Wild Rose (31 page)

She wondered why he had killed himself, but no reason came to mind, no reason had, in her memory, even been hinted at. For the first time it occurred to her that her Uncle Henri was actually her great-uncle and that without noticing she had done so, she had long imagined him as a copy or near-copy of the father she had never known. Surprised, for an instant her tears ceased, then started again as she tried to imagine her own father as a much younger man than her great-uncle had been. Tried, but drew only an Uncle Henri-sized blank.

“He was my great uncle,” she told Pierre. “He was very kind.” Pierre said nothing, pulling her against him, filling her with both gratitude and fear, so that she resisted, ever so slightly, and he didn’t insist. “I don’t know why he…killed himself. Do you?”

“How would I know?” he asked her, but gently. “I was a child too.” A silence. “I suppose I could ask the old man.” She drew away from him then, wiping her eyes, blowing her nose, struggling to compose herself. Indeed, the cool shade under the tree’s great branches, and something else, something gentle in the air soothed her. And Pierre at her side.

She knew that
M. l’abbé
Deschambeault had come and come again and had stayed for long hours with grandfather. And that cry she had heard that she knew came from grandfather. Uncle Henri was here and not in the cemetery with the rest of the family because – it came to her in a nun’s voice –
We cannot judge the greatness of the One True Church
. It was no wonder that grandfather could not prevail in the matter of where his beloved younger brother would be buried. She wished she knew if the Holy Spirit had come down from on high and lit in the Pope’s chest to tell him suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground, as the Holy Spirit had long ago done to her. But no message had been left her, only that ineffable lightness, that wonderful as it was, did not explain itself.

She stared up at Pierre, his face light dappled between the shadow of the leaves. She turned from him then, went to the trunk of the beech and ran both hands across its grooved bark, propping her feet against one of its thick, exposed roots. She became aware of birds singing merrily in the trees up and down the fence and the incongruity of their chorus in this place struck her even as she listened willingly to it. She tried to remember her uncle, his kindness to her, the
bonbons
he had placed in her pocket or tucked into her palm as he passed. His air, she saw now, of distance broken only for that second that he saw her. She was filled now with a deep unease: Her great-uncle’s exclusion, for all eternity from heaven, her fear, perhaps, of her own fate in some unimaginable future. Or the shadow of it, a prophecy.

“Maybe some woman he loved wouldn’t marry him,” she suggested. Pierre shrugged, put his hands in his pockets and looked away, then offered a hand to her so that she would come away from the tree trunk. She couldn’t resist, even though she knew she should, and stretched her hand to meet his. He took it and kept pulling her gently toward him until their bodies met, then bent his head and kissed her on her mouth. For an instant she allowed it, then pulled away, laughing in an embarrassed way. Chills ran up and down her body interspersed with little spurts of excessive heat.

“Has no one ever kissed you before?” She shook her head, no.

“I am glad to be the first.” She remembered then that grandfather wanted to marry her off to some man she didn’t even know, and both hands went up to her face.

“How will I escape…?” She didn’t need to explain. He turned away, reached up, grasped a low branch with one hand and hung from it. He had no answer either, apparently. She thought, what if I didn’t know Pierre, had never met him, what would I think then? She was jolted a little by this, seeing for just an instant, but also for the first time, the pleasure she might take in the process that grandfather had initiated. But, she thought further,
I have known Pierre since we were children; I have always…
but she could not allow herself to say what it was she had always felt for him: Love? Her first inkling of a destiny for herself? He was taking her hand again, and in his touch, all her thoughts vanished from her head to focus into the heat and heaviness of his flesh engulfing hers. Shivering slightly, her entire body quarrelling with itself as to whether she was hot or too cold, light or heavy, she began to walk beside him.

