Wild Rose (15 page)

But as Suzette had called to her this sympathetic remark said almost in bravado, in that unguarded moment, the sound had come to Sophie again, a cry, high-pitched, short, of such a texture and intensity that Sophie’s stomach had plummeted as it did when she was dreaming she was falling off a cliff. Who was it? Not someone she knew; not grandfather. It was night; she was asleep; she had dreamt it. But no, now, she heard it again, it echoed in her head and her heart and her gut, a sound that came out of a universe of which she knew nothing, did not know even existed, and that terrified her so that then she had pulled her pillow up over her head, pressing it on each side against her ears. Now, at the memory, sweat having broken out on her forehead and palms, she walked faster as if to outrun it.

Oncle Henri
was dead. That meant she would never see him again, that meant he would never again come in the front door, kiss
grand-mère
on the wrinkled cheek even as
grand-mère
pulled back her head from the second kiss as if he would spit on her, and he laughed, then went on past her without waiting for her to lead him to his older brother’s study, from where would come loud male voices and laughter. If he saw Sophie, he would sometimes lift her, swing her around once, kiss the top of her head, call her
ma chère petite-nièce
Sophie before he put her down again. Often he brought her a sweet that he tucked into her apron pocket, one finger to his lips to indicate she should say nothing, a quick wink like his older brother, her grandfather, then he would be gone again.
Grand-mère
knew about the sweets, but she never took one from her, a puzzle, because she was allowed sweets otherwise only in the spring when the new batch of maple syrup and sugar would arrive in the kitchen.

He would be in heaven by now, she surmised. Heaven was a good place, he would be happy there, not pale and anxious as he had been the last few times he had visited. No kiss for grandmother, no sweet for Sophie, only a touch to the top of her head as he passed, as if an accident, as if he hadn’t seen her at all. And for some time, now that she thought about it as she walked alone from school through the bright afternoon, when he visited there had been no laughter and loud voices from
grand-père’s
study.

Dead. He is dead, she whispered to herself, and waited for the sky to crack open because she had dared to say this out loud. She wasn’t allowed to say that her mother was dead, or that her father was dead. Or her little brother Achille who had killed her mother somehow, or her older sisters she had never known either, Françoise or Édith, were dead. She had to say that they were in heaven. And anyway, she couldn’t remember a time when they were all alive. She twisted her head to one side, and then turned it upward to the burning blue sky as if should she strain hard enough, she might see her uncle, her mother, her father, her brother and sisters smiling benignly down on her.

Before she was aware of crying she felt tears on her cheeks and for an instant, an instant only, she wished she were dead too, and up there in heaven with them where there was no Sister Marie-Catherine, no grandmother, no hours to spend motionless, kneeling in church or sitting between her grandparents not daring to so much as move a finger. She couldn’t breathe; terror at what she had just thought seized her, she was panting, trying to catch a full breath. She would go to hell;
le curé
Deschambeault would see to that, burning in the fiery pit for all eternity, such torments she would suffer, never to see heaven. Never meet her mother there. She would confess; if she confessed and said many, very many
Avé Marias
she would be spared. But oh, how she wanted her uncle back; how she missed him.

But when she finally reached the house, bracing herself for the scolding and punishment, a lie on her lips about being kept behind at school, trying to think of a reason for this that would not attract more or harsher punishment, no one was about. The door into the
salon
where the coffin sat was closed tightly and not a sound emerged from behind it. Antoinette, she discovered, was in the back garden, her
grandmother nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she was in the
salon
. And where was grandfather? By their absences reprieved, she rushed up the stairs as silently as possible, threw off her school dress, put it away in the closet, changed quickly to her after-school dress, and sat down at her desk to pretend to be studying. Although there was only silence from below she had a sense, perhaps from half-heard whisperings and swishings of garments, faint clicks that meant doors shut as quietly as possible, that there was much activity going on in the house, although when she deliberately listened she heard only silence, and later, the faint pings of pots and pans being moved in the kitchen. She wondered if this strange time would ever pass, if the coffin would remain forever below in the
salon
, if her uncle would ever be buried.

Yet Antoinette called her for dinner and both her grandmother and grandfather were at their customary places at the opposite ends of the table, neither eating, sipping at water from their heavy glasses, grandmother toying with her cutlery, rearranging her napkin, grandfather as heavy and dark as a block of obsidian, not moving at all or speaking. Sophie ate carefully, the thick bean soup sticking in her throat, requiring much swallowing, and tiny sips, until grandmother finally gave her permission to leave the table, although both her grandparents remained there as she, with infinite care to make no noise at all, shut the heavy dining room door behind her.

That night she again put herself to bed, no one came to help her, she knew only that she must have gone to sleep because she had wakened to the faintest hint of light creeping along the windowsill, stretching a finger to touch her pillow. She had not known if it was morning or still night. A horse whinnied somewhere close by, she would have snuggled further into her warm bed and drifted back into sleep, but there was something strange about the horse whinnying, she did not know what, but let her mind examine the problem in a half-interested, drowsy way. It had come to her that their horse, when she wasn’t in the pasture outside of the village, was on the far side of the house from where Sophie lay, she should have barely been able to hear her.

A sound from below woke her further and she pushed her quilt away from her face, sat up on her elbows. In the full silence then, no heavy cotton rasping against her head, no whisper of feathers, holding her breath, she knew there were people again below in the hall. She was too sleepy to get up out of bed, the room too cold so that even her curiosity wasn’t strong enough as it would once have been to propel her up. Instead, she listened, her child’s hearing so acute that she could see pictures with each tiny, muffled sound: the front door opening, the squeak of wood against wood, a faint grunt, hinges rasping as if something were pressing too hard against the door, more shuffling noises, then the door shutting so quietly she hardly heard anything at all.

