Seasons of Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #4) (17 page)

Stupid creatures! Robbie Dunbar sawed on the reins until the oxen were into approximately the position he wanted. Then, in a passion of weariness, frustration, and despair, he dashed the reins to the ground, staggered to the shade of a nearby poplar (poplars—wherever you were—were nearby!), flopped down, spread-eagled himself on his stomach, buried his hot, sweaty face in his arms, and gave himself over to the misery that had walked with him, step for step, all day.

The oxen, borrowed for today’s task, simply dropped their heads where they stood and endured this mortal’s idiosyncrasies patiently, as they endured all else. Pulling stumps in the middle of summer! They flicked their tails against the flies that swarmed them, heaved their sweating sides, and waited.

It had been a foolish idea in the first place—to pull stumps. They were too green, the trees too lately chopped and cleared away. In a season or two, Rob had been told, the stumps would be dryer, ready to loose their hold on the earth, and would
come out rather readily for piling and burning. But so torn with feelings had Robbie become—turning to first one thing and then another, with little rhyme or reason and wanting, needing, something to occupy his mind and his body totally—he had opted for the challenge of the stumps.

For the task, he borrowed Herkimer’s oxen—ideal for such a job, supposedly—but soon found out the task wasn’t accomplishing what he had hoped for: blankness of mind, easing of the pain that twisted his heart, the erasing of the realization that—in agreeing to marry for financial gain—he had acted as . . . as stupidly and as mindlessly as the oxen.

Burying his sunburnt face in the leaf mold, Robbie Dunbar groaned. Such groaning was ordinarily reserved for the night seasons when he was turning and tossing sleeplessly on his bed, with the knowledge that, just a few miles away, the lass of his dreams and desires lay wrapped in uneasy slumber, or tossed, as he did, wakeful and wretched. The few miles of bush in between might as well have been the heaving ocean between Canada and Scotland, so inaccessible was she. And all due to his own crassness, his blind desire to increase his acreage!

Why, oh why, had he agreed to Alice Hoy’s offer? Not for a day, hardly for an hour since he had sailed away from Scotland and Binkiebrae, had Tierney Caulder been out of his thoughts. If he’d been a praying man, he would have been constantly beseeching God to—somehow, someway, sometime soon—make it possible for her to sail to Canada and join him. And, having prayed, he would have believed.

Not praying, not believing, it had seemed such a remote possibility, that when Alice approached him with the reality, the urgent reality, of the present—her land for his strong arms and care of her boys—he had seen no farther ahead than the next few months and what they would bring.

Again Robbie tried to defend himself; pride sought a way to explain his predicament: It had been Alice’s idea. It was a business arrangement, pure and simple. An arrangement that would be a benefit to her.

But the comfort he sought escaped him, and rising up before him was the face—the dear face—of Tierney Caulder.

Again he went over the sweet memory—he saw her coming to him across the furrows of his homestead. He saw the unbelief that widened her eyes when she recognized him, the joy that flooded her face. That same joy gave wings to his own feet as he leaped the plowed ground to meet her, to take her in his arms.

He had not held her since. Never before, and not since.

Realizing almost immediately that he must go to Tierney, must tell her of the arrangement between himself and Alice Hoy, he had hoped against hope that, when he did, she would take it gravely, with understanding, willing to wait patiently until—

This was when Robbie’s dismay erupted: Until—until Alice Hoy died. That was what it came down to. What a ghastly thought, and how it cleared his vision and caused him to see the plan for what it really was. It all turned on the death of a woman.

Why—when Alice broached the subject—hadn’t he suggested Herkimer Pinkard? Herkimer’s homestead was on one side of the Hoy land, Robbie’s on the other. Herkimer, a bachelor, with no heart-ties to anyone, would have been the ideal choice to take on the Hoy responsibilities.

Under honesty’s glaring searchlight, Robbie Dunbar admitted that he had been thinking of himself, not Alice and the boys. Or at least he thought of them second, himself first.

Robbie rolled over and stared with unseeing eyes up into the heavy growth of a black poplar, its leaves quaking green and silver in the slight breeze—a beautiful sight. And so meaningless. Robbie’s pleasure in his homestead and in his accomplishments had fled. The purpose for his efforts, his plans for his future—all were gone.

His dream had centered on Tierney more than he knew; with her unattainable, the dream was a faded remnant of the bright possibilities that had accompanied him and buoyed him all the way from Binkiebrae to Bliss.

The sound of a rig passing on the road brought Robbie to a sitting position, ready to spring to his feet. To be found, like a child, sobbing into the damp leaf mold of the bush, was not a manly thing, and not one he cared to try to explain to anyone.

Half risen to his feet he paused, recognizing the Bloom rig, the Bloom horse.

On the narrow buggy seat, jaunting home from what had obviously been a trip to Bliss and the store—Quinn Archer, the personable man he had searched out and sent to the Blooms as hired man, and at his side, Tierney Caulder.

Tierney had made the same trip enough times by now to recognize where she was and whose land was passed along the way; she had been well indoctrinated by Lydia, who felt a responsibility to introduce the young woman to the district. From time to time they had stopped to deliver mail or an item purchased on request for the lady of the home who was out of sugar, or soda, or yeast, and, with the horses engaged in fieldwork, had no way to get herself to town.

“This place, I believe,” Quinn Archer said as they passed by, nodding in the direction of the buildings, “is the homestead of Rob Dunbar. He’s the man who advised me of the opening at the Bloom place. I’d say he did me a favor.”

