Bittersweet Bliss

by Ruth Glover

  The memories! And why today?

  It was the letters, of course. Much as she disdained them, much as she determined to ignore them, she found herself thinking of them over and over. Perhaps it was the emptiness of her life, the dull routine of her days, the very pointlessness of her future, burgeoning the nameless correspondence all out of perspective until she, who was dedicated to common sense and service, should find her heart lifting with expectation.

  Suddenly, in a blaze of anger at her foolishness, calling herself addlepated, Birdie snatched open the dresser drawer and withdrew the two envelopes. About to rip them into shreds, she found herself immobile, unable to bring herself to so summarily destroy the one ray of light in her otherwise humdrum existence.

  Hesitating, staring down at the misspelled Saskachewan, trembling on the brink of a decision, she found herself smoothing out the envelopes, gently replacing them in the drawer. Replacing them and shoving the drawer shut with some small explosion of feeling, though whether of finality, anger, or frustration was not clear, even to her.

  “Birdie! Ho, Birdie! Are you ready?” It was Lydia Bloom at the foot of the stairs, hatted, gloved, Bible in hand, ready to take off for church.

  “Coming!”

  Hastily now Birdie swept back every recalcitrant tendril of hair, fastening them severely. Reaching for her hat, she pinned the neat but well-worn “Leghorn Flat” on top of her head. Bought untrimmed, it was worn untrimmed. Lydia had offered a bunch of silk and velvet violets for decoration, but until today they had been ignored. Now, at the last minute, Birdie snatched the humble violets from the dresser top, set them on the hat brim, and, with a thrust of a hat pin, affixed them. Startled at her own action and with her hands going to her hat ready to remove the nosegay, Birdie heard Lydia’s voice again, more urgent this time.

  “Birdie! Herbert is waiting, my dear. Are you all right up there?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be right down!”

  At the last moment Birdie picked up the “lapidary cut stopper bottle of diamond brilliance” presented to her at Christmastime by Lydia and dabbed a restrained amount of Queen Victoria Lily of the Valley perfume behind one ear.

  Picking up her Bible (a mere formality since Birdie, a self-sufficient woman, had long scorned its promise of comfort and strength) and hanging her grosgrain bag over her arm, she was ready, as ready as she would ever be, for Bliss.

  Outside, Birdie climbed into the shiny black rig where Herbert sat waiting patiently, the horses not so patiently. With two seats, resembling a surrey and more properly termed a wagon, the rig was called a buggy by the good folk of the bush. To them, a wagon was that clumsy, utilitarian vehicle used for the hauling of large loads. Or large families.

  Whatever the means of conveyance, numerous rigs were making their way to church this Sunday morning, churning up the dust of the road until those afoot would have to undergo considerable brushing off before they could enter the house of worship.

  House of worship. It was surprising how the small, white frame building, having echoed to the youthful voices of children all week, could, by some miracle, resound to the hearty singing of hymns and the earnest petitions of prayer and become the house of God come Sunday.

  It seemed strange to Birdie, come Sunday, to find herself seated at one of the desks rather than standing at the front of the room. After greeting several people and noting the arrival of a smartly clad young woman whom everyone was greeting warmly and calling Vonnie, she settled herself as comfortably as possible and opened the hymnal handed to her, idly turning the leaves. She had no favorite, she realized when the pastor called for one. And she wasn’t surprised when Ernie Battlesea—he of the clock-winding effort—trilled forth a most unacceptable selection.

  Throughout the singing, which was hearty and spirited, Birdie participated. She was alert to the announcements, particularly the one concerning the annual Sunday school picnic—races for the children, ball games for all feeling young enough, horse shoes... lots of lemonade and homemade ice cream... delicious dishes from the best cooks in the world.

