* * *
THAT MORNING, THE ENTRANCE of Marie’s ancestral calèche with Poney hitched to it attracts a lot of attention on the way into Old Montreal. On rue Notre-Dame the blue-collar workers have removed the metal plate that was the cause of Champion’s accident. Marie vows that she will get through this day.
“Hey!” shouts Alice across the street in front of the Basilica. “That horse isn’t for little girls!” Marie stops a little farther along, at the top of Place Jacques-Cartier, at the stand with the fewest customers. This morning she is the first arrival and doesn’t need to make her horse back up, which suits her. John told her that making the calèche back up is like playing pool, that she just needs to understand the angle for lining up calèche and horse and, afterwards, it will go almost by itself, it comes with practice. But Marie doesn’t know how to play pool. She offers a carrot to Poney, who savours it without dropping a crumb, efficient even in the way he devours treats. On her way to the drinking trough she spots Le Rôdeur, who is approaching.
“So, Kid, you managed to get here in one piece. Coffee?”
Shortly after, she experiences the drivers’ quantum law, which John had already told her about: “Soon as you’ve got a coffee in your hands, you take on your first customers, without even appealing to tourists.” Out of pride and so as not to worry them she doesn’t tell a couple of fiftyish Torontonians that they are her first passengers.
Seeing that she’s taken on her first client before him, Alice grins sardonically. Marie’s attention is focussed on what road to take, the dates to remember, and the description of architectural styles. The Aldred Building, the one that’s shaped like a wedding cake, is art deco. The National Bank and its impressive outside vault that’s protected by a tangle of electric wires are visible from rue Saint-Jacques. Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the guy with a pigeon on either shoulder in the very heart of the Place d’Armes: founder of the city in 1642. The Saint-James, with its suite that goes for five thousand dollars a night where Mick Jagger stayed…. All is well. Poney turns out to be the ideal companion. Turning onto rue des Recollets, she hits the corner of the sidewalk; her tire elastic comes undone. Fortunately, she’s not in the field of vision of any driver. After telling the tourists she needs a couple of minutes, Marie gets down and tries in vain to repeat what Billy did after the accident. With no elastic, she gives the impression of trotting along in a dilapidated carriole along a bumpy road. She can’t help it, she has to come up with a way to tighten the elastic. For it to work she has to be able to lift the calèche for a fraction of a second; the task seems to her impossible. It lacks a third hand.
Georges Prince passes close to her with the Clydesdale still hitched to the green buggy adorned with stuffed animals and roses. The mare lopes along, her strides so long that her walking speed is nearly equal to the working trot — in fact, she seems out of breath and has a little foam on her lips. The star driver waves at Marie and then, without even smiling or interrupting his explanations to the people seated in his calèche, he jumps out, joins the young driver, fixes the tire elastic in a quarter of a second. Gentlemanly, he gives her a wink and leaves with no further ado.
When she reaches rue de la Commune, Marie recognizes Trudy and two other female drivers to whom she is about to say hello when a chorus of bitter voices rises up.
“Are you the new kid who wears out the horses?”
Immediately, tears come to Marie’s eyes.
“It was the metal plate,” she mumbles so faintly that no one hears her.
“You have to learn a horse isn’t a car,” one of the three women bellows.
“Yeah, you can’t go to the garage to change some parts after an accident. Didn’t John explain that?”
“Anyway, you aren’t finished with us.”
Marie inhales, exhales; struggles to get back the upper hand.
There are tourists on board, after all.
“Who are those scary bitches?” asks the woman.
“My colleagues,” replies Marie, looking down.
Quai de l’Horloge, Accueil Bonneau, the drop-in place for homeless men, the city’s first brothel, the École de cirque: the tour is coming to an end and the convoy turns onto Berri, the street that marks the eastern boundary of the Far Ouest.
Her life on the other side doesn’t interest her now. After her ex cleared out the apartment, not much was left — a lot of dust, the spice rack, and a jar of gherkins in the refrigerator. Only emptiness and the possibility of a fresh start.
