Wild Rose (44 page)

“Certainly not, Monsieur,” she said, but stiffly, her back on him as she moved kettle and coffee pot around in order to check the fire.

“I put another stick of wood in,” he said. “Didn’t want it to go out on you. It’s a bad cold day, it is.”

“You are here for breakfast?” she asked.

“Didn’t know you served breakfast.”

“I do not,” she answered, “But of course I will make an exception for you.” Now she sounded simply angry, and smiled quickly, to mask it. She could see that he wasn’t fooled, nor did he mind
much her anger. “I have salt pork, I have fresh bread, but the chickens are not laying in this weather. There is porridge.”

“Some of that fresh bread would be just the thing,” he said. She went to the narrow counter under the shelves that held the dishes and began to cut the bread. She put two fresh slices onto a plate, carried it back to the table, not even bothering to toast it on the stove, and set the plate down in front of him. She had already placed a pat of her dwindling supply of butter on a saucer before he had come, and now, pulling his chair into the table so that there was room for her to stand at her customary place by the stove, he reached for it.

“You are here on business?” she asked. He chewed, swallowed, sighed, leaned back in his chair making it groan as he tipped it back. Seeing her disapproval, he quickly dropped the front legs and put his heavy arms in their wool tweed on either side of the plate of bread. There was a good fire in the cook stove, but the heat it gave battled the cold seeping in from outside. Even then, or maybe because of it, a curlicue of steam rose an inch or two above the rim of his thick cup. She fixed her eyes on the steam, and waited in the posture of every homesteader, back as close to the stove as she could place herself without scorching her dress. The smell of the burning wood, its crackle and sometime thud occupied her; she nearly forgot Campion sitting so close to her that her skirt brushed the back of his chair. He moved, about to speak, and she stepped quickly away from the stove.

“I come here to take you away,” he said, amiably, and with his foot pushed out the chair across from him for her to sit on. Reluctantly, she did, his words having made her unsteady, even as she loathed his rudeness.

“What do you mean?”

“Word of this business of yours has spread. Ran into somebody in Regina who just came through Bone Pile. Said your prices are low, you make fresh bread, cakes, pies, roast beef every day, pots of thick soup, lots of taste to it, fresh biscuits with it, place always clean, friendly as can be. Said people like coming here.” He wasn’t smiling as he spoke these words, but was instead studying her, his eyelids partly lowered so that she couldn’t see into his eyes and had only the impression of cunning, and something else – a shrewdness in his judgement of her that she felt, possibly, flattered her. Although she did not want his flattery.

“I do my best,” she told him, “But it’s hard to get supplies, my space is small, and I should really have help. And when I began a few months ago, I had very few customers. For a while I was afraid I might have made a mistake.” She laughed, prettily, aware of the falseness of the sound, not knowing what to do or say to him, and not able to get control of her uneasiness.

“I can put you in a better place,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

Again, she said, “What do you mean?” And after a moment, trying to clarify, “There are no other available buildings in this town. I don’t want to go into debt to build.” He lowered his eyes to the thinly-steaming coffee, lifted a spoon, turning it in his fingers, then set it down decisively. “You’ll never make any real money this way. You can break even, you can even put some aside, but I’ll wager that if you can’t handle more customers, you’re going to be stuck here in this place forever.” She had thought this herself, but did not like hearing it, especially not from him. “Has Mr. Hippolyte returned?” he asked, his eyes on the table.

“Surely you know he has not.” Then, her composure slipping a little, “Have you seen him?”

“I haven’t seen him since the day last summer when we went to the lawyer together.” She stared at him, but he was still not looking at her. “Makes it hard for you,” he said. “The church not allowing you to marry again.”

“As it happens, Mr. Campion,” she said, her voice tight, “it seems I don’t need a husband to survive.”

He glanced at her, chuckling as if her spiritedness amused and pleased him. Ahh, here it comes, she thought.

“I am here to persuade you to start a new business in a bigger town, over by the Cypress Hills.”

