Wild Rose (57 page)

She went into the kitchen, stirred the stove, added a bit of coal, and pulled the coffee pot forward, filling it with water and grounds. Then she pushed the table aside and lifted the door in the floor to the cellar below, holding her skirt up, going down the two steps and reaching for the pot of soup she had placed there to keep it cool until she needed it.
I should be thinking about Pierre
, she told herself, but her thoughts were slippery as eels and wouldn’t be caught. Maybe, she told herself, after the child was born, no doubt towards morning he had left again, to return when mother and child were ready to travel. She couldn’t believe how calm she was, and wondered if there was a crack forming somewhere in this stoicism that was widening, that she would suddenly break apart with her shame. Unless the realization of Harry’s desire for her had strengthened her, that she wasn’t merely a discarded woman any more, but one that another man wanted. Thinking about Harry was fruitless, she decided, not knowing where that was going. She was surprised that surrounding all thoughts of André she felt a warmth that hadn’t been there all those years ago in her home village. How she had despised him then, she was so blinded by Pierre’s good looks, and laughed aloud in embarrassment at what a ridiculous girl she had been. She vowed again that as soon as she had taken Charles to Mrs. Wozny’s she would write that letter, and mail it at once.

Then bitterness at Pierre’s treatment of her returned. How the town must be gossiping about her now, with Marguerite in labour, or the child born, and her husband and his lover only three doors down the street. For a second she didn’t think that she could bear the humiliation, and hated Pierre with a profound hatred that made her clench her jaw, her whole body going rigid.

Lost in her reverie she hadn’t heard Charlie get out of bed until now the sound of his urinating into the chamber pot that she had left out for him – if she didn’t, he tended to spill it trying to pull it out from under the bed – could be heard clearly. She wondered then if Pierre would try to see his son.

“Mama?” Charles called, and she answered quickly, “Hello, my sweet, good morning.” He came from the bedroom into the kitchen where he climbed up onto a chair as he did every morning and waited for his breakfast. “Did you sleep well?” she asked him, just to let him know she was thinking about him.

“Mmmmm,” he said. “Can I go outside to play today?”

“But of course,” she said. “We’ll go down to Mrs. Wozny’s soon and the girls will play with you.”

Outside their dwelling there was the sound of men’s voices as they called across or down the street to each other, and the welcome jangle and creak of a dray going by pulled by a team of heavy horses. The general store would be open, Mrs. Kaufmann sweeping dirt out onto the short section of boardwalk outside, and Mr. Kaufmann bustling around inside without appearing ever to accomplish much. Before too long her first customers would come wanting soup and sandwiches made of her homemade bread and whatever was left of the sliced beef. And pie after. Was it for this that she had braved the West? Her resolve failed, and if Charlie hadn’t said, “What is that noise, Mommie. Is that oxen out there? I want to see,” beginning to climb down so that she had to tell him that it was, as usual, only someone’s team going by and that he must sit back down and wait for his breakfast.

“Did you wash your hands?” Without replying he climbed down from his chair and went back into the bedroom where she could hear the loud splashing of water that meant he wanted her to think that he was washing his hands, whether he actually was or not.

When she took Charlie down to Wozny’s house she was careful to go down the main street so as to avoid the Tremblay house. But, still, she found herself listening for a newborn’s cry. She had heard there was a French community in or near Calgary. It was called Mission, and Father Lacombe, she had been told, had gone all the way to Ottawa to procure the land for it. Would she wish to live again among the French, her own people? Yes. Then she remembered how stifled she had felt among them, how she had yearned for freedom, and what had freedom brought her but this?

She took the same way back, hurrying, but no neighbours were on the street, and when she thought to look back over her shoulder to Harry’s house she saw the team was out front, now hitched to his wagon. So he would go back onto his land today. He wouldn’t even know that Pierre was back; maybe no one but the Tremblays knew of Pierre’s return. He may be gone by now, she reminded herself, and couldn’t tell if she wanted this to be so, or not.

Hearing a shout up the street from where she was hurrying along, Sophie lifted her head, thinking someone was calling her, but no, in fact there was no one about, the call must have come from the stable, a horse acting up perhaps. Mr. Kaufmann was leaning against the wall of his store smoking a pipe and two farmers Sophie recognized were standing with him chatting, paying her no attention. The shouts of small children came from the Wozny’s house behind her
and over one street. She saw no one else, and moved more quickly, anxious to get back into her house before she’d been seen.
As if I have committed a crime
, she thought indignantly. She was reminded of the day a year ago or so when she had perambulated the town’s main street with Charles, looking for a place to sell her wedding ring and her brooch and had met Adelaide Smith in her finery and had failed to recognize her as the poor, thin woman who had sat across from her on the train a few years before on the trip West. When she reached her café, she hurried in and shut both the outer screen door and then the inner one, pausing to give her eyes time to adjust to the now shadowed room before she began work.

“Sophie.” She thought for an instant that it was Harry, and felt annoyed as she had a great deal of work to do and little time in which to get it done. But it was Pierre. He was standing at the stove, facing her.

For an instant her breath caught and dizziness struck, retreating as rapidly as it had come. At last she said, “What do you want?” emphasizing the ‘you,’ to remind him he had no rights with her.

“Nothing,” he said, mildly enough.

“Has…the woman…had your child?” She wanted to hurt him as badly as he had hurt her.

“Yes, a girl,” he said, before she could ask.

“Why did you come here?” It was a cry, she wished never to have to see him again.

“I came to say…I wanted to see you again…”

“For what?” The rage in her voice astonished even her. He came toward her and she took a step backward, it seemed as if he would use his old tricks with her: touch her, kiss her gently, and she would be lost, still, after all that had passed between them.

