Wild Rose (6 page)

The train pulled to a long hissing stop. Sophie and Pierre disembarked in the middle of the few others also getting off. Through the drifting clouds of steam and the milling passengers and those meeting them, the several teams of horses backing around to set their wagons and drays for loading settlers’ effects or other goods from the box cars, Sophie thought she saw Adelaide Smith and her sister far down the train past the engine. They were climbing into the only buggy present driven by a thick-set man whose face she couldn’t see, three dark silhouettes presenting their backs to her as they wheeled rapidly away. But it couldn’t have been them. Or maybe it was.

“I am still rocking in my bones,” she groaned to Pierre.

He said only, “First, a team and wagon. Monsieur Taylor says we can get supplies here. Then the land.” Taylor was a rancher who had, as he said “hitched a ride” on the settlers’ train at Moose Jaw, having been there on business, and was now heading back to his cattle ranch. He had chatted pleasantly enough with Pierre, saying at one point that there were no “Frenchies” where they were going and Pierre had looked dismayed, while she had thought angrily, Good! and was shocked at herself.

“Is there a hotel?” Sophie asked, dubious. She tried to see the village, but only three rough buildings presented themselves down the trail, beyond which there was only the grassy yellow rise of land with only a tinge of new green. And that sky! Would it never end? Against the horizon there was nothing. Nothing at all, not even a single tree. Never such a thing as a church spire. She had never seen such a skyline, never seen such an empty ground, had not imagined such a place could even exist. She put her hand on Pierre’s arm.

“It is like a sea; it is like there is no land, only sky; it is…” But she wasn’t afraid so much as fascinated and awed, and dropped her hand and stepped ahead of her husband, not stopping, as if she planned to go on forever until she had seen everything there was to see.

“You should have been Jacques Cartier,” Pierre said to her back, irritated. “Or Champlain.” She turned to him, surprised, to find he was now staring down the train to the boxcars where men had begun to unload the settlers’ supplies and equipment. As if speaking only to himself he muttered, “I like a farm, that is all. Our own land. Lots of it,” and the glint she hadn’t ever seen in his eyes at the mention of
the West
was there at last. At this, a tiny, festering sliver in her brain dissolved.

Then he was gone without another word to her, leaving her alone. She hardly noticed. What a lot there was to look at: the land, the endless layers of sky, great cumulus clouds setting sail above them, no hint of thunder or of lightning or rain in any of their gauzy white bottoms. The sun, too bright to look at, pouring itself over everything: horses, the hats of the men, the few women’s entangling skirts, the children’s round eager faces, the, although apparently newly-built, already weathered false-fronted buildings, piles of all kinds of goods on the ground from walking plows to stained sacks bulging with their anonymous contents, to the teams of horses, the train itself, and lighting again the tops of the already-brilliant clouds. Sophie was filled with light and space, no longer her heavy, earthbound Québec self; she wanted a long-handled spoon the better to eat those yellow-tinted clouds; she wanted to run miles across the pale grass as fast as she could go, to roll like a giggling schoolchild down the sloping, yellow-grassed hills.

She waited, walking the distance of the train, watching the people. Some passengers were being met: a wife with her children, by her dour husband, two grown sons by their aged father, one family by another family, while the few remaining passengers, solitary men all of them, strode or rode horseback off alone as if they knew exactly where they were going and why. A couple of wagons, that one buggy, and a dray all pulled by teams or single workhorses rattled, squeaked, and creaked toward or away from the trampled open ground that acted as the station platform.

Pierre, returning, still not looking at her, pointing, said, “We’ve piled our things there. They tell me it is oxen we will need.”

Sophie nodded sagely, hiding her dismay. Oxen! Surely only drovers used oxen. They were going to their own land. A fine team of Percherons or Belgians, was what they needed, but she said nothing. Pierre would do whatever needed doing, in that, she had faith, even if
grandmère
and Guillaume did not. Had he not been a farmer all his life?

But land! Land first, everything else second.

“There is no one out there,” the land agent told them when Pierre inquired as to neighbours. “Only cattle ranchers.” Pierre considered.

