Wild Rose (48 page)

“You were in town last night?” she asked.

“I was not,” he said.

“How did you find out about the fire?”

“Ask a lot of questions, don’t you,” he grunted, although he didn’t seem annoyed. Adelaide was grinning into her coffee. Sophie wanted to reach out and bat the top of her head. Ridiculous hair piled there like a giant cow pie.

“One of the men rode for you,” she said. “A cold night for riding anywhere.”

“It was indeed.” She wondered how the man, whoever he was: Archibald? Ambrose? Kaufmann? Tremblay? had known how to find him, but chose to ask no more questions. “Just lucky I wasn’t that far away.” He had finished his porridge and pushed the bowl away as if it bored him, as if he had to instantly organize himself and get on to the next thing, whatever that might be. “All right then,” he said. Lily rose and Adelaide pushed away from the table, both of them moving about, reaching for their outdoor gear. She watched them for a second, then let her glance finally rest on Campion. He had stood too. She saw that he wasn’t in the least ashamed;
Now I know his worst secret
, she told herself, and was both elated and frightened.

There was something here she had to understand, some dark well of knowledge about the world; she did not want to think of it, to ponder it, to throw herself head first into that abyss where such things as she did not want to know lived. She thought of the peace and protection of her little room in her grandparent’s home so far away in what seemed now another country, one where flowers bloomed, soft rains fell, on snowy mornings voices muffled yet carrying across the roads and yards. A flash of yearning, that was all. I have chosen life, she told herself.
This is life: I must not look away.

Seeing her gaze on him, he said, “When will you be coming to Garden City?” There was a soberness in his voice she did not think she had heard before, as if he could glimpse her thoughts, knew something more than she did about where they might lead. As if he saw what she had just seen. She drew her hands back from the table top, putting them to rest on her lap.

“I will not be coming,” she said, and was angry at herself because her voice was low, as if she were speaking to a husband, rather than clear and firm, as if she were in control. She stood now too as he went toward the door, where he turned toward her.

“This is a mistake,” he said. “I know people; you can go far; I am giving you the chance.”

“You would turn me into your…” she couldn’t think of the words. “Your prize cow.” She did not know how angry she was. How rage consumed her in the face of this…this… She was seeing the future if she went with him: One step at a time, she would end his mistress until he tired of her, or in charge of a brothel, step by step, she would descend, pretending she wasn’t, into the dark world where he and the prostitutes lived. In the barest flash she saw herself wielding her charm with men so they would choose to buy her services, and stepped back, away from him. But he appeared more interested in her reaction than upset by it.

“You don’t know things yet,” he told her, as if Lily and Adelaide were not dressed and standing by the door, as if they were alone in this suddenly vast room. “You will find out that it’s every man for himself in this world. You will find out that if you don’t do people first, they will do you.” His face had reddened, his heavy moustache moved about as he chewed on his words and did not spit them out. Then, “You will find out.” She put a hand to her throat, feeling he had cursed her.

All she could think to say was, “I have a child.” Pleading. She threw out a hand at which he gazed at first with something that seemed to be contempt, then weary resignation.

“All right then,” and Lily began to pull on the door to open it, Adelaide pulled her shawl up over her face and then reached out to do the same for Lily. Sophie saw this as trying to keep warm, as something they all did in winter, then understood that it was to hide their faces.

In the passion of the moment she had heard nothing but his voice. Now she recollected that she had heard a rig driving up and stopping, the ringing of the bridle, the creak and snap of cold buggy wood, the hissing of sleigh runners on hard-packed snow. She did not need to look to know that Ambrose or his helper had been ordered to bring the Campion rig down to her house, that Campion, Adelaide and Lily would make a fast exit, probably no one even having time to notice them going, or seeing only their backs as they raced out of town, would not know who they were, although, she thought, some will know, others will have their suspicions. She was not free and clear.

Chapter Fourteen

Winter

T
he winter stretched on without any lifting
of the intense cold, while Sophie cooked for her customers and looked after Charles. Blizzards blew up and stayed overnight, or a day or even three days, when she was trapped with her child in the thin-walled shack, hoping not to run out of wood before it was safe to go out and get more, hoarding her coal supply, wondering when more would come into the town. Then no one came for meals, or cups of coffee and conversation, and the days seemed endless and empty, and her sadness, both from her situation and from what she had seen with Campion, grew from the occasional few hours to a near-constant state.

She found it harder and harder to keep cheerful. Once indoors, she could not even look outside as the inside of every window in Bone Pile was etched with opaque wild frost jungles: ferns, exotic flower-like tracery, curlicues that might be seen as faces, or animals, or plants of the rarest varieties. Or so she told Charles when he too grew restless, wanting to run about and play, when outside there was only screaming, snow-laden wind and cold so severe that it was a risk to step out the door. Then they would stay at the window, Charles standing on a chair she had put there for him, and Sophie with her arm around him, tracing designs with her finger and saying, “What is that, do you think?”

“Fower,” Charles would say, delighted, and then, “Fern! Tree! A kitty!” and she would hug him and try not to let him see that tears were sliding down her cheeks, tears she had neither willed nor whose source she fully understood.

She wished for a woman friend. Even as a child, although she had had school friends, she had to steal away from home to play with them, was never allowed to go to their houses, or they to come to hers. There had been Violette Hippolyte, but after she had gone to the convent, Sophie had never seen her again. And here, who was there? Only Séraphine Beausoleil, a true friend, though more like a mother, and the same was true of Mrs. Emery. Often she drank tea with Mrs. Wozny, but they had in common only that they had both been abandoned by their husbands, and had to make their own way for themselves and their children. That, their imperfect command of English, and their unwelcome but unrelenting sense of themselves as being not quite the right thing in this village, in this West, because they were not from the British Isles and were not Protestants, their Catholicism, whether renounced or not, seeming to be something the others could smell on them, and wondered, is this why people marry? So as not to be alone?

