that of most writers. Remember the Vimy Ridge interpretation above. I reject many mainstream views, not only because I am contrary by nature. I think there are enough, and perhaps too many histories written by and about leaders, mainly white men, in war, industry, and politics. There are also plenty of, but not enough histories by and about women, Indigenous, other people of color, and the poor. There are plenty, but not enough social histories about the material culture of dissidents, workers, minorities, and women. Good writers enliven the past. My fictional characters live in a lively past. Does Canada need equivalents of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide, U.S. history from workers and Indigenous perspectives, respectively? Perhaps Canada has or will have such works. I would welcome such works.

My novel offers a combination I have not seen much in Canadian historical fiction: dissidents, workers, women, Indigenous, ethnics, and the poor, in one novel. Mazo de la Roche combines some of these in her "Jalna" novel series: I got the name Adeline from that series.

The idea for this novel came from United States writer Howard Fast's "Immigrant" novel series. Fast's generations live through the 1903 San Francisco Earthquake, the city's epic 1934 dock strike, the anti-communist hysteria that began during World War Two (1939-45), and postwar social and political turmoil in the United States. His novels depict the rich and poor realistically, not romantically such as John Steinbeck's novels do.

CONFRONTING LYING HISTORY

I despise as destructive to understanding, inclusion, peace, and progress the tales of sturdy settlers hacking a future from "terra nullius," "empty land," land which Roman and British law gave to expanding empires. The "Doctrine of Discovery," a fifteenth century European edict, said that Europeans could legitimately steal the land of non-Europeans, especially of non-Christians. Legitimate theft? Europeans stole Indigenous land. Settlers and their descendants write as if they are the first to use this land wisely. Where I live today, 500 kilometres north of Vancouver, Canada, a sea of such misleading books continues to emerge, like literary mine tailings from a stinking stock.

This land lately called Canada was inhabited long before Europeans found it. Europeans, who are my cultural ancestors, and the people already here produced the Metis, a new people. I wrote of Indigenous people in my first novel, the socialist utopian The Red Path, set in the near future. In this novel you are about to read, set in the past, I write of Metis fleeing Batoche in defeat, but maintaining their language and culture. Cree historian Howard Adams shows this struggle in his history Prison of Grass. Maria Campbell, a descendant of Metis military leader Gabriel Dumont, who fought at Batoche, shows this struggle to endure in her autobiography Halfbreed. For too long, we have read of General Middleton's colonial army riding the rails and trails to Batoche to defeat Dumont, Louis Riel, and the Metis. A growing scholarship, some Metis, some not, offers Metis views of this clash and of its enduring consequences. Settler colonial Canada remains unsettled in the realm of justice.

This book inserts Metis into post-1885 Canada, where they survived, and continue to survive, as do hundreds of thousands of other Indigenous people. This survival hinders ongoing attempts, by descendants of both settlers and Indigenous people, to portray the Metis and other Indigenous people as belonging to a past age, as people irrelevant to modern Canada unless they adopt its ways.

Canada's ways must be diverse, to legitimize Canada's existence. Israel, suppressing the Indigenous Palestinians whose land it stole, is an illegitimate state. Canada and Israel can do better. In both places, people from many cultural backgrounds are trying to defeat class, race, and gender oppression, and thereby create legitimate states.

This novel rejects cultural chauvinism, a perversion born of racism. Tecumseh, Lord Durham, Goldwin Smith, Duncan Campbell Scott, Lionel Groulx, and other cultural supremacists are long dead; but their reactionary intellectual descendants thrive today, in many cultures, settler and colonial, inside and outside Canada. A modern country worth existing is multicultural. It integrates the best of all cultures within it, Indigenous, settler, later immigrant, and the descendants of all three.

Modern Canada emerged, and continues to emerge, from stressful collisions of cultures. This stress rose during an era of great change and migration, from the 1890s to the 1910s, the period of this novel. I hope this novel shows how cultures can coexist in peace and respect.

CHAPTER 1: ORIGINS

Mom was such a brave woman, Mary thought as she plodded through the mud to Victoria High School. It was "the oldest public high school west of Winnipeg and north of San Francisco," her mom Jennifer Evans had told her more than once. Mom had become a local leader since floating in, pregnant, on a "Bride Ship" in 1871, one of the last vessels in a racist flotilla. Nobody on the Liverpool docks but Jennifer, then Jennifer Thomas, had known that she was pregnant when she had boarded the ship.

Colonel Moody had been a colonizer with a problem: too few non-Indigenous women for the many men who had come to the new colony of Vancouver Island since the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. Many of the men had come from San Francisco, whose 1849 Gold Rush had decayed to unemployment, poverty, and violence. They had come from land recently stolen from Mexico to land recently stolen from the Indigenous people of Southern Vancouver Island. There had been fierce resistance by the Lytton people to the greedy gangs invading their land along the Fraser River in the 1850s.

After the Barkerville Gold Rush began in 1862, farther upstream in the Fraser River watershed, Moody's masters were more cunning. The colonial government sent men infected with smallpox to trade with and live among the Bella Coola, Chilcotin, and Shuswap, who were defending their land from trespass by the gold seekers. People died by the thousands, from Bella Coola on the Pacific Coast to Richfield in the mountains hundreds of kilometres to the east. The dead might haunt land but they cannot defend it. The land became "terra nullius," "nobody's land," an Ancient Roman legal phrase interpreted in English law to mean that nobody exercised sovereignty over the land. Colonizers claimed such land. The growing British Empire assumed ownership of this land, as corpses rotted on the beach of Bella Coola, and in the vast expanse between there and Barkerville. Pre-empt the land of those you murder. From a crooked root grow a crooked tree.

There had been resistance, most famously by the Chilcotin when Alfred Waddington's road building crew entered Chilcotin land at Bute Inlet, south of Bella Coola. By then, smallpox was doing its grim work, hence Chilcotin efforts to clear their land of the infectors and their infection. This brought the sneaky wrath of the British Army on the Chilcotin.

Unlike at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, where a ship's cannon blast had made toothpicks of a longhouse and ended effective Indigenous resistance there for awhile, this battle site was beyond the range of ship cannons. The British invited Chilcotin leaders to Quesnel for peace talks, arrested them for murder, had a show trial under land-speculating judge Matthew Begbie, and hanged five leaders. The sixth died in a jail cell in New Westminister, near the mouth of the Fraser River. "This was war, not murder," Chilcotin leader Klatsassin ("nobody knows his name") said before he mounted the gallows. His people were down, but not out, as the future would show.

Colonel Moody had done his small bit to keep this part of North America under the British flag, when many gold seekers from the United States had wanted to add this area to the Oregon and Washington territory their country had gained in 1846 from a Britain reluctant to fight for it. The 1858 union that had joined Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland to make the colony of British Columbia had kept the territories under British rule. The 1864 quelling of the last major Indigenous resistance stregthened British control from Victoria in the south past Fort Fraser in the north. Control does not confer legitimacy, but Moody was a soldier, not a philosopher.

The earlier, fur era had been less invasive: furs, not land had been outsiders' targets; but there had been the Hudson Hope Beaver Indian resistance to the fur trade 1820. To the south, the Tsilhqot'in had run out more than one group of fur traders west of the Fraser River. Fraser Canyon Indigenous people had puzzled as Simon Fraser canoed past them in 1808, as had others puzzled while guiding Alexander Mackenzie overland from the Fraser River to Bella Coola at Pacific Ocean tidewater in 1793. These outsiders did strange things, but they usually left the land in the people's hands. There had even been noble fur traders. By 1800, David Thompson had cohabited with Charlotte Small, an Indigenous woman, a canny way for the Scot to survive harsh winters. They and their children later retired to Montreal: unlike other fur traders, Thompson did not abandon his "country wife" for a non-Indigenous women.

More than a half century later, Colonel Moody, tasked to populate this stolen land, had a problem; but the Home Office back in London had a solution. Non-Indigenous men outnumbered women more than ten to one in Victoria, and in the colony in general. David Thompson had taken an Indigenous spouse decades before, but that was no solution since recent wars had soured relations between the settlers and the Indigenous people. David Thompson had wanted help from someone he respected as an equal, almost. Times had changed. Settlers now wanted to transplant England to the Pacific shores of North America. An Indigenous woman inconveniently brought her own culture, a culture resisting colonialism. Disappear, don't procreate.

Moody needed European women, white women, who could bear children, and grow families and communities to support the colonial vision for this wilderness. Indigenous women would not do. Educated, independent-minded women would not do. Poor, uneducated women would bring fewer questions and opinions. They were unlikely to threaten the delicate cultural structure being built on this stolen Indigenous land. Moody had grouchy Indigenous subjects, the few who had survived smallpox and other colonial toxins. Moody's men needed compliant women subject to them, as the men were to Moody.

The English class structure ventured overseas, not for the first or last time.
A few years before, England had begun sending "Bride Ships" to its colonies.

Poor women, some orphaned, some starving, some thrown off the land by gentry and capitalists in favor of sheep, filled the ships. Some women were surplus to the needs of the factories sprouting in England, a reserve army of the unemployed to help control the employed. All the women were young and strong, what British Columbia Lieutenant Governor Richard Moody's idle, troublesome settler men needed.

     One woman was pregnant.
     Jennifer Thomas was one such poor, young, strong woman. She was desperate to leave England. She had been governess to a newly-rich textile mill owner in Lancashire. His frigid spouse had born him two children but had soon sunk into melancholy, missing her London friends and habits. Jennifer had taught these children reading, mathematics, and much else. She had learned reading and more from her late father, a minor gentleman and Dissenter. He had kept the feminism of Mary Woolstonetcraft and her daughter Mary Shelley alive in their Yorkshire village.
     Jennifer Thomas was pregnant when she boarded that bride ship in Liverpool in the spring of 1871. Her lord and master had wanted a woman as well as a governess. His obliging spouse didn't object; this kept him off her, so to speak. The lady of the manor did object when Jennifer became pregnant. The three swore secrecy, to avoid scandal and legal implications. He arranged Jennifer's passage on the ship, and gave her enough money to resettle, the farther away the better. Jennifer Thomas left England, never to return. Jennifer had come to love him, and he her; but this was 1871 Lancashire. There was no Charlotte Bronte in sight. Jennifer was no Jane Eyre. Her lord was no Rochester.
     Colonel Moody wanted women who could breed a colony. Unknown to Moody, Jennifer had started that job before boarding the Bride Ship.

     Sean Evans was waiting at the Victoria dock when Jennifer Thomas and more than 30 other young, single women walked down the gangplank more than two months later.   Jennifer's belly bulged in its sixth month of pregnancy, but, like Isabel Gunn, she dressed for concealment. Gunn had dressed as a man to become a fur trader decades before.   Only the birth of Isabel's child had shown others that she was a woman.   Only a few women on board knew that Jennifer was pregnant.   No men knew.
     Sean did not seem to notice that Jennifer was pregnant.   He did notice that she looked at everything carefully, through those light brown eyes some English women have, surrounded by wavy brown hair.
     Jennifer noticed the clean-shaven man on the dock, amid a rough rabble. Far from home, forever from home, she needed someone she could trust, someone gentle, someone clean in this muddy land halfway around the world. She noticed Sean's bright blue eyes, which reflected the sunny day.
     Well, here's a new land and a clean man, Jennifer thought.
     Well, she noticed me, Sean thought.
     They came together in the jostle that was women and men seeking partners, seeking futures.
     "Hello, miss," Sean said, trying and failing to hide his strong Irish accent. "My name is Sean Evans."
     "Hello, sir," Jennifer replied, enchanted by this polite, curly-haired man. "My name is Jennifer Thomas." She detected his accent, and he hers.

She had enough Irish relatives, dead or alive, to know Irish tales of displacement and determination. Who was this man? Would he accept another man's child? These were matters for later, after they got to know each other. She hoped there would be a later. She had turned 20 during the voyage, an old 20.

Sean pondered the woman before him. Where was she from? Who were her people? Why had she come on this ship?

He knew why he was in Victoria on that July day in 1871. His parents had survived the Irish Hunger of the late-1840s. Only Sean, the youngest of five children, born in 1851, soon after the Hunger, reached adulthood. His aging, ailing parents practically begged Sean to emigrate. He left, only after he was sure that his cousins could care for his parents. Boston had not been the city of gold that others had described aboard the ship. The westward trek to Oregon had not enriched him either. He remembered soldiers killing Indigenous people, just like Cromwell's armies had killed Irish people in the 1600s. He had therefore crossed into British Columbia. Sean didn't like how the English treated the Irish, but Victoria was far enough away to be different, although the English wanted to stamp it English. What sort of English woman was this Jennifer?

In Victoria, Sean had prospered. His skill with horses helped him in this new city of many opportunists and few skilled people. After a year's hard work and saving, Sean owned the livery stable that had first employed him, its owner happy to return to England. There was always someone who wanted to go somewhere, or get something shipped somewhere. His stable was near the docks, adding a sea link to his land business. He treated well the two people who worked for him, and paid them above average to keep them. Good help was hard to find here.

Good women were harder to find here.

"Have you a trunk?" Sean asked. "I brought my carriage," he said eagerly, but he hoped not too eagerly, pointing to the horse and wagon on the road above the dock.

"Thank you. My trunk is over there," Jennifer replied, gesturing to the growing jumble of steamer trunks at water's edge. Well, this is my future, Jennifer thought, hoping for the best.

Sean wrangled the trunk up the hill and into the back of the open wagon. He helped Jennifer into the front. He had scrubbed the wagon from front to back, even gotten the pitch stains out of the corners. The harness buckles gleamed on his horse. Was it enough? Was he enough?

"Welcome to Victoria. Welcome to Canada, ma'am," Sean chirped as he got in beside her. "I suppose you're hungry."

"Very,"

"Well, a meal can make a friend," Sean said. "My place is down the shore a piece, at the bottom of Yates Street. The fare's not fancy, but it fills the gap."

"Sounds wonderful," Jennifer said.

There followed a couple weeks of courting, while Jennifer stayed in a rooming house and watched her lord's money shrink. A week later, paperwork with Moody and marriage vows before a local priest sealed their union.

How many times had Mary heard that tale of how her parents met? How nervous both had been, especially her mother, six months pregnant. How accepting her father had been. Of course Mom was secretive, even ashamed; but she deserved love, not shame. People survive how they must. Had Jennifer refused her lord's advances, she would have landed on the street, in a workhouse, or worse. Jennifer and Sean had left desperate lands.

Mary's dad told her tales of people dying on the streets and shores of Galway during The Hunger of the 1840s. His parents had seen it, and almost died themselves. Sean's oldest sister Mary had died, starved into such weakness that typhus had killed her. Sean's parents had gone inland with their other three, sick, weak children. They had begged for food and shelter at an estate, where they would work like animals. Still, Sean's other three siblings had died by 1850. Sean was born on the estate in 1851, rekindling his parents' hope. Soon the worse of the hunger was over, and the family moved back to Galway. There, his dad's skill with horses, learned on the estate, supported the family, barely.

Sean grew up looking at Galway Bay and wondering what lay beyond. So many had departed, many in "coffin ships," built to haul wood from America to Europe. Many died on the way. Many died in quarantine in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere. Some landed and found work. Some prospered.

Sean's parents, tired of the struggle, watched him watching the sea. When he was 18, he left a melancholy mother and wistful father. They both hoped their only surviving child would fare better than they had, than he would in this first English colony, whose overlords constantly reminded a person of his proper place. Sean joined the sea of hopefuls crossing the Atlantic Ocean. They left a certainty for a mystery.

"Your mother was my mystery," Sean told Mary, their only child, named after his late, oldest sibling.

"Your father is such a story teller. He kissed the Blarney Stone," Mary's mom quipped.

Mary was 13 when Jennifer told her daughter about the day she told Sean that he had married a pregnant woman. Jennifer told this tale solemnly.

"'We had been together for a couple weeks. We had only kissed. My belly was growing so much, it seemed to me that he must have been blind not to notice; but my family of big-boned women carried pregnancies well.'"

"'I'm getting fat, Sean.'"

"'More of you to love,' he said."

"'I'm pregnant.'"

"'What good news!' How far?' he said, not seeming too surprised."

"'Seven months,' I replied, expecting him to to rage such as he sometimes did with deadbeat customers in his shipping business."

"'I suspected you were pregnant when I met you,' he calmly replied."

"'What?' I said. 'And you didn't leave me right there? This is another man's child in me!'"

"'Jennifer, I can't father children,' he said. 'Lord knows I tried, mostly in the states, but it never worked out. Some men cause pregnancies. Not me. Some Irishman I am. I suspected you were pregnant. I hoped you were pregnant.'"

"'Why didn't you say something? I was so worried you'd reject me!'"

"'I waited until you were ready to bring it up. I thought that if I asked, you would think I didn't want you, and you would leave. Or you would think that I pitied you. Pity is no road to love. I didn't want to lose you. Victoria is no city for a single, pregnant woman. So I shut up and waited, unusual for an Irishman.'"

"I cried and cried and cried, right there, in front of him," Jennifer told Mary. "I was so relieved, so safe, so loved. May you one day find someone as good for you as your father was and is for me."

"We certainly tried to have children after you," Sean winked to them when Mary was older, and the topic of her origins was less delicate. "I think there are few Irishmen who cannot father a child, but I know that most like to try."

"Sean!"

"Dad!"

"Now, my girl, if any of those slick boys at Victoria High School try anything with you, tell them your father is ready with the whip," Sean said, suddenly serious, looking at his daughter, looking through her. Sean's dad had looked at him that way as Sean had boarded the boat to leave Galway. Look through your child to the dangers your child might face, and hope you raised your child to be ready for them.

"Don't worry, Dad. I'm going to be a teacher. A woman teacher can't be married."

"Ridiculous convention," Mary's mother grumbled. "Get through school and go where a teacher can be a woman, too, girl."

These memories stuck in Mary's mind as the mud stuck to her shoes during the walk to school that spring day in 1889. She would graduate in a few weeks, and leave this settled place for somewhere with more freedom for women. Her mom had come halfway around the world pregnant. Mary would ride a ferry from Victoria to that new city of Vancouver across the water. She would then ride a train on that spanking new railway that ended in Port Moody. She would go east by rail to Calgary and north by trail to Edmonton, an outpost that she had heard hired Grade 12 graduates to teach school. It was far, but less than the distances her parents had traveled when young and alone.

CHAPTER 2: INTERSECTION

"No Irish need apply," too many signs read in Montreal, where Patrick McCoy had been born in 1863, a few years before Canada had been born in 1867. Now it was 1881, he was 18, and tired of scrambling for a living. He was ready to move west, as so many had done before.

Patrick's parents Joe and Eileen (Donnelly) McCoy had moved west, from Ireland to Canada, in the 1840s. Their parents had brought them and their siblings during The Irish Hunger. Patrick, Pat as his friends called him, looked from Pointe St. Charles across the St. Lawrence River. In 1849, Pat's future parents, then mere ragged children, had come up that river in a "coffin ship." Such ships carried lumber to Britain and Ireland. The ships usually came back to Canada empty. Then someone thought of filling the ships with starving Irish people for the trip back to Canada. Ship owners then profited more: misery money.

Pat's parents and their siblings and parents had walked with a group away from their meagre farms in County Donegal in the summer of 1849, after the potato blight had made the farms even more meagre. Their small savings had bought them passage on a ship leaving tiny Port Donegal. They had heard stories of crowded ships leaving Cobh, Cork, and Galway to the south, and of people starving to death before they could board. When they learned of a ship, a single ship, leaving Donegal that summer, they decided to walk to the port. They walked away from land farmed by their kin for generations. They left the harsh necessity of working off-farm during hard times, and the indignity of working for people who were never hungry.

The passage had been harsh, and even deadly for one older sibling of each of Pat's parents, Joe and Eileen. Weak upon boarding, Joe's sister Adeline and Eileen's brother Patrick were prone to the typhus and cholera that raged through coffin ships during the Atlantic passage. Off the Newfoundland Coast, Adeline succumbed to typhus. At the Grosse Isle quarantine station in the St. Lawrence River, Patrick died of cholera. Joe and Eileen each watched their mothers, ERin and Nora, die of typhus during quarantine. Authorities then let the surviving children and their fathers ashore. The survivors then rode a train along the St. Lawrence River upstream to Pointe St. Charles. There, the growing Irish immigrant community helped the widowed fathers raise their children. Joe's dad Fergus remarried, but Eileen's dad Seamus did not.

Joe and Eileen grew up sturdy, tested by The Hunger, the passage, the loss of dear ones, and resettlement in a strange city in a strange land. The Montreal area was big, busy, noisy, and dirty compared with Donegal. People died of cholera from bad water here, but not in the numbers that starvation and emigration had killed in Ireland or fleeing Ireland. Like their fathers, Joe and Eileen attended Saint Charles Catholic Church. Like their fathers, they shunned "the cold hand of charity" that the church offered its many poor parishioners. They knew each other vaguely as children when they left Ireland, and romantically as adults in Canada. They bore and raised Patrick ad his three younger siblings Nora, Erin, and Joe with love, and usually enough to eat.

Patrick, named after his mother Eileen's brother who died in quarantine on Grosse Isle, also went to mass. Didn't everyone? Unlike his parents, he went to school long enough to do something other than use a "strong back and weak mind" to follow someone's orders. Still, in Quebec, where the church-run schools ensured that "a few would be doctors and lawyers, and Grade 7 was enough for the rest," Pat got through Grade 7 and no further. High school cost money, and his family didn't have much.

Smart but poor, Patrick did a bewildering variety of jobs, including run errands, load and unload ships, and labor on the many construction sites that crowded The Pointe, and Verdun across the river. He worked wherever his feet could bring him.

When Patrick landed a laboring job in Montreal's vast Canadian Pacific Railway yards in 1880, the yards, like the new country, buzzed with talk of the transcontinental railway inching west. Pat's yard pay was good, but he wanted adventure. In the spring of 1882, Pat boarded a train bound for the end of steel, wherever that was in Western Canada, a place as strange and distant as The Pointe had been to his parents.

First he worked on a tracking crew, hard work for long days under the hot sun. When the rails reached Pile o' Bones, later renamed Regina, Pat noticed a better way to make a living. Speculators had run up the real estate prices in what was to be the regional centre for the railway, and the development they expected the railway to spawn. The CPR merely moved that centre to Regina, but it entailed a complicated re-routing of supply lines and volumes. Pat had no sympathy for the land speculators: people trading in land, which should be a commons, not a commodity, had impoverished the Irish for centuries. He saw money to be made supplying this historic venture, to help the rails reach the Pacific Coast.

A summer, and especially a winter of laying down track convinced Pat to change jobs, as the rails approached Calgary. At first he merely handled the many items used to build a railway: hammers, spikes, food, tents, what meagre medicine the CPR provided to injured or diseased workers, and assorted other items, including workers, who were items to his bosses, but humans to Pat. His bosses noticed that Pat got things and people where they had to be when they had to be there. This sped up their work, so their bosses back in Montreal worried less and profited more, largely from government money.

The Canadian government was impatient with the slow progress and rising cost of this railway. There were rumblings from British Columbia that it might join the United States if the rail link to the rest of Canada did not come soon. The government leaned on head builder Donald Mann. He leaned on his minions, who leaned on crew leaders in the West. One crew leader sent Patrick, a small cog in this big machine, to Calgary. Calgary was the site of the herculean effort to supply the crews blasting and dying through the mountains to meet the crews doing likewise from Port Moody, on Burrard Inlet.

Patrick McCoy saw an opportunity. The rails had reached Medicine Hat by May, 1883. Progress was fast toward Calgary. That spring, Pat bid farewell to his co-workers, whether they wielded hammers or griddles. He led a line of packhorses west toward Calgary, on one of many wagon roads doomed by the iron rails. One horse's pack included the letter of introduction to the yard master at Calgary, a busy man happy and relieved to see Pat.

"No Irish need apply" was not part of the vocabulary in Calgary. There, if you could work, you were hired.

Even the Chinese fared better in Calgary than with the tracking crews in the mountains west of Calgary. Fewer of them died. Paid less, often given dangerous jobs such as scaling mountain slopes to plant explosives, the Chinese died on the line more often than any other workers died. More than one dead Chinese worker per mile of track would permanently stain Canada's history. On average, four Chinese laborers died for every mile of track in the Fraser Canyon.

From the Indigenous in British Columbia and across the Americas, from the Irish in Pointe St. Charles, and from the Chinese on the railway, colonial ventures exacted steep prices in racism, blood, and death.

Patrick McCoy found Calgary different, at first. Chinese ran laundries, grocery and dry goods stores, and restaurants. Some even worked for the CPR in Calgary, suffering inferior pay and racist words and acts, but less death than those building the railway. Even a few Blackfoot, recently driven off their land around the growing city, found jobs in the city. Would work remain after the railway was done and there was surplus labor? Patrick thought about this, and vowed to survive and thrive after the railway was built. He worked hard and smart, learning all he could during two years in Calgary.

When a railway crew near Craigellachie, British Columbia drove the last spike to complete the railway, and a staged re-enactment of the ceremony followed on November 7, 1885 to photograph soft-handed railway moguls driving a spike, Pat was in Calgary. The yard boss wanted him to stay, when most others were losing their jobs and scrounging other work, or going homesteading, or back to Blackfoot villages, or eking out a living with Chinese kin along the rail lines. Pat politely declined, took the money he had saved during his railroad years, and built a warehouse to supply the city and surrounding homesteaders. Who knew better how to ship supplies than someone who had done it for the building of a railway?

Patrick McCoy, in his early 20s, prospered in Calgary as few of his Irish ancestors had prospered in centuries. Letters to and from his parents in Pointe St. Charles glowed with cheery visions of the future.

Less than three years later, in 1888, rumors circulated that a rail line would stretch north to the North Saskatchewan River, across from Fort Edmonton, a historic fur trade post. Less than two years after that, Patrick sold his Calgary warehouse at a good profit and moved north, to the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River, across from Fort Edmonton. Calgary had become too settled for him. It was certainly too English and Protestant, he noticed when well-connected others got shipping contracts he could have fulfilled faster and cheaper. Move or starve. Move. It was time for another adventure.

When Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had proclaimed that the west would be English, there was a strong implication that it would also be Protestant. The bullets that had defeated the French-speaking Catholic Metis at Batoche three years before had lethally echoed Macdonald's view. Still, most people in Fort Edmonton spoke Cree or French as a first language. Patrick's French from growing up in Pointe St. Charles would help him settle in Fort Edmonton before the rails, and a flood of settlers, arrived. Until then, he could supply the growing community of settlers there and nearby. Build another warehouse, and maybe a brickyard. There were possibilities in this country for a man who could think ahead.

Patrick, a wagon, and a line of packhorses, one of them carrying a letter of credit from the Imperial Bank of Canada, left Calgary in the spring of 1890. The letter of credit, standing for his money from selling his Calgary warehouse, would be his financial springboard up north. It was also safer than gold, on the 300-kilometre trip northward across the prairie. Times were getting tough; people were getting desperate. Patrick McCoy would be damned if he'd let some highwayman rob him of years of income, from years of hard work.

Birds sang in the flowery fields as Patrick rode north. Buttercups waved in the morning sunshine. A few homesteads had sprung up close to Calgary. Patrick traveled land that fur trader and explorer Anthony Henday, the first European recorded to have seen the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, had traveled in the 1750s. Buffalo herds had thundered across the prairie then. Now only the odd buffalo rambled by, a tiny remnant of the herds recently decimated to starve the Indigenous people into confinement on reserves, prisons of grass. A few Red River carts, with their wooden wheels, rattled across Pat's path.

A few days later, Patrick and his laden horses rolled along the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River. He found a neat inn and stable for himself, his wagon, and his horses. French-speaking Yvonne Richard ran it and had a blonde daughter named Gisele. Patrick was happy to practice French again. His horses were happy to shed their burdens.

A ferry connected South Edmonton to Fort Edmonton, the older settlement on the north side of the river. The fur trade had made Fort Edmonton a major post along a major fur trade route. Paddleboats and barges and York boats and canoes plied the river, from Rocky Mountain House upstream to Hudson Bay far downstream.

The next morning, Patrick left his wagon and all but one horse at the inn, and rode down the hill to the ferry to cross the river. On the far bank was the Imperial Bank. While he floated across, he noticed a barge of lumber coming downstream, about to dock on the Fort Edmonton side. After the ferry docked, Patrick rode his horse to the lumber dock. He talked to the lumber merchants with the authority of a man who knows his business and wants to do business. They were very interested in the prospect of a warehouse in South Edmonton. He didn't tell them of the railway rumors, but they might have known already. Know what to say, and what not to say. A warehouse was good business, railway or no railway.

Hitching his horse outside the bank, Patrick noticed a young woman and a slightly older man arguing on the wooden sidewalk outside the bank.

"You paid me for a wagon. I built a wagon," the man said plaintively.

"Your wagon is too small," she replied. "I asked for one that would hold ten children."

"Children are small. They'll fit."

The woman took a piece of paper from the pocket of her trousers. A woman in trousers? Patrick pondered.

"See, twelve feet long, seven feet wide, three rows of double seats, and a raised seat at the front for the driver and another passenger. That's what I paid for."

"That's what I built," the man said, indicating a small wagon on the road. Patrick saw that it was neither twelve feet long nor seven feet wide.

"Fine, I'll take it; but I want you to refund some of the money I paid you."

"But..." the man said, until he saw the woman's glare, when he said no more.

"Don't worry," she comforted him. "My school will need more wagons as it gets more children. The one you built is good, if a bit small. Could you build a bigger one?"

"Yes, ma'am, I could," the man said, mollified. He was about to haggle with her, to avoid giving too much money back due to the small wagon.

"What are you staring at?" she turned to Patrick, who didn't realize he had been staring at the pair.

"You," he said meekly.

"Take a picture. It lasts longer."

Patrick untied his tongue and said, "Actually, miss, I am new here and looking to start a business."

"You and a flood of others," the man said. "Times are tough."

"What sort of business?" the woman asked.

"Shipping."

"What do you know about shipping?" the man asked.

People speak their minds here, Patrick thought.

"I helped supply the building of the railway through Calgary, and I just sold my warehouse there. I plan to build a warehouse across the river. You seem to know how to build things," Patrick told the man.,

"When he's sober," the woman said.

"You seem to know how to bargain," Patrick told the woman.

"Keep your hand on your wallet when you talk to Mary," the man said. "She's more than a school teacher, my friend."

"Mary the teacher, eh?" Patrick mused, remembering his Grade 7 education. "How's your arithmetic?"

Mary glared at Patrick. "I'll have you know that I finished near the top of my Grade 12 class in Victoria. I had no trouble getting and keeping a teaching job in Fort Edmonton last fall. My arithmetic is better than your manners. You know my name is Mary. Mary Evans. What's yours?"

"Patrick. Patrick McCoy. Pleased to meet you."

"Allan. Allan Long," the wagon-builder interjected. "I'm always looking for a better job than I have."

Patrick pondered a moment. "Would you two wait outside, or in the bank, for me? I have a proposition."

Mary folded her arms, musing. Allan dug his toe in the dirt, thirsty. They agreed to wait for Pat.

Thus did Mary Evans and Patrick McCoy meet, on a muddy Fort Edmonton street in the spring of 1890.

CHAPTER 3: BUILDING

Allan Long knew where to get lumber, and men who knew how to use it. Pat McCoy liked both these qualities. Within a week, they had a large lot in South Edmonton, a large pile of lumber, two other men, George Kiel and Ray Anderson, and a plan for a warehouse.

"Where did you meet those two?" Pat asked Allan one day, as they watched the other men measure and saw planks.

"I met Ray at Batoche in 1885," Allan replied. "We three fought Riel and the Metis at Batoche. Ray was with the army. He later told me and George that he wished he had stayed in Ontario rather than fight a war that wasn't his."

"I heard about that war," Pat said, inviting details.

"It was no war. It was a massacre. Ray and I volunteered at St. Albert, where the Catholic clergy were recruiting people against Riel. And Riel was Catholic!"

"The church sides with the winners, whoever they are," Pat said, recalling church efforts against the Knights of Labor in the Montreal area during his teen years. "I rarely attend mass anymore, Allan."

"I'm sorry I went to mass that day in St. Albert, Pat," Allen said. "The priest talked as if the devil himself had taken over Batoche. The pay would be good. George could use that for his homestead. I always seemed to need more money than I had. We expected to work in supply, not in killing."

"What happened?"

"We passed through Frog Lake after the Metis had cleaned it out. There was still blood on the walls of the main building, and not a scrap of food or supplies inside. They were starving, you see."

Patrick thought of his parents' tales about The Hunger back in Ireland. Hunger breeds desperation.

"The sergeant who had gotten us that far said that Batoche was where he planned to meet the army and fight the Metis. We met Ray the day before the Battle of Batoche. Ray came with the army from Ontario."

"Telling war stories again, Allan?" Ray asked, leaning on a sawhorse. "That was no war. That was organized murder."

"You know it, Ray," George added.

Long continued, deadly serious. "The army had come most of the way from Ontario by train."

Patrick thought of the railway he had helped build. A railway could bring life, or death.

"When they opened up with that gatling gun, it was all over. The Metis didn't have a chance," Ray said. "They were putting nails and other bits of metal in their guns for ammunition before they surrendered."

Ray paused, pensively.

"I didn't like it. I hadn't joined the army for that," Ray said, now intent on the conversation. "I never went back to Ontario. Luckily, I had no family there waiting for me. I was an orphan when I enlisted, and I certainly didn't want the army as my father."

