A Beauty

COPYRIGHT
© 2015
BY
C
ONNIE
G
AULT

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

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

ISBN: 978-0-7710-3655-2
ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-3656-9

Frontispiece image: © Taiga |
Dreamstime.com
Cover design: Kelly Hill
Cover image: © Jean-Marc Valladier | Moment | Getty Images

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

McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v3.1

1

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

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

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

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

“I take after my mother,” she said.

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

“Boundless? What does that mean?”

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

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

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

“Look,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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