Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel by Ruth Glover Page B

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... it,” 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