Ray was one of the Home Children, poor, many of them orphans, shipped from England to its colonies. England had surplus labor and colonies sought labor. These children were pawns to equalize that imbalance. Ray, 5 at the time, did not know who his parents were. Was he an orphan? Years of hard labor on Ontario farms distracted Ray from wondering, until he stopped wondering. When he was old enough, Ray joined the army, desperate for men to ride the new railway west to fight the Metis, who were desperate to keep their land around Batoche. Ray expected a changed life and he got one.

Would Ray ever discover his parents, if he still had any? His earliest memory was of a Liverpool building full of children, but he did not know how he had gotten there. The ocean passage was a floating jungle, but a couple of older children had protected Ray from the meaner children, and adults, on board.

George said, "After Batoche, Ray came to my homestead to help me, and possibly to get his own homestead. I'm glad I didn't kill anybody."

Pat wondered why homesteaders were sawing lumber in South Edmonton, when the government was giving away land. Perhaps land was less valuable in this vast country than in cramped Ireland, with its numerous small plots crowded in and around aristocrats' estates.

"When Ilsa died on the cabin floor last winter, I couldn't keep the place," George said, seeming to read Pat's mind. "I moved here to find work. Ray came with me. It has been hard, but I think we're getting somewhere, finally. Germany was too far to return to."

"You speak good English, George," Pat noted.

"And French, and some Cree," George added humbly. "It helps with the work around here. I got a good education before I left Germany, but Germany under Bismarck was no place for a working man."

George had been 13 in 1870, too young for conscription into the Prussian Army to fight France. His older brother Fritz had fought, faced a court martial after the war for mutiny, and been executed.

Some of the army stayed on to help the French destroy the Paris Commune in 1871. The French communards had built barricades and taken over Paris. George's expanding German nation strongly opposed this, but George quietly sympathized with the French. Fritz's letters from the war had been full of shame at what his commanders had made him do. The French army was probably no better, George thought. An army's first duty, since the Romans quashed Spartacus's army of slaves in antiquity, was to serve the rich against the poor. Nationalism dressed it in fancy, fallacious rhetoric; but the Prussians who helped the French against the Paris commune showed the army's traditional purpose: fight for property, not for people. Fritz's resistance, gleaned from his letters to George, cost Fritz his life.

National armies were less the enemies of one another than the enemies of the poor, at home and abroad. In 1880, at 22, George had left his German Alsatian border town before Bismarck could conscript him to fight elsewhere, perhaps against fellow Germans.

Ilsa had come to Canada on the same ship as George. They met on board and liked each other immediately. They settled among other Germans in Berlin, Ontario. In the growing town, George found work bricklaying, glad that he had learned from his bricklayer father and uncles. Work was steady, but George's part in the Knights of Labor labor union soured bosses on hiring him.

The spring after the CPR had crossed Canada in 1885, George and Ilsa had migrated west, like so many others. Ten dollars bought them a homestead in the parkland northwest of Fort Edmonton, in the Sturgeon River Valley, a long journey by horse and wagon from Calgary.

George worked hard to clear enough land to gain title. He hired himself out to help other homesteaders build their houses and barns. When Ilsa and their baby died during childbirth in their cabin in the summer of 1888, George lost heart for homesteading. He gave up his homestead and migrated to Fort Edmonton, where his two skilled hands and his good English and French always found him work. George wondered if this would always be his lifelong lot: work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep. But he knew that life could change fast, for worse or for better.

"Canada, especially this part of Canada, accepts me," George said. "This country appreciates people who can work."

"George and I are quite a pair," Ray quipped.

Patrick launched into French. He and George chatted, while Allan went to help Ray move planks into place above the rock and concrete footings. This heavy work of framing would take the four of them, pulling together. Pulling together was part of George's nature.

People pulled together for the darnedest things, Pat thought: homesteading, war, construction, family. He thought of Mary. He was glad he would see her across the river tonight. He had talked her into helping with the bookkeeping for his business, but that had only been an excuse to see her regularly. She had seen through his ruse early, but she liked seeing him, too. Mary had just begun her second year teaching in the 1881 Schoolhouse, the quaint name for the school on McKay Avenue. The school was growing with the city. It gained classrooms and storage sheds and teacherages. Patrick wondered if the city would replace that hodgepodge with a new school, perhaps a school made of brick.

Patrick had been thinking of brick lately. He planned brickwork for parts of his warehouse. He was happy to learn that George knew brickwork. Brick lasts, George said more than once. Ray hoped that George, Ray, and Allan would stay with him, and not take other jobs in this city short of workers, who could command almost any wage. Pat paid above average, but his decency as much as his generosity attracted the three men. As winter closed in, the men closed in the warehouse.

Across the river, Mary was thinking of Pat, as she corrected student work and prepared the next day's work, two tasks that stretch a good teacher's day into the night. She was glad that Allan had made her a new wagon, and that her public school paymasters had agreed to two wagons, not the one they had grudgingly approved at first. They knew the school was growing with the city.

This was a public school, open to both rich and poor children. There were fees, waived if unaffordable. There was no priest, no minister, no Mister Gradgrind from Dickens, dictating what people must believe, say, and do. Mary was free to teach new ideas, such as evolution, working conditions, working women, and even Indigenous topics. She and the students learned together. Mary thought she was doing something historic, in historic times. She was so happy she had come to Fort Edmonton after graduation from Victoria.

The trustees had tried other teachers, almost all men. They preferred men because they could control older boys. A whip worked for a horse. A strap worked for a boy. But the men teachers didn't stay long. They fled to better-paid work on the river, or in the fur trade, or they homesteaded. Mary had convinced the school board to try a woman teacher. They were happy to pay her less than they paid men. Mary was happy for the experience. Pay would rise as trustees appreciated her more.

Like many who don't teach, trustees had many ideas about how to teach. Show the children, especially the older boys, who's boss. A strapping worked wonders. Mary tried that during her first autumn in the classroom. She guessed that the parents and school board of Fort Edmonton knew their children better than she did. A disastrous war of nerves resulted between Mary and the children, all the children, even the younger ones whose hands rarely felt the strap's mottled leather.

A couple weeks before Christmas, Mary had sat at her desk. She told the children to clear their desks. She said they would have a talk. Children aren't fools. They wondered what new control scheme this was. She asked them why they came to school, and what they hoped to achieve there. Amid the grumbles about parents forcing them there, and the older children's admission that school was less work than they would face in whatever job they could get without school, there were two children, one a little boy and one an older girl, who said, "I come here to learn."

That was the opening Mary needed. Thank goodness for the teachable moment.

"What do you want to learn, William?" she asked the boy, who was 8.

"To read and write and do numbers, so I can get a better job than my dad has."

Mary knew that William's dad was a day laborer, a sober man who nonetheless regularly lacked the money to feed and clothe his wife and their four children. William's mother took in laundry, but still the family barely survived. Despair and violence sometimes stalked such families. Why had William's parents come to Fort Edmonton? To leave someplace that had been worse? William's story was not unique.

"William," Mary said, looking squarely at him but thinking of the rest of the class, now quiet with anticipation. "School is a place to learn to read, write, and do numbers. People who learn these things can get better jobs than their parents have. That's why your parents send you to school."

While the class, whose ages ranged from 7 to 15, digested this wisdom from someone only a bit older than the oldest students, Mary turned to the older girl. Gloria, 15 and smart, was from one of the richer families in Fort Edmonton.

"Gloria, you said you came here to learn. You have been in this school for several years. I'm glad you still want to learn. Some people lose that," Mary said. "You could leave anytime, even before you turn 16, which is just before Christmas. Will you stay to year's end?"

"Yes, Miss Evans," Gloria said. "You're the first woman teacher we ever had. You talk to us more than the men teachers did, and you strap us less."

Gloria's hands had felt the leather of Mary's strap, early in the school year. Gloria had stood up and snapped that her dad owned a big store in Fort Edmonton, he was a school trustee, and who was this young teacher to tell her how to behave? Mary had caught Gloria flirting with one of the older boys. Mary had strapped Bruce, who winced but did not object. He was a strap veteran. Bruce would probably quit school by spring, for river or construction work, or to hire on at a prosperous homestead near Fort Edmonton. Mary had ordered Gloria to the front for the strap, in that teacher voice that tells children who is in charge.

Mary had strapped Gloria. Gloria had complained to her dad. Her dad had come to the school. Mary thought her job was over, by late September. Instead, Roger Samson had told Mary that Gloria was long overdue for "a whipping." This complicity in classroom control by violence was cold comfort to Mary.

Even the school board had commended Mary for being "as tough as a man." Some commendation, Mary thought at the time, and still thought.

"I talk to you because you are all human beings, some of you children, some of you close to adulthood, like you, Gloria," Mary said.

"I don't know about your family history except what you told me here and what your families told me when I visited them in early September, but my family history includes famine and violence." The class went very quiet. Teachers, those distant gods by blackboards, rarely talked of their own lives. The children felt as if they had been invited to special knowledge.

Mary briefly told her parents' history, omitting the part about her mom being pregnant before meeting her dad. Such was "the economy" that John Henry Cardinal Newman spoke of, some Victoria priest and Mary's mother had argued about in front of her when Mary was 14. Tell people only what you think they need to know, only what they can handle. Jennifer had told the priest that as children grow up, adults should tell them all, as clerics should tell adult parishioners. Jennifer was no docile dogan. Mary's class listened intently.

Gloria was becoming someone who seemed able to handle anything. "Economy" of a different sort would define Gloria's later life.

Mary Evans was the first teacher to visit her students' families. Some adults welcomed her. Others were wary. One happy result was that the poorer, less-educated parents felt welcome as never before, when they came to the school.

The Christmas concert was coming. The children had worked hard to prepare. Mary hoped that many parents, rich and poor, forward and shy, would come. Not all the rich were forward, and not all the poor were shy. Fort Edmonton was an interesting place, Mary's letters to her mother Jennifer had said that first year.

Mary's life story settled in the students' minds. Then Gloria raised her hand.

"I'll finish this year, and come next year, if you'll have me," Gloria said. Mary's toughest, most articulate critic had new respect for Mary. "I want to go to university."

Where was the frivolous flirt of September? Mary wondered. "I would be happy to have you here next year, Gloria," Mary said, bewildered by the change in Gloria. "When did you decide to go to university?" Even the older boys were attentive now.

"When you taught us about Frankenstein," Gloria replied. "That woman who wrote it, Mary Shelley, went through some hard times after her rich husband Percy Shelley died. Your Irish and English ancestors went through hard times, you just told us. I come from wealth, not from poverty. I could run Dad's store. I could find a rich husband around here. My parents expect it, but if I'm not educated enough to support myself and my husband dies and the store goes bust, what would become of me?" Gloria seemed to ignore the whispers among the boys at the back of the class.

What indeed, Mary thought, acutely aware of the impact, good or bad, that teaching can have on children. Gloria was no longer a child.

"I couldn't depend on any of you little men," Gloria shut up the back-row whisperers.

Gloria Samson reminded Mary of her own mother, Jennifer Thomas, from the bride ship from England, so many years before. Mary hoped that Gloria could find someone as good as Mary's mom had found, but Mary was glad that Gloria wanted to be able to support herself. Men aren't always dependable.

After this talk, Mary Evans never used her strap. The children, even the older ones, listened so intently that Mary became almost too conscious of what she said. A teacher is on stage every day, unrehearsed, without the chance to repeat a performance. She never told the school board that she stopped using the strap. Attendance and achievement rose enough that nobody asked. Good news sometimes gets less attention than bad news.

The trustees and powerful parents liked Mary's work. They liked the resulting literate workers, ready for whatever work the growing city and district needed done. Even Gloria's parents liked the prospect of their daughter going East to university, after initial misgivings about "over-educated women." Was Mary over-educated? Fort Edmonton needed higher education, Mary pondered as she read her students' work by the oil lamp on her kitchen table.

This teacherage was small but comfortable. It was enough for her. It had been warm last winter, even during the deep freeze of January. The trustees who hired her, amazed that a Grade 12 graduate agreed to work for them, had given her ample wood for the barrel stove that heated her two rooms. They even found Allan Long to fix the roof that leaked that showed with the spring rain. She found Allan amusing but no more, despite his best efforts, when sober, to ingratiate himself. A single woman in a place like this had to be careful. A single teacher in a place like this would lose her job if she gained a man. Allan wasn't worth Mary's job.

Patrick McCoy was a different sort of man, Mary mused, as the light flickered nearby. Pat brightened her day whenever he visited. She was glad he was visiting tonight. She finished her homework quickly. Good teachers have more homework than students have, any good teacher knows. She did not merely put in time, as some of her Victoria teachers had done, waiting for a better job to free them from the classroom. Mary put in herself.

In those children's faces she saw her own face, of not so many years before. Her mother Jennifer had sent her to primary school in Victoria. Her mom and dad had paid her way through high school. Mary's clothes had not been as fancy as richer girls wore. These girls' fathers didn't work with their hands. These were the daughters of doctors, lawyers, and military and government people. School was a hobby for them until they married a prosperous man.

School had been a lifeline for Mary Evans, like a trapeze act without a net below. Mary had been too preoccupied with success to notice if there were any Gloria Samsons in Victoria High School. Perhaps there were. Not all rich girls bite back their opinions and shut off their minds to please their husbands and social circles.

In Victoria, her mother had found, and read with Mary when she was 15, Mary Woolstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an 1790s book that argued for freeing women, so their talents could advance them and humanity. Poor women, and even some rich women, died in childbirth. Those who survived, rich or poor, felt the heavy weight of social convention, whether a husband's hand across a woman's face, or corsets and petticoats that tied a woman to society's narrow vision of a woman's place.

Mary Woolstonecraft had not practiced "the economy" that Cardinal Newman had preached. That Mary had questioned more than accepted society's ways. Mary's mother and the Victoria priest had agreed to disagree. Mary's parents were Mary's idols. Jennifer was a freethinker in a conservative city. Mary had no idea where her mother had found Woolstonecraft. Perhaps Jennifer had brought it from England. Like Woolstonecraft and Jennifer, Mary saw people as good, and able to understand much. Jennifer and Mary had both handled much. Like Mary, Gloria had "an old head on young shoulders," one of Jennifer's many telling phrases.

Gloria Samson is a big reason I teach, Mary thought, as she packed away her school work. Could she leave teaching for Patrick? Would the school board insist? This year's contract, like last year's, promised dismissal for teachers who married. Would Mary have enough bargaining power to remove that ugly clause from next year's contract? Through the winter, she would talk to board members and parents. Some people suspected she and Pat were courting.

Mary was glad to be in Edmonton, and glad to have met Pat. A jingle of harness and buckle outside announced his arrival. It was Friday night. Mary had a couple days off, to ponder her future.

"How ya doin', professor?" Pat said as he rumbled through the door, a gust of cold, snowy air in his wake. "Set those ruffians straight today?"

"Yes," Mary replied calmly. "Now I'll work on another ruffian."

"You'll be happy to hear that I gave my men tomorrow morning off, and I paid them for the whole day," Pat offered. "Your talk of the working man moves me, Mary."

"You did it because you found good workers and you want to keep them. You know they could go elsewhere, and then where would you be? You'd be daydreaming outside the Imperial Bank, without enough hands to make your dreams come true."

"You talk like a book."

"I read you like a book."

"Like what you read?"

"So far so good, but the story's not finished yet."

"Always careful Mary, quite contrary."

"Did you eat, Pat?" Mary descended from the clouds of dreams and metaphors to the land of the practical.

"I can always eat. I even brought something from that new mill across the river," Pat said, digging a loaf from his coat pocket. "It's soda bread. I've been nagging them to make it since they opened this summer."

"Well, the stew's on the stove, bread man. Help yourself. Let's try that bread. I hope there's less sawdust in it than there is at your construction site."

"You'll be happy to know that we finished the inside walls today. We'll have this thing ready for business by March, 1891, only a few months away, just in time for the railway. I could then spare Ray to travel and buy furs."

"The bread's good," Mary said.

"Not as good as my mother's, but this is the frontier," Pat added. "You and I will civilize these savages yet."

"I must civilize you first."

"You need some taming, too, my girl."

What is attraction? What joins people? Words? Manners? Beliefs? Something physical? Something in the eye, across a distance that is no distance to people in love?

Mary and Pat chided each other, but they respected each other. Each let the other think, talk, and dream. Each had come from far away, from cultures hidebound by traditions that seemed not to bind this growing northern city. Each was content here. Each found peace with, and an open ear in, the other. Was this true of all couples, or only of a lucky few couples? No doubt there would be disputes. There already had been, minor ones. Were greater ones coming? Too great for love to conquer? Where to live, when a river divides them? Bring children into this world, a world at times fair and beautiful, at times unfair and ugly?

"What you thinking, Mary?" Pat asked, over his stew, his elbows not on Mary's wooden table. He had had a mother back in Montreal, Mary surmised from his manners.

"I was thinking of how far we came. We're each from far away, from families that survived hard times. We have more prospects than they ever had."

"Does it make you feel guilty, as if we don't deserve our good fortune?"

"No. We worked for it," Mary explained. "I suppose I worry that it could vanish as easily as it came."

"You contradict yourself. It didn't come easy. I won't let it vanish," Pat said, gazing intently at Mary. "You worry about a day you'll never see, as my mom would say," Pat added.

"Yeah."

"More stew?" he said, getting up.

"Not for me, but help yourself, Pat. How is it?"

"Like angels dancing on my tongue."

"Bring your poetic tongue to my classroom some day. I wonder what the children would make of you."

"You told me what the school board would make of you if I keep coming around."

"Let me worry about that. They might keep me, even with you in the bargain."

"You think highly of many people who don't deserve it, Mary."

"Now who's worrying about a day he'll never see? Eat your stew."

Mary looked at this clean-shaven, polite man of 26 at her table. An old 19, Mary would finish this year teaching, and keep company with this diligent, sober man with the rusty brown hair, brown eyes, and curious expressions.

Patrick ate his stew, happy for Mary's company. He knew about her English mother Jennifer, who had arrived in Victoria pregnant with Mary. He knew about her Irish father Sean, who had accepted Jennifer, pregnant and all. Mary spoke glowingly of them both. Patrick would like to meet them, or would he? Could he measure up to Mary's father? Could he be as good to Mary as Mary's father had been to Mary's mother? Perhaps it's easier to befriend someone who is powerless, who needs the help. Befriending someone who can take or leave you, someone who can fend for herself without you, is a challenge.

Patrick McCoy came from a line of desperate people, who had clung together to survive hunger in Ireland, emigration to Canada, and discrimination and poor pay in Montreal. He was more prosperous than his father had ever been. Perhaps Mary came from similar people, toughened by hard life, but not made bitter by it. Perhaps they were a pair, like young green plants, yearning toward the sun, in this new land, not restrained by hierarchies such as Ireland, England, and Montreal suffered. Patrick could always think better than he could speak. Mary could speak. He wanted a strong partner, an equal, not a pet.

When they parted that evening, Patrick glowed as he rode to the ferry. Mary glowed watching him ride away, as the temperature dropped. November is a cold month in Fort Edmonton. Last November had been cold. Mary had never felt such cold in Victoria. Perhaps the cold made people stick together.

The cold night now felt warmer to both of them.

CHAPTER 4: IMMEASURABLE

"It's a good warehouse, Pat," George said, as he cleaned his trowel.

"I couldn't have done it without you three," Pat said. "I'm glad we could start business before we finished the warehouse. My capital's low." Patrick noticed that George was happier than usual, while Allan was sombre. Ray, after unloading a wagon of furs, joined the others to admire the work.

"You three want to stay on and work for me?" Pat asked, the spring sunshine glinting in his brown eyes.

"I want to celebrate first," Allan said. "Let me think about it over the weekend."

"Come back sober, Allan," Ray advised. "Nobody is a better carpenter than you, sober." Turning to George, Ray asked, "How's life in the rooming house, George? I lived there before Allan and I built our shack on top of the riverbank."

"Better than I expected, Ray," George almost chirped.

"Tell us more," Allan asked, suddenly interested. Ray was often on the road, selling homesteading supplies and buying furs. Ray sometimes stayed near Lac Ste. Anne. George's tone made Allan curious about George's life away from the job.

"Yvonne works hard to run her rooming house," George said. "Many people come and go: homesteaders, laborers, even the odd government man. I help on my days off."

Pat suspected the reason for George's newfound happiness. George found joy in a job well done, but had George found joy in a woman's company? Pat knew Yvonne, a French Canadian widow with a teenage daughter. Gisele was getting old enough to help with the rooming house, but Yvonne wanted her out of there, away from the hard men it often housed. George probably did more than repairs and heavy lifting. He probably protected Yvonne and Gisele from rowdy boarders. Pat pitied any man on the wrong side of George.

"Good woman, Yvonne," George said, wondering if he had said too much, but these were his friends. He trusted these men. Allan asked no more. George would tell all in good time.

"How about it, George?" Pat asked.

"How about what?"

"Staying on to work with Pat, George. Or should I call you Romeo?" Ray winked.

"There's work for at least you three," Pat said. I know you. That's a load off my mind." Pat remembered a few months before, when he had hired two other men, rough men, strong enough and brave enough to scale the building to work on the roof. They worked a week, got their pay, and disappeared. Pat, George, Ray, and Allan then worked night and day, with care and speed, to finish what the two men had started, before the four had resumed work on the warehouse's interior.

Pat had wanted the warehouse done by spring, when the wagon roads got busier with settlers and shipping, before the railway arrived. Now he had his warehouse, and he hoped he had three men to help run it. George seemed to be slipping through his fingers.

"Pat," George said seriously. "You've been fair with me. You've paid me more than anyone else I worked for, in Germany, Ontario, or here. I'm 34, not young, but not yet old; but you are young, and you need young men in this young business you have. I'll help when I can."

"Yvonne?" Pat asked.

"Yvonne needs me more than you do, Patrick," George said. He always said "Patrick" when he wanted to be heard. "She agreed to marry me."

"Congratulations, George!" Allan said. "I'll drink to that!"

"You'll drink yourself into an early grave, Allan," Ray warned.

"At least I don't go sneaking off for a bit of brown, Ray," Allan retorted.

Ray glared at Allan and moved toward him. George held Ray back. "You'll have bigger fights than Allan if you stay with Elise, Ray," George said.

"Just kidding," Allan said.

"Bring 'em on!" Ray said. "I never met anyone like Elise Boucher before. Her people came to Lac Ste. Anne after Batoche. Times were hard for the Metis after Batoche, and times aren't much better now."

The Metis, a fusion of Europeans and Indigenous people, lived between worlds. Neither the settlers nor the Cree fully accepted the Metis. The Cree hadn't helped at Batoche. The Metis, an orphaned culture, had been the paddling brawn of the fur trade. Wise settlers knew to befriend the Metis, the versatile result of a cultural collision. Ray could depend on Elise, whose family accepted this man from Ontario, whose soldiers had fought the Metis. Ray had fought for the wrong side at Batoche. Now he rarely raised his voice, except to defend his beloved Elise.

"I thought of moving Elise here," Ray said. "She likes the idea. There are many Metis here. They know how to work."

"Would you stay on with me, Ray?" Pat asked.

"If you'll have me, Pat," Ray answered. "You've been a fair boss and I've learned a lot working with all three of you."

"You're getting handy with bricks, Ray," George said. "I'm glad you're staying. I won't feel so bad being here less."

"Allan?" Pat asked.

"Let me think about it over the weekend. Now I want to celebrate finishing this warehouse, and spend some of the bonus you gave me today, Pat." Allan marched away, toward the ferry dock to cross to Fort Edmonton.

John Walter's cable ferry would have at least one thirsty passenger tonight. Not yet ten years in service, Walter's ferry was busier by the week. With a railway reaching north from Calgary, there was agitation from the business community for a bridge across the river. When a bridge came, Walter could do other things on and off the river. Lots needed doing in this booming area.

Allan Long never returned that night, nor the next, nor the next. Ray had waited in the shack for him. Ray had wanted to go to Elise in Lac Ste. Anne, but he hadn't wanted to leave their shack empty overnight. Finally, on Monday afternoon, Ray crossed to Fort Edmonton and asked around. There had been more than the usual high level of violence in the city that weekend. Ray's last stop was the police station.

Allan had been killed in a bar room brawl on Friday night, a constable said. Was Ray a relative? The police had a few of Allan's possessions, but no relative had come for them. Ray looked at the meagre pile, the few material traces that Allan had ever walked the earth: an empty wallet, with a photo of an orphanage in it; one cufflink; some scraps of paper with construction calculations on them; a couple carpenter pencils, mere stubs by now. Ray signed for the items and returned in the spring sunshine to Pat's warehouse.

"Allan's dead, Pat. A bar room brawl on Friday night," Ray said. "He'll get a pauper's burial in that new cemetery on the west end of Fort Edmonton, near the top of Groat Ravine. It'll be tomorrow, Tuesday, at 9 A.M. I want to go. Then I want to go to Lac Ste Anne. I think I'll bring Elise back with me. A couple days off?"

"Sure," Pat said. "I'll go to the graveyard with you." Pat said.

"The drink," Ray said.

"The drink," Pat agreed. "Allan have any family?"

"They couldn't find any. That's why they gave me his stuff," Ray said, emptying the scanty collection of items from his pockets. There was a single cufflink. I left it at a jewelry shop across the river. I want to keep Allan's wallet."

That was a sombre day, despite the warmth of spring. The new warehouse seemed empty, even old, without Allan. During construction, Allan had drunk away a few days, but when he was on the job, nobody was more careful in measurement, or more cooperative, or more safety conscious. Allan was two people in one.

Allan Long's short, hard life ended under the pressure the frontier places on people. Some, like Pat, thrive on this pressure, and get tougher with the tougher times; but they remember to listen, to learn, and to be careful. Some flee the pressure for the hollow comfort of the bottle. When they sober up, the pressure is waiting for them.. Low wages, uncertain work, rising living costs, and loneliness combine to make men hard, not tough, easily provoked, and not very able to handle troubles. A word, a look, a bump in a bar room might begin a deadly fight among people already stretched to impatience by this frontier.

The next day, Ray, George, Yvonne, Mary, and Pat were at the cemetery, five mourners. A priest and two gravediggers increased the tiny group. They bid farewell to Allan, merely one man in a vast land, neither better nor worse than the next man. Allan Long was one among many who populated this frontier, who left their troubles elsewhere to seek a better life here. Some find that life. Others find poverty, loneliness, drink, violence, or death.

Mary cried. Pat held her. Yvonne cried. George held her. Yvonne had only met Allan once, when George had invited Allan and Ray for dinner at the rooming house. George had wanted them to stay there, but they preferred their absurd shack near the river.

"Good man gone," Ray said, as the priest finished praying and the gravediggers began to cover Allan's rough coffin. Allan's few friends then walked away, each wondering how he or she could have kept Allan's lethal enemies, outside and inside Allan, from beating him. Who knows what to say, and when to say it? Perhaps each resolved to listen better to any struggling, suffering people they met in future.

Allan, like Ray, was alone when young, but born in Ontario, not overseas. Allan's parents had drowned in a storm on Lake Ontario. Someone had saved him, then 4 years old. The boat had been ferrying Allan's family and a couple other families through the maze of islands near Kingston. His family had been moving, but he did not know from where and to where. Allan had known that he was an only child. He knew that in the Cornwall Catholic orphanage where he grew up. The nuns had taught Allan to pray, work, speak French, and little else.

Upon leaving the orphanage at 14, Allan had learned carpentry in construction jobs in and around Toronto. Hired with a couple others to build and fix army barracks, Allan had later joined the army in 1885, when it was recruiting for the Batoche battle. He had expected to use a hammer more than a gun. Allan, like Ray, instead became part of the deadly scheme to displace the Metis. Like Ray, Allan had been relieved that he had survived, and had not killed anybody.

Allan Long, dead at 25,was buried far from his parents' watery grave among the Thousand Islands in Lake Ontario near Kingston. Allan had packed much into his short life, and had recently made a few good friends to mourn him.

Each friend felt guilt, the emotion that keeps on giving, for not saving Allan from drink and death. Then each friend realized that he or she could not tell the future, or tell others how to live, and the guilt faded. A healthier habit, to attend to the living, replaced the fiend guilt.

"We are our brother's keeper," George said, before Yvonne whispered to him in French. Pat overheard and understood. She wanted George to stay with him. Yvonne worried that without George Pat might go the way of Allan. Whatever the reason, Pat eagerly expected George to approach him.

The group watched Ray get on his horse and Mary board her wagon, one of the two wagons that Allan had made for her. Ray went west toward Lac Ste. Anne and Elise. Mary went east, to her school, whose trustees had given her the morning off for the funeral.

Knowing that children would come to school, teacher or no teacher, and that the board would probably not send someone to fill in, Mary had convinced Gloria to run the class that Tuesday morning. The two board members Mary found on Monday after school had agreed. Attendance fell as the weather got better, with many of the older children needed more at home or in workplaces than at school. Flu kept others away, too. Still, controlling a group of children is harder than it looks, as a teacher knows better than do most parents, sometimes unable to control their own children.

Mary was happy that Gloria could keep order in her absence. Gloria would accept the few dollars Mary planned to pay her. Gloria didn't need the money. She needed the confidence that the work inspired. Mary considered the money kindling for the fire of desire in Gloria for higher education.

Poor Allan, Mary thought, as she rode back toward the school. He measured up. This hard city did not.

Poor Allan, Ray thought, several miles to the west, soon outside the settlement.

Spring leaves whispered in the wind on the rolling hills between Fort Edmonton and Lac Ste. Anne. Allan will never see this day, Ray thought. The thirty miles passed quickly, almost in a daze, as Ray thought of his dead friend, and of how easily he too could die in a fight fueled by liquor. Ray drank a bit after Batoche, a fruitless effort to clean its bitter taste from his mouth and mind, but he had rarely touched a drop during the past four years.

Ray had tried to sober up Allan, but there's no reasoning with a drunk, even when he's sober. Who knows what bubbled in Allan's breast, to draw him to drink, that fair weather friend? A celebratory drink now and then was fine, but drink was no way to fill a hole within, whether that hole was loneliness, bad memories, or a million other things that drink only made worse.

Elise liked Ray's sobriety. More than one of her ancestors, on both the Cree and French side, had come to a bad end at the bottom of a bottle. Elise didn't drink. Life was better that way, especially for people challenged to survive, as her people were. Ray hoped he could help there. Ray had never known a family, having been raised on hard work on various farms.

Ray and Allan, one perhaps an orphan, the other certainly an orphan, had found much in common. Strangers, some loving, some not, had raised each of them. Each had been on his own by a young age. Each knew that blood relatives sometimes abused their children; each had seen it. Allan once told Ray that Allan's orphanage had some children who were not orphans, but refugees from abusive parents and other relatives. Still, Ray and Allan had yearned for family, for belonging. The duties of survival had not quelled that longing, at least in Ray.

If Allan had found someone like Elise would Allan still be alive? If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, Ray recalled one of Allan's many quaint phrases. As a child, Ray boarded a boat whose passage would change his life, around the same time that Allan boarded a boat whose sinking almost ended his life. Each had grown up in harsh conditions, but each had used whatever sense he had gained to choose this or that path in adulthood. Allan had chosen a dangerous path. Ray knew that he could have ended like Allan, or Allan like him.

As Ray rode toward Lac Ste. Anne, he remembered the good times he and Allan had known. Ray was happy, as Allan would have wanted him. Allan's sudden death taught Ray to appreciate life more. What a nice day this is, Ray thought. I ride for Allan as well as for myself. Horse riding can be a thoughtful time.

Ray had met Elise during one of his fur-buying rides in the rolling hills west of Fort Edmonton. She had been washing clothes in Lac Ste. Anne. He had stood on his wagon, far enough away not to make her nervous, but close enough to watch her. He had summoned the nerve to approach this graceful young woman. She was wary, understandably, given how recently her people had fled the ruins of the dream that had been Batoche, the spiritual centre of the growing Metis nation. Perhaps this was another of the many settlers who bothered her people, forcing them to move, or swindling them of their land scrip. When she learned that Batoche had changed Ray, Elise liked and trusted him.

You know the Metis grievances better than most Metis, Elise's father had told Ray when he had visited their lakeside cabin.

"Yes, Monsieur Boucher," Ray said, practicing the French he had learned from Allan in Edmonton. Where others saw a whiskered eccentric, Ray saw a wise man. Emile Boucher had liked the respect and French that Ray had surprised him with; this was not the usual settler. "I was there, shooting, but I am glad I shot nobody. I stopped trying after it become a massacre. I wasn't the only rifleman who shot into the air, over the Metis' heads. Our commanders complained, but their commanders told them to forget it. They had captured Riel. He was all they wanted. Capture him and the Metis would disappear, they thought."

The unfair trial in Regina that hanged Riel killed a leader but not the Metis. Gabriel Dumont, Riel's military strategist, fled to the United States. Dumont was still there, a sharp-shooting curiosity in a traveling wild west show. Dumont had led buffalo hunts, which required more skill than any wild west show. The army's might, not Canada's right, had defeated the Metis.

"You seem to have captured my Elise's heart," Elise's mother Marie Boucher had told Ray a month before. "How will you support her back in that dirty, dangerous Fort Edmonton?"

"I will work. Elise will not starve," Ray had said. Was Ray's infatuation with Elise a way to compensate for joining an army against her people in Batoche? Nobody ever said so, and any who thought so soon thought otherwise, as trust rose between Ray and the Boucher family.

Her thick black hair, dark brown eyes, graceful motions and insightful speech were a combination Ray had never seen before. Elise was "wise beyond her years," as one of Ray's nicer "farm mothers" had said of him.

