Wild Rose (17 page)

When they reached the church, all paused, the singing stopped or in one or two cases trailed away, the priest went slowly up the church’s wide front steps, waiting until not a sound could be heard save the birds chirping so gaily in the trees that surrounded the churchyard; he blessed everyone, and the float itself, which had stopped to one side, the owner of the horse pulling it taking the animal by the bridle to hold it still. As soon as the priest finished the blessing and everyone followed him and the cross into the church for the special Mass, the farmer and his son would unhitch their horse from the dray that it pulled, hurry the animal off to a nearby small pasture where it would be left for the day, and would come rushing back so as not to miss a moment of the Mass or the celebration that would follow. By then André would have jumped down from his perch and taken off his costume, a long piece of dark blue cloth patterned with silver that was wrapped around his lanky body that resembled, suspiciously, a curtain from a fine house, and that had been worn for many years by successive St. John-the-Baptists, folded it away, smoothed down his blonde thatch, and joined everyone in the church too.

Grandmother had not walked through the town with the procession as Sophie and grandfather had done, but gauging the moment, had arrived precisely as the procession did, so that she walked into the church with them, and sat down in their customary pew just below the altar where all the towns’ dignitaries had places. A low-grade buzz of excitement filled the church even among the very pious and the priest, normally given to long sermons and many admonishments about the behavior of his parishioners, seemed to be infected too, if not exactly rushing through Mass, wasting no time about it and cutting short his sermon on the saint and what he had to teach the people of
la patrie
, Quèbec, remind them that God was watching and He did not like drunkenness nor fornication, the latter a sin apparently so grave that Sophie could only hope it was one of which she hadn’t been guilty.

After Mass most of the townspeople went home for a light
repas
and a nap in preparation for the night of festivities ahead, but the country people who had poured into town in wagons and buggies, on single horses and by whatever other conveyance they could press into service would stay lolling in the grass wherever there was a high spot where the ground was dry, or finding shade under a tree from the hot afternoon sun for a nap, while others were picnicking, playing games and making music with fiddles, spoons, and flutes until it was time for the feast. And after the feast, the bonfire! It was for this highest point of the day that Sophie had braved her grandmother’s ire to ask if she might attend, and grandfather had intervened saying she was now old enough to attend and he would look after her.

But first, the feast. Most of the villagers and those from the countryside were there, she had even caught a glimpse of Pierre Hippolyte standing with a group of boys his own age. As many as possible of the crowd were seated at the roughly-made long wooden tables on which sat trenchers piled high with bread, platters of meats of one kind and another, others creaking under mountains of biscuits, cakes, pies and sweating pitchers of lemonade for the children, women and old people, and beer for everyone else. Already people were eating and when they were satiated, they rose and wandered away to visit with relatives, neighbours and friends, or if children, to play noisy games in the grass, to run in and out among the trees shouting, hiding and being found, and boys tripping each other, running away, being chased. Grandfather, remembering at last that she sat quietly beside him, released her with a pat to her shoulder so that she might join in the fun. Far down the tables she spotted Violette Hippolyte and her mother and sisters, thought she would go to them and sit with them.

It was slow going on the uneven ground in the twilight that was beginning to rise up from the grass and with the stars not yet out nor the bonfire lit. People were beginning to come and go, the long tables emptying and women to gather dishes and leftover platters of food to cover them until another supper would be required after the bonfire had died away – a last sleepy lunch before the slow trip home, drowsing in the wagonbox or the buggy. Some boys too, had lit firecrackers and they were pop-popping on the far side of the square beyond the great pile of wood. Sophie slid between a group of men who stood together smoking, tankards in their hands that were thick and gnarled from work, and when she emerged, twisting past the full skirt of a dignitary’s wife, she saw that the Hippolytes had left the table and in the growing darkness, she couldn’t pick them out from the female figures milling about in front of the trees. She came to a stop, considering, looking about, then back the way she had come where she saw the figures of girls her own age, although she couldn’t make out who they were. Never mind: They would be friends, or at least, acquaintances from school. She began the trip back, once again dodging among adults and avoiding little boys whose eyes burned with their own fire, clearly intent on mayhem. Her grandfather was no longer at the table, nor was the mayor, nor the town clerk.

