Wild Rose (7 page)

“We must name our animals,” she announced, studying the oxen, one a tiny bit bigger than the other, one with darker brown spots than the bigger one.

“You choose,” he said, and for the first time since they had disembarked from the train, he looked at her with the old light in his eyes. She considered.

“I have it! Let’s call them Gog and Magog!” He laughed aloud at that.

“Where did you get that? Because of where we come from?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up at him, and was flushed with happiness, at her own perfect choice. “Gog and Magog, and Fleurette,
la vache
.” He laughed again, but offered no objection.

By nine, the light finally beginning to seriously falter, it was May after all, they were hurrying to set up their first camp in the wilderness. Pierre had unhitched the oxen, hobbled them, and saving the few oat bundles, given them a little of the hay that he had bought from the station agent, the grazing not being good enough yet, this early in the spring, although the men lounging
in front of the store had told him that the sun-cured grass even left over from last year would help fill his oxen’s bellies.

Pierre had used the tent, an unexpected wedding gift from the old farmer, M. Fournier, for whom Pierre had worked now and then, as covering for their load and the tent pegs clanked in their canvas bag beneath the wagon seat. Before long he had the tent laid out carefully on the grass before them, the bag of pegs at his feet, the handle of the heavy long-handled mallet leaning against his leg, and looked around assessingly. Sophie pointed. Yes, indeed, a higher spot, but not as high as to make them conspicuous against the horizon, although there was no one to see them–except possibly Indians. For an instant, as he began working, she stood patiently, hands clasped at her waist, and then remembered that she was not standing in the convent yard now, not ever again, that she wasn’t pacing demurely in
grand-mère’s
garden pretending to read her missal and thinking of Pierre: She was where she wanted to be, in
la région sauvage
,
les pays d’en haut
, the North-West Territories. The sun was sinking below the horizon bathing the prairie in a rich golden light that quadrupled the lengths of their shadows. In
the West
, she too, had become a giant.

She leaped as if she had been poked, ran to the front of the bulky grey canvas Pierre was dragging, caught an edge in both hands and began to pull beside her husband. Pierre barely broke stride, glanced at her, lifted a hand as if to refuse her help, then dropped his arm and kept moving forward. Elated, for a brief instant, she surged ahead of him.

Soon they lay entwined beneath wool blankets under the canvas, Sophie’s forehead tucked against Pierre’s neck listening to his slow breathing. Tired beyond words, both of them, but too excited to sleep.

“As soon as we can we will get a good team of Percherons; these oxen are too slow.” She yawned. “We will have a neighbour,” he said. “The agent said there was nobody, but when we were loading the storekeeper said so.”

“What?” She had imagined that in all of the North-West Territories, Saskatchewan District, there would be no one but them.

“Napoléon Beausoleil and his family. They moved here from the Red River district two years ago and are well-settled.”

“How far?” She hoped it was a long way.

“Six miles or so, I think,” Pierre said. “They came west fifteen or more years ago. I’ll be glad to have somebody nearby who knows the country.”

Wolves had begun to howl far in the distance, their voices faint but nonetheless causing shivers to run down her back. She hugged Pierre harder. Nearly asleep, he mumbled, “My gun…,” reminding her that it leaned against their bags beside him, that he had only to put out his arm to grasp it.

Soon he was asleep, but she lay beside him, until, judging by his breathing that his sleep was deep enough that she wouldn’t disturb him, she moved carefully out from under his muscle-heavy arm that lay across her chest. She needed to empty her bladder, but more than that, some authority was urging her:
Get up, go outside, see what it is you have contracted for yourself.
She gathered her shawl, pulled it around her shoulders, then sought and found her felt slippers. So still was the air and mild the night that they hadn’t secured the tent flap and she crawled out, only standing when the stiff grass, an astonishing thing to her, she had never felt such grass, began to hurt her knees. She would not go far; it was too dark, and too dangerous to stray. She could hear the oxen and the cow snuffling and breathing on the far side of the tent, comforting sounds, and thought to say a prayer of thanks for having made it this far, and to ease her fears.