But she couldn’t allow herself to think about marriage, her chest contracting with pain as if an iron bar had been thrust in there that could never be taken out, so that she raised her head, stretching her neck, trying to open her heart and lungs so it would be dislodged, and when this didn’t work, turned to her little boy to caress him and murmur to him, fixing on his needs because only her love for Charles was strong enough to make her forget her sadness. Sometimes she caught herself moving as if she were an old woman, her limbs and every joint aching, or else a lethargy invading them so that they were hard to lift. Then she would long to be away, anywhere that wasn’t this collection of shabby huts, the peaked roofs all that could be seen in the field of snow, the shoveled banks rising even higher, while day after wintry day thin plumes of smoke streamed upward into the distant blue of the sky.

On the stillest of winter days she dressed Charles in so many clothes he could hardly walk, and herself in layers of wool under her heavy coat and boots, and they would go outside. Sophie waiting, huddled, or else using the time to move snow from around her entrance and steps, the shovel’s iron ringing in the crisp air, its noise carried across the village as she could hear the shovels of others on the other side of town scraping and pinging, while Charles threw himself in the snow, talking away to himself. He would make angels with his widespread arms and legs, or with the small shovel she used for coal would work away at building a snow fort – it was invariably too cold to make snow
men as Sophie had done as a child in Québec, the snow would not stick together, although it broke readily out of the hard-packed
snowbanks as large flat chunks ideal for building snow forts.

Sometimes Mrs. Wozny’s little girls, seeing them outside, would stuff themselves into their shabby outdoor clothes and come to help Charles. He was happy then, and Sophie could walk away to the end of the narrowly-shovelled road that opened out to a trail that led into the countryside, to the farm where she and Pierre had labored fruitlessly for three and more years, to where the Beausoleils lived, and on, down to the American border, or through town to the other end of the road that ran north to Swift Current and the railway, or curved west to Garden City, then Calgary, then Banff, then the mountains that formed the western boundary of her known world. Beyond that, her mind opening out to the great sea that she had never seen, and beyond even that to an Orient that appeared to her as only formless colour and movement.

She was stunned by the beauty she saw as she paused from her shoveling to rest, her viscera wide open to the land, to her sorrow she always battled to keep away, and to the great mystery that she was learning in her loneliness and pain, was human life. Often there was such a sun-bright sheen stretching out to the horizon that the snow-covered land was too bright to look at; even shading her eyes with a hand she could catch only glimpses of the wide spans of glistening blue-white and had to close them against the streaks of radiant silver so bright her eyes would run with tears; she would be stunned by the heartlessness of such beauty, a frozen paradise, fit for no human. When she looked back to where the children played in the snow, noses running, cheeks red, puffing out billows of frozen breath, she would be nearly blinded by what she had seen. She dreamed of something then; what it was she wasn’t sure. Not to have lost Pierre, and in such an ignominious way, not to be alone and scrabbling like any peasant to stay alive. Not to be alone.

And still, no more word from Harry beyond that one letter he had sent to Mrs. Emery. She was aware that he could send her no private letters because the mail was laid out in the shack used for it as well as for the Mountie’s business, and everyone could see if they wanted to who had sent her a letter. He had been gone months now and she was beginning to wonder if he had forgotten her, or if maybe he had met a woman in Winnipeg and was living with her, or even had promised himself to her. Maybe in the spring he would come back with his team and wagon, the woman on the seat beside him. She covered her face with both hands when she thought this, the two figures on the wagon seat melting into Pierre and Marguerite. When he returned, however he returned, what
would she expect from him? She asked herself do I love him, but couldn’t answer. She would not allow herself to say yes, because if
she did, the fact of her still being Pierre’s wife in the eyes of the church would intrude and she would have to deal with that. And anyway, she sometimes thought she cared as much as she did for him only because he had wanted her when Pierre had cast her aside and she was wounded to her very soul and no longer sure of her own worth. In wanting her he had also given her hope. In the end, she couldn’t answer her own question.

She remembered then what over the course of this long winter she had half-forgotten, that she was occupying his house, that when he returned she would have to leave. In fact, she thought one night as she lay in bed trying to fall asleep, while two steps across the small room Charles slept deeply in his cot, and blew tiny bubbles through his lips on each exhalation, that she would have to be gone before he returned. But how? There was still no empty house to be had and she didn’t want to spend what little money she had managed to hoard on building another small shack. If I do that, she told herself, shuddering, I would be well and truly trapped in Bone Pile. I’d have no money left to go anywhere else. No. Her best hope was to get out of Bone Pile as soon as she could; there was still time; maybe something would come up.

On the third day of a blizzard, during a short lull in the wind that slammed against the town, plastering snow against the west side of all the buildings, banking it six feet high across the town’s streets while leaving other stretches bare down to the iron-hard frozen ground, there was a thumping at her door. She opened it as fast as she could, not caring who might be there. Frank Archibald stood on her step, nearly vanished behind a huge bundle of chopped wood so that she had to peer around it to see who it was.

“Well, now, before you go thanking me,” he said, pushing past her to drop his load partly on her clean floor and partly into the woodbox by the stove, “It was the Mountie, Constable Lewis who reminded me you might be needing supplies.” He straightened, grinning, brushing bark, wood chips and slivers, and small chunks of snow and ice off his coat. Flustered, she still didn’t know what to say other than, “Thank you. I was running out, I was starting to worry…” Then, struggling to regain her composure at this unexpected kindness, went into the bedroom, calling over her shoulder, “Sit down. I’ll make you coffee. How is Mrs. Archibald?” Returning, she carried her metal cash box out of which she made change for her customers.