Wild Rose (34 page)

She continued to go for her evening walks. She did so defiantly, knowing she was putting herself in the way of trouble, that, although she was fairly sure no one had seen her return that evening with Mr. Adamson, if he should meet her again and insist on escorting her back into town, soon everyone would know about it, and in no time at all, everyone would assume that she too had fallen just as far as Adelaide Smith, or whatever her true name was, and then what? And yet, she risked it.

Again, as she must have hoped, only a week or so later, Adamson came riding quietly up to her one evening, and dismounted to walk along with her.

“I was hoping I’d see you again,” he said, and his eyes shone in the last rays of light as he turned his face to look at her. “I think all the time about when I was sick and you came every day with bread or biscuits and soup.”

“Mrs. Emery’s kindness,” she demurred.

“But you came,” he said. “I got so I waited for you every day.” The fear she had kept at bay touched her, and she answered,”I am a married woman. I have no choice. I can’t divorce, I can’t marry again.” She was aware of the primness in her voice, and embarrassed by it, even as she wondered at her own objection. But still, to re-marry when your husband was still alive was beyond unthinkable.

“Pardon me,” he said. “But that’s nonsense.” He paused, calming himself. “People come West so they can get a new start. Out here people don’t keep on living by the same old rules.” She heard such anger in his voice, and wondered where it had come from. But she would never ask. Out here, it seemed, everyone had a story. Even me, it occurred to her.

He raised a hand to stroke her cheek. From that touch, she began for the first time since the day Pierre had left her, to doubt again all she had been taught as a child and a girl. She thought of grandfather’s suffering over his brother’s death – worse because the church cast him out – cast out his very soul from the paradise she’d been told waited for them all one day. But what had this to do with that? Confused and faintly afraid, she thought,
but when I left that life behind, didn’t I also leave behind the rules in which I was raised?
People live here in ways she had never seen before, had never thought possible, or even considered that anyone might want. She hadn’t seen a priest in months, there was no church for her to attend, no village of people who have known her family since they arrived there after the
dispersal
more than a hundred years earlier. There is no one to take notice and accuse her; she felt herself falling into a sea of doubt and above all, was the intensity of her desire that would not abate or leave her.

He grasped her elbow, stepping in front of her so that she couldn’t walk away.

“Mr. Adamson – Harry –” she began in an admonishing tone, but even to her own ears her resistance was feeble. He bent and kissed her, harder this time She pulled away, “If I fall,” she cried.
“If I lose my good name, Mrs. Emery will turn me out…”

“Nobody is going to know,” he said. “Especially not Mrs. Emery.” His frankness gave her pause.

“I can’t marry…”

“I’m not proposing.” She did not think this a very gentlemanly thing to say –
but – she looked about her: Darkness had fallen; no one was out; a few lights glowed in windows nearly a mile away across the prairie, the only light to guide them back to their homes. Behind them was the deep “coulee” as the people called it, speaking French without knowing they were, where animals lay alert, their eyes glowing yellow or green in the darkness, or they stalked silently, searching for prey. The day’s heat still radiating off the earth warmed her feet and legs even as her arms beneath her shawl were goose-bumped with cold. And her face, her throat, even the skin of her chest burned.

“You want only… “She stopped, not able to go on, torn between her desire and her fear of discovery, her fear that he would use her and then abandon her too. Perhaps would tell others – but no, she didn’t believe that of him.

“That we do what men and women do,” he said. “What they’ve always done, will always do. That would be enough for now. We don’t have to talk about anything else.” He kissed her again.

She half-resisted when his hands touched her bosom, and then moved downward, pushing at her dress, but her own desire finally overruled what she knew was the only thing to do, the right thing – to wrench herself away, to run as fast as she could away from him. Even when he had helped her down onto the stiff grass, lifted her skirts, and with her help, removed her long cotton drawers, even when he was inside her and groaning softly into her ear, she utterly abandoned her wiser self and clung to him, her mouth on his neck, his shoulder, his lips, and gave herself to pleasure, for after all, by this time it was too late to go back to what she had been only moments before. Then she thought of pregnancy, and would have shoved him away from her, so terrified was she, but as she thought this, he was already moving to let his fluid spill onto her thigh. In gratitude she clung to him harder until, breathing heavily, he rolled aside. The thought of pregnancy, which ought to have come to her much sooner – she was puzzled by her own recklessness, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know – had for that instant cut into her longed-for pleasure, nearly, but not fully, spoiling it.

