Wild Rose (54 page)

But she had a letter, one she saw when she looked hard, was stamped with the name of her village in Québec. Her fingers began to tremble, but she opened it slowly enough, as if it were nothing, and seeing the handwriting inside, not recognizing it, began to walk home without pulling it out of its envelope, Charles trotting ahead of her, racing in circles, on his imaginary horse. She walked quickly, unable to stop herself, and once inside the house, the screen door open to the warmth of the day, took out the letter, spread it flat on the table top, and looked at the signature first. It was from André Chouinard, her would-be suitor from a thousand years ago. Tall, gangly, fair-haired André. She began to read.

My father is sending me West on a business venture, or rather, to search out business ventures; I am hoping to visit you if you are anywhere near Calgary, and if you will see me.

He made no mention of Pierre but in her surprise she knew at once that what had happened to her was no secret back in her own village; the knowledge made her gasp, she sat straight, for an instant forgetting the letter, shame flooding her, horror that she had no privacy in the entire world, that nothing was her own, but shame.

I leave the first of May
, he wrote.
You may write to me at this address in Calgary.

She drew back, surprised again. “You may write to me?” But then, she thought, he has his pride too, and also, he didn’t want to offend her by being too forward. She wondered if he still loved her; it has been five years. She thought he would have married someone else by now, that his father
le notaire
– how long it had been since she had thought in French – would force him into marriage.

The screen door creaked open, a man and his wife, people she didn’t know, looking for supper before they headed back onto the prairie, there now being no place in town for strangers to stay overnight.

“I am – I am – not prepared,” she said, laughing, embarrassed, and hastily folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. “Can you give me half an hour and then return? I do apologize. I…” tucking her hair in place carefully, reaching for her apron. “It has just been one of those days,” she said, switching on her carefully nurtured charm so that they might forgive her and not refuse to return, laughing gracefully at her own fecklessness.

The wife said, faintly injured, “We were told you prepare good meals, and quickly.” And the husband said, “Of course, Mrs. Hippolyte. I have one more errand and then we’ll come back,” touching his wife’s shoulder perhaps a little heavily, so that she stepped aside so he could open the door and they could exit. Men, she thought, both in faint surprise and something like despair, she could always charm men.

It was spring, people were on the move, farmers coming into the village to look for supplies and machinery parts, or wagon repairs, or new horses, or men to work for them during seeding. How business would flourish, how hard she would work for the next few weeks, how she would have to rush about and sleep only a few hours each night so as to keep up with the baking, cooking, dishwashing and cleaning. It was said that when the land dried enough the village would begin building a school. She tried to imagine staying on in Bone Pile and watching while it grew, building by building, as she suspected it would once the branch line was a reality. Yes, if Campion said there would be a branch line, there would be one. Yes, she thought, and then she would be old, having spent her life, raising Charlie here so that he would never achieve what she dreamed of for him. Or she would marry Harry and go back to the land, spend her life there in poverty, working like a slave.

~

The days were becoming longer
this time of year, it sometimes seemed to her that the light never really left. At the end of this long day, hours after Charles had been asleep, her work at last done and things ready for the next day’s onslaught of work, she went outside to sit on her step and feel the cool night air on her face before she went to bed. Tired to the point of exhaustion, she leaned back against the door, then let her head rest against the frame. Presently she heard the jingle of harness to her left up at the livery barn, saw a light inside, a lantern had been lit, and thought, someone coming in late. How would he ever keep to the trail in the dark? Although it wasn’t really dark, not pitch dark as it sometimes was on the prairie on rainy nights when the stars and moon were blotted out by clouds. She leaned forward to see who was still up in the village, but all along the street as far as she could see there was only silence, the shops and houses closed, the windows dark. But wait, her eyes, sweeping the village, paused at one house down the street to her right, between her and Mrs. Wozny’s house. There a light blinked on and swelled, someone lighting a single lamp. She wondered when the village might get electricity, everyone not afraid of it said it was as good as a miracle, and supposed that if the train really came to Bone Pile, there would be electricity in town soon enough.

