There is a black and white photograph of a family: a man, woman and five children. Scrawled on the back, in tight archaic script, are the words Willow Creek, Alberta, 1933. This will be their only photograph together.
The opening lines of the novel preface the opening chapter. A single page describes the people in the photograph further, delineating in finer detail the physical manifestation of the those posing for the camera. By the end of the page, it is learned that the farm on which the family in the photo lived and worked will be foreclosed three years later. It is also conveyed that one of those in the photo will die and two who not picture and of whom no photo exists will be murdered. But on this day in that moment when the shutter clicks the family smiles. It is an eerily evocative opening, filled with the promise of tragedy and the foreshadowing of intrigue.
Three weeks before the harvest, they come for their money. Eleven dollars. They take it all—the house, the barn, the shed, the lumber, the fields ripe with grain—and say, “Leave.” It was August. The grain in those fields was worth sixty, seventy dollars.
The driving force which is the engine of the narrative is a debt that is unpaid. The debt amounts to a merely eleven dollars on a crop six or seven times that. Time is quite literally money in this case. And time will also become quite literally the punishment for not paying the debt. Teodor spends nearly two years in prison for an inability to cover the small debt at a particular moment in time. Given an extension, obviously the debt could have been paid with interest. If the conditions of non-payment were only limited to the time spent in jail, the story would be tragic enough, but it is the consequences of time lost that bring about further developments and twists in the story which push the tragic implications ever further to the extremes.
Anna meets her guests at the door, like a lady. She ushers the family to the table. Maria is relieved to see the room tidy and clean. Even the window has been washed. She notices that every trace of Stefan has been removed. Anna looks radio as she caters to her brother, insisting that he sit at the head of the table. She keeps up a constant chatter, making everyone laugh, until they have eased into the comfortable role of guests.
The brother to whom Anna caters is Teodor. Beaten down by the system and unfairly removed of his land, sentenced to prison and having already faced a long life of such butchery of humane treatment, Teodor is nevertheless prepared and committed to somehow putting everything back together and trying once again to beat a rigged system and carve out a little happiness and success in life. Stefan, of whom all traces have been removed, is Anna’s estranged husband. Let’s not go so far as to say he is the exact opposite of Teodor—who is, after all, not exactly an angel—but he is far enough removed to make the contrast apparent.
The traces of Stefan’s presence which can be so easily removed from sight and mind do do not extend so easily to Stefan. While he may be temporarily out of sight and attempts may be made to put him out of mind, he is an active and unwilling participant in this attempt. And very soon all traces of Stefan will be very much back on display and very much an active agent seeking to continue the bad luck stream of Teodor.