But when she stood and looked about her, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the night after the darkness of their tent, she forgot to be afraid, so dumbfounded was she by what she saw: Had there been so many stars in Québec? Surely not. She stared and stared, letting her head drop back until she lost her balance and would have fallen if she hadn’t put out a hand against the wagon wheel to support herself. A quilt, she thought, at first, and then, a flower garden made of stars, but as she continued to gaze into the heavens, sobered: No, nothing so dainty, it was a vortex of stars, a force field drawing her upward into their ancient, eternal realm.

Something, some force, some
thing
pulling inside her chest, heretofore narrow and warm, a mere girl’s; pulling, pulling, crying wordlessly to go there, back from whence it had come. What something? It was as if it was not her, Sophie Charron Hippolyte, headstrong, lovesick, but something else that resided inside that cage of bone, that perched there for the duration as if assigned and could not leave, for whatever reason until she breathed her last: her soul, her spirit, her own little speck – perhaps – of God. She fell to her knees, her head still tilted upward, as the thing inside her yearned upward with such power she felt it might burst out of her chest. No one, she thought, could gaze at this and think this vast, glittering dome could hold so puny a thing as a heaven, would tolerate a silly human paradise.

In that instant she disbelieved. Not in the moment and its truth itself, but beside this…this…how thin and small the bosom of the church she had been taught was her only and best home, the place where outside of God, all truth resided. Beside this wonder, she felt the church, its teachings, its power, slipping away from her grasp, it was like trying to catch water in your fingers, it moved on, it grew thin and pale, it vanished. It was nothing, after all. So this,
this
, she thought, is
the West
. And sank
further, onto her bottom, to sit, closing her mouth that must have been agape all the while, moistening her lips with her tongue, her breath slowing at last. What she had been thinking was flooding over her, filling her with terror; she fought back against it. God would forgive; He would understand. She shook with the two ideas fighting against each other in her heart and mind, first one, the other, then she prayed:
Notre père
…until weariness began to creep through her, she remembered who she was, where she was, and rose, still shaky, went into the tent, crept into the bedroll beside Pierre, reaching for his human warmth.

~

Then there was sunshine
, Pierre’s deep voice commanding the oxen, the walls of the tent moving slowly, or with a crack and a thud, in and out with the wind. She scrambled from under the blankets, stood for a second holding her head in both hands trying to grasp again the enormity of where they were, of what they had done. She rushed outside and the chilly air shocked her back into herself and the moment.

Pierre was harnessing the oxen and didn’t turn his head toward her.

“Don’t look at me,” she called, and vanished to the other side of the wagon where in a moment Pierre would re-hitch the oxen. There she voided her bladder as she had failed to do the night before.

“There’s a small bit of water in the basin,” Pierre called. He was tackling the tent pegs now, and she hurried to the spot in the earth where they had the night before dug a hole for their fire and dragged or carried rocks from wherever they could find them, not much lying loose, but mostly half-buried in the hard prairie sod, to form a ring about it. When she admired Pierre’s campfire building skills, he grunted, “Did I not spend a full winter in the bush cutting trees? How do you think we kept from freezing to death?” He was unamused, barely noticed her.

Inside the ring of stones the blue granite basin sat, an inch of their precious water supply in the bottom, and she washed her hands and splashed her face, even drew up her nightdress to splash the remainder between her legs, then pulled off her nightgown and used it to dry herself. Shivering, she moved naked across the grass toward the tent. Then Pierre was behind her, his hand on her rump, the other spread against her belly. Before she could stop herself she gasped, and was about to pull away, to run playfully into the tent where he would follow her, and lie down beside her, kissing her everywhere, when suddenly he stepped back, dropping his hands, planting one long kiss on her neck where it joined her shoulder. “Dress,” he said.
“Vite.
If we’re lucky, by tonight we raise our tent on our own land.”

