Wild Rose (20 page)

Two kinds of beauty, she thought, and wished for an instant she had someone to say this to: the long view, and the very short view. And look! Wasn’t that lichen? Growing right on the ground. How colourful the few scattered rocks were, and examining them closely, saw that the colour wasn’t the
stone itself that made them so bright, but lichen of many shades from rust and orange, to gold to white and black. And surely that was moss with those tiny white flowers blooming on its palest grey-green surface, moss growing right on the dry ground. How could that be? She touched it, rubbed it gently with her fingers, wondering at it stiffness, from which sprang this tiniest perfection of blooms.

She had not at first paid attention to what seemed to be bits of old, stringy, dark brown wood half-buried in the grass and dirt that she sometimes saw by the flowers she examined so closely. On impulse she reached for one, scratched it up with broken fingernails from the dust and the previous year’s semi-cover of beige-coloured blades of matted grass. But no, as it came free she saw that she held in her hand, not a piece of wood, but instead, a short curved animal horn, or rather, the bark-like covering of a horn. At one end it was at least two inches wide, its edges ragged and it curved to a sharp but broken point at the other end. The horn itself, she supposed still attached to the skull, was nowhere to be seen. She rose from her knees holding it up before her eyes, turning it slowly, shifting hands, then putting it back to rest on the palm of her right hand.

But what animal, and looked about nervously, half-laughing at herself. Antelope horns were black as ebony, and the horns of deer darkened ivory. Then she knew: It came to her in a rush that started in her abdomen and flushed upward into her chest where it held for a breathless second: She was holding the horn casing of one of the legendary, vanished buffalo.

She walked on, glancing up for the three hills and the middle one with the bump on the top, so as not to lose her way. A breeze came up and she pulled on the strings of her bonnet, tying them more tightly, brushing away a buzzing fly. She heard, far above her head, but faintly, a piercing falling sound, half-whistle, half-screech and raised her head, back, and then further back than that. A hawk circled, and as she gazed, far higher even than the hawk and a long way ahead of them she made out a black speck and then another: A pair of eagles, she knew at once, circling too, looking for prey and wondered how big she looked to them. Too big to be prey she hoped, and would have stopped, perhaps even turned back, but the blue-green space ahead of her called. On she walked, carrying her pail in first one hand and then the other, the wind singing in her ears, her whole being held fast by the yellow-white sun, until she saw in the near distance a dark green line that she knew to be shrubs and knew too, that she had found her way to the only surface water she and Pierre knew of on the prairie near them.

She thought then that she’d been foolish not to bring any food with her, or a jar from the last of their drinking water, and wondered at her carelessness. She had been so intent on this new life and this strange new place, that she had somehow, without realizing it, in the perfection and wonder of this precious time with him, her beloved, in this wide, barrierless Eden, she had moved into a dream. Although she would have argued that it was the old world that was the dream and that she was now, for the first time in her life, fully alive, and wide awake.

At last, she arrived. What she saw was a narrow ribbon of clear, brownish water bubbling over rocks embedded in or lying on a smooth clay-like bottom surface of a perhaps ten-foot wide and six-foot deep raw cleft in the prairie. The stream ran swiftly because the cleft in the earth angled slightly downward at the point where she stood. She dropped the pail down the cleft’s deep side and clambered down herself, pausing only to free her skirt from the grasp of a rose bush and to brush off the bits of grass and dust. How cool it was down here, and how still, except for the hiss and burble of the water as it swept by her. No river this, she thought, but she bent and filled her pail at a spot where the water pooled on the downward side of a deeply-embedded, larger, flat-topped rock. Finished, she wanted to follow the stream, to see if perhaps she could find berry bushes, or to rest on the bank below the sharp edge where the short prairie grass nodded in the breeze, lying against the crumbling beige wall of the bank with the occasional stunted bush that she didn’t recognize growing more horizontal than vertical out of it, its trunk the size of two fingers, but as gnarled and grey as if it were a thousand years old, its greenery not even proper leaves, but a sort of fuzz like a pussy willow, and not a proper green either, but closer to the faded, dusty green of the prairie moss. But she didn’t; she had to walk a mile back in the sun and carrying a full pail of water at that. This wasn’t going to be easy, and she needed to start at once.

