Wild Rose (3 page)

Behind her, Charles murmured to himself and struck his spoon against his bowl gently to listen to the sound the glass made. Still no trace of anything moving far out over the prairie, only a pair of hunting hawks circling above, their shrieks reaching faintly down through layers of blue to where she stood alone in the cabin doorway, puzzling over her husband’s absence. Two nights now, and soon three days.

She knew before she knew; maybe she had always known it, the sudden weight of her knowing buckling her knees, so that she slumped against the door frame, clinging to it so as not to fall, terror at what would become of her and her child seizing her before a single clear image of perils ahead emerged. She made her way, staggering, to the wooden table in front of the stove where her babe played with his porridge and sang to himself, fell into the first chair, the one in which Pierre always sat. A roaring was in her ears; her breath came quickly:
Pierre wasn’t coming back. Pierre had left them.

The room’s shadows had taken on a strange, bruise-like colour. She held the tabletop with both hands as if the cabin were a ship at sea tilting to the left and to the right; bile rose into her throat and she swallowed, forcing herself to breathe evenly through her nose until her stomach quieted and the room stopped its crazed pitching. Charles was carefully putting a fingertip into his porridge, lifting a tiny dollop, then placing it on the table top, pausing to consider it, then reaching for another and placing it beside the first. She watched the care with which he did this, even in her fear and shock marvelling at the precision a three-year-old could muster.

Tears sprang into her eyes. She wept copiously for less than a minute before fear returned, lifting her to her feet so abruptly she knocked over the chair and Charles looked up and would have wept had she not leaned over him quickly, kissing his dark hair, briefly caressing his face.

Back to the door, opening it again, this time with hands that shook. He hated the hard labour of plowing virgin soil from sunrise to sundown; it troubled him deeply to see what the sun and constant wind were doing to his handsome face, how his hands were thickened and scarred.
Voyez!
he had shouted at her, lifting them to her face. She had gazed silently at her own, pleading, “It is honest labour. Soon we will have a crop.” He had turned away, pushed open the door and gone out onto the prairie. She should have known then that they would be leaving their homestead, for town, she supposed, where there were people, real houses, a community, where he would find some sort of work to do. Or perhaps he’d been planning to return to Québec. But if so, wouldn’t he have taken them? How could he make such a decision and never once ask her? When they had vowed to be one, to think as one, to work together as one? Was he not the only possible man for her life?

Wherever he had gone, it was not back to Québec where he would be shamed and worse if she and Charles weren’t with him. Where then? North to the Métis communities near Prince Albert? Farther West to the French villages near Fort Edmonton? No, that would only be more of the same. More likely he had gone south to cross the border into the United States. The border had barely been established there, there were no guards nearby; crossing it would be easy. Or – he could have had trouble getting his broken part fixed. Maybe he had to go on to Swift Current or even to Garden City where – but no. Even if he had gone on, he would have been back by now. He would have sent a messenger. Wouldn’t he have?

Wait! Why did he take the wagon and team if he knew he was leaving forever? Why didn’t he just saddle the horse he loved so much and gallop away across the prairie as he had done more than once before? But she had been washing clothes the day he left and had noticed nothing missing from his meagre wardrobe. He hadn’t loaded the wagon with any of his belongings, so why did he not take Tonerre?

Charles had grown tired of his porridge game, climbed down from the table and was once again pursuing an ant. She said aloud, “Pierre has left with a woman.” Charles looked up from where he squatted in his pursuit and asked,
“Maman?”

“He has taken a woman with him.” Her child came clumsily toward her, one hand out as if to offer comfort. That is why he took the team and wagon and not his beloved saddle horse. How long has he been seeing a woman? Who is she? But he has
no money – how could he – unless she has money – but, wait, I have no money, I have only this farm, this half-done harvest, this one horse and few cows he has left me, an aging milk cow.
He has left our child!

