Wild Rose (24 page)

“Madame Hippolyte,
bon jour, enchantée
,” she had said, her accent precisely correct, but in its precision declaring her to be an English-speaker who must have learned her French in some young ladies’ school. How fine and delicately wrinkled her skin, as if she were ill; how very thin she was.

“So beautiful a day,” Sophie had replied in English, “And so pleasant to be out with so many people. Do you enjoy the pony races?”

“Hmmm?” Mrs. Archibald had answered Sophie’s efforts, and Sophie saw that this woman thought her of no consequence, was barely listening to her. She blushed to think of how poor her English had been then, and how thick her accent. Now, wondering if she should go to her, she was too ashamed of her clothing, her shoes, and worst of all, to have her situation exposed first-hand to such a woman.

Dawn came and she had fallen asleep only once. She lay quietly, Charles stirring beside her now and then, meaning that he would soon wake. Out in the darkened village a rooster crowed, then crowed again. Now she closed her eyes; she had been too distraught and exhausted to pray before she lay down; now in her near-despair, the thin warmth of a dream lingering, she who had for some years now merely gone through the motions, thought to pray:

Notre Père, qui es aux cieux

qui ton nom soit sanctifiié….

The words dried in her mouth. But surely, she told herself in her misery, if the church cannot be trusted, God can be. Still,
the rest of the prayer would not come. She foresaw the years ahead as she worked night and day to keep herself and Charles alive. She thought of her girl’s dream of wifehood, of marriage, of family, how she had deferred to Pierre, and still he had gone –
and she cried out against her own new wisdom. But she couldn’t go back; she could only go forward. What began now would be her first trials at managing her own life, in her own way. Today, now that she thought of it, perhaps her emancipation would begin. But she trembled all over as terror swept through her, then passed, leaving her shaken to her core, a grey residue left made of sorrow and her new knowledge of the darkness underlying the hopeful world she had mostly occupied until this terrible day.

“Maman?”
Charles cried, getting ready to wail, and she reached for him, holding him tightly. Then she rose, changed his soaking diaper, bathed him, put fresh clothing on him, performed her own perfunctory toilette. Her child in her arms, she descended the stairs as silently as possible, and after the necessary morning trip to the outhouse, made her way back to the kitchen. From here on, she thought, she would have to work and at the same time watch Charles like a hawk or he would wander off or burn himself or fall downstairs…or Mrs. Emery would tire of his endless needs and would send Sophie and her boy away.

Dawn was breaking and Mrs. Emery had not yet risen. Sophie spooned a bowl of porridge out of the pot that she and Mrs. Emery had started the night before and gave it to Charles to keep him busy while she descended to the cellar to bring up the milk, butter and eggs. While she fed Charles, she ate a slice of buttered bread that sat in a lump in her stomach while she made a large pot of coffee, put the kettle to boil, and began setting the table in the dining room for breakfast for the five people Mrs. Emery had told her would be down. When that was done, she sliced the slab of salt pork and lay the slices in one of the two large frying pans, and to heat the second pan for the eggs she would cook whenever she heard the boarders descending for breakfast. Everything ready for the morning’s meal, she began to prepare the yeast and to mix bread dough, it being one of the two days a week when Mrs. Emery had told her she made a dozen loaves of bread. By the time she was giving the dough its first kneading, Mrs. Emery had arrived in the kitchen, rubbing her eyes behind her glasses and bustling overly-much out of embarrassment at having slept in.

“I ain’t had such a good sleep in ages,” she remarked to Sophie. “Guess I thought, for once, somebody else was making breakfast.” She poured herself some of Sophie’s coffee and not even sitting, sipped at it. At the sound of footsteps on the stairs, she drew in her breath, put the cup down, and joined Sophie at the stove, frying salt pork, breaking eggs into the pan, while Sophie toasted bread, Mrs. Emery giving instructions and Sophie following them, as one by one the boarders descended and found their places at the table in the dining room.

