Wild Rose (19 page)

She looked back at the tent – even from the far end of the long furrow it looked tiny in the immense space of grass, hills, sky – wondering what she ought to be doing: organizing supplies, setting up the stove, if she could discover how, they couldn’t cook on a campfire the entire summer, arranging their trunk of clothing, making a place for morning
toilettes
inside the tent; setting up a makeshift cupboard where she could keep handy her plates, cutlery, pots and pans, but covered with a
cloth to keep out the flies and mosquitoes, not to mention mice and even gophers and the small foxes that ran about; gathering –
she paused. Gathering what? No chickens, so no eggs – they would have to remedy that very soon – no animals as settled farms had and they would someday soon too, the oxen already fed, watered and working, Fleurette, hobbled and nibbling tentatively at the grass. Needing to be milked for sure.

She started, remembering this, and left Pierre at once, he appearing not to even notice she was going. Finding one of their two wooden pails, also hand-me-downs from one of the Hippolyte neighbours, she went to the cow, speaking quietly to her as Mme Hippolyte had shown her she must do, but firmly, even though her palms were damp with anxiety. She set the donated milking stool at the cow’s flank, mercifully Fleurette seemed to know what came next and stood quietly, switching her tail against the insects while Sophie took teats in each hand, and doing her best to hold them just so and to draw as she squeezed, began to milk their cow. What ridiculous triumph she felt as milk began to cover the bottom of the pail.

The farmer said Fleurette had had a calf not long before, although he had kept it, so there would be milk for a while, but then, they would have to find a bull somewhere, so the milk supply could continue. In the meantime, no way to keep the milk cold, no cool dark well into which to lower it in a bucket where it would be out of the sun, no ice box, no delivery of ice, no ice. Her butter churn, Mme Hippolyte’s old one that M. Hippolyte had hurriedly repaired for them, was somewhere in the pile of goods tumbled onto the grass, but without a way to keep butter cold…They would have to dig a hole for it, that was all. She wondered if the oxen could drink the leftover milk. Fleurette made a hard, wide swipe with her tail, catching the side of Sophie’s head. She blinked, leaned away, tears starting at the sting. But no, Mme Hippolyte had told her that she must take charge.

“Fleurette, stop that!” loudly, angrily, as if she were indeed in charge. Fleurette subsided, it was as if she had been trying this out to see if her new owner would allow it, and finding Sophie would not, desisted. A lesser victory, but one nonetheless, and feeling suddenly competent, she relaxed into the job. We will get along, Fleurette,
non?
she inquired of the cow.

The milking done, she puttered about trying to put things to right again, laughing because overnight the prairie had become her house, the four walls made of air, the cupboards
wooden boxes where things could be shut away at night, the stove sitting majestically against the sky in a patch from which they had scraped away all the grass so as to avoid starting a prairie fire when
she cooked. I have the biggest kitchen in all of Christendom, she
remarked out loud, and stood listening to her words riding on the steady breeze. She wished Pierre would take the time to hunt –
in a few days he would have to – she didn’t choose to eat cured meat forever and they were running out in any case. A garden! How could she have forgotten? She must start a garden at once, for without one, they would starve come winter.

For the first time, trying to get the tip of the shovel into the root-matted, dry sod, the reality of the hard work she would need to do began to sink in. If it seemed too much today, how would she manage for the many summers that she saw lay ahead of them? She would, that was all; she would not fail, but in her fear that she would fail, all the past came welling up over her, all her many losses, parents, brother and sisters she hadn’t even known, Sophie no longer first in dearest Guillaume’s heart, her grandfather who had done his best for her, great-uncle Henri. Had the sun not clasped her so fast in its bronze grip, so strong it was almost visible, the smell of grass and sage not filled her nostrils, had her beloved Pierre not been plowing so nearby, she might have collapsed onto the hard prairie and beat her head against it. She might have wailed and screamed; she might have died from her own terror and sorrow. She sought frantically for something, anything to grasp that would make it possible to go on. No words came to her, no memory of anyone else’s, but instead, in her violence of emotion, she raised the spade and with the aid of her foot pressing with all her strength on its shoulder, she succeeded in getting it into the hard, gritty soil, again, and again, and again, sweat pouring down her temples, along her spine and under her arms. She slammed the shovel into the ground, wrenched it, pushed it forward, until she had no breath left and had to stop, panting, leaning on it.
I will have a garden
, she told herself, through gritted teeth, or maybe she was speaking to those unseen forces that would let her have nothing unless she forced it out of them.
I will not fail Pierre. I will not fail.

She thought then,
winter will come
. Had not the
voyageur
Jacques Le Blanc told Pierre of the ferocity of the winters in
le pays d’en haut
, claiming them worse than even in the north of Québec, the week-long blizzards, the temperatures so cold you could freeze to death in minutes, made the more terrible for lack of towns or houses on any of the trails in which to take shelter?

Winter. From now on, in a flash more like a knife cutting through her bridal dream, her dream of freedom, she understood that winter would be their darkness, their ultimatum from which there would be no escape, their final test. Every year from now on they must be ready for winter, or die. She lifted a quivering hand to her face, closing her eyes, breathing in through her nostrils, trying to shake this unwelcome wisdom, trying to encompass it with her own will, one that demanded that she be stronger even than winter.

