“Night Travellers” by Sandra Birdsell

There’s a saying that goes: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” This statement applies equally well not only to the opposite gender, but to writers. When a writer physically leaves a place and moves elsewhere, it almost goes without saying that the place she left behind will haunt her in memory, and provide the inspiration for her work. Two examples are Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy, both of whom wrote intensively about the prairies they chose to leave behind.

Sandra Birdsell, who moved to Winnipeg from Morris, Manitoba, has not put so many miles between herself and her roots, but they are far enough away in time and space to provide the subject matter for her first collection of short stories, Night Travellers.

This book consists of thirteen related stories about the ten members of the Lafreniere family, inhabitants of the small prairie town of Agassiz, Manitoba. Mr. Thiessen, the octogenarian maternal grandfather, is dying of lung cancer from smoking; his wife’s reaction to his death, and that of another family member furnish the substance of two of the stories. Maurice Lafreniere, barber to the town of Agassiz, is the subject of two more stories. A timid man, unassertive except in bed, Maurice is the son of a Francophone father and an Indian mother; he bears the shame of his mother’s sordid death for which he feels the townsfolk have never forgiven him.

His wife, Mika, is angry and disappointed at the lot life has dealt her, and labours bitterly to keep her six children clean and fed. The three older sisters, Betty, Lureen and Truda, share five stories: Lureen tells her stories in the first person. The smaller three children, Rudy, Sharon and Peter, raid the kitchen cupboards, throw food from high chairs and lie screaming in cribs, too young to articulate their pain.

Thus the book is more than a short story collection, but less than a novel. Although there is a definite chronological progression from the beginning of the book to the end, each story is complete in itself and not just a chapter.

The period in which the stories are set is not clear, but the treadle sewing machine, washing mangle, curls of sticky brown flypaper hanging from a ceiling (the days before the dreaded Vapona No Pest strip) and the once ubiquitous neon, pecking-chicken restaurant sign, put the time in the late forties or early fifties, which coincides with Ms. Birdsell’s childhood years.

Because Ms. Birdsell was born after the Depression ended, her vision of rural life is not one of complete bitterness and despair. Her landscape is not dotted with bleak homesteads whose boards groan with spiritual torment. If Ms. Birdsell’s characters are longing to escape over the horizon, there’s no mention ofit. Because Ms. Birdsell is writing out of the present, the simple world of Agassiz takes on an idyllic allure when seen from the eighties and in light of the dubious achievements of progress. Life truly was lived on a human scale then and was not amplified by television images and special effects and, in retrospect, this looks attractive. The natural world of Agassiz is an unpolluted and succulent one, filled with the scent of sweet grasses, wild plum trees, Wacs, the songs of birds, chunks of watermelon pickle winking through the sides of quart sealers, and the sun as it used to be seen on the land, a shimmering fireball sinking towards the horizon.

But the human world is not so wholesome. Ms. Birdsell captures the angst of the characters, the sense that there is little they can do to control their lives, that they do not act, but are acted upon. The experiences she explores are universal—birth, death, infidelity, loss of innocence. The strength of the adults is not that they have chosen, but that they have endured. The three young girls too quickly rush towards maturity, and it is sad to see how easily they can be corrupted. Only Betty with the nascent wisdom gleaned from one bad experience, makes a choice, and it is one not much different from those of her parents.

It is in the tradition of rural despair that Ms. Birdsell has established herself. Yet her version of it is softened by nostalgia and affection. The characters’ epiphanies are gentle, undramatic realizations that confirm their basically good hearts. These people do not stride heroically across the landscape; they are imbedded in its horizontality. It is as if Ms. Birdsell has seen them in her imagination with the eyes of a child, in closeup.

In the final story, Betty babysits a child left in a creaking, rat infested spectre of a grain elevator, set inexplicably in the middle of Winnipeg. The elevator as a symbol of a vanished way of life was also used by W.P. Kinsella in his story, “The Elevator,” where it was levelled by Indian workmen. Betty’s elevator, however, is a nightmare of dereliction and destitution, scaring her into the realization that she cannot go back, she must move on. Too frequent use of the grain elevator as a symbol could dissipate its power; it is enough to have one grain elevator in this book, especially one so spooky that it dominates your memory of the stories.

Night Travellers, lyrical, grassrootsy and western, fits neatly into what the cultural brokers of Toronto call ‘regional’ literature. I sometimes think regional is a term coined by the Toronto literati to apply to all work not done there. Like it or not, Toronto is the cultural capital of Canada, and it is a fact of life that to be successful on a national basis, books written in Canada must be recognized there, as American books are recognized in New York and Commonwealth books in London.

Although they are not immune to caprice and occasionally single out someone’s work because it confirms a trend, or because it suits their preference, I have faith that the arbiters of culture in Toronto are aware of the role they play in Canadian literature, and feel their responsibility to perform it honourably. Writers who live in the Canadian hinterland, therefore, must strive to write very well to increase the odds in favour of Toronto smiling on them.

How does this affect Sandra Birdsell? Because she writes about rural Manitoba, her goal thus far may be to be a good ‘regional’ writer. She writes well; the only flaws in the stories appear to be a possible lack of excitement, and a sense of pacing that is a little too sedate. If she persists, she may find herself following in the footsteps of Kinsella and Valgardson, two short story writers whose ‘regionalism’ has been left behind. One always hopes that what is now ‘regional’ will one day become ‘national’; hopefully, if she hangs in there, Ms. Birdsell will go that route as well. ■

Melinda McCracken is a Winnipeg author and critic.