In the early afternoon, they hop a southbound freight on the third track from the road. It’s a local, creeping slow under long, feathery clouds that bounce light like hammered copper. Everett chews up the dandelion greens that he pulled near the tracks and feeds the sludgy paste to Pod with his fingers, who accepts it, if unenthusiastically.
With the baby tied upright to his front, Everett jumps off at the Estevan water tower and veers south. Since he related to Pod the story of his boyhood back on the train, she’s been babbling gibberish almost non-stop, and as he walks, she makes a series of long puffing sounds, almost like her own impersonation of a steam boiler.
The August sun gnaws his skin, and sweat slicks his neck as an exhausted darkness teases the edges of his vision. After a few hours of walking they come across an irrigation ditch, where a snapping wind kicks up more dust that pastes his mouth and cakes his eyeballs; Pod begins to cry and thrash her head to avoid it. While he’d like to tell her that things will get better, that soon they’ll find her a decent home, or at very least a mouthful of water, he can’t credibly bring the words to his lips. Then a figure wiring a fence to some timber posts materializes through the haze.
“That’s far enough,” the woman calls out when she sights him.
Everett stops. Pod pumps her legs impatiently for him to keep walking.
The woman pockets her pliers and saunters in his direction before pausing twenty feet away. Through sun-fired dust he makes out her work-built shoulders, her clothes pasted against her by the coursing wind. Her auburn hair is pinned up and she has a kerchief tied over nose and mouth.
“Came in on the ten o’clock?” she calls out, visoring her eyes with her hand. Given her directness and the rooted manner in which she stands upon the ground, Everett is certain she owns it. And anyone living this close to the line can probably set a watch by the whistles.
“That’s right,” he says.
“From the east? Before that?” She tugs down her kerchief. A rosebud of a mouth. A handsome nose. Eyes blue as fresh ink.
“I’m in need of a meal and some work. I was told I could find that here.”
“And what’s that you’ve got against you?” she asks.
He looks down at Pod against his chest, her chubby legs swinging in lazy circles as she squints into the amber shimmer. “An infant, ma’am,” he admits.
“It wouldn’t be a girl infant, would it?” she asks.
“It would,” Everett says, impressed that the woman can gauge such a thing at a distance.
Now her hands go to her hips and she turns her head and rests her chin on her shoulder for a long moment. Over the wind’s moan, Everett hears a curse escape her. She’s a hair taller than him, wearing a man’s box-toe boots, a broadcloth shirt, and canvas trousers. He lowers his gaze. He doesn’t know if it’s thirst or hunger, but already he’s drunk in the sight of her to the precipice of wooziness.
“Unfortunately, I’ve already got more farmhands than I got farm,” she says. “As you can see, it isn’t exactly a boom year. Besides, it’s not my regular practice to take in infants.”
“I understand that,” he says, too exhausted to argue. The thought of trudging back to the tracks nearly shatters him right there. “We’re sorry to bother you.” He turns and prepares to plunge back into the cloud.
“The rails are that way,” she calls out, pointing in the other direction.
“Thank you,” he says, turning his feet to correct his bearing.
“The dust may get worse as the day wears on and the wind really finds its legs,” she says as he’s again about to start off. “You’d best keep the sun to your right. And go quickly before it shifts on you.”
“I appreciate it,” he says.
“And keep a rag over her face or she’ll develop a cough,” she adds after he’s taken his first step.
Her interest in the child’s welfare is cause for some optimism, so Everett decides to risk a proposition. “Forgive me for mentioning it,” he says. “But it seems to me that your field could do with some trees for a windbreak. Maples are best. Five-foot spacing. Maybe a hundred trees. They’ll come up quick. And in just a few years they’ll do you some real good. I’d be happy to put them in for you along the lot line, if you’re interested. I know trees as well as anyone.”
She nods. Holds his eyes. In the time she’s been standing there, the drifting dust has nearly buried both her boots.
“You two are thirsty and hungry, I suppose?” she says.
“We’ve missed some meals,” he says. At the mention of food his knees nearly buckle.
She mutters under her breath again and glances around, almost as though she’s ensuring no one is observing them, then looks back at him. Her brow furrows, deep-creased like tilled soil—a field herself. “Just until we get some trees in,” she says, waving them onward, yet still walking twenty feet ahead. “Then you’re on your way.”
After following her for a while, he sees a farm appear as if conjured from the dust. “Half of the men up there are either sick or consumptive,” the woman calls back while gesturing to the barn’s loft. “So you and your baby can take the spare room in the house. I don’t want your little one catching anything.”
She escorts them into the house, where cloth is tied over all the doorknobs to prevent static shocks from the arid air. The large, linoleum-floored kitchen reminds Everett of the army: everything oversized, a colossus of a wood-fired range with six cookplates, a set of huge skillets, and great enamelled pans and roasters—all capable of tremendous output.
She introduces him to the cook, an elderly woman named Gertie with a pinched mouth and a kind yet terse demeanour, who shows them to the spare bedroom. While Everett is unbinding Pod from his chest, Gertie fetches water from the cistern in the cellar and fills the basin. The water is unexpectedly sweet and clear, and before bathing Pod, Everett lets her drink, then gorges himself until his gut pouts over his buckle. While he floats Pod in the basin—her green eyes bright, her lashes jewelled with drops—Gertie returns and begins pinning bedsheets up over the windows.
“There’s no need for all that,” Everett says. “She can sleep in broad daylight if need be.”
“Miss Temple insisted,” Gertie says through the pins in her mouth. “It’s for the dust. You should wet the sheets before putting her down. Dr. Stone said some youngsters in Estevan have caught the dust cough so bad they’re snapping their own ribs. Normally, we don’t accept little ones here. But Miss Temple is making an exception in your case.”
“We won’t be staying long,” he says.
“You’re putting in some trees. That right?”
“Yes,” he says, swirling Pod in the wash water, which has already gone a turbid grey with her grime.
“And then you’ll move along,” she adds while she pins the last sheet, more as a statement than a question.
“That’s right,” Everett says.
“Good,” she says while briskly making her way to the kitchen. “The other men will get jealous with you bunking here in the house and not out in the barn. And a jealous man is a stupid man, in my experience.”