Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel Read Free

and went to change her clothes, her mind busily engaged in the possibilities of the new club.
    Such an innocent beginning for something that was to change one small girl’s life forever.

    Twelve years later, bent over the ironing board and her father’s bib overalls and recalling that day clearly, Ellie’s forehead beaded with perspiration. A perspiration not caused by the heat from the No. 3 iron.

M iss Wharton, seated at her desk in the front of the schoolroom, glanced behind and up, checking the clock once again. As always, the face of the “Drop Octagonal” stared implacably ahead, unrelentingly ticking away the minutes of the day.
    What was wrong with her? Why this tension for the school day to come to an end? Where would she go other than home—the farm home where she boarded? Whom would she see other than those she always saw—Lydia and Herbert Bloom, homesteaders having opened their home and their hearts to her? What would the weekend offer more than any other—washing and ironing on Saturday, church on Sunday? Other than it being springtime rather than the unending winter, with the promise of a walk in the woods and the picking of a few flowers, it would be the usual weekend. Wouldn’t it?
    With the children quiet and bent studiously over their desks, Birdie Wharton, on an impulse, pulled a scrap of paper toward her and, with a few strokes of a pencil, figured the boundaries and extent of her days as sounded out, tick by tick, by the Drop Octagonal: Sixty ticks per minute amounted to 3,600 ticks per hour. Multiply by twenty-four amounted to 86,400 ticks per day. Multiply by 365, the number of days in a year: 31,536,000! Was itpossible! Totting it up in black and white, seeing it so clearly, so baldly, Miss Wharton’s head whirled while her spirits plunged. Like sand in an egg timer life was trickling away, minute by minute, sounded out by the resolute tick of a clock. In like fashion, twenty-eight years had trickled and ticked away. In no time at all the century would have dribbled away; the new one loomed without the promise of any more satisfaction than the last.
    Snatching up the paper and crumpling it, she turned to fling the grim evidence of the miserable sum total of her life into the face of the clock, only to catch the wide-eyed gazes of eighteen children. Had she gasped to get their attention? Had she groaned?
    Before their questioning eyes, she would spare the Drop Octagonal. With a quick decision she diverted her aim and the wad of paper sailed, true and straight, into the kindling box at the side of the stove. Never in her year’s time as teacher of the Bliss school had Miss Birdie Wharton displayed such wanton disregard for decorum. The children may be excused for gaping soundlessly.
    Birdie turned calmly enough to face the surprised faces of her pupils, biting back the impulse to bark, “Do as I say, not as I do!” But to spout such a thing would confuse them even more than her uncharacteristic paper throw.
    Birdie had taught long enough and was experienced enough to realize that without fail, some child, maybe several of them, would attempt the kindling box shot. And how would she deal with that? She bit her lip, conscious of having slipped in her role as a prime example of what was correct and proper.
    With a sigh Miss Wharton glanced one more time at the clock. Simultaneously every eye in the room swung to the Drop Octagonal, anticipating, Miss Wharton supposed, its Friday winding.

    To date—until the shot at the kindling box—Miss Wharton had been predictable. Every Friday, promptly at two o’clock—right after the second-graders (both of them) took their spelling test and before the three third-graders took theirs—Miss Wharton opened a drawer in her desk, withdrew a brass key, rose from her chair, stepped to the clock on the wall behind her, stretched herself, inserted the key, and, with a flourish, wound it. It was a grand climax to the week.
    In the beginning Miss Wharton had