After Allan's funeral, Ray reached the Boucher house at sunset, ate, and then slept in the stable, as usual.

When Ray awoke, Elise was sitting on a stump by the stable door, watching him. Elise softly sang a Cree lullaby, one of many Cree and French songs she knew. Her English had improved with Ray, as had his French and Cree with her.

"Sun's high, husband. Get up and work." The formalities of marriage rested lightly on Elise, but her mother had convinced her not to give herself to any man, until she could give her all to one good man. The family resented the church's efforts against them at Batoche, but Mama wanted a Catholic wedding. "I'm packed. My parents are lending you a wagon for your getaway with me. Bring the wagon back by winter, or Papa will scalp you."

"My Metis maiden, your wish is my command," Ray rose to her teasing. "I was in the army. I know how to follow orders. I will keep my hair."

"You don't know how to follow orders," Elise countered. "You did not shoot my people for your officers. Hang you with Riel in Regina?"

"Many miss Riel. Few would miss me," Ray managed in French. "Who would bring you to the lights and city?"

"Mud and fat English women, you mean."

"I only see you, not other women," Ray reassured Elise.

"I'm Metis, Ray. Your people and my people, they fight, in wars, in bars, at work, and sometimes in church. You and I do not fight," Elise said the last sentence in Cree.

"We do not fight," Ray echoed, trying to pronounce the Cree. His Cree was poor, but the Bouchers encouraged Ray's efforts.

Ray continued in English, "English women, as you call them, are either hard like those plastic dolls, or soft like horses with too many riders. Most of the white women in Fort Edmonton are not even English."

"They are English to me, Ray," Elise practiced her English. "Edmonton has Metis also. I talk to them. They talk to me."

"Talk to anyone, Elise. They will talk to you. If a nose turns up, against you, I will break that nose."

"My brave soldier, fighting for his woman. Are you a hungry nose-breaker?"

"Yes," Ray answered in Cree.

Ray got up. Elise took his hand and they walked to the house. They ate eggs from the family's chickens, bread from wheat the family grew and Baptiste's Mill ground for a reasonable fee, blueberry jam that Elise and her mother Marie had made from blueberries they had picked, and pork chops from the pig that Emile had butchered that week. Elise's mother had packed a veritable trunk of food. It sat in the wagon, with Elise's clothes, and tools for both kitchen and house.

When Ray and Elise rode away that spring morning, each felt like the luckiest person in the world. Elise loved her parents and her younger brother Louis. Elise loved Ray, a gentle man taking her to a new place. There would be hard times. She had known little else in her life, but they would lean on each other.

Elise expected that people would say nicer words about her to Ray when she was there than when she was not. She hoped their love survived this unfair test. Ray clicked at the horses and shook the reins like a man who had found a fairy princess by a magical lake. He would fight any dragon that challenged them.

South Edmonton was a growing town, of men and women from different cultures. A community was rising that could resist the small minds and big powers aghast at such matches as Elise and Ray's. They would be one pair among a growing variety of pairs of people.

We all bleed red, Ray thought, remembering the blood he had seen on both sides at Batoche. Ray wanted no more blood, no more fighting. Ray had survived his time of war. Allan had fallen in a different, insidious war.

"What are you thinking, Ray?" Elise asked, in Cree to make him practice.

"I am thinking I love you a lot, Elise," Ray began to answer in Cree, then switched to French, "Many people will fight our love."

"If we stand together, we win," Elise said, her young eyes hard. She was overdue for a victory.

"I am with you, Elise. I know why I like you. I wonder why you like me."

"Some of the same things," she began. "You are lonely. I am lonely. You came from far away for a new life, as I did. You look under the person to the true person, as I do."

"You read my mind, Elise," Ray said in French. "You have my heart."

"You have my heart," she replied in French.

They continued into Fort Edmonton, saying very little, having said so much, in three languages. How well do words measure friendship, love, and the human heart?

CHAPTER 5: TRACKS

"The railway's coming, Ray. I'm glad you're back," Pat said. "Did you bring Elise?"

"Yes," Ray answered. "Thanks for having me back. I hope you kept up while I was gone."

"George helped. I think that the three of us can do this together, if you don't mind traveling some."

"Where?"

"Mostly south, to the end of the rails, and west and east to homesteaders. Some travel across the river. Some fur buying. You might want someone to go with you, for company and security."

"I have Elise."

"Things could get dangerous."

"She survived Batoche. What could be more dangerous than that? We'll be fine."

"If you say so, Ray. I know I can depend on you."

Business boomed on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River. By the late spring of 1891, the rail line was close. The warehouse was a beehive of activity that required two full time men and a part-time bookkeeper: Sandra.

On some days, Patrick went with Sandra across the river to Fort Edmonton to the bank. On most days, he sent her alone. Patrick trusted Sandra. Her hours and wages were rising, which suited Sandra.

Now 27, Sandra Neal had come from Nova Scotia three years before, newly married to her high school sweetheart, to homestead in the Palliser Triangle southeast of Calgary. The dry, flat land, the work, and the homesickness changed Bruce. Never violent with Sandra, Bruce grew miserable, no longer the dreamy beau Sandra grew up with in Sydney.

Bruce returned to Sydney, but they stayed legally married. Settled Nova Scotia, even Sydney, cared more for the respectable niceties of wedding vows than the rustic West cared. The wedding ring that Sandra still sported kept men at bay. Sandra or Bruce now sought legal, amicable divorce. She was glad they had no children. Some days she felt like a mother to local men. When they became cheeky, she would mumble something in Gaelic and glare at them to improve their behavior. Sandra fast became Pat's right-hand woman.

"John and Peter want to know when Ray will be back from Wetaskiwin, Pat," Sandra said, as water dripped from rain falling on the roof. Peter was a confirmed bachelor; John was different.

"Tomorrow, or Saturday at the latest," Pat said. "He delivered meat to the railway crews and bought furs from Cree trappers in the west." Pat was glad that Elise went with Ray to translate, and to broaden the business. Paying a little more for furs than other buyers paid, especially than Fort Edmonton and Rocky Mountain House buyers paid, gave Pat a regular supply. The Hudson's Bay Company bought most of his furs, but he also shipped some directly to Winnipeg for processing, export, or both. The Bay didn't mind Pat in the fur business, which was shrinking in importance next to retail. The Bay had an empire to run. Pat only wanted a small, diverse business.

Sandra knew about The Bay. She knew some of the Gaelic-speaking Scots who worked in the sprawling Fort Edmonton compound, with its tentacles reaching all directions, by water and wagon road. Sometimes a tear came to their eyes when she spoke Gaelic to the winter partners who came to buy something. Most of them, especially those tired of "country wives," the Indigenous women who were the difference between life and death in the winter, would happily haul Sandra off to the wilderness. There would be no wilderness of no stinky furs and drafty cabins for this woman. Sandra was patient, diligent, and canny, like many of the Orkney men who clamored aboard a Bay ship on its last stop before heading west across the ocean to Canada.

Bay men often left the company for jobs with more predictable hours and pay. For the army-like Bay, a man worked night and day when the furs or supply boats came, or idled for days or weeks waiting for another flurry of business at the wilderness post. Some said that a Bay manager had "the keys to heaven," the keys to a building full of food and supplies, vital to Indigenous people now living hand-to-mouth after losing their land. Others said that the company motto, "Pro pelle cutem," Latin for "skin for skin" found more realistic translation in "getting skinned," trappers being underpaid for their furs. Bay payment for furs always seemed less than Bay charges for food and other supplies.

John McNab was one refugee from The Hudson's Bay Company, HBC, which some called "Here Before Christ," and others called "Horny Boys' Club." John knew how to work, and he found plenty of work, and better than Bay pay, with Patrick McCoy. John was 26, close in age to Sandra. John's Gaelic was good. Pat didn't mind Sandra and John jabbering in Gaelic, a language as foreign to him as the English expressions, probably translations, that popped out of Sandra's mouth when the mood struck her. John and Sandra did get close for a long time after Sandra's divorce papers came. Be careful. Wait and see, each thought.

"Why I ask about Ray, Pat," Sandra began," is that the warehouse is fair to bursting with lumber bound for homesteaders north and east of here."

"Most of those are day trips, Sandra. Ray can deliver it before seeding supplies arrives. People are coming here more now, too."

Sandra and Pat had lost track of how many times that spring the warehouse had filled and emptied.

Homesteaders were trickling into the area, but when the railway reached South Edmonton, that trickle would become a flood, Pat and Sandra knew. This warehouse that had seemed too big when it was new in March now scarcely sufficed. Spring was a busy time of year. Soon enough, Ray would be here more and on the road less. Pat needed at least two Rays and two Sandras, he sometimes thought.

Pat wondered if he should build a second warehouse, or even start a construction company. George had mentioned it. George knew about bricks, and had taught Ray. Brickwork lasts, George sometimes told Pat, gazing into the distance, as if looking at Germany, a country of stone and brick.

The next morning, Ray and Elise rumbled into the yard around the warehouse, their wagon bursting with bundled furs.

"We'll take this right across the river to The Bay, Pat, if you like," Elise said. "The rails are north of Wetaskiwin and moving pretty fast. That new town is busy busy busy. My people did not like the rails that brought soldiers and death. These rails bring life and make me happy."

"You do a good job with Ray," Pat said, glad that part of Ray's pay was a commission on what he delivered and picked up. Ray and Elise were worth every penny Pat paid them, and more. Without Elise, that wagon wouldn't be groaning with furs today. Pat was glad that Ray idolized Elise.

Ray was glad that Pat respected and trusted Elise. Ray had improved his absurd little shack, adding a porch and a second room; but Ray wanted something better for himself and Elise. He wanted the world for her; Elise was the world to Ray. He had the skills but not the time to build a house, but it would be easier to buy one already built, or pay someone to build it for him. Ray had more money than time, an unusual situation. He and Elise didn't have time to spend the money they earned now.

Each was thankful that the other didn't drink. During their long rides, in all weather, they sometimes talked of Allan. What if the drink hadn't taken him? He had the skills to make a fortune in the building boom about to grip these towns that faced each other across the North Saskatchewan River, especially South Edmonton, which the rails would soon reach.

The summer of 1891 heated up. The light green leaves of early spring darkened as the days lengthened. Across the river, Mary Evans prepared to say goodbye to her students, goodbye to some forever, goodbye to others until September. Mary was glad that Gloria Samson planned to return the next year. Gloria could be Mary's first Grade 12 graduate. Mary was the first high school graduate in her family ever, as far as she knew. Gloria's father was rich, and often boasted that he had made a fortune with a Grade 7 education; but a university daughter would enhance his prestige.

It was easier for a man than for a woman to prosper with minimal education. Grade 7 wasn't minimal, but when a boy reached 14 or 15, school often became for him tedious, a place for children. He wanted to be a man, not a child. There was work for a healthy, strong 14-year-old. Gloria's father had found it, first with The Bay in Fort Edmonton, then with his own dry goods business. Albert Samson reminded Mary of Patrick McCoy, but only in some ways. Both had a Grade 7 education. Both had worked to get where they were. Unlike Albert, however, Pat respected education for its content, not only for its prestige. Pat knew that education could transform a life, especially a woman's life. Independent Mary proved that.

Mary knew Pat better than she knew Albert, though. Perhaps Albert respected education, behind all the bluster he made that reading a book rarely put bread on a table. Albert had allowed Gloria to stay in school rather than join his business, which would be her business, Gloria being an only child. Gloria's mother came from educated stock in Ontario. Mary wondered what Ellen saw in Albert. Perhaps she liked his rough edges, so different from the cautious young men back in Toronto. Perhaps she smoothed some of those edges, and left others rough.

A woman could influence a man, even a man who spouted predictable drivel about a man's place and a woman's place. Society placed men above women. Social pressure made men and women accept this hierarchy. Mary suspected that many people, women and men, who voiced narrow, acceptable views in fact rejected them. Ellen Samson likely had a hand in seeing Gloria through high school. Would Ellen help get Gloria to university?

Ellen probably could have gone to university in Toronto, or could she have? More and more women went. Mary wondered why Ellen had chosen instead to go west with Albert. Rebellion against her parents, against her class? Had she heard and believed tales of freedom that was greater here than in the settled, stratified East? Perhaps Ellen was not of the Toronto people whose daughters went to university. To Mary Evans, Toronto was as far away as Fort Edmonton had once been. Toronto was in the same country as Fort Edmonton on the map on the wall of her classroom, but it was in another world to her, and on another planet to her students. Gloria was brave to want to go there.

Across the river, in another, closer world, Gisele liked George, who had moved from his room in her mother Yvonne's rooming house to Yvonne's own room. There had been a simple, double wedding ceremony in August, 1890 at Lac Ste. Anne. George, Yvonne, Elise, and Ray understood the French of Father Lestanc. Pat had translated for Mary, whose French was improving. Sandra and John had stayed back at the warehouse. Peter, a rooming house resident, had watched over it during Yvonne and Gisele's absence. Peter planned to go homesteading the next spring.

This gathering aided Father Lestanc's efforts to enhance Lac Ste. Anne, considered holy waters by both Crees and Catholics. Riding there from Saint Albert, northwest of Fort Edmonton, Lestanc had thought of aging Order of Mary Immaculate priest Albert Lacombe, his mentor.

Lacombe had left Lac Sainte Anne 30 years before. Lacombe was now in the Crowsnest Region far to the south, near the United States border. When he left Lac Sainte Anne so many years before, Lacombe had first migrated closer to Fort Edmonton, to start the Saint Albert mission, Lestanc's home. Lestanc had been happy to return to Lac Sainte Anne to marry Elise, as a favor to her family and people. Perhaps Father Lestanc had wanted to atone for the church's opposition to the Metis at Batoche. To whom does a priest, indeed to whom does a church, confess?

Lestanc recalled Lacombe discussing with him, years ago, what to do about the Indigenous people Lacombe had served for years before Lestanc's arrival from rural Quebec. The people did not know they needed something done about them, which compounded the Church's and government's perceived problem, a problem largely of their own making. Giving back stolen Indigenous land, whose theft caused the problem, was not an acceptable solution for the Church and government. Rapid changes were overtaking the Metis and other Indigenous people. The Metis were adapting better, if somewhat sullenly since Batoche, than the Cree were adapting.

Perhaps Lacombe could arrange better education for the Indigenous people, he had told Lestanc, then an eager young priest. Lacombe knew about the Irish boarding schools for orphans and poor children. The schools were tough, but many children emerged able to earn a living. They became responsible, respectable adults who knew their place in the great chain of being that the Church had supported for centuries. Such an old system could not be wrong, but Indigenous ways, however old, were wrong. The Church could do much for these people. Perhaps boarding schools could help them forget their ways quicker, and find their place in this new world, Lacombe had mused aloud to Lestanc, in the new garden by the new Saint Albert church. Make the Indigenous people ready for their place in the future, with or without their agreement. Lacombe knew his place, loyalty to the colonial government. Indigenous people would learn their place.

That future had come; Indian residential schools had sprouted across the prairies and beyond. Lestanc had seen a few. There were complaints from some of the families of the chlldren who lived at the schools. Some people are never satisfied, no matter what you do for them. Some medical visitors noted the unsanitary conditions and high disease and death rates. Was life any better in the slums of Montreal, or on the newly-created Indian reserves? How bright the future could be for people willing to renounce their old ways! The Church liked the old ways that supported the Church. The Church liked the order that strong government had brought for centuries; but the Indian ways must disappear, Lestanc was convinced early in his priest days. Lestanc hoped these newlyweds understood that.

Whatever the future would bring, this was a nice day for a wedding, Lestanc had noticed. As always, he had focused on the task at hand. He had assumed that if he did God's work today, then good results would follow. The future had fled from his mind whenever he held up the blessed sacrament, which was not for a time, whether past, present, or future, but for all time. He had hoped these people understood that.

Sometimes, Lestanc didn't know what lay people were thinking. Many times he doubted if they knew what was good for them. Lestanc and Lacombe knew what was good for them. It was good for the Metis Elise to marry the white man Ray, a step toward discarding her old thinking and habits.

Gisele had been excited to be by the sparkling lake, not only because she had escaped the endless chores of the rooming house for a weekend, but because this place was pretty, the brides were pretty, and the grooms were handsome. Who knew that her mother, Yvonne, with calloused hands and dirty blonde hair, could be so pretty at the old age of 36, older than George, her new husband?

Gisele had looked up to George. His income from working for Pat took the edge of worry from her and her mother's minds. No longer did they wonder if there would be enough boarders in summer, a slow season, to earn enough to buy the wood for heat in winter, to buy the food whose price seemed to rise faster than the rates they charged the boarders, and to pay to fix what the boarders broke when they stumbled in drunk, or fought in or around the house. George fixed things. George fixed the drunks when they got rowdy. Gisele felt safe with George around. She was so happy for her mother and for herself. Gisele, 13, had loved that day, and had pondered her own future.

"The railway's here, Yvonne," George said in early September, home from the warehouse, where he spent less and less time lately. He said it as if a train was following him through the front door. George had branched out into construction contracting, getting building supplies from Pat for a reasonable price; but he had trouble finding reliable workers, even for good pay. Peter now worked for Pat and George, but Peter had claimed a homestead and he would be gone by October, to throw up a shack before winter. George had plenty of work for the right men, and the trains would bring such men. He wanted more time with Yvonne.

When the first train wheezed to a stop at the station a mile south of the river, a holiday atmosphere surrounded the event. Pat McCoy was on the platform, Mary was by him, and George, Yvonne, and Gisele were nearby. Ray and Elise were on the road back from deliveries east of town. There was bunting, a choir, men, women, and children in their Sunday best, and beer, sausages, and much else for sale by wily vendors who had set up that morning. Train passengers mingled with locals, their talking of plans to acquire the wealth that brings freedom, to make futures better than pasts.

Robert Ritchie was there looking for people to help him and George build the flour mill he envisioned. The mill challenged George's planning skills and Pat's shipping skills. The pair had talked about getting into brick making. George's wistful tales of Germany, and of the permanence that brick implies, had swayed Pat and Ray. Pat had good lumber suppliers already, but their rising prices told Pat that he should make some of his own building supplies. He, George, and Ray could make bricks. With wood and brick, what couldn't a man build? There must be someone on this train eager and able to join George in his brick adventures. It was in Ritchie's interest to help George find such a person. Imagine a brick mill grinding wheat, right here, by the North Saskatchewan River!

September came. The 1891-92 school year began for Mary and her charges, some returning, some new. Two other teachers shared the load. Mary kept the oldest children. Gloria was there for Grade 12. She knew that Mary and Pat were sweethearts. Gloria's dad knew, too, and he was a school trustee. Mary was ready for a dispute with the brass about her job and her Pat. When Mary signed her teaching contract for the year, she noticed a clause that had vanished since the previous year's contract. Nowhere did her new contract say that she would be fired if she got married.

"Notice anything, Miss Evans?" Gloria asked the first morning, seeing the contract on Mary's desk, as younger children bustled around them.

"You did this?" Mary exclaimed.

"Yes," Gloria confirmed. "I wanted you as a teacher. My dad's a trustee and a powerful man around here. Mom has connections, too. We agreed that he should convince the trustees that you are too good to lose to marriage."

Lose to marriage, Mary thought. Does marriage defeat a woman's independence? She trusted Pat, but she despised the social pressures that might make Pat parrot the casual disrespect for women that she knew men showed among themselves, with or without women present.

"I don't mean to say that marriage is a loss, Miss Evans," Gloria said, seeming to read her mind. "You and Pat are meant for each other, like people in one of those poems you had me read, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I'm glad you'll be here for my last year in school. I hope you don't mind me helping keep you. I know you like to do things for yourself, but I wanted you here. I can't see myself getting to university without your help."

"I'll see you graduate, girl," Mary said. "Are you ready to work like never before?" Mary remembered the challenges of her Grade 12 year in Victoria. Luckily, Gloria wouldn't face the upturned noses of rich girls who thought she shouldn't be in school. Mary had endured that in Victoria.

"I'd do anything for you, Miss Evans," Gloria said. Gloria dared to touch Mary, that distant object, the school teacher. Gloria put her hand on Mary's back, and the fine-boned hand described a small circle, gently, intimately. Mary shivered.

"Do you find it cold in here, Gloria?"

"No, Miss Evans. I feel warm, especially near you."

Mary retreated to teacher mode. "You'll stay warm this year, with all the work you'll do to get to university."

"You say it. I'll do it, Miss Evans. You changed my life."

This was going to be a good school year, Mary thought. She and this willful young woman couldn't change the whole world, but they could change a part of it. No doubt other women were changing their small corners of the world. Many drops become a flood. Learn to navigate the rising, changing waters, men, or be washed away by them. Mary would happily sail those waters with Pat by her side.

Gloria Samson graduated the next June, and gained admission to the University of Toronto by the end of July. Her parents sent her on the new railway to Calgary. From there, she rode trains to distant Toronto. Gloria boarded with her dad's maiden sister Ann, and shone in university, among mostly men. Gloria was abler than most of the men, and than many of the few other women.

A Toronto professor saw Gloria's potential and recommended her for study at the University of Glasgow in Scotland after her bachelor's degree. Born and raised in rural Scotland, Professor Angus McKay had studied political economy in Glasgow. Perhaps the dour gazes from statues of Adam Smith and Thomas Carlyle in that ship-building city would inspire Gloria as they had inspired McKay. Political economy was becoming economics, and McKay marveled at this young woman's knack for understanding politics and economics.

Angus McKay, like Gloria Samson, had had a father short of formal education but bursting with ambition, and a mother with high school who had wanted her clever child formally educated. Angus, nearing retirement age, was happy to have an eager follower. Angus' parents were long dead. None of his three children showed academic interest. His two daughters had married well and his son had an army commission in the city. Angus and his wife Marion sometimes invited Gloria and her Aunt Ann for supper, at their house near the university. Their son Arthur catered to Ann, and especially to Gloria; but this charismatic officer's romantic forays failed. Gloria wasn't much interested in men, including Arthur McKay. Angus was relieved. Marion and especially Angus wanted a scholar more than a daughter-in-law.

Gloria was keen for adventure. She found it in Scotland, where she boarded for two years with older, maiden woman. This one disregarded men, who soon gave up romancing her. Men did not interest Sheila Wallace. The way Sheila talked to Gloria, and especially the way Sheila touched Gloria, at first reminded Gloria how she had approached Mary Evans so long ago in Edmonton. Gloria liked that touch. Gloria was happy to learn that there was at least another woman like her. Gloria learned much from Sheila, a discreet nurse in a local hospital, during Gloria's two years which became four years in Glasgow.

Letters streamed back and forth between Gloria and Mary, as they had during Gloria's four Toronto years. Mary would always be special to Gloria. Mary was the one who showed Gloria possibilities beyond those that corralled most women in Edmonton. As Mary wrote of advances that women were making in Edmonton, and in Canada in general, Gloria concluded that she and her education could thrive there. In that rough land, there was a growing awareness that women could do more things than previously thought. Scottish women inspired Gloria, for Scotland was a country of strong women and men.. Glasgow was Scotland's beating industrial heart. There was work for all, men and women, in both countries.

Women were even doctors in Scotland, Sheila told Gloria. Had Sheila known that possibility when she left the Hebrides for Glasgow twenty years before, then Shiela might have become a doctor. Still, she was a happy nurse. Men who worked at her hospital and men who came as patients liked Sheila; but they knew that she was militantly single. That was all they knew of her, and all that men needed to know of her, Sheila reasoned.

Sheila was very happy to have Gloria for four years. Gloria hadn't been her first woman boarder and she wouldn't be her last. This buxom Canadian had been easier to seduce than most of the boarders Sheila had approached so carefully. She would miss Gloria when Gloria returned to Canada. Gloria would miss Sheila. Neither wanted a lifelong partner, a want that comes at different times for different people, and never comes for some people. Sheila was a never person. Gloria wondered if she too was a never person. Never trust people who could use your sexuality to hurt you. This was Sheila's crucial lesson for Gloria.

Gloria returned to Canada confident in her economics training, and careful in her life. Edmonton wasn't Glasgow. Even London, which had jailed rich, Irish-born playwright and playboy Oscar Wilde for homosexuality during Gloria's Glasgow years, rejected "the love that dare not speak its name." Prosecutor Edward Carson had worked for the Marquess of Queensberry at the trial that had resulted in Wilde's imprisonment for romancing the Marquess' son Alfred. Carson, against the union of love, would later foment pro-British paramilitary violence in Ireland as leader of the Unionist Party. Gloria had seen photos of Wilde after his release. The once-robust man was sickly. Wilde's skin no longer glowed with a shine that embraced life. He no longer lit up any room he entered. Gloria didn't want to suffer Wilde's fate.

Gloria returned to Canada in the spring of 1900, her Glasgow achievements outshouting the Toronto university governors averse to hiring a woman professor. Gloria's mentor McKay would have clinched a posting for her, but he had died the previous fall. Fall and spring are hard on old people. Gloria wrote to Sheila, and more often to Mary. Sheila and Mary had both initiated Gloria into realms of possibilities. The academic achievement that Mary had kindled in Gloria met a cool welcome from University of Toronto governors. What Sheila kindled in Gloria was so unwelcome that Gloria kept it secret.

For two years in Toronto, Gloria showed that she was as good as any man professor, and better than most. Gloria tried to keep quiet her liaisons with women inside and outside the university, but apparently not quiet enough to please university governors. Gloria and the university parted amicably. Each side agreed on silence about the real reasons for Gloria's departure. Officially, Gloria was going west to nurture academic seeds. In 1902, two years after Oscar Wilde and the Marquess of Queenberry both died, Gloria Samson left Toronto, alive.

How similar were the tales of Gloria and of Mary's mother, Jennifer Thomas, Gloria noticed, and how different. Mary had told Gloria by mail the whole story of Mary's mother Jennifer, including the pregnancy she had not told Gloria when Gloria had been one of Mary's students. Pregnant by an English lord, Jennifer, the lord and his outraged wife had connived Jennifer's exile, to avoid scandal in 1860s Lancashire. Jennifer had become inconvenient in England. Gloria had become inconvenient in Toronto. Jennifer, however, unlike Gloria, had found a man who accepted her and her pregnancy. Mary and her parents had then lived a respectable, open life. Such a life was impossible for Gloria. She would be a careful lesbian in Edmonton, but she was hopeful. Was there a woman for her?

The Toronto university governors had given Gloria glowing letters of recommendation, but Edmonton had no university in 1902. Where would Gloria work? She and her parents knew that Gloria did not want to take over the family business. Eight years of university study and two years of university teaching made Gloria ready for more than retailing.

When Gloria wrote to Mary in the spring of 1900 that she was returning to Canada, and hoping to use her first-class degrees in economics to make a living, Mary was busy. The Yukon Gold Rush was still strong, but by then fading from its 1898 peak. This boom was temporary, like all booms. Mary hoped that the booming optimism that flowed from Gloria's letter would not become a bust in a city and country that still resisted a free woman who knew her own mind and spoke it.

Mary knew about Gloria's love of women, but she told nobody, not even Pat. That intimate touch from Gloria in high school had spoken volumes about unmet desires and risky actions. A woman must not reveal too much in this world, as Mary's mother Jennifer had told Mary more than once. Jennifer had concealed Mary herself, growing within Jennifer during Jennifer's voyage to Canada. Know whom to trust, and trust few with information they could use to hurt you. Gloria was vulnerable, more than even Mary's mother had been. Mary's adoptive father Sean had seen and accepted Mary's pregnant mother, and society had accepted all three. No such rosy future beckoned for Gloria's personal life.

Mary wanted her mother and Gloria to meet some day.

When Mary met Gloria's train in Edmonton that summer, Mary was a married mother. The march of time changes everything but time itself. Gloria and Mary happily reunited. They were adult friends now, no longer teacher and pupil. They discussed what united them, not what divided them. Over the coming years, Mary would learn much from Gloria, whose formal education eclipsed Mary's. Gloria would never assume that air of superiority that people with more education sometimes assume to bully the less educated. A truly educated person respects and is open to learn from anyone, however much or little educated. Gloria knew she could still learn from Mary.

Gloria took a banking job in Edmonton, far beneath her education, but something like economics while she stayed alert to plans now circulating to establish local higher education. Local academics, underemployed like Gloria, welcomed her to their cause. Gloria's parents, resigned to the truth that they would unlikely have grandchildren, welcomed Gloria home. Her dad bragged her around town. Swains kept their distance. Gloria's mother gloried in her only child's academic achievement. Gloria taught increasingly-popular night courses in economics, finance, and history. Everywhere, even this young Edmonton, had a history. Gloria Samson enlivened it for women and men, for skilled and unskilled workers, and for young and old.

CHAPTER 6: MOTHERS

Mary's and Pat's wedding had been in February, 1893, during the winter after Gloria's high school graduation. The chinook, that warm winter wind from the west, had melted the snow and made a sparkly world of dripping icicles around Mary's teacherage. The ceremony was at St. Albert, 12 miles from Mary's house, on the way to Lac Ste Anne.

Elise's family had left that dwindling community for one of the French settlements springing up near St. Albert. The villages' French language enticed the Metis, but the Metis' existence made the Church and the new settlers from Quebec nervous. Indigenous people continued to survive colonialism, inconveniently for the colonizers. The Bouchers frequently visited their Lace Ste Anne cabin, their refuge from Batoche. Friends there stayed in it for them.

The newlyweds stayed in Mary's teacherage, and would until 1894. That year, South Edmonton built a new school at Whyte Avenue and Niblock Street, not far from the train station.

Mary would have gone across the river to work at the school. Its builders certainly wanted her, married or not; but they didn't want her pregnant, which she was by the spring of the 1893-94 school year. She didn't mind. She was still young enough to return to teaching when their child was older. Mary had options that most women lacked, and a husband who supported her choices among those options.

Pat, George, and Ray had built a second wood frame house, beside the one they had built the summer before for Ray and Elise, between the train station and the river bank. George had added some brickwork to the front. Permanence. George certainly had bricks, and a busy brickyard always making more, barely enough to keep pace with the demand for bricks.

"What a cute little house, Mary," Elise said, her son Emile wiggling sleepily in her arms. Elise and Ray stayed in town almost all the time now. The railway had eaten into Pat's freighting business, but Pat, Sandra, John, and Ray had transformed the warehousing business into a retail operation with a growing construction arm. Gisele worked in the office, learning from Sandra. Gisele was learning some Gaelic, and Sandra some French, but English was rapidly overtaking all other local languages.

"What a cute, growing boy, Elise," Mary said, the glow of pregnancy on Mary's cheeks. "Our children will grow up together."

While the men cleaned the grounds around the new house, the women did the myriad tasks, inside and out, that make a house into a home. Elise put Emile in his baby basket in the shade from the late-summer sun.

Emile's namesake Metis grandpa and his family were settled in Morinville, one of the new French villages north of Fort Edmonton, itself newly renamed Edmonton. The French colonists liked the Bouchers more than the French clergy did, but Emile Boucher had left fighting behind him in Batoche. One had to get along in this world. His daughter, Elise Anderson, had certainly adapted to this changing world.

"Do you think you'll miss teaching, Mary?" Elise asked.

"I suppose I will, but I'm young enough to go back after our baby gets older."

"If that's your only baby."

"One's enough for me, and enough for Pat."

"One's enough for Ray and me, too. I think this is a good place and time for children," Elise said, thinking of her own wonderful childhood near Batoche, until Canada's army interrupted her puberty. Ray and her father Emile, once at war, were now bosom friends. What an example their friendship was. Let the generals fight the wars and leave the rest of us alone. We have nothing against one another.

"You take such good care of your little boy, Elise," Mary noted. "Some teacher will welcome such a nice little boy." Children, even babies, know if they're loved. Emile was certainly loved, as every child deserves to be.

Emile, less reflective about his start in life, merely slept in his basket. Was baby Emile aware that he was nice, or nasty, or anything? How reflective is a baby? A baby can't tell us. By the time a baby talks, the baby has forgotten babyhood, or perhaps not. Mary vowed to talk to the little guy as he grew up, "trailing clouds of glory," as Wordsworth's poem "Intimations of Immortality" said.

Mary had never seen a baby grow into a child, being an only child herself. Elise looked like a natural mother, whatever that was, Mary thought. She hoped she could be as patient and loving with her child.

Elise had a brother, Louis. Being the oldest, Elise had become more and more useful to her mother as her three younger siblings appeared. Only Elise and Louis survived childhood. Ray, Elise, her parents, and Louis loved baby Emile, one more Metis.

Mary would not have long to wait to see if she was fit for motherhood. Her little Adeline screamed into the world three weeks early. Luckily, Elise and her mother Marie happened to be visiting when Mary went into labor, on a chilly fall day in late October, 1894. Pat left Sandra in charge of the store and raced home after Elise calmly walked over to tell him his wife was in labor.

"What should I do? Get a doctor? Get a nurse?" Pat blustered.

"First, calm down," Marie said. "Get some hot water, a dark sheet, and a pair of sharp scissors. There's no time to find a doctor. The baby is coming."

Suddenly, Pat relaxed, so reassuring was Marie's voice. He knew that she had been through this before. Marie had been through worse giving birth to Elise. Marie's older sister Helene had delivered Elise, almost a breach birth. Helene had turned Elise, painstakingly for Helene, painfully for Marie, in Marie's womb.

"Don't worry, Pat," Elise said. "Mama has done this before. Your baby is in the right position. The top of her head is showing. Mama has seen harder births, including my birth." Mary grunted and squirmed.