As she began to speak while they sat side by side on the grass both adjusting their clothing, he interrupted. “No one will ever know. I promise you, no one will know. I swear that no one will ever know.” She hated him speaking of this; it was demeaning. She got shakily to her feet. He rose too, and kissed her again.

“I have to get back,” she said, urgent now.

“Yes,” he said, his breath still uneven. “Don’t take your eyes off the lights in the village. I’ll be behind you, don’t be afraid.”

“We mustn’t be seen together.”

“I’ll stay with you to the village,” he said. “Then I’ll circle back and come up from the south into my own house in a half hour or more’s time. Nobody will guess we’ve seen each other.” He kissed her one last time, and she turned unsteadily, and left him.

But as she hurried back across the prairie, stumbling now and then on rough spots or small dips that she couldn’t see, her eyes on the fewer and fewer lights of the village, she could hear his horse snorting a few yards behind her, or the muted chink of its bridle, or even Harry’s muttered expletive at a misstep. Then she passed the bones, a looming shadow on her left that she could have sworn emitted a faint murmuring – but no, it was only the wind. She was at the edge of the village when she looked back, and Harry was gone.

She lay beside her sleeping baby, her body suffused with remembered pleasure. At one minute she was both frightened and repelled by what she had done, horrified she would be found out, that Pierre would –
Pierre?
– and at the next, raged at God for having made such unbearable rules, followed at once, by joy at the memory of Harry’s body on hers, his mouth against hers, and a certain – she couldn’t deny it – satisfaction that a man had so desired her when Pierre had – then the cycle would start all over again, until at last she fell asleep.

Morning came, and as she hastened to rise, bathe in her basin, dress, clean Charles, feed him breakfast, and begin her morning work in the kitchen, the evening’s exchange faded, and as it faded, she saw it as less the occasion of her fall from grace, or as her salvation, as merely what had happened. No one knew it had happened; she would not be pregnant. She was safe.

“Did you get lost last night, Mrs. Hippolyte,” Mrs. Emery inquired as she tied on her apron. It seemed to Sophie that Mrs. Emery’s voice was unusually subdued, as if she weren’t really asking a question. But then she went on in a more natural-sounding tone, “I heard you come in quite late; I’d been a bit worried.”

“Why yes,” Sophie said, helping Charles down to the floor, handing him a crust to suck on. “I walked out too far, it fell darkness before I could get back and then I stepped into a dip and lost the lights of the town – I was quite frightened for a moment.” She laughed. “I think I will be more careful about how far out I walk.”

“There are wolves about,” Mrs. Emery warned her. “Some of ’em are human. After dark – it ain’t safe. It truly ain’t.”

“I am so sorry for worrying you.” Sophie risked a quick, side-long glance at her.

“They say there’s hardly no grizzlies left,” the woman went on, slicing salt pork at the wide table as she spoke. Sophie turned to the stove, lifting the kettle and setting it back down, ostensibly to measure whether it was full of water or not, although she had just finished filling it when Mrs. Emery had entered the kitchen. “But –”

“I will be more careful,” she murmured. “Grizzlies, what a thought,” and she shivered.

