Wild Rose (8 page)

All the rest of that first long day they saw not another human. Pierre fired one shot to frighten off a wolf he saw skulking in the distance, antelope came by in large numbers, running, always running, skimming the hillsides, their white rumps shining, disappearing on the far side of whatever hill they were first seen on. No shortage of meat, Pierre told her, pleased. He would have shot one, he said, but where would they put it? They would get first to the land, then he would hunt for their meat. Birds soared overhead, shrieking, or calling in different tones, the hawks rising on updrafts, circling, driving downward, doing it again. They saw even an eagle, Pierre following it with his eyes, an omen, he said, for the good. The wind came and went, the sun shone down with too little warmth and too much brightness, clouds came, scattered, melted away. The wagon bounced, swayed and rattled, their goods clanking, thudding, pinging, the oxen’s harness squeaking. Sometimes it was hard to stay awake, their wagon a raft on this sea of grass.

On they went stopping only for Pierre to gauge their position, triumphant when yet another section marker reared up through the grass, recognizable by its height and the mound of earth in which it sat. They stopped three times to eat, only once making a fire. At last, as the final light of day faded away, he pronounced that they were there, “home,” he said, and they looked at each other, grinning again despite their exhaustion, “or nearly there,” he added, it being too dark to go on searching for quarter section markers hidden in the grass.

Sophie was so tired that when she tried to climb down from the wagon, she fell, landing in a heap on the earth, and lay there smelling the dry soil, the stiff, dusty grass, and something else, recognizing, only feet from where she lay, the serrated small leaves and prickly stems of the wild rose bushes, already beginning to bloom. Lifting her head, she looked again, and then again, to see that they grew in the low spots all around them. It was the first moment when she was reminded of home – that surprising, unforgettable fragrance of wild roses perfuming the dry air.

Chapter Four

Sanctuary

C
losing the cabin door behind her, she stepped out onto the prairie and began to walk toward the buggy and its driver. She didn’t recognize him, but he was continuing on a straight line toward her and her cabin and the dugout barn and the half-cut crop. She made another effort to compose herself, smoothing back her hair with both hands, capturing a blowing strand, tucking it in, straightening her apron, then turned and walked back toward the closed door of her house in as leisurely a manner as she could manage. There, composed, the
châtelaine
again, she turned to face the visitor.

At last he drew up a few feet from her, not yet climbing down from the buggy, the horse waiting patiently, flicking its ears at flies, tired from its journey from town or from wherever it had come in this heat, the younger, unsaddled horse fastened by a rope halter to the back of the buggy pulling back as if testing if he might now be free, and finding he was not, watching fearfully.

“Who are you?” the man in the buggy asked, a puzzled expression passing across his features and leaving behind a countenance that seemed to her implacable. As if as soon as he had asked the question, he knew the answer, and didn’t like it.

“I am Madame Hippolyte, wife of Pierre Hippolyte. We are the owners of this homestead.” His eyes had taken on a dangerous glitter: Her instinct told her to back into the cabin and bar the door, but wait, she told herself, not yet. She hoped Pierre hadn’t taken his rifle; this she hadn’t noticed. During the rebellion he had taught her to shoot, but since then she hadn’t touched the gun. But surely Pierre, who loved his Winchester rifle and was as fine a shot – bringing in feasts of deer or antelope – as he wasn’t a handler of horses, wouldn’t go off without his gun.

She worked to keep her eyes steady on the stranger, who held the reins loosely in his hands, not moving, staring down at her, then lifting his head to look purposefully around at the buildings, as if she weren’t there, the crop ahead and to his right, and then, further out to the wide prairie he had just crossed in the smothering, late August heat.

“Hippolyte’s wife,” he muttered, sounding somewhere between disgusted and resigned. He looped the reins around the rod attached to the footboard, climbed down, and stood facing her. He was of average height, but heavy-bodied and short legged, his face not as sun-darkened as Pierre’s, but well-lined, although she could see no hint of grey in his thick brown moustache. She straightened even further, if such were possible, facing him squarely although it took all her courage to do so, as he took off his wide-brimmed hat, holding it in both hands with a humility that belied everything else about him. She saw he had not come to harm her, and this caused her uneasiness to grow even more.

