Wild Rose (5 page)

Beside them, though, the train shuddered and muttered and people began to mount the stairs at each end of the cars. They fell in with the crowd of settlers climbing aboard, and soon were seated on the slatted wooden benches among the other terrified, thrilled passengers, the many children among them wide-eyed, silenced for the moment by the unfamiliarity of it all, while the train’s iron wheels grunted and squealed, beginning to turn in rhythm, faster and faster, and the engineer pulled the whistle so that as they left the Sherbrooke station a last melancholy wail trailed, echoing, behind them.

Sophie clung to Pierre’s arm, gazing exalted, out the windows while, in what seemed only seconds, they left the town behind, began the rush through the greening countryside. She would have kissed him, but he would have pulled back and looked around, uneasy by the small impropriety of it, forgetting, Sophie thought, that we are married now. She grinned instead, and squeezed his arm harder, until he grinned down at her, the light in his black eyes as good as a kiss, no, a thousand kisses. She could not believe her good fortune, that Pierre was her husband, that Pierre loved her with a love as strong as hers for him.

In only a few hours they came to the St. Lawrence River. Sophie pressed herself against Pierre as they had rattled across the long iron bridge, far below them the water glistening through a floating mist – like a fallen cloud, she thought – in the distance slowly turning to silver and melding with the white sky. There was the harbor and great buildings, bigger than anything she had ever seen before, and dome after dome after spire of churches reaching skyward toward heaven. She could barely breathe, she and Pierre exchanged wordless glances that spoke of awe, delight, mixed with apprehension. Then they were entering Montréal where the train hissed, screeched, and clanked to a stop and they were able to descend to the platform for a short while.

She had thought that possibly Hector would leave his work long enough to say good-bye. She could barely remember her brother’s face it had been so long since she had last seen him, she couldn’t recall even saying good-bye to him, but hadn’t she gone to breakfast one morning and there was no Hector? Grandfather grim-faced, the glitter in grandmother’s eyes not to be looked at. A sob, unexpected, coming out of nowhere, caught low in her throat so that she touched the place with her fingertips and turned away from Pierre so he wouldn’t see. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Pierre that Sophie’s other brother might have come to say good-bye; it was no surprise that neither of them even spoke his name. And anyway, so brief a stop, so many people milling around on the platform, Hector would never have found them in time. Again some memory, or picture, unpleasant, wholly uncertain, tugged at her, so that she chased it away before it had time to form.

They walked the length of the platform along with other passengers from their car, children racing and screeching among them until captured by their parents, jerked into position, slapped, and momentarily subdued. Standing against the station walls, or in sheltered corners beggars stood, importuning passersby. So many, Sophie thought, surprised. Was this what Guillaume had warned her about? She shivered. I will write to Violette about this, about this whole trip, she told herself, but no, the nuns wouldn’t allow Violette letters from anyone but her mother. She would have pondered on what she had seen longer, but the conductor was shouting, they were climbing back onto the train, it was vibrating with building power, it was all too exciting, then they were pulling out of the station, beginning the long trip past the increasingly decrepit outskirts of Montréal, the vision of the great city fading a little more with each turning of the noisy wheels.

A half hour or more after they had left the city behind them, a conductor came bumping down the aisle followed by two women in shabby but clean dresses, each carrying bulging cloth bags and a hat box that the conductor helped them stuff under their seats, the two empty seats across the aisle from Sophie and Pierre. One woman was about Sophie’s age, the other older, the older one with light brown hair and matching light brown eyes, the other with blue eyes and the same shade of light brown hair, and both of them gaunt to the point of illness.

“We are sisters, Marianne and Adelaide Smith,” the older, taller, brown-eyed one, told them, when after an hour or so of riding across the aisle from them, Sophie moved to sit facing the elder sister and took the small trove of
biscuits
that Pierre’s little sister Lucie had made for them and, offering the tin to them. How quickly the women grasped the cookies, one after the other, crunching them down, crumbs slipping unnoticed into the frills of their too-loose bodices, nonplussing Sophie. She saw too, then thought she must have been mistaken, a certain trembling of their fingers as they reached in to take a cookie and to eat them.

