By supper’s end Ruth and Lee decided that they’d load the Justy onto a trailer and hook it up to their new work truck, and in the morning Aaron and I would drive it into Prince Albert, forty miles away, to the nearest repair shop. We protested, reluctant to accept that level of generosity. Our hesitation introduced an element of mistrust, and felt more rude than polite, but they understood. It was decided that Aaron and Lee would ride together into Prince Albert in the morning, and Ruth laid out the rest of the terms: We would sleep in her guest bedroom. I would cook the meals while I was there, and when Aaron got back, he would help Richard and a tall Swedish guy named Dean insulate their new potato barn.
The next day when I walked to the barn to deliver the afternoon cake, the three of them were standing up high on twenty-foot scaffolding near the airless ceiling of the hot barn. Aaron’s arms that night were sticky, the insulation particles clinging to his arm hair like dust to a fly leg. Seemed I had drawn the better chore stick.
There were five daily meals on the farm: breakfast, morning coffee and cake, noon dinner, afternoon coffee and cake, and supper. Everything was homemade, nothing store-bought. But when Ruth made the rolls, she used instant yeast, and they rose so fast sitting on the warm woodstove that you could almost watch them inflate. She didn’t cook in her squat central woodstove anymore—she used her electric range—but she did use it for burning her small batches of daily paper garbage, which we fed into the stove by lifting a flat burner with a hooked iron rod.
“Twice a week,” she informed me, “Richard’s wife, Linda, brings the lunches and field snacks.” Richard and Linda and their two boys lived on the adjoining eighty acres, in a white rambler nearly identical to Ruth’s. Already loyal to our benefactress, I thought to myself that with Ruth running the farm, maybe her daughter-in-law should have been taking on more of the cooking.
The first day I put on one of her aprons and opened every cupboard and drawer, and then opened them all again, thinking that if I was to be as efficient as Ruth, I should try to memorize the lay of the land. I set about making myself useful.
I fried the breakfast sausage in her electric skillet set up on the flat cast-iron surface of the woodstove, as Ruth did, and then fried the sliced potatoes in the grease until they were brown and crispy. I made the toast, stuck a spoon into the jar of her homemade strawberry freezer jam, and set it all on the table. Then I made the rolls and a gingerbread sheet cake for the morning snack and poured two pots of coffee into her large metal thermos. Lunch, what they called dinner, was more elaborate: one day, thin pork chops, from their neighbor’s hog, dusted with flour and quickly fried to crackling brown at the edges, the next day chicken and dumplings, and always a side dish or two of plain boiled and buttered vegetables from the garden—beets, beans, zucchini. The food was simple but honest. I gained an appreciation for the natural sweetness of carrots, dug from the garden, scrubbed but not peeled, sliced into coins, boiled in water, and heavily buttered. I learned to give my meal a sweet takeaway, as farmers did, a slice of homemade bread thickly iced with butter and jam to taste like cake.
The strange paradox of farming dictates that the people whose lives revolve around the production of food don’t always have time to linger with it on their own tables—they had no time to idolize it. Like the cycles of growing, the table here spun its revolutions, but at a higher speed.
After I finished the lunch dishes, Ruth would pick me up at the porch and take me with her on her chores. I sat behind her on the four-wheeler as she raced like a teenager over the rutted fields, looking for mounds into which she could inject an enormous plunger of mole poison. She took me with her to the grocery store, where she introduced me to others as part of a duo who had “broken down in my yard, but are staying awhile.” I sat next to her in the enclosed cab of the two-story tractor, harrowing the fields, which looked like dragging a wide rake over the tops of the rows as far as I could tell. Sitting next to her in the quiet cab, she asked me when Aaron and I had gotten married. When I told her we weren’t, I knew she was thinking of our cohabitation in her guest room, but she just looked to the horizon and said, “You will.”
The days were swollen with work, which oddly made the evenings more buoyant. I shuffled around her living room’s linoleum floor in borrowed crocheted slippers, fell into the deep sofa, and felt as at-home as I would at a family holiday. A tall bouquet of yellow wheat sat on top of her wood-consoled TV, its dried-out strands reminding me of the husks of palm sprays my grandma kept on her living room wall. Aaron was deeply immersed in the hardbound history of the township, and he kept Ruth talking long past her usual bedtime, trying to get to the nut of what powered the people of this community to settle there, way up north in the flatlands of Saskatchewan. In the book she found a picture of their first house, a primitive-looking straight-log cabin, and told us how in the early days of their marriage she scrubbed the rough wood floorboards with a brush until they shone. I thought of the rough-hewn floorboards in our own house and momentarily flirted with the idea of getting down on my hands and knees to scour them. I imagined doing this in the winter, as she had, with the heat from the woodstove toasting the tops of the boards and the thick arctic humors floating up from the cracks between them.
Toward the end of the week, Richard came over for dinner at Ruth’s with his two kids, but without Linda. As I cleared away the table, Richard pulled a fiddle out of its case and Aaron took out his small traveling guitar. The kitchen band struck it up, the sound pinging cleanly off all the hard surfaces—the linoleum counters and floors, the flat top of the woodstove, the paneled walls. Aaron sang, “She had golden memories of home…of her grandfather’s ooooold homestead…she went all the way to Ponsford on the prairie…cause that’s where her grandfather lived…” The sound had the telltale metallic echo of the 1400 AM radio station, both faraway and really close at the same time, acoustics that only a cavernous farm kitchen can create. Ruth sat at her kitchen table in a zip-up robe, tapping her soft slipper against the linoleum, cutting coupons out of the local paper with a pair of heavy silver scissors.
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By the ninth day, we felt the need to make a move—or just move in with Ruth permanently. The Justy was a lost cause. Its experimental brush transmission hadn’t been up to a three-thousand-mile jaunt into Canada. We gave the car to Lee for parts. I called up my brother Bob, who was working for a car rental company down in Minneapolis, and he was able to pull some strings to allow us to rent a car in Canada, which, because we lacked a major credit card between us, we’d previously been unable to do. We posed for photos in front of the rental truck and then we took the main roads straight down to Winnipeg, this time not stopping at any off-highway towns, running over the details of our unexpected adventure the whole way home.
A few minutes after arriving in Two Inlets, I dialed Ruth’s number back in Saskatchewan. It was six-thirty. She would be in for supper by then.
“Ruth!” I said breathlessly, when she answered. “It’s Amy! We made it home!”