  Thus the pastor threw out the challenge, with the smug smile of Bliss’s women—who would consequently labor diligently over their own particular specialty—being the expected response. Counted on each year were Mrs. Van Pier’s oliebollen, Mrs. Nikolai’s paprika potatoes, Mrs. Phaugh’s cabbage rolls golompki, and Lydia Bloom’s shortbread, to mention a few of the choice dishes proudly prepared and happily shared. This would be Birdie’s first Bliss picnic, and she looked forward to the occasion and the celebration of the end of the school term. She understood that report cards were traditionally passed out at the Sunday school picnic.

  All this Birdie absorbed. But when the Scripture was read and Pastor Jones launched into his sermon, Birdie tuned out completely.

  The windows, three on each side of the building, were high to discourage daydreaming on the part of children who, seated at their desks, should be giving attention to their studies. Still, Birdie well knew that outside the middle window on her left, just beyond the clearing, there was a circle of birches—the Fairy Ring, so named by a fanciful Ellie Bonney years ago and called that ever since. Here the unnamed and unknown writer-of-letters had suggested she betake herself, after school was out and the children were gone on the morrow, and meet him face-to-face.

  In all probability that person could be sitting within sound of her voice at this very moment. Birdie’s hand went tentatively toward the violets blooming in lonely splendor on her hat brim, only to withdraw self-consciously and hastily. What if, indeed, he were watching? Birdie could feel the back of her neck reddening.

  And that wasn’t good, because as a rule, all unmarried men and boys sat in the back of the room on the benchlike supply cupboards running down the sides of that portion of the building, the cloakroom. Her mind, in spite of her best judgment, ran over the list: five or six young men, striplings only, too boyish to be interested in a woman pushing thirty; Herkimer Pinkard, he of the lumbering walk and the perceptively apropos comments—Oh, no, not Herkimer Pinkard!; Jed and Jake West, brothers and homesteading together, supposedly awaiting the arrival of brides from back home; the widower D. Dunn—Oh, no, she could never abide being called B. Dunn!... Birdie was running out of names. There was, of course—sitting up front where he had sat with his wife until her death a couple of years ago—Wilhelm “Big Tiny” Kruger.

  For the life of her Birdie couldn’t come up with any suitable suspect. Anyway, she told herself firmly, it’s a lot of foolishness. She was not about to meet some strange, quirky male in a place called, of all things, the Fairy Ring! Heaven forbid!

  And so, with an effort, she turned her attention to the preacher and his concluding remarks, a quote, he said, from the ninth chapter of Romans, verse twenty-five. “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.”

  And the lonely, hurting heart of Birdie Wharton, wrenched from daydreaming too late, wished desperately that it had heard more.

  Miss Wharton, my scribbler is full. I need a new one.”

  “Miss Wharton, my pencil is gone from my desk. It looks just like that one Buck is using, with the eraser sorta bit off.”

  “Miss Wharton... Miss Wharton...”

  Birdie stood at the front of the room, waiting for the children to settle down. They seemed noisier than usual this morning, restless, high-spirited. No doubt it was the beautiful day beckoning through the high windows, the gentle wafting of the bush’s enticement through the open door; they were half-wild with longing to be out in it. And no wonder. Winter had been long and dark and bitterly cold.

  Settling down, getting order, had been even more difficult in winter. Before school could open each morning, coats had to be removed, wet mittens laid under the stove to dry, overshoes unbuckled and set in a straight line below the hanging coats and caps and scarves. Then, shivering children, icy through and through, had needed a few moments at the side of the heater to hold cold h
ands out to its warmth, cheeks blazing red, first from the cold and then from the heat. Finally, reluctantly, they took their seats, gripping pencils with stiff fingers, giving attention, often lackadaisically, to their books. Not even the accounts of the coureurs de bois, those legendary runners of the woods, could bring history books alive in winter.

  It was one thing for a boy to dream in summer of wild rivers calling and far horizons beckoning, and an entirely different matter in winter. Winter was a time for shut doors, hot fires, warm meals.

  But there had been those who challenged winter: those intrepid, indomitable coureurs de bois.