~

The fall season was ending
, winter with all its difficulties and hardships would soon be on them, and still she had heard nothing from Pierre, was no longer sure that she ever would. It was not just that his absence saddened her because she had loved him, but that Pierre’s son would not know his father, would quite possibly never have a father. When Charles asked for him, as he sometimes did, she not answer him directly, but would deflect his attention. It baffled her, too, that a man could simply walk away from his child and his responsibilities to him. That, she found more unforgivable than that he would walk away from his wife, would abandon her utterly – steal from her – shame her with another woman – not a woman, a mere child. He had loved his little son; even in the face of what he had done she didn’t doubt it. He would play with Charles when he had a few moments, would pick him up, hug him, sing a snatch of song to him. She felt that perhaps, in some way she didn’t have a name for, she was coming to terms with her own tragedy. But she gazed at Charles as he slept or played quietly in the boarding house’s back yard with its already decaying picket fence. How he had grown, so quickly, what a big child he was, how clever, speaking in complete sentences and picking up a dozen new words a day. Only yesterday he had said in English, “Mother, I need my horses, please,” to her enormously pleased surprise, before he lapsed back into broken phrases. But every once in a while he would announce something to her in a full sentence as if, if he could be bothered, he could do it all the time. He would need school very soon, that was plain, and Bone
Pile had no school. Why could Pierre, at the very least, not have thought of that?

Now that the tremendous shock from his betrayal had gone, she often found herself remembering moments of their lives together, small things, such as the way he had turned his head away from her when he had remarked on the need for more and better fencing, or the way he had worked with his horse, quietly, in the corral, doggedly, but with minimal success, and she had seen by his face that he knew the failure was his own – because he was impatient, didn’t know how to wait, how to repeat gently – although he would never say so out loud, and how she had pitied him then, and wanted to comfort him, but knew better than to even let him know what she had seen. She saw then, not for the first time, how puny they were in the face of what they had come West to do, in the face of the West itself – the vastness of the land, the ungovernable power of nature itself. And more, that they were not, had never been, not Pierre, not Sophie, in any way invincible, no matter how they beat their chests and crowed that they were. And yet, they stayed, or she had, while he had walked away. Was he defeated? Or was he merely bored?

It had snowed once, only to melt before noon. Sophie, as with everyone else, dreaded to think of winter, the previous one having been so harsh, but that scant snowfall, quickly melted, gave her a new thought: It was that maybe the very ferocity of the winter past had had something to do with Pierre’s departure. Already exhausted, he had harvest to finish and a thousand other tasks before winter came upon them, and maybe, in his deep fatigue, he had looked into the long winter ahead and decided he had had enough. But why hadn’t he told her? Why had he gone without her?

She remembered how sometimes over those years of hardships she had thought he would simply walk away, take her and Charles and go back to Québec, but each time she had feared such a happening, she had been able to dissuade him.
We have worked so hard, Pierre. We have almost reached our goal; soon this land will be ours.
And when even then he had paced and shouted and even sometimes swore, she would remind him, carefully, while never actually saying it, of the shame of returning home, having failed.
“Your family will take us in again until we find our way. You can go back working for old Fournier. He loved you to work with him. How good it will be to return to our birthplace, all the people we know…”
That, usually, would calm him, because she knew that he was as happy to be away from that constricting world as she was, and then she would touch him – his cheek, tracing his mouth with a fingertip, she would slip her palm inside his shirt, laying it flat against the heat of his chest, knowing he couldn’t resist her womanhood – and soon he would be soothed enough in her hands that he would sigh and mutter, and eventually go back outside, to the plowing or the building, or post-pounding, or the cutting. And in doing all of this, believing she was holding him there with her, she had convinced him only that she herself would never leave, and never let him leave.

Was he not incurably excitable, enjoying his own excitement, wanting more, always more, and had not their life become settled, more or less stable in the steady round of work? Hadn’t he talked about adventures with Indians, and were the Indians not mostly settled on their Reserves after the rebellion? And he, wanting to take part in the fighting, couldn’t go because he couldn’t leave her and his baby alone and had no one to leave them with? She had asked, “And on which side will you fight? With the Métis? They are our own people. Or with the soldiers from Ontario?” Come to think of it, hadn’t he spoken to her about the gold fields of California, and even of Barkerville in the Caribou, and hadn’t she laughed? His complaints had been saying this – that he felt he had made a mistake, that he didn’t want the life of the settler-pioneer after all.