Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel (13 page)

“‘Anthony Henday and his Indians,’” she read, Victoria at her shoulder, “‘had traveled hundreds of miles across the bush when they came upon a big river, the south branch of the Saskatchewan. He called it the Wakesew, or Red Deer. But they had no boats in which to cross, having left their canoes on the banks of the Carrot River. With willow from the riverbanks the Indians soon made b—boats, covering the frames with cured moose skins. When they were across, they abandoned the b—boats...’

“For heaven’s sake!” Birdie, already keyed up, exploded.

“What?” a startled Victoria asked.

“Why can’t you call them what they are? Bumboats.”

Victoria, twelve years old and wise, clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Victoria?”

“I can’t! I can’t say... that word.”

“You can’t even write it?” Birdie asked, realizing her annoyance was showing and all unfairly, knowing full well why the proper Victoria couldn’t bring herself to use a word that, to her, referred to a rather private part of the anatomy—the, er, nether quarters.

Now see
, Birdie thought crossly,
she’s got me doing it
.

“I don’t think my mum would like me to say... it,” Victoria stubbornly insisted.

Birdie closed her eyes momentarily and breathed deeply.

“Victoria,” she said tightly, determined to be patient, “take the word
darn
. It has two meanings. We use it to describe mending a stocking, and we use it as a euphemism for
damn
.”

“Euphem—” Victoria repeated.

“A good way, rather than a bad way, to say something.”

“Darn a sock is good...,” Victoria said gropingly, her eyes blinking with her concentration.

“But if you were angry and said, ‘Darn sock!’ you’d mean something entirely different, wouldn’t you?”

Victoria blanched at the very thought. Such words were absent from the vocabulary of well-brought-up children. Especially the children of Sister Dinwoody, to whom had been entrusted the sacred duty of playing the organ for worship, and who strove at all times to be worthy of such a trust.

“What I’m saying, Victoria, is that you don’t stop saying you darn socks just because other people use
darn
in place of a swear word, do you? It obviously has two meanings.” Birdie spoke reasonably.

Victoria looked unconvinced.

“Now take this back to your desk and do it over. Use the proper word for the boat the Indians built and which was much used in the West in those days.”

Clever (and stubborn) Victoria solved her problem by deciding to change Anthony Henday and his unmentionable mode of transportation to one that would not challenge her code of ethics. With a sigh she thumbed through her history book. Maybe if she switched to Peter Pond, “a typical, enterprising Yankee.... He was one of the men who literally put the Saskatchewan on the map.”

With considerable hope that Peter Pond, though experiencing “enough thrills to fill a dozen westerns,” would prove to be a man of acceptable character, Victoria settled down to her reading.

And Birdie, having satisfactorily handled that small problem, turned restless once again.

Lunchtime was no better. With resolution she stayed away from the north windows, and when she stepped outside to check on
the children and to walk around a little, she stayed strictly on the south side of the building. Realizing what she was doing, and why, brought a rush of blood to her cheeks and a feeling of despair that she should be so affected by a simple, unsigned letter.

With the children settled down to work again, Birdie turned to a stack of magazines and papers, thumbing through them, looking not only for something to read to the children but to direct her own wonderings and wanderings into safer channels.

Picking up an outdated copy of
The Youth’s Companion
, her attention was caught by a short account of a peddler of flypaper. Happy for the diversion, she read:

“I have here some of the most wonderful flypaper you ever saw,” the salesman said, standing at the door, unrolling his wares for a lady’s inspection. “Every inch of it is warranted to attract as many flies as can stand upon a square inch, reckoned to be, madam, in the neighborhood of thirty-two, without uncomfortable crowding.”

Who would care if a fly were crowded
, Birdie thought disgustedly,
especially if you were in the act of killing it
? Still, she read on, intrigued by the persistent flypaper salesman’s tactics:

“That would make,” the man continued smoothly, “on a sheet of this size, which contains five hundred squares, sixteen thousand flies. Think of that, ma’am! And at the ridiculous price of a nickel.”

Birdie, ever a teacher, began to see possibilities of making this account into an arithmetic problem for the children. Flies being an everlasting nuisance, the problem might challenge her sixth graders:

“Now here, ma’am,” the man continued, unrolling a larger sample of his wares, “is a sheet containing fifteen hundred squares. That means forty-eight thousand flies saved from falling into the soup or the butter, madam—”

Abandoning her plan with a shudder, Birdie turned the page. She was soon caught up in the paper’s report of the remarkable horseless carriage:

Advocates of carriages driven by motor-engines assert that they are certain to become popular because they will save money. In England it is estimated that the cost of fodder for a horse traveling twenty miles a day is twopence per mile, while a motor-wagon of two and a half horse-power can be driven the same distance at the expense of half a penny per mile. Another argument used in behalf of the horseless carriage is that two-thirds of the present wear and tear of roads is caused by horses.

The Drop Octagonal, ever timely, never hurried, never late, sounded out three o’clock. Rejecting the accounts she had just read, interesting though they were and with certain mathematical possibilities, she settled on a story found on the children’s page—“Eunice’s Sampler.” It would elicit a few groans from the boys, but with a promise of “Kenny and His Sled Dog” to follow, they would settle down.