Surprised at his self-denial – she’d seen no hint of that before –
she hurried inside before he folded the tent down around her, gathered her clothing – refusing her stays – pulling over her shoulders her chemise and undershirt, pulling up her pantaloons and stockings, down her petticoats, then the blouse, the long skirt, the tight little boots with their numerous buttons to be done. She would have left the stays behind on the prairie, but knew Pierre would frown on that, and who knew, she told herself angrily, a Cardinal might show up for tea and I would need my stays. She pushed them into her portmanteau, and carried out the two travelling bags, returning to roll the bedroll, cast about for anything else, and emerged, nodding to Pierre who quickly collapsed the tent. Just so.

“We’ll stop later for breakfast,” he told her, mounting beside her, the goods stowed, the tent spread out over them and tied down. She held the edge on the far side from him and he had come around to tie the knots himself.

“Show me how you did that,” she asked, noticing that his knots would hold, yet would be easy to untie. He demonstrated, but seeing he was growing impatient, said, “Never mind. I will practice and practice.” How extraordinary it was that one needed to know how to tie knots!

Then they were on their way, Sophie still tucking up the last strands of her hair, pinning them in place. His eagerness for their land surpassed hers. She wasn’t sure for what it was she had been so eager, and recognized that she had mostly looked only backward, at what she was escaping.

“Back to the bouncing!” she said, gaily, to evade her own thoughts.

All around them the tan and cream prairie spread, hints of green beginning to show, behind them only the ring of stones and the burnt twigs that had made their fire to show they had passed that way. Low rises mostly too small to be called hills undulated out to the horizon. But wait, wasn’t that…could that be… “Pierre,” she said, her voice low, her hand on his arm. Not a mile away, coming down the passageway between two hills was someone on horseback. Pierre drew Gog and Magog to a halt, his right arm going forward to where his gun stood against the front wall of the wagon box. They waited. The mounted man came forward, broke into two, a woman on a smaller horse behind him, a child riding in front of her. Indians. Sophie forgot to breathe.

Pierre murmured, “They’ll be curious; tea, the storekeeper said.” Sophie knew exactly where the tea was, in the seat below her, where it would be easy to find when they stopped for breakfast. The Indian family drew up, the man close to them, the woman and child on the pony staying well back, the horses motionless. Pierre did not get down from the wagon, nor did he lift his rifle.

“Bon jour,”
he called, tipping his hat with the side of his hand. “A beautiful morning.” The Indian, medium-sized, his body the darkest brown and gleaming as if polished, no spare flesh but well-muscled, his face grooved, his hair in braids, said nothing. Pierre went on. “We have a gift for you,”
un cadeau
he said, and was there not a flicker in the man’s face as if this he understood? But, Sophie remembered, had not the first white men here been French? Pierre put his hand out to Sophie, who reached below to open the tin she had filled the night before so she wouldn’t have to deal with the sack each time she needed it. She took a piece of cheap cotton from her supply, this one about six inches square, scooped tea from the tin into the centre of the cloth, tied it into a bundle. Pierre took it from her hand. The Indian had made a gesture without so much as turning on his mount and now the pony carrying the woman and child was moving slowly forward, past him, until it stopped beside Pierre. The woman lifted a hand, her eyes downcast, her face expressionless, Pierre set the bundle of tea into her palm, nodded briskly, formally, and the woman turned the pony and rode back to take up her position behind the man. Then Sophie saw that on her back an infant slept, strapped into a carrying case.

They sat that way for a moment longer, no one speaking, until a gust of wind came up. Pierre had to lift a hand to hold onto his hat, Sophie shivered, spring, yes, but not yet hot, and would have taken up her shawl around her shoulders, but thought it better not to move. When she had seen the woman’s face near hers, the way the child, perhaps two years, had glanced into her face and quickly down again, the wonder, the light of intelligence in his eyes, she had lost her fear. Now she waited, as Pierre was doing. The Indian nodded, the same brisk, formal nod Pierre had given the woman, his horse beginning to move.
“Au revoir,”
Pierre said, saluting, touching the near oxen’s back with his whip, that his clever brother Alexandre had made for him, and the Indian turned to ride north, the pony with its load following, calling back one deep-chested word that had the sound of farewell, and soon were gone into the landscape.