"Right," Pat said. Unlike many men, Pat didn't mind that women knew things he did not know. Sandra, for example, knew more about bookkeeping than Pat knew. He was happy that he had hired Sandra, and almost speechless with relief that Marie and Elise were here. "I'll get the water, sheet, and scissors," Pat said, hustling out of the bedroom.

Mary's scream brought Pat running back from the kitchen. "What is it?"

"Nothing serious," Elise said. "Mary's trying to push out the baby. Hold her hand, Pat."

Pat managed that simple task. He almost fainted with Mary's next scream, but he figured that if she could endure her painful part, he could endure too.

A little, hairy head appeared, dangling from between Mary's legs.

One last, gentle push, a serious grunt, and a baby girl slid out, into Marie's hands. Elise cleaned the blood off the baby and asked Pat to hand her the scissors, "unless you want to do it yourself."

"Nope," Pat said, exhausted, and he hadn't even pushed out a baby. What an event to see, he thought. He knew other fathers, but none who had seen their child born. What a marvel.

Marie stretched the umbilical cord and brought the baby close to Elise, who had just poured boiling water over the scissors and into the basin below.

Snip. "Waaah!"

"A fine healthy girl, Mary," Marie said. Mary groaned and her eyelids flickered. "Stay awake, Mary. This isn't over yet."

The afterbirth came out. The two women directed it to the basin. Blood splashed on the dark sheet between Mary's legs.

Mary sighed. "I feel better now."

"Do you feel weak or dizzy, or itchy, or bloated, or sore anywhere inside?" Elise asked, trying to remember the questions that her mother asked during births.

"No. I feel fine. Just tired, and sore down there, near the outside."

"If that's all, then you'll be fine," Marie said, handing Mary the tiny girl, still squalling, but now clean, wrapped in the small quilt that Marie had brought a week before. "You rest. When the girl sleeps, you sleep."

"It is tiring, but a joy," Elise said, looking into Mary's eyes. "I will help."

"Madam Boucher," Pat said, somewhat recovered. "I thank you. You are like a mother to us. If you ever want anything, anything at all, just ask me."

"Thank you, Monsieur McCoy," Marie said. It wasn't the first time that a young parent had adopted Marie Boucher as a mother. "A cup of tea?"

"Coming right up," Pat said, striding out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.

Back in the bedroom, Elise asked Mary, who was dozing, "What do you name her?"

"Adeline, the name of Pat's aunt who died as a child on the way to Canada," Mary replied, trying to stay awake. Little Adeline, who didn't yet know she was an Adeline, dozed on Mary's breast.

"Sleep now," Elise said. Mary went to sleep within seconds.

Out in the kitchen, Pat asked Marie, "Are they all right?"

"Yes, Pat. A baby can die, and a mother can die. They will live," Marie said, looking into her tea.

For them, I will be strong, Pat thought.

Pat and Marie sat silently over their tea. Pat offered Marie bannock that Elise had made that morning. Elise stayed in the bedroom by sleeping Mary. Elise knew that Mary could safely sleep now. Ray watched little Emile next door.

In the kitchen, Marie and Pat quietly drank their tea. What a day, Pat thought. What a strong baby, Marie thought.

Little Adeline McCoy hurried into the world. She walked earlier than most children. She talked earlier than most children. Some days, Mary imagined Adeline would sprout wings and fly. Mary's mother Jennifer had often said that Mary was an energetic and therefore smart baby. Jennifer had survived energetic baby Mary. Mary would survive energetic baby Adeline.

Did this child ever sleep? Perhaps a drop of rum in the bottle....

Emile, wise about babies, as are most two-year-olds, was good company for Adeline. Emile, fresh from babyhood, was gentle with Adeline. He helped her learn to talk, regularly feeding words to his inquisitive sidekick.

Mary marveled at their relationship. Her experience was with older children. They didn't spring from the womb into the classroom. Mary was gaining a new appreciation of the importance, the responsibility, and even some days the joys of parenthood. How had Marie Boucher raised more than one? How did and does Marie live knowing that three of her five children died? How does Elise do it? Was Mary doing it? How could she know? How did little Emile and littler Adeline communicate so well, with so few words?

Teaching school doesn't show a teacher everything about children. Mary was going to school herself, as every parent had done since there have been parents.

"How's my little Adeleen?" Pat would say when he came home from the warehouse, which could be any time of day or evening. He stressed the Irish pronunciation of Adeline. Others, including Adeline, copied Pat. By now she knew she was an Adeline. These bigger people around her made mysterious noises and motions. She imitated them. When she talked, Adeline mimicked the accents and words that swirled around her: Irish for her dad, Cree or French for Marie, Elise, and Emile, Gaelic for Sandra and John, and German for George.

Whenever Mary and Adeline passed the hitching post in front of the warehouse, work stopped, outside and inside. Everybody wanted to see this amazing little girl with the wavy brown hair and cute speech. Pat basked in this attention, happy to give his workers a break to coo over his daughter. They did it more because they liked Adeline than to please Pat.

Pat was the least bossy boss they had ever had. Pat knew how hard it was to find such people, who got along despite the pressures and uncertainties of a retail business hanging on the end of a railway line. They worked as if this little business, between steel rails and a vast northern wilderness, was the seed of something bigger, about to bloom.

One cause for more business came while Emile was 9 and Adeline was 7, in the school on Whyte Avenue and Niblock Street. The first bridge had crossed the North Saskatchewan River in 1900, the year after the south town had become Strathcona. In 1902, when rails went on that bridge, business increased on both sides of the river. The 1901-02 winter had been busy for George's brickyard, and for his construction business that took more and more of Ray's time. Pat hired people as he needed them seasonally. The children grew with the community.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Ray asked Elise, as they and Emile ate their picnic on the south bank and gazed down at a train crossing the bridge.

"I never thought I'd say this, Ray," Elise said, "but I'm glad to see a new railway."

"I know what you mean," Ray said. "Perhaps I should have stayed in Ontario rather than ride the railway to fight your people?"

"Heavens no!" Elise cried. "I never would have met you. The railway can bring good bad."

"I'm good?"

"Yes."

"You're good yourself," Ray said, reaching for her.

"Should I go for a walk?" Emile interrupted them.

"No, dear. Papa is just being affectionate. There's another word you can tell Adeline."

"She tells me words, too, Mama. I'm two grades ahead of her in school, and she understands most of my schoolwork."

"Listen to her, Emile," Ray said. "You can learn a lot from a girl, or a woman.'

"Such as?" Elise taunted.

"Such as, this," Ray tickled her. "How to make a girl pee her pants."

"I would never do that, Papa," Emile said.

"That's my little gentleman, Emile," Elise said. "Just like your papa," she continued, in French.

Ray chimed in, and Emile joined in one of the three languages he had spoken since infancy.

"Thank you," Ray said in Cree, then continued in that language. Emile changed to Cree and kept pace. Elise joined in, and corrected their pronunciation in a way that encouraged rather than disheartened them.

Would Edmonton and Strathcona always be places of many languages, places for people who sometimes fought but usually cooperated? Elise pondered as Ray and Emile walked closer to the edge of the river bank. Ray wanted to point out some bridge features to his son. Emile would always be able to point to that bridge and say, "My papa helped build that!"

There were new people, including one particular new group, pouring onto the prairies. This growing group, Slavs, came from Ruthenia, or Carpathia, or Galicia, or Ukraine, or Russia, depending on whom one asked. These were the "men in sheepskin coats" that the Canadian government, the railroad, and settlement companies were recruiting to populate the prairies.

Elise wondered if these newcomers knew whose land they were entering. The Cree, Blackfoot, Stoney, and other Indigenous people had long cared for this land. They had made permanent settlements. They had made peace treaties with one another. The Battle River, south of Strathcona, was a border between the Cree and Blackfoot, for example.

The Metis, Elise's Metis, fared badly in war and peace. Indians got reserves, small, but land. Metis got scrip that promised land, but many lost the scrip to land speculators. These same speculators now sold land to people from halfway around the world. People own the land? Preposterous, many Indigenous people thought. Land is to share and use, not own.

Elise and Ray had seen the poverty on the new reserves, and the precarious existence of the Metis on the fringes of two worlds. Elise's parents lived well in Morinville; her dad could build with wood, a useful skill in a growing community. Many Metis eked out a living squatting on land or working for wages. What could the healing waters of Lac Ste. Anne do for them? What about the Metis along the Athabasca River? How long would riverboat jobs last after railways pushed farther north? Would railways hire Metis?

Did the bright future that the government and railway bragged about include everybody? Nobody left Marie's table, or Elise's table, hungry, ever. Could this Canada say the same?

"Mama, don't cry," Emile said, laying down beside her on the grass. "Everything will be all right. Papa says so. Isn't that a great bridge?"

"Mama is fine, little one," Elise said, finally noticing and wiping away her tears. "Some people cry because they're sad, but others cry because they're happy," she said elusively.

Ray, quiet until then, said, "You worry about a day you'll never see, Elise."

Elise hoped so. Oh how she hoped so.

"Let's go see what Adeline is doing!" Elise chirped. "Yes, Emile?"

Emile, the self-appointed protector of Adeline, who probably needed no protecting, happily agreed.

Some birds landed on their picnic crumbs, erasing all trace that they had eaten there, under the late August, 1902 sunshine. Five minute later, it was as if they had never been there.

CHAPTER 7: ROCKS

In the fall of 1902, Adeline turned 8, Emile turned 10, and Emile's Uncle Louis turned south. Louis was tired of the job choices of Lac Ste Anne, Morinville, and the whole district. Louis did not want to turn 19, a man's age, in his parents' Morinville house. Dad had been independent by 19, supporting Mom, with Elise on the way. Louis' other siblings had followed quickly. Emile and Marie were sad to see him go, but happy that their son did not go alone. Louis' friends Pierre and Marc went south with him, to where a new railway had recently blasted its way through the Crowsnest Pass. That district had mining jobs, for coal to feed the locomotives.

Louis listened carefully to Pat recall his hard work and slow promotion working for the CPR, the same company that built the Crowsnest railway. Louis and his friends chose coal mining instead, in a booming new town called Frank. Nestled in a stunning, steep mountain valley just west of Blairmore, the regional centre, Frank was one of many new villages that housed miners. Men worked in dangerous underground conditions to hack out the coal that fueled an increasing number of trains, and heated many homes.

Louis respected Pat. Louis knew Pat's stories of working on the railway as it approached Calgary. While Pat developed skills and connections that would help him leave the railway for his own business, Louis was a baby in his mother's arms, fleeing Batoche with his older sister Elise and their wounded father Emile.

Louis knew the story of the scar on his father's shoulder, from a bullet during the Metis battle with the soldiers from Ontario and England. Emile, Marie, and two of their children, Louis and Elise, survived; but middle children Gabriel and Therese died of tuberculosis before the Batoche war made the family flee west to Lac Ste Anne.

Pat and Mary had both moved away from their parents when as young as, or younger than, Louis was now. Here they were, settled, with beautiful little Adeline, a pal for Emile, Louis' nephew. Louis hoped to become settled and start a family down south, in the Crowsnest. Crows are brave birds, Louis reflected.

The wagon ride of several days rolled along the eastern slopes of the mountains, from Rocky Mountain House south. Louis, Pierre, and Marc talked along the way, about what they would do, mining at first, and avoiding railway work at all costs. They would save their wages, and later open their own business. They were young and strong.

The leaves were turning yellow. The days were still warm, and the nights were rarely below freezing.

Elise had voiced worries about her brother's unfocused plans, but had her plans been any better focussed? She and Ray, on opposite sides at Batoche, had later met by the peaceful, miraculous waters of Lac Ste. Anne. Had Elise planned that? Had Ray? They came from two different, opposed worlds, and they were happy. This happiness showed on the face of their Emile, growing so fast, and so wise. Louis could adapt, and find happiness in the distant Crowsnest Pass.

Their mothers were nervous about how far away they were going, but Marie had migrated that far, perhaps farther, from Batoche to Lac Ste. Anne. Morinville to Frank was probably a shorter distance, and this was a different era. Youthful restlessness rather than war made them want to migrate.

Louis' father Emile had said little, one way or the other, about his son's plans. Papa always trusted me to take care of myself, Louis thought, as the mountains loomed closer on their right. Soon they would cross the CPR tracks, about halfway from Rocky Mountain House to Frank. This railway had brought the army to fight Louis' father and the other Metis. Now a railway farther south and west seemed to promise coal-fired wealth.

The three men concerned themselves little with the Stoney Indians whose pathetic camps they passed as they rode south. Go where the jobs are, they thought, but they were too polite to say. They also passed Metis settlements in no better condition. What could they tell these people, their people? We are not our brothers' keepers, they concluded, and rode on untroubled. Move to live.

They guessed that merely showing up would land them jobs. They guessed right, but mining was harder than they expected. Company housing was expensive, and drafty in winter. They met many others with dreams similar to theirs. Many had worked on the railway, as Pat had, and some of them had probably dreamed of riches in their own businesses. Pat had made his dreams come true. Louis, Pierre, and Marc could do likewise. They knew that they'd never get rich working for someone else. This mining misery would be temporary, a couple years at most. They would shun drink and gambling, as they had promised their relieved mothers back in Morinville. In two or three years, they would prosper their way, their own bosses.

"You came here to work?" Foreman Jones asked them beside the tipple of the biggest mine close to Frank. "I want men who will work, and do what I tell them. Are you such men?"

"Yes, sir," they replied in unison, like a choir hoping to go underground and make profitable music with picks, shovels, and wagons.

Hired at that moment, the three learned from this strapping foreman that they could share a company house in nearby Frank, for a reasonable rent. He showed them the company store, which staked them to the supplies they would need. They went to sleep that night full of visions of future riches, here in the shadow of Turtle Mountain. The coal stove heating their house warmed their visions.

The work was hard, the pay was good, and the three saved money, if less than they expected after paying for rent, food, tools, and clothes. Stay away from drink and we'll be fine, they agreed.

This sobriety suited Foreman Greg Jones fine. He understood men's need to get drunk, especially after surviving cave-ins; but he needed enough sober miners to keep the coal coming up, for the locomotives. More trains and mines were coming all the time, Jones knew.

Not many years before, Jones, fresh from Winnipeg, had been like these three young men. The Yukon Gold Rush hadn't "panned" out for Jones. In 1900, he had returned south, to the Crowsnest, as the rails and mines sprang into action. A year in the shafts, using the skills and tenacity Jones learned in Yukon, inspired mine bosses to make him a foreman. Greg didn't miss work. He didn't drink. He was what the mine owners wanted. These three seemed able to endure a year or so in the shafts without cracking, without dying of their own stupidity, and without drinking away their chances of promotion.

The company was tough but fair, as Jones would be with these three. Jones would help them if they helped him, by overlooking the odd safety violation, for example. Distant government officials in Ottawa made laws that made no sense for workplaces the officials didn't understand. Yes, mines cave in. Yes, there had to be enough timber supports. Hell, you can't get coal out of caved-in shafts full of dead men. Work together, with every man knowing his place.

What Foreman Greg Jones, the men, and the mining companies didn't need was men with ideas of unionizing the mines. Union organizers, idle talkers in Jones' view, were not welcome in the Crowsnest Pass. What did one uppity gaggle call itself? The Western Federation of Miners? Western Federation of Meddlers, more like. Stay across the border and stir up the Yanks.

We Canadians do fine without unions. We're a peaceful country. Let the Yanks fight it out, as they tried to do in Yukon before the Royal Northwest Mounted Police tamed them. The redcoats' Fort Steele wasn't far to the west. Fort MacLeod wasn't far to the east. Jones knew that the mine owners could call for help from the police if needed, against these union chatterboxes. Life's too short to fight. Let's dig coal, our common cause.

Louis, Pierre, and Marc could not agree more, Jones assumed. They worked like driven men, in all weather. Jones noticed this. He was paid to notice everything. By April, 1903, Jones saw Louis Boucher as a man ready for more responsibility. The mining company in Blairmore, a couple miles to the east, was desperate for a foreman to help with an expansion. Every man whom Jones had sent elsewhere had been right for the job. When Greg Jones recommended someone, mine bosses listened.

When Jones told Louis of the opportunity, Louis jumped at it. He and his friends had spent the winter talking about their futures. They knew that they might have to split up, but they promised to get together later. Pierre and Marc assured Louis that each of them would jump at such a chance. Jump, Louis. Louis didn't need to hear that twice, but he was melancholy leaving his friends.

Riding his packed horse to Blairmore two days later, with a few leaves budding on the trees below Turtle Mountain, Louis felt a shiver. "Someone walked over my grave," he remembered his mother's paradoxical expression. He dismissed it as nerves about the new job. This spring seems cool, as springs go; but this was his first spring in the mountains. Louis did not know mountains or their springs.

He must write to his family, and tell them the good news. He would be a foreman at 20, a man moving up. Louis wouldn't describe the two cave-ins that he and his friends had survived. That would just worry his mother. Instead, he would tell, without bragging, of his help during another cave-in. The whistle had blown, a whistle that meant danger and death. He had run to the shaft on his day off, and helped dig out the trapped miners. Mama would like that: her son, the hero.

Louis always tried to measure up to what he thought his father expected of him, but his father had never pressured him to achieve, only to be decent to people, especially the weak. Louis was strong, and the strong seemed to rule; but he heeded his father's words. Why else race to that shaft to save fellow miners? It was the decent thing to do. They would do the same for him. Perhaps I am my brother's keeper, he thought, as he rode into Blairmore. I'm learning a lot here, and becoming a real man, Louis thought. The possibilities were as vast and solid as the surrounding mountains.

____________

"Brick lasts, Gisele," George told her while he cleaned his shovel, trowel, and measuring sticks. The new brick line, four feet high, circled the rooming house and nearby shed. "This building is in good shape. Ray and I fixed a few things, the roof mostly, and I added this brickwork.'

George was so regular, like his bricks, so steady, Gisele thought. "It looks really good, George," she complimented, in French.

"Thank you," his French answer. "I hope your mother likes it."

Yvonne liked everything that George did for her, Gisele thought. She wondered what George's first wife Ilsa had been like. George talked of her, once in awhile, but less often as time passed. Gisele was so happy that George was happy with them: their knight in shining brick.

"What are you doing here in the middle of the day?" Yvonne came around from the back of the rooming house, joining the French conversation. Nowadays, Yvonne rarely had that urgent tone of voice from the days before George, when she and Gisele had struggled to keep this building up, and keep themselves fed, and safe.

"Sandra gave me the rest of the day off. We're ahead," Gisele answered. "She said I might need a rest before tomorrow, when a shipment of marble is coming in for some mansion we're building across the river." It wouldn't be the first fancy house they had built, but it would be the first building to include marble. George was looking forward to working with this shiny, fragile stone. Ray and his construction crew would be ready for it. Sandra would cost-land the precious stone from distant Italy. Sandra wouldn't pay for broken marble, the railway station men knew. The homeowner would happily pay well for the prestige that marble brought, Sandra rightly guessed.

Sandra and Gisele's challenge was to come up with a freight rate for something that came from Europe by boat, and from Quebec City by train. The Englishman who would own the mansion could afford whatever they decided to charge him, but they wanted a fair price. If the women overcharged him, then word would get around and hurt their business. If they undercharged him, then he, and especially his English wife, might think less of their mansion and its builders.

Sandra handled others' money as if it was her own. She pinched pennies until they squeaked. Pat admired her frugal ways, ways that Gisele was learning. Pat suspected that Gisele's subsistence childhood had primed her for frugality.

Gisele and Sandra had met the woman of the house they were building. She was English enough to be almost of another species than Gisele and Sandra. She moved like a breakable doll. They wondered how she saw them. She wondered how they saw her. It takes all kinds to make a world, the three women concluded.

Mrs. Virginia Stanstead wanted to impress people in her new neighborhood, a mile west of the main part of Edmonton. She downplayed the fact that her husband Ronald's inherited fortune came from brewing. Many fortunes came that way in England. Ronald also had heard some idea of making clothes, particularly work pants, in Edmonton. That business interested him. His and her families weren't many generations removed from the coal fields of the English Midlands. Neither was Virginia's. Here, though, she intended to build a little piece of the England she always dreamed of, the England of fine houses and women, the England her family had so recently joined.

It's an impressive house, Gisele thought. She hoped the Stansteads would be happy in their glittering mansion, with smooth marble floors in the dining and drawing rooms. Gisele had always been happy with her mother Yvonne, even when they didn't know where the winter's wood would come from, even when drunken louts threatened them, or didn't pay their bills. Gisele didn't know her dad, who had fled before her birth; but Yvonne had convinced her that he was a good man, but in the wrong place. Gisele had barely survived infancy. One of her earliest memories was of her mother praying the rosary for two days in the Edmonton rooming house, while toddler Gisele writhed with fever, as wet as the day she was born in a Saulteau tipi on the prairie. Gisele wondered what kind of children Virginia Stanstead would have, if she had any. They would want for nothing, Gisele hoped.

Gisele fell to her old habits of helping her mother around the rooming house, not as busy as it had been, not needing to be as busy as it had been before George. Still, working men and some women showed up, word of mouth having told them of decent, affordable accommodation in Strathcona. Yvonne turned away almost nobody, when she had the room, and she almost always had the room these days.

Gloria Samson moved into Yvonne's rooming house when a bank opened in Strathcona, the side of the river favored for the university. The university was only an idea now, but Gloria wanted to help make it real, "bricks on the ground," as George said soon after they met. George and his bricks. George reminded Gloria of Angus McKay, the Toronto professor who had helped her get to the University of Glasgow, the fourth oldest university in the United Kingdom. Gloria noticed that George, like Angus, could get others working, and behaving.

Gloria also met Gisele, Yvonne, and later Sandra when Sandra and Gloria walked together as far as Sandra's workplace one morning in the early spring of 1903. Adeline, bound for school, felt very grown up at age 9, walking beside Gloria and Sandra.

Sandra's Cape Breton accent reminded Gloria of the accents around her in Scotland, although Sheila's accent had been stronger. Sandra talked of her co-worker John. Scotland had been different for John and Gloria. What poverty must have plagued his Orkney Islands to force him to emigrate to Canada, Gloria thought, feeling privileged by comparison.

Gloria was assistant manager at a new bank. What could a bank do for people like John, Sandra, and Gisele? What could a university do for them? Gloria's new friends caused in her many new ideas.

Yvonne liked Gloria like another daughter. Gloria liked Yvonne, hardy like George.

Gloria's parents had long ago given up the idea of marrying her off to one of the growing number of beaus who floated on money and promises into Edmonton. It was Gloria's independent streak, not her sexuality, that had convinced them that their daughter was not the marrying kind. Luckily for all, Gloria had Ontario cousins on her mom's side who would be happy to take over the store when the time came. Gloria's parents, like everyone else except some Toronto university governors, Sheila, and Mary, did not know that Gloria preferred women to men. Gloria was more different from every woman she knew than they were from one another.

Gloria's new friends had more in common with Virginia Stanstead than with Gloria. They loved men. Gloria loved women. Gloria kept herself busy enough to keep worries of lifelong loneliness from disheartening her.

Elise liked Gloria immediately, when Mary introduced this early success of her teaching career. Mary was excited to have Gloria back in Edmonton, educated and independent, after so many years. Gloria was a great free-thinking influence on Mary and Pat's daughter Adeline, who already thought and spoke freely. Gloria noticed and welcomed Elise's friendship. Keen observation was a vital skill for Gloria.

Who was this young mother, who accepted people so different from herself? If Elise knew how different Gloria was, would Elise still accept her? Gloria wanted to meet Elise's parents, and Mary's parents, the sources of these remarkable women. As well as two degrees, Gloria had brought from Scotland the careful, considered manner of speaking acquired from Scots who had endured generations of English rule. Sheila's example had fine-tuned Gloria's caution. Sheila the Highland Scot loved women, making her doubly suspect in the eyes of the pro-English Lowland Scots who dominated Glasgow. Scots had helped produce the Metis people, Gloria knew. She pondered the consequences.

Gloria was pondering Elise, parents, cultures, banking, and universities, when Adeline interrupted.

"What work do you do, Gloria?" Adeline asked.

"I work in a bank, Adeline," Gloria answered. "Do you know what a bank is?"

"I sure do. It's the place that guards people's money. Do you count money all day?" Adeline asked.

"Sometimes I count money, but only for a few minutes at a time."

"You already know how much is there, I guess. Maybe you count money that people bring in, and money they take out, so you can keep track."

"You're a smart girl, Adeline," Gloria commented. "Would you like to work in a bank when you grow up?"

"Not on your life!" Adeline exclaimed. "I want to build things, like Dad and Sandra and Ray and George and Gisele do. Then I can earn money to put in your bank. Do you get paid more when your bank gets more money?"

"Sometimes, Adeline," Gloria answered, before Adeline skipped away to chase a butterfly.

Who was this girl, Gloria wondered. How did she get this way, way out here? Then Gloria remembered Adeline's mother, Mary. Any child of Mary's would be as clever as Mary.

Mary had joined Gloria's university committee, oriented more toward the social than the academic aspects of a university; but, now teaching again, Mary missed as many meetings as she attended. Mary had asked why Gloria hadn't joined one of the academic planning groups, the meat in the sandwich, rather than a group considering academic condiments.

Mary had shown rock-like fortitude, coming from Victoria when she was about the same age that Gloria had been leaving for university in Toronto. The two were rocks, resisting conformity to a man's world. This little Adeline was a chip off the old rock. She could grow up to help Mary, Gloria, and a growing number of women divert the course of society, like a rock dam redirecting the river of history in a new, more open direction.

Gloria could have joined an academic group. She had better qualifications than half the men on each of those all-male groups. Instead, she had chosen to chair the group of women organizing the social elements of the university. She was the only academic among them, but they were from the budding business and academic elite of Strathcona and Edmonton. Gloria planned to depend on these women, more than on the men, to get her a teaching job at the new university.

Like Mary and Gloria, most of the women on the committee wanted women to get the vote, in civic and federal elections, and in elections for the provinces that would soon replace the territories run by Ottawa appointees, all of them men. Voting wasn't enough, but it was progress. Women in a wider variety of jobs, women safe in their homes and communities, women less beholden to men, even to peaceful, trustworthy men such as Mary's Pat, were more urgent than voting. Political democracy was empty without economic democracy. Marking a ballot every four years does not bring equality among people or between sexes.

Edmonton and Strathcona had changed in many ways since Gloria had gone away to university. Women, almost half the population, were feeling and exerting their power. Gloria felt closer to the throttle of the engine of history than she had ever felt in Toronto or even Scotland. Women voting, and women teaching in universities were decent goals, and good economics. Why continue to underuse the talents of half of humanity?

In Scotland, Gloria had seen an autographed copy of Mary Woolstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Imagine the battles that woman had faced a century ago! Mary, who had inspired Gloria in school, had told her about the book. Mary had even lent Gloria the book, a secret between the two of them. Gloria hoped to meet Mary's mother Jennifer, and ask her how on earth she acquired that book in 1880s Victoria. Jennifer had brought the book from England.

Women still risked trouble for standing up. Mary stood up. Gloria stood on Mary's shoulders, in a way, to see further, and to see more possibilities. This little Adeline might one day stand on Gloria's shoulders, in industry, in academia, or in who knew what. Gloria was certain that Adeline could navigate higher education. Their walks and talks confirmed that. What would Mary Woolstonecraft make of this era a century after her death, when much was improved, but much remained unimproved, like these muddy tracks ridiculously called roads?

Muddy, rutted roads were signs of activity, of the production of wealth, as Adam Smith would say. His bust had faced Gloria and everybody else at the University of Glasgow. A nation's wealth came from its industrial activity, the great classical economist had written in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations. The labor theory of value was in that pivotal book which the thorough Smith had dictated. Smith smoothly synthesized, from a thatch of his own and others' ideas, the theory that labor was the ultimate source of all wealth. There had to be land and capital, but labor made the land produce items useful to people, and the surplus value extracted from labor produced capital.

To Gloria, little Adeline was a synthesis herself, a bright little girl with a growing inkling of the source of wealth. Gloria hoped that Adeline was the future, in which women were equal to men. Gloria hoped that enough Adelines, and good men, would gain for women pay and respect equal to what men enjoyed. She hoped both sexes would improve the lot of all workers.

Adeline, right now, hoped to catch a butterfly.

Gisele, 21, ambled along beside them, saying little, but listening to every word. She was looking forward to her lunch picnic with Elise, on the bank above the river. Elise's brother Louis hadn't written for three months. She hoped that he, Pierre, and Marc were all right, in that distant, noisy, dangerous hell of coal dust that could explode with a spark from a lantern. A mountain could crush any man who dug into it. We are so smart we sometimes outsmart ourselves, Gisele remembered one of Pat's Irish expressions. Listen to others and to nature.

Gisele had met Louis and his friends. Pierre was formal and courteous. Marc was rougher. Gisele liked Pierre the most. Was there a place for Gisele in that hard, blackened place so far south? Perhaps Pierre would return, chastened by that dangerous work, ready for the quieter, safer life of running Gisele's mother's rooming house. Yvonne could then slow down. George and Ray could certainly find work for Pierre and his friends. Gisele could find Gisele for Pierre.

Despite paying well and treating their workers well, George and Ray always seemed to be replacing them. That wretched homesteading tempted those strong Eastern Europeans away from city work. They wanted to live like the large landowners they had lived under in Russia and Austria. Some were stubborn, and hard like the bricks that George and Ray used. At least these immigrants were polite and sober, and they paid on time whenever they stayed at her mother's rooming house. Perhaps they had a softness under that hardness so necessary in this land. Pierre was hard, able to do hard work; but he was soft inside. Gisele missed them all, but Pierre the most.

"Pierre," French for "rock,'', Gisele thought. He was strong and sober, like George. Gisele could homestead with him, but she preferred the city, and life with many people to isolation with one man, however gentle he might be at first.

Be safe, Pierre, Marc, and Louis, Gisele hoped.

____________

One had to get up pretty early to work harder than Louis, Marc, and Pierre; but only Louis would live past April 29, 1903. Turtle Mountain, there before they came, there before the Blackfoot came, was working at four in the morning that spring day.

Louis heard the rumble from Blairmore. This was bigger than a cave-in. He and the others who had worked the night shift at Blairmore mounted their horses and wagons and rode west like the wind.

What caused that rumbling? The coal-dust solidarity of miners brought many from both directions to Frank.

Louis arrived before the dust settled, but after Turtle Mountain had broken into a million rocky pieces and buried the town of Frank. He and his fellow miners went to work immediately in the dark blue light just before dawn. Groans from many directions reached their ears. Horses, men, and wagons jumped into service. They moved rubble to find a man here, a woman there, and a child somewhere else, dead or alive. Louis worked harder than he had ever worked for coal. Louis worked for miners, their wives, and children.

Louis wondered gravely about his friends Pierre and Marc. He hoped they were at work, but he knew that the Frank mines lately worked mostly by day only. He hoped they were among the dusty survivors crawling from the rubble, or among the injured carried out by rescuers. The sense of death rose above the smell of dust.

"We found some dead ones here," someone shouted. Even the dead had a right to leave the rubble.

Before Louis looked at those dead, among the many other dead being pulled out by the rescuers and by survivors strong enough to help, he knew that Pierre and Marc were among the dead. Louis wasn't a natural pessimist, but he sensed their deaths.

Then Louis saw them, or what was left of them, crushed almost beyond recognition. He was too busy to mourn, but a tear ran down his grime-caked cheek. Louis shivered, and remembered his shiver of a few weeks before. He could have been here, in this shack, where he had spent the winter. It was a pile of splintered wood now. Pierre and Marc were no more.

Louis did not sleep that day, nor that night. The next day, stiff and tired, he quit his job, as many men had done, spooked after Turtle Mountain had crushed a whole town. The mine owners wanted Louis to stay, but they understood his reason to leave. He at least had to bring the death news, in person, to his friends' families. He might be back, he said, but he and his bosses knew he wouldn't.

He rode to the early-morning memorial service for the Frank dead that included his friends Marc and Pierre. They would forever lie in that narrow valley just west of Blairmore. Louis alone had survived this Crowsnest quest for wealth. Louis had a new respect for health and life.

What did the few Boer War veterans in the area think of this disaster? They had survived a shooting war in South Africa. They had fought for the English against the Boers, to help make South Africa an English colony. Louis had known of them but not befriended them. They were too much like the English army men his father had fought at Batoche. They breathed empire. At least died under the Frank rubble. He had survived one war only to die in another war.

The two wars were so far apart, but with outsiders so similar fighting them. Men from many lands fought the mountains for coal, until a mountain claimed many of them. The British and the Dutch-descended Boers fought for the land of black people in Africa. The Metis, part outsider themselves, were born of the union of Indigenous people and the French and Scottish migrants to this land called Canada. Dreams of distant wealth had sent the Dutch, English, French, and Scottish overseas, and Louis to the Crowsnest. Must the quest for peace and life end in war and death?

As Louis rode north that day, he realized that he had by chance dodged death. He could have died in a previous or future disaster. Turtle Mountain's fall onto the town of Frank had ended many dreams and lives in a dangerous, underpaid line of work. So recently had Louis become a mine foreman, mere weeks ago, that he still identified with the dead miners and their kin. He vowed as he rode that he would respect workers however prosperous he became, or didn't. Greg Jones had liked him and he had liked Greg, but they seemed to be on different sides of some line. Still, Louis hoped that Greg stayed safe.

The beautiful buds of spring poplar and birch leaves lined Louis Boucher's northward ride. He rode across the CPR tracks, past Rocky Mountain House, and then turned northeast, away from the mountains and toward Morinville. Louis had a good stash of money, but he would have given every penny to have Pierre and Marc.

