Wild Rose (22 page)

~

For several weeks, as fall drew on toward winter
, Pierre had been making time to take the team and wagon out onto the prairie to find firewood before snow came and covered up whatever there was left. In the end, he had gone to town and bought a load of wood from a settler who had driven down from further north where there are trees, trying to make a little money by selling roughly chopped loads of dead trees he’d picked up on the forest floor. These Pierre had brought home and spent an hour every night chopping into lengths to fit their stove, and so that he could pile them more efficiently against the side of their rough cabin, with the help of the Beausoleils, finished before winter set in. Whatever Pierre did, Sophie thought admiringly, he did well, partly because M. Beausoleil knew so much about the best way to do things, and partly from his life on his family’s farm. Her admiration for him grew, her love increased, and even as she immediately quashed even the slightest doubt or uncertainty about his uneven temper, and his sudden fancies: the way he would suddenly throw down whatever tool was in his hands and with a quiet curse, walk away to begin another job. As long as he loved her, she thought, his idiosyncrasies meant nothing, as surely as he forgave her hers, whatever they might be, this latter thought making her frown a little, for a second.

With what was almost the last of their cash he had also brought home a small supply of coal, “For the really bad storms,” he said, “the ones that go on for days.” She had pretended she hadn’t heard this last, but a chill of fear went down her spine and she had to remind herself that storms in Quebec also often went on for days and she had barely noticed them. In response to this thought, she had gone all around the interior of the cabin again to make sure she hadn’t missed a spot where there was a crack or a hole that needed chinking with a mixture of clay from the streambed and ashes from their fires.

And now, it was on them, had been on them for six weeks, Sophie carefully marking the days on the calendar, and now it was Christmas and what might they call Christmas when they were alone and far from home and couldn’t even go to Midnight Mass? They were to have spent it with the Beausoleils, but on the afternoon before Christmas Day when they were to leave, both of them anxiously watching the sky the whole morning, the first bad storm of the winter had blown in from the east, growing worse by the minute until even Pierre had to say that it would be too dangerous to go. It was a terrible disappointment to them both, Sophie had even cried when she realized this, but carefully hid her tears from him when he came in from settling the oxen and milk cow in the dug-out barn, leaving them with a good supply of feed in case for a day or more he couldn’t get across the yard to them.

“Maybe we can go tomorrow,” she said to him, uncertainly. He slammed his hand against the window frame where he had been standing peering out into the whistling white that obscured the world outside the cabin.

“Not this time,” he muttered. “This is here for days,” and she had said nothing, afraid to make him explode as he sometimes did when things went especially wrong. While he had been attending to their animals, she had put on her heavy mantel and boots, hat, scarf and leather mitts and had brought in several armloads of firewood, knocking off the encrusted snow first, and piling it neatly near the stove. She filled the coal scuttle too, to overflowing. He had seen all this, she saw his eyes go to the woodpile and the dull gleam of the coal, but he hadn’t spoken and she wondered if she had made a mistake, taking on one of his jobs, and leaving him with nothing to do when he was so full of barely suppressed anger.

As if to resolve her concern, the wind gave a great howling bellow, and blasted snow and ice particles against the walls of the cabin so that they shook and rattled and groaned, she was afraid the roof would be torn off, and she dropped the broom she had been holding to stand, frightened, listening. He came to her then and held her. “Sophie, Sophie, we will be all right. We have prepared for this, we have shelter…we even have firewood right here so I won’t have to go out again before daylight tomorrow.” Safe in his arms, her contribution acknowledged, she clung to him. It came to her suddenly that her very need was steadying to him, so she held him tighter, and didn’t move back until, gazing gently into her face, he unclasped her arms from around him and said in a mock roaring voice, teasing her, “Quick, woman! Stir yourself! I am a hungry man!”