“Garden City?” He nodded, yes. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you want to help me?” He said nothing, and she wished she hadn’t asked, realizing that his goal would never be to help her, but to find another way to help himself. She was to benefit enough to persuade her to help him do so. “What are you proposing?” Other questions crowded in, but she held her tongue, counselling herself:
Wait.

“Garden City is growing by leaps and bounds – good business opportunities there for somebody. Every single train through leaves behind settlers and speculators looking for land, others looking to buy cattle and horses, big lots of ‘em.” He paused, picked up the spoon again, then set it down. “The Truesdale brothers are building a hotel there. It’s going to be a quality hotel – none of your boarding house bedbugs or crowding and filth. With a proper lounge and facilities. Big chairs in the lobby for people to wait and visit together. Indoor plumbing,” he said. “Electricity.” He paused to glance at her as if to assess how this news was affecting her. “They want a dining room for it. I’m doing a bit of business with the brothers and I said I’d find somebody good, clean, reliable, to run the dining room. Good dining room – people will choose the hotel just for that service.

She sat, looking away from him, thinking. A larger town, more people, a bigger room for her café, maybe a hired girl would even be possible so that she could get some rest now and then. And if she worked less hard, she would be able to serve breakfast too. Maybe there would be a laundry, a butcher, a bakery, so she wouldn’t have to do all the work herself. A bigger town meant a real school for Charles. She turned to Campion, to find him watching her, but the instant she looked at him, he dropped his eyes back to his coffee.

When she had left Mrs. Emery she had said to herself, in her private accounting, that she had made her first, longed-for, step forward. She knew she had to make another one, and not a day passed when she did not consider how she might do so. Could it be that Campion would be the instrument of that next step? As he had once been the instrument of her disaster? They sat silently, she waiting to hear what more he would propose, he silent for what reason she didn’t know. Maybe it was only to give her time to consider what he had already said to her.

“You are in business with these Truesdale brothers.”

“I am,” he said. “Just a small part. An incentive, to get them to build faster. Garden City needs that hotel. I need it. It’s a cattle town, I’m in it often on business. I’m tired of crowded boarding houses or having to sleep at the livery barn because there’s no room. The Territories are moving forward,” he told her. “They are getting modern.”

“I like the idea in principle,” she said. “But I foresee many complications.”

“No business is without complications. I like complications,” His shoulders raised and lowered as he chuckled in a secretive, pleased way. She could imagine him doing that when he was alone and a deal had gone his way, or he had succeeded in fooling someone to his own advantage. In that instant she found him disgusting. But wait. He was offering something she might be able to use.

“I need to be able to trust you, Monsieur,” she said, her heart pounding at her own audacity. “How do I know I wouldn’t be joining the enemy?” He lifted his head, his eyes glinting.

“That farm of yours? Hell – pardon me – that was just business. Business is all it was. And look – you came out all right, didn’t you?” She could feel her lips pursing tightly, her cheeks growing hot, and breathed through her nostrils.

“I do not have you to thank for that,” she told him. But what use was it now to show her anger?

“The boys hauled in the lumber for the hotel a week or two ago from that sawmill in the Hills. Soon as it warms and melts they’ll be building. Once they get started that hotel will be up and running in no time. Say, four months from now. And the dining room needs to open with it. I can’t wait long for an answer.” Footsteps could be heard coming down the narrow trail shovelled in the deep snow outside the cafe’s door.

“Are you staying in town overnight?”

“I can,” he replied. For an instant, she wondered where he would stay, then thought that he had to be sleeping maybe in her old bed at Mrs. Emery’s, or perhaps the Archibalds would put him up. Mrs. Smith’s house crossed her mind, but the thought that a respectable man of business might simply go there for a place to spend the night scandalized her, even as she wondered if in this too, she was being naive. Men, she was learning, did not view the world in the same way women did, paying lip service to the women’s view, but going about in secrecy in a different, less moral world. To join Campion, would she be joining that world too?

The door was creaking open now, the usual cloud of freezing air filling the room.

