Wild Rose (37 page)

Daylight was coming faintly through the white muslin curtains. Soon she would have to get out of bed and begin her
toilette
. She thought of the moment when she had paused to listen as she stepped outside into the night and the garden, how she had discovered her impatience, her simmering rage had gone, leaving behind that crystalline sense, everything at once precise, perfect.

Now, as morning approached she felt the familiar but nameless
pushing
rising again, this at the thought of yet another day following grandmother about, down all the familiar paths of the village, seeing all the familiar faces, hearing sounds she had been hearing every day since she could remember. How the days dragged on! Only the thought of going to Montréal, or the thought of Pierre brought her relief.

Pierre’s father was a poor farmer, some of the land he farmed belonged to grandfather. Pierre had begun to work in the fields and with the animals when he was a small child. He had barely gone to school. Yet what choice had she, in the end, but to marry? She thought of finally being allowed to leave the village for Montréal and the homes of her brothers, Guillaume in particular who was a solicitor, as Hector, a banker, did not write himself, but let his wife, Isobelle do his duty to his grandparents, and that rarely. Anyway, she didn’t want to go to Hector’s. There was some trouble, between her grandparents and Hector, she didn’t care for him herself, and whenever she thought of him, felt funny and uncomfortable. Yet, he was her brother, wasn’t he? Sophie did not like his wife Isobelle who was stiff and kept her distance, although she loved Guillaume’s pretty wife, Claire, who despite their age difference treated Sophie as if they were sisters.

Her door opened widely, quickly, at the same time as there was a knock. “Hurry, Sophie, hurry,” Antoinette said, whisking into the room, pushing back the curtains and lowering the window.

“Leave it, Antoinette!” Sophie cried, angry. “Leave my window alone!” Antoinette was so surprised she stood with her mouth hanging open. Immediately Sophie felt guilty.

“I am sorry, Antoinette, forgive me,” she said.

“You didn’t sleep well?” Sophie couldn’t help but smile.

“I slept terribly,” she told the maid, in a solemn tone, and then laughed aloud.

~

Near midnight as she waited in her room
, fully dressed, no candle lit, for it to be time to meet Pierre in the garden again, she heard a short, anguish-laden cry coming from her grandparents’ bedroom two doors down from her own. So odd was the sound, so burdened with the helpless shock of extreme pain and perhaps also with sudden understanding, and horror at the understanding, that she couldn’t tell whose voice it was. The sound lifted her to her feet, while goose bumps sprang up on her arms and legs; she stood stock still, straining to hear. No further sound broke the night’s hush.

The cry her grandfather had made all those years ago in his study when
le curé
Deschambeault had been locked for hours in it with him came back to her as clearly as if she were just now hearing it again, that time – that time when – ah yes, it was when Uncle Henri had died and
M. le curé
had told him… That must have been what happened: the priest telling him that he must accept that his brother wouldn’t be buried in the village cemetery. This insight came to her out of nowhere, or out of shock, at the same moment she heard her grandparents’ door open, the rapid thudding of slippered feet on the hall floor, her own door handle turning, the door swinging open so that it banged against the wall.

“Wake Antoinette! Send her at once for the doctor!” It took Sophie an instant before she said, as rapidly as her grandmother had spoken, “I will go myself,” and ran from the room. She was almost at the bottom of the stairs when she realized that, planning on meeting Pierre, she hadn’t undressed, and surely grandmother would have seen that and wondered. But she
rushed through the house, bumping into furniture, catching her skirt and freeing it, to Antoinette’s door downstairs by the kitchen, banged on it with the side of her closed fist – Antoinette
was notoriously hard to wake – then opened it and called, “Go to grandmother, quickly, I am going for the doctor.”