All night they lay clasped together, still in their clothing to keep warm despite the steady fire in the other room, the noise outside so great sleep was hardly possible. If they had had another bed or a divan to sleep on they would have spent the night in the main room where the fire was, but everywhere the floor was colder than a block of ice and small gusts of freezing wind came up through cracks as well so that they had no choice but to go to their bed and pile on every blanket they had, even their two small rag rugs Pierre’s mother had given them. Pierre drifted off, exhausted as he always was, and she lay thinking of their animals – how terrible for them – out there in their fragile shelter, and of the wild animals further out on the prairie who could be freezing to death even as she lay thinking of them. Then she thought for the first time that maybe she had made a bad mistake, a life-threatening mistake to cause them to leave their long-settled village with people around to help them. If they survived this cataclysm, there were still another three months of winter to get through, and she wondered if they could do it.

As if he could read her thoughts, Pierre spoke into the darkness and the steady roar of the storm, in a strange, hollow voice, as if she had somehow entered his very dream, “Not every day will be like this.” But she couldn’t, at this moment, believe what he had said. Now she knew that she and Pierre were nothing, they were nothing out here in the West, they were barely human beings here, just helpless animals in thrall to the unimaginable, implacable force that nature was showing itself to be.

In the morning, the wind still battering their home, they woke to a film of dry snow on their bed coverings, the air so cold despite the fire, that they could see their breath. All that day, Christmas Day, and that night they rose, taking turns at Sophie’s insistence, only to replenish the fire, or to go into the other room and use the pail that was their chamber pot, or for Sophie to bring them something to nibble on, bread or dried fruit or lukewarm porridge, waiting for the storm to end. Each time she entered the other room she couldn’t even bring herself to look at the basket of her baking and the venison roast, all frozen despite being on the table and covered with a length of toweling, that they had planned to take to the Beausoleils.

~

She slumped against the cabin’s outer wall
where there was perhaps six inches of shade to be had. The hoe fell from her blistered hand, and she didn’t stoop to retrieve it. She placed her palms flat against the small of her back and pushed, trying to find relief from the steady ache. Should she go in and rest? But Pierre didn’t rest, she could see him out there, plowing, always plowing, and then he would haul water from the stream, a hard job, for it was the end of the summer and the stream nearly dry, except where, with infinite slowness, a spring seeped water. They would begin the well as soon as help was to be found. Pierre would pay back the help, not with money, but with work of his own. In the meantime if, rarely, they went to town for any supplies, they always brought back a barrel of water pumped from the town well. Yet, it was beginning to seem to her that the harder they worked, the farther behind they found themselves, their money supply all gone and waiting to be replenished by the sale of their small harvest still ahead, and another winter on them before they had time to turn around.

But the garden – which thought brought her back to herself, and she bent and picked up the hoe, breathed deeply a few times, walked back into the rows of vegetables and began to cut the ground, her hoe striking stones and devilish weeds with roots that must descend down to hell itself, puffs of light-
coloured, fine soil rising with each strike. When Pierre brought the water in the wooden barrels, she would carry pail after pail, watering carefully each single plant so as not to waste a drop. Soon there would be potatoes, and God willing, also corn, the peas having been a failure this year, but the carrots, turnips and beets a success. We must have a root cellar, she had said to Pierre at the end of their first summer on the prairie, and he had nodded in agreement, but looked away toward the horizon with an expression that said digging the root cellar would be the last straw that would finish him off. She had dug it herself, in the evenings, when the air cooled a little, and she could think of herself as having finished her long day’s work. Then Pierre had come and shored it up for her with planks and the trunks of bushes he had found lying at the stream. Without it, they would have starved come winter.

Once again Napoléon Beausoleil’s bull would service Fleurette, but she must, this time, be brought to the Beausoleil’s instead of the bull and the Beausoleil family to them. The men having settled this on their last visit together when they had met by chance in town, it was decided they would make a good visit of it, and even stay overnight, and maybe they would have music and perhaps dance a little and then eat Madame Beausoleil’s good Québec food. It would take a half day or more to get there, as they could hardly expect Fleurette to run all the way, or even part of it. And Sophie had been feeling a little unwell this last little while; the jolting of the wagon would be hard on her, although she vowed to be strong and not complain no matter how nauseated she might become.

