Journey to Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #3) (23 page)

Among the green growth at the edge of the stream a certain small plant grew, catching her attention. None taller than a foot in height, amid its grasslike leaves bloomed a small, clustered, blue-violet flower; its six petal-like segments were star-shaped, with yellow centers and sharply pointed tips. It was beautiful in its daintiness. It was brave in its choice of bed, with the intimidating prairie grasses above and all around.

“What are they?” Tierney asked, enthralled.

“Actually they’re not grass, though the leaves look grassy, but a member of the iris family,” Will explained, taking a handful of them from Buster, who had laid aside his frog tin in favor of other pursuits.

“Put some water in your cup, son,” Will suggested, “and we’ll take the flowers home to Mama. They might live,” he said in an aside to Tierney, “and they might not. But, fresh or wilted, Lavinia will appreciate the effort. She loves beauty.” A spasm crossed his face, a face unremarkable except for its unremarkableness. “And she loves coulees . . . we visit them far too infrequently. Sometimes she goes with me when I go for wood, or, in earlier days, water. Though we’ve got a well now and water is sufficient for the first time since we came, we used to take barrels to the nearest coulee, fill them, lug them home—for drinking, washing, everything.”

Comfortable they might now be, Tierney realized, but the Ketchums had paid a price not figured in dollars and cents. First the soddy . . . then the lack of water . . . whatever else they had been called upon to endure. Tierney was devoutly glad that it was in the past and she would reap the benefits of their sacrifices.

“Now this,” Will said, pointing to a foot-high plant with a lovely greenish shaft of small, spiky flowers, “if I’m not mistaken, is camas. See,” he said, pulling one, “it has a bulbous root.
People who don’t know, sometimes mistake it for the prairie onion and eat it to their own harm. It’s definitely poisononous. But,” he thrust the bulb near Tierney’s face, “it doesn’t smell like an onion. That’s the clue.”

“I’m sure I shan’t be eating prairie onions,” Tierney said decidedly. “Or . . . will I?”

Will gave a shout of laughter. The little side trip down into the depths of the coulee was good for him; he seemed to have left his troubles above, on the prairie.

“You never can tell,” he warned. “Now this looks like the coneflower. The Indians make great use of many of these plants . . . they make a tea from the leaves and centers of the flower of this particular one.

“Well, enough nature study,” he said, rising from his knees in the grassy growth. “Actually, I’ve imparted to you just about all I know; it’s too late in the season for buttercups and too early for goldenrod.”

It was just a matter of minutes on Will’s part to hitch the horses, while Tierney gathered up the remnants of their lunch, packed the box and put it in the wagon, and rounded up the reluctant Buster with his tin of frogs and his cup of flowers. Climbing in, she clung to the seat while Will maneuvered the wagon up the steep bank, away from the small “oasis” and up onto the windswept “desert” again.

But it was no desert. Southeastern Saskatchewan and Alberta did indeed have their semiarid areas and were dominated by short grasses and sages, their shallow, spreading roots readily absorbing the little rainfall and their small leaves helping to conserve moisture despite the scorching sun and drying winds. But here, as in most of Canada’s grassland, rainfall, though light, was not insignificant, and the grass grew to about four feet.

Tierney looked at Buster, intent on play in the bottom of the wagon, and shuddered, realizing his small stature would be completely enveloped by grass if he should roam away. Once surrounded by grass, losing all sense of direction, what hope was there? More than one story of lost children had seeped out
to sober prospective settlers; only the desperation of their situation drove them to come ahead anyway, no matter the cost, taking a chance on the very lives of their little ones. The grasses in summer, the blizzards in winter—it was a fearsome place, especially for children who might be lost in them forever.

The prairie was demanding too much of her attention! But what else was there? For miles and miles, in all directions, it stretched, even, it seemed, to infinity. What a relief it was, almost a hysterical relief, to see another wagon approaching. Tierney watched it come as one would watch for Christmas or for the dawn, her attention focused solely on it until it pulled up alongside.

