Wild Rose

1. Title Page
   
2. Book & Copyright Information
   
3. Dedication
   
4. 1 – Wind
   
5. 2 – Spiritus Sanctus
   
6. 3 – La région sauvage
   
7. 4 – Sanctuary
   
8. 5 – Introibo ad Altare Dei
   
9. 6 – Angels
   
10. 7 – Beginning
    
11. 8 – Bone Pile
    
12. 9 – Introibo ad Altare Dei II
    
13. 10 – Night Music
    
14. 11 – Saecula Saeculorum
    
15. 12 – Work
    
16. 13 – Fire
    
17. 14 – Winter
    
18. 15 – Return
    
19. 16 – Le village
    
20. Acknowledgements
    
21. About the Author
    

© Sharon Butala, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access
Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Edited by Dave Margoshes

Book designed by Tania Craan

Cover image by Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, Library of Congress LC-USF33-012666-M2

Typeset by Susan Buck

Printed and bound in Canada at Friesens

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Butala, Sharon, 1940-, author

          Wild rose / Sharon Butala.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55050-636-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55050-643-3 (pdf).--

ISBN 978-1-55050-868-0 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55050-875-8 (mobi

          I. Title.

PS8553.U6967W55 2015            C813'.54             C2015-902954-6

                                                                              C2015-902955-4

Available in Canada from:

Coteau Books

2517 Victoria
Avenue, Regina, Saskatchewan Canada
S4P 0T2

www.coteaubooks.com

Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Saskatchewan through Creative Saskatchewan, the City of Regina. We further acknowledge the [financial] support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l'appui [financier] du gouvernement du Canada.

This book is dedicated to the women who settled western Canada

and

especially to my aunts Cécile (now in her nineties) and Germaine (in her eighties) both née Le Blanc

Chapter One

Wind

T
he first night
she hardly noticed he was gone
, and even though she had expected him back before the moon rose, she slept soundly. Probably, she thought, he has stopped overnight at the Beausoleil’s so he and Napoléon can have a good chin wag and a glass of brandy together. He will surely be back by ten tomorrow morning. Charles asked,
“Papa?”
more than once, but a crust of bread, a sip of milk, a song complete with nose-touching and hand-patting, soon made him forget his father’s absence. The second night, though, the slightest sound disturbed her, twice she rose from her bed, carefully, so as not to wake her son, and peered out their cabin’s one window onto the moonlit prairie, but there was no one to be seen, not even a wild animal. Not that there was anything to fear – grizzlies were rarely seen anymore, indeed they had never seen one, only their droppings. The cabin walls kept out any wolves or rare mountain lion, and the Indians, subdued since the rebellion, posed no threat to settlers, if they ever had. And yet, all night she felt uneasy, lying for long periods awake, changing positions in the bed cautiously and, if Charles moved, holding still until he lapsed back into sleep.

Toward dawn, drowsing, she came awake with a start to a low moan in the distance – ceaseless, growing louder as it advanced toward the cabin, until, arriving, it pushed against the cabin walls, the furred body of a great animal blundering determinedly by, the force of its desire set always on something further on, at the far edge of the prairie, while she lay, already tense, listening over the wind’s noise for the sound of hoofbeats, or the creak of the wagon’s approach.

Again, she fell asleep and this time slept deeply, opening her eyes to stained canvas walls that swelled, then collapsed inward with gusts of wind. Pierre lay snoring beside her, and she tried once more to orient herself. A tent. She was back in the canvas tent they had set up on the prairie while they built their small house. The sloping ceiling had turned from greyish white to a burning golden-yellow, meaning the sun was up and they had overslept, both of them, exhausted as they were from the hammering and lifting, from the dragging and the sorting. Around their cots the sacks of their perishable goods – flour, sugar – leaned against each other waiting for the sod roof to be finished on the house. Wind caught the closed tent-flap door and snapped it noisily, as if to say
rise, there is work to be done
. Then she was working in her garden, pulling weeds. The soil, usually thin and a pale brown, now rich and dark as the garden of her grandparents’ house back in Québec and she worked doggedly, pulling and digging, checking the tiny plants, saying a prayer to them to grow. Then she was standing alone in the endless sweep of strange prairie grasses and small flowering plants, the wind tearing at her skirt and apron, her face turned upward to the sun, and all around her a music rose that seemed to be made of rippling grass, birdsong, a throaty murmuring from the earth itself, and a high-pitched keening from the sky that rose and fell with the music of the wind. She saw all of it would sweep her away; she wasn’t afraid, lifted her arms in preparation, pulled the fastenings from her hair and loosening the buttons at her throat, then her bodice, until she had bared her breasts to the elements and the music.

