The Age of Water Lilies (7 page)

“It's the Chinese lady, miss. She's been bitten by a snake! I'm going to Flowerdews to see if the doctor is at lunch there.”

Flora let him continue on and she called Mary from the kitchen.

“What can we do, Mary? Do you have any experience with snakebite?”

“Put the kettle on the hot part of the stove, Missus,” she said and ran down to the path by the river. She snapped some sticks from a young maple growing there and rushed back.

“This is good but depends on how bad the bite.” She was putting the sticks into an iron pot and covering them with hot water from the kettle. “I'll let it steep for a few minutes and then we can go.”

Standing on the veranda, Flora could see several people on their way down the orchards. Was the doctor among them? She couldn't tell. He was a man who liked his drink, and she hoped he hadn't begun on the many glasses of port he liked as an accompaniment to lunch. He wasn't a young man either and was semi-retired; most people chose to go to Ashcroft or even Kamloops for medical care.

Mary soon appeared with a basket on her arm. She and Flora walked as quickly as they could to where a small crowd was gathered around the moaning form of May Lee on the newly hoed earth of a potato bed. Someone had cut the lower part of May's skirt and had used some of the cloth as a makeshift tourniquet on her upper calf.

“It was a rattlesnake,” a man whispered to Flora. “Evidently she was hoeing close to the rocks on the edge of the potatoes and it struck her hard on the leg.”

Flora could see where the fangs had punctured the skin. The bare feet—for someone had removed her black cloth shoes—looked unbearably fragile, side by side on the dry earth. No one should have been looking at those bare calves and knees, pale and smooth, apart from a young husband. Already there were blotchy red patches all over May's lower leg, beginning to reach up past the tourniquet. Mary took out a flask from her basket and soaked a clean flannel with the tea of maple sticks she had made in that moment of quick-witted attention while Flora had wrung her hands and wondered what on earth might be done. Gently pushing Song Lee away from his wife, Mary applied the cloth to the punctured skin, pressing while May tossed her head and cried out. Flora knelt down with her and began to wipe May's forehead with another flannel. Her skin was clammy and cold. She was moaning and shuddering and she had vomited. Flora cleaned her face. She murmured reassuring words, but it seemed that May was beyond hearing, her eyes fearful and her pulse, or what Flora thought must be her pulse, a slow and distant measure against her finger as she held May's wrist. Flora gently laid her hand on May's abdomen and felt the briefest of fluttering, a butterfly on milkweed.

“Is the doctor coming?” she asked one of the bystanders. “And has someone asked that a car be available to take May to Kamloops?”

“He had to go to his house for his bag,” was the answer. A car was in fact on its way. And then the doctor was there, puffing and brisk, his face flushed. Others were arriving too, Gus among them.

“Well, then. Snakebite, eh? Let's see what I have for that.” The doctor reached into a battered leather bag and brought out a vial and a case that he fumbled open. A glass and steel hypodermic syringe lay in a bed of blue silk. He pushed Mary aside and bent down, wheezing with effort. He was very red.

“Calmette's serum,” he announced to the group, as he filled the syringe from the vial. “It's an anti-venom for snakebite. We used it in India. Terrible snakes there.”

He injected the serum into May's arm and, untangling a stethoscope from the bag, he listened to her heart, breathing heavily as he did so. He looked up.

“This young woman is in serious trouble. Has someone sent for . . . Ah, here it is. I will accompany her of course.”

A car had arrived. Several men lifted May from the ground and arranged her in the back, where the doctor found room for himself. He located a respiration mask in his bag and fitted it over her face, pumping its bulb as the car pulled away. There had been no gesture to poor Song, who stood watching the vehicle leave with his wife inside, his hands helpless at his sides. He followed slowly on foot, uttering a single cry as the car disappeared over the bridge and up the hill to the main road to Kamloops.

Mary was putting the lid back on the flask and the others were leaving to return to the community. Flora felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Gus.

“What an awful thing for Song. Why couldn't they take him along?” she asked him.

“Well, at least
she
was taken,” he replied. “I've been present when medical attention has been refused to Chinese workers because no one believed they could pay. But I have to say that this doesn't look good for May. Calmette's serum won't work for this.”