Antoinette thrashed about in her sheets, cried, “What? What?” in a thick voice, but Sophie was already gone leaving the door wide open, although she hadn’t taken the time to light a candle, and hoped that the kitchen’s cool air would flow into Antoinette’s stuffy bedroom to keep her awake. To further this end, on her way out of the house she deliberately banged the front door hard. Then she was rushing down the flagstone path, the moonlight bathing the whitewashed village houses so that they gleamed, and out the gate and down the street to the house of
M. le docteur
. Dogs had wakened at her door slam and were barking. She ran up the path to the doctor’s house, onto the open verandah that ran across its front and pounded on his door as she had done on Antoinette’s.

“Monsieur! Monsieur!” she called. After a moment she could hear someone coming down the hall, the door opened, a lighted lamp thrust in her face, and the doctor’s male servant, Denis, his voice loud and angry, demanded, “What is it?”

“My grandfather!” she cried. “We need the doctor at once. Is he here?” The man, attired in his night clothes, held the door open so she could enter and as she did so, a new light appeared at the top of the stairs, this one a candle held by Doctor Belanger. If he isn’t careful, Sophie thought, he will light his beard, and then was shocked at such an idea overtaking her in so dire a moment, as if she were still a child or an
idiote
. The doctor said, “Yes, yes, yes, who is it? Who is it?” as if he were not at all used to being wakened in the middle of the night by frantic people. He too was wearing his night clothes and was trying to fasten with one hand, his dressing gown.

“Mon grand-père,”
she called up to him, too loudly, so that he took one hand from his candle and patted the air downward with it, to calm her. She swallowed hard. “I know nothing else, nothing else, I came because
grand-mère
…”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the doctor said. He was at the bottom of the stairs now, not bothering to go back and throw on trousers, and Denis was helping him on with his coat, handing him his bag that evidently was kept by the front door for such emergencies, and at the same time taking his candle from him. The doctor did not look at his servant, nor at Sophie, cleared his throat loudly, twice, Denis opened the door behind Sophie, brushing against her as he did so, so that she had to move out of the way, and then they were back outside in the night, dogs barking, moonshine lighting the way.

When they arrived at the house, the doctor carrying his bag, Sophie still out of breath from shock and from her run to the doctor’s, and hurried up the stairs to her grandparents’ bedroom, they saw at once that grandfather had expired. He lay on the clean pine boards of the floor, his limbs straightened and a quilt pulled from his bed neatly covering him as if he might feel chilled. Grandmother and Antoinette, still in their nightclothes, were seated, each on one of the two chairs in the room, Antoinette sobbing, but grandmother who had lighted a lamp and set it on the stand by the bed at her husband’s head, sat with her rosary in her fingers, staring straight ahead, not moving or turning her head even when Sophie and the doctor entered.

“We have lost him,” Antoinette wailed as if it were her husband who had died, and grandmother hissed, not turning her head toward her servant, “Calm yourself.”

The doctor was kneeling by the body, and when, after closing the old man’s eyelids and pulling the quilt up over his face, he stood back, crossing himself, his lips moving in a silent benediction, Sophie knelt by his body. She dared to lift the quilt back so that she might kiss his cheeks one last time, and saw, in the slackness of his facial muscles, the thinness of flesh against his strong cheekbones, his eyes sunken into his skull, how very old he was, how inevitable this moment had been all along only she had never even thought of it, had thought that grandfather would live forever as would grandmother, she would herself, and now she saw that this was not so, had never been so, and she was only a foolish young girl who knew nothing at all. She was too stunned even to cry.

Downstairs someone was knocking on the front door, insistently, loudly, but carefully. The doctor put his arm under Sophie’s upper arm and with a series of gentle tugs, caused her to rise to her feet. She became aware that Antoinette was still snuffling in her chair. Grandmother said, “Antoinette, go and dress yourself at once,” sharply, as if her husband was merely being annoying as he so often was, lying there on the floor in the middle of the night. But in the harsh command Sophie heard some other, new sound, the meaning of which she couldn’t decipher. The knocking downstairs continued, and grandmother said, less angrily, “Sophie, go and answer the door. Doctor, I must dress.” Dr. Belanger answered, “I will find some men to lift him back onto the bed; we will come in when you are ready,” and Sophie said, “I will tell someone to go for
M. l’abbé
.”