“To say good-bye,” he said. There was some note in his voice she didn’t recall having heard before, her ears perked at it. Even in her anguish she wondered if he had at last grown up and recognized her worth and her womanhood, that she had to admit he had helped her to create.

“It is late for that,” she said, finally, and found herself sitting down at the table. He hesitated, then sat down across from her.

“You didn’t need to come,” she told him. “I wish you hadn’t come.”

“Where is Charles?” he asked. “I hoped I might see him one more time.” At this it was all she could do not to cry.

“He is at the Woznys’,” no use to refuse to tell him; everyone knew where Charles spent his days. “I don’t want you to see him, he needs a father.” She was ashamed at the illogic of her statements, but her mind was too confused. He did not want to come back, he did not want her back, he wanted only to see his son.

“I will see him before I go,” he told her. Now there was emotion in his voice.

“You won’t take him?” she asked, her voice shaky. He could, he could do that: How frightened she suddenly was.

“No,” he said, his voice having gone gentle. “I will not take him. Maybe later, when we are settled, you might send him to visit me?” She was about to declare, never, but thought better of it, nodded as if she agreed.

“I am sorry to have left you,” he said. “It… I…am sorry.” No suggestion of it having been a mistake, or dishonourable. No true apology to her, although, of what good would an apology be now?

“You left me with nothing.”

“I knew you would manage,” he said. “I knew what you are made of.”

“And in the end, did not like it,” she said. “How did you get from such perfect love,” sneering the last two words, “to leaving me with nothing? Not even telling me you were going, much less why?”

He said, “What do you mean, perfect love?” He raised his voice now, although not to a shout. “I was forced into marrying you. I thought, I will need a wife soon, why not this one? I like her well enough, and I have to live in this place. Might just as well do the right thing.” And he laughed. She could have killed him because he laughed. “And the old priest, he was ready to kill me, so I thought…”

“You said that you loved me,” her tone shamingly querulous, how disgustingly pathetic she sounded, but hadn’t he just taken away her last support that explained how she had come West, that explained how she sat in this worn shack, poor as a church mouse, and alone with her fatherless child? Curses rose in her, words she didn’t know she knew, but not one passed her lips. How one learns in the West, she told herself. How one learns.

“I despise you,” she said. “You deserve to be despised by all.”

She put her head in one hand, her elbow resting on the table. She was panting, remembering the night they married, remembering the excitement of the preparations and the parting and the long trip West with him by her side. Suddenly she knew that he was lying to her, for what purpose she could not divine.

“It was the work, wasn’t it,” she said. “It was the loneliness. You missed the village and the farm, and all your family. You came finally, to blame me. You forgot that you once loved me. Why did you think that Marguerite could bring you more than I did?”

The silence in the room was a presence in itself, the anguish she felt filling up the space.

He said, “I missed the forest, the two wide rivers, the great silver lake shining against the sky.” Another long silence while she tried to absorb this, trying to hold back the sobs that roiled in her chest and throat. “When she is fit to travel, we will go back. We will get an annulment. People will forget in time.”

“And me?” He was moving past her now, toward the door, but now he paused, lifted his hand, touched her hair gently, and went by. At the door, he said, his back to her, “You wanted the West, didn’t you? Now you
are
the West.”

~

At last it was truly spring
, all the snow gone, the land dried enough for seeding crops, animals put out to pasture where there were fences, flocks of ducks and geese and wild swans long returned. Two more families had moved into Bone Pile, none of them looking any different from those who were already there, and both speaking English and of Protestant faiths. One of them, a Mrs. Cunningham said to Sophie as she drank tea in her café, “I think you are French!” as if this were the most astonishing thing.

“I am,” Sophie replied, perhaps a little too crisply.

“Why didn’t you go to where the French people live? I hear there are French towns all over.”

She said, “We came where we wanted to be.”

But for a long time after that she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe the source of the failure of her marriage to Pierre had been, not their failure to tell the truth that night so long ago, but that first, early error, for which she was to blame. She was the one who rejected going north to Prince Albert or further West and north to the communities near Fort Edmonton. She thought of her youthful dream of freedom, and wondered if such a thing were even possible, anywhere. Where had she gotten the idea to start with? She supposed she had heard the men talking of it in the churchyard, at the summer festivals each year, and at her grandparents’ table.

She knew the women didn’t speak of freedom, and she wondered what it was they did speak of: marriages, children, houses, gardens, not even of education. But she had wanted more than the things the women spoke of, only she had no way of knowing what it was she wanted and using the language of the men, who seemed to have more than the women, she had grasped onto the word, ‘freedom,’ and taken it as her own. The West meant freedom; so why was it that she was in the West now, and of it, Pierre had claimed, and she felt only marginally more free than she had felt as the unwanted child in her grandmother’s home?

When, a few weeks earlier, Pierre had walked from her door and she knew she would never see him again and had no sense of true apology or shame from him, she had thought,
I am free now
. Should I go to Prince Albert? Should I go to this new “Rouleauville” at Calgary? But always she was brought back to the sorry fact that she hadn’t yet enough money to go anywhere. Another year, she told herself grimly, and I will have enough to go. No one, she thought with some glumness, is free who does not have enough money. She wondered too, if perhaps André Chouinard had gone back to Québec. If perhaps he and Pierre were meeting on the streets of the Québec village from which they had both come, and were friends now, because neither of them possessed Sophie Charron. She doubted it.

She remembered too, now, having been too angry to think of what she knew, that no child born in wedlock became a bastard because his parent’s marriage was annulled. That was a teaching of the church she would cling to, and tell Charles when he was old enough to wonder. And she thought further too, that she would be glad of an annulment, that if she had married in the church, she could be un-married by its own rules.