More than once he stopped along the trail, just to look at the beautiful light green of spring leaves. His friends would never again see such trees, or spring, or their families and friends back in Morinville. Louis tried to memorize this scenery in their honor.

Camped along the route back north, Louis sometimes dreamed of that morning in Frank. The sound, the dust, the wreckage, the dead, and the staggering survivors enacted a haunting scene of suffering. He woke up shivering more than once. Did those Boer War veterans dream of the death they had seen? Did Papa dream of Batoche?

What would he tell the families of his two friends? Louis was not even a year older than he had been when the three had gone south to make their fortunes, but he felt much older. He was an old 20.

A deer bounced across his path when Louis was a few miles southwest of Morinville. This was life, precious, fragile, and fleeting. Louis felt strong, but his hard experience down south taught Louis caution, to love life, whatever it brought him, and to be soft with others, especially women and children.

CHAPTER 8: BELONGING

"How's that new house, John?" Sandra asked him in Gaelic, on a rare afternoon he was actually in the Strathcona warehouse and retail shop. When she spoke Gaelic, John knew Sandra spoke only to him.

"It gleams like a manor house, Sandra," John answered. "We did a good job on it. You did a good job keeping the books balanced while we built it. The owner paid all we asked, including the unforeseen expenses."

"How does the marble look?"

"Fantastic, Sandra. George loved working with it. I learned a lot, when I wasn't fetching and carrying for him, or for you."

John McNab was fetching, Sandra thought, more than once during the years they had worked together. He thought the same of her. Their Scottish nature made them careful, with money, with people, and with life in general.

"Would you have lunch with me, Sandra?" John asked.

"Let me finish some things here," she said, surprised, and a bit nervous. Why was she nervous? They had eaten together before. Perhaps it was the summer air. Perhaps it was the fact that this was 1905, the year of two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan. What else was new?

John was nervous, too. Settled in Strathcona, with a good job, John felt free and hopeful, as he had rarely felt during his time with the Hudson's Bay Company. The Bay had brought him from the Orkney Islands to Canada. It had worked him like a mule, but taught him how to survive in this new country. Did Sandra feel free and hopeful toward him?

He watched her bustle around the office. He thought she didn't notice him watching her. She noticed. Sandra noticed everything about John.

"What is new?" Adeline burst in, in fractured Gaelic, lightening the mood.

"Thanks for speaking Gaelic, lass," John said in English, "the language of Scotland, where I'm from."

"Gaelic is also in Cape Breton, where I'm from," Sandra added.

"Are you two married? I see you together a lot," Adeline said brightly, without the nervousness that often kept adults from asking such a question.

"No, dear," Sandra said. "We're just good friends."

"I think you should get married," Adeline proclaimed, as her dad walked in.

"I think you should mind your own business, Adeline," Pat said. "Go find Emile and play."

"Emile thinks he's too old to play," Adeline huffed. "He's only two years older than I am. Sometimes he talks about his Uncle Louis. I think I understand Louis better than Emile does."

"I don't doubt that," Sandra said. "You're a smart little girl."

"I'm not little," Adeline objected. "I'll be 11 in October. My teacher might move me up a grade this year. Last year's school work was so easy that I started doing the next year's work by March, when I wasn't helping other children. I might be in Grade 7 by Christmas."

"You'll be grown before you know it," John said. "Don't wish your life away. You get to be an adult for a long time. Sandra and I are 40. We've been adults for a long time. There are many adults older than we are."

"You're pretty old," Adeline observed.

"Thanks," Sandra replied. "John, get my wheelchair and push me to lunch."

John hobbled across the room.

"I didn't mean it that way," Adeline said.

"My daughter's tongue brings troubles on her head," Pat chided. "Speak sweet words, Adeline. You might have to eat them."

"Yes, Dad."

"She's a bonny girl, Pat," John said. "You have a gem there."

Adeline glowed.

"Run along, gem," Sandra said. "John and I are going for lunch, if that's fine with you."

"Me, too?"

"No," Pat said.

"Oh, it's a lunch like that," Adeline winked. "A romantic lunch for two."

Sandra blushed. "Let's go, Romeo."

"Yes, before Adeline sends a minister with us," John added.

Sandra blushed again. What's wrong with me, she wondered. I'm acting little older than Adeline. I'm a grown woman. Still, Sandra liked Adeline's insightful interruption. From the mouths of babes....

____________

September, 1905 came. Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier came, to Edmonton, to declare the new Province of Alberta. The District of Alberta to the south had joined the District of Athabasca to the north. Laurier confirmed the union.

Pat gave everyone the day off to go across the river to the new Alberta Hotel, decorated for the occasion. It reminded him of the colorful day in 1891 when the railway arrived. Was it 14 years already? Had he been here that long? So much had happened. He and this growing area had been so busy. The time had passed, day by day, season by season, scarcely noticed.

Pat puzzled, until he remembered what he and Mary had done during their years together. They were still young and healthy. Their Adeline, living proof that years had passed, was their joy, even with her headstrong ways. Pat, and especially Mary admired Adeline's headstrong ways.

"May I go to the platform to see Prime Minister Laurier up close, Mom?" Adeline asked Mary. "Emile's up there."

"Yes, darling," Mary said. "Stay close to Emile. It's crowded around here; he can watch over you."

"I don't need someone watching over me," Adeline objected.

"Listen to your mother," Pat said. "I don't want you trampled in the crowd."

"Yes, Dad." Adeline said, before she weaved through the crowd.

The crowd was pretty quiet for how big it was. People seemed aware of the importance of the occasion. When had a prime minister ever visited Edmonton? When would another? Would there ever be a prime minister from Alberta, this new province of industrious people from everywhere?

Adeline joined Emile, who looked at her briefly, before he returned his gaze to Laurier. Laurier was saying something about the twentieth century belonging to Canada.

"How can a century belong to a place?" Adeline whispered to Emile. "Time's just time. It doesn't belong to us. It rules us, if anything. We belong to it."

Emile's brow furrowed, as it often did when Adeline said something that hadn't occurred to him. More and more, she said things he didn't understand. He'd be damned if he'd ask her to explain, and risk showing that she, a girl, and younger, knew something he didn't.

"Just listen to his speech. He spoke in French, too."

"I heard, but I didn't understand much of it. You speak French better than I do, Emile."

Emile was happy that he was still better than Adeline at something. He translated for Adeline.

Laurier paused, his speech nearly over, to look at the crowd and sense its mood. This West was a foreign land to him, but it was part of Canada. He wanted a Canada that welcomed anyone from anywhere. Clifford Sifton, in charge of immigration, was bringing people by the trainload to this West. Others, including Frank Oliver, a narrow potentate in this new province of Alberta, didn't like Canada open to just anyone; but Laurier and Sifton had a bigger vision. Laurier hoped that enough people in this crowd, in this new province, would share his vision. Oliver was coming around.

Oliver was cumbersome but necessary in Laurier's Liberal party. Laurier hoped that such reactionaries had shorter political life spans than visionaries had. Laurier had recently made Oliver his minister of the interior and of Indian affairs, two big jobs that would keep Oliver busy and perhaps broaden his outlook. Even Frank Oliver couldn't stem the tide of immigration necessary to Canada, and he certainly couldn't send back the "men in sheepskin coats," some of them in this crowd today. Oliver and Laurier needed each other, Laurier lamented. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Was this vast country governable? Was it even durable?

What about the Indians, a tragic, forgotten, declining group? The Liberal Laurier was glad that he had repealed their voting rights in 1898, for Indians had voted mostly Conservative since Conservative Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had granted many of them voting rights in 1885. A couple generations in the church-run residential schools, one of Macdonald's better ideas, would erase Indian culture, fit them for such menial jobs as they could do, and, Laurier hoped, make them vote Liberal. The Great Chain of Being, from God through the monarchy through his government to the unwashed masses of whatever culture, each knowing its place, had guided the rise of Europe and would guide the rise of Canada.

Laurier was glad that one European legacy, the French language, endured in the West. What a fight, years long, that had been, first with Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, a Scot who was more English than the English. Then Louis Riel had spoken too strongly for Indian rights but also for French rights in the West. Riel was a tragic figure on the scale of Papineau, the Patriote leader of 1837. Then had come that legal circus about French in Manitoba schools: French, no French, French, no French. Then the Boer War had kindled the fire of empire among the English in Ontario and Montreal, and equally strong words against empire by the French in Quebec. Laurier liked the monarchy, unlike many French in Canada, but it must listen to its outposts of empire, such as Canada, French and English.

The Patriotes of 1837 had tried to reverse the outcome of the 1760 conquest of New France by the English. Like too many English, many French lived a fantasy that one language, one culture, and one country were the way of the future. Honore Mercier, and Henri Bourassa, a Quebec member of parliament in Laurier's own party, spoke as if New France would return. Feudalism was dead, not about to return to this growing, multinational country. Laurier knew that. He wished that Mercier and Bourassa agreed more heartily. With friends like them, who needed enemies? Canada had enough problems already. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, the English writer Samuel Johnson had written, and Laurier saw himself as anything but a scoundrel. Unlike the nationalists in Quebec and the Orangemen in Ontario, Laurier was open to ideas from his enemies, and each camp sheltered enemies of his. This young country needed ideas from the the French, the English, and from here.

To his credit, even Macdonald had known that Canada was "two nations warring in the bosom of a single state," as Lord Durham, "Radical Jack," had written after the smoke cleared from the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada, and the pale imitation of rebellion in Upper Canada. Macdonald had Georges-Etienne Cartier. Laurier had Clifford Sifton. Laurier rejected Durham's pessimistic prescription, that the French abandon their language and assimilate to English speech and ways. No visionary, Frank Oliver seemed to share Durham's ideas, decades after history had proven them unworkable. Even Macdonald had grudgingly accepted French language and culture, if only in Quebec, and tamed by Cartier. Macdonald and Laurier were both visionaries, with different visions, each informed by what he saw as the best of the past.

Laurier looked over this crowd of people from many lands. He had hope for this growing country. His words about sunny ways and about the twentieth century belonging to Canada seemed to come to life in places like Edmonton, and in people like these, under this warm September sun.

A little girl at the edge of the platform was saying something to him, Laurier realized.

"I want to be prime minister some day," Adeline said, trying to seem eager, not impertinent.

"That's a noble aim, young lady," Laurier said softly to her, as a few noticed the exchange. Then he raised his voice, finished his speech, and the ceremony continued.

"He called me a lady, Emile," Adeline preened.

Emile smiled at Adeline's courage to talk to this impressive man.

"I didn't mean to embarrass us, or get us in trouble, Emile. It just popped out of my mouth. As soon as I said it, I was afraid someone would grab us and take us away."

"It crossed my mind, Adeline," Emile said. "I'm not mad at you. You always amaze me."

"I felt less like a fool when he called me a lady."

"You are no fool," Emile said in French, knowing that Adeline understood that much French, unlike many people around them. Emile liked Adeline, even when he didn't understand her, or agree with her.

"Let's get some cake, Emile," Adeline said, gesturing to the free food spread on tables near the platform, a Laurier Liberal Party lunch.

"Good idea, Lady Adeline," he joked.

"Very funny. Come along, my brave protector. Mom and Dad want me to stay close to you in this crowd, but I can take care of myself."

"Without doubt," Emile said, in French. Adeline grinned.

A bit of free cake and a drink returned the pair to childhood thrills, on this thrilling day, in the biggest crowd that either of them had ever seen.

Emile's parents Elise and Ray stood beside Adeline's parents. Elise's parents Marie and Emile and her brother Louis were nearby. Louis had moved back to his parents' place in Morinville and and now worked at the feed store. It was heavy work for less pay, but it was safer than coal mining. Louis rarely dreamed anymore of the horrors he had seen that morning at the Frank Slide two years earlier. Ray wanted Louis to leave Morinville and work with him and George in Edmonton and Strathcona. Louis was thinking about it.

Gisele was helping Louis think about it, and think about other things, including them as a pair. Louis was thinking about Gisele and even dreaming about her, which was happier than dreaming about crumbling mountains killing his friends. She was a couple years older than Louis, but that was fine with him. Despite his youth, Louis had a maturity that Gisele admired. Perhaps mining had grown him up, but not grown him coarse.

"There's talk of construction projects in Edmonton and Strathcona," Louis told Gisele as they ate the free lunch provided outside the Alberta Hotel, where Prime Minister Laurier had stayed during his colonial trip west to speak in the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Would more provinces and more devolution of federal power to them strengthen or weaken Canada? Democracy and diversity or divide and conquer?

Louis' mention of construction projects brought to his and Gisele's minds another project, their possible union.

"Big projects," Louis said.

"I know something about those," Gisele said. "Sandra's busier every day, and the company is building some fancy houses along the top of the river bank, on both sides. We had to hire new people."

"Ray wants me, Gisele."

"Do you want it? How would your parents be without you? They're getting older."

"They have other relatives, including my cousins, and good friends in Morinville. It's not too far away for me to visit. Elise visits them often."

"Would you work for Ray? He needs people he can depend on. He has some, but wages are rising, and workers come and go."

Each wondered if the other would come and stay, in that ticklish field called romance.

"Ray told me that many of them return to him after the other jobs aren't as good as they first appear, but he still wants me. Ray pays people what he promises, on time, and sometimes more when they do more than he asks," Louis said, thinking of some crooked coal operators in the Crowsnest. "I think I'll work for Ray. I know less about construction as he and George know, but I will learn."

Ray had walked up behind them. He overheard the end of their French conversation. "You know me, Louis," he said, coming alongside before speaking, not blathering from behind, so as not to startle the pair. Ray suspected an fluttery undercurrent of romance between them, and he didn't want that bird to bolt. "I'm getting to know you as someone who can work. Fair pay for fair work, that's my promise."

"And I hear that it keeps your crew around, despite promises of riches elsewhere."

"You can't support a family on promises," Ray said, glancing at Gisele. Ray and Gisele had known each other longer than either had known Louis. Gisele knew that Ray suspected budding romance between her and Louis.

"Would you like to try, Louis?" Ray proposed.

"Yes, sir, I would."

"No 'sir' for me, Louis. Just Ray."

"Yes, Ray."

Yes, Gisele and Louis thought at the same time, we should try with each other, too.

Suddenly, Gisele and Louis were more eager to go to work, in the same company. Laurier had talked about "sunny ways." The couple felt warmer.

____________

Two rumored construction projects were a university, a new railway or two, and another bridge across the river. The university would be in northern, not southern Alberta, in Strathcona, not Edmonton. Edmonton was growing faster, but new Alberta Premier Alexander Rutherford's preferred Strathcona to Edmonton for the university. The two towns competed with each other. Together they competed against Calgary, whose leaders resented the choice of Edmonton, not Calgary, as the new province's capital. The new Duggan School was pressed into temporary university classroom service.

Gloria Samson was unaware of geographical wrangles, as she angled for a teaching job at the new university. People in the know, in power, all of them men, told her that her chances were not good. Not for nothing had Gloria joined a committee of women planning the social side of the university, while all-men committees planned the academic side. Wives of some of these men, powerful local men, were on Gloria's committee. These women would put Gloria in the new university, whatever their men thought or said against a woman professor.

Some solid buildings sprang up at the west end of Strathcona, overlooking the river. There would be only undergraduate degrees for the first few years, and not many of them; but economics, Gloria's specialty, would be one field of study.

Gloria knew more about economics than anyone in the area and almost anyone in Western Canada. She had kept her skills sharp during her banking days, banking being only one part of economics. The local postmaster marveled at the journals that Gloria got by mail, from Scotland, England, the United States, and Eastern Canada. He called her professor. A plaque on her university office door would say "Professor Gloria Samson." By 1909, she would show herself so versatile, as enrolment rose, and the variety of courses bloomed, that the university could scarcely grow without her. The men who had resisted the women's idea of hiring Gloria now flattered themselves for their foresight.

Don't break your arms patting yourselves on your backs, boys, Gloria thought. She knew what she was worth to the university, as did the few men around her who put scholarship above gender. Gloria kept quiet about gender, letting her work speak for itself, in classrooms, on committees, and in scholarly journals that published her articles. The few women students in Gloria's classes took inspiration from Gloria's presence. They and the men students learned much about economics and fairness, which overlap less than Gloria liked.

Gloria's iron will to succeed, while remaining as mute as a fish about her sexual preference, found an absurd parallel in the two new railways running through Edmonton toward the Pacific Coast by 1909. Adam Smith would sneer at the economic inefficiency of a double railway into a wilderness. The investors in the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian Northern Railways saw nothing wrong with their plans in a booming Canada. Hadn't the CPR profited its investors, albeit with much government money and grants of land, Indigenous land newly swindled away by treaties? However subsidized and scandalous its beginnings, the CPR now made money. Smith and Gloria would have let the investors sink or swim, unaided by government help. Government-funded capitalism was an oxymoron. Gloria, plenty busy at the university, avoided the railway investment hysteria. Know when to speak and when to stay silent. Know when to act and when to be still.

An rough-talking, hard-living army of railway builders flowed west with the lengthening railways, across the Pembina River, to Sundance Creek, the last big crossing before the Athabasca River and Yellowhead Pass. Wolf Creek was to be the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway's divisional point between Edmonton and Lucerne, recently moved a few miles west and renamed Jasper. Near Wolf Creek camped 2 000 workers. About a thousand of them were building the Big Eddy Trestle across Sundance Creek, 13 miles to the west. The wooden trestle would be 1000 feet long and 80 feet high, a great collective feat.

Then the speculators did their selfish worst, as Gloria could have predicted. They bid up Wolf Creek land prices so much that the Grand Trunk moved its divisional point seven miles west to Edson, in the boggy bush. Edson would in time become a major railway centre. It would service a transcontinental national railway and its Coal Branch spur line, both born of the federal government nationalization of the financial wreckage of the Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern Railways. The two railways' entrails became the guts of the new Canadian National Railway.

Emile Anderson was only one man in that sea of men hammering steel west of Edmonton. His Uncle Louis had warned Emile against railways, and especially against coal mines. Emile's high school teachers in Strathcona's new high school had advised him to finish school. Adeline had said many pithy things to Emile, some of which he understood. Still, Emile hired on, all 17 years of him, and went west to seek his fortune in the muskeg. Hadn't Adeline's father Pat done likewise?

"Even the Indians wouldn't live on this land," was a popular quip in the railway camps around Edson. The Indians had indeed lived on that marshy land, but they preferred the mountain valleys to the west in summer, and the river valleys to the east in winter.

It was in the mountains around the new town of Jasper that the Indians became inconvenient without knowing it. Generations of them had worked for the fur trade, helping the voyageurs survive, helping them travel the Athabasca, Yellowhead, and Sheep Passes. They knew the Athabasca and Kakwa Rivers. Kakwa, Cree for porcupine, they would come to know better than they ever expected to, after a prickly federal scheme to make a national park around Jasper led to their exile from the Jasper area. They would be forced north, toward the Kakwa River, and east, down the Athabasca River Valley.

"Tete Jaune," "Yellow Head," was the nickname of Pierre Bostonais. He had been a fur trader, with Mohawk and French blood. He had died decades before his namesake mountain pass witnessed the deportation of the descendants of people there for generations. His Tete Jaune Cache, his legendary stash of furs, would be west of the new Jasper National Park. The park would be all nature, with none of the descendants of people who had long lived in harmony with nature.

Dutifully the people went north or east from Jasper, to the Muskeg and Athabasca Rivers. The land wetter, colder in winter, and had less game. This scheme was reasonable only to distant Ottawa civil servants drawing lines on a map, or nature-seeking travelers who sought scenery without Indigenous people.

The few remaining Indigenous people Emile saw during his first rail-building year either eked out a living hunting, trapping, and trading, or worked on the railways, or worked in the new settlements and lumber camps near the railways. They were paid less, treated worse, and therefore quit more often than did other workers. This injustice fueled the racism of colonial Canada. "Lazy Indians. At least we're doing something with this land. It was just sitting there idle, for centuries," newcomers said. They ignored the fact that this land had sustained hardworking Indigenous people for centuries.

Emile was almost finished his second rail-building year when Adeline came. Freshly finished Grade 11, in July, 1911, Adeline rode a freight train west to meet Emile in the Robson River Valley, west of Jasper.

Adeline brought a friend.

Adeline was known to workers whom her dad and others employed in Edmonton and Strathcona. The year 1911 had sped up the boom that had gripped the area for a few years. Wages rose, but prices rose more. Adeline noted this fact to workers, no news to them. She had read about Robert Owen in Scotland raising the wages of his Lanark textile mill workers, which had profited him and them. George Kiel sympathized more than Patrick McCoy did.

If Robert Owen could do it in Scotland, why couldn't her dad do it in Strathcona? Dad complained about how hard it was to find good help. He paid better than average wages to keep good help. Hadn't he said that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys?

"Surely, Dad, you don't want monkeys working for you?"

Adeline had certainly inherited her mother Mary's way with words, Pat thought, refusing to argue with her. To his credit, Pat did not chide her for youthful ignorance. He supported Mary's efforts to grow a free-thinking, free-speaking daughter. Adeline was certainly that. Pat worried about her physical safety more than about her big mouth during her trip to visit Emile, and continue beyond.

Pat had long wanted to send Mary and Adeline on a trip to British Columbia, to visit Mary's aging parents Jennifer and Sean. He too wanted to go, to meet these roots of his wife and their daughter. Adeline was going to British Columbia now, but alone to the wilds of the Robson River, on her way to staid, safe Victoria. Pat hoped Emile would give Adeline advice that would keep her safe. Pat hoped Adeline would pry Emile off the railway and send him back to Strathcona. Pat employed Louis. Pat, Ray, and George would welcome Louis' nephew Emile.

Her parents knew that Adeline had friends among the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, a growing union for people who worked on railways, mines, logging camps, and most any other place workers wanted better pay, conditions, and sometimes a better system in general. The railways pushing into British Columbia were prime union organizing ground: railway workers, loggers, miners, anybody. This was a new, inclusive, revolutionary union. One organizer, Roger Mills, whom her parents had met and trusted with Adeline, was going with her as far as the coast. Adeline's parents had met the reassuring Roger.

Adeline was glad that she had shown years of sense. By now, her parents rarely questioned her decisions. Her parents had left their families to improve their own lives. They understood Adeline's desire to do likewise. Adeline knew how precious she was to them. She would be careful. The day Adeline left them, Mary cried after school and Pat sniffled in a backroom at work.

Adeline was determined to reach Victoria, and finally meet her grandparents. Adeline could finish high school in Victoria, her parents had agreed. Imagine graduating from the same school Mom had graduated from, so far away. She and her parents had talked about her living in Victoria. How would Adeline get there from the wilds of Northern British Columbia? Emile would see to that, and tell his mother Elise, who would tell Adeline's mother Mary.

Adeline felt as if she belonged in many places: school, construction sites, picket lines, perhaps near Emile, and with her grandparents, still strangers to her, despite the many tales that her mother had told her about them.

The telegraph wires sang with Adeline's travel progress through Edson and Jasper to Mount Robson, where Emile awaited them. He telegraphed Edmonton when Adeline's train reached the platform. Emile had come east from Tete Jaune Cache, where he was staying that summer. "Tay John" was bigger than the Mount Robson camp. Tay John was closer to Fort George, newly renamed Prince George, where Emile planned to settle. Emile now preferred to run rather than build railways. He had leads on Prince George railway jobs, he had telegraphed his mother.

After Adeline and her IWW friend Roger gaped at the beautiful mountains, they got off the train at Mount Robson. Emile met them there in the wee hours of a July morning. Mist rose from the Robson River as they walked toward the two tents that Emile had set up along the Robson River. Adeline and Emile had little sexual attraction for each other; they had grown up more as siblings. Emile, respected by his coworkers in Mount Robson and Tay John, let them believe that Adeline was his visiting sister. Roger they saw as Adeline's protector.

Adeline had for months carried a knife in her boot, George's idea.

"If you're going to a picket line, be ready for anything," George had said.

Adeline had used the knife only to cut meat, bread, and other food on picket lines and during her train trip west. She would make anyone who attacked her pay in blood.

Adeline, Roger, and Emile talked outside the tents. They traded tales of their pasts and dreams of their futures. Adeline slept in one tent, the men in the other tent. The next day, the trio walked up the Robson River, to the face of Mount Robson, a snow-capped triangular peak that loomed over the valley. Adeline talked about Edmonton, now a distant place to Emile. Emile talked about his plan to prosper working for the railway in Prince George, west down the Fraser River.

"I read about that river, Emile," Adeline said as they walked back toward the railway camp in the late afternoon. "Simon Fraser explored it for the fur trade in 1805 or so? The water was so rough that the river did not became a major fur trade route."

"The Fraser flows past Tay John," Emile said, having already explained the local slang for Tete Jaune Cache. "Not far south of there, boats ply the Thompson River to Kamloops because there is no railway between here and Kamloops, yet. Isn't the Thompson named after another famous explorer, professor?"

"It sure is, smarty pants. David Thompson mapped more of Canada than anyone," she noted, wondering what the Indigenous people called these rivers. She hadn't thought to ask any she had met along the way. Emile was sort of Indigenous. Did he know?

"There's more than one history in this country," Emile said, seeming to read Adeline's mind. "Who knows what these rivers were called before Europeans named them? My own Metis people know a different history than the one written in the books that you and I read in school." That was one reason Emile had quit school. He knew he belonged in this land, but his people were like foreigners to the newcomers who wrote the books, and to the new-coming teachers who preached the books' narrow history.

"That's for sure. There's also an unwritten history of working people," Adeline added. She would like to write a book or two to set the record straight.

There was much that needed setting straight in this country, but this summer was for travel, and to see Emile. He was so grown up and confident, a man rather than a boy. Ws she a woman, or still a girl?

Two young people, in the summer sun of the Rocky Mountains, yearned to belong somewhere. Emile had saved enough money to take July off work to settle in Prince George. He would stay there while Adeline was in Victoria. When would they meet again?

Emile had eyed IWW union organizer Roger Mills, Adeline's traveling partner. That guy jawed with the railway workers, and walked the mountains and valleys during Adeline's visit. Emile didn't care one way or the other about unions, but he cared about Adeline like a sister. He told Roger, on a day that they hiked while Adeline fished, that if Adeline didn't reach Victoria unharmed, then Emile would find and harm him, wherever Roger was. The IWW man, a good socialist feminist, was honorable with Adeline. Emile and his railway friends pointedly reminded Roger to remain honorable, and therefore healthy.

The trio rode a work train from Mount Robson to Tay John. There, Emile borrowed a freight wagon to bring Adeline, her union friend, and Emile's workmate Ben to the North Thompson River, not far to the south. The river continued south, winding out of the mountains, toward Kamloops. At the river, Emile sized up Adeline's other traveling partners, so he could telegraph his mother and Adeline's mother that Adeline was safely on her way to Victoria. Emile had acquired three canoes for the travelers. Emile told Adeline that her visit had repaid him for the canoes, which were waiting for them at the river.

It sure was nice to see Adeline again, Emile thought. He understood her better than he had while they grew up, but their lives had diverged. They would see into each other each time they met, however long they were apart.

"Friends always, Emile," Adeline said, hugging him before she got into the canoe.

"Be careful, Adeline," Emile replied. "You are important to me."

It sure was nice to see Emile again, Adeline thought as her party floated downstream. Each of them had changed, but a durable bond remained. She wondered when and where they would meet again. Life was getting so busy.

CHAPTER 9: EDGES

The North Thompson River was low in August, but not too low for the three canoes. Adeline felt like one of those explorers, Fraser or Thompson, as she paddled south. The mountains receded behind to the left. Emile's friend Ben Skinku had arranged passage to Kamloops for Adeline, her union friend Roger, and three others.

The union man saw possibilities back across the mountains in the new coal mines, but there were possibilities wherever people faced unsafe working conditions and low pay.

The other three passengers, a couple and a single young man, were migrating south, ahead of the coming winter. They hoped to find work and warmth in Kamloops, or farther along the CPR line to Vancouver.

Ben was going past Kamloops, to his Kootenay people to the southeast, to his old, ailing parents. Adeline eagerly learned how to navigate the canoe. Ben, 35, respected her more as the trip progressed.

Ben was going home. He didn't talk much, but sometimes in the canoe or around the campfire, Ben told Adeline about his people, their ways and language, and their beloved deep lakes. Ben's last name Skinku means coyote in his language, he told Adeline. Ben described past Kootenay wars against the Okanagan and Shuswap to the west, and the Blackfoot to the east.

"With all these wars, perhaps your people are the problem," Adeline joked one sunny afternoon on the river. "You're a troublesome coyote?"

"You're not so peaceful yourselves," Ben rejoined. "You told me about the English-Irish wars, and that you have ancestors from both sides. Are you a problem?"

Point taken.

Ben was going home. Was Adeline going home? Could Victoria, a place she had never seen, become her home? Her grandparents knew she was coming. They were eager to meet their only grandchild. As the canoes drifted downstream, and the group portaged around the rapids on the North Thompson River, the landscape changed on both sides. Hills replaced mountains. The air got warmer and dryer toward Kamloops.

Why had people named a North and a South Thompson River? Adeline wondered, as the valley widened 40 miles north of Kamloops. What did Indians call these rivers? Surely they had more imagination than to give two rivers similar names. It was almost as unimaginative as the "Rocky" Mountains.

The other Thompson River valley became visible on the left, to the east, as Kamloops appeared downstream. Dusty, dry Kamloops had few trees and much long brown grass.

Roger and Skinku sold the three canoes. Emile had told Adeline to keep the money. She divided it with her fellow travelers. Good old Emile. Someday she hoped to do something so generous for him. Ben, and Anna and Ivan Kirov, less than two years out of Russia, went east by train. The single man, Mike Brown, stayed in Kamloops to find work. Adeline and Wobbly organizer Roger Mills went west by train.

"You're a brave young woman, so far from home," Roger observed, as their train rattled west, along the Thompson River, by this point the union of its north and south tributaries.

"I have help," Adeline replied. "My parents gave me enough money in to reach Victoria in style, I suppose by rail, wagon, and coastal or paddle boat; but I wanted to travel some other way. Canoeing and camping were not stylish, but they were educational, and cheap. The river was less bumpy than wagon roads would have been. You have been a good protector."

"You plan to live with your grandparents in Victoria and finish high school," Roger said. "Then what?"

"I don't know. My mother was born in Victoria, became a teacher, and moved to Strathcona, where she met my father. I don't want to be a teacher, though. I seem to get along better with working people than with children and snooty school trustees, although I suppose I'm still a child myself."

"Interesting. Workers can be snooty, Adeline."

"Why interesting?" she asked.

"My father is a teacher, in Portland."

"You're from the United States, then?"

"Yes. I finished high school, worked on lumber boats and booms, and joined the Wobblies in Seattle."

"How did your parents like that?" she asked.

"Not much. That's why I spent the last year far from home, trying to organize the railway workers west of Edmonton."

"Any luck?"

"Some, but the union is stronger in Seattle. It's in Victoria, too. I'm going to Seattle for the winter. Who knows where the union will send me after that."

"Sounds like hand-to-mouth work, Roger," Adeline said, "but not boring. I suppose it can be dangerous," she added, noticing a scar on his chin.

"Oh, that. The Sundance trestle railroad foreman came out worse. I earn enough to live on, if I live cheap."

"Railway, Roger. In Canada we say railway, not railroad. Did you come by canoe because you're broke?" Adeline asked, noticing his small bag and shabby clothes.

"If a man works hard for his wages, why fritter them away? I had enough to get to Seattle, barely. My share of the canoe money helps me more than you know. Thanks for that. I've lived this way for ten years. I've been in tougher spots than river rapids."

"I'm sure you have. Well, knight of labor, would you condescend to share the food I bought while you were selling our canoes? Thanks for not fleeing with the money after you sold the canoes," she half joked.

"A union man is not a thief. Emile worked hard for that money. I would never cheat a fellow worker. You know about the Knights of Labor, Adeline?"

"I was just kidding, Roger. My dad's friend George joined the Knights in Ontario after he came from Germany. He was union in Germany, too, where people die for it. I guess you couldn't make Emile join."

"Nope. He has dreams of wealth in Fort George, Prince George now, I guess. There are more people than princes. The people have power that princes don't want them to know they have. The Indians now losing their land there to the railway, government, and speculators aren't wealthy. I wish Emile well."

"Hard place, eh?"

"No place is hard if you have a friend or two."

"You're happy to return to Seattle, to your Wobbly friends?"

"I am. I have tales for them. You're quite a tale. You give me hope for the future."

"I'm happy to oblige. Most Strathcona and Edmonton union leaders I met think they're better than their members. Your union seems to stand by a worker, rather than preach at him."

"You said a mouthful there, Adeline."

"I heard you call your people Wobblies? Why?"

"A Chinese worker somewhere, or a Chinese shopkeeper somewhere, was sympathetic to us, but he couldn't say the letter 'W.'"

"Not in his language."

"Clever girl. Not in his language. When someone said we were the IWW, he said, 'I wobble wobble.' He joined. The name stuck."

"Clever union. You wobble but you don't fall down. You're the first person I heard call them Chinese rather than Chinks."

"Everybody's welcome in the IWW. You talk as if you would like to join."

"Not right now," Adeline said, "nor this coming winter. I'll be busy with high school. I want to graduate. You did. I'll help the union in Victoria if I can. My grandmother would probably approve."

"We can use educated people."

"No man uses me, Roger," Adeline said, flashing hard eyes for one so young.

"I didn't mean it that way, Adeline. I meant that we need heads as well as hands. I'd like to meet this grandmother of yours."