She woke then, still feeling the heat of the sun on her bosom and throat, and lay stunned, trying to come awake to the day, and the cabin, and the fact of Pierre’s continuing absence. But she couldn’t catch her breath, and her heart fluttered and tripped against her skin, each hair on her head bristling with its own life. She pulled herself to a sitting position and gazed into the shadows of the room where everything sat as it always had, rough and shabby, waiting for her to begin work. Her breath slowed to normal, her heart retreated into its cage and resumed its steady beat; even the hair on her head lay subdued. Such a dream! She lifted herself from the bed and padded to the pail of water where she filled the dipper and drank thirstily from it. Morning, and still no Pierre. Now the dream dwindled fully and vanished. Both elated and frightened by it, not daring to pursue it, she let it go, for there was exigency this morning to which she must attend. Where was Pierre?

But this was not the first time he had failed to return home when he said he would. Once, it had been a deluge of rain that turned the trail to gumbo, forcing him to camp until it dried enough for the team and wagon to get through. Another time, when a wheel had broken on a rock he had failed to notice on the trail, he’d stayed at the Beausoleil’s while he and Napoléon repaired it. This past winter he stayed two nights with l’anglais, Harry Adamson, whose shack was at the edge of the village by the trail that led into the wilderness and home. Night was falling, Adamson had seen Pierre trying to get his horses to face into the growing blizzard sweeping up from across the American border. Pierre wasn’t good with horses, a more serious weakness in a settler – although one never to be mentioned – than Sophie would have guessed. His horses knew better than Pierre. In the spring, to the west, the bodies of two unnamed travellers were found huddled by the trail.

“Adamson, he didn’t even put a coat on,” Pierre had told her in his dramatic way – the flash of light in his black eyes, the quick lift of chin, his black hair tossed from his forehead, his smile. “He came rushing out in the wind and the snow – he caught Belle by the bridle and shouted to me,
“Venez–vous a moi! Chez moi!
I could barely understand his French! But –” his shrug, wide-handed, his mouth comically pursed, his eyes full of merriment, so that, imagining that excellent, overly-large bachelor in his crudely mended trousers, she had laughed too.

She hadn’t the energy in this too-early morning, in this late summer of unending dryness and oven-like heat, the fourth of their sojourn here, and now, in his worrisome absence, to feel anything at the memory of that gesture. Once, that movement had brought heat to her face and chest, so that after he had left, as she walked in her grandparents’ garden in the Québec village where she’d been raised, she would fan herself, and ponder in wonder, dismay, and some half-denied delight, the deep-seated sensation by which she’d been overcome whenever he fixed those dark eyes on hers, smiled, and tossed back that lock of hair. She hadn’t understood then that what she felt wasn’t so much love, as she had thought, as physical desire. But no, she thought, remembering again how overcome she was when at last she was freely able to put her fingers in his hair, her palm
against his cheek, her mouth against his. She had been in love with him since the first kiss by her great-uncle Henri’s graveside –
no, sooner, since she was a child and with grandfather, visiting the Hippolyte farm. Surely, she corrected herself, there is no separating love from such desire.

On the third morning since his departure, the stillness came as it always did, the only sound, the piping of small birds in the buff-coloured grass, the occasional call from a single coyote somewhere toward the west where the land rose, hazy and mauve, into a line of low hills. It was her favourite time of day, strolling to the barn with Charles walking at her side as the sun climbed slowly above the horizon sending its first gold, then yellow rays across the grass, the light rising higher, soon blotting out the stars. And the heat, even so early, beginning.

At the barn she pumped the trough full of water, then opened the corral gate so that their five cows could move out to spend the day grazing on the prairie, while she kept a constant eye on them to see that they didn’t venture near the crop or her garden so parched in the heat. She turned Fleurette, her milk cow, into the pole corral, gave her hay, and milked her
while the cow munched contentedly. Charles wandered, chirping
to himself, picking up an insect and bringing it to her to admire, whether crushed to a bloody pulp on his palm or crawling up his arm.
Papa?
he thought to ask, but not waiting for an answer, toddled off to whatever new matter had caught his attention: a yellow wildflower quivering under the weight of a bee, a tiny green snake slithering into the grass. All the while the warm milk hissing into the wooden pail, and birds singing their morning song in the still, clear air, and the sun rising higher, a bath of lemon and gold light lifting the night-dull prairie into the blaze of day. Then she and Charles let the chickens out of their shed, and gathered whatever eggs they could find. Last, she led Tonerre, Pierre’s saddle horse, and Fleurette, one by one out onto the prairie, pounded tethering pins into the ground, tied them, and left them to graze. One day soon there would be fences, but for now, not being able to risk losing either animal, tethering pins would have to do.