Wild Rose (53 page)

Then she remembered that Harry hadn’t said a word about a future with her, only that brief mention of a day on his land, and was indignant and for a second, suspicious. But when she thought about how Harry might simply have used her tonight, she found herself too tired to dwell on it, saying to herself only,
and I him
, and surprised as she was by this errant thought, almost at once fell into a restless, dream-laden sleep.

She woke late the next morning, Charles had gotten himself up and was tugging gently at her hair so that when she opened her eyes the first face she saw was his peering into her own with a look somewhere between mystification at the fact of this sleeping woman who was his mother, and mischievousness that she didn’t see him and would not tell him to stop. She began to laugh, gathered him in her arms and swung him onto the bed beside her.

“Are we going today?” he asked her. She remembered then that the promised trip had been taken from them, and grimness descended over her spirit. But she said, “Today we go to see Mrs. Emery! We will help her put her things in the wagon!” Quite satisfied, the boy climbed down from the bed and went into the other room to find his toy box that they had left on the floor beside the sofa, while Sophie cooked his breakfast.

But an hour later when she walked with her son to the Emery house, it was to discover that no one answered her knock, and when she opened the door to peer in to see if Mrs. Emery was perhaps upstairs – but come to think of it, she told herself, Harry isn’t even here yet with his wagon – no one answered her call. She stepped inside, Charles following her, and called again, “Charlotte, are you here?”

From the back of the house she heard a latch click and then a door open; she hurried down the hall to the kitchen and was just in time to see a bulky figure in dark clothes entering through the back door. He was as surprised to see her as she was to see him, although it took her a second to realize that it was Walter Campion.

“They have left,” he told her, and let air out through his nose, heavily, as if he regretted their going. In her sudden fright she had placed a hand over her heart, and Charles, sensing this, had leaned against her skirt, hugging her leg as if for protection. “She didn’t take much, didn’t take long to load what there was. And it is a long way with a loaded wagon to Garden City. Need an early start.” Sophie wondered what had become of the boarders, but didn’t ask. Moved on, she supposed, dispersed through the village.

“I wanted to say good-bye,” she said, beginning to back away, out of the kitchen, to go down the hall, out onto the muddy, rutted street back to her own house. He stepped forward, arresting her movement.

“How are you doing, Mrs. Hippolyte?” he asked. “Nearly a year or so has passed since you came here with me.” He paused, made a short guttural sound that might have been a laugh. “And refused me, too.” He repeated that odd grunt again. Sophie stiffened.

“I am a decent woman,” she told him. “You had no right to speak to me in such a dishonourable way.” Now his laugh sounded more like that of a normal person, as if she had made a witticism and he was laughing politely to acknowledge it. The sun was moving around, though slowly, and the shadows in the room seemed to lift so that she could see him more clearly, or maybe it was only her own vision that cleared.

“It is the West,” he told her, conversationally. “No rules apply.”

“They do!” burst out of her before she had time to think. She almost turned and ran out of the house at this, but stifled her impulse, trying to gather together some feeling, some emotion, some wisdom that hovered around her that she waited to coalesce so that she might say it to him. About herself. About him. About such a life as he proposed.

How bulky and large he seemed although he was not a tall man, how much space he occupied. How dark he appeared, his garments heavy, creased and folded with age. It would not have surprised her, in that moment, to see seaweed or grey rags of dust hanging from his forearms and shoulders. Her forehead prickled with what she apprehended.

“There will be no railroad,” she told him. “You will lose the money you have put into this venture.”

“There
will
be a branch line,” he answered. “It will be built this coming fall. Business will boom. Those kind of mistakes I don’t make.” He cleared his throat, gave a bark of a laugh as if at those who
did
make such foolish mistakes, then going on in a less harsh tone. “I won’t be here to see it.”

“Where will you be?” She was uncertain, thinking that he meant more than he was saying, or that he was giving her some message too mysterious for her to understand.

“I’m moving on,” he said. “I have done what I can here. Calgary is waiting, people pouring in, limestone mansions, store after store down the main street. I will try my hand there.” He was complacent, dismissive of her as part of what he would leave behind.

“Somewhere, sometime, you will go too far. You will be caught.”

“Caught?” His voice was loud, the tone harsh. “Caught?” She stopped her self from backing away as he stepped forward.

“You make your way over the bodies of others,” she told him. “The women…the homesteaders…especially the women.” She was thinking of Adelaide Smith, that hungry woman on the train West, and of her pride as she marched down the street in her near-garish finery, and at the memory of that pride, or contempt, wavered for a fraction of a second. No, view it as you may, she knew it, the woman was used. Her life was no one’s first choice, unless out of despair. He let air out his nose again, as if Sophie were a hopeless case, then turned away and went back to the outside door.

“And
you
are minutes away from starvation – you and that boy of yours. Minutes! Don’t you see that? One thing goes wrong and you are finished! In the gutter!” This she knew well, although she rarely allowed
herself to think of it, the notion of it being too terrifying. He was calming himself, she could see the effort it took. Neither spoke nor moved, staring through the gloom at each other. She saw his small, dark eyes begin to take on a glitter that she had seen before, when he had found her alone on the homestead, expecting no one, and Pierre gone for good. He had brought her her downfall, had not wavered a jot at doing it.

“Work for me and together we will conquer this place.” His hand was on the doorknob, he was turned sideways to her, looking at her slyly over his shoulder. “You’re a pretty woman. I like pretty women. I might even marry you. Imagine that. You riding in the buggy beside me in the finest garments money will buy. Blue silk, ermine, a diamond necklace for that pretty neck of yours. The great ladies would bow to you.”

