Five Roses - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Alice Zorn is the author of Arrhythmia and a book of short fiction, Ruins & Relics, which was a finalist for the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize. She has twice placed first in Prairie Fire’s Fiction Contest. She lives in Montreal.

Alice Zorn is the author of Arrhythmia and a book of short fiction, Ruins & Relics, which was a finalist for the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize. She has twice placed first in Prairie Fire’s Fiction Contest. She lives in Montreal.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The bus hurtled along the highway. Cigarette smoke wafted down the aisle. The crackle of a bag of chips. The innocent movements and sounds of a handful of people heading north out of Montreal on a Wednesday evening.

As the lights of the city receded, Thérèse let herself relax. She and the baby were safe now, weren’t they? Who could follow them? No one knew where they were going. She hoped the embrace of her arms made the baby feel safe. That the jiggling of the old bus wouldn’t wake her. She slept now that Thérèse wasn’t shifting her from side to side to grope in her pocket for money, clutch a ticket, set down and pick up her suitcase. In the subway, if that pretty Indian woman hadn’t helped her at the turnstile, Thérèse wouldn’t have been able to lift her suitcase across. She’d never before left the house with the baby and hadn’t known how hard it would be to shove against doors, count correct change, carry a suitcase, and keep track of a ticket while holding a baby.

“You’ll see, we’ll be fine,” she murmured, as if the baby heard her thoughts. Nothing was too hard. She would manage, even if she had to hide the suitcase in the trees by the ditch.

When she’d climbed on the bus at the station, she’d asked the driver if he would let her off at the gravel road before they got to Rivière-des-Pins. He glanced at the baby and the canvas suitcase she’d packed tight with diapers and formula, a bottle, and nipples. Quelqu’un vient te chercher? Someone picking you up? Nothing but trees out there. She hurried down the aisle without answering.

A few seats away someone listened to a ballgame on a transistor radio. Bursts of tinny hollering. The escalating roll of the announcer’s voice.

Thérèse held the baby tighter. The bus window was so streaked and blotched with dirt she couldn’t tell if the moon shone. She trusted that her feet would remember the trail through the woods. The humps of tree roots she had to step across. The dips in the forest floor. So often she’d walked along that path. But never before with a baby in her arms.

She lowered her head to breathe in the tender intimacy of soft baby hair. Her lips brushed the wisps. So sweet, so delicate. She’d bathed her that afternoon. Her own darling Rose.

For the summer, they would be fine in the cabin, but in the winter she would have to keep it warm. She didn’t know how Papa had paid Armand for wood, but she would find out. She would ask. Now that she had Rose to care for, she no longer felt timid about talking to Armand.

The cabin had a table, chairs, sofa, a bed. Maples and birch circled the clearing. Around them brooded the hush of a centuries-old pine forest. Armand and the people from Rivière-des-Pins would soon know she was there, but no one from the city would ever find them.

Six months ago she’d scrubbed the wood floors, wiped the tongue and groove walls and two windows, stripped Maman and Papa’s bed. The furniture stood in place as they’d lived with it. The cast iron stove. The rocker with the rope seat. The plank table where she and Maman had kneaded dough and peeled potatoes — and where they’d eaten, Papa, Maman, and Thérèse. Meals had been silent except for the tap of their forks on their plates and the wet sound of Papa chewing as well as he could with the last stumps of his teeth.

The balding velvet sofa against the wall was for reading the Bible. The difference between kneeling to say the rosary and sitting on the sofa, while Papa read the Bible, was that listening to the Bible was like a formal visit with God. His stories were written word for word on the pages. The rosary had words too, but requests were still possible. A plea could be mumbled between Hail Marys. Blessed be the fruit of thy womb and please may the traps not be empty tomorrow. Hope was more heartfelt when the hard boards of the floor dug into your knees. Papa and Maman prayed with their heads bent, pinching the beads of the rosary like a lifeline. Thérèse, watching them sidelong, felt less sure. Even as a young girl, she’d wondered if God listened. He’d never answered her prayers for a baby sister or brother. For the girls at school to let her turn the rope when they played skipping. For a dress bought new from the store.

At night the sofa was covered with a sheet, sewn from old bags, where Thérèse slept. The sheet had been washed so often that the cloth was soft, the lines of print faded. She could just make out the faint pink letters on the cloth tucked across the sofa’s back: FIVE. She didn’t know because it was English, but ROSES were flowers in any language, she was sure. Every morning the ghostly message whispered to her when she woke.

Roses grew in the bushes by the creek. In the forest there were tiny purple violets, bloodroot that bled real blood when you picked it, elegant white trilles, trout lilies with sleek, speckled leaves. Maman had taught her the names.

Papa brought Maman home when the doctors in Montreal could do no more for her. She lay in bed, her lungs torn by the coughing that kept all three of them awake. Thérèse fed her bread softened in milky tea, lifted her in bed, and cleaned her. Maman could no longer move herself. Only the ravage of disease moved through her.

Papa still slept beside her, because that was his place. At night, when Thérèse sat with Maman, she saw how small they both were, their bodies flattened by the heavy blankets woven from strips of rags. She was their only child, born to them late in life, a gift God sent to care for them in illness and old age.

When Maman finally died, the cabin was silent. Thérèse missed Maman, but how could she wish for Maman to keep suffering? She didn’t know what Papa felt. She cooked for him, and washed their clothes, the floors, and the windows, but they hardly talked. On Sunday they sat on the sofa, with the empty space between them for Maman, and he read the Bible.

One day Papa didn’t come home. Thérèse hadn’t noticed if he’d gone out with an axe, a wheelbarrow, a shovel, or his gun. The sun had set behind the trees, and still she waited with the marmotte stew warming on the side of the stove. From the window she watched the last light blur the outline of the trees. Her stomach watery with foreboding, she strode through the woods and across the field to Armand’s farm.

As children, she and Armand used to wait for the school bus that stopped at the end of the gravel road. Thérèse took the path through the woods to the road, Armand the long driveway from his white clapboard house. If Armand got to the road ahead of her, Thérèse paced her steps not to overtake him. He did the same when he was behind her. Both at the end of the road, they stared at the fat pods of milkweed in the ditch. Candelabra goldenrod and feathery purple vetch. In the winter they made footsteps in the snow and watched the crows in the trees squawk and flap their wings. When it rained, they huddled away from each other under separate trees. Armand didn’t talk to her. No one at school did. She was dressed in old clothes donated by the church. The other kids jeered when they recognized a sweater or a skirt. They knew she had no electricity or bathroom in her cabin, and they scrunched their noses in disgust because how could she take a bath? Thérèse could have explained, but no one ever asked. Once a week Maman heated water on the stove to pour into the tin tub. Papa bathed first, then Maman, then Thérèse. She often sniffed her clothes and skin. She couldn’t smell...