Read Online Wild Rose by Sharon Butala - Free Book Online

dainty, it was a vortex of stars, a force field drawing her upward into their ancient, eternal realm.
    Something, some force, some thing pulling inside her chest, heretofore narrow and warm, a mere girl’s; pulling, pulling, crying wordlessly to go there, back from whence it had come. What something? It was as if it was not her, Sophie Charron Hippolyte, headstrong, lovesick, but something else that resided inside that cage of bone, that perched there for the duration as if assigned and could not leave, for whatever reason until she breathed her last: her soul, her spirit, her own little speck – perhaps – of God. She fell to her knees, her head still tilted upward, as the thing inside her yearned upward with such power she felt it might burst out of her chest. No one, she thought, could gaze at this and think this vast, glittering dome could hold so puny a thing as a heaven, would tolerate a silly human paradise.
    In that instant she disbelieved. Not in the moment and its truth itself, but beside this…this…how thin and small the bosom of the church she had been taught was her only and best home, the place where outside of God, all truth resided. Beside this wonder, she felt the church, its teachings, its power, slipping away from her grasp, it was like trying to catch water in your fingers, it moved on, it grew thin and pale, it vanished. It was nothing, after all. So this, this , she thought, is the West . And sank further, onto her bottom, to sit, closing her mouth that must have been agape all the while, moistening her lips with her tongue, her breath slowing at last. What she had been thinking was flooding over her, filling her with terror; she fought back against it. God would forgive; He would understand. She shook with the two ideas fighting against each other in her heart and mind, first one, the other, then she prayed: Notre père …until weariness began to creep through her, she remembered who she was, where she was, and rose, still shaky, went into the tent, crept into the bedroll beside Pierre, reaching for his human warmth.
    ~
    Then there was sunshine , Pierre’s deep voice commanding the oxen, the walls of the tent moving slowly, or with a crack and a thud, in and out with the wind. She scrambled from under the blankets, stood for a second holding her head in both hands trying to grasp again the enormity of where they were, of what they had done. She rushed outside and the chilly air shocked her back into herself and the moment.
    Pierre was harnessing the oxen and didn’t turn his head toward her.
    “Don’t look at me,” she called, and vanished to the other side of the wagon where in a moment Pierre would re-hitch the oxen. There she voided her bladder as she had failed to do the night before.
    “There’s a small bit of water in the basin,” Pierre called. He was tackling the tent pegs now, and she hurried to the spot in the earth where they had the night before dug a hole for their fire and dragged or carried rocks from wherever they could find them, not much lying loose, but mostly half-buried in the hard prairie sod, to form a ring about it. When she admired Pierre’s campfire building skills, he grunted, “Did I not spend a full winter in the bush cutting trees? How do you think we kept from freezing to death?” He was unamused, barely noticed her.
    Inside the ring of stones the blue granite basin sat, an inch of their precious water supply in the bottom, and she washed her hands and splashed her face, even drew up her nightdress to splash the remainder between her legs, then pulled off her nightgown and used it to dry herself. Shivering, she moved naked across the grass toward the tent. Then Pierre was behind her, his hand on her rump, the other spread against her belly. Before she could stop herself she gasped, and was about to pull away, to run playfully into the tent where he would follow her, and lie down beside her, kissing her everywhere, when suddenly he stepped back, dropping