She saw it herself. Dark red, not blue, a matching ruby necklace. But it was as a fairy tale. Thoughts flashed through her mind so quickly she could barely catch them. Not a fairy tale; it might well be real. Her cheeks burned at the realization of how real it was.

“And how the great ladies would hate and revile me,” she said, as if she were the sophisticated one, and not he, and swallowed hard, her breath coming quickly. “I think you are evil,” she said, surprised at the lightness of her own voice, its purity in the dusky air. It seemed to her there was a whisper in the air behind her head, the movement of cool air, shivers went down her back. At this, he turned the doorknob and went out, not so much with footsteps or the movement of his legs, as a kind of slipping away of a shadow. The door closed behind him.

“Mommy!” Charles declared, pulling at her sleeve, startling her, she had forgotten him entirely. “I want to go. I want to play with Sonja.” Had not the air in the room taken on a texture and become visible? She shivered, chilled, waves of something more emotional than physical were passing from her lower abdomen up to her chest and back down again. She thought she might be sick, but Charles went on. “Mieka wants me to play horses today. Come on, Mommy,” tugging at her sleeve again.

It took her a long time, the entire day, to rid herself of the smell of Charlotte’s kitchen, and the feeling of the air while she had stood there. Every time she thought of it shivers ran down her back again. With descending softness of the early evening air, she began to think she had been imagining things, because she did not like Campion, because she thought of him as a malign influence on the town and the countryside, with his graspingness, and his willingness to do whatever would bring him money, no matter what the cost to others. She wondered at the dress she had seen herself in, rich and colourful, the matching necklace, while he had offered the Blessed Virgin’s colour, and the white flash of diamonds. It seemed so odd to her, how they both saw her, and she couldn’t think what this meant if it meant anything, and yet, some part of her insisted that it meant something profound. But if presented with the situation again, she knew she would not change her choice.
I wish to be a grown-up, a woman, not a girl
, came into her mind, surprising her. Before, it seemed to her, she had only wanted to
seem
a woman, to
seem
to others in control of her own actions and her world. Why would Campion wish to clothe her as a virgin? It frightened her, to think of this. Or was she being a fool to think of it at all. Of course she was.

~

The next day was mail day
, an event for which the whole town waited anxiously, she supposed for a variety of reasons from the arrival of important bank documents, to advertising about farm machinery, to newsy letters from the longed-for home in Ontario or England or North Dakota. She expected letters from no one, although she received bills in every mail, and seldom received one except from her old friend Hélène, perhaps once a year since she had arrived in the West, and once from Violette Hippolyte, when Violette had taken her final vows. And the Hippolytes had sent that box of books and toys for Charles. Still, she waited as eagerly as anyone else in the town for the mail coach to come racing in, the mail bags dumped onto the sorting table, and late in the day, finally, to be able to go to the shack called ‘the post office,’ to pick up one’s letters. She supposed everyone had noticed that there were rarely letters for her, and it embarrassed her a little, although never enough to keep her away from the crush. She was hardly the only one in town who never gets letters, she told herself.

In mid-afternoon she went out to pick up Charles, who as usual these warm spring days, was out galloping around with Mrs. Wozny’s smallest daughters on the dry hillside behind her house. Charles apparently hadn’t seen her approach for he kept on running and calling, waving a stick about in the air, disappearing down the far side of the hill out of her sight. It was then that she saw, for what seemed to her the first time in a very long time, the long high pile of buffalo bones still waiting in the sun to be carried away and sold. It astonished her anew to see how many bones there were. The sun was warm enough this afternoon that the pile seemed to waver, rising and falling, growing bigger, then smaller in the heat waves coming off the prairie. Why did it always seem to her to be calling or beckoning? A long time ago she had thought they were about power; now, she no longer knew. Maybe it was only grief.

Then Charles returned from the far side of the hill to its crest above her, still brandishing his crooked stick, still calling and running, a black figure against the whiteness of the bones, taller even than the bones far behind him.

Rather than taking Charles straight home, they went together to the post office, walking among their neighbours. She was about to look around for Mrs. Emery when she remembered that Mrs. Emery was gone; it registered as a blow to the heart, her mind racing through the months she had spent with her, her kindness, her toughness, how Sophie had wronged her. Or not. It was then, for the first time, that she wondered what had become of Mrs. Emery’s boarders, of Old Sam Wetherell in particular, who had kept her awake nights pacing around overhead. She thought to ask Mr. Reed, who lived alone and knew everyone; he shrugged. “They took him over to the hospital in Garden City. They’ll keep him as long as he lasts.”

“Some illness?” Sophie asked.

“Naw, just old. Just wore out,” the farmer told her. Something that might have been regret went through her, and the pictures renewed themselves, him racing on horseback through the moonlight, his rifle across his saddle, his bowie knife strapped to his leg, danger all around him. His wildness, his recklessness, his lack of sensible fear. Although, she thought, how she hated what she knew of him, as if they were born enemies.

She always held back a little at the post office, letting others more certain of letters enter before her. She and two or three others trickled in finally as the rest of the village walked away, clutching unopened letters to their sides, hurrying home so as to read them in private, or not able to wait, tearing them open right there in front of everyone and beginning to devour them, laughing aloud at their contents, snorting, or gasping. And she thought,
why are they here? In this wilderness, so far away from the real world? Why do they stay?
She knew the answer in a sort of way, that they were poor people and the West represented hope in the form of their own land. If they survived the hardship, grew old on that land, left it for their children to live on and work, would they die in satisfaction? Or would they die in profound regret for the mothers left behind they had never seen again, the sisters and brothers, the green villages and forests, the burbling streams, the cloud-filled skies, the narrow, homey vistas? Who could love the wide, empty, grass-covered plains in the same way?