The traffic light turns green and Poney, trotting, darts onto the Bonsecours hill. Then Marie does something she’d never have allowed herself as a rider: she loosens the reins and delegates all power to the animal. “Your horse is amazing,” says the woman once they have come to the top of the slope. Marie thinks back to the idea of “a horse for experienced drivers.” Bullshit! These horses are so sensible, so independent, they allow the driver to light a cigarette and drive with one hand, thinking about something else.
After the tourists have gone, Marie gives Poney three big carrots and a handful of peppermints. She would like to press herself against his shoulder, wrap her arms around his neck, plant a kiss on the rosette at the very top of his nose; but knowing his temperament she has a sense that those movements would unnerve him. And so she plants herself in front of him and looks him deep in the eyes.
Black and gleaming, protected by a fine ring of russet eyelashes, Poney’s eyes shine with intelligence that’s both sensitive and intuitive. In their depths, Marie detects something as yet untamed. Are the eyes of horses ancient jewels? she wonders.
* * *
IN HIS MUSTARD-COLOURED buggy John arrives at Marie’s stand, holding the Haflinger with short reins. The biceps in his long thin arms stand out, on the verge of trembling.
Unlike Poney’s, the Haflinger’s ears are very mobile. Nostrils dilated, blond mane blowing in the wind, shadow of foam at the corners of his lips, the animal looks agitated and nervous, his disposition explosive.
“I’m always digging my heels in. He reminds me of my father.”
Frowning, John scans the horizon and curses.
“Alice is coming to steal our gun, that’s all we need!”
“Who’s we?”
“He’s going to squeeze himself in at the end of the line and steal our customer.”
For Alice to indulge in such a despicable act is outrageous to John.
“I’m bored at the Basilica; there’s been nothing for two hours,” he tells John, his expression contrite. “Lloyd’s asleep and I don’t even have half a bell yet.”
“We’ll remember your tremendous talent, Alice.”
Farther west on Notre-Dame, Trish, Trudy, and Patty, all of them hitched to Belgians, advance in a near-military procession towards the stand.
“The old hides!” announces John.
“Kid, you’re in deep shit,” warns Alice, who has just had a ride stolen for the third time.
Poney takes in the odour of the three women and their horses before he spots them: two mares and a mature gelding. From him comes a quick, cheerful whinny, a greeting that is friendly but polite, a simple expression of complicity that doesn’t ask to be answered. The three horses (manes washed, coats smoothed) point their ears in his direction and take up their positions in front of Alice’s horse.
The female drivers, carrying buckets, jump out in one motion and pretend they are heading for the water pump while they loiter in the space occupied by Marie. They are trying hard to catch her doing something wrong, but the asphalt around Poney is clean, the calèche is the proper distance from the sidewalk, the uprights of the bridle are tight enough, there isn’t a hint of a small apple-size piece of manure in the diaper; Marie has taken the time to clean the eyes and nostrils of her horse with a cloth and to braid his black mane, using a technique that Trish, Trudy, and Patty aren’t familiar with.
“It’s not as complicated as it looks and it lasts all day,” says Marie when she notices
the other three taking an interest in the braid. “And when it’s hot out it frees the neck.”
John can’t get over it; the Kid has been able to avoid the wrath of the main female drivers. From his bench, he watches Marie: slender, milky complexion, constant effervescence, long swanlike neck, slightly awkward. She’s not so innocent and is much more enigmatic than he’d thought at first. Her gaze is open and expansive, so deep one can imagine diving into it. But not everything is so simple. There is something untamed and broken within her. She’s like the horses around her: her past now haunts her. Sensing the insistence in his gaze, the young driver turns towards John, lets go of the tuft of mane hair she is holding.