“Hello there,” the unknown driver called, having first hollered, “Whoa!” To have passed without stopping and drawing together in some sort of camaraderie was unthinkable; Tierney could see that.

“Hello, yourself,” Will called jovially. “Name’s Will Ketchum, from over Fielding way.”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard of you. Chickens, right?”

“Right. Just took a batch of eggs to town. This here,” he indicated Tierney, “is our new help—Tierney Caulder, from Scotland. Back there is my son, Buster.”

“How do you do, ma’am,” the hat came off, and the man, though seated, actually managed a bow. “Dilbert Short here. These creatures in the back”—three pairs of eyes in three blond heads were peering with interest over the side of the wagon—“are the D, E, and F of our family—Damon, Ellery, and Florence. The A, B, C’s are home working under the supervision of the wife. These’uns need to have some shoes or they’ll be using their feet as snowshoes come winter. Too bad kids couldn’t have feet like rabbits! I’m taking a calf to pay for ’em.”

Sure enough, tied to the back of the rig was a brown-and-white yearling, dusty and weary, but game. Even as they watched, it dipped its muzzle into the growth at its feet and tore up and began chewing a mouthful of grass.

Buster, standing on a box in order to peer over their own wagon, was saying nothing but was holding aloft, in one hand,
a thrashing frog. The eyes of the three in the Short wagon grew as large as saucers.

“Got ’im at the coulee,” Buster managed, shyly but proudly.

“Can we stop there, Dad; can we?” D, E, and F chorused.

“Plan to,” the father said, without turning around. Then, addressing Will, he remarked, “Say, I’d like to come over sometime when work is scarce—ha ha—and see your operation.”

“Glad to have you. I think you are south of Fielding? Come on through Fielding, about ten miles to the north . . . anyone in town can tell you.”

Reluctant farewells were said on both sides; duty called, and there was no time in the middle of the day for the finer facets of life, earnestly though they beckoned the lonely in heart.

“Short,” Will Ketchum said, as they lumbered on. “Dilbert Short. Good man, I’ve heard. Too bad there isn’t time for socializing. It’s one of the hardest prices we pay.”

And so saying, leaving a nostalgic trace in the air as they went, they proceeded homeward. Buster went to sleep on the floor of the wagon, the loosed frogs hopping around him until they too became sluggish from the afternoon heat. Tierney’s head drooped, and she dozed fitfully on the wagon seat, waking once to find her head resting on the shoulder of the uncomplaining man at her side. Apologies seemed unnecessary; explanations were not needed.

If truth were told, Will himself might have dozed off without any problem. Unless, of course, there came a branching of the dim trail they followed, and the beasts took it, leading off into unknown and frightening emptiness. As it was, the team trudged on doggedly, and the reins lay slack in Will’s hand, and he too found his head nodding from time to time.

There was something about creatures that honed in on the familiar; lost in a blizzard, horses had, at times, taken a snow-blinded driver home as straight as an arrow.

Even Tierney recognized the increased measure to the horses’ gait; even she could see their pricked ears. She looked inquiringly at Will.

“Home,” Will said briefly. “Just over the rise. And the horses know it.”

I wonder
, thought Tierney,
if his heart and breath quicken as the horses’ do?
Certainly the man straightened his shoulders, ran a weary hand over his face, and seemed to be more alert than he had been.

“Almost home, Buster,” he said, and the child roused himself, to rise and cling to the edge of the wagon box, anticipating home and Mother and the end of the trip.

The supper hour was over and the shadows of the day were growing long when, over the horizon, Tierney could see the tip of the windmill. Next, not far from it, came the outline of a tall, narrow building—the house Will and his wife had erected, allowing them to move out of the soddy at last. Around and behind it were grouped what seemed to be several small buildings, granaries, perhaps, or storage sheds, and a barn that was, in spite of all improvements, made of sod. Finally she located the long, shedlike building that she presumed housed the “thousands” of chickens.