“Pierre,
mon mari
– he is – is he hurt? Is he – dead?” she asked. At this the stranger grinned a twisted, unpleasant grin, then quickly wiped it away.

“Mrs. – uh – Hippolyte,” he began. “I sure do hate to tell you this, but your husband” – here he paused – “has sold me your farm. The land, the buildings, the crop, the animals. Even the contents of your house.” He had looked closely into her face all the time he spoke; now he glanced away from her.

She took a step backward, put one shaking hand against the doorframe to support herself, tried to speak, but found she couldn’t control her jaw to form words. She could make no sense of what this stranger had just said to her. Or rather, she knew very well what he had said, it was only that it was such a shock, and all the many meanings and consequences of it were racing through her mind at the same time, tumbling about like swift foxes playing; she could not catch one of them and hold it; she would faint from the tumult.

“We have been here nearly four years,” she managed to say, hearing, helplessly, the irrelevance. The stranger had reached past her, Sophie so overcome she didn’t even flinch at the thick body inches from hers, the heavy arm brushing her forearm as he reached for the latch behind her to open the door.

“You better sit down,” he said. From deep inside the cabin, Charles emitted his waking cry for her. She hurried through the main room to the bedroom behind it and as she picked him up, the shaking diminished. Holding him tightly, she returned to the other room where the stranger pulled back one of the straight-backed wooden chairs for her, indicating she should sit, which she did, although not without annoyance that he would offer her a chair in her own house.

“I’m Walter Campion,” he said. “Came here from Ontario a while ago. I was looking around for land, saw your husband, he said he wanted to sell fast. Said that farming was not for him and he was leaving with his wife and he’d give me a bargain. I thought, better a place with sixty broke acres and a house and barn than one where I have to start from scratch.” He smiled self-consciously, then frowned, as if reminding himself to whom it was he spoke.

Sophie said, forcing herself, “When? He was – alone?”

“Yesterday,” he said. “Young woman in the wagon with him. Yellow hair,” he added, not looking at her.

“He – sold our farm?” she asked, still incredulous. Campion only nodded, steel glinting in his eyes again. He had seated himself in Pierre’s chair, casually, as if he had always sat there. His bulk was such that the room became smaller in a way it never did when Pierre entered it.

“Show me the bill of sale,” she demanded. Charles struggled to get down and she let him, hardly noticing she had. Campion reached inside his shirt and produced a piece of paper, holding it out to her. She had trouble reading it in the dim light and with her vision unaccountably blurring, but Pierre’s signature was at the bottom.

“But he didn’t –” she swallowed. “He didn’t ask me if I wanted to sell. And where is the money? What did you pay him?” She wanted to ask, and who was the woman?

He said, “I bought this place fair and square; we saw the lawyer in town, I gave your husband the money.” Again, he didn’t say how much. “Looks like he’s gone with it.” The last was heavy, as if for one second he had allowed himself to feel the weight of Pierre’s perfidy. She was regaining some sense now.

“I do not consent,” she told him in the coldest voice she could muster so that he looked at her anew, a brightness appearing in his eyes, the colour of which she couldn’t determine, some kind of calculation going on, his gaze dropping to the tabletop.

“You got no choice. I can give you a day or so to gather your personal things.”

She sat stiffly, not looking at him, trying to see what it was she should do. But if she resisted, he would have no trouble to force her away. She looked to the door – the gun was gone from its resting place above it.

“I will not go,” she told him, her voice growing louder, barely containing rising hysteria. He only stared at her. There was a silence, she unclenched her fists, swallowed, then said in a muted tone, “I need only an hour. But taking what I can gather in an hour in no way signifies my agreement to this sale,” a part of her amazed that she could find such words. But she rose, gathered Charles from where he stood, fingers in his mouth, gazing unblinkingly up at Campion’s impressive moustache. With her son riding her hip, she turned to go into the bedroom to begin packing, when suddenly she thought aloud, “I have no way to travel.” Turning to him, “I must ask you to take me to town.”