“Where in the West are you going?” Sophie asked, first in French, then getting no response other than a widening of the eyes, switching to her few English words, as she sat swaying across from them, while outside darkness at last began to fall, small splatters of rain hitting the window beside them, Pierre snoring like an engine only a few feet away.

“My sister and I are going to the District of Saskatchewan,” Miss Adelaide Smith told Sophie, enunciating precisely, presumably so that Sophie would better understand, while the younger one, Marianne – no, Mary Ann – nodded and smiled. Something wrong with her, Sophie thought: a vacancy, a flatness in the pale eyes. Ah,
les anglais
– but no, she reproved herself. Because they aren’t French I will not assume they are devils. The past is past.
It is past
, she had insisted to
l’abbé
, who scolded her angrily saying she was too young to understand, that one day she would make remembering her business.
Do not forget la langue maternelle; do not forget this precious church.
She was by this the more determined to know
les deux anglaises
.

“We are getting off in Saskatchewan District, too,” Sophie told them, miming getting off the train, enunciating “Saskatchewan,” carefully. “We will be…” she hesitated “…
voisines
… neighbours?”

“We will get off there too, in Moose Jaw,” the elder Miss Smith told her. She was not unfriendly, yet Sophie didn’t like the way the woman treated her, as if behind the show of politeness, she found Sophie amusing, as if she were only a stupid child. “Our brother has land near there and we will go there to help him.”

“Ahh,” Sophie said, trying to think of the English words, “He has no…wife?”

“No wife,” Adelaide intoned solemnly, shaking her head as if it were a great shame, and unaccountably, Mary Ann began to laugh. Adelaide fixed her now hard brown eyes on Mary Ann’s blue ones and instantly Mary Ann fell into silence, her laugh cut off as if by a slamming door.

“You have come from Montréal?” she asked, but Adelaide merely shook her head, no, saying nothing, while Mary Ann reached furtively for the last cookie. Puzzled, Sophie took her leave of them, returning to her seat between the window and Pierre who slept on, not noticing his wife had been gone.

But the next morning the two women were gone from the car, their boxes and bags also, and Sophie didn’t see them again. Their place was taken at once by half of a large family that had had so far to squeeze itself into two seats at the far end of the car, the older children staying behind in those seats and the smaller of the half-dozen children, moving across the aisle from Sophie and Pierre. The smallest of them now insisted on standing on the seats until their shabby, distracted father smacked each of them once, methodically. This was followed by loud crying until another blow was threatened, which dried all tears instantly, and in a moment, punishment forgotten or shrugged off as too usual, the little ones were running up and down the crowded aisles, tripping over the feet of passengers, and the sacks and boxes of belongings that no matter how the conductor scolded and threatened, the bulging corners of which continued to find their way into the aisle.

And still the train hurtled on through the wooded, greening landscape with its low, grassy hills, its cows and horses grazing in meadows, rounding corners where sunlit church spires greeted them, villages of stone houses just like the village they had left behind, forever, sat warming in the spring sun. The train was long, heavily loaded, making its loud, steady, if slow way out to the thin fringes of civilization, into Ontario, through blackwater swamps edged with a sometimes brilliant green, the dark surfaces broken here and there by streaks or pools of amber, past lakes bluer than the sky that reflected whiter clouds, around impenetrable black granite cliffs from which flakes of quartz and fool’s gold glinted in the harsh light.

On it went, stopping briefly now and then to take on water and coal, and one morning when they woke, dressed, pulled back the curtains, and climbed down from the trays attached to the ceiling that acted as their beds, they had moved out of all enclosures – lakes, forests, hills, villages – into a space so vast that Sophie, standing to see better, became dizzy and would have fallen back into her seat if Pierre had not been pressed against her as he stared too. It was as if in the night the train had left its tracks and ventured into some new planet from the one they knew.
Was this the West?

