Sea of Tranquility(2)

“Six months,” Reginald repeats at breakfast, not quite believing it. He stops spreading jam on his toast for a moment, seemingly unsure if he heard correctly. “Six months? Six months here.”

“Yes,” Edwin says lightly. “Six very agreeable months, I might add.” He tries to catch Mrs. Donnelly’s eye, but she’s focusing intently on pouring tea. She thinks he’s a little touched, he can tell.

“Interesting.” Reginald spreads jam on his toast. “I don’t suppose we’re hoping to be called home, are we? Clinging to the edge of the Atlantic, staying as close as we can to king and country?”



* * *



—

This stings a little, so when Reginald lights out for the west the following week, Edwin accepts an invitation to join him. There’s pleasure in action, he decides, as the train leaves the city. They’ve booked first-class passage on a delightful train that features an onboard post office and barbershop, where Edwin writes a postcard to Gilbert and enjoys a hot shave and a haircut while watching the forests and lakes and small towns slip past the windows. When the train stops at Ottawa he doesn’t disembark, just stays on board, sketching the lines of the station.



* * *



—

The forests and lakes and small towns subside into plains. The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed.



* * *



—

“This is the life,” Reginald says, when at last they arrive, standing in the doorway of his new farmhouse. The farm is a few miles outside Prince Albert. It is a sea of mud. Reginald purchased it, sight unseen, from a disconsolate Englishman in his late twenties—another remittance man, Edwin can’t help but suspect—who’s thoroughly failed to make a go of it here and is headed back east to take a desk job in Ottawa. Reginald is very carefully not thinking about this man, Edwin can see that.



* * *



—

Can a house be haunted by failure? When Edwin steps through the door of the farmhouse, he feels immediately ill at ease, so he lingers out on the front porch. It’s a well-built house—the previous owner was well-funded once—but the place is unhappy in a way that Edwin can’t entirely explain.



* * *



—

“There’s…a lot of sky here, isn’t there?” Edwin ventures. And a lot of mud. Really an astonishing amount of mud. It glitters under the sun as far as he can see.

“Just wide-open spaces and fresh air,” Reginald says, gazing out at the horrifically featureless horizon. Edwin can see another farmhouse, far away, hazy with distance. The sky is aggressively blue. That night they dine on buttered eggs—the only thing Reginald knows how to cook—and salt pork. Reginald seems subdued.

“I suppose it’s quite hard work, farming?” he says, after a while. “Physically taxing.”

“I suppose so.” When Edwin imagined himself in the new world, he always saw himself in his own farm—a verdant landscape of, well, of some unspecified crop, tidy but also vast—but in truth he never thought much about what the work of farming might actually entail. Taking care of horses, he supposes. Doing a bit of gardening. Digging up fields. But then what? What do you actually do with the fields, once you’ve dug them up? What are you digging for?

He feels himself teetering on the edge of an abyss. “Reginald, my old friend,” he says, “what does a fellow have to do to get a drink around here?”



* * *



—

“You reap,” Edwin says to himself, on his third glass. “That’s the word for it. You dig up the fields, you sow things in the fields, then you reap.” He sips his drink.

“You reap what?” Reginald has a pleasant way about him when he’s drunk, as if nothing could possibly offend him. He’s been leaning back in his chair, smiling into the empty air.

“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it,” Edwin says, and pours himself another glass.





3


After a month of drinking, Edwin leaves Reginald on his new farm and continues west to meet up with his brother Niall’s school friend Thomas, who entered the continent via New York City and sped west immediately. The train through the Rocky Mountains takes Edwin’s breath away. He presses his forehead to the window, like a child, and openly gapes. The beauty is overwhelming. He maybe took the drinking a little far, back in Saskatchewan. He’ll be a better man in British Columbia, he decides. The sunlight hurts his eyes.



* * *



—

After all that wild splendor, it’s an odd jolt to find himself in Victoria, in those tamed and pretty streets. There are Englishmen everywhere; he steps out of the train and the accents of his homeland surround him. He could stay here for a while, he thinks.



* * *



—

Edwin finds Thomas in a tidy little hotel in the city center, where Thomas has taken the best room, and they order tea with scones in the restaurant downstairs. They haven’t seen one another in three or four years, but Thomas has changed very little. He has the same reddish complexion he’s had since childhood, that perpetual impression of just having stepped in off the rugby pitch. He’s trying to become a member of the Victoria business community, but he’s vague on what kind of business he wants to be in.