Wild Rose (9 page)

But she couldn’t stop herself; as the horse picked up speed, beginning to jog its way onto the trail, she looked over her shoulder at the frame cabin with its yellow-grassed roof, the rough grey pole corral, and what she could see of the barn set into the hillside, and the sod chicken coop, and the half-cut crop gleaming golden in the sun. She looked back further to the place where the buff-and-cream land met the encompassing sky and her heart gave such a leap, would crack in two, the pain such that she turned back again to face, impotently, the miles before them.

The horse trotted on, the buggy swaying, the roughness of the trail causing her to jostle now and then against Campion, or he against her, no matter how she squeezed to her side of the narrow seat, until she judged it safe to move Charles from her knee onto the seat between them. Her mind had slowed enough now that she could fasten onto a thought, but all such thoughts seemed as if only distantly her own; otherwise, she was hollowed out, emptied, the emptiness vast and dark. She barely noticed Campion except as a heavy shadow on her left. Occasionally, though, he spoke to her.

“Must a’ been lonely out there with no neighbours.” Sophie said nothing. “But you mark it,” he went on, as if she had answered, “Come spring, settlers will be flooding in. This whole big empty place – room for thousands and thousands of people.” Sophie said, softly, as if testing what she had felt, “I was not lonely.”

“Can you go to your family?” She didn’t answer. “Are they farmers?” She saw this as his attempt to find out why she might choose not to go to them.

“They have a general store.”

“Good business?” he asked, interested.

“Yes.” Her ear lobes began to tingle, as if the earrings with their tiny diamonds were still imbued with the warmth of her grandmother’s fingers. The dishes, riding precariously in the barrel jammed behind the seat, had never been so heavy, nor at once fraught with such delicacy. She couldn’t bear the thought that her grandparents might know of her plight; she vowed she would never tell them.

Sounds seemed to come from far away: the shriek of an eagle far above, a dot circling in that space between earth and sky’s edge, (she didn’t search for its partner, although there would be one), the scolding chitter of small birds fluttering out of the horse’s way, the lament of a coyote that followed them for a time before trotting away, pausing to look back over his shoulder, then leisurely nosing his flank for fleas. The creak of the buggy springs, harness buckles clinking, the soft thud of the horses’ hooves on the ground. The sun beat down on them, and if she raised her eyes beyond the faint trail through the grass ahead of them, it seemed they were travelling on into the colourless band where the cream and tan earth and blue sky failed to meet.
Charles had fallen asleep against her and would tumble off the seat. She lifted him back into her lap, shook out a shawl from her bag to cover his head against the sun. His weight, though considerable, he was big for his age, comforted her, as if, without him, she might float off the seat. Two hours passed in this uncomfortable way, the sun burning down, Sophie staring ahead, seeing nothing, until at last Campion pulled the rig to a stop.

“Horses need a rest. A few minutes.” At the ceasing of motion Charles woke, and at once wanted down. Campion had dismounted from the buggy and reached for him, Sophie reluctantly allowing this, then suffered Campion to help her down, holding herself in so as to touch him only where she had to, her elbow in his palm, that was all. She held the reins for him while he went off behind a small hill and when he returned, she took Charles and went off too, although to a different rise. She laughed out loud, inadvertently, as she made her choice of a different hillock, preserving proprieties even in this wilderness, even in her situation. But the thought of coming upon Campion’s leavings steaming in the grass sickened her, so she walked faster; Charles running to keep up.

She wondered briefly, herding her son back across the grass to the buggy, how it could be that someone like her, not a bad person, only twenty-four years old, should be asked to bear so much so suddenly. How Pierre could have turned away from her. This was far worse than finding him dead on the prairie, she said to herself, but even as she said it, wasn’t sure, telling herself,
It is the suddenness of it; it is the unexpectedness
. But she walked on, one foot in front of the other in her worn-out boots, stumbling a little on the uneven prairie, the scent of sage, grasses, and the few wild roses sickening her, wishing the scent she had loved would end as everything else had ended. At the buggy she allowed Campion to lift Charles, and to put his thick hand under her elbow again to help her up.