"I know you wouldn't use me, Roger. If I'm educated, I will have other choices besides depending on men, not to say I'll avoid men forever."

"I didn't mean you should be used that way, either, Adeline. Marriage isn't for everyone. A wise person once called marriage 'Prostitution with a contract.'"

"Interesting, but I hope not inevitable," Adeline observed. "Roger, you have been a perfect gentleman since Edmonton. I'm glad you let me buy your train ticket from Kamloops to Vancouver."

"Thanks for offering, Adeline. I would have bought a coach ticket. A sleeper will be nice after camping along the river."

"Well, Mr. Thankful, this charity lady is going to bed."

"Beware the cold hand of charity," Roger quipped as he walked to his sleeper.

"What's that?"

"Some people who give charity do it for themselves or for their religion, with little feeling for the people they give it to."

"'A loan loses both itself and its friend,'" Adeline said.

"Shakespeare! I haven't heard from the Bard for awhile. Get thee to a high school."

"Funny. Good night, Polonius."

"Good night, Ophelia. I'm glad you avoided her watery fate."

Outside the train window, the sun set on the Fraser River Canyon, a gorge descending toward adventures for the pair of them.

The next morning, the train chugged westward in the broadened Fraser River Valley, toward Vancouver. This was a young, growing city where Adeline would spend a couple days before she boarded a boat to cross the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver Island. Victoria clung to the island's southern tip, an English outpost on the edge of Canada. The United States was visible across the water, but a cultural world away from Victoria. Roger would cross with Adeline, see her safely to her grandparents, board another ferry for Seattle and his union friends, and then endure his Portland parents.

"I suppose you'll rabble rouse during your couple days here, Roger," Adeline asked as they got off the train in Vancouver.

"Nope. I'm on holiday, like you. I'll look for a few certain people, but people here and in Seattle probably know what to do here better than I do."

They walked to Powell Street, found separate rooms in a hotel, and Roger insisted on paying for both. That evening, they walked along Burrard Inlet. After a late supper in the hotel cafe, Adeline went upstairs to her room. This port city, the first she ever saw, fascinated her: land and water meeting, cargo moving, and people busy in many languages. Vancouver was quite different from Strathcona and Edmonton. What would Victoria be like?

Her grandmother had written to Adeline and Mary about Vancouver, and pointedly warned Adeline of its dangers. Adeline wasn't nervous, though. Roger had been stalwart. He would help her reach her grandparents. Adeline was resigned to needing a protector so far from home. Between homes?

Roger was a good man. There was something to this I wobble wobble. People together are safer, and stronger.

A day's promenade along English Bay was a sea-aired wonder to Adeline. Seagulls took pieces of bread she cast about; some dared to pluck from her fingers. Waves lapped the sandy shore. Women in finery strolled with parasols. Children threw rocks at the birds, or built sand castles on the tidal flats. A forest green-furred a point of land to the north. Indian villages dotted the shore north and the south of the beach.

What a majestic setting, Adeline thought. In time to come, this busy city could be another London, New York, or one of the other big cities she had only read of in books. What volumes of past and future could be chronicled here? The railway ended here but much else was just beginning, Adeline thought as they returned to the Powell Street hotel late that afternoon.

Their walk along the docks the next morning introduced Adeline to many workers, men and women, from many countries. Some talked like Roger. They knew that their strength lay in unity and solidarity. Ship owners stuck together, as did labor contractors; those groups were chummy with the city, provincial, and federal governments. Workers should stick together.

Some workers blathered improbable dreams that they would one day be as rich as the owners of the ships and rail cars they loaded and unloaded. Roger patiently listened, then tried to convince these dreamers that they were on one side, that the owners were on another side, and that only by uniting with other workers could they wrest decent work and wages from ship owners. May we all rise, rather than a few rise at the expense of many. Make a future in which workers, not capitalists, own capital and share the fruits of it and labor.

As Adeline and Roger boarded the ferry to Victoria late that evening, she thought about the French Revolution. She wondered if she was the only one thinking this way, on this boat of people from many lands, speaking many languages. Perhaps some were from France, or from Quebec, or from St. Boniface or Edmonton, two Western outposts where French endured. Adeline heard little French. Did Canada need a revolution, French or otherwise?

The ferry stopped on various islands, sometimes waking her up, but mostly she slept, lulled by the rolling waves. This was another new experience for her. Imagine crossing an ocean, as her grandmother had done when young. What had that been like? Grandma had known nobody in Victoria, a smaller, wilder place then that it was now. Adeline longed to meet her grandparents. As she dozed again, she resolved not to brag about her summer of independence. They had endured more when they were little older than she was now. Each life is a fascinating voyage. Adeline went back to sleep.

Then she dreamed.

Adeline dreamed of her grandmother Jennifer, whose face she knew from photographs, some of which she carried. In the dream, Jennifer was young, looking over the edge of the boat, as waves crashed around it and spray splashed the deck. Jennifer, unafraid, looked into the distance. All around her was ocean, large, powerful, moving the ship like a toy boat in a basin. Jennifer's gaze was eager and hopeful. A seagull landed on her shoulder, not to peck at food, or at her. It merely sat on her shoulder, almost tame, gazing in the same direction as she gazed. Then it flapped away, cawing as it rose above the spray. It said something to Jennifer that Adeline understood during the dream, but forgot once awake.

"Wakey wakey, Miss. We're about to dock in Victoria," intruded the cheery voice of a ship steward. "I want to wake you up before the bump at the dock. Are people meeting you?"

"Yes," Adeline said with a groggy smile. "Thanks for waking me up."

"Your bags are safe below. Someone will put them on shore for you."

The steward ambled away, into what would probably be a busy part of his day, Adeline thought. Despite his many chores, the man seemed relaxed and happy about his work. How much was he paid? Was it enough to live well? Did he live in Vancouver, Victoria, or elsewhere? Had he chosen this job, or would he like a different job? Was he naturally cheerful, or was that a strain imposed by his job? Work took up so much of a person's time, a person should enjoy it. Adeline wondered what work she would enjoy.

There was so much that she wanted to ask her grandparents that Adeline almost forgot that they might want to ask about her life. On deck, she found a basin of cloudy water than was cleaner than her sleep-worn face. I must look good for Grandma and Grandpa, Adeline thought. As she splashed water on her face and rolled spider poop from the corners of her eyes, the boat bumped into the dock. Water splashed from the basin onto her clothes and shoes.

Well, now I get my feet wet, Adeline thought. She scanned the people ashore, while they scanned the passengers.

"Adeleen!" a handsome man in his early sixties shouted the Irish pronunciation above the crowd noise. "Let's have a look at you!"

"Grandpa!"

"No other, maid," Sean smiled with blue eyes twinkling.

"Where's Grandma?" Adeline asked, her tone a mixture of eagerness and respect.

"Back with the horse and wagon up the street. Where are your bags?"

Adeline gestured from the to a growing pile of luggage along the dock. "There, the two light brown canvas ones." Roger stood by the baggage pile, like a grandfather clock waiting to chime.

"You travelled like a sailor! What? No trunk?" Sean asked.

"I gave it to someone up north and came from near Tete Jaune Cache to Kamloops by canoe." Adeline remembered how happy she was to trade Emile her trunk for his two canvas bags, which fit better in her canoe.

"You what? That's my granddaughter! Wait until Jennifer hears that. She'll have something to say!"

"Will she be mad at me?"

"She'll be so happy to see you that she'll forget to give you hell. She might remember later, though. Beware her temper," Sean said. He thought about past blow-ups, usually due to his foot finding his mouth. He also rejoiced inwardly that his granddaughter had the courage to paddle a canoe a couple hundred miles. Then he remembered who her mother and grandmother were. Sean thought back through the years, to the day he met Jennifer's boat. He looked at the ferry, then at Adeline.

"Penny for your thoughts, Grandpa," Adeline said, trying a light entry into the challenging, exciting task of getting to know her grandparents.

"I was just thinking how brave you were to come so far, so young. And part of it by canoe!"

"I had help," she said, finally gesturing to Roger and his bag to join them.

"I'm sure you did. I'm also sure you had no fear. You remind me of your grandmother, when she stepped off a boat here, so long ago. You even look like her."

"Mom tells me that. She also tells me about growing up in Victoria, and about you and Grandma," Adeline continued, trying to turn the conversation from her past, so short, to her grandparents' pasts.

"I wonder what you mother told you about us," Sean mused.

When you talk, you repeat what you know, but when you listen, you might learn something, Adeline's dad had told her many times. There was so much that she wanted to learn from her grandparents.

Roger trundled shyly behind them.

It was the middle of August. School hadn't started, but Adeline sensed that she would learn from these two people things that her school teachers could not teach her. Adeline was thrilled to be trying a new school in a new city, but perhaps more thrilled to be with her grandparents, at last.

She finally remembered Roger and turned toward both men as the trio reached Sean's wagon.

"This is Roger. He rode the train with me from Edmonton to Tete Jaune Cache. Roger met Emile. Roger and four others, one a woman, came with me to Kamloops, in three canoes. Roger and I rode the train from there and the ferry from Vancouver. He has been good, safe company, Grandpa."

Adeline, Sean, and Roger soon stood before Jennifer, who sat in the wagon.

"Hello, Adeline, at last," Jennifer said. "Hello Roger."

"Pleased to meet you both," Roger said.

"Roger's on his way to Seattle, Grandma," Adeline said, wondering if she should say something about his line of work. But her grandparents didn't ask. The less said the better, sometimes.

"Granny to you, Adeline," Jennifer said.

"Granny," Adeline beamed.

"Would you stay a night or two with us, Roger?" Sean asked. "You both had a long trip, truly many trips. The morning ferry to Seattle gives some daylight to travel in, unlike the night boat leaving soon."

"You're sure it's no trouble?" Roger asked.

"None at all," Jennifer said. "Any man who helps my family is my friend."

"Climb aboard, Roger," Sean said.

Family. Adeline, Jennifer, and Sean silently savored the word.

Roger got himself and his canvas bag into the back seat. The men hefted Adeline's bags onto the seat beside Sean. Jennifer enthroned Adeline between herself and Sean in the front seat. As Sean drove, glancing beside him, it was as if he saw double: the same wavy brown hair, olive-colored skin, and light brown eyes. As the wagon rumbled away from the dock and toward the bottom of Yates Street, Jennifer and Sean Evans proudly bracketed their granddaughter, who basked between them.

Roger watched them from behind, and watched the sun setting over the harbor. He was back at the edge of the world, close to Seattle, also on that edge.

The next two days passed fast and hospitably. Jennifer gleefully showed Roger and Adeline around Victoria, while Sean put in an appearance at his livery stable.

Sean only worked part time now; his years of work had built a fine business whose income kept him and Jennifer in style. Perhaps he should sell out and move closer to Mary, but Victoria had been good to him and Jennifer.

Roger liked this plain-talking man, not at all like other capitalists, and especially unlike their lackeys, whom Roger had battled for so long.

Sean reminded Roger of what many workers had dreamed aloud to Roger. Who wouldn't want to live like Sean? Alas, the rich gained their wealth from the labor of the poor, Roger knew.

While he floated away on the ferry two days later, Roger thought of the little family that had welcomed him. He hoped for such a welcome from his family in Portland, after he stopped in Seattle to meet local Wobblies.

"Goodbye, Roger!"Adeline yelled as the ferry moved farther out into the harbor. "Thanks for helping me get here. I hope we meet again!"

Jennifer waved at Roger.

"Roger," Sean said, booming his voice as the ferry moved away. "You're always welcome in our house. Victoria needs good men like you. Think about it."

"What a nice thing to say, Grandpa," Adeline said, throwing her arms around Sean. "I thought you would resent a stranger traveling here with me."

"I size people up fast, Adeline," Sean said, remembering the day he had met Jennifer in that same harbor. "Roger is a good man. I hope he finds his way in this world."

"Roger's dad is a teacher, like Mom," Adeline said. "You know that Mom has been back teaching since I was five and started school. Now she has a new school."

"Alex Taylor School, I believe it's called," Jennifer said, recalling Mary's letters. "How does she like it?"

"She likes it. It's like she never left teaching, she says. She likes to make a difference in children's lives. Did you know that one of her students graduated in Edmonton, went to university in Toronto and Scotland, and now teaches at the University of Alberta?" Adeline asked.

"Your mother wrote about that," Jennifer said. "I'd like to meet this woman professor."

"You could meet her next summer, if she comes here with Mom and Elise. You know about Elise, eh?"

"We do," Sean broke in. "Didn't she marry a soldier who fought against her people?"

"Yep. Ray. She fraternized with the enemy, but after the war. He's sorry he fought, but he's grateful that he came west, because it brought him to Elise, eventually."

"Well, my Fenian friend," Jennifer said, looking at Sean. "I'm English and you're Irish. Our people have been killing each other for centuries, and here we are together."

"I am your majesty's obedient servant," Sean said.

The Fenians took their name from Finn McCool, the mythical Irish warrior who drove invaders from Ireland. Fenians inside and outside Ireland worked to drive British rule from Ireland, but Sean had never joined them.

The three walked from the dock to the house, talking of Adeline's coming Grade 12 year. Her grandparents didn't offer post-graduation plans. The complicated adventure that had brought Adeline to them told them that she could plan for herself.

A couple opened letters from Mary to her mother sat on a desk in the dining room. Another letter, addressed to Adeline, sat unopened on a shelf above the desk. They had been so busy exploring Victoria with Roger that Jennifer had forgetten to mention the letters.

"Would you like to read what your mother wrote, while you were bushwhacking?" Jennifer asked Adeline the next morning, the day before school was to start. She handed her granddaughter the two letters, and the unopened one.

"I'll read them, and then I'll read you the letter for me, Granny."

"You are a handsome granny."

"You are a flatterer, like your grandpa. I'm younger than some grannies. You make me feel even younger."

Adeline read to herself, as Jennifer watched her:

Dear Mom,

Thanks for offering to keep Adeline for the coming school year. You'll find her charming but headstrong. How did she come by that? Me? Where did I get it? You?

I miss you, Mom. I want to come and see you and Dad next spring. How about me and Elise coming for Adeline's graduation? We'll try to get my Pat and her Ray onto the train to Calgary and west, if they're not tied to some building project.

Pat is a good man, Mom. I want you to meet him. Over the years, Pat has been as good to me as Dad was to you while I was growing up.

Take good care of Adeline. She's my only ever.

Your Only, Mary

Adeline wiped away a tear while she folded this first letter. Jennifer said nothing. Adeline opened the second letter.

Dear Mom,

I hope Adeline gets there all right. The telegraphs she sends to me come from strange places. I worry about her. Some days I wish she'd get on the next boat and train home. We have been in each other's pockets since Adeline was born. Now that she's away, the house feels empty.

Perhaps it will be better when I'm back in school this fall. Teaching is less complicated than years ago, when I had up to eight grades of children in one room. At the new school, I have no more than three grades in one room. And I'm paid more!

Adeline will probably tell you about Gloria, one of my first Grade 12 graduates. Gloria went to university in Toronto and Glasgow. Have you been to Glasgow? Not me. Someday, perhaps. Anyway, Gloria now teaches economics at the University of Alberta. That's the new university here. It even trains teachers. I don't pressure Adeline to become a teacher. She's more outdoorsy, as you will see.

I miss her so. Take care of her. See you next summer,

Your Only, Mary

Adeline wiped away another tear.

"How many letters do you have from Mom, Granny?" Adeline asked, as she folded up the second letter and opened the envelope of the third, addressed to Adeline, care of her grandparents.

"Plenty," Jennifer said, opening a big drawer in the bottom of the desk. "You could say that I have the story of your life in this drawer, Adeline."

"May I read them?"

"Certainly."

"Thanks. Now I'll read you the one from Mom to me."

Jennifer became still and silent, as if about to learn secret, special knowledge. Her daughter was writing to her daughter's daughter, as Jennifer had long written to her daughter in distant Strathcona. How were the relationships similar? How did they differ?

Adeline read:

Dear Adeline,

If you are reading this, then you reached Victoria. I have sleepless nights worrying about you, my only. I suppose I shouldn't worry. When I struck out into the wilderness, I was not much older than you are now. My mother, whom you will have met by now, missed me. I didn't know how much until I read the first letters from her. More than once, before I met your father and we had you, I almost returned to Victoria.

I'm glad I stayed in Edmonton, though. I'm glad I had you, who became a beautiful young woman. Your grandmother was a beautiful woman in her day. She still is. I'm sure your grandpa is as handsome as ever.

Call her Granny. She wants to see me and finally meet your dad next summer. You know how hard it is to pry Dad loose from his business, but I'll tie him to a train seat if I must. Elise and Ray might go, too. You have this winter to prepare your grandparents for this invasion by strangers.

I'm so relieved that you arrived. Telegraph me the day you read this, or else.

Mom

"Or else?" Jennifer asked, finished blushing about the comment on her enduring beauty.

"When Mom says 'or else,' she means business," Adeline said. "I'll go to the telegraph office now." Jennifer didn't say that she telegraphed Mary the day Adeline arrived.

Jennifer watched Adeline walk lightly but strongly down the stairs and onto the street. What a diamond her daughter had grown, in that cold, grimy place of railways and migrants. How would Adeline like the rainy Victoria winter? How would she, Jennifer, like the frigid Strathcona winter, she wondered? Perhaps she would go there after Adeline's graduation.

School hasn't even started yet, and I already think past Adeline's graduation, Jennifer realized. Perhaps Adeline would go elsewhere. Jennifer had. Mary had. Jennifer resolved to listen to this young woman, not dictate to her. What did she know about Adeline, or about Mary now, so far away for so long? Better to encourage her, whatever she chose to do. Hadn't she done the same with Mary, who had made a good life for herself?

Jennifer longed to see Mary, after so many years apart. At least Mary would see her mother. Jennifer long ago knew that she would never again see her mother or father. Circumstances and choices separate people. Longing fades as daily duties intrude. Jennifer didn't tell Adeline about the few letters she had from her own mother. She would show them to Adeline during the coming year. Mary had seen the ones that came as Mary grew up, but not those that came after Mary moved to Edmonton. The future flows from the past, for individuals and groups.

Jennifer wondered if Mary had told Adeline about the letters from Jennifer's mother. Adeline seemed too full of youth to be interested in memories in older heads. The young live as if they have endless time, but they still lack time for the old. They are all future, no past. Jennifer felt the past more than the future. This was sometimes melancholy, but predictable for a woman past sixty. Jennifer had more past than future, the opposite of Adeline.

Jennifer had long lacked the time or interest to muse about the past or future. When she was little older than Adeline is now, Jennifer had seen her life and land vanish behind her as her boat left the Liverpool docks. In distant Victoria, she and Sean, himself a migrant, had invented new lives and raised Mary. Mary as a young woman had then migrated more freely than Jennifer had. Did wandering run, or wander, in the family? Now Adeline had migrated here, partly by canoe, like some warrior princess of Anglo Saxon or Celtic legend. This would be an interesting winter, Jennifer thought. Where would this lively Adeline fit in society? Need she fit in anywhere?

CHAPTER 10: BRIDGES

"I haven't seen so much iron in one place since Sydney," Sandra said to George, as they walked along the top of the river bank in the spring of 1912. "That will be quite a bridge."

"That it will. And we made quite a penny contracting some of it," George replied, gesturing out into the river.

"What a job those pillars must have been to pour. I saw some of the numbers you brought in, and you say you only did part of the cement. I imagine all the cement from all the contractors cost plenty. Why so high above the river?"

"Someone's idea of making better road and rail approaches to each side."

"So the railway will cross again?"

"Actually two railways, one off the main line, and a street rail between the towns. And a road beneath."

"I hear they're merging, Edmonton and Strathcona."

"Some call it a shotgun wedding," George said.

"Like mine and John's?"

"No. You and John fit together, two Gaelic peas in a pod," George said. "Who else could understand you two?"

"My Gaelic, your German, George."

"There are lots of Germans around, and more coming every week."

"English dominates here, George. I wonder how longer people can live and work in Gaelic, German, or even in French."

"I know what you mean, Sandra. But I think at least French will survive in the West."

"And German?"

"That will be harder. We Germans assimilate to the main language, and here that's English. I speak German with my friends, and French with Yvonne and Gisele; but with most people, I speak English. Still, I feel comfortable here, even as England and Germany wave battleships at each other."

"That's not our fight."

"No, but Canada is in the British Empire. I hear many insults against Germans. Even though I've been away from Germany for decades, it hurts. I'm not building battleships. The Kaiser is. The war machine was the main reason I left Germany. Now Canadian leaders rant for war for democracy, but will not be a people's war."

"John says the same thing, George. Let the kings and generals fight the wars. Leave the rest of us in peace."

"What do Gisele and Louis say? Would Louis join?"

"No way, but there might be no war. We only hear the bad news. I'm sure calmer heads will prevail."

"Let's hope," George said.

Below them, an army of men hoisted iron girders. This High Level Bridge, as it was named, would link the university and the government sides of the river. Perhaps peaceful ideas would flow across the bridge, and out to the world.

While Premier Alexander Rutherford navigated the politics of a growing province, with growing labor unrest in its coal districts, Gloria Samson navigated university politics. War didn't pay, she told students, colleagues, and anyone who listened. Gloria rejected the contest of empires, a game of whose colonies were richer, whose ships were bigger or faster, and which country should rule sea lanes, the veins that carried empires' wealth. The British Navy was strong, and Canada should pay something for its safety under the empire, Gloria's colleagues reminded her. Hadn't her precious Adam Smith written that the state had a duty to fund a military to protect the people?

Attacking is not protecting, Gloria countered. Growing a military big enough to attack, or to invite attack to prevent it growing bigger yet, merely enriched war speculators and other economic parasites. Nothing good came of war. A colleague soaked in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel told her that war was an inevitable tool of progress. War replaced an obsolete, expensive, wasteful system with one that worked better, until the next war ushered in a better system. A gradual improvement in the human condition resulted, toward an ideal religious state. Even that troublesome Karl Marx wrote that war brought progress, toward an ideal material state. Marx turned Hegel upside down.

"Perhaps Marx turned Hegel right side up," Gloria countered.

There was never a dull moment at the University of Alberta.

Adam Smith himself admitted that feudalism gave way, with much violence, to mercantilism, and that mercantilism succumbed to capitalism, again with much violence. But the enclosure of common land, peasant uprisings, and industrialism had not threatened human existence, Gloria replied, because weapons were less widespread and deadly centuries ago than they were now. The machine gun changed everything but how we relate to one another. Use it and lose your humanity. Entrenched injustice was a likelier result than progress, Gloria predicted.

Across the river, Liberal Premier Rutherford worried about class war in Alberta's coal mines. He left larger wars to Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden, who seemed sensible for a Conservative. If the king said fight, then Canada must fight, Rutherford lamented.

June heat came and the days lengthened. Elise and Mary boarded the train to Calgary, the first stage of their trip to Victoria for Adeline's graduation. Elise hadn't ridden so far on trains before. She needed a couple days to overcome her claustrophobia. By the Roger's Pass, Elise's wonder at the mountains eclipsed her sense of confinement. Still, they were barely halfway there, after all this time.

Pat and Ray stayed home. They had a bridge to help build, among other projects.

Emile might meet Elise and Mary in Victoria, via a train from Prince George to Prince Rupert and a boat south from there. Or would Emile travel part way by canoe, as Adeline had?

Mary vowed that Pat would meet her parents, but she hadn't met his, and probably never would. Grow up. Move away. Lose a precious, irreplaceable link? Perhaps, but Mary preferred joy for the connections she made after she left Victoria, so long ago, so young and naive. A different Mary was returning to Victoria. No doubt her parents had changed too. Letters to and from Victoria over the winter had told her some things, and eased her worries about Adeline being so far away. Mary supposed that her daughter now knew Mary's parents better than Mary herself knew them, in some ways. Mary was happy, not jealous. A parent herself, she was happy to see her parents, with her daughter.

"What you thinking about, Mary?" Elise asked, as the train snaked westward out of the Selkirk Mountains.

"Adeline has been away for almost a year," Mary began, then remembered Emile, "and Emile has been away for two years. Do you miss him as much as I miss her?"

"Believe me, I do," Elise replied, "but what can we do? People grow up and move away. I'm glad I stayed close to my parents, but they migrated far from their parents after Batoche. Think of how far your mother and Sean moved, to Victoria."

"Yes, I suppose." Mary paused, and gazed out the window. "Thanks for coming. I hope we see Emile."

"Me, too," Elise said, gazing out the window.

The pair were silent for the next hour, as the train rolled through hilly wilderness. Ashcroft would be a good place to stay overnight, and sleep without moving.

Back in Strathcona, newly subsumed by Edmonton, Louis and Gisele expected their first child. Married a year before in Morinville by a priest, at Louis's mother Marie's insistence, the pair did most of the work in the rooming house now. Yvonne relaxed into retirement. She wanted George do the same, but where there was unusual construction, George wanted to be.

George and Ray helped coordinate the sea of cement that made the pillars below the High Level Bridge. The pair added their brains, and some brawn, to the placement of the iron girders that would top the cement, 60 metres above the river. They worked well with the polyglot crew. Ray found as many French speakers as George found German speakers. The head contractor liked their bilingualism; he couldn't afford to lose a single man to some other job in this booming summer. All hands on deck, to grow a big, long bridge deck across the North Saskatchewan River.

Gisele was growing something more important than a bridge, according to her mother Yvonne. Yvonne would finally get a grandchild, although she hadn't nagged Gisele much about it, even as Gisele approached thirty, unmarried. Louis was a nice surprise, as George had been. Yvonne fawned over Gisele, who barely recognized this mother who once ordered her around the house. To Gisele, two new people were coming to birth: a baby and an indulgent grandmother.

"We'll bring Marie here when your time comes," Yvonne said more than once that summer. "Elise went joyriding to Victoria with Mary." Other people's people's interests only mattered to Yvonne when they inconvenienced her life. What could be more important than having a baby? Mary wanted to see her mother after all these years, which was fine. Elise was Mary's friend as well as hers. Still, Elise the midwife was racing away on a train.

"We'll be fine without Elise, Mama," Gisele reassured her mother in French, a calmer language than that mumbling mishmash that English seemed to her mother. "Sandra will be around."

"She knows about babies like I know about typewriters," Yvonne objected, in French, for her a good language for sneering in, and for settling arguments.

"There are doctors and nurses."

"Butchers and spinsters. They will not touch you. Marie is old, but I will help her," Yvonne said, tearing up.

"Oh, Mama. Don't worry. It's not 1882, when you had me in that prairie tipi. This is a modern town. I'm old for having a baby, but I'm strong and I'll be fine."

Yvonne caught her breath. Gisele noticed.

"You're truly worried, aren't you?" Gisele asked.

"There have been many years and tears since your dad left me pregnant and returned to Quebec. I was good enough to live with, but not good enough for his family back in Trois Rivieres. I don't know how you and I survived. You were so small. The Saulteaux Indian women helped bring you into this world, and kept us alive that first winter."

Gisele knew the story, but her mother wanted to tell it again. Gisele listened again. Her mother's eyes assumed a faraway look, a far back in time look, as she described moving westward. Bernard and Yvonne, from opposite sides of the tracks, had fled Trois Rivieres, a city against such romances. Bernard had turned back east in Manitoba, a few weeks before Gisele's birth.

"He was a good man in the wrong place, your father," Yvonne said. "There was no place we could be together and happy. He went home, but I made a home with you. You are everything for me."

Yvonne had done many jobs to feed them. By the time they reached South Edmonton in 1886, toddler Gisele was a motivation and comfort to her mother. Yvonne hired on at the rooming house, then owned by a couple who missed their native England. The mistress of the house was so taken with the little girl that she became almost a second mother to her. Yvonne appreciated the help, and the patient instruction in English from the childless couple. Gisele learned more English than Yvonne learned.

One day in 1889, the couple gave the boarding house to Yvonne and returned to England. Yvonne offered to pay them over time; but they refused Yvonne's money. They wanted to quit this land so alien to them, a land now home to Yvonne and Gisele. The couple would be fine back in England, where helpful kin missed them. Their parting gift was to help this blonde single mother and her charming blonde girl thrive. There were a few letters back and forth for a few years, and Christmas letters for awhile longer, and then nothing. Yvonne hoped they were happier back in England.

Then came George, when Yvonne feared growing old alone. Then came Louis. Now the baby. Four French speakers in this English sea would ensure that this baby grew up speaking French as well as English. Yvonne saw Gisele as a gift, and the baby as a second gift.

"I want a little girl," Gisele said.

'I want a healthy grandchild," Yvonne amended, "with ten fingers and ten toes."

The July afternoon wore on. The heat bothered Gisele, whose bladder made her seem to live on the toilet, in her eighth month of pregnancy. She felt more and more kicks from within. What a thing it was to grow a person inside oneself! All those buildings and bridges that the men built paled by comparison. Gisele was glad she had Louis. Many women she knew didn't have a Louis. Many women with a lesser man would be better off alone. Her mom had been better off alone. Gisele rarely wondered about her dad. He, like the English couple she did remember, wasn't meant for this land, she reasoned. He was a good man but in the wrong place, as Mama said. This toilet was a good place to relax and think.

* * *

"Mom! Elise!" Adeline exclaimed as the ferry docked in Victoria. "I'm so glad you came! I have so much to tell you both, about my time up north and my school year here. My graduation ceremony will be next Tuesday. That gives me a weekend to tell you everything! Then we have all summer."

Would a weekend be long enough for these stories? And for Mary's and her parents' stories? Would it be too long for Elise, far from home?

A little more than a year's separation had filled Adeline with tales for Mary, Jennifer thought as she waved at the Mary and Elise. They seemed like strangers to Jennifer, although Mary was her daughter. Mother and daughter had been apart longer than Adeline had been alive.

All these stories definitely needed more than a weekend.

Jennifer and Elise intensely wanted to hear each other's life stories.

Jennifer watched Mary walk along the ferry's rail, this day that each had sometimes thought she would never see.

As she walked down the gangplank, Mary thought of her mother and father. I'm glad Adeline stayed with them, and even glad that she knows things about them that I don't, or that I forgot, if I ever knew them. I must seem a stranger to them, almost as strange as Elise. Elise is like my sister. I must ask Mom and Dad about their siblings. They and Elise have siblings, unlike me and Adeline. Mom and Dad and Elise might connect in ways strange to Adeline and me.

Jennifer and Mary hugged long and quietly. Sean hugged them, stood back, and said, "Let's look at you, Mary."

"What a fine mother you have been to this child," Jennifer said. "She's a spark wherever she goes."

"Like her granny?" Mary said, at last saying something, anything. What does one say after more than 20 years apart? "She found her share of trouble as she grew up."

"Like her mother?" Jennifer asked.

Sean added, "Adeline's all girl. And who is this lovely thing?" He looked at Elise, who blushed and put her head down.

"This is Elise Anderson, Grandpa and Granny," Adeline broke in. "Elise, these are my grandparents, Jennifer and Sean."

"I'm pleased to meet you, " Elise nervously held out her hand.

"None of that here," Jennifer responded, hugging Elise as if she were another daughter. "Over the years, Mary has told us so much about you in her letters, that I seem to know you already."

"All nice things, I hope," Elise said, glancing at Mary. Elise's Metis people knew what trouble could come from words on paper.

"Elise, you are welcome here. Mary couldn't say a bad word about anyone so charming, I am sure," Sean said.

"Your grandpa is a charmer, Adeline," Elise said, trying to turn the conversation away from herself.

"Grandpa could talk a dog off a meat wagon."

"I see that my daughter has learned some of my parents' quaint ways of speaking," Mary said, wondering if anything too quaint had found its way into her school work. Was Victoria High School still as conservative as Mary remembered it?

"She brought us some expressions from where you live, too," Sean said. "And from Seattle this spring."

"Seattle?" Mary asked, raising an eyebrow at Adeline.

"I thought I told you in a letter," Adeline winced. "I went there for a weekend in May. I have a friend there."

"Do you now?"

"Roger."

"Roger, eh? Tell me more about Roger, busy daughter of mine," Mary said, pausing. "Oh, that Roger!"

"I'll get your bags," Sean said, lurching to a more agreeable topic. "Roger will take some explaining."

"I'm sure," Mary said, looking from her father to her mother. "Mom?"

Sean loaded the bags and the women into the wagon, with Mary between him and Jennifer in the front seat, and Elise and Adeline in the back seat, crowded

by baggage.

Jennifer patiently reminded everyone that Roger, over 30, had innocently helped Adeline get from Edmonton west to Emile, then south to Kamloops, Vancouver, and Victoria. On his way back to his parents in Portland, Roger had stayed a couple days with them. He was helpful and interesting.

Somewhat mollified, Mary said, to Adeline, "Why did you go visit him in Seattle?"

"The free speech fight," Adeline replied.

Jennifer intervened again, to explain that Roger had been trying to unionize rail and bush workers. His union, the Industrial Workers of the World, had a stronger presence in Seattle, which upset the local powerful. Even speaking on the street sometimes resulted in arrest and jail. Adeline joined the Victoria free speech fight, too. Sean and Jennifer's friend in the Victoria police force visited them and Adeline, with tips to keep her out of jail.

"Say no more, Mom," Mary said. "That's my Adeline. She consorted with the noble laboring men and women of Edmonton, too. I knew about the Wobblies there. I met Roger before they left for here."

"Mom...." Adeline began.

"It's all right," Mary explained. "I'm not surprised that you went to Seattle. I wonder what career is in it."

"I found out, Mom," Adeline said. "My trip to Seattle made me see a useful career."

"Career, eh? Do I want to hear about it?"

