Lisa

The trip to Montreal that Hannah took with Frank had the effect on her we were all hoping it would. The Monday after they’d returned from the trip Hannah got straight to work acquainting herself with the workings of the farm. The solution that Hannah and Frank had come up with for how she could best help the refugees was for her to take over the running of the farm and for the fruits of her labour to be used to help families in need. Hannah spent the entire morning going through Frank’s old ledgers, reviewing the past performance of the farm to ascertain how much needed to be done to reverse the negative trajectory it was on. The decline, according to Hannah, had been precipitous. Only a year ago the farm had been producing vegetables, corn, wheat, milk, eggs and surpluses of beef, lamb, mutton, pork and chicken. Today the farm was only producing enough meat for Frank to sell at his butchery. Hannah was alarmed by the drop-off in production and was determined to bring about a reversal in the farm’s downward trend. I’d never seen her busier than she was the first few days of that week. Cathy barely got a moments rest, Hannah was constantly calling on her to drive her to get soil samples tested, to ascertain fertilizer, seed and building materials prices, to enquire about the availability of labourers to work as farmhands and their wage demands, and when she got tired of always asking Cathy to drive her places she asked her to teach her how to drive and she drove herself around.

On Thursday evening at dinner Hannah talked with Frank about her plans for the farm and displayed a level knowledge that was astounding having only started four days earlier.

“I talked to Sister Bernadette, who’s in charge of the food assistance program, she told me that the meals they prepare most are soups, stews and curries because those meals allow them to stretch out their ingredients the furthest.”

“That’s true,” Frank said.

“To be as helpful to them as we can be we should focus on growing the ingredients they need for those dishes: onions, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages and beans; if we want to help them with meat that’ll have to be done in two stages. Increasing the numbers of cows and sheep to high, sustainable levels will have to be a long term goal but increasing the numbers of pigs and chickens can be done in the short term, with the chickens we’ll need to balance out how many we want for egg production and how many we want for meat.”

“That all sounds about right.”

“I’ve put together a plan that includes budgets and schedules based on the previous output of the farm and Sister Bernadette’s needs; I left it on the desk in your study for you to read.”

“Thanks, that should be a great help.”

“We’re going to need quite a lot of fertilizer, the results from the soil that I had tested show that it’s not doing very well at all, it hasn’t been tended for far too long. The irrigation system needs to be snaked out, sand and muck has built up inside, and the animal shelters that have been standing empty need some repairs, two of the chicken coups are in such disrepair that they might need to be rebuilt.”

“I’ll take a look at the budget that you put together and talk to Refugee Affairs about acquiring the funding we need.”

“Get enough money for the fertilizer and seed first; cultivating the fields is the best place to start.”

The extent to which Hannah’s mother had trained her to be a competent and effective manager came as a surprise to us all. She had shown us a glimpse of it when she’d put together the list of items for us to assemble for Kevin to help him escape from Prospera, items that proved to be the difference between us living and dying when we were making our way through the forest. Frank was similarly impressed. They had many more discussions at the dinner table about the farm that made the rest of us feel like we were invisible to them. Frank was thrilled by the level of enthusiasm that Hannah was showing, so much so that he was oblivious to how it was making Cathy feel. She took his enthusiasm about Hannah running the farm as another example of his disappointment in her. I was finding myself feeling increasingly sympathetic toward Cathy. After meeting her boyfriend and spending the evening after he’d left helping to calm her down I’d come to see her as a girl who was carrying a burden that was perhaps too much for her. Since arriving here to live with Cathy and her father we hadn’t met anybody who was a friend or a relative of Cathy’s. She’d been dealing with her mother’s cancer, her father’s disappointment in her and her boyfriend’s constant imperilling of himself all on her own. In the few short weeks that we’d been with Cathy’s family she had developed an attachment to us that at first I’d thought was a little strange but that I’d come to understand the more I’d gotten to know her. Before we’d arrived she’d been lonely and desperate for some companionship, given that it made sense that she would be drawn to kind, effervescent Miranda who likewise would be drawn to Cathy, the only one who could teach her about this world about which she was so curious. Their close relationship was never a source of concern for me; I trusted Miranda to never betray me and to be honest I was grateful for the free time I had for studying.

Kevin was working, Hannah had started working and I was studying. I was beginning to worry about Miranda and where she was going to find a place for herself in this world. It wasn’t her fault that she was facing this problem; in Prospera she was celebrated for her musical talent and had a place of which she could always be certain. In this world talents like hers weren’t as appreciated as they were in Prospera; here what people cared about most was one’s ability to make a tangible contribution to the practical concerns of society. Miranda’s talents would be wasted on such pursuits, unfortunately that meant she wasn’t going to be serving much of a purpose. I had no problem with working and supporting her, neither did Kevin and Hannah. What worried me was that growing up in Prospera we had had the importance of living a meaningful life that contributed in some way to the welfare of the village deeply ingrained in us; at some point Miranda may feel the need to do something with herself and I didn’t know what she was going to do should that time come.