“You are light as a feather,” he said, grunting, as if to contradict what he had just said, but in that grunt, and in her heightened state, she heard his sexuality, gross and hard; it hit her like a blow, sickening her.

Eventually, in late afternoon on the eastern horizon, a shining white hillock rose before them, growing longer and higher by slow degrees as they inched nearer. The pile from which the village had acquired its strange name, an uneven mountain of bleached and broken buffalo bones sat waiting either for a branch rail line to be built to the village so that the bones could be hauled away to be sent East to be used in industry, or more likely, until its owner hired teamsters with wagons and oxen to haul it, load by load, to the closest rail line, north and either to the east, to Swift Current or even Moose Jaw, or to the west, to Garden City, or as far as Medicine Hat. No one knew who had laid the first bones there, that in the few years Sophie had been in the North-West Territories, had accumulated to this great mass, and her knowledge as to its uses didn’t in the least diminish her uneasiness whenever she approached it, nor could she properly divine its source.

The Indians had started it, she had heard. In her strange state, altered from normalcy by shock and fear, she understood why, the knowledge seeming to swell across the prairie to reach inside her: Grief had laid them, and fear: The bones were about power. She tore away her eyes, lifted the back of one hand to her nose as if to deflect a stench, feeling Campion’s dismissive glance.

In more hopeful days, Sophie and Pierre had contributed a wagon load that had brought them five dollars;
It was not worth the trouble
, Pierre had said, although Sophie had done nearly all the gathering, he had helped only with the loading of the wagon, driving the team from pile to small pile that Sophie over weeks, whenever she could find the time, had made in a circle around their land. Then he had laughed, “We’re circled by bones.”

“Don’t say that,” Sophie said sharply, and he had laughed again, in a way that seemed cruel to her, yet carried too, the sound of uneasy incomprehension. “At least now we won’t always be stumbling over them. Tonerre could have broken his leg.”

Before them lay a coulee, the north end deep and narrow, the south end, where they would in a moment cross, wide and shallow. Here the land folded on itself like an open mouth, lips, tongue, exposed. The town dipped out of view, then almost at once began to rise again through the stiff, dun-coloured grass: The livery stable at the north, the false-fronted general store, a few other small frame, false-fronted buildings strung out between them, and haphazardly, starting at the south and Harry Adamson’s cabin, a handful of unadorned square houses built of wood, tar paper and tin, mostly little more than shacks, and scattered over two streets, the street nearest to them anchored by a large frame house. Not a single tree graced the village, there was no church spire, as yet not even a school.

But there was a water supply here in the coulee, and a few stunted trees at the deep end, which was why, people said, that rancher Quinn had built his house here, intending to make it his ranch headquarters, but just as it was ready to move into, instead, he had crashed off his horse, dead of a heart attack, people said, before he hit the ground, although others said his neck was broken in the fall, and wouldn’t that kill you dead enough, never mind a heart attack? His handsome frame house with the verandah down two sides and its two fireplaces, growing shabbier and grayer every day, was now Mrs. Emery’s boarding house.

Without consulting her, Campion drove the buggy straight to the livery barn at the end of the main street, Sophie barely registering that a new house had been built in the gap between the livery stable and the blacksmith’s shop. Campion remarked, unnecessarily, as if to deflect her attention, “I’ll get the horses feed and water while we do our business.” Once again with his help, she and Charles climbed down and waited while Ambrose, the livery barn owner, came out and conferred with him. After which Campion instructed her, “Leave your things for now. Ambrose will take care of them. Right Ambrose?” Sophie understood that coins had changed hands, but as she had nothing to give anyone, she kept her back straight and gazed off at one of the front windows of the new frame house. Its lace curtain stirred as she watched.

She was holding hard onto Charles who was trying to get away to play in the hay. Impossible! Horses would not eat hay that children had played in, and anyway, it was far too dangerous to let him loose around them. To distract him, she walked out of the barn onto the boardwalk which extended a few feet across the livery barn’s entrance to end abruptly on one side in what, in wetter weather, would be a muddy quagmire but which in the late summer heat was only a patch of hard, rutted, light brown earth with a few sparse heads of dry grass growing in it. A section of boardwalk had begun to be built at the entrance of the new house that would eventually meet the one at the livery barn entrance. She became aware of Campion’s bulk beside her.