"Oh yes. I wanted to tell you in person, not by mail. I know you'd like me to teach. I worried that you would reject anything else, unless I had a firm plan."

"Adeline," Mary said, "I guess my enthusiasm for teaching hid my true aim for you. I only want you to do something that you can make a living at, and be happy doing. Teaching isn't for everybody."

"Tell your mother what you decided," Jennifer said. Elise and Sean watched this discussion intensely.

"Nursing, Mom."

"That's a good job. Why nursing?"

"What I saw in Seattle. People clubbed just for speaking out. I put on more than a few bandages. Imagine what help I could have been with more training. It was awful, but inspiring."

"Awful but inspiring," Elise pondered. "Sounds like Batoche."

"Not far from it," Adeline said. "Batoche people stood together, against heavy odds. Seattle people stood together, too. At least there was less gunfire in Seattle."

"That's a relief," Elise and Mary said together.

"Adeline told us about Batoche, Elise," Jennifer said. "She said she learned it from you and your family."

Elise glowed. Adeline had listened to Elise's family stories. There's hope for this land. Elise explained her dad Emile's military action for the Metis, against the British and Canadian soldiers.

"British soldiers, eh?" Sean noted. "Some things never change."

"Grandpa's Irish," Adeline told Elise.

"Ahhh," Elise said. Sean looked over his shoulder at Elise. He supposed that Mary and Adeline had told Elise their family stories, too. Sean liked this Elise. No doubt Elise knew about Jennifer's history and people. Sean trusted Elise, mere minutes after meeting her. He wouldn't mind if Elise knew he wasn't Mary's father.

"You didn't get hurt in Seattle, did you, Adeline?" Mary asked.

"I was careful, Mom. I'm no good to anyone injured or dead."

Mary and Jennifer shuddered.

"Don't worry, either of you," Adeline quickly added. "Look at the bright side. I know what I want to do with my life, or at least what job I want after high school. I can train in New Westminster."

Adeline was different from the girl whom Mary had hesitated to put on the train the previous summer. Then, Elise had assured Mary that Roger and Emile would protect Adeline. Elise and Mary knew that, despite growing up together, or perhaps because of growing up together, Emile and Adeline had no romantic connection. Adeline had entered the wilderness full of ideas, many of them conflicting. Now she was focused. Mary liked the change. Her daughter had become a woman.

"Adeline reminds me of a young Mary," Jennifer told Elise. Elise was happy to be taken into the confidence that is family lore. "Mary grew up here, decided to teach, and went to what I thought was the end of the world to teach."

"Your end of the world is my homeland," Elise said. "Everywhere is home to someone, my parents say."

"I'd like to meet your parents, Elise," Sean said. "You're young, but wise beyond your years."

"Not so young, Sean," Elise corrected. "I've seen a lot in my 38 years. My mom says I have an old head on young shoulders."

"You're the oldest, aren't you, Elise?" Sean asked.

"What makes you think that?" Elise asked.

"I'm the oldest, the only in my family, although it didn't start that way. My older siblings died in the Irish Hunger. Born after it, I survived. My parents said it made me old before my time."

"Interesting," Elise observed. "We're not so different, you and I. Two of my three younger siblings died of disease as children."

"Jennifer here aged before her time, too," Sean added her to the conversation that was taking them on a tour of Victoria. The wagon had passed the house twice, but nobody had noted it. The conversation was too precious to interrupt by stopping to unload at the house. "There's no predicting who will die or live."

"There is courage in survival," Elise said, "but it becomes heartlessness if a person stops feeling for others. Their problems are big to them, even if they look small to others, including you, me, and Jennifer."

"You have a good friend in Elise, Mary," Jennifer said.

"Don't I know it?" Mary replied. "I found her at the end of the world."

"Sean and I met at the end of the world, Victoria," Jennifer said.

Adeline, her memory like flypaper, her mind like a fleshy machine, inferring and comparing, listened, aware that she was hearing something special. In later years, Adeline would recall this conversation more than once, when trouble threatened, and tempted her to back down or lose hope.

"Well, let's stop riding around in circles and settle you two," Sean said, stopping at the house on the third approach.

"What a pretty little house!" Elise cried. "It reminds me of our house beside Lac Ste. Anne."

"I want to hear more about Lac Ste Anne," Jennifer said.

"Me, too," Sean said, with dust settling and women climbing from the wagon.

In Edmonton, the bridge work continued through the summer of 1912. Ray and Pat marveled at the great structure, similar in Lethbridge, 300 miles south. Louis had been in Lethbridge during his Crowsnest Past mining year, years before the bridge crossed the Oldman River. Now, rather than risking his life in coal shafts, Louis was working on a bridge, and doing more and more at Yvonne's rooming house. Yvonne had been feeling old until Gisele became pregnant. Now Yvonne was like an expectant mother.

"It's a good day," Louis told Ray and Pat as he joined them that warm August morning.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Ray snapped. "George just left for Yvonne's! Yvonne sent some kid to tell him that Gisele's in labor!"

"Well, Marie got there last night...." Louis began.

Pat and Ray looked at Louis.

"I'm going. I'm going."

"Damn right you're going," Pat muttered, remembering Adeline's birth.

Pat missed Mary and Adeline. The house was so quiet. He was there as little as possible. He found excuses to stay at work longer and longer, or to putter around this growing bridge. He ate at Yvonne or Sandra's house. In the shop, Sandra, John, and Peter let him be. Peter would go homesteading after this project.

Ray, also often worked late, to avoid his empty house, with Elise in Victoria and Emile in the western wilderness until who knew when. He was a wandering diner, like Pat.

Pat and Ray were married to a bridge, lately.

Louis hustled home.

Pierre Boucher wiggled into the world around sundown on August 29, 1912, with hair as black as Louis' hair, but curled, from curly blonde Gisele. Yvonne's blonde hair was more white than blonde, but there was nothing aged about her efforts to help Marie with Gisele and Pierre.

"My little girl," Yvonne said in French, tears in her eyes, "a mother. How is she, Marie?"

"She's fine," Marie replied in French. "Don't worry. You have a strong girl, and a strong grandson."

Yvonne left the room, relieved, but she promised to stay within earshot.

Louis leaned against the wall to keep from falling over in shock at what he had just seen. George hadn't wanted to watch. This scene reminded him of his Ilsa, dying in childbirth in their homestead cabin many years before. George, in the kitchen, called Louis. Louis, confident that he could leave the safety of the wall without fainting, lumbered into the kitchen.

"Formidable, George," Louis said, in French.

"You're a lucky man, Louis," George said. "Your late friend Pierre's family knows what name you and Gisele picked?"

"I'll telegraph Morinville with the news. When one knows in Morinville, all know in Morinville."

"Or call them," George suggested. "Use the phone in the office. Call the priest. He'll get the message to them."

"Good idea. When Gisele can travel, we will bring Pierre to Morinville."

"He'll be famous there. Here, too."

"Thanks for letting us keep staying with you and Yvonne, George. You're a great help to Yvonne."

"Like you, I'm a lucky man. I never became a father. I'll be a happy step-grandfather."

The youthful cries in the next room made George feel younger. They gave him a reason to be careful at work, to live as long as he could. Nearing 55, George felt his age more on other days. Today he felt as young as he had felt the day he reached Canada, many years earlier.

While life burst forth in this rooming house on the south side of the river in Edmonton, and unity strengthened among its German, French, and Metis occupants during the entry into the world of this innocent baby boy, across the ocean the governments of Germany and France prepared for war. President Clemenceau and Kaiser Wilhelm were once babies. What happened to them? Would they pause to think of the young men, little more than boys, they planned to send to early graves?

____________

To keep people out of early graves, Adeline McCoy crossed the straits to New Westminster in late August. Emile had reached Victoria, much to everyone's delight. Imagine what Emile and his mother Elise talked about after being apart for three years. He had stayed two nights, then returned north by boat, while Adeline, Elise, and Mary went east by boat. Now Sean and Jennifer noticed a new quietness in their Victoria house.

Adeline, Grade 12 diploma in hand, walked confidently into Royal Columbia Hospital, where she would become a nurse in a year, or two if she wanted extra training. She wanted extra training, to be ready for anything, anywhere.

Adeline passed through Vancouver a month after the Japanese ship Komagata Maru left Vancouver to return to Hong Kong and India. Canadian immigration authorities had denied its passengers landing rights in Canada. Its passengers were from a British Empire country, like Canada, but Canadian authorities had not wanted them in Canada. The determined passengers had survived a two month floating siege in Burrard Inlet. Only the promise of food once the ship reached international waters convinced the ship owners to send the ship back to Asia. Once back in India, many passengers faced further persecution.

Adeline regretted being too late to help passengers who had been shot during a police invasion of the unarmed vessel. The passengers, mostly Punjabi, had stuck together, like a union. Adeline saw in this outrage more proof that people of different colors around the world had common cause against those who divided them by race, religion or nation. Police were merely the violent lackeys of this conspiracy against people peacefully trying to improve their lives.

Adeline had two urges, nursing and unions. She expected to work in many places. Her flypaper memory and deep analytical skills put her near the top of her class. Younger doctors wanted her to stay in the hospital, to help improve its practices. Older nurses, inspired by Adeline's youth and courage, wanted her to stay.

Adeline clashed with trustees and older doctors, but she inspired clerks, orderlies, and other nurses. Adeline's enemies rejoiced that she planned to nurse elsewhere.

In the spring of 1914, Adeline pondered where to go. Return to Victoria or Edmonton? Go elsewhere, farther east, to the prairies, perhaps Regina, Winnipeg, or some rural place? There was plenty of work for trained nurses in cities and towns. Might smaller places would need her more and therefore endure or even welcome her freethinking?

There was plenty of unionization and of anti-war work to be done, two tasks facing growing odds. Adeline liked steep odds. She chose Lethbridge. The miners west of Lethbridge endured dangerous conditions, poor wages, uneven medical care, armed strike breakers, and even militia attacks on their picket lines. Life near the Crowsnest Pass would be neither luxurious nor boring.

Even before she left New Westminister, Adeline had spoken against war, casually to hospital staff and patients, to some of her teachers, and at meetings organized by newly-unionized dock workers. The heavy hands of police, courts, and fines were smothering the IWW in Canada and the United States, but other unions were strengthening. Young men would be the cannon fodder for war, and Adeline told them graphically what they risked. Empire and war boosters in New Westminister were happy to see Adeline McCoy leave town.

During her two hospital years, Adeline had treated men who had disfiguring, crippling injuries from waterfront and railway work in New Westminster. A bomb, bullet, or shell fragment could do worse to a human body. As in the industrial war between bosses indifferent to safety and workers who lived and died by their wits and unity in dangerous situations, this war between nations would make many of the living envy the dead.

When Adeline met James Shaver Woodsworth on one platform for anti-war speakers, the Methodist minister, newly transformed into a friend of labor, seemed likelier to talk than to act. Perhaps it's harder for men, she thought. Men, more than women, risked a police club to the head. More men than women were the prime income earners for their families. Be brave to oppose war, rather than brave to survive that bloody scheme of profiteers and politicians, both groups likely to die old, in bed. J.S. Woodsworth would talk some, and even go to jail some, but people resisting together would prevent war. Pacifist preachings spread selfish, heavenly fantasies more than solidarity among people facing death on a job or in a trench.

The New Westminster police did not like Adeline McCoy. The city's rich and patriotic British and their Canadian dupes wanted her locked up. The lace-dressed wives of these cops and patriots huffed at this unfeminine, unnatural woman. But what could be more feminine, more natural than defending life? Adeline connected her anti-war efforts to her union organizing and nursing. Safe working conditions reduced the number of injuries and deaths at work. Words and actions against war reduced the chances of injury and death in war. A phalanx of beefy defenders sometimes walked Adeline to and from a speaker's platform. Florence Nightingale had spoken and acted for life in the Crimean War decades before. Adeline did likewise along the Fraser River in 1914, as war drumheads beat war drums, and beat anti-war people.

By the end of July, 1914, Adeline was as happy to leave New Westminster as its invincibly-ignorant warmongers were to see her go. The early August train rides up the Fraser Valley, around mountains, along the Kettle Valley, and through the Crowsnest Pass were a welcome rest for her.

Even on the trip to Lethbridge, Adeline nursed injured railroaders and passengers. Just west of the Alberta border in the Crowsnest Pass, Adeline delivered a baby on the train. The Lethbridge-bound passengers took her to their hearts, and rejoiced that this brave young nurse would work in their growing community. Romantically-inclined men who reached for Adeline's hand were likelier to receive a bandage or pair of scissors, with curt instructions on how to use them.

Adeline liked men, but they were a low priority now. Perhaps she would end up like Gloria, a spinster; but Gloria seemed like a happy woman. The world was opening to women. Hence war, to stop this opening, this path to peace between the sexes and between the nations? In a peaceful world, violence, man's last resort, was less likely, and men would less likely rule women. Violence dehumanized men, but Adeline knew of peaceful men, such as her dad Pat, his workmates George and Ray, and Emile. Adeline wondered when she would next see any of them. Peaceful men seemed rare lately.

What had Florence Nightingale thought about men, and about war, Adeline wondered, mountains gave way to rolling hills west of Lethbridge? When the train reached Lethbridge, she would wire her parents and grandparents. She thought that people worried too much about her. That was better than too little worry; choose love over indifference. They loved her. Adeline loved them. She loved life, as any nurse should.

What a big bridge that was in Lethbridge! Hence the town's name, Adeline supposed, as the train wheezed to a stop.

CHAPTER 11: BLOOD

"I'm going to enlist," Emile told his mother in mid-September, 1914.

"Over my dead body," Elise replied.

"I'm old enough. John's going, too."

"I don't care if Gabriel Dumont rises from the grave to hunt buffalo! You won't go to war. Think of your grandparents, my own parents, who brought me and your Uncle Louis out of Batoche when I was a child. Those were British bullets whizzing around us. You won't fight for the British!"

"I'm not asking you. I'm telling you, Mom. Many of my Prince George friends are going. I planned to leave through the west, to Prince Rupert, and then by boat to Victoria, to the navy. I wanted to join the navy, but the army needs more men."

"It doesn't need my only child. It won't have you," Elise said, her voice rising. She wished that Mary were here. She wished that her mother and father, Marie and Emile, were here. She wished this damn war hadn't made everybody insane. "I'll tell your grandfather. What would he think?"

"He's an old man and he doesn't understand the world."

"He's a war veteran and he understands death, my God!" Elise always brought up God when she lost her temper, which was rare. What kind of God watched over a world of people mad to kill one another? To kill strangers? And for what? No German threatened them, but the English had threatened her family at Batoche. That was a war worth fighting. This war was not worth her only child's life.

Ray walked in the door and into the argument. "What's the trouble? Emile came home."

"He came home to tell us that he's going to that stupid war!"

"No," Ray said, with a tone and look that silenced Emile. Emile dared not object to his father when he heard that tone.

"I need good workers here. You know how to work. Let other people kill. You're my only son. You will not kill." Ray tried to sound understanding, to disappoint his son without defeating his son's pride.

"Do you know what I did when I was about your age, Emile?" Ray asked, knowing that Emile knew.

"You fought the Metis at Batoche."

"Yes, I fought the Metis at Batoche. That was a mistake. Imagine if I had shot your mother. She was at Batoche, on the other side. I was on the wrong side. In this war, there is no right side, no matter what those fools and liars on the platforms and in the newspapers say. Notice that they're not going to this war, and neither are their sons."

"Please, Emile," Elise begged, her eyes tearing. Ray looked at their son and slowly shook his head.

Emile knew he had lost the argument. He knew he wasn't going to the war. He didn't feel too disappointed. His Uncle Louis had already given him an earful against war, and shaken a fist at him to punctuate the lecture. Uncle Louis hadn't been to a shooting war, but his Crowsnest Pass coal mining days were like a war, for how miners had lived and died.

Emile hugged his mother and thought of Louis's dead friends Pierre and Marc. Emile could do much on the railway for the war effort, and not risk his life. He was no coward. It would take more guts to oppose his Prince George friends when they asked him why he didn't join them, than it would to go along like a sheep. A lamb to slaughter?

Had Prince George himself ever led troops into battle?

Down the street, Sandra didn't like John going to war, but John assured her that he was too old for the front line. He'd probably work in some supply depot, handing out unreliable weapons and indigestible food.

"The food will be indigestible if the English or the Yanks make it," Sandra quipped, still nervous.

"The Yanks aren't in it," John corrected.

"Not yet," Sandra said. "They'll join if they can make a buck from it. Mark my words. As for you, have fun in your war, but come back in one piece, or I'll go to Europe and spit on your grave."

"I won't rest in peace?"

"I'll dig you up and give you hell," Sandra's voice cracked.

John held her. They stood together for a long time, not moving, perhaps hoping that this war was an elaborate joke, mere sabre-rattling before peace talks made everyone sane again.

Who wins war, besides profiteers, military brass, and militaristic poets, almost all of them far from the butchery.

Who loses? Almost everyone loses when savagery outshouts civility. Civility always returns, better able to resist savagery the next time.

There will always be a next time, as long as greed and inequality dominate, as in John's native Scotland, and in Sandra's native Cape Breton. Robbie Burns, writing less than a generation after the last stand of the clans at Culloden, Scotland, saw no winners in war.

Why, then, did John plan to go to this war? Sandra needed him more than a war did.

"I can do my part, Sandra, shorten it a bit, and save some lives."

"You're set on going, John. At least you'll get a chance to see your kin in the Orkney Islands. Blood is thicker than water. Some days I think your head is thicker than both. Be sure that one of those lives you save is your own. I want you back, rather than a letter about your heroic death."

"I'll be fine, and back by spring. I hear this war won't last long."

War buzz distracted Victoria, otherwise an empty city for Jennifer and Sean, with Adeline gone. This Little England city wanted to fight. The newspapers were full of it. The government was full of it. The powerful men were full of it. They twisted Sean's arm to help raise a military force to represent this outpost of empire. Sean and Jennifer were not full of it. They refused to help.

"Here we go again," Sean said. "The English want someone else to fight their war. No offense, dear."

"None taken. I've been in Canada most of my life. I left England young, and England never did much for me. Let them fight their own wars. That's what Adeline said before she left."

"Clever Adeline," Sean said. "I'm glad she got to Lethbridge safely, and by train rather than canoe."

"She'll find plenty of adventure in that boomtown, my love. I miss Mary and Elise, too. Wouldn't it be nice to see where they live? We can afford the trip."

"We could go to Edmonton after this war hysteria quiets down. I give this war until Christmas. Germans and English and French aren't stubborn enough to die for longer than that, for distant millionaires. I'm glad my parents didn't live to see England once again scheme to see more Irish killed."

"The Irish won't fight for the English, Sean."

"Some will. Irish collaborators help England rule Ireland. Even so, it's getting harder to control Ireland. The pro-English papers here report Irish efforts at home rule. Even the English parliament passed a home rule bill. Will the king keep his word?"

"Do you miss Ireland, Sean?"

"Not a bit. I'm Canadian, in a land where a poor man can rise. Do you miss England?"

"No. I was pushed out, but I'm glad I left. I'm really glad I landed by you." Jennifer hugged Sean.

"It's so long ago, but when we talk like this, it seems like yesterday."

"We built a good life here, raised a fine daughter, and she raised a fine daughter. I doubt I would have done so well in England. When people here how war support for England, I want to tell people how Great Britain is not great."

"You don't need to tell an Irishman that."

"You said you were Canadian."

"I am, with Irish ancestors. Too many Canadians wave flags for Britain now. I wish they would serve Canada more than that faraway rock in the Atlantic Ocean. I suppose people remember their roots when something threatens those roots. England is more threat to Ireland than Germany is right now, but the press lie otherwise. I feel for Ireland, but I prefer to be here. Maybe I trumpet my Irish heritage to tell people here that Britain preaches democracy better than it practices it, in Ireland for example."

"Let's take a lesson from Adeline, and watch what we say. She almost didn't graduate, for all her activity here for free speech and against war. Going to Seattle and seeing police batons crack heads made her careful."

"Bloodied but unbowed," Sean said.

"Had any cop here laid a hand on my granddaughter, they would have felt Hell on Earth from me."

"My rebel girl," Sean winked. "May others have such a protector."

"If they stand together, they have, Sean. Someone from Ireland knows that."

"Indeed."

While the drums of war beat, Jennifer and Sean lived decent lives in Victoria. They pondered selling their livery business and moving closer to Mary or Adeline, but there would be plenty of time for that. For being past 60, they felt healthy. Far from European mud and blood, what could happen to them?

Adeline's canoe partner of the previous summer, Roger, was a frequent visitor, when he was in Victoria on IWW business. Each time he landed on their doorstep, Jennifer and Sean implored him to stay, and hire on. With many local men enlisting, Sean feared a labor shortage. Roger, in class war, would never sign up for this war, which his United States avoided so far; but Roger was getting older and might want to settle down. Why not Victoria? Roger liked Sean more than any boss he had ever met, more than his own father for sure. Sean knew from experience that moving could freshen one's view.

____________

"Oh, what a beautiful little boy!" Elise gushed at Pierre, in French. Gisele and Louis beamed from the other side of the crib in which Pierre slept. Sandra stood nearby.

Pierre knew not of the war raging in Europe, nor of Sandra's sleepless nights worrying about John, who had briefly met kin now in Glasgow, before he was sent to combat in Belgium. Sandra was as surprised as John, but she knew John was careful. The Hun was killing anyone, even babies, some propaganda said; but Sandra didn't believe it. She thought of George, who hesitated to kill a fly. He didn't like this war. Nor did he like the increase in local words and deeds against anyone with German background, including him. George had been in Canada for decades. This was no more his war than it was little Pierre's war.

"Louis is good for something," Elise said in English, inviting Sandra into the conversation. "Louis, Pierre looks like you did as a baby. Unlike Pierre, you and I were children who survived a war. I knew the danger in Batoche more than you did. Pierre must grow up to love peace. Pierre will not go to war, as Emile almost did."

"Does Emile still want to enlist?" Gisele asked.

"No," Louis said definitively. "I was only half joking when I told him I'd lock him in the Morinville barn first."

"You were not in war, but you seem to know war's dangers," Sandra said.

"I was in a coal war in the Crowsnest, Sandra," Louis said. "People died there. For how the mine owners treated us, it might as well have been a war. At least in war a person may kill as well as be killed."

"When I saw the bodies of Pierre and Marc under that pile of rocks in Frank, I knew that life mattered more than money."

Sandra said, "The army pays John well, as a non-commissioned officer, but he's gone to some Belgian battleground. I check the paper every day for the dead, and I hope don't see his name."

"That must be horrible!" Elise cried. "I couldn't sleep at night if Ray was in such a place."

"I don't sleep some nights, Elise," Sandra said. "I'm glad you help with Pierre, because I sure need Gisele at the shop some days."

"Gisele's young and strong. She works like a Metis," Louis quipped. Gisele poked him. "I suppose you learned it from your mother, Gisele."

"I know someone is talking about me," Yvonne said in French, from the kitchen of the rooming house.

"Nice words, mama," Gisele said. "Leave your work and come watch Pierre sleep."

Yvonne entered the first-floor room, formerly a lounge, now a nursery. The few boarders had taken the baby boy into their hearts. Even soldiers coming and going idolized this new life, as they prepared to end life elsewhere.

"Where's my grandson?" she whispered, walking up to the end of the crib.

Pierre stirred. A tiny mouth produced a tiny yawn.

"Mama, you woke him up."

"Keep him awake. He'll sleep more at night. You also rest, Gisele," Yvonne said, glancing at Sandra.

"Mama, there's Elise, you, and the boarders, an army of baby-watchers. Sandra needs me at work. Had you stopped working when I was a baby, we would have starved."

"True," Yvonne said wistfully. "We have seen much. Life is good now."

Gisele hoisted Pierre from the crib and went into the kitchen to breast feed him. "I'll be there in a half hour, Sandra."

"Thanks, Gisele," Sandra said. "I only need you for an hour. It's a great help." Sandra and Louis walked out the door. Elise and Yvonne looked at each other.

"Need help, Yvonne?" Elise asked in French.

"Always, Elise," Yvonne replied. "Thanks for being here."

"My nephew deserves the best, Yvonne. That is you."

They went into the kitchen to make lunch for the boarders and mind Pierre during Gisele's absence. Pierre was finished eating, and sleepy again already.

"I don't know about this war, Pat," Ray said as they inspected a house they were building. "What's it for? What's it ever for?"

"Germany wants a piece of the African sandbox that England has ruled for so long," Pat said.

"That's one way of looking at it. The English fought in South Africa less than 20 years ago. I wonder if the Boers will join the Germans against the English."

"I'm sure the English and Germans wonder the same thing, Ray. Who wins these things? Not the young men who fight." Pat paused to look at clouds rolling in from the west.

"Why did you go to Batoche, Ray?" Pat asked.

"Hell if I know. I was young and stupid. I believed the lies about violent Metis. I saw the bloody truth in Batoche. Now the weapons are bigger, and the killing is bigger, like a machine. Have you heard about the mutinies?"

"No."

"The papers won't report them, or anything else against this war hysteria. I met a couple guys the other day who were at Ypres."

"Where?"

"Belgium. The French and British and Canadians were to fight the Germans, but on both sides many men refused to fight. Some officers threatened to shoot them if they didn't fight."

"Hung for a sheep as hung for a lamb, eh?" Pat observed.

"Yeah. In the end, the men died fighting the other side, not their own officers, but this is something new in war. Mutinies this big are new, anyway."

"The size of this war is new, Ray. I wonder if it'll be over by Christmas, as they say."

"I doubt it. I hear that both sides are dug in, and running at each other through a blizzard of machine gun bullets, Pat. Imagine that horror."

"Insane."

"Exactly. I'm glad I'm too old to join this time. I wish John had stayed home. He was there."

"Ypres? Did he join the mutiny?"

"I don't know. He's an officer, you know; but I doubt he threatened the mutineers. John's probably sorry he signed up."

"Sandra is sorry he signed up. Some days I walk into the office and she's crying. This war is hurting the business. She can't concentrate," Pat said.

"Other businessmen are making out like bandits, Pat. Think of the grain and meat trade, and the clothing and arms makers. Death profits many people."

"Not the dead."

"It's a rotten racket, but if we say so, we might go to jail."

"I know, Ray. Adeline almost got locked up in New Westminister for speaking against the war."

"How's she doing in Lethbridge?"

"Fiery as ever. She's trying to unionize hospital workers. With the war on and the labor shortage, the hospital brass is forced to listen to her."

Pat paused, looking at the house, almost done. "Mary worries about her, but she's a tough young thing, like Mary was."

"I worry about finishing this house, Pat. If we lose any more men to this stupid war, we'll spread the men so thin that we'll have to slow down on some jobs. The guys paying us won't like that."

"Perhaps we should get into food speculation, Ray," Pat kidded. "Make money feeding men their last meal in the trenches."

"Then I'll be speaking against you outside your warehouse, Pat," Ray kidded back.

The two men continued to admire their handiwork, and they praised the men who puttered around putting on finishing touches. These men knew their bargaining power. Many men who worked for Pat were too old for war, but they remembered the tough times of a year ago, when the settlement boom went bust. They were happy to have jobs, and the prospect of better pay as enlistment shrank the pool of unemployed. Pat knew their worth and paid them enough to keep them. Pay peanuts, get monkeys, Adeline's echo of his own words went through Pat's mind.

John McNab had seen a mutiny at Ypres. He had not raised a threatening gun to stop it, but neither had he joined it.

He wasn't where he had expected to be. Pushing 50, John had expected to be safely away from the front line, handling supplies, and shortening the war some other way than by risking his life. Having been forced a couple times to go "over the top" into machine gun fire, John now wanted to leave this war as soon as possible.

John quietly cooperated, and kept those around him safe. They kept him safe. That's the key to survival. Stand together. The mutineers knew that, but when John saw that the mutiny might get him shot rather than get him home, he kept his head down. Who threatened him more, the English officers or the German guns? What a dangerous, pointless mess this was.

At least there had been no gas. John had heard about gas. He vowed to get out of this war before a bullet or gas killed him. He dreaded never again seeing Sandra and Canada. He hoped that his next visit to his kin would be on his way to Canada and peace. John was glad to have seen them, before some general shipped him to this death trap. His father was long dead, but his mother lived happily in Glasgow with his brother William, who worked in the busy Clydeside shipyard.

William had asked John to work in Glasgow building ships during the war. Nobody shot at shipbuilders, not even the police or militia during strikes. The union kept conditions and pay good, but John thought he could shorten the war by joining it. Foolish thought. The front line would likelier shorten John's life.

The next time he was near that Glasgow shipyard, he would stay there.

Surviving Ypres gave John a week of Christmas leave in 1914. He wasn't the only volunteer who intended to stay away from the deadly fray. William understood. Their mother rejoiced. His commanding officer understood; John had done more than his share at the front; he had been recommended for a medal.

John signed on at the shipyard and stayed the winter. This war work made him feel like less of a deserter. The shipbuilders were glad to have someone who could use his hands and head, and speak Gaelic. John landed in an office, mostly bookkeeping. A generation ago, there had been no work for him in Scotland, so he had gone overseas with The Hudson's Bay Company. Now there was work in Scotland for every hand, thanks to war. It was a strange world: money via death. Would there be work in Scotland after the war?

After Sandra got John's Christmas greeting, in January, with the news of his move, she only cried because she missed him, not because she feared that he would die. Until Sandra told him the good news, Pat saw only more tears, not their reason. He rejoiced that Sandra cried less and worked more.

The armies battled a second time at Ypres, in the spring of 1915, with gas. Choking, drowning men littered the battlefield. John and the few first Ypres battle veterans he met in Glasgow were happy to have missed the second battle. Let the generals, prime ministers, and weapons makers fight this war, many agreed. The wounded veterans of the second battle who showed up in Glasgow hospitals had a shell-shocked gaze as if they had returned from the dead.

When John boarded a Canada-bound ship in June, 1915, his mother cried and his brother shook his hand. All three worried that a German torpedo might sink John's ship before it reached Halifax. No torpedo found John McNab's ship. He arrived to a hero's welcome, an older man commended for enlisting and surviving Ypres, not nagged to return to the war. John survived this "war to end all wars," which ironically seemed endless itself.

John saw and pitied new recruits leaving for the war. He wished them well and said little about his own experience. John doubted they'd believe him. For months, they had heard and read promises of foreign glory, theirs for the taking. In truth, many a Sandra would never see her John again. John had a long, thoughtful train trip from Halifax, through Montreal, to Edmonton, and Sandra.

The Halifax telegram that Sandra read, announcing John's safe arrival in Canada, made her hug Pat so hard he lost his breath. Sandra could finally stop holding her own breath.

"How was it?" Emile asked John two weeks later, as they walked along the river bank on a Sunday afternoon.

"It was Hell, Emile. Be glad you weren't there," John replied. "I wish I had never gone. Life's too short to lose in someone else's war."

"Whose war? Canada is at war, John. We are Canadians."

"Think about George, Emile."

"I know. He was born in Germany. Local pig heads insult him. He didn't start this war. He's not overseas killing Canadians. He's one of us, by God!"

"Exactly. 'Us' is almost everyone. This isn't George's war, either. It isn't the war of the men I watched die in the Belgian mud."

"Whose war is it, then, John?"

"It's a war among rich men in Europe and elsewhere, including Canada. They profit from death. Germany, France, and England fight for overseas land, land already stolen from Africans and Asians. Remember the Boer War?"

"I heard about it. Uncle Louis, and you sound like Uncle Louis, told me that the English fought the Boers. The Boers' ancestors were Dutch settlers in Southern Africa."

"Yes, but neither the Dutch nor the English are from South Africa. That's the land of the negro. The Dutch took it from them. Their offspring, the Boers, say they defended their own land against the English, but it was not the Boers' land. The English stole it and promised to civilize the negros, and the Boers. Civilization by bayonet?"

Emile patiently listened to John, then said, "We hear that this war is different, that the Germans are barbarians."

"Such lies make people enlist, to die in foreign mud, Emile. Is a civilizatioin that fights really civilized? I saw civilization bleed and die in Belgium. I got out before I became another casualty, another name for Sandra to read in the newspaper. Your grandfather fought in a war, didn't he, Emile?"

"Batoche."

"I wasn't in Canada then, but that sounds like a worthier war, if a war can be worthy. But if your Grandpa Emile had died, you wouldn't be here. I'm glad you didn't go to this war, Emile. It's not what the papers and recruiters say."

"I hear that Quebec is against it."

"I heard the same. I saw it on my way back from Halifax, when I stayed overnight in Montreal to visit old Hudson's Bay friends. Most of my friends are against this war. The Quebec French especially don't want to die for the king of England and his rich friends. They don't even want to die for France, which their people left generations ago. Many go to jail for opposing this war. Opposition is a worthy war. Fight against war."

John went quiet, relieved to be alive, healthy, and home. Emile walked beside him, a sadder and a wiser man.

____________

Across the United States border, class war continued. The U.S. wasn't in the European war, yet, but mining and government powers fought the Wobblies. Adeline read about it in letters from Roger, himself in a Seattle battles. The focus had shifted east by the fall of 1915.

Joe Hill, the Anglicized name of Joel Hagglund, the Swedish-born organizer for the Wobblies, sat in a Utah prison cell. Hill awaited execution, state-sanctioned murder no better than war, but Hill was innocent of the murder for which he had been convicted more than a year earlier. Adeline sent money to the Salt Lake City IWW office for Hill's legal defense. Every little bit helps. This was a war worth fighting, Adeline thought one October morning in the hospital

"Vote? For more war?" Adeline asked Margaret Parker, an older nurse in the Lethbridge Municipal Hospital. "If women vote , wives of soldiers will stampede to elect a government that would send more men and material to war."