Having moved out from under the bows of the great tree, they paused to take a long look across the rising field of bronze-coloured barley soughing in the breeze that had come up while they had been meditating over the grave, then up to the sky where the clouds had thickened and were moving faster now. They made their way through the gap in the stone fence again, waded through the ditch of tall grass and flowering plants back onto the track that they had come along. He said, “Sophie…” She waited. “How can we meet again?”

“Next Sunday?” she suggested. “We could walk here again. Grandmother thinks I am reading my missal in my room.”

“Too long,” he said. “Far too long to wait.” He gazed up and down the over-grown trail, then, not looking at her. “We could see each other after dark.” She waited, not sure what he meant. “In your garden,” he said, “at the back of your house. We could meet there.” She couldn’t imagine what he meant; grandmother would never allow it, nor would grandfather. “At midnight,” he said.

“Oh, I could never…”

“On Wednesday. I’ll be taking oats into the village with Alexandre. I’ll just stay on and walk home afterward.” She thought, grandfather will marry me off without my having a word to say about it. Pierre was hope – wasn’t he? For the first time she noticed that now and during the time she was with him, that inconsolable, indeterminate yearning that plagued her, that she could not name nor understand and that was sometime larger than she was herself, had dwindled and almost disappeared.

“Yes,” she breathed. They walked on then, not speaking, until at the edge of the village where the new road met the remnants of the old on which they walked, they paused again briefly.

“I will leave you here.” She nodded, not taking her eyes from his face. “Your eyes are beautiful,” he said. Had she heard him right? She wanted to speak, but was afraid to, found herself nodding, once, twice, nearly imperceptibly. “I will come,” he said. “Wednesday?” Again she nodded. “Midnight,” he said, and turned, began to walk away toward the road that led into the forest, not waiting for further assent, nor looking back.

~

But at two or three in the morning
she woke suddenly, not with thoughts of Pierre Hippolyte, but instead of the woman Julie who was her grandmother also.
This means
, she told herself before she was fully awake,
that grandmother is not my blood relative
. And further, her thoughts coming so clear it was as if a voice were speaking them aloud in her ear, she had to raise Julie’s children, and then her grandchild.
It means that she hates me not because I have been such a bad child, but because grandfather loved Julie first, and I – I belong to her eternal, never-to-be-equalled rival, Julie.
Then she realized with something approaching awe that grandmother must have loved grandfather.

Chapter Ten

Night Music

S
he rose reluctantly through layers of sleep
until, awake, she lay gazing into the darkness, puzzled, listening intently for what had wakened her. She put a finger gently against Charles’ nostrils to feel his steady, shallow exhalations. Not him, then. She held still and listened for sounds from Sam Wetherell’s room. Nothing. So sometimes he did lie in his bed. But he would be awake and listening too. Gradually, through the stillness came the faint sound of music: a piano, voices singing – no, a woman’s voice, joined now and then by a man’s, phrases broken, fading eerily to silence, the sound returning, only to dissolve again into the faint near-humming that was the noise of the night’s silence. She wondered if she were still dreaming, but the sound returned, louder this time, only to fade again, then returned once more. Sophie got out of bed, threw her mantel on over her nightclothes, and went silently into the hall, past snores wafting from behind the closed doors of the boarders, to the end of the hall where a small ornamental window looked out over the verandah roof, giving a narrow view onto the street. She pulled back the curtain and gazed down and to each side as far as the glass would allow, but not a figure appeared in any direction, no dog or horse, wagon or buggy, or even wild animal disturbed the blue-shadowed emptiness.

Still, there it was, that faint music: tinny, dissonant, and now, broken by a man’s shouts, followed by laughter both male and female – drunken laughter, she thought, suddenly. Her curiosity growing, she descended the stairs to the main hall, and placing her ear against the outside door, listened again. Here, the noise was a fraction louder, and after a second’s indecision, she opened the door, leaving it ajar, and stepped out onto the verandah.

