Wild Rose (2 page)

Later, Charles leaned his sturdy little body against her knee as she stood looking out the open cabin door across the unending expanse of grass. So intense was the heat that at the far horizon the earth lifted, shivered, melted slowly downward to rise again, so that sometimes she could see the land on the far side of the upward tilt of the plain floating, the palest aqua, low in the sky. She gazed, sweeping the quivering horizon, searching for the first sign of someone approaching, a darker spot in the wavering heat, tiny, growing bigger by infinitesimal degrees, until she could decide if she saw a wild thing, or horse or cow, or human.

She could feel through her skirt how hot Charles was, and she bent and lifted him into her arms. He settled his head into the crook of her shoulder and she kissed his cheek, patting his damp back at the same time. He lifted his head and said into her ear,
“Maman?”
And then, letting his head return to that curve of neck and shoulder where it fitted perfectly,
“Où est Papa?”
Such a bright child, she thought, only three and speaking so well. Already she was worrying about where he would go to school. Would she have to send him away? And where would she find the money to do that? She had been no scholar herself, nor was she much good at the skills the nuns and her grandmother had insisted on, her fingers still prickling at the thought of all the embroidery. Even her devil-may-care Pierre complained when the socks she had darned for him raised blisters. But for her little Charles all would be different. She would find a school where the teachers would cherish her bright boy and teach him well.

She said in English, “Soon papa will come ’ome.” Then, correcting herself, “Home,” aspirating the “h” carefully and adding,
“Bientôt.”
She wanted Charles to speak both languages and spoke to him in her own imperfect English, never hesitating, on the few occasions she was with the English–speaking settlers’ wives, or the few women in town, to enquire how one said this or that, finding them only too eager to help as if she, a heathen and an
idiote
, had at last come to her senses. Then she would practice on the way home, irritating Pierre with her efforts.

“We are Québécois,” he would insist to her. “We are French.”

“Can’t you see?” she would say. “Already settlers come from other places – they all learn English. Everyone who is important here is English. If we are to survive, we must learn English too.” But Pierre merely grimaced, and if she insisted, he would shout. She had faltered only during the rebellion, especially after they hung Riel, and wondered for a while if it was a mistake to throw in their lot with les anglais.

Then their perfect peace, or so she thought of it, had been
disturbed by the fear running through all the settlers, men riding
from one tiny, isolated farmstead to the next to ask of news, to try to think of plans for the safety of their wives and children should the Indians rise up too, and kill them all. Or the mad Métis.

“We are French,” she had argued. “They will not harm us.”

“Oh, so now we are French,” Pierre had bellowed at her, and in front of Napoléon Beausoleil. Exasperated and embarrassed, glaring at him, she had snapped back, “We cannot be anything else, of course. But we must be practical, Pierre,” a pleading
note entering her voice. She knew Beausoleil thought her mad:
To be French was to be French, that was all there was to it. One didn’t argue about it, or mitigate it; one was, and would always be. She gritted her teeth, holding back her argument, that one could be French privately and among other French people, while in the larger community working to fit in. In her mind it was simple, and not one whit treasonous, as the men clearly thought.

And were not the Beausoleils their only neighbours for miles in any direction on this never-ending, boundless plain? Somewhere far to the east there were swamps and bogs and near-impenetrable forests of pine and spruce that went on forever before one reached Toronto and then Montréal. Below them lay the United States of America, much-longer settled than the newcomers they knew themselves to be, where, if one went far enough, the winding trails made by wagons and mule trains or teams of oxen had become real roads. Where there were schools and churches and governments elected by the local people, unlike them who, despite the Territorial Council, were truly still governed from the East. To the West, equally impenetrable, the Rocky Mountains, snow-covered at their summits all the year round she had heard, and then the rainforest and the ocean. Above them, the north, everyone said fit only for the Indians and the Eskimos. Legion upon legion of trees, then tundra, then unimaginable millions of acres of ice and snow leading to a frozen bluish-white sea. No, Beausoleil had ridden half a day to see them. For half a day he had ridden his plow horse across the undulating sun-cured grasses of this blessed golden plain, seeing not another soul, and if he rode on, as he said he might, it would be more than another half day before he again found a settler’s flimsy shack rising grey and shabby, a miniscule dot above the lie of land and beneath the endless dome of sky. She had said, then, “Dear Monsieur Beausoleil, do share our meal before you go on. We will say a rosary to speed you on your way.” She had felt Pierre relaxing.

Now she asked, “Are you hungry, Charles?”

“
Oui
, Maman,” he replied, and she said, automatically, “Yes, Mother,” but he was intent on a lock of her hair that had come untucked.

She went back inside, closing the door behind her to keep out mosquitoes and flies – a hopeless task, that one – and set her son down, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the interior gloom. They could afford only one window, so as long as the weather allowed, they spent most of their waking hours outside. If she were cooking, though, she hurried inside every few minutes to make sure the chimney hadn’t overheated. In their first year, there had been a prairie fire to the north, flames leaping more than a hundred feet in the air, devastating the grassland for many miles killing everything in its path from wildlife to cattle and horses, and burning out every settler’s shack in its way. All that long night they had waited, watching, falling asleep to wake with a start, the wagon loaded, the horses in harness, ready to run should the wind shift. She would never forget how terrifying it was as the horizon blazed against the black sky and the wind blew eastward in howling gales.

Charles’s eyes seemed to need no time to adjust. As soon as she put him down he was attracted by an ant struggling across the rough wooden floor, and toddled toward it, his fat little hand outstretched, murmuring to it. What quick eyes he has, she thought, and would have laughed at herself except that how could any child be quicker or more curious than Charles? And where was Pierre?