Séraphine was ready for them when they arrived and had a feast spread out on their homemade table in their shack which was one room bigger than Pierre and Sophie’s. Meat pies! Sophie hadn’t seen them since she’d left home, but no, one of them was a Saskatoon pie, and Séraphine had just pulled four roasted grouse from the oven. Napoléon also had a shotgun, besides his rifle, and often shot prairie chicken and grouse and would sometimes send a brace of them home with Pierre whenever Pierre dropped in to give him a helping hand.

“Such heavenly scents!” Sophie cried. Suddenly she felt her cheeks flushing and perspiration popping out on her forehead. Pierre had driven the team to the barn where Napoléon and his two oldest boys waited to unhitch the wagon and unharness the oxens that would be put in the corral for the night. She put out a hand to support herself against the door frame.

“My dear girl!” Séraphine exclaimed. “You have been working too hard, non? I know how it is. Never-ending and then some more after that. Aurore! Go – pull out the chair for Madame Hippolyte!” Little Aurore hastened to do as she was told, her sister Jacqueline trying to help, although she was too little to do much good. The door opened and Martine, the oldest of the girls at fourteen, entered, carrying a bunch of carrots from the garden. Her twelve-year-old sister Marie-Anne followed with a sack that Sophie supposed would be full of potatoes from the root cellar. Séraphine bustled over, batting away flies and children as she came, and helped Sophie sit down.

“It is nothing, I am fine,” Sophie protested, and swallowed hard to keep down the bile that wanted to rise and spill all over the hard-scrubbed wooden floor. Suddenly Séraphine drew back, pausing, arms akimbo, mouth fastened in an ‘oh’ as if she had just understood.

“Tu es enceinte!”
Then put her hand over her mouth as if to hold back the news. Sophie burst into tears, why, she couldn’t have said. They wanted a baby, yes, Pierre, a boy, while she didn’t care which it was. But now, when there was still so much work to be done, even a year after their arrival? And no doctor, no midwife – she cried because she was afraid. And she was surprised, not recognizing that this was the reason she hadn’t bled this last couple of months, thinking that the flow had stopped as it had during the trip West and the first six months of such hard labour and so many shocks to her system, the ferocity of the winter being, she felt, the worst. But no, it was true: She was carrying a child. A Western baby! And was caught between more tears and sobbing, and laughter. As if it had never before happened that a woman became pregnant with a child for a fleeting instant some closed thing in her solar plexus opened wide and her whole being cried out for her mother. Now, to be with her now, her mother. This fathomless sorrow threatened to engulf her utterly at the same time as something else, a huge joy, grasped her body and shook it as if a slow lightning moved up and down it.

“Oh, my,” she said, gasping, “Oh, my God,” while Séraphine crossed herself so rapidly it was comic, and sought her rosary that she kept in her apron pocket at all times, like a nun. Pure joy was flooding Sophie now, at the same time as she sobered, thinking of the added labour ahead, and all the many things she lacked for a baby. No nursery or nursemaid, never mind so much as a cradle or a cot. “I am perhaps two or three months along?” she asked Séraphine when she regained control, who nodded, tears running down her face, as if she were the one pregnant yet again.

“I have a few baby things that aren’t worn to absolute shreds,” Séraphine told her. “And I will help you deliver him – or her. I have had enough of them myself to know something about how it’s done,” this last sounding both very determined, and a bit angry, although at who or what, Sophie wasn’t sure. Séraphine was old enough to be her mother, Sophie thought now, she will have to do.

But Séraphine said nothing about it for the rest of the day or during the long evening, nor did Sophie say a word, as Napoléon screeched out tune after tune on his banged-up fiddle, and the children swung each other around heedless of dishes, or furniture, or adults’ toes, and the men quaffed a certain amount of homemade alcohol. After Sophie was in the children’s bed with Pierre, the two little girls in their parents’ bed, the older girls sleeping on blankets on the kitchen floor, and the two big boys on straw in the barn, she whispered to Pierre, thinking perhaps she should wait until they were alone on the way back to their farm, or when he hadn’t had so much to drink, but unable to keep back the news a moment longer, that they were expecting a child.