She clutched her head to stop her brain’s skittering, then released it, began to pace, fists clenched, feet thudding on the rough wooden floor. Back and forth she went until she noticed that Charles, laughing uncertainly, had begun to toddle after her. This halted her and she lifted him again, burying her face in his silky hair – Pierre’s hair – clutching him tightly to her.
I am abandoned!

A wave of shame engulfed her, melding before she could stop it into longing: His smooth skin, golden beside her whiteness, his black hair, blacker even than hers, and gleaming black eyes, his muscled torso, arms, and thighs – for a second, she couldn’t breathe. But – he loves me so! She could feel by the weight of her child, his warm body molded to hers, that he had fallen asleep. He would sleep an hour, two hours, and she would think. She would find out what to do. She carried him into the bedroom and carefully placed him on the bed, pushing a chair against its edge so that he wouldn’t roll off onto the floor. She returned to the kitchen and began to clean the porridge from the table, and then to sweep the floor. She worked slowly, with extreme care, missing not a particle of food or dirt, as if important guests were coming.

The crop! She paused in her careful sweeping. She couldn’t farm without him. Would she have to sell the farm to get money to buy train tickets to return to Québec? She faltered, because returning to Québec struck no chord of joy, the opposite, rather, and fear and disgust, all that she had escaped coming back to her as well as the fact that she could never return, tail between her legs, and no one to take her in. Then the image appeared involuntarily behind her eyelids of the plain spreading endlessly in every direction, glowing as if with its own light.

She thought of the few French women in town – the pretty ones – there was only Madame Clothilde Le Fèbvre, but wait, hadn’t they moved on? Or…the unmarried daughter of those newcomers, Marguerite – she could not recall the family name. Or – maybe the woman had left behind an angry husband. Maybe
he
would go after them and bring them both back. Or the father. And the loss of her own poor dead father, of whom she hadn’t thought much for years, loomed before her now, and she felt she would weep forever over him even though he had been dead since her early childhood, as had her mother, and – if only my brothers were here! Guillaume would go after Pierre, or Hector. Even in her turmoil she turned her mind from Hector as quickly as she thought of him.

Stop such foolishness, she told herself, because her brothers wouldn’t come running to save her. They might not even send money so she could go home, Guillaume angry already, Hector uncaring. Banished. He was banished too, but the faceless woman with whom Pierre had run away blotted out random thoughts of her brothers. She imagined the slender curving line that ran from the woman’s girlish bosom to the swell of her hip, the waist as narrow as hers had been before Charles, bent and retched, tasting the bile of her husband’s hatred of her that she had never even seen. But he hid it from me – he knew he was wrong! Yet, he left anyway. She despised him, she told herself, but she didn’t, she yearned for him; she even dared to hope this was all her own foolish mistake, that he would come across the plains with the new part for his machine, he would laugh at her terror, he would hold her…

She went to the door one last time to stare out across the prairie. Far in the distance, shimmering through the waves of heat rising off the land, someone approached. She waited, her hands pressed against her chest. The black spot drew closer, it was a team of horses – no, a single horse pulling – what? She waited again, saw that it was a buggy, not a wagon, that another horse was tied to the back of the buggy. Not Pierre then, but maybe – yes, it would be news of him.

Chapter Two

Spiritus Sanctus

I
t was a morning like all the others
she could remember, although it did not occur to her to try to remember; at six years old every morning was an astonishment, every quicksilver birdsong heard through her bedroom window the first. She lay, her eyes open, watching the play of tree-shadows on the ceiling, hearing the creak and clink of a wagon, the muted hoof-falls of a horse drawing it down the street past the house. The starched white curtains billowed into the space near her head and were sucked back with a slap, as if Antoinette were angry at the wall and slapping it hard with her flattened palm. Soon she would come swiftly through the door, her skirts whispering their morning melody as she hurried to Sophie’s bedside. Up would go the window, or down, whichever it was not, for sometimes her
grand-mère
or her brother Hector would come in while Sophie was sleeping and change it.

