Wild Rose (32 page)

“Don’t look so scared,” Mrs. Emery said. “I ain’t about to ask you to go.” Sophie became aware of the tight grip of one of her hands on the other and loosened it. “No, I just want to say,” Mrs. Emery paused, began again. “I’m tired out.”

Sophie said, “You work very hard. You should let me take more of the load.”

“You already do, Mrs. Hippolyte,” she said, turning her head to gaze at the unused fireplace with its dark wood trim, so elaborately carved, that teamsters, it was said, had brought up from Fort Benton. “Having you here doing so much of the work makes me feel how tired out I am.” In this clear light, softened by the lace curtains, Sophie could see that what Mrs. Emery said was true. “I want to take it easier,” she went on. “I been trying to think how…”

“You are thinking about selling this house?” She had seen at once where this was going, and thought it best to simply say it, even though her heart had speeded up in fear. What now?

Mrs. Emery nodded, then sighing, said, “But who is there to buy it?”

“It is a good business, I think?” Somehow, she doubted this, but still, she wondered.

“Keeps a roof over your head. Not much profit for all the work, but I managed to get some set by.” Her expression was dubious, and a sudden pity struck Sophie. To work so hard and leave with next to nothing.

She considered. “Your sons would want it?” Mrs. Emery snorted, causing Sophie to look away from her in embarrassment at seeing such pain.

“They’d sell it – they might keep the money.” She laughed without amusement. “Got to look out for myself.” She lowered her gaze to her gnarled hands resting loosely on her lap.

Sophie said, helplessly, “You are wise to think of your future.”

Mrs. Emery smiled unexpectedly, looked up somewhere near Sophie’s face and said, in a voice that shimmered with emotion, “Never thought I’d end like this.” The air between them had grown fragile.

“I did not think so either.” For a long second neither of them spoke.

“You still want to leave here?” Mrs. Emery was still gazing at her hands.

“I do,” Sophie replied, “If – my husband doesn’t – return –”
it was her turn to avoid looking at the other. “If he does not send Charles and me money…”

Ever since the day she had seen Madame Tremblay digging potatoes in her yard she had been wondering what the woman knew about Pierre – where he was, or what his intentions were, even if he was still with Marguerite or if, having abandoned his real wife, it would be easier to abandon his paramour. A part of her wanted nothing so much as to speak to Mrs. Tremblay, and armed with whatever information the other woman could give her, use it to track down Pierre in order to confront him. But she felt guilty too, thinking that Madame Tremblay might be very angry with her because she hadn’t been able to keep her husband, and the consequence had been that she lost her daughter. At this thought, Sophie felt an agony of shame mixed with rage at Pierre who did not care what he had done to her, who did not even write her a letter, much less send her money, if not for her, at least for his son. But when it came to actually walking down the furrowed, dried-gumbo track that passed for a street, to knocking on Mrs. Tremblay’s already-weathered door, she had not yet been able to bring herself to do it.

“Now you know what I’m thinking,” Mrs. Emery said firmly, looking Sophie in the eye, something she rarely did, her habit being to fix her eyes on the view out the window or at the work her hands were doing rather than on the person she was talking to. Sophie realized with a start that Mrs. Emery was suggesting that she might buy this house and take over her landlady’s business.

She said, haltingly, “I have nowhere near enough money.” Mrs. Emery nodded carefully, as if she were having thoughts she wanted to express, but wouldn’t.

“Leave it alone for a while.” Dismissed, Sophie rose, was about to go out of the parlour when Mrs. Emery said to her back. “But if somebody comes along wants this place – and you know they say that when the railway branch line comes here in the next couple of years or so property will be worth something – if somebody comes along with the money, I ain’t in no place to turn it down.”

“I know it,” Sophie murmured, bending to retrieve the soiled bedsheets. She imagined writing to Guillaume asking for – what – a thousand dollars? Five hundred dollars? The very notion made her rush out of the hall, catching the trailing ends of sheets and angrily stuffing them into a ball in her arms. Guillaume would never help her.

