Wild Rose (16 page)

“Why does he want attention?” she asked Violette in a whisper. Violette shrugged, then said, staring ahead as if she were talking to herself, “He is the third boy. Papa hasn’t much time for him. Alexandre and Marcel tease him.” She sighed. “He likes mischief.” Sophie was unsure why anyone would like mischief, but then, he was a boy and she knew nothing of boys, at least, not of ones near her own age.

The girls made a slow circle around the old house, chattering about the convent and the sisters and the other girls, and then made a second circle, ignoring Pierre. Growing bored or, as she had said wanting some attention that Violette refused to give him, he rooted about in the tall grass near some lilac bushes and came out with a half-dozen large duck eggs, that judging by the smell when they broke, were old and had failed to hatch. He began to throw them toward Violette and Sophie, deliberately sending them just short so that they splattered on the ground near where the girls walked sending up the most appalling stink. As if that were not bad enough, miscalculating, or so she thought, he threw one that broke against Sophie’s skirt, sending stinking orange rivulets down it.

It was all she could do not to cry. Violette, seeing her dismay, said, “Never mind, Sophie. I will clean it for you.”

Sophie whispered, “It is only that grandmother likes me to keep my dress clean,” lamely, unable or not wanting to say just how angry grandmother could be, and perspiring a little at the apparently hopeless situation in which she found herself. Now she felt herself a child and Violette the kindly mother, which only added to her confusion.

“It’s nothing,” Violette insisted. “He is such a rascal!” She threw up an arm and made a pushing gesture in Pierre’s direction as if to tell him to leave at once, at which he only grinned.

How Sophie blushed as at the water trough in the yard Violette raised the stained part of her skirt to eye level and scrubbed at it with a brush that hung on a hook from the pump until there was only the faintest yellow mark left in the muslin, although now it was wrinkled where when she had arrived there had not been a wrinkle.

“It will dry in a minute,” Violette assured her. “No one will ever know there was an accident.” She turned to Pierre, calling to him where he lounged against the open barn door. “If you did the washing you wouldn’t be so careless!” but he only laughed, looking into Sophie’s face with those eyes still sparkling with mischief, then turned away to pick up dried balls of horse dung, pitching them as hard as he could against the barn wall where they exploded into golden dust. Violette shook her head in exasperation, but left him to his own amusement, saying, “Useless to scold him,” with an expression somewhere between annoyance and puzzlement as if she were his mother instead of a sister actually younger than he was.

Soon Madame Hippolyte stood at the low kitchen door calling,
“Voyons! Vite!”
and all of them came from around the yard, the little girls running ahead of everyone, while Pierre and his brothers strolled behind. In the crowded kitchen there was buttermilk to drink and
gaufrettes
Madame Hippolyte had made. How delicious they were, melting on her tongue like the Host. Oh, no, she mustn’t think that thought, and tried to erase it.

She wished then that she might never go home, but could sit forever in that crowded, low-ceilinged room with huge blackened hearth all along one wall and children everywhere giggling and teasing one another, while the two men sat at the scarred wooden table, smoking their pipes and sipping a hot brew from thick mugs. And their mother, short, stout, red-faced, rushed about simultaneously scolding and praising, throwing out orders to the boys who paid no attention, but that Violette did her best to carry out. Sophie sat in silence in her corner on a low stool, her mug of buttermilk on her lap, basking in the warmth that filled the room. Across the way now Pierre avoided looking at her, giving all his attention to the men, but Sophie was unable to stop herself from glancing at him every few minutes, fascinated by the gleam of his white teeth when he smiled, and the curl of black hair that hung over his forehead. Eventually the small girls began to grow restless and were sent outside to play, but the men and boys hung on, deep in conversation while Mme Hippolyte, sitting at the end of the table, lost herself in her knitting. Finally Violette asked, “Should we go outside too?”

