Wild Rose (58 page)

Pierre’s claim that he had never loved her came back to her, and she remembered that she had felt when he said it that he was lying so as to free himself of her, she supposed. Now she wondered if she had chosen to believe that this was a lie because she couldn’t bear to think that her dream of love was just that, a dream of her own, and never of his. She thought about their early days together, their lovemaking, the things he said to her, how he held her, and kissed her and said there could be no life without her. How could she disbelieve what she had known with every cell in her body to be true? Or had she been only a prize he had captured and the thrill of that had worn ff? But if he had once loved her as she believed he had, how could such love go away? Yet, it had. Such sadness as she felt, as if the world were made of sadness.

She began to understand then that there were not always answers for the deepest questions, that some things, no matter how important, were things that a person would never know, and that all the thinking in the world wouldn’t give an answer. Then she thought,
but I am different now: something must have happened when I thought and thought and thought and never knew what to believe
. She supposed that what was different was that she was now drained of passion that had been the only way she could think of him: with hatred, rage, or love, all of which clouded her vision and prevented her from thinking clearly. Now, she told herself, she could think clearly.

The men of the town had at last begun building a school. And none too soon, because by the time it was finished and a teacher had been found, Charles would be ready for it. But then, she thought, I want better for Charles, a better life than this, a better place than this. Only one year, she promised herself. Then I’ll be gone to a bigger place where there will be more opportunities for him, and much better schooling. But thinking of her tiny hoard of cash waiting in Frank Archibald’s safe, she was daunted, knowing of the poverty that would await them in Calgary, and how hard it would be to get ahead.

Always, in the back of her mind was the notion of the benefits of marrying again. But Harry offered only his farm and she had had enough of that, or so she thought, and there was perhaps André? But when she had finally written to him, and he had promptly answered her, his reply had made no offer other than the suggestion that if she should come to Calgary she should visit him. What that meant, she couldn’t tell. She had begun to think that he would have gone back east by the time she made it there, and sighed.

She was reminded that today was mail day and with the weather so good and the trails dry, the stagecoach carrying mail would soon reach the town, or perhaps, already had. She untied her apron, touched her hair with her palms, and went out onto
the street, pausing to look up and down and, saw a faintly green
ish tinge across the land that encouraged her.

Beyond the town the pile of bones still sat gleaming in the sun white as snow, brighter even than the snow, as if it was some precious mountain set there to mark what had been. Still, though, when she went near it, she was chilled and saw the cracks, jagged broken edges, and chips in each individual bone and the dirt embedded in those long cracks, and the stains on them from birds and small animals, and from blowing earth. And on days when the sky was low and purple and indigo, the light blue, and the vast pile black, it seemed to her that its very presence cast a pall on the town, was perhaps the source of its ill luck, its cruelty to its own inhabitants, to each other, and its poverty and failure. As if, perhaps, the bones were cursed. Or the bones themselves cursed the town for what had gone before she had even heard of the West.

People came and went as she waited for her turn at the table where some of the mail was still being sorted. She said hello, and yes, what a beautiful day, and how soon the crops would be in, and people could travel again without worrying about storms, and had she heard that surely this year the railroad would come to Bone Pile?
She hardly noticed when the husband of the family that carried the mail handed her a couple of envelopes, one she saw at once a bill for coal. She would wait until she returned to her own house to open the other, a plain envelope, unfamiliar handwriting. Although she barely glanced at it, she thought, pleased, that it would be from André.

When she finally took the time to sit down and look at it, she noted that it had come from a bank in Montréal, had been forwarded from a bank branch in Calgary to Garden City, that had sent it on to her in Bone Pile. Puzzled, she used a knife to carefully open it, then spread the thick paper out on the table. The letter was written in the formal language of bankers and lawyers and said that it concerned the estate of her grandmother. She was shocked: How could it be that grandmother had died and she hadn’t even been told? She felt no grief, nor any pity, not for her grandmother, nor for herself, but knew in a new way that hadn’t been there before that in her own time emotion would come.

The letter went on to say that she had been left nothing, which was, hardly a surprise, yet deep in her chest a hard knot formed that threatened to rise and cause her to vomit. She swallowed hard, keeping it down. Grandmother had left nearly all her money and her land to the church, also, not a surprise. A small amount had gone to each of Sophie’s brothers. That grandmother had left money for Hector amazed her and she took it as a blow directed at her.

But wait, there was a smaller envelope inside the large one. Now with fingers that trembled, not even bothering to use the knife, she tore it open. Inside was a bank draft attached to a note in Guillaume’s hand.

I send you some of the money that our grandmother left for me. My business is very slowly improving and money is less hard to come by these days. As well, I blame myself in part for the situation in which
you find yourself. As Claire has told me many times, I was wrong not to have let you come to us in Montréal. Therefore, I am sending you a small portion and hope that it will help you in your life.

He had signed it merely,
Guillame Charron
.

The draft was for five hundred dollars. It was to her a fortune; with what she had managed to save she now had nearly a thousand dollars, enough to move to Calgary this very day if she chose, and imagined herself packing a suitcase for herself and one for Charles and walking out. She wouldn’t even shut the door behind her.