Then she realized the house with the new light in the window was the Tremblay’s and in a second she knew,
Margueurite is in labour
. That must have been a doctor from elsewhere, or more likely the midwife who lived out on a nearby homestead come to help. Is she perhaps in trouble? But that seemed unlikely. It was odd how she felt so removed from this knowledge, how little
at this moment she could make herself care that her rival was only a few houses down from where she sat in the cool shadows waiting in her exhaustion for the desire to sleep to come to her, while Margueurite Tremblay labored to deliver the child of Sophie’s own husband. Whatever it was she felt – anger, shame, disgust, contempt – it was distant, and she wondered at that, but distantly, too. I am too tired, she told herself. I will feel all of it when I am not so tired. She let her head fall back into the shadows again, resting against the slivered door frame, closing her eyes. There were rapid footfalls coming down the road past her. The villager’s curiosity overcoming her, she opened her eyes, just as he passed so that she caught a glimpse of his profile and then his shoulder, and his back.

It was Pierre, come to be with his woman while she gave birth to their baby.

Chapter Sixteen

Le village

I
n the days that followed Guillaume’s departure
for his family in Montréal Sophie walked about the house quietly, tidying rooms that didn’t need to be tidied, going into the kitchen to work silently beside Mme Gauthier without asking if she might and strangely, the woman making no protest, or even helping Antoinette, who found stooping difficult now, gather flowers in the garden to be taken to the church. She did not know what to do with herself: Guillaume would not take her to the city with him; she had not seen Pierre since Guillaume had refused to allow their marriage. Had Guillaume gone to M. Hippolyte and told him that Pierre was to stay away from his sister? She thought that probably he had not; his anxiety to get back to his wife and baby was too strong; he wouldn’t have taken the time to ride out to the Hippolyte farm. But might he have seen M. Hippolyte or Pierre in town and spoken to them there? And they had listened and that was why she heard nothing more from Pierre since their agreement that she would spend the winter in the city and he would go to work in the bush to earn money for their marriage in the spring?

The more the days passed and she heard nothing from Pierre, the more anxious she grew, and the more restless. More than once she caught Antoinette straightening from where she was tucking in a bedsheet at the far side of the bed, staring at her, her lips pursed and eyes at once thoughtful and hard. She felt she would burst if something didn’t happen, she thought of Uncle Henri’s suicide and wondered if she had the courage for such a gesture because if Pierre had forsaken her and she had no choice but to marry
that Chouinard
she would kill herself. She would.

Grandmother appeared at the table at mealtimes, though she ate nothing, and didn’t speak. She had grown thinner, and her pale skin had taken on a bluish tinge that worried Sophie, or would have worried her, she thought, had she cared for the old woman.

She couldn’t quite get a grip on her own feelings, couldn’t pin them down with names, except irritation, impatience, an unruly desire that had no end other than Pierre, who had disappeared. She spent most nights lying awake, or leaning against her window frame, gazing out over the shadowy village through tree branches, their leaves quivering in whatever breeze might come up. The night is never merely darkness, she thought; it has life, it lives itself; it is a transformation of waking things. What? Had she just thought that? Was she losing her mind with this…this…her life was as vast and as uncertain as this night. How would she survive? During the day she had begun to move about the house as if she were dead too, or a ghost, and Antoinette kept giving her more of those strange looks. She wondered if there were some way that she could go to the Hippolyte farm herself, without anyone knowing. She knew she could walk with no trouble, but wasn’t sure what she would find there, and felt keenly the possibility of humiliation. And there was no way she could pretend to have dropped in when she was passing by. Where was he? For what was he waiting? That he might have stopped loving her crossed her mind, but she dismissed it at once, certain of his love. She was sure too, that Guillaume’s disapproval wouldn’t stop him from wanting her. She took that thought no further.

