The Winter Helen Dropped By - W. Kinsella P.

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taken with a tiny baby with celluloid arms and legs wearing a blue polka-dot dress. That tiny baby had a key in her belly, and when she was wound up she crawled across the floor, making a kind of crying sound just like a real baby. Helen hugged that little baby and she leaned way back in her chair and let the baby climb right up her from her waist to her chin.

      While I had been caught once being totally unobservant, I wasn’t about to get caught a second time, and it was me who pointed out to Mama and Daddy that Helen was pregnant.

      I made sure of my ground before I brought the subject to Mama and Daddy’s attention. I cuddled the little mechanical baby and rocked it in my arms, and looked at Helen, and then I pointed at Helen’s stomach and pointed at the baby, and Helen smiled and pointed at her stomach and pointed at the baby. I had noticed that under all the layers of shirts and overalls that Helen’s belly was round and ripe, and her hips were wide. Just to confirm my opinion I got out a book that had pictures of babies in it, and showed them to Helen. Helen patted her belly and pointed at the picture of the baby, indicating with no possibility of misinterpretation that she was building a baby inside her, though the baby she pointed at was pink as a rose petal, with blue eyes. I wondered what Helen thought of when she dreamed of her baby, I wondered if she dreamed of a blond, blue-eyed baby, pink as a rose petal.

      ‘I do believe you’re right,’ Daddy said, after I pointed out that Helen was pregnant, and Mama also agreed and went and got some of my old baby clothes, and some of the new baby clothes that she had created or acquired during the time she was pregnant with my almost sister, Rosemary. And Helen smiled some more and picked out two pink baby dresses, and a yellow blanket, and put them on top of her dirt-glazed parka so she wouldn’t forget to carry them away when she left.

      Leaving was another matter. The good old freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Alberta blizzard just raged on and on. The snow drifted up until the east window was blocked entirely, and the wind was so strong it blew the chickadees right off the branches of the chokecherry tree outside the west window and bounced them off the glass as they tried to pull the dried fruit off the frozen limbs.

      Helen continued to eat like she’d never had home-cooked food before, while Mama taught her to wash dishes and set the table and empty the ashes from the cook stove, and, Mama said, Helen caught on quick.

      I took to reading to Helen from story books I had outgrown. I read her nursery rhymes and Mother Goose stories, showing her the pictures at the same time, and even if Helen didn’t understand the words she was able to catch the rhythms, and she clapped her hands when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed and blew down the houses of the three little pigs. And Helen pointed at the little pigs and she pointed at Abigail Uppington, and I clapped my hands and Helen reached right over and put her arms around me and hugged me.

      Helen particularly liked the rhyme about the three little kittens who lost their mittens, and she had me read that one over and over until I got plumb tired of it, and Daddy said now I knew what I had been like as a little kid and how he and Mama had read those books to me until they were engraved in their brains. The three little kittens rhyme ends with ‘There’ll be rat pie for supper tonight,’ and there was a picture of an ordinary-looking pie but for a rat’s tail sticking out of it. Helen, whenever we got to that part, would cover her mouth and shake her head. I tried to explain that the rat pie was for cats and not for humans, but I’m not sure Helen ever understood.

      ‘Can’t we keep her?’ I asked Mama. ‘She likes it here and she ain’t no trouble, and she’ll catch on to talking in a few days.’

      ‘Helen ain’t a pet,’ Mama said. ‘She’ll likely want to get on home soon as the blizzard lets up.’

      Which she did. But not before she said her first words. At supper on the third night we had apple pie. Mama had me go to the cellar and get a quart of preserved apples and she hammered out a crust and placed this big apple pie on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table right after we’d finished a feed of side pork and eggs.

      ‘Rat pie!’ I announced.

      And for just one instant Helen believed me. She had her hand halfway to her mouth when she realized I was teasing, and she smiled and shook her head, and then she said ‘rat pie,’ and pointed at the pie and laughed like a little girl.

      ‘Helen talked,’ I said.

      ‘Indeed she did,’ said Mama. We all raised our cups to Helen and said ‘Rat pie,’ and laughed like maniacs.

      ‘In the middle of a blizzard people tend to be amused by relatively simple things,’ Daddy said.

      I know Helen would have been talking with us like a regular person in just a few more days, but late that evening the blizzard died down, and deep in the night a chinook swept in, and by morning the powder-dry snow was soggy and the air was warm and moist, and Daddy said he guessed it had gone from -40° to almost 40° above.

      Helen had her parka on when she sat down to breakfast and we could tell she was anxious to get to wherever she was going. Mama packed her a big lunch with four meat sandwiches and a quarter of an apple pie, and Mama packed up a whole bundle more baby clothes and forced them on Helen. I gave Helen my picture book with the story of the three little kittens, and said ‘rat pie,’ as I gave it to her, and Helen said ‘rat pie,’ as she accepted it. And we all laughed like maniacs.

      Daddy and me and Benito Mussolini, my cowardly dog, all walked Helen as far as the barn, where Daddy sent me in to pick up another gift for Helen, which she accepted, and Daddy shook her hand and I hugged her, and she went on her way. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t keep big tears from rolling down my cheeks.

      ‘I know about how you feel,’ Daddy said. ‘You’ve had your first taste of being a parent. In spite of Helen being an adult, expecting a baby of her own, she was out of place and more or less helpless while she was with us. It’s awful easy to love someone who’s helpless.’

       Chapter Two

      The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was not named for one specific event, but for several, unlike the summer following the winter Helen dropped by, which was forever after known as the summer Jamie O’Day damn near drowned except in our family where it was simply the summer Jamie damn near drowned, though the season really was spring and there was ice in the water I damn near drowned in.

      The summer before the winter Helen dropped by was known in some circles as the summer Earl J. Rasmussen and the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, officially tied the knot, and then officially retied it in a reconstituted wedding, and in other circles as the summer my daddy took on the bureaucracy to straighten out the life of Lousy Louise Kortgaard.

      Both of those events had their beginnings, I believe, at the Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day at Doreen Beach, it being the turn of Doreen Beach to host the annual Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day, Fark having hosted it the year before, and Sangudo being scheduled to host it the next summer. The Fourth of July Picnic and Sports Day was the high point of the social season in the Six Towns Area, a fact often pointed out by the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, our poet-in-residence, and Mrs. Edytha Rasmussen Bozniak who, as Mama frequently said, was lurking in the wings waiting to become the person of artistic integrity in the Six Towns Area, should the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, ever falter. Mama said marriage to Earl J. Rasmussen, who lived alone in the hills with about six hundred sheep, would be considered by many to be faltering.

      The Fourth of July, while admittedly an American holiday, was what was celebrated in the Six Towns Area of Alberta. The first of July was celebrated in Canada as Dominion Day, but, Daddy pointed out, and so did people like Earl J. Rasmussen and Bandy Wicker, both of whom had emigrated from the United States, and Wasyl Lakusta and Deaf Danielson and Adolph Badke, who had emigrated respectively from Ukraine, Norway, and Germany, that everyone had come to Canada to be free, which they were, but they resented that Canada wasn’t really an independent country, and each and every one of them resented that the King of England was officially the head of state in Canada, and that Canadians sang ‘God Save the

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