He looked at her gravely, once again assessing her, and a knife of rage went through her so that she quickly lowered her eyes to keep him from seeing it.

He took in a long suck of air through his nose, as if exhausted with this whole annoying inconvenience. “I have business back in town too. Want to sell that horse –” he tossed his head toward the young horse tied to the back of the buggy outside the door. “I’ll take you,” and she felt that now he was squelching amusement, which perception further enraged her. But she had to get to town, she would find out who this woman was. She would send the Mountie after Pierre; she would retrieve the money; would go elsewhere, since she doubted she could farm without a husband. Had she already accepted that he was truly gone? That he had indeed abandoned her – his wife, his one true love?

Now, all the fear and anger, the pain and disbelief retreated. It was as if she were floating above the turmoil far below her, and she moved to gather belongings, thinking only of how best to do that, conscious – ridiculously – of her own still youthful body, of her baby’s heft, of how easily her fingers worked to lift garments, to fold them neatly, to place them in her portmanteau. How cleverly her hands worked, she thought, as she lifted, discarded, chose, folded cloth creaselessly.

At first it went through her mind that she wouldn’t need to take the heavier things with her, her dishes, her frying pan and pots, she could get them later, that is, if Campion would let her, or when Pierre returned… If… Yes, she admitted to herself, but distantly, idly, Pierre was capable, in a fit of rage and when she and his son were not in his line of sight, of doing what Mr. Campion claimed he had done. Maybe she would never see this place again. But even this thought failed to halt her in her careful choosing, lifting, arranging.

How well I am doing, she thought, pleased at her own cleverness. She had taken Charles’ clothing and what little she had of her own, plus her two pieces of jewelry – her earrings with tiny diamonds in them that had been her mother’s inexplicably she put on – and a pretty brooch, a wedding gift from Pierre’s family. She was about to leave the bedroom when her eye fell on the barrel on which her few family pictures stood on a cloth she had herself, before her marriage, embroidered. The barrel contained her china dishes, Sèvres, that had come from relatives in France to celebrate her grandparents’ wedding, the porcelain so thin as to be nearly translucent, painted with bright pictures, and edged with gold.

She had remembered them in those confusing days before she left, knew them to be hers because they had been given to Julie, her real grandmother, and her grandfather for a wedding gift, long before she had been born. She wondered if her grandmother had packed them away this way when she married grandfather, because Sophie knew of them, but had never seen them used and without giving it much thought, had attributed this failure to use them to a combination of grandmother’s stinginess, and her love of her own dishes that had the family initial and crest on them… This man, Campion, would not have her dishes. Useless, she had to admit, as they had so far been in this wild country. The dishes themselves, though, now served to bring her back to the solidity of the rough floor beneath her feet, to the cabin’s stifling heat, and she moved more slowly, the turmoil returning.

Campion had vanished. Glancing out the window, she saw his hat over the poles of the corral and she understood that he was surveying the farm that was now his. Probably watering his own horses, maybe letting them graze a little while he waited for her, corralling and putting out feed for the saddle horse, the cow, and chickens, she thought, shutting them up so the wolves and coyotes won’t get them tonight, maybe even milking the cow yet again. Maybe he would bring in their five cows that grazed far out on the prairie. Who would care for the delicate Fleurette, whom she loved, and for Pierre’s beautiful Tonerre?

At last, the buggy laden with the two adults and the child, and the few belongings she was taking in the portmanteau she had carried on the train West and since hardly used tucked in at her feet, the barrel of china wedged behind the seat and the back wall of the buggy, the great bay horse to whom this load was nothing, at Campion’s command, pulled away from the cabin and from the farm to which she and Pierre had given, for four long years, every ounce of their strength and courage. She wanted to look back, but remembered Lot’s wife, who looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.