She recalled then that although Mr. Archibald had said he might find a buyer for her china dishes, no one had come for them or so much as inquired. She knew without asking that Mrs. Emery wanted a cash payment so that she could wash her hands of the house. Sophie didn’t blame her, and the woman was right, if a branch line arrived, every single person with property in the town would do very well indeed. Especially a boarding house, which could more profitably – it occurred to Sophie – operate as a hotel. A hotel for all the speculators and settlers and other business people who would flock to the town once it had a railway. Endless work, of course, but with the possibility of a much better income, for didn’t hotel-stoppers pay every single night, while boarders paid monthly fees that she knew barely covered the costs? But all that cooking, and daily washing of bedsheets and towels…

She had hit on something, could feel it in the pit of her stomach, but really – what good was such an insight if in the first place she had no money to buy the house? She had no clever ideas as to how she might add to her tiny store of cash. She was thinking all this while, hardly noticing where her feet were taking her, as she moved through the house intending to return to the back yard where the water in the large washtub steamed, and the fire below it would need more wood.

But at the door into the kitchen she came to an abrupt halt. Wetherell, tall, gaunt, a bit shaky on his feet, was standing over Charles who was sitting on the kitchen floor with the wooden horses the boarder Monsieur Roche had given him only that morning scattered around him, M. Roche saying that he had too much luggage, and that anyway, by the time he got back to Québec, his smallest son would be too old for them. Sophie had looked askance at him, but could detect no other motive in his manner and, in the end, had accepted the gift. She was even more grateful for a full morning without Charles pulling at her skirts for attention or begging for bread or milk when he had already had a full breakfast. The child’s appetite was endless; she didn’t know whether to be glad or to be worried, settling finally on gladness, that he would be a big man, that he needed all that food in order to grow.

Neither Wetherell nor Charles was aware of her as she stood with a touch of dismay, gazing at them. Wetherell held one of the horses in his gnarled hands.

“This here is a Thoroughbred,” he was saying to her little boy. “Fast, my boy. But big. You need long legs to ride one of them bastards.” Sophie gasped at the word. But Charles was pointing up at the horse Wetherell was balancing on his palm.

“Toor-bred,” he said. “Ride horses. Fast.” Wetherell laughed.

“That’s it. Ride ’em fast. Get a jumper so you don’t have to open them goddamn gates them goddamn farmers are putting in everywhere, ruining the goddamn country.” Horrified, Sophie hurried into the room, glaring at Wetherell who paid her no attention at all, but dropping the horse to the floor in front of Charles, brushed past her without looking at her, on his way out of the room. She rushed outside, dropped her armful of sheets on the ground beside the tub and hurried back into the house where she gathered a protesting Charles up in one arm, while collecting the horses with her free hand, and brought him outside where she plunked him and his toys onto the ground a safe distance from the fire and the steaming water.

“He is a bad man!” she said fiercely to Charles. “He uses bad language!” But Charles wasn’t interested, engaged in throwing his horses one by one as far as he could, then hurrying to pick them up, saying, “Fast, fast, fast!” each time. Sophie muttered to herself, “That West is over! It is over! Charles will never, never know it!” And finally, “I have got to get us out of here!” Meaning, out of this house where bad influences seemed to be everywhere.

Plunging the sheets into the steaming water and reaching for the paddle to push them down, for the thousandth time she asked herself how she might acquire more cash. Teaching school would have been a good possibility, but unless she found someone to care for Charles, no one would hire her. And when she considered who might be found to care for him for the pittance she could afford, she rejected school teaching. She would not have her son coarsened – or worse – neglected, even abused. These were not people who let children be children. Here they were put to work, their labour taken for granted. Even though she supposed she and Pierre would have had Charles working on the farm too, when he was still barely out of the cradle, even though she understood the necessity, she deplored it. She had been raised with a cook and a housekeeper, her only duties to attend school and church – and even that had been too much for her, she thought wryly. Altogether too much church. No, Charles would stay by her side. Fear struck and she gripped the paddle too hard, then told herself that Mrs. Emery would never abruptly toss her out on the street. Not as long as she could work.