She began to cry; the tears she had for so long forbidden herself pouring down her cheeks. Her tears were of relief, they were of sorrow of such depths that she was astounded herself: her loneliness, the sadness of her childhood, the abandonment that had nearly broken her in two, only her dear Charles saving her. Leaving at once consumed her, but as soon as she began to rise to begin packing regret came: Regret because she would leave this village even though she had hated it and never been part of it, but in which she had had friends of a sort, and had made her own way. Memories of her village in Québec swept through her next; in this moment she missed profoundly the vast forest that surrounded it, missed running on the hills with her friends, screaming until her throat hurt, missed the yellowness of the sun there, and the damp air, missed the balsam and sycamores, the wild columbine and honeysuckle, missed the two rivers and the silver lake shining under the sky, and thought, remembering grandmother’s unkindness and that of the nuns, remembering how the priest ruled as a king:
Where we came from becomes a myth in our minds
. This thought, surprising as it was, dried her tears. Calm once again descended on her.

I can go from here, she reminded herself, and began at once to make her plans for their departure. She thought now of Pierre, because now it was safe to think of him; now she was a woman of some means and could leave him behind.

Ever since she had talked to him she had doubted herself, thinking first that she wasn’t wrong and he had loved her, then thinking she had been a fool and the love was all on her side, and girlish nonsense as well. She had thought that she had done well once he had left her, that she had made her own way, and that with a small child, was something of which she should be proud. But ever since he had stood in her kitchen and offered her not a crumb, she had seen how poor she was, how hard she had to work for the little she did have, and how she remained alone, and had no one who could save her. No one who even wanted to save her, except perhaps Harry, although she suspected that he really thought, even if he didn’t realize it, that she would save him: With her hard work, and her good sense, with her mere presence, no matter what any of it cost her. And now André Chouinard had reappeared in her life. But she mustn’t think of him; from now on she must depend on no one but herself.

She had, too, her precious Charles on whom to lavish love, so he would never know what it is to grow up without a mother, seeing for the first time that she would never stop grieving for her own mother, that it would be her pain to bear long after she had gotten over the deaths and betrayals of others.

Now she could leave Bone Pile this very day. She knew it would not be as she left her childhood home, lost in a dream of passion and glory, believing she could shuck off all her past without a trace of regret or even remembrance. Nor as she left the homestead, in terror, ill with shame and her loss, unable to understand what had happened to her, or why. She and her son would go away from this place of wonder – for it was a place of wonder after all – would move on to the city where there were women with hearts and minds like her own, maybe even French women, and warmed at the thought of speaking French again. She knew a little of herself now, and that knowledge would be the rock on which she would build the rest of her life.

She stood in the doorway of the shabby rented house she called home and gazed out over the town that stood gleaming in the spring sun. She had not loved this village, nor the way people lived in it. The way they would not admit to their own errors, or to their hardship that they would never escape although they said they would, they believed they would, and saw for once a glimpse of the nobility, well-hidden by the daily pettiness and venality, that their Western venture invested their lives, the suffering that was inextricably part of it.

Out beyond the village was the vast prairie broken only by a narrow trail wandering south and west through the limitless expanse of grass, another going north, another heading east. How happy she had been when she had first seen this place from the windows of the train. How in love with it she had been when she had lived all that long summer on it, in a tent batted by the steady wind, its constant soughing in the grass, the scent of sage, wild onion, gumbo primroses, cinquefoils, wolf willow, strange grasses, and many, to her, nameless plants, some odour that was
prairie
and nothing else. She remembered the day so long ago when she had fallen from the wagon and landed by a patch of wild roses so that her first real memory of prairie was of their bright pinks and reds, the air around her drenched with their delicate, musky perfume, for all their beauty, the plants themselves as tough as any weed. No, tougher. Wild animals always nearby, though unseen, and when the pitiless sun sank below the distant horizon, the constellations, old as the world, and the white-faced moon their only light, the sky then so vast and boundless that her soul had come loose and drifted out among the stars.

Acknowledgements

I wrote this book, or a version of it, during the most tumultuous and possibly most difficult time of my life; I wrote it in Perth, in Sydney, and in Tasmania, in Ireland and in the Czech Republic, in the Saskatchewan countryside where I lived for something like thirty-five years, and then, eventually, I wrote it here in Calgary. Then I wrote it again to create this version. For this I thank especially David Margoshes, who is an incisive and supportive editor. Along the way I had help from Jennifer Glossop, and before that from Charlene Dobmeier and from Phyllis Bruce, and from other writers – in particular Dianne Warren who fixed an astute prairie eye on it – also from my sisters, and friends too numerous to name. Thanks very much to Gerald Schmitz for his careful editing of any French text. My agent Jackie Kaiser helped me find my way through all advice and my own conflicting notions and desires concerning this book, and to say the right thing as the joy of writing came to me, and went away, and came again. In the end, it turned out that nobody could write my book but me (although lord knows I tried to escape that), and all its shortcomings are my own. My deepest thanks to the people named above, and those not named who know who they are, as do I. Blessings to my deceased husband Peter, wherever he might now be.

To those prairie historians who object that in the early 1880s there were virtually no settlers in the area in question, I can only answer: This is a novel. I give the same answer to the assertion that most French settlers, either from France, Belgium or Québec, chose to settle in groups. Indeed they did, including my own Québecois grandparents (from the Eastern Townships) who settled near St. Isidore de Bellevue around 1911 and who, around 1940 went to Ste. Rose du Lac in Manitoba and finally spent the remainder of their lives in St. Boniface, and my own generation who scattered from one end of the West to the other.