The children knew the routine; books were being closed, desk lids opened, and lesson material stuffed inside. A few fingers were raised, resulting in several children making a trip to the water pail, but finally everyone was seated, properly attentive, and story time began.

Birdie never knew that lips could speak certain words while the mind, like a thing set apart, could be thinking of matters entirely separate and distinct. Finally, after struggling through the two stories, she gave one last desperate glance at the clock and, though it was lacking ten minutes to closing time, announced, “Now you may gather up the things you will be taking home. We’ll dismiss school a few minutes early today.”

When every straggler was gone, when the door was shut and the room silent except for the ticking of the clock, Birdie sat at
her desk, listening to time tick away and wondering why she had been so desperate for the day to come to an end.

Finally, abruptly, she rose. Once on her feet she hesitated, then moved slowly toward the north windows. Standing in the shadows of the room she turned her gaze toward the birch circle. The late afternoon sun pierced the bush and lit the small gathering place, a favorite with the children.

Nothing. As she had suspected, nothing. No one.

But wait. There was a movement, someone creeping... yes, creeping through the bush, stealthily approaching the birches from the side, pausing just before reaching them, crouching, peering, studying the ring, finding it empty. Finding it empty and standing erect, parting the bushes, making certain. Then turning, sending a searching gaze toward the schoolhouse, frowning, clearly chagrined at her failure to appear.

The face peering from the bush was flushed. It was nervous. It was guilty. It was Buck.

I
’m going over to Marfa’s this afternoon, Dad,” Ellie reminded her father as he made ready to go out to his afternoon’s work.

“Shall I hitch up for you?” he asked.

“No need. I’ll walk.”

Farms in the Saskatchewan bush were, ordinarily, not large, seldom exceeding the quarter-section originally homesteaded. And though homes were isolated because of the bush and the weather, they were not far apart, and Marfa and her husband George Polchek were only two miles away, not an unreasonable distance to walk.

The Polcheks were among those “stalwart peasants” referred to by Sifton, the minister of the interior whose zeal netted tens of thousands of poor, persecuted Europeans seeking free land and an opportunity to pioneer in peace. The Polcheks came in the first wave, and George, being over eighteen, joyfully claimed one of the last homesteads available in the community of Bliss while his brothers and father went farther afield.

George was a pioneer in the true sense of the word, with acreage to clear, ground to break, buildings to erect. Somewhere along the line he had met Marfa and they had fallen in love, and Marfa gladly and willingly joined herself to the enterprise of making a home and a farm out of the raw materials on George’s land.

Nevertheless, it was a mighty crude operation that was spread out before Ellie as she made her way from the road up the lane to the cabin on the raw patch of ground so recently wrenched from the bush’s resisting grip: a small barn with a sod roof, a garden, a well, a cabin of two rooms, filled with love and happiness in spite of having known tears of disappointment over the loss of several previously expected babies.

The screen door was open, Marfa was watching, and her welcome was warm.

“Come in, come in!” she exclaimed, her small, round figure almost vibrating with pleasure and satisfaction.

“Vonnie isn’t here yet, I take it,” Ellie said as she stepped up onto the stoop, seeing no rig and knowing Vonnie would drive, having three miles or so to come.

“I think she’s turning in now,” Marfa said, and the two young women paused on the step, watching and waiting.

Now, as ever across the years, it was Ellie and Marfa together—the one slim and trim and vibrant, dusky skinned and dark-haired, with hazel-green eyes as full of lively interest as in days of childhood; the other, Marfa, shorter, more rotund of figure than usual, with the stamp of kindness and goodness shining from her round face.

And as ever, though Vonnie had grown up as one of the accepted “gang of four,” she was a step or two outside the magic circle that united Ellie and Marfa. Outside the circle and, by some inner knowing aware of it, often resenting it, sometimes challenging it, but never able to invade it.

What Vonnie’s thoughts were as she pulled up to the cabin to see Ellie and Marfa together as so often before was her own secret. But she did say, as she pulled the horse to a stop and looked at her
friends, “Well. And so there you are. Again.” And added gaily, “A gang of two.”

“Three, actually,” Marfa said as she stepped forward, patting her burgeoning middle. “And now that you’re here—four.”

“It doesn’t seem right without Flossy, of course,” Ellie added, holding out her hand to Vonnie and helping her down.

At the head of the horse, Marfa looked expectantly toward the barn, and sure enough, a sturdy overall-clad form appeared in the doorway. With a wave, George strode toward them.

George’s greeting, spoken in his broken English, was warm. “You girls haf a goot time, now,” he concluded, adding as he turned back toward the barn, horse in tow, “and leaf some of dem tarts for me.”

“Oh, George!” Marfa laughed, adding fondly, “You’d think I starved him, to hear him talk. Come on in, girls, and we’ll see what he’s talking about.”

With a smile and a courtly dip of his head, George led the horse away, and the three friends went inside the cabin.

It was the first time Vonnie had been back to Bliss since her marriage, and she looked Marfa’s home over frankly.

“You’re very comfortable, I see.” Vonnie was removing her gloves and lifting her hat from her head.

Give her a few more days in Bliss
, both Marfa and Ellie were thinking,
and Vonnie will discard her fineries and be back in harness, helping with the milking, hoeing in the garden, putting up jams and jellies with the rest of us
.