“What do you mean? He said it was for snakebite and surely that was what bit her. Look, they've killed the snake. There it is, right there!” She pointed to a big rattlesnake, its head sliced off with a hoe, left on the side of the potato bed. Flies had already found it.

“Oh, yes, I believe that snake struck her. But Calmette's serum was devised for cobra venom. I know from my father that it is useless against rattlers. What Mary prepared will sometimes work. Later in the year, a poultice of baneberry might have been more effective, but there're no berries on the plants yet. We'll just have to hope that they get her to Kamloops in time for treatment. Dr. Aspern is a bit past his prime, I'd say, and the port has befuddled what sense he might once have had.”

“He did have his case and came quite quickly,” said Flora in defence of the old doctor. He had once been kind to her when she had been laid low with a fever.

“But he has no idea where he is, Flora. Surely that is evident? A medical man who doesn't know that snakes from the Far East are not the same as those in British Columbia? Or who seems unaware of the knowledge of people like Mary who live here and have some sense of how plants have medicinal value? I'm surprised, though relieved, that he didn't pull out a kit to cup and bleed poor May. It confounds me beyond belief that people have so little interest or knowledge of the actual place where they live. In India, I'm sure his feeling was that it ought to be more like England and that would suit everyone and solve the dreadful problems created by the natives. He is like something out of
Punch
.”

May did not return to Walhachin. She was dead by the time the car arrived in Kamloops. Arrangements were made for her body to be returned by train to Vancouver, for her family to bury her in their own way. Song went down to the city for a week and then returned to work. Flora wondered about the child. It had died with May of course, but had it been mourned as its mother must have been mourned by her family in Vancouver?

Flora took Song flowers. She had been told that white was the colour for Chinese funerals so she made a bouquet of yarrow and traveller's joy, long tendrils of it, along with pearly everlastings, daisies, and a few pale asters. Song's eyes were as sad as anything she'd ever seen; he carried the flowers into the shack and then returned with four brown eggs, wrapped in a bit of newspaper with Chinese characters on it. On the wooden box where he had been sitting, she saw a little bamboo flute. Some nights Flora would rest on the veranda, eager for a little of the cool air off the river, and she would hear quavery notes coming from the direction of Song's shack. It was lonely music, a series of longing phrases but no response.

SIX

October 1913

George was away in the Okanagan, looking at orchards and talking to their owners now that the main harvest was over. He had been reluctant to leave Flora unchaperoned, but she insisted he go.

“Whatever could happen to me here with the community at hand?” she asked him. “I will draw and perhaps bottle some applesauce. If I ask her, Mary will stay overnight, in the box room behind the kitchen, though I can't think why I'd need her to.”

And so he left, catching a ride with another orchardist. After his departure, Flora let it be known that she herself was going away for a few days. To Vancouver, someone suggested, and she didn't correct that impression. She packed her small valise. She was given a ride to Pennies and then left to wait for the train, which was due within the hour. As the car disappeared down the road towards Ashcroft, Gus appeared on Flight, leading his gentle gelding, Agate. Under her travelling skirt, Flora was wearing her jodhpurs, so she removed the skirt and folded it into her valise, which held only her nightdress, an extra blouse, and a sponge bag of toiletries.

“I can't believe I'm doing this,” she confessed to Gus as she mounted Agate after tying her bag in among the saddlebags.

He smiled and released the reins he'd been holding while she arranged herself in the saddle. “I don't know when I've looked forward to something as much as this,” he replied. “Now let's be off before the train comes and you're spotted from the window by a matron from Kamloops.”

They touched their heels to their horses' sides and were off at a lope, up a trail along the flume and over the hill by the time the train slowed down for Pennies. Luckily it stopped to drop off freight so that anyone listening would think that Flora had boarded. Out of sight of the bench and its community, Flora felt hugely, wildly free. She removed her gloves and tucked them into one bag and flexed her fingers on the smooth leather of the reins.