Hannah had certainly found something to do that made her feel like she was doing something meaningful. While waiting for the funds to come through from Refugee Affairs Hannah had continued to familiarize herself with the operations of the farm with undiminished zeal. She had Cathy spend an entire day teaching her how to operate the tractor that had been sitting unused in its shed for months, she called on Frank’s friend who owned an industrial steam cleaner and he came to the farm and snaked out the irrigation tubes for free, she continued to build on and refine her budgets and schedules and when the funding from Refugee Affairs came through she unleashed herself on the farm like a torrent. Frank being so well known and respected for the work that he was doing to help refugees the money from Refugee Affairs all came in at once, allowing Hannah to begin work on everything right away. The three workers that Frank had on the farm taking care of the livestock immediately grew to twenty as Hannah didn’t waste a second in getting to work. She drove the tractor herself across the fallow fields, furrowing them for planting and bedding in fertilizer and compost, small crews of labourers worked to repair the damaged animal shelters, Hannah hitched a trailer to the back of Cathy’s truck and drove around to other farms and brought back female cows that they’d bought for breeding and for milk. For weeks there was a frenzy of activity at the farm and at the centre of it all was Hannah. Watching her riding around the farm on horseback as she inspected the various work that was being done I was reminded of the sight of her mother riding around Prospera on horseback as she was going about her business.

Hannah’s authority was never questioned and Frank never had second thoughts about entrusting her with the farm. After three months much of what Hannah had set out to do was coming to fruition. The vegetables that she’d planted were harvested, packed in crates and carted away by a truck that the food assistance program sent; every week Hannah personally delivered a trailer full of eggs to Sister Bernadette and the quantity of milk that the farm was producing and supplying to the food assistance program was steadily increasing as more cows were being added to the farms cattle stocks, cows that Hannah purchased cheap mostly at auctions that Frank accompanied her to. Hannah had succeeded in bringing about a turnaround in the farm and she was looking forward to doing even more, which wasn’t all that she was looking forward to. We found out during this period that she was pregnant with a child that she and Kevin had conceived while we’d been living in the cottage in the woods during winter. I found out about the pregnancy first when Hannah came to the clinic complaining about stomach pains and was revealed to be pregnant by a quick ultrasound.

I had started working at the clinic that had been established for refugees to begin my practical training after completing my three months of theory and examinations. Officially I was a nurse’s assistant and was assigned to work alongside Sister Audrey, who had been a nun and a nurse for twenty years. Most of the work being done to help refugees was being done by the church, people like Sister Audrey and Sister Bernadette working to help others out of fidelity to the principles of their faith. Religion was the most interesting aspect of this world. We had no such thing in Prospera and had gotten on just fine for one and a half centuries without it and yet in this world it was a major component of so many people’s lives. Its popularity appeared to me to be rooted in its ability to give people a similar sense of meaning to what we in Prospera derived from the unique contribution we made to the village as individuals and the guarantees of safety and purpose that we all enjoyed. To suddenly start believing in the existence of a God was something that was too late for us to do, nevertheless it was interesting to be around religious people like the Sisters and Frank, who on Sunday mornings attended church alone. News of Hannah’s pregnancy came especially as a shock to him; in all the time that we’d been with them he hadn’t suspected for a moment that Hannah and Kevin were a couple, the same went for me and Miranda. Hannah advised us to keep it that way, telling us that the attitudes of religious people towards homosexuals tended to be virulently negative.

At the clinic the fact that I was only an assistant nurse didn’t result in me having what could in anyway be described as a light workload. Sister Audrey was constantly busy and as her assistant it was my responsibility to ensure that she was always adequately equipped to perform her tasks in addition to performing all of the rudimentary tasks that I was assigned. The clinic had been established by the local Catholic Church with assistance from the Huntingdale municipality to provide free healthcare to refugees that had been resettled in Huntingdale. The patients that came into the clinic on a daily basis were for the most part relatively routine cases; the cases of those that came for treatment for injuries from the war were less routine. In some cases Sister Audrey and I were able to administer treatment ourselves if all that needed to be done was to dress a wound or administer an injection. There were two doctors that were permanently at the clinic, Dr Ahmed, whose family had immigrated to Canada from Iran, and Dr Fillon, who’d come up to Huntingdale from Montreal. They attended to those they could and those they couldn’t they referred to the hospital, like Deborah, who’d gotten struck in her eye by shrapnel and needed the help of an ophthalmologist. There were many such cases, people with broken bones who needed an orthopaedist and physical therapy, people with limbs missing that needed prosthetics, people suffering from post traumatic stress that needed a psychiatrist.

Every day I was encountering the effects of the war that had driven Hannah into a deep depression when she’d only been reading about it. Were it not for my close working relationship with Sister Audrey I too might have succumbed to overwhelming despair. I had come to look up to Sister Audrey in much the same way Hannah had come to look up to Frank. Her indefatigable approach to everything she did was an example that I was determined to follow.