“To be first is best,” he said, and grinned over his shoulder at Sophie who stood beside him, a wifely foot back from where he and the land agent were studying the maps, her hands neatly clasped at her waist. But she could contain herself no longer and stepped forward to follow the agent’s pointing finger.

“What is that?” she asked, her finger pointing to a small dot.

“Bone Pile,” he answered brusquely. She couldn’t understand what he meant, and faltering, decided against asking.

“We have nearly thirty-three thousand square miles available for settlers,” he went on, but Sophie, not listening to the rest, thought,
thirty-three thousand square miles of grass and sky
. How much of creation is that? He meant only the square miles of land under his office’s jurisdiction, she thought suddenly, and could not – absolutely could not – conjure eight or ten or a thousand times more than that was
the West
.

“Water,” Sophie said, suddenly, her mind racing ahead as she did not recall it ever having done before, as if the pure air of the endless space that was
the West
had clarified her thought processes.
But neither man looked at her, even though she was pointing to a thin line that traced a watercourse, a stream perhaps.

“That is on land leased by a rancher,” the agent said, looking at Pierre, as if he were the one who had spoken. “Here is where free land begins.” His finger made a line perhaps a mile or so from the line of water Sophie had found. She stepped back again, biting her lips to keep herself silent.

The agent and Pierre carried on their conversation, Sophie’s mind wandering, her ear tuned to the noises outside, the men at the counter before her eventually coming to a decision. Papers were produced, Pierre lifted a pen to sign, dipping it in the ink with a flourish, whereupon Sophie stepped forward again to see what it was he was signing. A ten dollar bill extracted from his purse lay on the map beside the paper to which he was putting the pen. He gave her a sideways glance she recognized as faintly warning, and was shocked; they hadn’t been married a month. Yet the communication itself, so intimate, so subtle, thrilled her in itself, made her feel an adult, and she said to herself for the hundredth time:
We are married; we are man and wife
.

“I too am bound by this,” she whispered.

“Your signature is not required,” the land agent said brusquely, again not looking at her, as Pierre wrote his name.

“But what did you choose? Where are we going?”

“Here,” he said, the document signed, lifted by the agent so that Pierre might show her on the map that lay under the paper with its drying signature. She saw that Pierre had chosen a quarter-section almost identical to where she had pointed a moment earlier. She tucked down her chin, trying not to smile.

“Oxen,” Pierre said. “Where will I find some? And a wagon?”

“Next door,” the agent told him, jerking a thumb to the south.

“Best of luck to ye all,” he called as they went out the door, and as the three other men waiting behind them shuffled forward to take their turn choosing land. A thrill went down her backbone that now, that simply, they possessed land that was followed at almost the same moment by that rapier-thin shaft of terror that vanished as quickly as it had come.

Outside, hardly anyone was left, and a silence broken by horses shaking their heads at flies, their halters clinking, and squalls of wind racing through the grass flattening and darkening it, prevailed. But wait, back of the expected, the usual sounds of horses, if she cocked her head just so, she could hear a faint, high-pitched ripple of sound. Birds! No trees, yet somewhere out there in the grass there were birds. She wondered how they survived without trees to light in or in which to build nests, or to keep away from predators, but Pierre was moving ahead, stepping over the rough door sill into the next building that proved to be the general store.

Already its proprietor was greeting Pierre; he seemed to be hail-fellow-well-met enough for two, eager to do business with those newcomers who had disembarked into his purview. In back, he told them, discoloured teeth appearing from under his moustache and a certain rumble back of his voice as if he couldn’t get his chest clear, in fact, was a sturdy enough wagon, and the proprietor sent his son to find and bring in the team of oxen he had broken to harness and had been waiting for settlers to come so he could sell. While they waited, Sophie and Pierre joined him again in his store and began to fill the long list of needed supplies they had made sitting over the kitchen table at the Hippolyte’s farm in the day or two before they left, Mme Hippolyte ticking off items on her thick fingers. A ton of supplies, Sophie standing by with pencil and list, reading it aloud, and checking off items as they went into a growing pile outside the store’s front door. Flour, sugar, tea, coffee. Excitement kept her on her feet, kept her near Pierre, who didn’t seem to notice her proximity.