Outside, she said, “I am tired of walking around. Let’s go up into the loft and sit in the old hay. Papa won’t mind, and we can hear everything there. You’ll know when M. Charron is ready to leave.” Sophie had never been in a hayloft before and climbed the rough ladder with some excitement. When both of them had stepped from it onto the floor of the loft the first thing that struck her was the delicious smell of last year’s hay, and then the wonder of the way beams of dust-filled light poked thick fingers here and there through openings in the walls. Following Violette’s lead, she went with her to a place where the hay was still thick on the floor and stretched out on it beside her friend who was already lying on it. They lay beside one another staring up to the rafters and for a long time neither said a word. Sophie was growing sleepy. She lifted her hand, put it into one of the light-rays and wiggled her fingers to watch the shadow fall on the thick post at their feet.

“Do you remember when my uncle died?” For a long moment Violette said nothing, then she stirred, turning on her side to face Sophie, the loose hay crackling under her.

“Yes,” she said, in a tentative tone.

“Do you know what happened to him? No one will tell me.” Sophie was careful not to look at her friend, not to touch her, not to stop wiggling her fingers in the ray of light that cut across above her own bosom. Violette rolled onto her back.

“You don’t know?” She asked the spiderwebs in the beams above them.

“Know what?” She wanted to stop making shadows, she wanted to roll against Violette and be held by her, she wanted to ask Violette to help her, although with what she was unsure. “There was no funeral for him, my brothers didn’t come home. Nobody ever spoke of him again.” She put her hands down, linked them on her chest, took in a deep quavering breath, still not looking at Violette, but gazing instead at the far barn wall where below which she could hear mice stirring in the loose hay. Violette didn’t reply.

Abruptly, she turned onto her side facing the older girl, lifted herself on one elbow from the sweet-smelling hay, and commanded, “Tell me!” Then, hesitating, “It is time I knew, don’t you think? I am thirteen. I am not a child.”

Violette let out her breath, ran fingers through the hay beside her, lifting a strand or two, then dropping them. “Your uncle, he…he hung himself, Sophie.” Sophie’s arm that had been holding up the upper half of her body gave way so that she fell back against the hay. A few seconds passed; she began to shake. Seeing this, Violette moved against her, lifted Sophie’s head to rest it against her shoulder.

“Hung himself?” The words didn’t make sense; she couldn’t imagine this.

“That is why there was no funeral.” Sophie would have asked why not, but she knew the answer:
Only le bon Dieu gives life: only He can take it away.
It was the greatest of sins, greater even than to kill someone else – to kill yourself. She heard herself make a cry, not loud, a sound she did not know she owned. It made her think of grandfather’s cry so long ago when he had been with
l’abbé
. An infinite number of dust particles still danced in the streams of light, outside in the yard the little girls called to each other, laughing, a horse whinnied from the nearby pasture, and crows cawed loudly, nastily, as if to mock her.

“I have never seen his grave,” Sophie said, turning her face away.

“It is behind a stone fence, under a big beech tree.”

“How do you know this?” Sophie cried out at the injustice of Violette’s knowing while she did not.

Violette said softly, “Everyone knows.”

She had no resistance left, and puzzled over the other question: How could it be that everyone knew such things and she did not?

On the way home in the early twilight, she longed to ask grandfather why his brother had hung himself, what it meant to hang yourself, and where exactly he was buried, and how it was that everyone knew things that she didn’t know. But looking up at his strong jaw, his wide cheek under the black hat, the thick grey moustache moving up and down as he hummed a tune or clucked to the horse, even at his carefully groomed hands holding the reins, she knew she could not. She allowed herself only to put her head against his upper arm and hold it there, as if she had fallen asleep.

And yet, it was at dinner that same evening that grandmother, who had seemed to Sophie for reasons she didn’t know, more agitated than usual, also angrier than usual with grandfather, had suddenly said, “When you are fifteen you will go to your brothers’ houses in Montréal. We will have looked after you long enough.”

