Wild Rose (18 page)

Had she fainted? She wasn’t sure.

She sat wrapped in a quilt, although fully dressed, in a big armchair in the
salon
so that the sun could shine on her. She wasn’t sure what summer it was, had expected it to be winter when Antoinette had carried her downstairs the first day she was well enough to leave her bed, grunting falsely, saying, “How big you have grown,” to her even though she knew, because everyone had told her, that she was very thin and must eat to regain all the weight she had lost. She remembered with certainty a vast winter storm that for days had left the countryside frozen and still, snow coming up over the windows and she was afloat on a scintillating sea of white, snowflakes drifting around her, and her mother floating above her bed, disappearing as soon as grandmother or the doctor opened her door.

“Do not forget the water,” her mother, whose face was the one in the only photo she had ever seen of her at the same time as she could not quite see it, instructed her, and another time, “Be the sure the lake…” and even, “Where is the…” but Antoinette came into the room then carrying something white on a tray and Sophie’s mother had vanished, her voice trailing away, and Sophie had cried out, “Antoinette!
Antoinette!” angry because Antoinette’s entrance had blotted out her
mother’s last word and now she would never know what it had been. Then there was a cool dampness on her forehead, her chest was on fire, she couldn’t breathe, and twisted her body, beating the bedclothes with her fists to make the air come back into her lungs.

There was winter, she instructed herself, she had been sick.

“You nearly died,” Antoinette told her. “It was very close.” She remembered that the doctor had said, “Well, you are back with us again!” as if he were surprised, crossing himself, then stroking his stiff grey beard with one hand, his other in a fist at his waist, holding back his long coat so that his trouser leg in corded grey wool was revealed. But Antoinette said that it was not winter when she had grown ill, that it had been summer, “Not long after
la fête
,” she explained. “You were overtired, you lost your shawl and got yourself chilled.” She paused from where she was holding a length of white Turkish toweling having brought the clean laundry into the
salon
to fold so that she might keep Sophie company, shaking her head solemnly, her lips pursed as if about to chastise her.

“Yes,” Sophie answered, uncertainly. “Grandfather said I must take the shawl. Where is it?” fearful that it was lost permanently, that if grandmother found out she would be angry. Antoinette
went to the
armoire
that sat in the hall, returning with the pale brown shawl draped across her forearms for Sophie to see.

“
La sœur
Marie-Mathilde brought it for you. It was in the church,” and she cast Sophie such a look that Sophie knew that Antoinette knew that Sophie herself had hidden it there. That was now though, when all of this had happened in the previous six months, or so she thought because now it was summer and time to stop being so confused. Then she remembered, or thought she did, that Hector had sometimes come to see her in her room when she was ill, and her mother had talked to him, because she was Hector’s mother too. It seemed to Sophie that she could remember Hector weeping by her bedside, or was that grandfather?

“Was Hector here?” she asked.

“Hector came home for one day,” Antoinette answered briskly, not looking at Sophie. She had finished folding the toweling and now was rearranging the parlour lamp and the glass figurines on the table beside her, all glittering from the beam of sunlight that bathed them. Her voice changing, she asked, “Do you remember Guillaume coming home? He brought medicine from the famous Montreal doctor,
le docteur
Roche that Dr. Belanger asked him to bring. But then the doctor,” – Sophie did not know which one – “said it was useless, you would live or die on your own according to the will of
le bon Dieu
, and He decided you should live and here you are.” She tapped Sophie on top of her head, then unexpectedly bent and brushed her hair with her lips. When she stepped back, crossing herself, there were tears in her eyes, but then, Antoinette always cried over nothing at all. Crying from Antoinette didn’t mean a thing Sophie reminded herself.

Snow over the rooftops shining silver in the high sun, fields of snow spreading out in blue waves for miles in every direction. Trying to remember, she grew uncertain: Had those been clouds? Had there been fields of clouds? Impossible, clouds didn’t come down and make fields, she told herself dreamily. She thought that she could remember floating over frozen clouds, that she had been suspended in the frigid air by the white puffs of her own breath. Through her wonder, she laughed out loud at the impossibility of it, so that Antoinette paused in her folding and gazed assessingly at her.

