Wild Rose Read Free

wooden floor, and toddled toward it, his fat little hand outstretched, murmuring to it. What quick eyes he has, she thought, and would have laughed at herself except that how could any child be quicker or more curious than Charles? And where was Pierre?
    What if he has had a runaway and was thrown from the wagon and lay, all his bones broken, somewhere on the prairie? Four years ago when she and Pierre had begun to search for the quarter of land they had filed on in Swift Current, the entire area was nearly empty of other people. But since then, more of them crisscrossed the prairie on their way here and there. Some stopping to ask Pierre for advice in finding a section or quarter-section stake, miles away from Sophie and Pierre’s cabin, so that she thought they stopped more out of fear, and to hear a human voice not their own. And now, the newcomers, too, those who stayed, stood in their cabin doors as she did, gazing out across the stiff pale grass, and spotted every rock, every animal, and if they could not at first tell a rock from a cow, it did not take long for them to educate themselves: horses as black strokes against the tawny landscape, cows black dots. She did not believe Pierre was lying half-dead on the prairie. He followed trails; someone would have seen him as a still black spot where one had not been before. Someone would have found him.
    Yet she could see no reason why his trip to the blacksmith in town to repair a broken part from his binder in such perfect travelling weather should take so long. He drank yes, what man did not enjoy a glass of wine, or a brandy now and then, but he was not a drunkard as so many of the men in the West seemed to be, no doubt because they had no women to remind them of a normal way of life. What else to expect when no single woman could even apply for free land?
    She thought back to the morning Pierre had left. He came to the house, the horses already hitched, the broken part, she assumed, tossed into the wagon-box. He had seemed angry, in a hurry, ignoring Charles who had called, “ Papa, papa ,” so she hadn’t questioned him, didn’t even ask him to get her this or that, not even if she might go with him. A sheen of sweat lay on his forehead, a line of it trickled down his neck, but then, he’d been cutting wheat since not long past dawn, and the morning was such that heat came up off the prairie in billows, as if it was the earth itself churning it up. He hadn’t once looked into her face, and that had also troubled her.
    Charles climbed into his seat at the table, and she picked his bowl from the shelf and at the stove spooned a little of the porridge she had made the evening before when the prairie cooled and it was possible to make a fire in the stove without fainting from its heat, then carried it to the table where she set it in front of him. Guillaume and Claire had sent the bowl for Charles when he was born, and the shiny silver spoon too, in which he could see his own face upside down, and that, no matter how many ways he turned it, to his eternal mystification, remained upside down. She poured a little of the pitcher of cream she had separated earlier in the morning onto the porridge.
    “Careful, c’est chaud! ” She said to Charles, as she always said to him, sitting down beside him, and taking the spoon from his hand to demonstrate yet again, “It’s hot, very hot. Blow, blow very hard.” She gave the spoon back to him and Charles blew, sending porridge in all directions, grinning happily into her face.
    She rose and went to the door again, opened it and stared once more out over the prairie to the southeast where the village of Bone Pile sat some ten miles away, then she turned to look out to where Pierre had left the binder against the last row of cut wheat, at the other end of the field from where she stood. He had made a few stooks, but they ended far back from where the binder sat. He wouldn’t allow her to stook for him, having some prejudice