* * *
TWO O'CLOCK AT THE stable, dead calm: all the daytime drivers are out and several hours will pass before the relief crew arrives in late afternoon. Billy generally uses this time to clean the stall, count the cubes of hay, sweep the aisle, recharge the batteries in the lanterns for the calèches …. But Paul’s death and the discovery of his truck in the parking lot sows anarchy in his routine. He now spends a lot of time leading the investigation. The last Irishman sits on the roof of his trailer or on the freezer in the cellar, the barrel of the rifle across his lap. There he does his exercises in extrapolation that take him back to the two men. Evan, first of all, because of the madness that haunts his gaze and his megalomaniacal ideas. And Le Rôdeur, whose motivations he can’t really grasp, nor his comings and goings, who spends a lot of time in the stable, in the stall that serves as his shelter. He disappears, then comes back, never giving details. In a notebook above the old billy goat’s head with its gold teeth, Billy has drawn a question mark.
The last Irishman showed John the charred remains of Paul Despatie’s pickup and discussed the two suspects with him, but the driver is no further ahead than he is and can at best serve as confidant. In the Saloon, the horsemen continue to get drunk and suspect one another. They’re not much help either and Billy was afraid matters would get out of hand, but their usual concerns won out: the Amphi-Bus that scared the new horses; the shoes that clicked unevenly; the construction work. He trusts only one other person but he doesn’t know at the moment if she is still alive and breathing, and to find her he’ll have to manage by himself. Paul can’t stay eternally bent double in the freezer.
He goes down to the cellar, lays the hunting rifle on the ground against a dried-up old harness on which a litter of newborn baby rats is squealing, and pulls the freezer door ajar.
When he sees Paul’s head, the nape of his neck and his still frizzy dark hair, he feels as if his former boss is going to turn towards him and tell him to get Cinderella’s coach ready for a wedding. Painfully, he hoists the body out of the freezer, lays it on the ground, on a tarp. He’ll wait for a thaw to carry out his plan.
La Mère. He has to get in touch with her. If she is still alive.
* * *
PAUL DESPATIE'S BODY TAKES several days to thaw completely. They pass like this: John happens to run into Marie at the stand, giving her as usual an incredulous half-smile; Marie amassing fares so quickly she has barely enough time to gulp a sandwich; Le Rôdeur wandering from stand to stand, carrying his brown bag; the three female horsewomen of the Apocalypse stationed on rue de la Commune near the Pointeà-Callière; Poney and the Haflinger, each in his own way, delivering the best of themselves. Around four p.m. the whole gang sets off for home. The honeyed light of late afternoon breaks through the dimness of the stable, casting on the men’s skin and animals’ hide a stubborn luminosity that magnifies the scene.
On the day in question, someone has managed to tune in a radio station that comes in clearly, playing American country. Hank Williams, Leadbelly, Patsy Cline …. Listening to them — one hand on the shoulder of a horse and the other holding a cold beer, worn by the sun and filthy from the dust of Griffintown — restores the essential meaning of all this music opening up the horizons of those who slave away.
“How many bells?” John inquires.
“Two,” Marie lies, when under her bench she has a little more than three hundred dollars.
“Keep a low profile when you’re taking in a whole lot of cash. It’s not the same for everybody and the others will be mad at you, especially at first.” John himself had taught it to her. Her own trips happen in the early morning, before the arrival of the lemon-green calèche hitched to the matte-gold horse and the other drivers, while she reigns practically alone in the tourist area with Le Rôdeur as her accomplice, always wearing the jacket ripped off from a city employee. She has him board the calèche as she leaves the stable and drives him to the Old Town; in exchange he shuts his eyes when she welcomes customers at places other than her stand. After that John arrives, then the others. Already she has close to a bell, a hundred dollars, in her pocket. At night, back home in the Far East, Marie’s sleep is agitated and not really refreshing. It’s her own voice that wakes her in the middle of the night. She hears herself tell the story of the Centaur Theatre, formerly the Montreal Stock Exchange, a building erected early in the twentieth century, very imposing with its six columns rising in front of the facade. Eyes closed, she declaims like a robot the history of the town, face turned towards the window at the head of her bed, repeating what she has recounted at least six or seven times in the course of the day. She sees herself in a dream as well, sometimes on board her calèche but sitting on the passenger seat, stretched out uncomfortably: feet on one of the seats, knees folded like an accordion, shoulders on the other bench and neck twisted, legs dangling, trying to resist gravity…. She wakes with a start, just as she is about to fall. Her dreams exhaust her.