The oxen came, Pierre pronounced them sound; money was handed over and a receipt given. It was decided that Pierre would go back to the station and load the wagon with the furniture, household goods, harnesses, traps and the single plow that had once been his Uncle Onésime’s, then return to add the items they had purchased. A few cowboys had ridden up, dismounted, tied their horses to the hitching rail and, remained leaning against the building, chatting to each other from under the shade of their big hats. Inside the store the owner, his son, and a male clerk, worked at arranging supplies and answering requests for goods from men, apparently ranchers, who came and went. Since she and Pierre had clambered awkwardly off the train, their muscles slow to respond after a full week of sitting, Sophie had begun to notice that other than the few who had gone into the land, no women were to be seen anywhere. Did none of these men have wives? Were there no mothers in
the West?

One of the men lounging against the store wall called to Pierre. “You would be needing a milk cow?”

Pierre glanced at Sophie, then turned back to him.

“Bien sûr, oui,”
then, embarrassed, “Yes, a cow for milk.
Non?”
he inquired of Sophie. She nodded firmly, once, clasping her hands at her waist again so as not to forget herself and touch him. The cow, a Jersey, was tied to the back of a buggy in the shade on the far side of the store. Examined, she seemed sound enough, and as the men exchanged the cow for money Sophie shivered to think how fast their supply of cash was vanishing. But they had known it would, and calculating mentally, knew there was still enough for the building materials for the house.

Uneasy, although none of the men surreptitiously studying her had been anything less than courteous, if a trifle too interested, she opted to go with Pierre to the station, even though she could tell he would prefer that she stay behind. Even he could see, though, that to leave her behind was, if not unsafe, improper as there were no women there at all, and he gave her a helping hand up onto the wagon seat where she sat as straight and tall as she could. Bouncing away the short distance down the trail to the station, she could feel the eyes of men boring into her back, imagined she could hear their low-voiced comments to each other about her. Yet she felt pleased: Was she not more than a little comely?

By the time their goods were loaded, Sophie helping with the small items, both from the station and the store, hours had passed since they had gotten off the train, and even though the afternoon was vanishing into what should have been dusk, the sun remained high. The promise of hours more of daylight was held out both by the storekeeper, and by the sky itself, whose late afternoon clarity was astonishing and beautiful.

“Now, we go,” Pierre announced, finishing tying the new milk cow Fleurette – Sophie had already named her – to the back of the wagon. Sophie began to climb up onto the wagon seat, but the storekeeper protested, “It’s a long way to that homestead. Why not wait? You can leave in the morning.” He crossed his arms on his chest as he spoke and she became aware of how thick it was and how muscled his bare forearms with his shirt sleeves rolled as they were. She wanted to speak, but pressed her lips together. It was growing chilly, too, but she reminded herself that the woolen shawl folded in her portmanteau was thick and warm. Pierre answered, “But you have no
hôtel
. We ’ave our
tente
…” He shrugged.

“Tent,” Sophie whispered, and again felt his irritation with her. He saluted the two men who stood watching him, apparently unconcerned about the disregard of their good advice, went around and climbed up into his seat.

“Indians?” Sophie murmured to him. He started.

“Les sauvages?”
he began.

“Nothing to worry about,” the storekeeper called up to them. “All that trouble is a long way north of here. Indians around here don’t cause no trouble. Might want tea, or sugar, but that’s all.” Both she and Pierre knew very well there had been a good deal of trouble in the territory, now a province called Manitoba, when Sophie and Pierre were still children. The Métis, led by the great Louis Riel, who had had to run to Montana to stay out of prison, or maybe even a worse fate. Everyone in Québec knew about it, and about the settlement itself then over-run by
les anglais
, so anti-French that the
French-speakers, the Catholics, had had to leave their homes and their land to go farther west. No use to think of it; they were here, they were alone, they would be fine, and stubbornly, she low
ered her head, quelling a hint of nausea. In the meantime, they were rattling and swaying across what turned out, surprisingly, as it had appeared silky smooth, to be a very bumpy prairie, Pierre having located the first section peg only just laid out by the Dominion surveyors, and trying his best to keep steady in the direction of the next one. South, south by southwest.
West.