"Adeline, we must try to make a difference. Women could vote against war. They could vote to bring the men home," Margaret objected. "You tell me that big money votes every day. Why not women? It's almost 1916. People are tired of this war."

"Some people are making fortunes from this mass murder."

"It's not murder. They started it. We British are merely defending our allies,, and belling the cat, or kaiser, you might say."

"They started it. We started it. This sounds like a school playground fight. It would be as cute if so many innocent people, barely older than children, weren't dying. Also, I am Canadian, not British. The British haven't done much for me. For you? You'd die for a foreign king and his rich friends?"

"Adeline, the things you say. Watch out. At least we can vote about it, if what I hear is true, that women will get to vote in the next election."

"That is 'least' all right, Margaret. Consider a young Canadian facing a young German. They don't know each other, but officers send them to kill each other. This won't solve anything, even if the Germans lose. In our lifetime, they'll want revenge. The French want it for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. What would end revenge?"

"You and I are nurses, healers. We know the body is fragile but that it heals itself well. Right?"

"That is why I am a nurse, Adeline. To heal. They need nurses in the army now, but I'm too old and I have a husband and children. Paul's not overseas, being over 40 like me; but he works to support the war effort, in the rail yards, shipping food and clothing overseas. "

"Margaret," Adeline began, calmly, "you and Paul are my friends. I didn't have many friends when I came here. I won't let this war divide us. It will end, sooner or later, and we'll remain friends. I'm not saying you like war. Who does? I just see no good coming of it, and probably another war resulting in a generation or so."

"You sound so pessimistic for one so young, Adeline."

"I'm not. Life is beautiful. This growing town is full of interesting people, such as you and Paul. I rant and rave, but deep down, I am a lot like you, I think. We heal. War does not heal. Let us remember what unites us, while all around us a few powerful people try to divide us, to divide men and women, and to divide foreigners and citizens. The rich profit by setting people at loggerheads."

"You heard that people born in Germany or the Austrian Empire must register with the government?" Margaret asked.

"I did. It is unnecessary and unfair, and destructive in the long run. My dad's long-time friend in Edmonton had to register because he was born in Germany, but he came to Canada more than 30 years ago. George wouldn't hurt a fly, and neither would he join the kaiser's army. He left Germany to avoid fighting wars for Germany. Would registering George make him resent rather than support Canada?"

"Maybe registration is a good idea?" Margaret said, a twinkle in her eye. "Is this George a threat to Canada?"

"You sneaky woman! You won't get me into another argument!"

"You started this one!"

"Wanna vote on it?"

"Would it make any difference?"

"No."

"Adeline, you are a sweet young thing with tiger's teeth."

"Meow."

"Nice try, kitty. I'm not afraid to grab your tail."

That fall, on November 19, 1915, Joe Hill died by firing squad in the Utah State Prison. Still, people heeded his words, "Don't mourn. Organize." Thousands paraded to honor Hill. They spoke in the United States against the war, but that country wasn't in the war. Speaking in public was safe there. Anti-war speech in Canada was not. Police and their thug-like supporters attacked speakers. Business and government people lost them their jobs and put their names on secret lists. Hospital officials endured Adeline's speaking because they needed her nursing.

Adeline was allowed to visit the internment camp in the Lethbridge Fair Grounds. There, captured German, Austrian, and Turkish soldiers shared space with "enemy aliens," people who lived in Canada but were born in countries which Canada now fought. She volunteered to nurse on some of her days off. The meagre medical staff in the camps welcomed the help. Sometimes Margaret volunteered too.

Adeline half expected to see her dad's friend George interned, but he was only registered, so far. Perhaps George's Edmonton construction work was important to the war effort, like Adeline's nursing. Also, George had powerful Edmonton friends, such as Adeline's father Pat McCoy. George's socialist views, which influenced Adeline and many others, made him dangerous to Canada's elite in a way it was only starting to perceive.

Adeline's father was anti-English, unlike George, but Canada neither registered nor interned its many Irish-born people. Adeline suspected that many English were anti-war. England had jailed anti-war Professor Bertrand Russell, a blueblood whose uncle had been in a government that helped starve the Irish.

Adeline found Heinrich Lida in the Lethbridge camp. Actually, Heinrich found her one day in the mechanical room of the main camp building. Born and raised in Berlin, Heinrich, "Henry" to his friends back in Kitchener, Ontario, was interned as an enemy alien. Kitchener had been called Berlin when Henry came to Canada before the war, with his fresh engineering degree in hand. What's in a name, he mused when the war began and his adopted town changed names from Berlin to Kitchener. Had that militaristic British windbag Kitchener ever been there?

Plenty is in a name, Henry learned, when he lost his job just before Christmas, 1914 and was interned that winter in Lethbridge, half a continent away. To the nervous government of Canada, this recent immigrant from what was now an enemy country was not Henry, but Heinrich, a foreigner, not to be trusted. His plea that he had left Germany to avoid military service fell on deaf, in fact hostile ears: a pacifist enemy alien was a double threat to the war-driven Canadian government.

The day she went looking for a mop and pail in a mechanical room she found Henry checking pipes and adjusting valves. The camp maintenance foreman saw Henry as an engineer first and a German second.

"If they trust you to work here, then they should let you out," Adeline responded to Henry's tale. "You won't bring Canada down with a wrench, I'm sure."

"This war will end. I will be free again," he replied, lying on his back under a pipe.

"Would you go home to Berlin? I mean, the one in Germany. Canada should be ashamed for renaming Berlin, Ontario after a snooty English war monger."

"Watch your tongue, Adeline," Henry cautioned. "The walls have ears."

"Let 'em listen. I was born in Canada, but my grandparents weren't. This is a country of immigrants."

"And Indians."

"Yes, Indians. What do you know about them?"

"I met some in Ontario, before the government locked me up as a threat. I learned that I was not the first one mistrusted by the men who run Canada; they never trusted Indians. The funny thing is, I left a country to avoid wearing a uniform, and came to a country where people worry that I'll help my birth country fight this country that welcomed me, then anyway. I just want to be an engineer."

"So you'll stay in Canada after the war?"

"Yes. I think Canada, especially this part of Canada, needs engineers."

"Especially ones who speak such good English."

"My parents insisted that I learn English in school and university. They like English democracy, but one does not say such things under the kaiser. Luckily, Father is too old for the army. They miss me, but they still have my younger sister Greta."

"The English aren't perfect. Ask my Irish relatives. But I agree with you that this country might value you, and even your opinions, more than Germany did. After this stupid war, that is."

"Adeline, I'm glad to hear you say that, because before I lost my job and freedom in Ontario, people in Berlin, I mean Kitchener, started looking at me funny. The same people were friendly when I arrived a year earlier. I worry that the same prejudice exists here, but I can't tell, because my only experience is in this internment camp."

"Believe me, Henry, there's a place for you here. Take my hospital, for example. All four maintenance men enlisted: one engineer, a boilermaker, and their two helpers. Now one old man and a teenage boy try to keep the place together. If the building wasn't pretty new and in good shape, it would fall apart under them."

"Interesting."

"There is more. We're short staffed everywhere: medical, clerical, you name it. Winter is here, and winter is cold here, perhaps colder than in Ontario."

"Certainly colder than in Berlin. But if your hospital is so short of staff, how can it spare you to work here? I've seen you two or three evenings per week lately."

"I volunteer my time. There are sick people here. I don't care what nationality they are. We all bleed red."

"You sound like my younger sister Greta, Adeline. She was in the German Social Democratic Party, until it changed from anti-war to pro-war. She almost got arrested for speaking against the war this summer. People that our parents know kept Greta out of jail. I don't know how long Greta can stay free. I hope she is careful."

"Why, Henry? One Greta would go to jail. A million Gretas would stop the war and possibly overthrow the government. Even before it started, I spoke against the war. I was in nursing training in New Westminster. I almost got arrested. I almost got arrested in high school in Victoria, when I spoke for unions. The New West hospital bosses might have hired me after I graduated, but they were happier to see me leave. I came here. I speak more carefully now, but my workmates know what I think. You'd be surprised how many people here hate this war, besides the widows and mothers of the glorious dead."

"The glorious dead. The unfortunate dead."

"Henry, my hospital needs you after the war. Heck, it needs you now. I'll see what I can do to get you out of here early. I know some important people. I don't think this camp will last another year."

"Why, will peace break out and put the war mongers out of business?"

"No such luck. I think this camp costs lots of money and people to run, money and people the government would rather throw at your kaiser. A few big camps are easier to run than many little ones."

"He's not my kaiser, or I'd be in his army."

"I am joking. Are you a humorless Hun?"

"Better that than an imperialist lackey nurse," Henry winked, water dripping on his face.

"You can laugh! Don't drown down there. You're good company. How are you on your feet, not under a pipe in a shed?"

"I listen to beautiful women like you."

"Flatterer!"

Adeline left with a mop, pail, and spinning head.

Henry stayed, pondering his new friend more than the pipe above him.

Christmas, 1915 was a few days away. For at least two people in Lethbridge, a festive season had begun, quickening their blood.

CHAPTER 12: ROOTS

The next spring, internment increased, in Britain at least, after Irish republicans rose in arms against British occupation of Ireland. Many Irish-born people in Canada sympathized with the Irish; others, in Ireland and Canada, sided with the English. England was busy fighting Germany, preventing mutinies in its own armies on the front, and keeping the France and Russia in this "war to end war." Adeline in Lethbridge, her father Pat in Edmonton, and her grandfather Sean in Victoria marveled that the English could spare soldiers and even ships to fight the Irish republicans during Easter, 1916. The English locked up many Irish in Ireland, and even executed a few. Some English, in England and Canada, would jail anti-war critics. Would they shoot Canadians, as they shot Irish?

"The English never forget rebellions against them,” Jennifer told Sean when after heard of the Easter, 1916 Rising. "They'll finish their war, and then resume fighting the Irish."

"Not this time," Sean said. "This war will kill the British Empire."

"Even if that happens, the empire will take many innocent people with it, in England and elsewhere. The United States might muscle in for the spoils."

"They'll get into this war."

"Probably,” Jennifer said. “The U.S. threw out the English, but they'll fight for England, with an eye to taking over the empire."

"I know it. I first came from Ireland to the U.S. It's a republic, with no king; but it behaves like a kingdom, wishing for an empire."

Jennifer looked across the table at her husband of more than 40 years. Many times she had heard him talk of his tough times in Galway, on the estate whose owner welcomed his starving family. She knew about Sean's emigration to the United States in search of a life better than as a horse groomer for a lord. Sean had crossed the continent, worked at many jobs, often with horses, and had finally left the U.S. for Canada and Victoria. Victoria was English, but here a person could rise higher than back in Ireland, or in England, or in the U.S., it seemed to Sean.

Over the years, Jennifer wondered what might have become of her had she stayed in England, fled the lord whose baby she carried, and given birth to Mary in England. Perhaps a man would have come to save her from poverty, to help her keep her baby. More likely Mary would have gone to an orphanage. She might never again have seen Mary, who might have acquired a different name. Mary might even have left England, one of many poor children exported to Canada and Australia, to be cheap labor on farms and in cities.

Jennifer sighed.

"There but for the grace of God go I?" Sean asked. "Your life back in the old country would not have been as good as here, eh?"

"You read my mind, Sean dear," Jennifer said, then paused and gazed out the window.

"You miss Mary?" Sean asked. "I do."

"We're not getting any younger, Sean."

"These blasted motorcars hurt my horse business. I got an offer last week from the government."

"What offer?"

"For all the horses, for the war effort."

"Oh, Sean! Think of what would happen to the horses in war!"

"That's why I said no."

"Thank you," Jennifer sighed. "Still, perhaps it's time to change businesses, even move."

"You read my mind, Jennifer dear. There's a boom on, with this war, and a couple young guys who work for us want to start their own business. That's expensive, especially with speculators and profiteers driving up prices."

"I know it. Have you seen the price of bread lately?"

"I hear things at work. Times are great for some, but hard for others. These two men who work for us are eager and sober, with young families. We could make a deal with them, to buy us out over time."

"We get something like a pension, and they get the business?"

"Jennifer, you're so smart. That's where Mary got her brains. I'm glad you were there to build this business with me. I couldn't have done it alone, all those years." Sean looked at her quietly. “I’m glad I’m not alone anymore.”

Jennifer said, “We have pretty good legal connections here in Victoria. We could make a good deal with your men, for reasonable legal costs, and retire anywhere."

"The old country?"

"England is not my country anymore, and Ireland is not yours. How about Edmonton or Lethbridge?"

"You really like that fiery Adeline, don't you, Jennifer? You miss her? I do."

"She reminds me of myself when I was young. When I watched her that winter with us, the years melted away and it was as if I was watching myself at that age. But when I was 16, there were fewer open doors in England than Adeline found in Canada."

"You had more education than the average girl of your class," Sean said, "but I know what you mean about doors. There are few open doors in Ireland for the likes of me. I wish I had met your parents, and you had met mine."

"Dad was fair-minded and educated, which don’t always go together. He stood up for Mom and me. If his dissenting parish hadn't been so poor, then I could have stayed on; but I had to leave to go into service on the Burt estate. Luckily, I had brains, thanks to my parents. Even without having to feed me, my parents barely got by. I'm glad you agreed to send them money regularly until they died. I wish you had met them, and I had met your parents."

"I helped them for your sake, Jennifer, always for you. My parents fared better, but I'm sure they welcomed the odd parcel of surprises from here."

There was a pause, as their minds returned to the present. Then Jennifer spoke.

"Sean, I would leave Victoria. Many things I didn't like about England seem to have grown up here over the years. This war hysteria is merely the latest blare of empire, half a world away from England."

"New land, new life, I say," Sean said. "Perhaps we need to find a new frontier, where John Bull doesn't rule."

"Adeline's letters from Lethbridge talk about the wide variety of people living there, as do Mary's letters from Edmonton. There’s no 'Yes, ma’am’ and No, sir’ in those places. "

"Write to both of them, Jennifer. See what they write back."

"I think they'd welcome us. Seeing them both after so many years told me that I don't want to be away from them as I age," Jennifer noted. "It's funny. You and I were happy together here for years after Mary left, for years before we ever met Adeline. Now I don't want to live without them."

"I know what you mean."

While bombs and bullets flew, and while fire, blood, gas, and mud claimed millions of young people in Europe, letters circulated among Victoria, Edmonton, and Lethbridge. This triangle of words produced a plan for Sean and Jennifer to move to Lethbridge, after they sold their business.

In Victoria, Jennifer and Sean negotiated a deal with three, not the original two men interested in starting their own business there. Poor in capital but rich in labor and ideas, the threesome happily signed a 10-year contract of payments to buy the business. The men knew that the days of horse and wagon freighting were ending. They planned to transform the business into something more motorized, but maintain some horses and wagons for tourism, for the growing forestry industry, and to serve horse owners who needed the firm's stables just outside Victoria. Jennifer and Sean wished that Roger the Wobbly was one of the men, but he was not. They hoped Roger did well wherever he was.

A few months after Canadian soldiers tunneled like moles and emerged to conquer Vimy Ridge, only to die in subsequent battles, Jennifer and Sean Evans rode a boat to Vancouver and a train to Edmonton. Their train rumbled up the North Thompson Valley from Kamloops, on a track that hadn't been there when Adeline had canoed down that river a few years earlier. The older couple gazed at the mountains, dark blue silhouettes under a full moon, and continued east through foothills and parkland to Edmonton. This was Jennifer's longest trip since age 20, and Sean's longest since he left Ireland. They traveled in a country they now called home. They felt Canadian, whatever that was. This war was not Canadian, despite media and political rants that Vimy Ridge proved Canada's maturity. Vimy proved Canadian elites’ subservience to empire.

____________

"Gloria, who is Brigid Kerr?" Mary asked.

"A teacher, translator, and refugee from Ireland. She has been living in Montreal since she left Ireland in a hurry last May, after the Easter Uprising."

"Why is she coming here?" Pat asked.

"To meet you, Pat, for one thing," Gloria said, eyeing Pat and Mary.

It was August, 1917, a hot day, even in the shade. Pat worried that Brigid would bring another sort of heat.

"Brigid is from the same part of Ireland as your parents, Donegal. She knows some of your relatives. She met your widowed mother in Montreal."

Pat worried that Brigid brought his mother trouble, but now he was more curious than worried. "Why did she leave Ireland in a hurry, Gloria? And why do you know all this? And why is Brigid coming here, really?"

Mary looked at Pat. "My, aren't you a bag of questions!"

"It's only natural. This will be the first person I met in Canada who knows my kin back in Donegal. She met my mother. I'm sure they talked plenty. Imagine hearing such stories about your kin back in England or Ireland, Mary."

"You have a point there. Now I'm keen to meet this woman. All I know about that part of Ireland is what you told me. When I meet Brigid, I will know if you are better or worse than the average person from there. I do deserve the best, my bogside buddy," Mary winked at Pat. “Do you worry that Brigid will tell me things you don’t want me to know?”

“No!” Pat exclaimed. “I have no secrets.”

Gloria looked at the pair. Would she ever have such a strong, trusting bond with someone such each of these had for the other? "You two are marvelous!"

"We know," Pat teased, "and I'll be glad to see Brigid confirm it, in my case. I hope that government agents don't follow her to my front door. I hope Mary is English enough to prevent an Irish uprising in Edmonton."

"Funny man," Mary observed. "I've kept you legal for decades, Pat. Find a funny mate, Gloria, to keep you young. Now, tell us more about our refugee. I came to this country as a refugee in the womb, I suppose. I like Brigid already."

"Brigid and Liam were teaching, and making Gaelic translations of poems, essays, and speeches in French and English," Brigid began. "Liam joined John Connelly's militia in Dublin during the Easter Rising. Padraic Pearse talked Liam into it, over Brigid's loud objections. They knew Pearse since before he founded St. Enda’s School near Dublin. Liam died in the uprising. His death, and the British execution of many republicans, including Pearse, set Brigid and most of the Irish against British rule of Ireland. Their Donegal house became a safe house for Irish Republicans fleeing British soldiers and the Black and Tans. Brigid fled Ireland before the British arrested her for helping the republicans.

"The Black and Tans?” Mary asked.

"The British hired and armed English and Irish people loyal to the king to round up Irish people who oppose British rule in Ireland," Gloria said. "Their pants aree tan like British army pants, and they wear black berets. They burn houses and kill women and children. They might have killed Brigid in her house, and burned it down. She left Ireland none too soon."

"So is she a fugitive? A wanted woman?" Mary asked.

"Not in Canada. Here she's a teacher, or she was a teacher until some powerful Montreal monarchists, some of them Irish, objected to an Irish republican teaching their children. It didn't help that so many educated English and Irish came to Canada during the war, as teachers looking for jobs, and to avoid military service for Britain. So many extra teachers in Montreal made the monarchists connive that only Irish teachers loyal to Britain would get jobs. They got information about Liam and Brigid from the British government, and fired Brigid."

"So the Montreal monarchists embrace people who flee Britain in her hour of need, and they reject someone who stands up for her country?" Mary asked. Pat looked at his clever spouse.

"Exactly, Mary," Gloria confirmed. "Brigid and Liam stood up for the wrong country, in monarchist eyes. One unjust aside in this sordid business is that Brigid opposed the rising. She tried to talk Liam out of joining it. The police state that gripped Ireland after the rising made Brigid republican. Her mistreatment in Montreal strengthened her republicanism. The British made their friend into their enemy."

Mary and Pat looked at each other. Then both looked at Gloria, who continued.

"I convinced Brigid that the monarchists don't rule this part of Canada, so she can probably teach here. She speaks French, as well as English and Irish. Ireland's loss might be Canada's gain," Gloria concluded.

"Perfidious Albion." Pat mumbled. The women looked at him. "Gloria, I want to meet this Brigid Kerr of Donegal."

"I guessed you would. I wanted to meet her as soon as an Irish janitor at the university told me about her," Gloria said. Gloria listened to janitors, unlike many academics, who supposed that rough hands concealed dull minds.

"She'll be here two days after your parents arrive, Mary."

"Isn't Adeline coming for a week, as well, Mary?" Pat asked.

"If she can spare a week. Her hospital is busy with wounded soldiers. She's busy with her internment refugee friend. She got him a job in her hospital. He's an engineer. Thanks for twisting arms in the university and government to get Henry out of that ridiculous internment camp in Lethbridge, Gloria," Mary said.

"I even talked to Premier Rutherford," Gloria said. "He needs engineers in hospitals, not in internment camps. He argued Henry's case to Prime Minister Borden, a smart man for a Conservative. When the government closed the camp, there was at least one less inmate to ship elsewhere."

"I want to meet this engineer tinkering with our daughter's heart," Pat said.

"Me, too," Gloria added.

"If I know Adeline, she'll engineer the engineer," Mary said.

An intersection of generations, and strangers becoming friends, made the fall of 1917 in Edmonton happier and less predictable than the pointless bloodbath in Europe. Opposing soldiers could become friends in peacetime.

Sean and Jennifer stepped off the train across the river in downtown Edmonton, which boasted more buildings and less mud than when Mary got there almost 30 years earlier, by rail, wagon, and ferry. Almost 70, her parents had jaunty steps and twinkling eyes. Mary and Pat met them, Pat for the first time. So long without his own father, now dead and buried back in Pointe St. Charles, Pat would soon treat Sean like a new, old father. Mary was as keen to show all as her mother was to know all. Mary's parents wanted see Elise again, and get to know Pat and the other people mentioned in Mary’s letters.

Perhaps old people can easily talk to one another because they lived long and had many similar experiences, even if they never met before. Perhaps they are less competitive than young people. Jennifer and Sean Evans were old, as were Marie and Emile Boucher, and each couple came from different cultures and places. Even their aches and pains differed. Why then, when Mary, Pat, Elise, and Ray brought Jennifer and Sean to Morinville to meet Elise's parents, did the four old people almost immediately talk like longtime friends?

"I wish Gloria were here to explain this miracle," Mary whispered to Pat, while Elise puzzled similarly, in French, to Ray.

Ray seemed to understand this instant friendliness and trust. Emile and Marie had welcomed him into their home after Elise and he became friends. And Emile and Ray had been on opposite sides at Batoche.

"It's the children," Ray whispered to Elise, whose look became more puzzled. Mary and Pat looked at Ray as if a bird had just flown out of his mouth.

"Huh?" Pat said, desperate to understand Ray's insight.

"Let's leave them alone, and go for a walk," Ray suggested. Elise, Mary, and Pat followed him as if he was about to guide them into a jungle.

"Elise," Ray began, "do you remember when you brought me to meet your parents? How I was? How you were?"

"I thought Papa might shoot you, Ray, because he knew you were in the army against us at Batoche," Elise said.

"I was nervous, but not only about being shot. I had been shot at before, perhaps by him," Ray said. "I was nervous because I had never really known a family, and I wondered if I could fit into one. I grew up bouncing from family to family in Ontario. Then the army became my family, which was crazy. Could I do what was required, whatever that was? I wanted to do whatever was necessary to be with you, Elise.”

"Poor you, Ray," Mary said, “but I still wonder why the old folks get along so well so soon.”

Ray took a breath and continued. "Elise's parents took me in more honestly, and more simply than any family ever had, especially more than the army had.”

Pat's eyes lit up, the same time as the women's eyes lit up.

"Emile and Marie took me in like family. They have long known you two," Ray said, looking at Pat and Mary. To them, I changed from a soldier trying to kill them to a human being trying to impress them enough to give me Elise."

"You certainly did that," Elise interjected. "Do you mean that because my parents have long known Mary, they know her parents better than they would know other old people whose children they don't know? The daughters unify the parents?"

"My smart wife!" Ray concluded.

Mary gazed thoughtfully across the field at the four elders sitting in the August sun outside the Boucher cabin. "I never realized how hard it must have been to grow up without a family, Ray."

"Every day I am grateful for the family I have now, Mary," Ray replied.

"Good thing you didn't shoot us at Batoche, eh, Ray?" Elise quipped.

"I didn't try very hard. I'm glad your side ran out of bullets, Elise," Ray said.

The four, who had known one another for a quarter century, walked back to the two couples who had just met, and seemed happily familiar already.

People, like trees, sometimes produce children, seedlings of themselves. A child grows up and entwines with other children grown up. That link also links the children’s parents. Mary and Elise met, and drew together their lives and their pasts. The two daughters' parents were somewhat united before they even met.

Mary and Pat met a second train in the fall of 1917, this time with Jennifer and Sean on the train station platform. This train brought Adeline and Henry, whom the Lethbridge hospital brass had spared for a week. While armies gathered in Europe for the butchery that would be the battle of Passchendaele, two generations gathered a third into their arms in South Edmonton. Henry, whom Adeline had freed from the internment camp mere weeks before it closed and shipped its other inmates to other camps, followed at a humble distance Adeline and her kin.

"Henry?" Pat asked, looking over Adeline's shoulder.

"Yes, sir," Henry said, offering his hand.

"Henry's nervous," Adeline said after her parents and grandparents released their grip on her. Granny Jennifer let go last. "He had to get a special pass to travel on the train, and there had to be two soldiers in our car all the way."

"They should find useful work for those soldiers, and leave peaceful people alone," Jennifer snapped.

"That's my granny, Jennifer," Adeline said to Henry, who smiled. "And this is my grandpa, Sean, and my mom Mary and my dad Pat. Everybody, this is Heinrich Lida, but you can call him Henry."

Henry gently shook the women's hands and bowed his head curtly at the men. "I am pleased to meet you. I am also nervous. Canada calls me an enemy."

"Correction, Henry," Pat said. "You're an enemy of the government and business fools in Canada and elsewhere, including Germany, who started this war. To me, you're a man. Be square with me and I'll be square with you."

"Henry, you must be a special man to get my Adeline's attention," Mary said.

"I've never met anyone quite like her," Henry confessed.

"The man knows quality," Sean said, harrumphing his whiskered jowls.

"Welcome, Henry," Jennifer said.

The six packed into Pat and Mary's wagon for the ride to Yvonne and George's rooming house, where the two young people got separate rooms. While George and Henry talked of Germany, which George had left decades before, and Henry had left only a few years before, Yvonne wheedled Adeline's medical advice and services for Yvonne's precious grandson Pierre. Adeline needed little wheedling for that or other medical matters in the rooming house. Gisele and Louis were happy for the company.

Gisele and Yvonne pried wedding plans from Adeline. Louis and George offered Henry words of conjugal wisdom, over beer and bratwurst. The first three days flew by.

A couple days later, Adeline and Gisele left Yvonne in charge of the house, men, and little Pierre. The two women joined Gloria and Mary on the train station platform to welcome Brigid to Edmonton. Brigid, about 40, seemed cautious, but that might be from having seen many soldiers since leaving Montreal by train a few days before.

"Brigid?" Gloria asked tentatively.

"Gloria?" Brigid asked back.

"Yes, and here are Mary, her daughter Adeline and our friend Gisele. Welcome to Western Canada, far from King George, the Black and Tans, and Montreal. In this region, women are more free," Gloria said, thinking of her own move from Toronto about 15 years before.

"Music to my ears, Gloria. Pleased to meet you, Mary, Gisele, and Adeline," said Brigid.

"Yes. I have an English granny, but my other three grandparents are Irish," Adeline explained.

"Pleased to meet you, Brigid," Mary said. "Like you, I came to Canada in a hurry, but long ago."

"I want to hear that story, Mary," Brigid said. Then she turned to Gisele, and said in French, "Gisele is a pretty name, good for a pretty woman like you."

Gisele blushed and ground some sand under the ball of her foot. "You speak French! My mother will be glad," she replied in French. "And you're pretty, too," in English, conscious of Mary, Adeline and Gloria, politely confused by the change of language.

Brigid turned toward Adeline and launched into Irish, "Did your people teach you our language?"

Adeline's baffled look was her answer, but never at a loss for words, Adeline said, in English. "My grandpa and my dad speak some Irish. Grandpa and Granny are retired, and they plan to live with me. We're leaving in two days."

"I want to meet them all," Brigid said, "and I'd better be quick about it. People move fast and far in this country."

"Well, Gloria said you are a teacher looking for a job, Brigid," Adeline began. "I live in Lethbridge. It needs teachers."

"You get right to it, don't you, dear?" Brigid said.

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize. I like your spunk."

"Adeline has plenty of spunk,” Gloria said. "Well, Spunk, shall we bring Brigid to Yvonne's?" Gloria asked.

"That's my mama's rooming house," Gisele explained. "Adeline and her grandparents are staying there. We don't have much room for boarders anymore."

"Well, my busy Canadian friends. I'll try to keep up." Brigid hefted her bags into the back of Gloria's shiny black car. "I haven’t ridding in many of these contraptions."

"I haven't lost a passenger yet, Brigid," Gloria said, touching Brigid’s arm to direct her to the front passenger seat. Mary, Gisele, and Adeline got in the back seat. "Edmonton needs teachers, too, as Adeline's mother the teacher will soon tell you."

Brigid gave Gloria a friendly, slow pat on the back. Gloria glanced subtly at her. Mary noticed from the back seat.

As the car rattled northward from the train station, toward the rooming house near the south bank of the river, each woman pondered.

Gloria thought that all wars were a murderous waste of people and theft of resources. Gloria, aquiver after Brigid's slow, friendly pat, hoped she could be for Brigid what Sheila had been for her so many years earlier in Glasgow.

Brigid loved the freedom she already felt here that she had not felt in Montreal. Gloria attracted Brigid as no man ever had. Why do I feel this way toward this woman? Brigid wondered.

Gisele thought of this Irish woman who spoke French, whom Gisele already liked. She predicted that her mom and George would like Brigid, too. Gisele would ask about Liam later. Louis and his dad Emile would want to hear about Liam.

Adeline thought of her and Henry's imminent return to Lethbridge with her grandparents, whom she hoped would enjoy many twilight years there. Gloria, who looked happier than usual today, was a gem for helping free Henry from that stupid camp. Adeline wondered how much Irish her dad and grandpa spoke.

Mary looked at the women around her that summer day in Edmonton. She thought of her mother arriving, pregnant with her, in Canada so many years earlier. Sean, dad to her in ways more important than blood, had welcomed her mother on the Victoria dock. Mary was happy to welcome Brigid on the Edmonton train station platform.

Jennifer Thomas, Mary Evans, and Adeline McCoy were three women from three generations. Each was brave enough to move to distant, strange places. Each transformed strangers into friends, reducing their and others' loneliness, making new lives in an old land.

The End

AFTERWORD

This novel was fun to write. I hope it was fun to read. Perhaps you found it unbelievable, polemical, lacking in literary refinement, historically inaccurate, tedious, pretentious, or other things. Perhaps you see it as a novel that Canada and the world needs: historical, inclusive, socialist, feminist, and other things.

Two historical novel series gave me the idea for this novel, the first of a series. Howard Fast’s “immigrant” novel series, with its United States socialist theme, gave me the idea to write a socialist novel series set in Canada. Mazo de la Roche’s “Jalna” series of generations of a Quebec family reinforced my plan to make early-1900s Canada the setting for my series.

This novel took surprising twists for me as I wrote it. I had no outline other than the radical historical events I wanted to include. I wrote this novel in 2015 and edited it a couple times since then. It could use more editing. Several plot threads continue into the next two novels in this series, which I wrote in 2016 and 2017. In 2018, I plan to write the fourth novel in the series.

I expected this novel to end much later than 1917, but the story was in 1917 when I exceeded 50 000 words. That is the target set by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWrMo), a United States literacy charity that challenges people to write a 50 000-word novel in one month, November. I heard of this charity in the 1990s, when some writers wanted more people to write. Fewer than 30 new writers joined in the first year. A 2013 email from the Edmonton Public Library reminded me of NaNoWrMo. That year, more than 300 000 joined, including me. I wrote the socialist utopia The Red Path. In 2014, I wrote Michael Wynne: My Youth, about my life before I came to the Cariboo Region of Western Canada just before age 30. As noted above, in 2015 I began the historical novel series with this book.

If anyone wanted one of my novels, I would send him or her its Word file for free from my email address, cmcwynne@yahoo.ca.

I also post them on my blog, www.michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/

I expect little fame or fortune from my writing. I write to fill a gap I perceive in Canadian literature, that is a shortage of fiction with a socialist feminist bias that upholds humanism against colonialism. My views come from decades of experience and observation. Authors who influenced me include Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Stanley Brehaut Ryerson, Maria Campbell, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Meridel le Sueur.

Being Canadian, whatever that is, is complex and full of contradictions, in this world, country, and novel. Rejoice in this tension. Respect others' ways to be. Your life, my life, and the lives of our friends and relatives are short compared with the history of our species, itself short in geological time. Consciousness enables us to reflect on ourselves and the cosmos, before we die and revert to the elements that made us. I hope that the thoughts, words, and deeds of this novel's characters entertained and enlightened you, and made you reflect on how best to make your remaining life joyful and useful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Joseph Wynne, born in 1961 in Edson, Canada, is the fourth of five children of the late Joe and Irene (Nasby) Wynne. He graduated from Carleton, Alberta, and McGill Universities in English, Business, and Education respectively. His experience includes mining, newspaper reporting, fur trading, and teaching. Michael, his Indigenous spouse Carla, and their adult daughter Chelsea live in Williams Lake, 500 kilometres north of Vancouver, Canada.

Michael Wynne's Blog

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The Claims of History: Ireland

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Novel: New Lives, Old Lands