* * *
CROUCHING NEXT TO PAUL, Billy takes the hand of his former boss, touches his palm, and, with his own thumb, presses to see if the body has thawed. The corpse discharges a quantity of water and a small funereal mist that smells of moss and mushrooms.
The body will be waked that night, in Paul’s office. John helps Billy carry Paul’s sodden remains to the sofa. The very heavy legs that seemed at first hard to unfold after spending several weeks frozen in an impossible position now seem out of alignment with the trunk, as if Paul had tried to grow taller to see over a fence. He’d been shot twice in the chest; the bullets are in a line straight to the heart. Paul’s complexion is a strange mauve, speckled with yellow, his hair, shaggy and oily, his fingers claw-like, his lips stretched in a sardonic grin at once grotesque and cynical…. John casts a perplexed look at the corpse.
“We got to make him look better than that.”
While Billy shoves Paul’s feet into his black boots and again pulls on his own, John snaps open the office latch. He remembers there’s a crucifix above the door and he wants to slip it between his fingers, not having a rosary handy.
The door gives way more easily than expected. Inside, in the amber light that seeps through the horizontal blind dances in a fine but concentrated gold-coloured dust as it does everywhere in Griffintown. John coughs slightly, then smiles at the sight of Paul’s cup, which is inscribed, I like my beer cold and my women hot. Paul also liked draft horses, Garth Brooks records, and western accessories. He liked to think he was a cowboy. At the bottom of his cup, in two or three centimetres of curdled milk and coffee, some sugar-mad flies have drowned.
Billy screws a candle into the neck of a beer bottle and announces that they will wake the body early that afternoon and that no horse or calèche will go out into the Old City, except maybe at the end of the evening.
John seats himself on a wooden chair, to the left of the corpse. To give himself an impression of composure and to mark the passing of time, he cracks his knuckles every fifteen minutes. On the right of the remains, Billy cleans the grime out of his nails with a pocket knife and now and then swigs some vodka. The bottle is behind the sofa, in precarious balance on the radiator. He offers it to John who, given the time, turns it down. And, like that, they await the arrival of the first coachmen while on the TV in the background come thick and f
ast the morning programs featuring interior decoration and cooking. On the menu: lacquered duck; truffle oil mousse; anise sherbet. On the other network a lady has saved up a thousand dollars to set up a small feng shui boudoir. Billy looks at Paul, then at John, who is biting his nails, and the lady on television who is bemoaning her life over a small pile of rocks in a glass bowl. He wonders what crazy world he’s living in.
They wake the corpse all day long. The coachmen cross themselves and go to sit on the bales of hay outside, right where Evan parked his trailer some weeks earlier before he disappeared, God only knows where. Lloyd has heard that he’s working in an animal auction house not far from the American border. The Chinese man from the corner store comes several times to deliver cases of beer to the coachmen. In the afternoon, a squabble breaks out between Alice and the Indian. It’s about Trish, busily making coffee in the kitchen. Something happened between her and the Indian during the past few days that annoys Alice, who dated her several years earlier. With cheeks purple, he rises and provokes the Indian by calling him “savage.” Best not to press that button. All the alcohol soaked up since early morning has dulled their actions, slowed their movement, and muddled the precision of the blows they’ve dealt. John orders them to fight somewhere else, near the stream, beneath the big oak. Under the Indian’s boots the earth crumbles as he draws back, in the spot where the ground starts to slope steeply towards the stream of stagnant water. He flaps his arms as if to restore his balance. He tries to clutch a branch, in vain, instead grabs Alice’s arm, dragging him along as he falls. The stream is much deeper than the drivers imagine. Something like the height of two men standing one on top of the other.
Griffintown Page 8