What if he has had a runaway and was thrown from the wagon and lay, all his bones broken, somewhere on the prairie? Four years ago when she and Pierre had begun to search for the quarter of land they had filed on in Swift Current, the entire area was nearly empty of other people. But since then, more of them crisscrossed the prairie on their way here and there. Some stopping to ask Pierre for advice in finding a section or quarter-section stake, miles away from Sophie and Pierre’s cabin, so that she thought they stopped more out of fear, and to hear a human voice not their own. And now, the newcomers, too, those who stayed, stood in their cabin doors as she did, gazing out across the stiff pale grass, and spotted every rock, every animal, and if they could not at first tell a rock from a cow, it did not take long for them to educate themselves: horses as black strokes against the tawny landscape, cows black dots. She did
not believe Pierre was lying half-dead on the prairie. He followed trails; someone would have seen him as a still black spot where one had not been before. Someone would have found him.

Yet she could see no reason why his trip to the blacksmith in town to repair a broken part from his binder in such perfect travelling weather should take so long. He drank yes, what man did not enjoy a glass of wine, or a brandy now and then, but he was not a drunkard as so many of the men in the West seemed to be, no doubt because they had no women to remind them of a normal way of life. What else to expect when no single woman could even apply for free land?

She thought back to the morning Pierre had left. He came to the house, the horses already hitched, the broken part, she assumed, tossed into the wagon-box. He had seemed angry, in a hurry, ignoring Charles who had called, “
Papa, papa
,” so she hadn’t questioned him, didn’t even ask him to get her this or that, not even if she might go with him. A sheen of sweat lay on his forehead, a line of it trickled down his neck, but then, he’d been cutting wheat since not long past dawn, and the morning was such that heat came up off the prairie in billows, as if it was the earth itself churning it up. He hadn’t once looked into her face, and that had also troubled her.

Charles climbed into his seat at the table, and she picked his bowl from the shelf and at the stove spooned a little of the porridge she had made the evening before when the prairie cooled and it was possible to make a fire in the stove without fainting from its heat, then carried it to the table where she set it in front of him. Guillaume and Claire had sent the bowl for Charles when he was born, and the shiny silver spoon too, in which he could see his own face upside down, and that, no matter how many ways he turned it, to his eternal mystification, remained upside down. She poured a little of the pitcher of cream she had separated earlier in the morning onto the porridge.

“Careful,
c’est chaud!
”
She said to Charles, as she always said to him, sitting down beside him, and taking the spoon from his hand to demonstrate yet again, “It’s hot, very hot. Blow, blow very hard.” She gave the spoon back to him and Charles blew, sending porridge in all directions, grinning happily into her face.

She rose and went to the door again, opened it and stared once more out over the prairie to the southeast where the village of Bone Pile sat some ten miles away, then she turned to look out to where Pierre had left the binder against the last row of cut wheat, at the other end of the field from where she stood. He had made a few stooks, but they ended far back from where the binder sat. He wouldn’t allow her to stook for him, having some prejudice about what a woman of her sort could and could not be asked to do that he refused to relax even in the face of their need. Hadn’t she helped build their house? Hadn’t she carried sods to him? Hadn’t she delivered Charles with only Madame Beausoleil to help? Didn’t she dig the soil of her garden herself, waiting for a spring rain to soften the ground, and planting seeds his mother saved and sent West with her? She could be stooking behind the binder, speeding up the harvest. This, their best crop yet: the first year, only five acres plowed, there were so many other things needing doing: the second year twenty, the third year nearly double that, and now, sixty acres seeded to crop, and where was he? She was terrified a storm might come and they would lose it all, even thought of getting on the binder herself and cutting more crop, or stooking what hadn’t been done yet, even though he would be angry. And what to do with Charles if she did? Tie him beside her to the binder seat? What was it Pierre wanted from her, besides a child, besides a home, besides her unbounded love for him? She watched the sky, cloudless and distant, and the land, flattened now by the high, clear light, without seeing them.

She was thinking of her first summer here. She had been fearless, riding Tonerre by herself to search for berry patches – had picked pails of Saskatoons and chokecherries, once near the creek a mile to the north where Saskatoon bushes grew abundantly on the banks among the wild roses and wolf willow, beside a group of native women, not even knowing they were there, until they came through the bushes to pick side by side with her. Sophie, unsure what to do, until one of them reached silently in front of her, pulled down a fruit-laden branch she couldn’t reach, and held it for her as Sophie stripped its fruit.

“Merci,”
she had said, smiling, but the Indian woman did not speak or smile, and slipped away through the bushes. Sometimes she thought that perhaps she had dreamt that strange, silent encounter, for it was rare these days to see even one lone Indian, much less a group of them. Bees buzzing by, flies whispering around them, the air rich with the scent of the roses and grasses, the sun bronzing all their skins with its relentless heat, the sky pale and far away. Why was she then so unafraid? Her first taste of freedom, her soul free at last and spreading out as far as the plains allowed – forever – there being no end to them. Or, it might have been the wind; sometimes she was sure it was the wind, what it carried, heat from the sun, glinting particles of sun-matter, scents she
had never before smelled, the very distance the wind had covered to reach her.

She thought of the plagues of mosquitoes, the never-ending swarms of flies, of the thunder and lightning storms followed by rains so heavy and intense that it would be days before they could leave the homestead, even this blazing heat, and in winter its opposite, so cold sometimes that they had had to wear all their clothes in bed to keep warm. This past one had been the very worst of all their winters here, with snow several feet deep on the level, except when a hurricane force wind blew it into ten foot drifts, and bitterly cold day following bitterly cold day, and day after day Pierre shovelling the snow down from the roof and away from the door. She and Pierre had survived only because they had a good supply of food and fuel. But it was a life of their own, a thing they could never have had in the comfortable, God-loving village from which they had come. It was
la grande aventure
; it had shown her what it meant to be alive.