The Winter Helen Dropped By. W. Kinsella P.

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      Contents

       Title Page

      Copyright

      SECTION ONE: Rat Pie and Fireworks

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      SECTION TWO: Rosemary’s Winter

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

       SECTION THREE: The Reconstituted Wedding

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

       SECTION FOUR: The Summer Jamie Damn Near Drowned

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

       Also by the W.P. Kinsella

       About the Publisher

       Chapter One

      ‘Every story,’ Daddy said, ‘is about sex or death, or sometimes both.’

      ‘What about your baseball stories?’ said I, thinking myself more than passing clever.

      ‘You know what the word phallic means?’ my daddy asked.

      ‘Nope,’ said I, feeling less clever than I had a moment before.

      ‘Well, y’all come back when you do, and we’ll discuss my pronouncement further. No, on second thoughts,’ Daddy said, ‘by the time you understand the word you’ll understand the implication.’

      ‘Is it something like the women talking about Flop Skaalrud’s blatant male aura, when they think no one is listening in?’ said I, once again feeling passing clever.

      ‘It is indeed,’ said my daddy. Then after a pause, during which he scratched his mop of black curls, ‘So that’s what they talk about when they think no one is listening in. Your mama and I will have to discuss that matter.’

      ‘Don’t tell her you heard it from me.’

      ‘Your secret is safe,’ said Daddy, giving me a large wink.

      The area of Alberta where I grew up and spent almost the first eleven years of my life was known as the Six Towns Area. While the town we lived closest to was known as Fark, Fark wasn’t big enough to be a town, consisting of only a general store and a community hall and hardly big enough to be called a hamlet. We lived on a farm sixty miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, a distance that in the early 1940s might as well have been six thousand miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, because travel was, as they say in polite society, somewhat restricted.

      Only three families in the Six Towns Area owned automobiles, and only three families in the Six Towns Area had telephones, a situation that limited not only travel but communication as well.

      None of the families who owned automobiles (though actually only two families owned automobiles; the third owned a dump truck), and not one of the families that had a telephone was our family, the O’Days.

      One of the families with a telephone was Curly and Gunhilda McClintock, who, in the process of letting their inherited eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing go to rack and ruin, also allowed their telephone service to be cut off, so while they technically had a telephone, the Telephone Company being too lazy or economy-minded to travel the forty miles from Stony Plain to collect it, that telephone was, my daddy said, dead as Billy-be-damned. I never was too sure who Billy-be-damned was.

      Because of a lack of travel and a lack of communication, time didn’t mean a whole lot in the Six Towns Area. Daddy claimed he once arrived at Flop Skaalrud’s to find Flop holding a piglet up in the air, the piglet eating crabapples off a tree.

      ‘Don’t feedin’ him like that take up a lot of time?’ Daddy asked.

      Flop Skaalrud looked at him СКАЧАТЬ