As she stirred the kettle of soaking sheets, forgetting even to scrub them, she pondered the problem, while the small prairie birds chittered in the grass beyond the sagging picket fence and the sun, rising towards its zenith, caused a breeze to rise, blowing loose strands of hair into her face, at which she pushed absently. A meadowlark called and a second one answered from beyond the town behind her where the pile of bones sat brooding in the sun. She swatted a mosquito on her cheek, then waved away flies. In her exertion sweat had begun to trickle down her neck, and she used a sheet still sitting in the grass to wipe it away, hardly noticing that she had.

There was no other work to be had in the town – just cleaning houses, doing laundry, baking, cooking, and dishwashing. Mostly only for room and board, as she was doing for Mrs. Emery. How did one do the only thing one was trained to do – keep a household – and make money by doing it? She thought of the women at the party, how much they earned, was shocked that she would even wonder such a thing.

Perhaps she could borrow the necessary amount? But from whom? The banker was in Garden City, but he would never lend her money. A mere woman, and worse, young. She allowed Marguerite’s appearance to surface at last: pretty, with the delicate white skin and the slenderness of youth. But Pierre can’t marry again without renouncing his faith – unthinkable – he would first have to divorce her, Sophie. Marguerite didn’t know it yet, but by taking her away when he couldn’t marry her, Pierre had stolen her life from her. Perhaps he would tire of her too, before too long, and then what would the girl do? Especially if she were with child, a thought so unexpected that it caused Sophie to halt in her labour.

She dropped her paddle, collected the washboard that had been lying in the grass, set it into the tub, and began pulling at a sheet until she had it in position to begin scrubbing. It was then that she remembered the spinster sisters who ran a tearoom in her village back in Québec. They not only ran the business themselves, but baked many of their own pastries. For them, her grandmother had once told Sophie, it was not entirely a financial necessity as their parents had left them a house and some land which a neighbour farmed for them. They took pleasure in their business, and did it to fill their days, and for the company of others it brought to them, their lives otherwise being circumscribed by the church and, Sophie surmised with a shudder, the stifling propriety of their own front parlour.

She imagined the tearoom from her village transplanted here where she stood in the backyard washing the bedsheets of strangers, shooing away insects, trying not to inhale smoke from the fire that she kept forgetting to renew, and saw that in this community such a business would be ridiculous, even an object of fun. People here didn’t want fancy pastries or cups of tea served on elegant china. They wanted hearty meals of roast beef, or steaks, and potatoes, ending with thick slices of fresh pie, or hearty bread puddings. They wanted home-baked bread and buns, and home-made preserves, and baked beans studded with chunks of good salt pork.

A café? Could she do it herself? What would she need to do it, and would it be any easier than the boarding house ? And would there be enough customers? Instantly, she thought, if she kept the prices low enough, everyone would come, just to experience something new. Then – oh, appalling, but interesting thought – she could slowly raise them.

“You’ll wear out that sheet,” Mrs. Emery said, startling Sophie so that she dropped it and had to reach into the water to retrieve it. “We’ll never get ‘em all done today.” She went on muttering as she took the paddle from the ground and used it to search out a sheet, lift it, and catch an end.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Emery. I was thinking and thinking –” Mrs. Emery had succeeded in pulling loose one sheet from the soggy tangle in the tub and said only, “I reckon you got things to think about.” Quickly Sophie caught the sheet’s other end as it emerged, and together the women, each holding an end, backing away from each other, began to twist the dripping sheet, wringing the soapy water from it, then dropping it into the unheated water of the rinse tub, before going back to do the same with the next sheet. The rinse tub had a mangle attached and when the two women judged most of the soapy water had been removed from a sheet, while one turned the mangle, the other straightened and fed the sheet between the rollers.