Wild Rose (45 page)

“I am not a Protestant,” she said, lifting her voice into pret
tiness. “But thank you for thinking of me.”

“I think of your eternal salvation,” he said, although mildly, and she felt a twinge of revulsion in her chest that she subdued quickly.

“I cannot,” she told him firmly. “It is the church’s teaching. I am sure you know that.”

He had been carrying a cloth bag, like a woman, and at this, he reached into it and pulled out the bible, a cheaply printed one, but new, and had handed it to her. If a Catholic priest came to her door, she had wondered when Oswald was gone, what would I say to him?

She read the bible in wonder combined with a horrified semi-reverence and with the deepest interest, selecting only certain passages to read aloud to Charles for their beautiful sound, so that he might learn to love poetry. That Mr. Oswald had been thinking of converting her to Protestantism she found ridiculous. As with most Catholics, she felt sure, it would be Catholicism or nothing. It shocked her to realize she was leaning toward nothing. Maybe, she thought, it wouldn’t be possible to extricate herself fully from the church she was raised in. Such an all-encompassing world it was, touching everything, a belief system without which she would find herself emptied of all richness in life. Yet, all around her, people survived very well without it. She didn’t know what to make of this, but kept on reading parts here and there from the bible to her son, not sure why she was doing so. As a substitute, perhaps, for the lack of religious training or even church going, a lack she felt strongly, but made no move to change.

Once in a while when her day’s work was done, she would drop in to visit Charlotte Emery. They would settle into her parlour where Charlotte would stretch out on the sofa, Charles would seat himself on the floor with his toys, and two women would chat about the weather, about their housekeeping difficulties, and any gossip either of them might have come across. Sophie enjoyed these visits, they were a welcome break from her own company and from the tiny house in which she lived and worked. Charles too, slept better after he’d spent an hour or two in a different house.

Not long ago a box of worn, homemade toys and ragged books had arrived from the Hippolytes. She was able to receive mail as she always had, here at the post office in Bone Pile where it had always been held for them until they could get into town to pick it up. Thus, she didn’t know if anyone back home knew that Pierre had left her. If they did know, although nobody gave any indication of it, Pierre would have told them, which she doubted. But on his travels with the new woman he might have run into someone else from their home district, had told that person, who then relayed the story back to the village and their families. Nevertheless, whether they knew or not, how grateful she had been for the books and toys. There was never anything from Guillaume and Claire, nor from Hector and Isabelle, not that she had expected to hear from them.

Still, it hurt, made her both angry and glum, and she was glad that Charles didn’t know them and so didn’t miss letters or gifts from them. Sometimes when both the books and the toys failed to amuse him, Sophie would make up stories and tell them to him. In their spare hours she had even begun to teach him to read, tracing the letters of the alphabet in flour that she scattered onto a table, asking him to repeat the names of the letters after her, or to identify them and name them to her. She was filled with pride at how quickly he learned. In her plans for the future she now included a good school – not a homesteader’s anything-will-do school, but a really good school for him.

Then she would mentally count the money that Mr. Archibald kept in his safe for her, hoping against hope to get enough together to start a fund for Charles’ education. All the time, in the back of her mind, praying that Frank Archibald was, at least in this matter, an honest man who wouldn’t steal her money from her, or worse, that a fire would not consume the entire frame building, burning up her savings with it. She would cross herself, then shake her fingers as if she had burned them. What to do, when you can’t pray? Before she realized she had, though, she would pray,
Please God, don’t let anything happen to my savings.
The irony of this made her laugh, but grimly.

No one came by all afternoon and she spent the time playing with her son, who had recently taken a great interest in two rag dolls that were in the box. He christened them Boar and Bimmy, Sophie had no idea where the names had come from, and he always chose to play with Bimmy. She said, “We could call him Alfred!” He had looked at her angrily.

“No!” he said. “Bimmy, bimmy, bimmy, bimmy,” and went on singing the word while he waggled Bimmy’s long ears. Bimmy was a rabbit.

“What is Boar?” she asked him, as they sat together on the lumpy sofa, a blanket over their legs against the cold. He tipped his face up to search hers, as if the answer might be found there.

“He has a horse,” he decided at last.

“Oh, so he is a man,” Sophie suggested.

“No, he not a man,” Charles said. “He a boy. He has a big horse. He gallops…” He raised one arm to move it back and forth. “He gallops everywhere!” this last a shout.

“What fun!” Sophie cried. “Gallop, gallop, gallop!”

“No,
maman!”
he declared, pushing at her hand that she had lifted in imitation of his movement. “He gallops – you don’t gallop.”

She wanted to laugh, rarely understanding how his mind worked, but delighting in trying little things with him to see how he would react, pushing him, just a little, in the interests both of better understanding him and in teaching him about possibilities. “Does he like cake?” she asked, making Charles laugh out loud as if she had said the silliest thing possible.

Soon he grew tired, and for a little while, napped, while she worked on some heavy trousers she was sewing for him; he was growing so fast that nothing fit him anymore. Evening came, she fed him supper and put him to bed, then fed the fire, and sat in the warmth of the room by herself, her feet up off the freezing floor, a blanket tucked around them, resolving to at last cut herself some new cloths for dish washing and drying and to get at least one of them hemmed before she went to bed. If she couldn’t embroider to satisfy a nun or her grandmother, she could at least stitch well enough to make what she needed. The long, bitterly frigid day had given her time, for once, to think, and she put her mind, as she had promised him, to Campion’s proposition.