It took her a full hour, or so she estimated, to return, and when she arrived, she had perhaps slightly more than a half a pail left, what with the missteps she made that caused water to rise over the pail’s edge, its small tendency to leak, and with its evaporation in the heat. But she was proud of herself. Pierre was still in the field, still wrestling the plow, sometimes she could hear him shouting at the oxen. She took a glass jar, filled it with water, took two of her breakfast biscuits from the tin, and carried them to where he sweated and panted in the heat. He stopped plowing then, giving the oxen a rest, and sat on the grass beside her to devour the biscuits and sluice down most of the water, then lay on the grass, tipping his hat over his face to keep the sun from his eyes and after a pause, reached out one hand to her.

Surprised, she took it, he pulled her against him, then rolled them both over so that they lay full-length against each other. He kissed her softly, his hand on her breast. Before she knew it he was pulling her skirt up, whispering to her to remove her underwear – she had taken to wearing only one plain petticoat so as to save the others and because of how silly she felt in this place empty of people in all her standard layers of proper clothing – and in barely a moment they were rocking together, crying out, as if they hadn’t seen each other in months, or it had been a thousand nights since they had last made love.

“Sophie,” he began, and fell asleep in mid-sentence. She pushed herself upright, rearranged her clothing, and sat beside him gazing at his beloved face: his black eyelashes, long and thick for a man, and eyebrows threatening to thicken when he grew old as her grandfather’s had, his straight, strong nose, the hint of curl in his glossy black hair even where he had unbuttoned his shirt at his throat, and she could see the sun-bronzing that had darkened his face, hands, and throat stopped abruptly and where his skin with its olive tone was fine and pale. Just gazing at him while he slept stirred her. How I love him, she said to herself, and then, out loud, “How I love you, my Pierre.” Not long after that he got up, pulled his clothing together, and went back to the field where the furrows he had plowed lay shining in the sun.

Evening came, she was preparing to take his supper out to him since he showed no sign of stopping, but then she realized that he was plowing toward her, was nearing the end of another furrow, and that probably he would stop then, when he was nearest their camp. She waited. As she had expected, at the end of the plowed land he stopped, unhitched the oxen from the plow and began to lead them to the barrel of water. She knew, just looking at him, that he was thinking how he needed to build a water trough as soon as he could find the time.

She was alarmed at how slowly he moved as he came toward her, how under the sun’s darkening she could see a hint of ashen pallor. He ate groggily, together they went to do their few chores, then he went into the tent to undress and lie down while she made sure the fire was out, and that things were tidied and covered, and whatever needed to be kept safe from marauding animals or weather she had carried or drag inside the tent.

Tomorrow, she knew, she would have to go back to the crevasse in the prairie to pick up more wood, having stripped the prairie near their camp of any burnable twigs, and knowing she would have to resort to buffalo chips, which lay all around them,
although there was not a buffalo to be seen, nor would there be, she had heard on the train. All gone, no one knew where.

~

From their first bright day
Sophie had wanted to know what they might see from the top of hills that lay a couple of miles to the northwest. She had at last prevailed and made Pierre take an afternoon away from work so that they might explore the landscape around them a little. “If winter comes and the cabin isn’t ready we won’t be able to stay here,” he warned her, “we would freeze to death,” but she said, pleading, “One half day, that’s all,” and eventually, curious himself, he had given in.

Now, Pierre reached the hilltop first while she, surprised by their height, at least a hundred feet above the prairie, was still struggling up the hill’s steep side. “Hurry,
vite
,” he called down to her, and she called back, panting, “It is not a race, sir,” and they laughed together out of delight in each other and excitement at what they were about to discover. But when she reached the top of the hill, the one with the bump on it that broke the softly undulating line of the horizon to the north of their homestead, that at last, after days of staring at it, they were finally investigating, he was yards away standing before a big pile of stones. She paused to catch her breath.

