Wild Rose (23 page)

He groaned, then hiccupped. “I was afraid of that.” She drew back from him. “I mean, so soon. I’d hoped to have one more year to ready things for a family.” Placated, she told him, “Never mind, you know we will manage as we have managed everything so far.” Then both of them lay on their backs, side by side, not touching, thinking of the year they had just passed that had been so hard, and changed even their physical bodies, all lumpy and hard now, with sore spots and bruises and scars, even Sophie’s pretty hands thickened, the skin darkened and rough. And of what they had left behind: Pierre sadly of his parents and all his many siblings, their farm, and the village, and Sophie, bleakly. For her to come West had been an escape, and all the hardship – still – worth it.

“Do you want to go back to Québec to have the baby, and so you can have him properly baptized?” He said this as if it had just occurred to him that having a baby in this wilderness would be a dangerous enterprise.

“Of course not,” she answered, a little too sharply. “I will never go back.” She breathed in tightly through her nostrils her mouth set. “Séraphine will be my
sage-femme
, and we will find a priest to baptize him when he is old enough to travel.” He sighed loudly, starting to turn on his side away from her.

“Do you doubt me? Do you think I am not strong enough for this?” It was not usual for her to talk to him in this tone. A long silence followed, while she waited for his touch, his kiss.

“No, Sophie,” he said, finally. “I do not doubt your strength.” His voice had in it a hint of something she couldn’t quite place, but that did not gladden her heart. Resignation? And back of it something that might have been…distaste? No, she told herself
instantly, it is only that he is tired and has had too much to drink. That was all he said, and though she lay awake a good part of the night thinking of the little one coming soon, trying
not to give in to the sudden arrows of fear that pierced her, trying
to believe that this at last would not be too much, because she knew nothing about babies, or children, or… Pierre fell immediately to sleep, and snored. At first she was hurt at what seemed to her his indifference, but after a time, as she listened to his breath, heavy with what she knew to be more than just drink but from sheer exhaustion, and then to its loud expulsion, though never so loud as Napoléon’s in the next room, her annoyance slowly dissolved. Was he not still her beloved? Was he not the man for whom she had given up everything?

But no, she had to admit it, that wasn’t true. They had not run away from things so much as they – or she at least – had run
to
this life that was their own, where no one made rules for them, where they made their own decisions, their own choices, and built their own life together, stick by stick, furrow by furrow. And now, what was always inevitable: a child. Thinking of it, she suddenly realized that even the youngest of the Beausoleil’s children had been born in Manitoba; in their district their child would be the first Western-born baby. She lay awake for a long time, her mind reaching out beyond the bed in which she lay, beyond the cabin walls, and the few plowed acres, out across the miles of grass, and over the distant hills, crossing streams and gullies and wild, animal-filled coulees, lifted out of herself by the momentousness of this thing of which she was the fundamental part.

Chapter Eight

Bone Pile

N
ight came; the residents retired
, the house gradually falling into silence as everyone from Charles through Mrs. Emery to the boarders drifted into sleep. But Old Man Wetherell could still be heard walking about, his footfalls, steady, but not loud enough to keep anyone awake. Sophie lay, despite her exhaustion, staring into the darkness as the long hours of the night began to pass and Wetherell walked ceaselessly back and forth. Who was he? Had he killed someone? Was there some other crime in his past? Where was his wife? His children? He had come West before Sophie was born, according to Mrs. Emery, but he had ridden south, crossing the border to the United States before the border was even demarcated, when the Indians were still wild and dangerous, and to run into them alone was certain death. She saw him racing through the night, the moon lighting his solitary course across the hard pan and burnouts of the territory south of Bone Pile, his horse foaming from under his saddle. She imagined that terrifying, exalted passage south and ever more west, crossing the Missouri, through the Bitterroot that she had only heard of but thrilled to the name. Were there even towns in Montana then? Fort Benton, maybe. However he would not be quivering with fear as she had been all day, but flooded with some strange wild toxin. No, not toxin – joy,
une joyeuse sauvage
. Her mind went out to the long fields of dark grass spreading for miles out beyond the bed where she lay, peaceful, quiet, only animals crouched in burrows or bushes, or running soundlessly, their eyes glowing – how he would have galloped past them, seeing or not seeing them, he wouldn’t care either way. His rifle tucked against his thigh, his bowie knife against his gut. Of course he would have a bowie knife, she told herself and laughed out loud, one quick ungovernable snort, and stunned at herself, pressed her lips together, holding her breath. Oh, such stories as she had heard
of that wild West. Thinking of Pierre again, and sturdy Beausoleil who could barely stay on a horse, a farmer in his very soul. Maybe it was all lies. And all the men she had heard speak of it as if it were some male Eden, were duped by men like Wetherell. But even she didn’t quite believe this. And still he walked, as if to see that none of them forgot what the West had been. It is as if he is keeping guard, although against what, she couldn’t think. Then, as if the words had come from elsewhere:
He is guarding against you.
What? Me? What am I? But she knew very well: Softness, femininity, home, hearth, family. She had been sucked out of herself; not frightened, but she nonetheless felt pinpricks of perspiration popping out on her brow. A day like this, she thought, the things that have happened, twisting her head on her pillow, her eyes grainy for lack of sleep. She had to think.

She had gotten them a roof over our heads and food, but she couldn’t stay here forever being a housemaid in exchange only for that. She needed clothes for Charles or the cloth to make them, shoes, medicines, perhaps even to pay someone to care for him while she worked. She couldn’t manage for more than a few days without money.