Three nights of this and she fell asleep and then didn’t know if she had wakened or was still sleeping. It seemed that the door into her room had opened; someone stood in her doorway, a figure made of shadow, faceless, but with the shoulders of a male. She didn’t know she had, but at this vision she had cried out, a mewling whimper, not the scream she thought she had made. The figure came toward her, climbed onto the bed with her, she a child again, not the woman she had become since Pierre had declared his love for her and grandfather had died. And yet, was she not both at the same time? She was sweating, hot sweat soaked her flannel nightdress that was drawn up into a lump at the small of her back, that she was lying on, that hurt her so that she was trying hard to move and could not. Why could she not move? What was this weight she felt on her? What this pain? The roaring in her ears?

She came fully awake, her heart pounding like the hooves of a galloping horse, drowning out all other sounds, sweat pouring down her temples and neck, trickling from under her breasts, a lake of sweat on her belly and between her legs. She couldn’t catch her breath, and terrified, forced herself up off the bed to stand in the darkness beside it while the night that she had been seeing in multi-coloured streaks began to grey and darken again to a deep blue. Her chest rose and fell rapidly against the muggy dampness of her nightdress and she shucked it off and pulled a shawl around to cover herself.

At last her heart began to slow, she swallowed and swallowed again, licking her dry lips and teeth with her tongue, wiping her face with the shawl, the night air drying the sweat on her body so that her skin tightened and cooled. Such images as swelled in her brain, and changed and swelled again. Her brother Hector. She sat down hard on her bed. Hector. Why Hector? What is this? She sat that way for a long time until, thoroughly chilled, she lit the lamp, went to her bureau, pulled out a fresh nightdress, slipped it on, and climbed back into the bed, pulling the quilt up to her chin. She trembled still, but on the inside, not visibly, as if she were now made of something so fragile that she hardly dared move for fear of breaking.

Why Hector? Whom she had not seen for many years, except perhaps that time so long ago when she had been ill and nearly died. Nor heard from. Had her grandparents heard from him? She thought not. No one ever said. And why was she so frightened at the thought of his name? She tried to remember what he looked like but could not bring back a face. Not like Guillaume, she remembered that he was fair where Guillaume was dark. And why a nightmare about him? A nightmare that didn’t feel that it was a nightmare, but felt that it was a reenactment of something that had happened?

At this, she caught a flash, that was all, a flash, and in an overwhelming fraction of a second, so powerful she would have fallen had she been standing, she remembered, remembered how he had come into her room, not for the first time, had gotten into her bed with her, she pleased at first, how then – and the door had opened and grandmother screamed – yes, grandmother had screamed – had something like this happened to grandmother when she was a girl? She had screamed and the lamp went sideways, the chimney crashing to the floor, as the flame guttered and sucked the air and bloomed wide, then suddenly died, and grandfather had come and dragged Hector from her room, grandmother following, slamming her door behind him so that she couldn’t see anything more, and she was alone, listening to thumps against the wall and then the crashes of someone falling down the stairs. The heavy, brooding thud of the door into grandfather’s study. The long silence while grandmother stood listening and praying – Sophie remembered hearing the slight brush of the beads against grandmother’s nightdress, the delicate tinkle of the silver links hitting each other – in the hall outside her door, Sophie in some exalted state of what could she say? Boundarylessness, or as if she were floating above herself and could hear and see everything. Grandmother not re-entering her room, at last, after a very long time, padding down the hall back to the bedroom she shared with grandfather, opening the door, shutting it so softly behind her, the latch clicking with finality.

After this, she fell into a deep sleep. She must have, because the next thing she knew it was morning as if she had used that sleep to know fully the things she couldn’t, waking, bear to know. Now she lay watching the light and shadows play on her ceiling as she had been doing as long as she could remember. Waiting for Antoinette, or grandmother to come.
Hector was gone when I came down to breakfast the next morning
, she informed herself as if reading from a schoolbook,
and I never saw him again
. When she asked for him, they said, Gone away to school. Never mind. Then no one even spoke of him. And once, when she had tried to ask about that dream she had had, her grandmother had glared at her so fiercely that Sophie, truly, for one instant, had felt a mortal fear, so that she too never again mentioned his name.