“Mon Dieu!”
she said, awed, with a touch of sudden fear, for were they not alone out here? “So that is what the bump is.” Pierre was silent as she hurried to stand beside him. The pile of stones was perhaps twenty feet in diameter, the bottom layers nearly buried in the earth, and at its highest point it rose as high as Sophie was, at least five feet and possibly more. Thin bunches of awkward yellow grass grew up around the pile, and more stalks thrust upward from the layers of dirt packed between the stones by centuries of wind and snow and rain; many of the stones’ exposed surfaces had white stains on them and partially-eroded trails down their sides, bird droppings, the size of the chalky worms of excrement speaking of great birds, hawks or even eagles; the surface of more than one stone had resting on it the feathers and bones of small birds or tiny animals torn apart by predators. Oddly, Sophie thought, for the most part the stones were smooth, often oval in shape, and she wondered fleetingly what had polished them so. Some were too big to be lifted by any but the strongest man. Many were smaller, and embedded in the earth were a couple of boulders, one of them as high as Pierre’s waist, as if the pile or cairn or whatever it was had been started around them. The stones were dull greys, biscuit-coloured, charcoals, and some with fine, sandy surfaces as if they were soft, a faded ochre or a powdery near-white, all the stones’ very paleness melding into the landscape of soft blues, greens, and cream and dun-coloured grasses.

“But who…?” She moved closer to him, touched his arm to reassure herself of his protection.

Pierre said, “Who else but the Indians. There is no one else, and what white man would waste his time carrying so many rocks up so steep a hill when he has ground to plow and crops to seed?”

“And houses and barns to build,” she said, not stifling a small sigh. But she was whispering. “Do you think it is…a grave?”

A wind came and pushed around them, rippling her thin skirt, blowing loose strands of hair into their faces, then passing on. Into the silence he said. “Unless we throw aside the rocks and dig, we will never know.”

They didn’t speak then, studying what lay before them, alive to the mystery of it, Sophie shivering briefly even though the sun beat down on them and the world melted at its edges with heat. They walked the full perimeter of the mound of stones, looking for what they didn’t know, and finding nothing, turned then, to gaze out around them from where they stood in the centre of the universe.

Nothing, nothing to be seen for miles in any direction: only grass and more grass, hills and more low, softly sloping hills repeating themselves until they reached the far, light-filled, wavering horizon. Beyond all that, lifting a thousand times higher than the highest hill, the wide sky, a light blue that deepened at its fathomless apex to take on a purple tinge, a few wisps of cloud hanging motionless far above where they stood, two specks in the immensity of plain and sky, light and wind. And the sun, too brilliant to ever look directly at, its rays burning through their clothes, commanding all that lay before them.

~

One morning in mid-July
, they both saw at once a wagon and team approaching from the southeast, the direction of town. They waited as it slowly drew nearer, saw that many heads bobbed around in the wagon, that there were three people on the wagon seat. Staring hard at the people on the seat, Sophie thought joyfully, merciful Virgin! A woman! Before the horses were even stopped, (Percherons, both Sophie and Pierre noted), three of the children, all girls, dropped one by one to the ground, running to where they had come to stand side by side by their tent, then stopped abruptly a safe distance away and stood there shyly, hanging their heads, peeping up to look at the newcomers before dropping their heads again, the oldest girl scuffing in the dirt with her boot, as if she were at home standing in front of the pen of chickens with not a soul between her and the faraway town.

The man holding the reins called,
“Bonjour, bonjour! Comment allez vous!”
– they were French! – and was climbing down from the wagon, reins still in his hands and shaking Pierre’s hand as if to pump his arm off. Pierre, at first tense when they saw the wagon coming, now grinned from ear to ear. Before they had even stopped, Sophie, and certainly also Pierre, knew them to be the Beausoleil’s whom they had never met, nor gone to visit themselves because of lack of time–they had to get the crop in as soon as Pierre had broken a small patch of ground – although they kept hoping to go “any day now,” as Pierre would tell her if she asked.