Out there against the sky Pierre was plowing, wrestling with the plow, his voice reaching her faintly as now and then he cursed at his oxen, stubborn as they were, but powerful, another furrow unfolding behind him straight as the first. Behind her, the sides of the tent snapped or cracked dully, heaving with the wind that rose and died and rose again. Pierre would plow from dawn to dark,
while I putter away prettily
. She had not succeeded in breaking down more than a couple of square feet of sod. Prettiness will not help me now, she told herself, disgusted by her own, heretofore unrecognized vanity, nor will it help my husband. As she watched him work a half-mile from where she stood in her frustration, she was awed by something she could only call his manhood. How different we are, she thought, and a thrill ran through her in celebration of the difference that she had not mentally examined before, allowing it only to settle in her body. She thought of her grandfather bending down to her when she was a child, smelling of his pipe, grunting as he bent, his hand so big and heavy on her head that she nearly buckled under its weight. How then she had loved what grandfather was, although she did not
know
what it was: his size, his deep voice, the way he smelled, his whiskers, all were part of it, but were not
it
itself. Watching Pierre she felt she could not now fully grasp what a man was, and was grateful that this
man
, so different from what she was, belonged to her, that he adored her, that he would never hurt her, but would protect her forever, as her grandfather had done from her birth twenty years before. Is this what it is to be a woman? She supposed that it must be.

When Pierre came back across the prairie to her just before the sun reached its zenith and the heat came up in waves off the earth, and fell onto his side on the ground, groaning, she said, “We aren’t enough people. We need a hunter, a builder, a plowman, a chef, a housekeeper…” She sat down beside him.

“And a parlour maid,” Pierre said, touching her ribs with his elbow, teasing her because she had lived in a house with Antoinette who was both something of a parlour maid and a housekeeper, and with a cook.

“I will be the parlour maid,” she said, starting out in a high-pitched, pretty voice, then dropping the joke as she would indeed be the parlour maid, whenever she acquired a parlour. But her hands were blistering from her garden work. When Pierre, lying exhausted and wet with sweat on the grass in the shade of the tent while she prepared his meal of the last of the canned beef and the biscuits she had made on the top of the stove for lack of wood to fuel the oven, saw what she had done, he had looked at her with something new in his eyes, frowning a little, watching her, as if to ask himself, who is she? But all he said was that after he had eaten and had a nap he would plow some ground for her garden, then she could break the sods down with her shovel.

“That will be easier than trying to cut through that matt of roots with only a shovel,” he told her. “A little rain would make breaking the sods easier.” Inadvertently, both glanced at the sky, then looked down again. Not so much as the shadow of a cloud broke the even blue.

“Then we have to get water,” Sophie declared.

“I need to build a stone boat, but I can’t do that without wood and some iron for the runners, or I buy the runners in the town.”

“And wood,” she said, “for fuel, when we get the water.” He said that surely there would be a wood supply along the stream where they filled their barrel with water.

“I need chickens.”

“Maybe we can get some hatchlings or chicks in the town too, or…”

"She didn't tell him that after his break, when he would go back to his field, she would take one of the wooden pails and go out across the prairie to get more water, being careful to stamp in her mind the bump on the top of a hill that she knew was above the stream nearly a mile away to the north, the one she had pointed out on the map with her own finger, and then to survey carefully the terrain around their tent so as to know what to look for on the way back, she would take one of the wooden pails and go out across the prairie to get more water. She would take two pails but knew she would never be strong enough to carry them both back at once. If only we had a saddle horse. Soon, she told herself. Next year at the latest.

She knew that the stream ran through a shallow ravine where some shelter from the sun might be found, and perhaps some berries too. What had the grocer in Swift Current called it?
Couler
, she thought. A French name, butchered in English; he had said ‘coulee’ with the accent on the first syllable. The word meant running, so…ah, she thought. A place where water runs. That must be it. Or did he only mean the French Canadian word “coulee”?

It occurred to her to wonder what would happen if she hadn’t chosen a destination and had merely wandered out from their camp to walk, but thought that if she had no destination, how would she ever find her way back again? She pondered this fact as she walked, that already what had seemed beyond endless, an infinity of gently rolling plain covered with grasses soughing delicately in the steady breeze, she had found, or made, markers. A human thing, she told herself, just as at night we find stars to tell us where we are. She tried to imagine a featureless world, but frightened herself, and stopped. She walked slowly glancing at the horizon to re-orient herself.

The thought that she might find berries at the stream heartened her, and she imagined presenting Pierre with a freshly-baked blueberry pie. But she hadn’t nearly enough wood to keep an oven hot for the time it would take to cook the pie. Worse, she had never made a pie all by herself, and knowing what skill was required, quailed at the thought. Pie, too, would have to wait. She would make biscuits.

Behind her there was a narrow gap in the line of mauve hills far beyond their tent and the new long scar in the grass; she would use it to mark the way back. Every once in a while she would stop walking and turn in a slow, full circle studying the vista of grass in each direction, marvelling at the subtlety of colouring, the way the slopes of the hills, a soft ecru at the top, changed as her eyes moved down them to a faded blue-green and, at the bottom where water sometimes gathered, there would be a streak of brilliant emerald, incongruous in the otherwise subtly-coloured landscape. The beauty of the scene in all its softly-radiating distance suffused her; she could not
think
of it: it
was
and she
was
, but as she moved slowly forward, her skirt trailing in the stiff, dusty grass, she was stopped by a flower gleaming at her feet. She bent to look at it, faintly surprised, this didn’t seem to be a landscape for flowers, but there it was, a daisy-like plant, bright yellow, but tiny compared to the daisies she knew from far-away Quebec.

After that, every fifty or so feet she bent, or even knelt to study tiny flowers reaching up through the short grasses, for she recognized by name only the sparse scattering of pink or white roses that grew a few inches high here and there in the grass. The other flowers were yellow, blue, white, purple, and even once a true red: She was amazed at the plethora of flowers she saw if she looked closely, and although most of them with blossoms not bigger than her smallest fingernail, how lovely they all were, when she had thought there were no flowers at all, and would have missed their presence if she had had time to think of it.