Staring out in a stunned silence, a new, unidentifiable soaring sound filled her head. It was the delicate hissing of her brain, as closed as only stone and rail fences, garden swings, rows of oak pews, years of nuns’ pious sobriety and priests’ thunderings, could make it, opening, now, to encompass the endless meadow –
meadow? She had no other word for what she viewed before her, going on forever to the place where the earth curved down and away, and above where it had been, there was only the far-distant, pale, sky. And not a forest out there, not even – could it really be? A single tree. Again, she experienced an instant, a
frisson
of terror, suppressed at once.

But she couldn’t quite catch her breath, leaned, rocking against Pierre’s side so that he braced himself against the window’s high frame with one arm, and slid his other arm around her waist. The waist he murmured over in the night, so slim it was, so tiny, a handsbreadth only. And now Sophie thought – even as she thought,
I must be mad
– she would wear no more stays. No more whalebone choking her, leaving deep red marks on her tender white flesh, as Pierre, unlacing her corset, had murmured to her, so that she trembled, her breath shallow and fast. Did she not know she was desired? Did she not know how beautiful was her flesh? Blood so suddenly rushing through her veins, heating her, its susurration in her ears so loud she could hardly hear his whispers which soon, in any case, became grunts, sighs, gasps, as if he had forgotten it was her, his Sophie he labored with such passion over. Then, overcoming even the tearing pain, all drowned by the cataract of sensation, so astonishing it did not bear thinking about.

But then it was the sky. All day they watched in silence as it filled the windows of the train on both sides and down the length of their enclosure. In the morning how the rising sun in the east lit the darkness with gold; ascending higher, shot beams of glowing red light into the car so strong it made the passengers look away from it, laughing helplessly, the sky gradually lightening until by afternoon it was the palest blue and measureless miles in the distance above them, as evening drew on deepening to sapphire, the highest arc of its dome too dark to see more than a white pinpoint here or there, and though otherwise lightless, all the while, everywhere, miraculously radiant. The car full of exhausted, swaying people could not stop themselves from watching the sky, the woman riding in the seat ahead of Sophie and Pierre beginning to sob, sobbed an entire day as they rocked on into the North-West Territories, tears running unchecked down her cheeks to drip off her chin, her husband turning his face resolutely away from her, to the window, and
the West
.

Dishevelled, none too clean, and aching in every limb, two days after the train had properly entered
the West
, the conductor came down through the cars calling, “Next station Swift Current,” the tension in the car rising palpably, the settlers, their patience stretched beyond the imaginable, began to gather bags and small boxes, organizing, instructing each other, calling to children, straightening clothing, wiping children’s faces, brushing hats and placing them carefully on heads.

“We are not going to Versailles!” Sophie muttered into Pierre’s ear, her irritation or whatever it was making her want to scratch all over her own body; itchy she was, suddenly, everywhere.

No one waited patiently, for most of their number had gotten off in Winnipeg and the succeeding towns, all of the settlers left on the train, crowded the windows of the car, leaning close, stretching to see over the heads of family members, leaning against the glass so as to see down the track. Voices exclaimed, then silence fell, then an exclamation from someone else; somewhere down the car a woman had sobbed, broken off in mid-breath as if poked from behind or else grasping hard for composure. Something soared in Sophie’s chest: This was it; for this they had come so far, they had left all behind, they were starting life again.
Land
was echoing in her head, but she pressed her lips together and did not say it. No one said it: It was the only thought in the car, except perhaps for young wives and mothers understanding at last that they would never again see their mothers. Remembering then their own children who clung to them, even the most disobedient chastened by the emotion in the air, dimly aware of some unknown cataclysmic thing occurring, unsure how to behave, burying faces in skirts, or gazing upward at a suddenly subdued, somehow lessened, father.