  Montreal, so far to the east of them, at one time was considered to be the gateway to the West; beyond it stretched almost endless forest, the empire of the trader and the missionary. The lure of this vast green area was irresistible to young men, and hundreds of them in the nation’s early days made their way into its dark shadows. Gaily painted canoes carried them along, shouting their challenge to the wide skies, rowing with might and main up the sunlit waters and over swirling rapids; portages were accompanied by rollicking singing; campfires were bright with laughter and an endless fund of stories.

  The voyageur looked the part, flamboyant in a combination of Indian and French dress: bright woolen or coonskin cap on his longhaired head, gaudy sash around his stalwart middle, moccasins on his feet, bearskin coat covering his muscular frame.

  From trading post to trading post he went, with legendary feats of courage, daring the elements and beasts, and always with the good humor for which he was remembered. A special breed, the coureurs de bois. A special time in history, touched with a romance that had never been seen before or since.

  Eastern settlements could ill afford to lose so many youth from their farms, and the government tried to intervene, making it hard, or impossible, for them to go. At times the young men were threatened with severe penalties if they persisted in going off into the woods. At one time they were required to have licenses. Needless to say, where young, hotheaded men were concerned, neither plan worked very well. The fascination of the woods and the life of a coureur de bois were stronger pulls than any orders from the government. And because of the demand for furs and the pelts they supplied, these audacious runners of the woods were appreciated, their efforts applauded.

  All too soon—with the passing of the beaver—the coureurs de bois became part of Canada’s colorful past.

  Many a Bliss boy, wading spring runoff in his rubber boots, flashed swiftly along a foaming river in a canoe—in dreams. Many a lad set out a trap, catching a measly rabbit and counting it a glossy beaver. Caps of rabbit fur, cobbled together and worn jauntily on young heads, were coonskin in imagination.

  But in winter—that time of deep freeze, heaped snowbanks, solid rivers and streams, when even the proud coureurs de bois had been near starvation—Bliss boys bowed their flannel-clad shoulders over scarred desks, flexed stiffened fingers or reached to rub chilblained heels, and narrowed their dreams to firesides and cups of hot cocoa.

  Just now, with summer not yet fully upon them but with spring gloriously rampant, they were restless with an urgency to be free, to hunt crows’ nests, to trap gophers, to search moist meadows for that flame-red flower, the lily that was to be chosen Saskatchewan’s emblem, carrying it home as a gift to mother. They longed to leap, Indian-guide style, from grassy tussock to grassy tussock in the low places where the melting snow was draining, to put a handkerchief on a pole and sail a rickety raft over a small slough.

  Already winter’s long underwear was a thing of the past, and mothers were laundering the fleece-lined, baggy garments, mending them, folding them, putting them away for a few short months. Soon now, shoes would be discarded, and feet, tender from a winter of woolen socks, heavy shoes, and thick overshoes, would ease gingerly—bare at last—into summer and revel in it.

  Miss Wharton, not knowing she broke into numerous daydreams, rapped sharply on the edge of her desk and slowly brought order out of the chaos of eighteen children settling themselves to a morning of history and arithmetic, geography and spelling.

  One small arm was raised, and one small hand urgently poked the air with three fingers. Ernie Battlesea. Miss Wharton’s system to reduce confusion was a simple one: Raise one finger to use the pencil sharpener; two for a drink; three to be excused for the toilet. A nod of the head by Miss Wharton and the supplicator went about filling his or her request with a minimum of disturbance.

  Would Ernie never learn that certain needs should be taken care of before school? But being forgetful of rules, and having walked a mile or more after downing a large glass of milk, Ernie was desperate, this morning as every morning.

  Having refused him once and having suffered the consequences, Miss Wharton, admitting defeat, sighed and nodded permission.

  Much easier—the trip out back of the barn—in summer than in winter. Then, poor Ernie, suffering the same urgency, donned the coat and overshoes, cap and mittens that he had so recently removed, and though it meant plowing through snowstorm and sweeping winds, made his necessary journey.

  Permission granted, Ernie made his relieved escape, and Birdie Wharton gave her attention to other things.