She had just put her hand on the door handle when someone tapped gently on it from the other side. Startled, all eyes turned toward it which now opened slowly to reveal the curé Deschambeault, breviary and cross in hand, a frightened-looking small boy, just visible to one side of him.

“Alphonse Charron has gone to Our Lord,” the doctor said softly. Antoinette, at this, still crossing herself, squeezed past the men in the door and could be heard going clumsily down the stairs.

“I heard the
tintamarre
,” the
abbé
said. “I came at once.” He turned to the child. “Jean-Pierre, go to the house of
le notaire
. Tell him he must come. Tell him to bring another man or two of them. Go now, quickly.” The child could be heard at once scrambling down the stairs. At some point, probably while Sophie had gone for the doctor, Antoinette had lit lamps downstairs and a lamp cast its light from the stand in the hallway outside the death chamber. Grandmother was standing now, had cleared a small table that usually stood by the wardrobe and began to move it beside the body. The priest was opening his small bag, preparing to say the proper words over her grandfather who had died so quickly and unexpectedly there had been no confession, no extreme unction.
L’abbé
would do what ever needed to be done to assure her grandfather of his quick place in heaven. And yet, still, she thought, even grandfather would suffer in purgatory first, and was angered at herself for this thought at such a moment. She couldn’t understand her own mind. What was wrong with her that she had such thoughts?

It was then she remembered that Pierre was to wait for her in the garden, would be there now, no doubt. But no, she thought, when all the commotion had started, the dogs barking, the door slamming, the lamps being lit, he would surely have gone away so as not to be found out.

It was at this that she began to cry, at first silently, tears streaming down her cheeks and falling onto her dress, soaking into her bodice, and then, gasping for breath, she began to sob out loud uncontrollably, her chest heaving as great lumps of air rattled it. Grandmother hissed at her, “Silence yourself!” but Sophie couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t stop the heaving of her chest or the tears that poured out of her eyes. In the midst of this bodily paroxysm, she felt her head would burst with the pressure of the water, an ocean of water pushing to get out that she had no idea lived inside her very body; she would flood the room, all of them, grandmother, the doctor, even Antoinette downstairs in the kitchen would dissolve in Sophie’s sea of unstoppable tears.

But now the doctor came to her, holding her gently, then moving to her side, his arm around her, pushing her head gently so that it rested against his upper arm, guiding her very slowly out of the room, murmuring to her as she gasped and shook, her chest cracking in its quest for air, “It is only the shock, my dear. It will pass, Antoinette!”

“Monsieur?”
Antoinette called from the bottom of the stairs, more knocking on the door, a “mon Dieu, what now,” from her as she was about to open the door, still listening for what the doctor would tell her, when it opened again of its own volition, but no, two men stood on the other side, and the doctor repeated, “Brandy, bring brandy at once. Is there any in the house?” as men came up the stairs and Sophie, released by the doctor, letting the wall support her, bent from the waist, still crying, though less noisily. The doctor pointed to the bedroom where grandfather lay, dead, then turned to Sophie and asked, “Your room?” but she couldn’t speak and guessing it to be hers, he ushered her in and set her in the one, straight-backed chair at the foot of the bed, as Antoinette entered carrying brandy and a small glass on a tray.

She would have wished never to remember one thing about that night. She would have wished all of it to have been washed away in her tears, but no, she remembered drinking the brandy that the doctor had told Antoinette she must give to her, and that Antoinette must not leave the room until she saw Sophie had emptied the small glass. She remembered the ringing of the church bells, waking the village. She remembered how grandmother had slowly melted over the night with exhaustion, how worn her face, how dulled those frightening eyes, how slow her usual brusque movements. Could it be she had been grieving? And yet, she said nothing aloud, while her lips moved in constant prayer.