“Who might you be?” Sam Wetherell of the creaking floorboards demanded of Sophie, glaring at her from under his overgrown white eyebrows as she carried in the steaming pot of coffee. She didn’t care for the way he looked at her, but it was a gaze that made her straighten her back and ignore him rather than reply. It surprised her how much in that instant, she found she disliked him, as if he stood for all that was wrong with men. Thinking of her own people, the
voyageurs
and their great, open hearts, their love of food, drink, song, and good times, even while they did their backbreaking, life-threatening work. Old widows in her village whose men had drowned in rapids or been torn apart by bears as they carried their loads through the wilderness. Beside them, Wetherell, the lone hero, she could not admire at all.

“She’s my new helper, Mrs. Hippolyte,” Mrs. Emery said.

“French, then,” he remarked, and looked down at his plate, as if she was by her Frenchness of no interest to him after all.

“I speak English, sir,” Sophie said softly, but she had waited until she was walking briskly from the room to say this so that he couldn’t reply. She had seen glances exchanged between at least two of the boarders, all of them men, when Mrs. Emery had given her name. She hadn’t thought to expect this, although the instant it happened, she realized that she should have. Her cheeks burnt and she thought that she couldn’t go back into the dining room, that surely Mrs. Emery would understand… She drew her breath in sharply enough through her nose that Mrs. Emery, taking the fried salt pork from the pan, glanced at her, but then Sophie clenched her jaw, thinking that if she could not withstand a glance between two so far nameless young men, then she might have just as well accepted Campion’s offer. I am blameless in this, she told herself, not without a measure of ferocity. I must remember that
I am blameless
.

Mrs. Emery had introduced Sophie to the other, younger men, although Sophie had difficulty straightening them all out, mixing up in particular Mr. Henry Ogden with Mr. Harold Olds, not only because of their names, but also because they were so alike physically – short stature, fair-skinned, with slicked-back blond hair – that they might have been brothers. When she entered the dining room carrying food, or tea or coffee, or clearing away, she never once saw or heard them engaging in the general conversation which could be lively, and which was often punctuated by loud pronouncements by a red-faced Wetherell –
balderdash, horse manure
– always, momentarily, silencing everyone at the table. Ogden and Olds, she knew, worked in the village, one as a clerk at the general store, and the other as a private tutor since there weren’t yet enough children to warrant a village school. And although they didn’t seem to speak to one another during their meals, Sophie had the impression that they were particular friends.

The remaining two men weren’t difficult to distinguish. Percy Haslam was taller even than Mr. Wetherell, with black hair, eyes and moustache, and there was something about him Sophie didn’t like, finding him –
louche
– shifty, for want of a better word. He worked for Ambrose – Sophie didn’t know if this was a first name or a last – at the livery barn, and in the ensuing days she would find that always, no matter how clean he appeared to be, he smelled faintly of hay, manure, and horses. Instinctively, she kept her distance from him.

She would save her warmth for the last boarder, Monsieur Guy Roche, a francophone like herself although neither of them ever spoke French to the other, not even when Sophie found herself longing to, and she thought, he too longed to, countrymen after all, in this Protestant, English land. He would treat Sophie with absolute courtesy, and she him. A man of average height, a good figure with broad shoulders lacking in the other boarders, and a taste for quality clothing, he was married and a father, but had left his family behind as he came West to search out business opportunities. Soon, he told them, he would return home to Québec and would probably stay there as he had so far found nothing out West to attract him. It was he who had come upon Sophie, late on her first evening there, trying to get the barrel of dishes from the verandah into the house and who had insisted on carrying it to her room for her.

“I like my comforts,” he would tell them, laughing. “I do not like sleeping out on the ground or eating food so bad that only the spectre of starvation puts it in the mouth. That is why I make this house my headquarters – because of Mrs. Emery’s excellent cooking.” And Mrs. Emery’s cheeks would turn pink, although she would frown fiercely as if to say they needn’t think she would be taken in by compliments. While Wetherell’s unspoken contempt blighted the conversation, except for M. Roche, who seemed to be somewhere between amused, puzzled by, and dismissive of the old man. After one of Wetherell’s sneers, Sophie and M. Roche would glance quickly at each other. Aside from mealtimes, she would hardly see the boarders, except to pass them once in a while in the hall or going up or down the stairs. But as a housekeeper, which struck her as odd, she would become intimately acquainted with their belongings, their clothing, their habits, even while they remained strangers she saw only at meals, too tired in the evenings after Charles was asleep to think of joining them in the sitting room.