Gus had asked to use the cabin that Agrippa's parents wintered in, up in the Back Valley. Over the summer he had become very friendly with Agrippa and had gone hunting with him earlier in the fall. The men stayed in the cabin then. Gus told Flora about its placement on a little lake, saying they'd fish for trout and walk barefoot in the sweet grass. To get there, the pair rode for a good part of the day, through grasslands, then aspen forests, the turning leaves trembling on their stems; finally they went up into higher country where the air already smelled of approaching winter, though it was still warm. Gus called it “flinty,” a tang of rock in icy water, and noted the frost-damaged wildflowers they passed along the way. The cabin was waiting, its lake fringed with reeds and bulrushes where the remnants of blackbird nests clung to the tall stalks. Tattered leaves of water lilies floated on the lake's surface like saucers, stung by dragonflies. A loon watched from the opposite side, curious at the sight of horses.

“How beautiful this is!” Flora exclaimed as she helped unpack the gear. All around the cabin, tall grasses grew in soft abundance. Gus removed saddles and bridles from the horses and turned them out into a corral of peeled poles. They immediately began to graze on grass as high as their bellies, their tails fanning their rumps for flies. A small shelter stood at the far end of the corral. Above the low door of the cabin, a rack of moose antlers reached out to embrace those entering. Flora touched the surface, surprised at the granular texture.

Inside, the cabin was dark and smelled of mice. A startled bat flew out the door at the interruption of its sleep. Gus opened the shutters—there was no glass in the openings but screens of frayed mesh—and brushed mouse droppings from the table. There was a stack of pitchy pine by the stove, and he'd brought a few sheets of newspaper in a saddlebag for lighting the first fire. With the windows open and fresh air coming in, the place felt quite welcoming. Flora quickly picked a bouquet of willow boughs and a single yellow aster to place in a tobacco tin in the centre of the rough table.

The cabin consisted of a single room with pole beds built into two walls. There were no mattresses. Gus explained that fresh fir boughs were collected each winter, providing not only comfort but also some control against bugs. The table, the stove, some shelves, a screened cupboard with lard tins for flour and other staples, two benches and one comfortable chair made of woven sinew with a cushion sewn of calico filled with yarrow—when Flora sat on it to test its comfort, there was a sharp clean odour that did something to dispel scent of mice. Snowshoes hung from the rafters and a box of tools sat on the small porch, its handle gnawed by porcupines.

How little is needed, thought Flora, thinking of the busy enterprise that was Watermeadows. Or Walhachin, for that matter, with the accumulation of farm equipment, the regular deliveries of every manner of house furnishings, dishes, even a set of Meissen coming from a family home in England, arriving in a tea chest, the delicate items packed in paper, then nestled in straw like precious eggs. Panes of window glass necessitated regular cleaning, and curtains to keep out the night. And water lily roots packed in a vasculum with their promise of the familiar.

“I am going to cut some fir boughs. Why don't you take a bucket to the lake for some water? Then we could have a cup of tea,” suggested Gus. So Flora walked to the lake and dipped the bucket in, filling the kettle when she returned and setting the bucket by the door. By now the fire was burning well, the stove pipe creaking as it adjusted to the heat. The incense of burning pine was lovely in the cooler air of the high valley.

Gus came into the cabin with an armload of sweet-smelling fir boughs and piled them onto one of the pole beds. He showed Flora the bear skin on an exterior wall of the cabin, the side they hadn't yet investigated. The animal's feet were nailed to the logs, its head was supported by a hook, and the skin covered almost the entire surface of the wall. Flora had not expected to touch a bear in her life. She marvelled at the coarse hair, the dry nose. She took the tea things out to the porch, and they drank from tin mugs while the loon swam back and forth as if to inspect them from all possible angles.

Flora knew from Mary that Agrippa's parents still spent every winter in the Back Valley, living in the old way, though even cabins as rustic as this one weren't used until recently. Gus pointed out a depression possibly twenty feet across, on the shore of the lake, and explained that it was the site of a kekuli or pit house. Poles would be erected to hold a roof of sod and boughs, and access would be by ladder through an opening in the centre of the roof where smoke also exited. Flora tried to imagine people coming up through the hole in the roof, out of the darkness and into daylight like this, the sound of grasshoppers and water lapping against the pebbles drawing them forth. Though maybe by the time of year when grasshoppers could be heard, the families would be living in the tule lodges Gus also described, sleeping in airy rooms created by bulrushes.