Come spring, everyone said, the current trickle of settlers would swell to a flood. Opportunities would abound, people said; the frontier was the place to make a fortune. Her own experience had her doubting such a thing because most people she saw had come West for the free land, to have land of their own was, in many families, a dream that was generations old. What the countryside abounded with, she knew now, was shysters and confidence men, and the ever-present land speculators, of which Campion, it turned out, was one of the biggest and most successful. Yet nobody seemed to know where his real home was, or if he had a wife or children, or how he had gotten the money to start his buying and selling. Everyone knew him and had done business with him at one time or another, however small the venture. If they feared him, or mistrusted him, they kept silent about it.

Still, many were the stories of small kindnesses he had done: taking meat and potatoes to a starving Galician family, lending money to someone who hadn’t a cent and charging no interest. She thought, privately, that it was more likely he had done them to get on the good side of people, reasoning that the better his reputation, the easier it would be to make deals. But she had no proof of this, based this only on the look she had seen in his eyes, cold, assessing, that belied the ready smile and the good cheer that came from his mouth.
Cast thy bread upon the waters
, came to mind. And yet, he had taken away her farm, even knowing what that would do to her. Trust him? Never.

She worked alone in the warm silence for half an hour or so, falling into a deep reverie, as she cut and stitched. Pierre was in her mind, how they had loved one another, how they had worked together in those early days on the homestead, how they had come together to love the prairie as others loved their gardens or their children. Loneliness overcame her, and with it, longing; she dropped her sewing into her lap, her hands falling idle onto it, while misery crept in, and tears she hardly noticed were there ran silently down her cheeks. She sat, while the fire slowly began to run out of fuel, burning lower and lower, the room growing colder and colder.

Charles stirred in the bedroom, let out a sharp cry as if someone had poked him, which drew her upright in Harry Adamson’s armchair from which she could still smell his tobacco, sometimes thought she could feel the length of his warm body. She waited, but there was no more sound from Charles. Now she longed for Harry’s warmth and kindness, for his overwhelming desire. Her body had begun to ache, not in any one place, but all of it, as if her pain were another self that was her too, inhabiting her in the way that love once had, and she rose to her feet with difficulty, to fix the fire, to take refuge, if she could, in sleep.

The motion helped, the pain lifted a little, enough that she could remind herself as she always did at such moments, that others suffered too, some more than she did: all the dead children in the West, all the hungry ones, all the failure and despair, all the Mrs. Woznys, all the Lilys. Had she not her beloved Charles still? Had she not a home? Was she not succeeding, however low the standard? Were they not all succeeding in their way? Mrs. Emery, Mrs. Archibald, Mrs. Kaufmann. Even Mrs. Smith?

She knew then that she would go with Mr. Campion, despite the risk that he would try again to destroy her when it suited him, when it was to his advantage. She would start anew in Garden City, and Campion or no Campion, she would succeed there too. She thought, some days, that if you kept your wits about you, if you had wits to begin with, it was hard to fail. And yet, all around her, she saw what she knew to be failure: slave labour, hunger and despair. Was it only what you called your life that made the difference between success and failure?

She thought again of Pierre, but he was remote now. Pierre’s good looks, that white-toothed smile, his outgoingness and unfailing charm, would carry him wherever he went. She, Sophie, would rely on her brains and her resolution. And caution would be her byword. No longer would she be that reckless, foolish girl she had been when she came West. In that instant, understanding this, she felt a hundred years old.

She thought of Campion’s tight control of himself. I need that too, she told herself. But he is not a mother; I think he does not know anything about love. And she wondered, not for the first time, if perhaps there was something wrong with men that their affections seemed to count for so little in their lives, that everything else seemed to matter more. Or was it only that she had found herself with that kind of man?

She thought too, of Harry Adamson, whom she would be leaving behind. There had been one letter from him, sent as he said it would be, to Mrs. Emery. In it he had said that he had come to rest in Winnipeg where he had found ready work as a carpenter and a boarding house in which to live, “This town is booming,” he wrote, “and we are crowded together six men to a room. I can’t wait for spring to get back to my shack and my land.” He had also written, “I hope Mrs. Hippolyte is doing well and that her café is working out for her. How is her boy? He seems a smart little fellow.” She had hoped he might put a
note inside for her eyes only, but he hadn’t. She wondered if this was to save her reputation, or if it was only because in the city there was so much to see and do that it was easy to forget the small pleasures of the country. Easy to forget her, Sophie. She felt regret that he too, seemed to care so little, and then remembered
that he had said that he was not proposing marriage, only
–
Pah!
She told herself. Forget him as he has forgotten you. He hadn’t the power to make her suffer as Pierre had, and she took comfort in that, and thought further, that she would curb her passions in the future, would not give herself to a man again in her, so far, no-holds-barred way. She would learn from her past.

The great, snow-covered pile of buffalo bones came into her mind’s eye; under the glare of the pale sun, they seemed to give off white light, and for an instant she thought she could hear the sound that came from them, a deep thrumming noise, as if far below the piles’ chaotic surface, a great heart beat still. It was the heart of the prairie, beating away; it was the earth itself. In her near-despair she remembered that first day when she and Pierre had found their homestead, when so exhausted she had tried to climb from the buggy and her legs gave way and she fell, face down on the ground; instead of only dry earth and grass she had been surrounded by, filled with the precious scent of prairie roses whose fragrances saturated the air, and would forever after seem to her the true fragrance of the prairie. She could not reconcile the two: the great grief of the bones, the precious beauty of the roses, one as real as the other.

~

She was dreaming of fire
, of a conflagration in a town she didn’t know, the entire place flaming upward toward a black sky. The flames were spreading, coming closer to where she watched and she screamed, waking, half rising before she understood she had been dreaming and had only groaned aloud. She fell back onto her pillow, pulling up the quilt against the cold, seeing that Charles hadn’t moved, her heart still pumping hard until she had managed to quiet herself. Then she thought, as she was awake anyway, she would build up the fire in the stove, so that the house would be warm when she had to get up.