The Winter Helen Dropped By
From the author of Shoeless Joe, the book that inspired the movie Field of Dreams.Narrated by young Jamie O'Day, who is beginning to understand that, like his daddy says, "every story is about sex or death, or sometimes both,"The Winter Helen Dropped Byis a story of growing up, of loss, of laughter and of characters both sexy and dead.Helen is the young, pregnant Indian woman who drops into Jamie's life one freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey snow-storming night. It is her haunting presence, woven throughout Jamie's accounts of the spring he damn near drowned, the summer of the peculiar reconstituted wedding of Mrs.Beatrice Ann Stevenson and Mr.Earl J. Rasmussen, followed by the summer White Chaps murdered his wife, that makes this a funny, sad and wholly wonderful new novel.
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The Winter Helen Dropped By
BY W. P. KINSELLA
The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © W. P. Kinsella 1995
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
W. P. Kinsella asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
FIRST EDITION
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007497539
Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007497546
Version: 2014-08-07
Contents
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
‘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 kind of scornfully, Daddy said, and asked, ‘What’s time to a pig?’
When the roads were good, which was for about two weeks in mid-summer if it wasn’t raining and if what we traveled on could seriously be called roads, Daddy and Mama and me traveled to the Fark General Store, presided over by Slow Andy McMahon, all three hundred and some pounds of him, where we bought groceries and the three-week-old