It was as if she had gathered all her ire, all her bitterness at the world and placed it on Sophie’s head. She gasped aloud as she grasped what grandmother’s remark implied, that she had never been wanted here in the only home she had ever known. Hot blood flooded her face, neck and chest, and she gazed at her own napkin spread on her lap, swallowing hard so as to be able to breathe. Grandfather’s head snapped up, there was such tightness in his throat when he spoke that Sophie hardly recognized his voice, squeezed as it was by something.

“She will stay with us until she is married.”

Grandmother looked at her plate, saying nothing at all, although red spots appeared high in each cheek. Sophie left the table then without asking; no one stopped her. She moved lightly, as if she no longer weighed anything at all, going down the hall, up the stairs, into her room where she sat down at her desk, opened her school books and studied without lifting her head until Antoinette came to tell her it was time to go to bed. She didn’t think about what she had heard, not even when she was tucked into her bed, her lamp out, and Antoinette gone. But she lay for a long time, dry-eyed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, thinking hard of nothing at all. Or perhaps she thought a little of her mother, whose face she could only sometimes remember, but whose warmth she sometimes – rarely – felt around her. She even cried out, once, softly,
“Maman!”

Chapter Six

Angels

W
ith the firm insistence of her grandfather
who had said that he would take her himself as it was his duty to attend all of
la fête –de-St.-Jean-Baptiste
, she had been for the first time given permission to attend the late afternoon and evening parts of the day-long celebration.

“She must never leave your side!” Grandmother turned her face to Sophie’s then, Sophie watching as her mouth elongated, lips pressed together, chin lifting upwards, eyes hardening. “Stay with your grandfather at all times. Do not shame us.”

Sophie nodded, whispering,
“Oui, Grand-mère,”
shifting from one foot, carefully, onto the other, hands clasped meekly at her waist, and managed not to glance upward to grandfather for reassurance. Very unwise, she knew, when grandmother wore this face and held Sophie’s in its grip. Her eyes lowered, she waited until she heard the sibilation of heavy fabric that meant it was safe to look up, or better, to turn to grandfather where he stood gazing after grandmother as she went out of the dining room, a slight smile playing on his face, then tilting his head so his eyes met Sophie’s.

“We will go soon,” he told her, lifting a finger. “Are you ready?” Shivers raced up her spine.

“Yes, grandfather.” She already knew that grandmother would not so much as put in an appearance herself at the f
ête – uncouth habitant wildness
as she had put it, even though
l’abbé
Deschambeault would preside over the festivities and, through the Bishop, the church had sanctioned them. As they went out into the hall Sophie treading lightly for fear her grandmother might change her mind, Antoinette came bustling from the kitchen holding out a woolen shawl for her.

“It will be chilly when evening comes,” she declared. “You must carry it with you.” Sophie was indignant: The house was sweltering, it was June, how could she carry around a silly shawl all through the late afternoon without being laughed at by the other girls? But grandfather, seeing her petulance, looked gravely at her, saying, “This is very thoughtful of Antoinette,
n’est-ce pas?
Of course she will take it.”

“Merci, Antoinette,”
she said, wondering already where she might hide it to keep it safe through the hours ahead.

Her experience was that mostly on any of the rare occasions where only grandfather had taken her, having arrived at their destination, he simply forgot about her. That is, until it was time to go home. Then it was wise to be within his sight if she surmised he wanted to leave in order that he never had to look for her, such an annoyance perhaps having the effect, next time, on whether he would take her along.

Already this morning there had been a parade, although with only one float, a tableau of St. John the Baptist, the figures made of straw except for the saint himself who was represented by
le notaire’s
tall, fair-haired son, André, that is, while the saint still had his head, at the front of which a half dozen altar boys walked carrying the large wooden cross, and behind them
l’abbé
, then, singing, the nuns from the convent, and after them the children who lived as orphans in the convent, walking in pairs and singing bravely along with the nuns. Next to last the float itself, and behind it, the parishioners, suppressing any signs of anticipation of the gaiety to come, but excited enough not to mind even when their feet found themselves in puddles or mud caused by the warm early morning rain.