Wild Rose Read Online Free

him.” Her child came clumsily toward her, one hand out as if to offer comfort. That is why he took the team and wagon and not his beloved saddle horse. How long has he been seeing a woman? Who is she? But he has no money – how could he – unless she has money – but, wait, I have no money, I have only this farm, this half-done harvest, this one horse and few cows he has left me, an aging milk cow. He has left our child!
    She clutched her head to stop her brain’s skittering, then released it, began to pace, fists clenched, feet thudding on the rough wooden floor. Back and forth she went until she noticed that Charles, laughing uncertainly, had begun to toddle after her. This halted her and she lifted him again, burying her face in his silky hair – Pierre’s hair – clutching him tightly to her. I am abandoned!
    A wave of shame engulfed her, melding before she could stop it into longing: His smooth skin, golden beside her whiteness, his black hair, blacker even than hers, and gleaming black eyes, his muscled torso, arms, and thighs – for a second, she couldn’t breathe. But – he loves me so! She could feel by the weight of her child, his warm body molded to hers, that he had fallen asleep. He would sleep an hour, two hours, and she would think. She would find out what to do. She carried him into the bedroom and carefully placed him on the bed, pushing a chair against its edge so that he wouldn’t roll off onto the floor. She returned to the kitchen and began to clean the porridge from the table, and then to sweep the floor. She worked slowly, with extreme care, missing not a particle of food or dirt, as if important guests were coming.
    The crop! She paused in her careful sweeping. She couldn’t farm without him. Would she have to sell the farm to get money to buy train tickets to return to Québec? She faltered, because returning to Québec struck no chord of joy, the opposite, rather, and fear and disgust, all that she had escaped coming back to her as well as the fact that she could never return, tail between her legs, and no one to take her in. Then the image appeared involuntarily behind her eyelids of the plain spreading endlessly in every direction, glowing as if with its own light.
    She thought of the few French women in town – the pretty ones – there was only Madame Clothilde Le Fèbvre, but wait, hadn’t they moved on? Or…the unmarried daughter of those newcomers, Marguerite – she could not recall the family name. Or – maybe the woman had left behind an angry husband. Maybe he would go after them and bring them both back. Or the father. And the loss of her own poor dead father, of whom she hadn’t thought much for years, loomed before her now, and she felt she would weep forever over him even though he had been dead since her early childhood, as had her mother, and – if only my brothers were here! Guillaume would go after Pierre, or Hector. Even in her turmoil she turned her mind from Hector as quickly as she thought of him.
    Stop such foolishness, she told herself, because her brothers wouldn’t come running to save her. They might not even send money so she could go home, Guillaume angry already, Hector uncaring. Banished. He was banished too, but the faceless woman with whom Pierre had run away blotted out random thoughts of her brothers. She imagined the slender curving line that ran from the woman’s girlish bosom to the swell of her hip, the waist as narrow as hers had been before Charles, bent and retched, tasting the bile of her husband’s hatred of her that she had never even seen. But he hid it from me – he knew he was wrong! Yet, he left anyway. She despised him, she told herself, but she didn’t, she yearned for him; she even dared to hope this was all her own foolish mistake, that he would come across the plains with the new part for his machine, he would laugh at her terror, he would hold her…
    She went to the door one last time to stare out across the prairie. Far