“Has it been winter?” Sophie asked. Antoinette stood motionless, letting the length of toweling fall back onto the chair, her brown eyes widened and grew darker. Then she came to Sophie, placing a warm palm against Sophie’s forehead. Irritably, Sophie jerked her head away. Antoinette said, “It is summer still, Sophie. You have been sick for a month or so.” Her voice, unusually, was gentle. Sophie dropped her eyes, embarrassed to be so mixed up.

“Was there a storm?” she asked, but if it was still summer there could not have been a snowstorm, and tears sprang to her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Antoinette told her, going back to her folding. “You will get stronger and then you will remember everything. Your grandfather found you in the church, you had passed out, he brought you home. Already you were wheezing in your chest,” and she did an imitation of how Sophie had sounded. The sound terrified her, if only Antoinette would stop, she pulled the blanket up under her chin and would have hugged herself under it, but she was too tired.

Once she had opened her eyes and saw grandmother standing at her bedside, staring down at her with a look that said she was thinking of her, Sophie, but of other things as well and could not separate them so that sometimes Sophie seemed to be her focus and other times that she did not see Sophie at all, but was looking through her or past her into another time, one that made her sad. Had grandmother lost her mother too, when she was only a child? But when she had tried to ask the question the only sound that came out was thick and not what she meant to say, as in a dream, when in the midst of one she thought she had screamed but all that emerged from her throat was a sickly croak.

She remembered then that she could hear her own breath rattling in her chest, rumbling like grandfather’s sometimes did when he fell asleep and snored in church until grandmother kicked his ankle, her expression not changing an iota. Then she remembered how she couldn’t breathe, struggling for air, thrashing in the bedclothes, trying to call for help, but able only to make the rattling half-wheezes. It was the shadows in the corners doing this to her, she tried to push them back so she could get air. Her door opened, that she remembered clearly, and Antoinette in nightdress and slippers entered carrying a candle, cried out at Sophie’s struggles, there had been noises, doors, the window being opened, her own absolute terror engulfing her; she was lifted up, someone was striking her hard on her back until she coughed and coughed and choked and coughed some more, and then, breathing again, the world went black.

In the early evening when she had been carried back to her own room for the night, Grandfather came upstairs to sit with her for a while before she fell asleep.

Sophie told him, whispering, “I thought the angel would carry me to heaven.” Grandfather let his gaze rest on her face, gently, but then, seeming to dismiss what she had seen in her fever, he teased her, “How do you know it would be heaven?” At first she didn’t understand him, and then she had cried out in terror at the thought of hell, so near, hovering in the hall, and its implacable flames roaring on the other side of the maple tree outside her window. He stood quickly, pulled back the covers, put his arm behind her shoulders and helped her sit. She was quivering all over, her chest dampening with sweat, and he held her close to his chest and engulfed her with the smell of his tobacco and his warmth.

“Sophie, Sophie,” he told her, “Children do not go to hell. The church wouldn’t allow such a thing. You must not be afraid.” He put another pillow behind her head, helped her to a higher place against them, stroked her forehead, then sat again holding her hand.

She said, “But the church – May I go visit Uncle Henri’s grave? May I, Grandfather?” He wouldn’t look at her.

“Your grandmother would not like it,” he said, shaking his head slowly and not looking at her. “When you are older you can go yourself. But now? No.” She thought, I will go after school one day, when no one knows, but such exhaustion was sweeping through her that her hand fell from grandfather’s and she was asleep.

Later, she didn’t know how long it was, she woke again. He stood with his back to the window so that the light was blotted out, she saw only a grandfather-shaped shadow and then she remembered the widow Bénédicte Bilodeau, and was about to ask him why he had been holding her hand; why had he kissed her? When she turned to him out of the blackness of the shadows under the great trees of the churchyard and saw them standing so close together, then kissing, and how they had looked at each other.