When early afternoon arrived that first day, after Sophie had cleared and cleaned the dining room, finished washing the dishes, and tidied the kitchen, she told Mrs. Emery, “I have errands that I must run and as soon as possible, Mrs. Emery. I’ll be gone only an hour and a half, and then I’ll make the pies.” Mrs. Emery studied her, and for a second Sophie thought she might refuse to let her go, but a certain understanding seemed to dawn on her face and she said, “I always have a rest right now, anyways. You go, and good luck to you.” They were standing in the hall at the foot of the stairs, but rather than going upstairs, Mrs. Emery turned into the parlour where, Sophie knew from cleaning, behind it there was a small bedroom Mrs. Emery used, thus saving the mostly larger upstairs bedrooms for her boarders.

Sophie went upstairs, patiently moving behind Charles who was determined to mount them on his own, giving him a boost whenever he flagged or was distracted by even a loose thread in the carpet, or a shiny nail holding it in place. In her room she removed her large apron, folded it carefully and left it on the bed, tidied herself and Charles, and with hands that shook faintly, took her wedding ring, her brooch, her precious earrings, from their hiding place tucked against the back of the mirror’s wooden frame. Each was wrapped in small squares of cloth she had torn from Mrs. Emery’s worn cleaning cloths, and she put two of the packages in her pocket, but unwrapped the earrings and put them in her ears. She would have preferred to leave Charles behind, but he was so agitated by the abrupt changes in his life that she knew he wouldn’t sleep, and that keeping him from irritating Mrs. Emery was vital to their welfare.

The afternoon was again very hot, the light almost unbearably piercing to the eye, and although there was not a breath of wind, the air was filled with fine dust. For a moment, Sophie stood breathing it in, dust and all, welcoming it after the general stuffiness in the house, comprised of too many bodies in close quarters, when she was used to only herself and Pierre and small Charles, with the outdoors in their flimsy cabin nearly as present on the inside as out. In her moment of inattention, Charles had made his way up the path beyond where she stood getting her bearings. She let him go, looking at the town with the eyes of someone who would not be leaving it again in an hour or two, but who, willingly or not, suddenly finds it her home.

In the entire village not a tree grew for shelter from the sun, or to soften the village’s rawness, to remind the homesick of the green places from which they had come; nowhere was there a single patch of well-watered, soft, green grass. Hitching rails or single posts stood at intervals down each of the two, sun-bleached streets, and in the afternoon heat no one stirred; it was as if the village was deserted, the few whitened wood houses flattened by the unrelenting sun. All with a rickety air about it, as if a good wind might come one night and sweep it away, leaving behind only a churned up patch of earth, the stars in their black shroud glittering down, brilliant points of silver glowing in a few mud-brown puddles. Behind all of this, far back on Sophie’s left, the great pile of white bones stood brooding over it all.

The village’s few places of business began with the livery barn at the north end, which, rather than facing the buildings across from it, looked south onto the length of the street before it, as if the most important place in town. On the east side and proceeding south in a less haphazard manner than the houses on the first street, were the blacksmith, the butcher, the general store, the barber. The village had grown rapidly since the first time she had seen it four years before. But still, between the livery stable and the blacksmith shop, broken only by the new house, there was an open area where the grass-covered plain flowed into the town like a tide at the beach, but where, instead of engulfing it, the townspeople, their horses, dogs, cows, cats and oxen, wagons and buggies had trampled it into mud, now dried and crumbling, as rough as if some farmer had plowed it with his heavy breaking plow. While all around the village lay the prairie, serene, sun-bright, aloof. Their sixty plowed acres that had seemed to her and to Pierre to be a vast mark in the until then ungovernable wilderness, she now saw for what they were: Barely a pin’s head in size in all the acres of wild prairie.