Shortly she located some of her convent friends and ran to be among them, at first only listening to their excited chatter, not taking part. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed her grandfather standing well back from the tables that the women were so quickly denuding of dishes, saw that he stood next to a woman, although she couldn’t make out who it was. Not grandmother who never attended and in any case this woman was full-breasted, her skirts flaring out over her plump
derièrre
as she stood sideways next to grandfather, her bonnet more elaborate than most of those about tonight. Sophie peered over her classmate Aimée’s shoulder, just as Aimée moved away, so that Sophie caught a full glimpse of the two adults standing so near each other that their clothing touched.

Now she recognized who the woman was: the widow Bénédicte Bilodeau. Just as Aimée moved back to block Sophie’s view again, she saw grandfather catching and holding Mme Bilodeau’s fingers and that Mme Bilodeau was turning to him and he was looking down into her face with an expression Sophie had not seen before, as if this woman took up every iota of his attention, as if there were a magnet between their two sets of eyes. He had never looked at Sophie that way; he never looked at grandmother that way. A tiny shock ran through her of surprise and some not quite coalesced understanding. She could feel, unaccountably, her cheeks burning and would have said to Aimée, “Look!” but her friend was shouting to the girls around them to be heard over the racket of the crowd, including Sophie in her call, “Let’s go! Let’s go!
Allons y!
They are starting the fire!”

Swept up in the excitement, linking arms with Aimée and Catherine; they began to run through the crowd, everyone moving in the same direction toward the massive pile of wood and the men who stood at intervals around its base holding torches, whose flames were thick and bright and reached over their heads.

L’abbe
stood on a high point by the fire. As the girls approached running, they came to a dead stop as he lifted both arms in a gesture that said that everyone should kneel because it was a part of the celebration, it was imperative that he pray with them and remind all of them that this wasn’t just summer fun, but a serious occasion, that the church must be honoured too. Those at the front of the crowd fell to their knees, those behind stumbling a bit, a few accidents occurred and the crowd piled up tightly against each other, then spread, and all knelt. When he had obtained silence finally, except for the light breeze high in the treetops, the birds setting up a racket, then abruptly stopping, and the usual distant animal sounds coming from the thick woods that surrounded the village, he began to pray. For once, it was a short prayer and when he had finished blessing the wood, “the light that is Christ,” he intoned, he again raised his head and made a gesture toward the woodpile and the men who stood around it. At once, in unison the torch-holders stepped forward, crossing themselves with their free hands, and lowered the flares to the perimeter of the pile. As soon as the wood at each place caught fire, each man threw his torch into the pile and a cheer went up through the crowd. Sophie and her friends began to jump up and down screaming and clapping their hands, their bonnets bobbing askew.

It is here Sophie began to be confused. Somehow she lost track of her friends Aimée and the other girls, although how that had happened wasn’t clear to her. Of course she would never forget watching
le feu de joie
, the powerful roar and upward thrust of flames stretching so high they reduced the town to a toy village, the wood crackling and snapping, fountains of multi-coloured sparks, sometimes more than one at the same time, shooting upward and falling, falling, not to wink out, but simply to be absorbed by the night. She remembered too that at the same time, or maybe it was later, there had been shouting and singing to loud
music from fiddles, harmonicas, flutes and musettes, as well as much dancing on the grass among the grownups, although she had seen children dancing with each other too, holding hands, jumping up and down and laughing. She couldn’t remember if she had danced or not, but she had seen, maybe even more than once, a dancer or two falling down. This had frightened her so that she sought out her grandfather, he no longer standing with the widow but close to the fire among his friends. She clung to him and he looked down at her, laughing.