This air was cool enough that no mosquitos seemed to be about, so she pushed the door open behind her further to let a little fresh air into the stuffy house. Listening again, she turned her face toward the north end of the town. There, at the far end she could see an irregular rectangle of yellow light blazing into the darkness from the open front door into Mrs. Smith’s house where the party raged, uneven because of the same light bleeding from the windows on each side of it. Appalled yet curious, she watched and listened, wondering – until she caught herself – what it would feel like to be a part of that gaiety, then, unsettled by her own thoughts, went inside, shutting the doors, mounting the stairs soundlessly, passing the snores, having a sudden intuition that nothing escaped Wetherell, not even her wakefulness, but believing him to be as impotent as she was to alter anything, had no fear of him, went back to her bed. It was not that he did not like women, she had concluded, but that there was no place for them in his conception of the world; he saw them, ate the food they cooked, took his clothes cleaned from them, even desired and bedded them, but they were never real to him. An intuition that did nothing to cheer her as she listened still to the faint sounds of revelry disturbing the silence of the prairie night.

She couldn’t understand why Adelaide would run such a risk, wondered if perhaps the woman didn’t understand how vulnerable she was to being arrested and going to jail. But she had seen Adelaide close up. Fear was the last emotion she had projected. Or was she herself the one who was wrong, living in something close to terror that at any moment the tiniest indiscretion would bring about her total disgrace? Was it possible that she could risk more and stay on the safe side of the world? Or did Adelaide think there was nothing left to destroy her? Not disgrace, not jail, not – What? Sophie’s thoughts ranged through stonings and even hanging, before she shook them off as exaggerated and foolish.

Then she began to wonder who the people were at the party. Maybe prostitutes from Garden City or further away. As for the men, it wouldn’t surprise her if the boarder Percy Haslam was there, or – Would Harry Adamson go to such a party? She wanted to believe that he wouldn’t, but what did she know about him, really? More likely he was lying in bed only yards from where she lay, awake and listening to the music and wishing – what? That he had a woman with him? Probably he was still on his homestead and had no idea that Bone Pile was, however reluctantly, hosting such a party.

In the couple of weeks since she had last taken supper to him, she hadn’t returned to visit him, nor had he stopped at the boarding house, probably because he had gone back to his farm as soon as he was well enough, and wouldn’t be seen in town again, unless he had a machinery breakdown, until the crop was harvested, hauled to the nearest elevator or rail line, and sold. Not trusting herself to say his name without giving a hint as to her feelings, vague and unnamable as they were, she didn’t mention him to Mrs. Emery, wanting to appear to have forgotten about him over there being any suspicion of being too interested in him. She kept silent, and worked, while she waited and hoped for a letter, or even some news from Pierre. But the sound of the party continuing to ebb and flow through the softness of the fall night, she remembered their mutual shock when their hands had grazed each other, and the moment in the half-darkness of his bedroom when they had looked into each other’s eyes and a warmth had passed between them. She wanted very much to see him again, and forgetting Charles beside her, threw herself roughly onto her side to blot out his face. She was married to Pierre forever, and she was overcome again by longing for him.

She expected to hear the boarders talking about the party, or Mrs. Emery perhaps mentioning it, but to her surprise, the next morning at breakfast, as if by mutual agreement, no one made a single remark about it. It was wash day, so she had to hurry through the serving and the washing up and couldn’t linger to listen to conversation; she needed to get a fire going inside the circle of rocks in the backyard over which the tub would sit and, once the fire was steadily burning, to fill the tub with pails of water from the pump.

An hour or so later she was descending the stairs carrying a load of bedsheets to set into the water-filled washtub, when Mrs. Emery emerged from the kitchen, and said, not looking at her, “Come. Put down the sheets,” and passed her to stand in the door into the parlour. Unnerved, Sophie did as she was told, the thought of the twenty-five dollars, (now twenty-three), she had hidden away muting the worst of her fear. She followed Mrs. Emery into the parlour and sat down across from her on the prickly horsehide sofa with its crocheted doilies resting on the arms and spread across its back.