  Busy as her days were, they usually sped by swiftly. But today the hours dragged. Today the children droned at reading, stumbled at recitation, faltered at arithmetic, dawdled at the blackboard. Birdie found herself turning her gaze toward the Drop Octagonal time and again, to realize finally that several children turned puzzled eyes on the clock each time she did.

  Restless, she took a pencil that definitely did not need sharpening and made her way to the pencil sharpener on the sill of the window facing the Fairy Ring. The “Columbus Lead Pencil Sharpener,” purchased through the catalog for eighteen cents, reigned in lonesome majesty on the sill in sight of all, a small box for shavings at its side. Picking it up and inserting her pencil, Birdie turned it automatically, grinding away while she studied the woods until, startled, she realized she had only a stub of pencil remaining.

  Foolish, foolish! she berated herself, hastily gathering up a handful of shavings.

  It had been settled almost as soon as it had been received—the invitation to slip into the birch ring following school today to meet some unknown male, a writer of surreptitious letters. Never! Not today, not tomorrow, not ever!

  Why then did the day go by so slowly? Why did she have this urge to listen for the approach of a rig or horse? Why did her feet take her to the north side of the room so often, and why did her eyes turn to the bush there and the path into its depths? Why did she note the white gleam of the birch trees, why did her eyes note the emptiness of the ring?

  Why did she speak sharply, slashing through Victoria Dinwoody’s report on early transportation?

  “‘Anthony Henday and his Indians,’” she read, Victoria at her shoulder, “‘had traveled hundreds of miles across the bush when they came upon a big river, the south branch of the Saskatchewan. He called it the Wakesew, or Red Deer. But they had no boats in which to cross, having left their canoes on the banks of the Carrot River. With willow from the riverbanks the Indians soon made b—boats, covering the frames with cured moose skins. When they were across, they abandoned the b—boats...’

  “For heaven’s sake!” Birdie, already keyed up, exploded.

  “What?” a startled Victoria asked.

  “Why can’t you call them what they are? Bumboats.”

  Victoria, twelve years old and wise, clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Victoria?”

  “I can’t! I can’t say... that word.”

  “You can’t even write it?” Birdie asked, realizing her annoyance was showing and all unfairly, knowing full well why the proper Victoria couldn’t bring herself to use a word that, to her, referred to a rather private part of the anatomy—the, er, nether quarters.

  Now see, Birdie thought crossly, she’s got me doing it.

  “I don’t think my mum would like me to say... i
t,” Victoria stubbornly insisted.

  Birdie closed her eyes momentarily and breathed deeply.

  “Victoria,” she said tightly, determined to be patient, “take the word darn. It has two meanings. We use it to describe mending a stocking, and we use it as a euphemism for damn.”

  “Euphem—” Victoria repeated.

  “A good way, rather than a bad way, to say something.”

  “Darn a sock is good...,” Victoria said gropingly, her eyes blinking with her concentration.

  “But if you were angry and said, ‘Darn sock!’ you’d mean something entirely different, wouldn’t you?”

  Victoria blanched at the very thought. Such words were absent from the vocabulary of well-brought-up children. Especially the children of Sister Dinwoody, to whom had been entrusted the sacred duty of playing the organ for worship, and who strove at all times to be worthy of such a trust.

  “What I’m saying, Victoria, is that you don’t stop saying you darn socks just because other people use darn in place of a swear word, do you? It obviously has two meanings.” Birdie spoke reasonably.

  Victoria looked unconvinced.

  “Now take this back to your desk and do it over. Use the proper word for the boat the Indians built and which was much used in the West in those days.”

  Clever (and stubborn) Victoria solved her problem by deciding to change Anthony Henday and his unmentionable mode of transportation to one that would not challenge her code of ethics. With a sigh she thumbed through her history book. Maybe if she switched to Peter Pond, “a typical, enterprising Yankee.... He was one of the men who literally put the Saskatchewan on the map.”

  With considerable hope that Peter Pond, though experiencing “enough thrills to fill a dozen westerns,” would prove to be a man of acceptable character, Victoria settled down to her reading.