Watching with interest and something that might be a touch of fear how briskly the maid attended to the window, she had once asked Antoinette why up or why down every single morning. She was still far too young to know that duty, honour, thoughtlessness required many things of people that they could not explain had it occurred to them that perhaps explanation was required. She was a maid, Sophie was in her care, therefore, she opened or closed Sophie’s window to establish her authority, to insist on her very presence. One day Sophie would remember this and think how all her life she loathed in women such mindless bustling, as if to say, without me this world would collapse.

Her bladder pressed; she climbed from her bed, pulled out the chamber pot, sat, then, finished, her feet freezing on the cold floor, climbed back into the high bed, pulled up the feather quilt, and waited, patiently, with interest, to see what the morning would bring. No one, not Antoinette, not
grand-mère
would let her out of bed until they said she could get out of it. Except for the need of her bladder to be emptied. Sometimes, as she lay on her back singing softly to herself a made-up song she wondered if her mother were not in heaven, would she let
Sophie up when she wanted to be up? It was a question for which she had no answer. Mothers were gifts from God, were they not?
Maybe they did not have to answer to God every single day as Sophie did.

As she waited she wondered if the rhythmic thudding on the hard-packed dirt road had been, perhaps, the bishop arriving. This amazing thought drove her up to a sitting position; forgetting the stricture, she was throwing back the quilt so as to run to the window, just as the door opened and Antoinette entered.

“Is it the bishop?” Sophie cried, as Antoinette, pushing down the window in its sash, said “Up already, little one? My, my, my!” They stopped talking simultaneously, looked at each other, Antoinette, shrewdly, into the little girl’s eyes, Sophie holding her breath, her eyes open so wide she could feel cold air on their surface and had to blink. The maid laughed; Sophie plunked herself in her flannel nightgown onto the edge of the bed letting her bare feet dangle, and rubbed her closed eyes with both hands.

“No bishop, Sophie. Only
le curé
Deschambeault. Are you ready for today?”

“I’m thirsty,” Sophie said, petulant suddenly, remembering…
something, but what?

“No water,” Antoinette said. “If you drink, you cannot take Communion. You will have to wait another year. Your
grand-mère et grand-père
would be so angry.” Sophie considered, a reckoning that soared backward and downward where space opened waiting for her to connect to…what?… Something. How grave and enormous, tingling with minuscule points of light that place. Must she be hungry, thirsty? No, in the face of such enormity she felt only awe.

Already Antoinette had produced a jug of hot water, was pouring it into the basin, the welcome sound of it splashing as it met the bottom of the china basin with its sprays of mauve flowers up the sides, the noise causing Sophie to click back to the morning and the chilly room, to Antoinette finished pouring, now readying the bar of soap, the Turkish towelling. Demurely, pensively, her hands lying loose on her lap, she waited for the scrubbing, while outside, their neighbour, Monsieur Allemande’s fierce black dog that all the children were frightened of began to bark, the sound moving as he ran. The dog was loose!

“Antoinette!” she cried, pulling away from the cloth as it scrubbed at her face as though she had overnight dipped it in tar when she had only been sleeping.
“Le chien –”
Before Antoinette could reply an angry male voice could be heard shouting as fiercely as the dog barked, but not so piercingly, so that Sophie couldn’t make out the words. The barking subsided.

“No breakfast today,” Antoinette sang, pulling Sophie’s nightgown off over her head, then beginning to scrub her. “Today great things will happen. Today you will receive the Host for the first time. Such a holy day.” On and on she went, while Sophie stood, beginning to shiver although the window was closed.
Grand-mère
had said it was May, no more fires in her room. Now a heavy towel was draped around her and she grasped it where it fell on each side of her thighs and pulled it tight across her legs and then her shoulders. To her surprise, Antoinette kissed her on the top of her head, she felt it as an airy glance that stirred her night-loose hair, then the hairbrush tugging, the pulling, setting her scalp tingling, and finally, the lovely long silky
shshsh
of the brush through its thickness, and the coiling and tight pinning. Finished, the maid stood back, gazing down at Sophie, her eyes wide, her mouth held in an ‘O’ waiting for Sophie to fill in what came next.