The Lemon Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

– a man’s plaything. And I would prefer not to repeat what he used to call my stockman, Joe Black. Why should I care about him, Father?’ She had given a dry little laugh, and had turned and left the discomfited priest standing in the middle of the spring mud of the Fort’s yard.
    The priest had sighed. He had been warned by an older priest that this wilful, proud, strayed member of the Christian flock, a lone Maronite Christian survivor of the 1860 massacres in Lebanon, had endured a lot of sorrow. She was now in her late thirties, and, in her business affairs, she had the reputation of being as merciless as an Iroquois woman – and when he considered what Iroquois women had done to captured Jesuit priests in earlier times, a faint shudder went through his thin, bent frame, as if the devil had touched him on the shoulder.
    Yet, as he trudged along the trail to his Mission in StAlbert, he had to admit that during the Metis uprisings she had been one of the few to remain calm. She had prepared to defend her homestead with more common sense than other settlers, many of whom had panicked – even he and his fellow priests, who ministered to the Metis, had been very frightened.
    ‘Nobody has to worry about Wallace Harding or Joe Black,’ one of his parishioners in St Albert had assured him. ‘They’re the best shots in the district and she’s got that cabin well defended; the rebels’ll go for easier loot.’
    Then, of course, there was Joe Black himself, the priest reflected; Joseph Black, the only negro in the district. Joe had a history, too.
    According to Father Lacombe, who knew almost everything about everybody, he was the son of a Cree woman and a freed slave who had accompanied John Rowand on his exploration of the Bow River, further south.
    He had been brought up in his maternal grandfather’s lodge and had then gone to work on one of the early ranches. In consequence, he had a wonderful way with horses – with any animals, if it came to that. Later, he had trapped for a time, following the animals northward, and had finally met up with Tom Harding, an American miner. The young priest had never met Tom Harding, but the story was well known; Tom had been a squatter on undeveloped Hudson’s Bay Company land a few miles east of Fort Edmonton.
    Disregarding the splutters of rage from the Hudson’s Bay Factor at the Fort, who was rapidly becoming less and less able to enforce his company’s rights to the immense territory they were supposed to control, Tom Harding and Joe Black had, with sporadic aid from Joe’s Cree relatives and a couple of temporarily stranded miners, slowly opened up several square miles, much of it forest. Based on what he had observed in the United States, TomHarding sowed grass and clover, as well as barley, oats and potatoes. It was backbreaking work and, in addition, they had had the difficult task of protecting their first few animals and hens, not only from predators but also from increasingly hungry parties of Indians.
    Despite Joe’s abilities as a hunter and trapper, game was scarce and in the early years they were often hungry themselves. Each year, when the ferocious winter descended on them, they would ask themselves why they bothered and would become irritable with each other. But the first sound of water dripping from the snow-covered roof would raise their spirits, and they would begin to plan the coming year. The Hudson’s Bay Factor, aware of whispers from eastern Canada and from London about the Hudson’s Bay mandate being withdrawn, gave up on them and was thankful, occasionally, to buy or trade for some of their crops, to feed the increasing number of people living in and around the Fort.
    The trust between the two men became absolute.
    As the early winter cold bit into the priest’s own underfed body during his long walk back to the Mission, he secretly envied Joe Black’s physical strength. Over six feet tall, Joe was, and built to it, with wiry grey hair,