She thought of the money they carried when they arrived in the West – more than a thousand dollars that had come from hoarding Sophie’s small dowry left for her by her parents, a few wedding gifts of cash, and from Pierre’s savings, earnings from working for a local farmer during seeding and harvesting, and lumberjacking for a couple of the winter months before they had even promised themselves to each other.
I knew I would marry
, he told her.
It takes money to marry
, and he had laughed, and she knew he wasn’t thinking of her. It had all gone in paying the fee to acquire the land, buying the animals, the wagon, the plow and binder, the materials for their buildings and corral and the tools to build them with, the seed wheat and the store of household supplies – one hundred pounds of flour, fifty pounds of sugar, twenty pounds each of tea and coffee, table salt and rough salt, yeast cakes, baking soda, even laundry blueing and coal oil for the lamps. In what seemed no time, not a cent was left. Here in the West Pierre had earned a little now and then working for a few days on this ranch or that, or for a new homesteader building his house, or helping somebody harvest, leaving her alone on the homestead sometimes, or if his work was closer, riding back each night. They had been careful, had made no mistakes, and yet, the money was gone.

It was Pierre himself who turned out to be the mistake. Now she thought, still waiting for the great gap to close that had become her interior, trying to smother her aching for him, that soon, when she was able, she would rue the day she had met him.

She would have to sell some of her belongings. What did she have that had any value? Her earrings, her dishes.
I will never sell my earrings
, she vowed, even as a part of her registered this as foolishness. There was the brooch Pierre’s mother had given her, a pretty thing, gold, studded with seed pearls and with a sprinkle of the tiniest diamonds to catch the light. She had always wondered, if the truth were known, if those sparkling stones were perhaps only glass. The Hippolytes were poor farmers, where would they find the money for jewelry? Pierre had been his mother’s favourite son though, and she knew that his marriage to the granddaughter of one of the village’s prosperous families had been considered a
coup
for him, no matter what the circumstances. She wondered briefly if she and Pierre were still a topic of scandalous conversation in the village they had come from. She doubted it; by now surely there would be other scandals to occupy the countryside.

Still, even here in tiny, unprosperous Bone Pile, there might be some woman who would want the brooch, whose husband had
money to spend to please her. Tomorrow she would inquire –
no, she corrected herself. No one must know her true situation. It wasn’t in her nature to be secretive, she had learned to hate secrets and secretiveness; was it only her pride that insisted on silence? But everyone in the village already knew that Pierre had run off with Marguerite, had known long before Sophie did.

But they did not know that I have no one to turn to, and not one cent of money.
But they will assume that
, she realized. No ordinary married woman in the North-West Territories has money of her own, or at least, money left over after her and her family’s needs have been met. She remembered Campion’s overture, indecent, she had thought, and then that perhaps she had mistaken him, that he was offering her salvation in allowing her to stay on in her home, while also freeing him to go about his business, which she knew now was land speculation.

If she had accepted his offer, at the first opportunity he would sell the place out from under her a second time. Then where would she go? Ruined as she would be. Besides, to be hired help on the farm she and Pierre together had laboured to turn from wilderness into civilization… She’d rather start again on different land, and imagining plowing virgin prairie by herself, twisted in the bed with the bitter knowledge that she could never do it alone. Nor could she stay out there all alone even if she could do the farming herself. This knowledge was cruel, hopeless.

Above all, she was prey: If she let them – she did not define
them
– they would turn her into a slave, a drudge, into a…but the last thought, she could not quite bring herself even to articulate, although she knew very well such women existed, even here on the very frontier of civilization. Hadn’t Pierre told her that such a woman had arrived in Bone Pile? She saw the women at the station when she and Pierre had passed through Montréal on their way West. Dirty, bruised, ragged, some of them with small children, some of them clearly mad. Now, hearing Charles’s even breath beside her, she understood that mothers would feed their children, whatever they had to do to get that food.

The West was full of young men without women; if she couldn’t support herself by honourable means, she would be a bought-and-paid-for bride, slave labour on some homestead, or else she would fall and become a
putain
. There it was, she thought, although her bitterness was mixed with a kind of amazement that she had never seen this before, that if the man a woman had cast her lot with was not honourable, this was what her life would become. In three days, a day, an hour.

Even as she lay there though, wide awake in the darkness and deep silence broken only by the faint, long-drawn-out howls of wolves in the far distance, and the constant background of Old Man Wetherell’s footfalls, so relentless and she thought, malign, that she covered her head with her pillow so as not to hear them, she struggled back from the bleakness of this understanding. Surely the world was not so cruel. Pierre had loved her once, she had loved him. It was Pierre she wanted. Only him, and was ill with longing tainted with the shame of her desire for someone who had so wronged her.

There was no choice. She would have to present a face that said that she wasn’t helpless, but could go back to Québec any time she chose. And she would act carefully and wisely to save herself and her child. She would find someone who will tell no one – maybe even the lawyer – who could advise her or even buy her brooch himself for his wife. She thought of Adamson, that kind giant of a bachelor who had forced a reckless and inexperienced Pierre into caution so long ago, when they had first come and he was trying to go home in the middle of a blizzard. Perhaps Adamson could advise her, and keep silent about it. Still, the hope that Pierre would send money, she could not quite eradicate.

Her wedding ring: A flimsy gold band with another tiny diamond in a delicate setting. Oh, she would part with the ring with no difficulty, she said to herself, even as every part of her from her fingernails to her womb cried out against it.

Perhaps the lawyer would buy her china for his wife? She had once met Candace Archibald, a woman in her forties, slender to the point of thinness, and if you looked closely, who must once have been very pretty. There were two children, both in boarding school in the East, home only for short periods at Christmas and in the summer. Sophie had met her at the summer’s pony races a year or two before.