“I’ll need an answer tomorrow morning.”

“My answer,” she said, ponderously, “Will depend on how you answer the questions I put to you.” She stood, turning to the newcomers, a Galician farmer and his towering son, their clothing frozen stiff, creaking as they moved, and radiating cold, both of them, she knew, speaking only a few words of English. It would be a struggle to find out what they wanted and to tell them how much it would cost. They pounded their heavy mitts together, trying to put life back into their frozen fingers.

“Good morning to you,” she sang, her practiced smile already on her face. “Come in, come in. It is so cold out there today – another blast of winter,” she said, using exaggerated gestures to invite them into chairs. “Sit down here, warm your hands at my fire,” miming her hands out to the fire, fingers spread, palms down. When she turned back to the first table in order to go around it to the stove, she saw the door closing on Campion’s back.

After the farmer and his son had gone she cleaned, washed dishes and put them away, baked a cake and put it away too, and then, having decided that no one else would be coming in –
the day was getting colder and now the wind was up; it was too cold even for the hardiest – she pulled on her boots and heavy wool coat, wrapped her wool shawl around her head, thrust her hands into her fur-lined mittens, and went down the street to retrieve Charlie from Mrs. Wozny’s clan.

She carried him back through the frozen grey day, occasional gusts of wind blowing snow into her face so she couldn’t see where she was going for moments at a time, cloud banks, low and grey, were moving closer and shutting out the wide glow of the sky. A storm was coming. Charles had grown heavier and taller in the few months since they’d come to Bone Pile, was almost too big for her to carry now, and she tried not to let him overbalance her and tip them both into a snowbank as she hurried back to Adamson’s house which she realized she had, over the months, begun to think of as her own. It was not often she had enough time for Charles, or what felt to her like enough time, although she was well aware that the other women who were farm wives or worked at doing laundry and ironing, or sewing, or cleaning to support their children, would consider five minutes spent giving a child full attention too much and would spoil him. In the privacy of her rented home though, whenever she could, she played with him, talked to him and sang to him for an hour or even two.

“I’m hungry,
mama
,” he sang into her ear now.

“You are always hungry, my sweet,” she sang back to him, so that he giggled.

“What did you do today?” she asked, as she moved along the narrow trail of hard-packed snow.

“Played horsies,” he said, the question seeming to bore him. “Played wedding.” She started at this, wondering what he meant, but then Mrs. Wozny had only daughters who would play at being married, and of course Charles would be the bridegroom, this without his having the faintest idea what that meant. She would have to explain it to him, she supposed.

Whenever she could find a book, she read stories to him, for the first time in her life studying the bible, one given her by the minister, Mr. Oswald, having come from a world where ordinary people did not read the bible – unless they were Protestants who, she had heard, read it themselves. He had come into her café one afternoon when she was between the noon meal and the evening one, had quizzed her politely about her faith: “You are a Roman Catholic, I believe?” watching her solemnly.

“I was, of course, raised as one. Where I come from everyone is Catholic,” she said, “Although there was a whole English, Protestant world right in our midst and we just pretended they didn’t exist, as they pretended we didn’t.” For the first time, she understood that this had been a strange way to live, especially now that it occurred to her that here in the West Galician, Scottish, French and others worked and built and entertained themselves together. “We laughed at them, as they laughed at us, instead of trying to live together.” She was frowning, the lessons of the nuns spinning in her head about war and being overwhelmed and…whatever else.

He said, “There is no priest here, no church.” She nodded, nervously, not liking that he seemed to be standing too close to her, that he was keeping her from her work, not liking the gaze he fixed on her from his too-piercing brown-gold eyes, strange eyes, unpleasant eyes. “I come every third Sunday to conduct a service in the Archibald’s parlour. We are looking for a house, maybe even here, but in the meantime, sometimes the Olsons and sometimes the Archibalds put us up. I hope you will join us next Sunday. We are here for the week.” She swallowed, grasped a chair back as if planning to sit down, lifting a foot and putting it down again.
Never, in a million years.