“Il a trop but, c’est un pochard,”
he told her but she didn’t think she knew exactly what that was; it did not explain anything; it did not explain what frightened her. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “They won’t hurt anybody but themselves,” but, still, he seemed to find her fear amusing. She remembered, too, seeing crockery jugs being passed among the men, but then, hadn’t there been something like a fight between two of them? Both of them rolling around in the grass with women shrieking admonishments at them, men, bafflingly, calling instructions,
until the priest had come and demanded that they stop at once –
although he himself might have been laughing – which, nonetheless, they did.

She was clear that then her friend Hélène came up to her, there with her younger sister Thérèse; they had come by where she stood on their way to find a better place from which to watch the fire without it being too hot or too close to the sparks or occasional shards of glowing wood that would explode out of the flames.

“Sophie! Sophie, come with us,” Hélène screamed, shaking with excitement and with a stare that moved from place to place and person to person without stopping to recognize anyone or anything. Sophie grasped the sisters’ hands and hurried with them as they thrust their way through the people gathered several deep at the perimeter of the fire. The three of them stood, arms linked, rigid with mixed fear and awe, watching the fire as it consumed slowly at first, and then faster and faster the mountain of wood that the townspeople and country people alike had been gathering and bringing to the centre of the village for a week or more now until the pile was manor house high and as wide. Moment by moment it grew until it turned into a conflagration of such size and power she could not quite assimilate it mentally. Sophie turned her head to her friends, looking for comfort or explanation, but seeing them open-mouthed, bright-faced and shiny-eyed from the reflection of the flames, fixed in fascination, transported even, she dropped the sisters’ arms, they not noticing she had, she could only think – something about hell – hellfire – that even now, somewhere, souls were roasting slowly in such flames. Her great-uncle Henri! Perhaps her mother? Or her father? Perhaps someday even the widow Bilodeau? And – no, it could not be – grandfather? Horrified, already beginning to pant with fear, she backed away from her friends, and from the bonfire, while such thoughts sped, terrifyingly, through her mind, even as she tried to stop them. Not great-uncle Henri who hugged her and gave her candies. No, it couldn’t be.

Behind her was the night, pitch black and full of the rush of undefined and unnamed figures; ahead was the fire, by the second growing louder and burning more ferociously. It was too brilliant to look at, its noise too loud to tolerate. It was unstoppable, an engorged, fire-breathing dragon, twisting and yawing about; it would consume them all whether sinners or not.
But we are all sinners!
She spun about and ran, into the cool darkness of the night, through the blackness under the trees, up the stone steps of the church, pushed open the heavy wooden door, slipped inside to stand trying to catch her breath, overcome by the tumult in her brain and heart, in the vestibule’s shadows.

Oddly, the church was not in total darkness: a dim silver light came from the sides of the altar straight ahead of her, and a reddish glow from the high windows on the side nearest the bonfire even though tall trees stood between the two. In the centre of the church a softness that was neither darkness nor light bloomed so that the wooden floor gleamed darkly, seeming to float. So inviting was it that Sophie, her heart still tripping too fast in her throat, was drawn forward to it and began to walk without meaning to or noticing that she was, up the central aisle, past the crudely-built wooden pews, one by one, toward the altar, below which she stopped, genuflecting, and crossing herself as if her knee had been bent and her hand lifted by someone else.

Behind her trembling shoulder blades there was only darkness, not black and forbidding, but alive with miniscule quivering particles that seemed filled with – something – intelligence, wisdom, a presence that waited in hushed suspension. How small she felt, infinitesimally so, the shadowed rafters soaring high above her and before her, the white-clad altar glinting with gold, vases of lilies and roses sending out their scent to saturate the air. All around her the whispering grew into a rustling. In its Presence even hellfire retreated, withering. But still, she was afraid, and in her terror she might have called out,
Angels!
Exalted, she fell to her knees on the wooden floor, beat her temples with her fists, not able to assimilate the two visions of the world that she had been taught. How could it be both? And where was her place in this – but her ears were once again filled with a roaring, choirs singing perhaps? She could not – she could not…