“I believe ye’re reet . . . right,” Tierney said, but she kept her gaze from wandering in that direction. To see Robbie and not be able to run to him, to see him and not be able to call to him, to see him and ignore him—it was hard, so hard.

Without looking she knew every aspect of the place, every animal, every fence post, the small granary, the log barn, the cabin. In imagination she had scattered feed to the chickens, watching them come running to the sound of her “Heeeeere, chick, chick, chick!” She had drawn water from the well, tipping the pail into the trough, watering the brown and white cow; she had pinned overalls to the clothesline—and they were Robbie Dunbar’s. She had picked peas from the vines in the garden and
cooked them—for Robbie Dunbar. She had baked scones and sat down beside the fire and eaten them—with Robbie Dunbar.

She had, in dreams, watched children running around the cabin and the yard—and they called her Mither and Robbie Dunbar Da.

She had, in sad reality and with wrenching determination, put the dreams away and watched as they shriveled and died.

“Aye,” she said now, fixing her gaze on the horse’s ears, “thass Robbie Dunbar’s homestead. And thass,” looking ahead and pointing to the next cabin, the next set of outbuildings, “the homestead of his brother, Allan.”

“And back of them, I understand, making the final two in the section, are the homesteads of Herkimer Pinkard and Alice Hoy—that charming lady we just met.”

“Aye.”

“You and the Dunbar men,” Quinn asked casually, “aren’t you from the same place in Scotland?”

“Aye.”

“Did you know each other there?”

“Aye. We knew each other—there.”

Wise Quinn. Perhaps it was her clipped answers, after they had been engaged in cheerful conversation; perhaps he had heard rumors; perhaps he was suspicious. At any rate, Quinn Archer said no more, but chirruped to the horse, and without a backward glance at the Robbie Dunbar homestead, hurried the rig on past, toward whatever the future had in store.

For himself, he was more certain than ever that his plans were fixed on Bliss and a place, one of the remaining few available, of his own.

As for the girl at his side—Quinn slanted Tierney a quick glance and became aware, once again, of the abundant life that seemed to emanate from her, the vigor restrained in that slim body. Even her hair, lively and vibrant, testified to it. Her face—lovely but strong—was set now, her gaze fixed resolutely on the road ahead.

Quinn Archer’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Yo! Giddap!” he commanded the horse, as though eager, even anxious, to move on into whatever future Bliss held for him. And for the girl.

I
declare!” Lydia exclaimed with vexation. “I’ve had about all of these flies that I can abide!”

The harried housewife looked up from her work—washing canning jars in a dishpan of hot, sudsy water—brushing futilely at a particularly obnoxious pest that was hovering around her head.

“The regular flies I don’t mind as much,” she gritted, “as these horrible blue bottles! Horseflies! Listen a minute, Tierney—”

Tierney let her hands come to rest in the pan of beans she was preparing to string and snap, cocked her head, and listened. Sure enough, clearly, in the quiet kitchen, could be heard the droning and buzzing of flies on the windowpanes, the angry, useless buzzing of those caught in the dangling fly traps, and
the insistent cacophony of those outside thronging the screen door, jostling for place, hoping for a way in.

“The music of the northland, Herkimer calls it,” Lydia said despairingly and shuddered.

“Pity the homes without screens when we are this bad with screens,” Lydia continued, sighing. “There’s no way a house can be kept shut up, as hot as it is today, and so doors hang open, screens or no screens. And in those without, the flies are thicker’n sandhill fleas. And those are thick enough, goodness knows!”

“They certainly are a terrible plague,” Tierney admitted. “The flies, I mean. I thought they’d drive me crazy out in the garden pickin’ these beans.”

“You know what, Tierney? It’s time for fly patrol!”

“Fly patrol?” Tierney asked, intrigued. This was just one more new experience among many since she had come to the Canadian bush.

“First,” Lydia said, drying her hands, “we pull down all the blinds and darken the house as much as possible.”

Mystified, Tierney hurried to comply.

When the dark green shades were all pulled over the windows, Lydia handed Tierney a large dish towel.

“This won’t work unless the door is open, as of course it is, and the screen door shut. Now, you and I—we go back here . . .” Lydia led the way to the rear part of the house, stumbling a little in the dark.

“Now we’re ready. We start flapping the dish towels—”

Lydia suited action to words, swinging her towel in a mighty arc, back and forth, up and down, all around.

“It doesn’t work unless you keep it up,” she panted, “and you have to walk toward the light, shooing as you go.”

Side by side the two women flapped, flapped until their faces grew red in the heat of the day and their arms weary. Flapped, and approached the door letting in the only light in the darkened house.

The flies, as is their wont—and urged on by the dish towels—had made a beeline (fly line?) toward the screen door. Soon the inside of the screen was as loaded with flies as the outside.

“Keep flapping!” Lydia urged, laying her towel aside and reaching for the broom.

Standing at a distance from the door and with the broom handle held before her like a sword, she pushed open the screen, Tierney behind her, flapping all the while, urging the swarmed pests toward the light. With one final flap on Tierney’s part, Lydia yanked the screen door shut and—wonder of wonders—the house was comparatively free of flies. For the moment. Whenever anyone went in or out, they well knew, more would slip back in, and eventually the whole procedure would need to be done again.

“Now then, my dear,” the determined Lydia said, “you’ll need to get up on a chair and get those fly traps down—they’re full up. I suppose I should be grateful for them; at least they are doing their job. It’s getting them down that’s disgusting.”