At home on the farm there had been other developments besides Hannah’s pregnancy and the resurgence in productivity that she’d brought about. Cathy’s mother Kristin was released from hospital to continue her convalescence at home. Hannah, Kevin and I met her for the first time in the evening of the day that she had been discharged. Cathy took us up to her room where she was lying in bed and resting. She was under the covers and we could see that she was very frail; her cheeks were sunken, she had only a few wisps of hair on her head and her breathing was laboured. Miranda had just finished feeding her a dinner of mashed butternut (grown by Hannah) when we entered the room. She said that she had been looking forward to meeting us for months, having heard so much about us from Cathy, Miranda and Frank. She was especially glad to be meeting Hannah, to whom she was immensely grateful for the work that she’d done in revitalising the farm. When she asked me about the work that I was doing and I told her that I was working with Sister Audrey she told me to make sure I kept my eyes and ears wide open; Sister Audrey was one of the most respected people in the town and a great nurse, if I paid attention to her I would learn a lot from her. Frank returned home shortly thereafter. We left the room when he came upstairs to see his wife to give them privacy and went downstairs with Cathy to get the table ready for dinner. Cathy and Frank were extremely happy to have Kristin back at home; Cathy more so than Frank. That evening she was positively overflowing with emotions that she was trying desperately to keep contained. Looking at her damming up her emotions because if she didn’t a flood of tears would stream down her face, I thought back to Prospera and the relationships that we’d had with our parents. Very seldom had we enjoyed moments of true tenderness; our parents had applied constant pressure to us to realize our potential and become productive citizens of Prospera. Were she a Prospera citizen Cathy would not have been living the life that she was living. Nobody would have given her any time or space to, as she put it, ‘figure things out’. She would have already had a vocation picked out for her based on her aptitudes and personality and she would be spending her time working toward that, no matter how she felt about it. The freedom that they had in this world that we didn’t have in Prospera allowed them to take their time and make decisions that they thought were what was best for them, not what was in the best interests of the collective. Had we not come to this world we never would have known that it was possible to live outside of the narrow parameters of what was decided for us, that having an array of choices available to you was something to be embraced, not feared.

For once at the dinner table we didn’t have to sit and listen to Hannah and Frank talking about the farm. Frank didn’t join us for dinner, opting to stay by his wife’s side. Without Frank at the table the five of us had the freedom to talk about what we wanted to talk about. That evening the topic of conversation was Morgan. The attack on the US troop convoy that he’d participated in shortly after we’d met him for the first time had been a huge success, thirty five US soldiers had been killed and not a single #OI resistance fighter had been so much as wounded. The #OI fighters had divided themselves into two groups: one group drove alongside the trucks carrying the US troops and threw the magnet grenades that stuck to the trucks and blew them off the road and the other group was stationed on top of a hill next to the road. When the US trucks were blown off the road and the US troops climbed out of the trucks to escape the blaze the #OI fighters on the hill, armed with the M8 carbines that Morgan had been transporting, descended the hill and opened fire, leaving no one alive. The group was becoming much more skilled at guerrilla tactics and the success rate of their missions was increasing, they were killing more US troops and destroying more oil infrastructure and they were experiencing fewer casualties. The video that was posted on the group’s website after the US troop convoy attack was shot by Morgan, we could tell from his tattoo. Cathy was massively relieved that Morgan had survived the convoy attack and the two attacks that he’d subsequently been involved in, one that destroyed a pumping station and one that destroyed a fleet of tankers. The taunts that the #OI members issued to Mattis through the videos that they posted on their website grew more insulting as their success rate increased; the money that they received in online donations also grew.

The increased success of the #OI attacks led us to wonder if perhaps we were approaching a turning point in the war, if perhaps the US was suffering so much embarrassment at the hands of #OI that Mattis would finally decide after twelve years that his mission wasn’t worth it anymore. Sadly, we were wrong. The lead story on the evening news that night was about Mattis’s second revised strategy, increasing the number of US troops in Canada from 45 000 to 200 000.

The mood in the house was destroyed by the news. Cathy was the worst affected. She knew that the increase in US troops wouldn’t give Morgan pause about his involvement in the #OI movement going forward; on the contrary, most likely he would feel he needed to do more to stop them. The much larger fear that we all had was that the increase in troop levels would allow the US to break the stalemate that the conflict had been mired in, in which case none of us were safe anywhere in Canada. In the short term what the decision by Mattis meant was more refugees for Frank to help resettle, more hungry mouths for Hannah to help feed and more patients for us to attend to at the clinic. What Mattis’s decision meant for us in the long term, we didn’t know. Was the US just going to take Canada’s oil or were they going to be occupiers, subjecting us to violent oppression as had been the case in almost all past instances of military occupation? Was Mattis going to unleash hell on the citizens of Canada as payback for the Canadian army and the #OI resistance movement giving him so much trouble?

We had no answers for any of these questions, and suddenly, having left Prospera in search of a world where we would not need to feel like we could find ourselves in danger at any second, the spectre of Mattis and the US military loomed over us.