According to Joséphine, the train station in Maria looks like a badly wrapped pound of butter that’s been left outside on the prairie. Short and squat and sickly yellow, with no personality and, worst of all, poorly kept up, it turns its back on the village as if it wants to be forgotten and greets just two trains a day – the one from Prince Albert on its way to Saskatoon and the one from Saskatoon on its way to Prince Albert. Monsieur Sanschagrin, a retired Mountie, plays the dual role of station master and ticket agent. Grumpy and suffering from a perpetual cold, he never smiles, never says Bon voyage to people who are leaving or Welcome to those who are arriving, and rushes the unfortunate people who show up to buy their tickets at the last moment when he’s supposed to be on the platform with his little flag and his whistle because the train is about to pull into the station. If they want to go beyond Saskatoon – to Alberta in the west or Manitoba in the east – they have to be there an hour early: Chief Sanschagrin, as he likes to be called, writes slowly and doesn’t really understand the Canadian Pacific Railway schedule. It’s too complicated and the print is too small. Oh, he’d like to have an assistant – aside from old man Sylvestre who’s supposed to clean the station but spends most of his time smoking his pipe and looking out at the fields of wheat – a young fellow he’d allow to sell the tickets, but the young people in Maria, all of them farmers’ sons, aren’t interested in sitting behind a ticket window all day long, waiting for the two trains to pull in, when the wide-open spaces call to them and he’s there all by his lonesome, as he says to anyone willing to listen, running the whole station.

It’s another twenty minutes before the arrival of the train from Prince Albert that will take Rhéauna to Saskatoon and then Regina, to her aunt Régina’s, her grandfather’s youngest sister, a strict and taciturn woman who has always terrified the little girl. The whole family is sitting on the big wooden bench that runs along a good part of the station wall opposite Gate One – the only gate – that opens onto Platform One – the only one.

They are sitting very upright, the girls’ hands on their knees the way their grandmother has taught them, Méo stuffing his pipe after trying to send a friendly sign to Monsieur Sanschagrin who has not responded – oh, it’s all very well to forge ties over a glass of gin at the general store on a winter night, but here, we work! – and Joséphine is lost in thought. They could exchange heart-rending farewells; in fact, they need to, but when the moment comes they can’t do it, all five are glued to their bench, silent and glum. Each one in turn looks at the big clock that hangs above the ticket window. It’s nearly time. Monsieur Sanschagrin has stepped out of his cage and donned his station master’s cap. Before he steps onto the platform, just as he’s about to bring his whistle to his mouth, he turns toward the line of Desrosiers who look at him as if he were an executioner and shouts at the top of his lungs though there are only five people in the station:

“All aboard! Prochain arrêt Saskatoon, next stop Saskatoon! Allll aboooard!”