As they pulled into the yard, a low cacophony of sound could be heard, unrelenting, unchanging, that she figured out was the sound of a thousand and more chickens conversing with one another or perhaps lifting their complaints to the sky. That it was muted, she was to understand later, was due to the lateness of the day and the fact that common sense—if chickens had such—and more likely Mother Nature herself, alerted them to the futility of their loquaciousness.

With a bang that carried to them as they turned in at the gate, the screen door closed behind the form of Lavinia Ketchum. She stepped to the edge of the stoop at the back door of the house and shaded her eyes against the sun’s final rays.

In spite of the smile that lit her face and the small, tentative wave with which she welcomed them, Will, in an undertone, almost as if he was speaking to himself, muttered, “Something’s wrong.”

T
he Lord certainly knew what He was doing when He substituted Pearly for Anne at the Schmidt farm. And not entirely for Anne’s sake, who so dreaded being placed where there was an unknown, suspicious-appearing man. The elderly Franz she was prepared—grudgingly, it’s true—to accept, but the sturdy, manly form of his grandson—never!

How auspicious then, that the very person Anne looked on with apprehension, Pearly found so satisfactory.

Jolting across the prairie, a sapling at the side of the massive trunk that was Frank Schmidt, Pearly’s overflowing heart poured out, the entire trip, in paeans of joy. Everything, it seemed, pleased her.

“Oh, look!” she exclaimed when a hawk soared overhead, when a patch of prairie flowers appeared, when the wind blew the grasses in a magical display of syncopation and synchronization, back and forth, silently, as though swept by a Master’s hand. She sang it when a covey of prairie chickens flew up, almost from under the team’s hooves. She warbled it when the
sun, sinking at last, wrapped itself in folds of pink and silver and rested there on the horizon a while.

“Oh, listen!” she exclaimed when a lark sang, when, at a coulee at lunchtime, a frog croaked unmusically and bees hummed over a bed of blue-eyed grass flourishing daintily at the stream’s edge. She trilled it when, not far from the road, a ground squirrel chattered shrilly, accompanied by a sharp jerk of its tail, and slipped into its burrow.

The stolid, stoic Frank was bemused by her life and liveliness. She was the perfect match for his matter-of-fact, ponderous mind and body. Frank thought slow . . . he moved slow.

Pearly, in turn, was captured by that very deliberateness. While she had a lifetime of uncertainties behind her, he seemed to typify reliability, good substantial values—and, best of all!—staunch Christian virtues.

Hardly able to believe it, at one point she rejoiced, apropos of nothing except perhaps that a four-legged creature—“gopher,” Frank said—scuttled across the road in front of the rig: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; praise Him, all creatures here below!”

Immediately Frank responded with, “Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!”

It was truly a litany of praise, lifting out over the silence of the prairie as sweetly as though a mighty choir had sung the ancient doxology.

Pearly’s heart within her filled with an exultation over and above that of worship of her Lord. There was an acknowledging of the kindred spirit sitting next to her and a swelling of joy at the revelation. So certain was she, that she never doubted for one minute but what Frank recognized it, as she did.

At the realization of what was unfolding itself between them—as a flower, unresisting to the tug of the sun, uncurls itself fully to scatter its fragrance abroad—so the hearts of Frank Schmidt and Pearly Chapel opened at that moment.

Pearly’s great pansy-purple eyes swung in wonder toward the light-hued but earnest gaze of the young man, now looking at
her with astonishment mingled with awareness. Unlearned in the ways of love as they were, simple as they were in all things, and innocent, it never occurred to either of them that anything might be improper, or that it was too soon, or that anyone—man on earth or God above—wouldn’t approve.

Never a word was spoken. But Frank’s hamlike hand reached spontaneously toward Pearly, and her small hand, not yet free of calluses, slipped happily into it.