Now, suddenly, she remembered running into the church, the bonfire roaring maniacally behind her, the silence in the church that was filled with – she did not know what: Angels, she supposed. Was that when I got sick? But her thoughts were all mixed up. Why was I in the church in the middle of the night?
La fête de St. Jean-Baptiste
. With this straightening out of some of her confusion, her memory of the widow and grandfather grew stronger, both hellfire and salvation diminishing in the face of what she had seen, she knew at once, clearly now, that she must never ask grandfather about the widow, must never let him know what she had seen, must never speak of it to anyone else, not even Violette Hippolyte.

Chapter Seven

Beginning

S
he had come to know the stars:
To the south Orion, by his three-studded belt, above the sword that since her marriage she had come to understand was not a sword at all; to the
north the pole star and the dippers, and in the west, well, nothing
much in the west, she told herself, and the east was for the rising sun. She wished she had a book so she might identify more constellations. But there was no book to be found here on the prairie, nor any library from which to borrow one, and no neighbour who might be more knowledgeable than she was about the stars. Here, even the skies are wild, they are like an undiscovered continent, she thought, pleased, as she rose from her squat, lowered her nightdress and made her way back into the tent, and the makeshift bed beside Pierre who didn’t stir, as he hadn’t when she had crawled out moments before.

Mostly, the nights were silent, even the wind taking an hour or two to rest, and the only sound that came to them as they lay side by side or curled around each other was the faint, distant wail and barking of coyotes, and the howl of wolves that never failed to make shivers run up and down her back, or once in a long time, a snarling hiss that caused them both to stiffen, because a mountain lion stalked the night-dark prairie nearby where they lay inside their flimsy canvas house. They listened, not breathing, but no further screech disturbed them, and they relaxed and fell back into sleep. One morning, unnervingly, they found what had to be bear scat not far from their camp and staring at it, black, crumbling, and laden with berry pits, turned to look at each other with wide eyes, not speaking, until Pierre said, “I have my gun, Sophie,” and she had nodded, reassured. After that, even while they worked on the cabin, he kept the gun within reach, although mostly, during the day they didn’t even think of it, or of wild animals, or maulings, or death.

They rarely thought of what they had left behind only six weeks earlier: a village, families, church, priests and nuns, streets and sidewalks, stores and hospitals and mayors and police. If they were reminded, they would turn and gaze into each other’s eyes at the reminder, start to smile, then laugh aloud, a delighted, even ecstatic laugh that came out of their understanding, now, of what freedom consisted. Even if it also consisted of seeing no one but themselves for days and weeks, of thinking that this blessedly good weather would surely be broken one of
these days by a storm or a stretch of damp and cold that would tire them more and further exhaust their resources. For now, it was fine, and they were fine, and the world was fine as fine could be.

~

They had brought a walking plow
all the way from Québec. The first thing Pierre did when at last they had found their own quarter section, one day later than when they first thought they had, and Sophie had decreed that the house they would build would be
there
, pointing firmly, and
the door will face the east
. As Pierre had finished the hitching and grasped the plow handles experimentally, she had felt something was missing, almost called, wait! But then realized she was so used to the priest blessing any new venture, that it felt very strange to be beginning so momentous a thing without any ceremony. Shaking herself, she felt that need too diminish if not vanish, and making a hasty sign of the cross as Pierre was also doing, but he without even thinking about it as it seemed to her that she always did about everything, she let her hand drop to her side. Pierre set the plow blade down, spoke to the oxen and farming began. With Sophie walking with him as the sods fell aside from the blade, the grass turning over so that the light brown soil revealed itself, glistening and giving off a faint, unnamable odour, the iron ringing and sparking against the occasional stone, the muscles of his back and shoulders moving as he fought to maintain the plow upright, to keep it deeply in the soil, the line he walked straight, he plowed their first long furrow.