“It’s the lawyer you’ll be wanting to see.”

“Yes,” was all she said, not looking at him, but making her voice brusque as if she were not screwing up every ounce of her courage. They began to walk, Sophie shifting her bag to her other arm in order to carry Charles who did not want to be carried. “Hush!” she told him, her voice harsher than she’d meant, but a sound new to Charles who at once, in surprise, ceased to struggle and whimper. Never mind; he must learn too. Campion, not asking, took her bag from her and she let him. At the end of the livery barn’s boardwalk, they crossed the rough patch of ground and, avoiding the entrance to the new house, crossed the street, and stepped up again onto the long section that ran continuously before the few stores. They passed the blacksmith’s shop, then the entrance to the general store – odours of onion, oil, fresh cotton, spices, leather, wafting out and Sophie steeling herself against them, as if they had no right to smell as they always had – and at last reached the long set of stairs that went steeply up the side of the small wooden building that served as barber shop, to the lawyer’s office above it.

Once inside the bare waiting room, Sophie hesitated, suddenly frightened, but Campion strode across the room to the closed door that, presumably, led into the lawyer’s office itself, knocked briskly, and without waiting for an answer, opened it. She heard a male voice, Campion turned and beckoned to her, and mutely she obeyed his summons. Then they stood side by side in front of the desk of Frank Archibald, the town’s only lawyer. Charles, having given up the struggle to go his own way, lay against Sophie’s shoulder, sound asleep, making soft burbling noises; she hoped he wasn’t catching a cold, although in such heat a cold seemed absurd, even as Campion set her portmanteau onto the floor beside her as she straightened to meet the lawyer’s gaze. When Campion introduced her, the man’s eyelids flickered quickly before his eyes descended to the paper on the desk before him and stayed there. But she was concentrating her strength on keeping her voice steady, standing ramrod straight to control the trembling running through her.

“This lady, Mrs. Hippolyte,” Campion murmured, delicately
enough that she was surprised, “has been abandoned by her hus
band who, as we know, sold his farm to me. It turns out that she didn’t know about this.” He looked to the sleeping Charles as if to say to Archibald, See? A child. There was a moment’s silence, during which Archibald cleared his throat gently.

“There can be no question, Madame Hippolyte,” he told her. “The transaction was entirely within the law. Your husband has the legal right to sell his farm.” His moustache, light brown, thin, meticulously trimmed, glistened as he spoke, was motionless as soon as he stopped. She had a sense that he too had steeled himself.

“Without my consent!” Her voice, to her satisfaction, came out strong and clear; she hadn’t been sure it would. “It is my farm too, did I not give four years labour to it? Did I not leave my home and family to come with him here?” Aware, even as she said it, of her hypocrisy, for hadn’t she been the one who had persuaded him to come?

“He does not, by law, need your consent, Mrs. Hippolyte.”

“But certainly he needs my consent! I am his wife!”

“You must understand,” the lawyer replied, his voice gentle again,”that the dower law has been struck down here in the Territories.” When she said nothing, staring at him, her disbelief and consternation diminishing with the dawning of the full nature of her predicament, he went on more naturally, as if she too would be interested in his lawyer’s considerations. “Yours is one of the first cases I’ve dealt with, although it’s unlikely to be the last.”

She faltered. “What do you mean?”

“Please, sit down, Mrs. Hippolyte,” he urged her, his gaze faintly alarmed, as if he might need to rise to help her, and Campion stood ostentatiously behind the chair beside her, his hands resting on its back. Her knees were threatening to buckle; she sat more heavily, partly because of Charles’ weight, than she would have wished. For the first time, real anger rose in her, spreading heat through her face and throat, and it propelled her, child and all, back to her feet. Oh, yes, she had thought sometimes when Pierre was in the midst of one of his rages – she could rage too. But Archibald, seeing again what was in her face, spoke quickly. “Let me explain. It was the law that gave a wife’s right to a share in her husband’s property.” He cleared his throat carefully, glanced at Campion standing behind her – Why is he still here? she wondered – stroked his pale moustache briefly, and went on, “It was only last year the government…struck it down.”