She got out of her bed and at the window, leaned against it so as to see as much as possible of the road below. It was the box, the lamps in the
salon
and the sitting room along with the pale yellow glow behind the darkness that was the forest on the edge of town revealed a wagon, two horses, four men carrying the coffin, with visible effort lifting it into the wagon, then climbing in themselves, two on the driver’s seat, two of them at the box’s head, the horses moving slowly away to drive quietly out of town into the blackness that was the west.

~

Sophie put down her napkin
, glanced inquiringly at her grandmother, receiving a brusque if barely discernible nod in return, when without looking at his wife, grandfather announced to his dinner plate, “The child will come along with
me.” She didn’t know where they were going, but could guess: It was Sunday, grandmother, who hadn’t spoken, wasn’t going with them: They would spend the afternoon in the country visiting at the farm home of one of his better customers, or even –
because this had happened before although rarely – perhaps they would drive to two or three different customers’ homes and at each place the men would smoke pipes together and discuss the weather and the roads while the women bustled about passing mugs of beer to them, or fussed over the many small children, and she, happily would be allowed to run about with those her own age. She could barely contain her excitement and smiled in the direction of her grandfather who didn’t so much as look at her. Nonetheless, she left the table as silently as she could to run upstairs to change her dress to a light muslin one and to gather a shawl just in case they came back late when the day had cooled. She did this mostly so grandmother would have nothing to complain about, no excuse to keep her from going.

When they were safely seated in the buggy and the horse was pulling them along down the winding road that led out of town, through the forest, and into the countryside past small farm after small farm, she asked, “Where are we going, grandfather?”

“To mes cousins,”
he answered. “To the Hippolytes.” She didn’t know the Hippolytes were cousins and would have asked about it, but supposed that he might just as well have said,
mes copains
– my pals, so she didn’t bother to inquire as to how the family came to be cousins and whether or not they were her cousins too. And anyway, if they were really cousins, wouldn’t grandmother have sent some small gift with them if she would not come herself? But who understood grandmother? Certainly not Sophie. The buggy rolled on through sunshine and shadow, the birds making an uproar as they passed, and deer twice leaping across the wet trail before them. Even the very air smelled free to Sophie and she breathed it in deeply, smiling without realizing she was.

“I am so glad to see you!” Violette cried as the mud-splashed buggy rolled into the Hippolyte farmyard. As she put up her arms to help Sophie down – Violette was inches taller than petite Sophie – her parents already on the other side crying greetings to grandfather as if he were the returned prodigal son, and the oldest son, Alexandre with his tousled mop of dark blonde hair, ready to hop up into grandfather’s vacated seat to drive the horse to the barn, unhitch it, and give it feed and water although it needed neither after so short a run and having been fed before Mass that morning. Violette went on, hugging Sophie as if they were indeed cousins or maybe even sisters, “I was so bored! Sister Marie-Catherine says it is a sin to be bored, but I was bored anyway!” She laughed a delighted, full-throated, child’s laugh to which Sophie couldn’t help but laugh herself, and as for the hug, it was something she so seldom received it made her shy.

Violette Hippolyte was only a year older than Sophie and attended the convent too, although Sophie didn’t know her beyond passing her in the hall where they were not allowed to speak. Even though she was only fourteen, there were rumours that she had a vocation, that as soon as she finished her last year
at school she would go to the Grey nuns in Montréal to whom she was already bound. In her own farmyard and among her brothers and sisters she seemed less formidable, warmer, and more open. Her long dark hair wasn’t in the convent’s chignon either, although Sophie’s was at grandmother’s insistence, and hung down Violette’s back, its unruly abundance tied loosely with a pale green ribbon that went well with her blue cotton dress. Sophie felt a pang of regret on Violette’s behalf, who would be required to cut it all off when she arrived to join her order.

After she had made proper greetings to the elder Hippolytes, Sophie and Violette linked arms and went off together to perambulate the farmyard and then the small, well-kept orchard behind it, and behind it, the Hippolyte family’s thick woodlot. Violette’s younger sisters followed them, but not too closely, sometimes being distracted from their close study of the two older girls, by interests of their own. There were three of them: the youngest Cécile who kept a finger in her mouth and her big brown eyes fixed on Sophie, plump Lucie, so much like her mother already, and tiny Marie Ange who, although smaller, was older than Lucie. Soon the little girls were running about playing a game they seemed to have devised themselves during the long days when no visitors came, and no other children. It involved a lot of calling and chasing each other in and out of the trees so that often they ran ahead of Violette and Sophie, sometimes circling them, sometimes disappearing entirely to reappear, giggling with each other so that the older girls, watching, laughed too.

The older Hippolyte boys, Marcel, the tallest of them, and Alexandre, paid the girls no attention, going about their business from barn to house or out to a nearby field where they almost disappeared in the tall hay, then could be seen on the other side of the field smoking pipes as they lounged under the branches of a massive oak. Herménègilde, the youngest boy, had gone to the nearby stream to fish, Violette informed Sophie, and wasn’t seen all afternoon, but Pierre, a little older than Sophie, was hanging about the farmyard, not talking to the girls, but watching them as they made their slow way back into the farmyard proper. Sophie couldn’t stop herself from staring at him, wondering why he was lingering, going neither with the men in the house, nor his older brothers under the tree, nor fishing with Hérmènegilde. Was he being punished?

Violette said, “Ignore him, Sophie. He is always looking for attention.” But Sophie found she couldn’t. His eyes, blacker than
grand-mère’s
even, but at the same time light-filled, seemed to her to sparkle, and his teeth were so white in his brown face when he smiled, which it seemed to her he was always doing, that she kept glancing toward him in hope of seeing the beauty of that smile again, and to experience again that strange feeling in her gut when she saw it.