Griffintown

by Marie Hélène Poitras

  Billy hoists Paul’s body onto the wheelbarrow used for collecting dung. The thawed-out corpse is easier to fold, after all the time it spent folded like scissors in the freezer. Armed with a shovel, the groom digs the ground near the graves of Ray and Mignonne. It occurred to him again to swallow a handful of earth, but something in the damp and compact soil cut his appetite: one of Mignonne’s shoes. Under the weight of the living, of their pretention, of their distraction, the earth and dust have preserved the horseshoes in death. Why do men have the habit of looking up at the sky when they seek answers to their questions, when truths are to be found buried under the heels of their boots? Billy notices that one hoof — the right front one — is shod, thinks it’s strange, but fills it all in without pushing it and starts to dig down three metres.

  Two hours later, with Paul finally buried, he saddles up Maggie and rides her all over Griffintown, tearing down the missing person notices he’d stuck to the hydro poles a few weeks earlier. It’s not up to him to write the end of the story. He completed the chapter about himself without hindering the development of the follow-up, but what comes next rests in hands other than his.

  The last Irishman lights up a contraband cigarette, thinking about a case of twelve he’ll order for delivery by the Chinese man. He quickens his pace and sends Maggie galloping down Ottawa Street, like Mignonne in the opposite direction eight years earlier. You mustn’t make calèche horses gallop — Billy knows this better than anyone. It wrecks shoes and hocks. But he likes the perfectly round loop that changing from a brisk pace to a gallop with no transition through a trot makes him feel. He lets his mare run until lather fine as the foam on milk rises from deep in her breast and spreads along her strong and beautiful shoulder. Billy feels Maggie bolt under his backside, between his thighs.

  Then he stops, briskly, holding on to the reins, his horse nearly sitting under him, nose to the sky. If the last of the Irish knew how to smile he would do it at this exact moment.

  * * *

  THE RETURN OF THE horse to Marie’s life and the events of the past few days have stirred up memories, painful and ecstatic, against which she has begun to retaliate by the compulsive purchase of horse figurines — her favourite being a plastic Percheron intended for studying the anatomy of horses. These past days Marie has travelled across the city and bought all the trinkets that have caught her eye, from antique dealers on rue Notre-Dame and from Dollarama. Doing this has made her both content and dejected, moods that till now she thought were incompatible. Is it her recent breakup that has overwhelmed her? Who knows, she wonders more and more often, for Marie has the strong, alarming impression that the world is finally revealing itself as it is: fragile and without touchstones.

  In her east-end apartment, the driver has decided that she’ll create a labyrinth of little horses, a venture that inevitably ends like a game of dominoes. Horses knocked onto the marquetry floor now lying on the ground, knickknacks that have no relationship to the blocks of spirited grace perched on four legs that she’s started to spend time with; something along the lines of a childhood dream safeguarded, of a memory found at the bottom of a trunk, intact.

  Thinking about the coachmen, Marie helps up the horses that have collapsed. She would like to know where John, Le Rôdeur, Billy, even Alice were born, where they hail from. To understand what attracted them, like her, to the Far Ouest. That obsession will soon force her to go beyond her depth. The state of the apartment testifies to it: empty save for an armchair, a mattress and something like a hundred figurines.

  At John’s place too, as at the homes of most coachmen, there is the same kind of interior decoration reduced to the basics. The coachmen have the feeling that something will happen at the end of the summer and that they will have to find another place to lay their heads. The less they weigh themselves down with, the less tedious will be the process of uprooting and re-rooting. The rare objects we encounter in their immediate environment are untouchable, nearly sacred. Billy cherishes the portrait of his mother and her old cribbage set that sits on a shelf in his trailer; for Alice, it’s a penknife in the inside pocket of his leather coat; while Joe has been dragging around a broken compass that points to the west; earlier this summer, Lloyd pawned his watch on its gold chain to pay for Evan’s treats and now has bitter regrets. No way to recover it now, obviously, with all the antique dealers on rue Notre-Dame who know how to assess these things. Whenever he thinks of it, indignation colours his cheeks and forces him to guzzle an invigorating swig. Le Rôdeur has nothing, needs nothing, and has been feeling better since he’d got rid of everything, as if now he no longer needs to tolerate being deprived of anything at all. The advantage, he thinks, is that once he is lying on the ground, his face buried in the mud, at least he can be certain he’s not falling.

  As for John, he has an old camera that belonged to his grandfather, then to his father who didn’t know what to do with it. It is the only thing he fears being stolen.

  * * *

  A Lone Cowhand Goes Roaming

  One day John told Marie that he usually left his personal effects in a warehouse, since he went down to New York to sell Christmas trees. After that, he usually left on a long trip that took him farther south, where he managed to track down odd jobs until he’d had enough of selling fish and chips and corn on the cob on an American beach and considered going home to Montreal. During that time he would wander, sleep in a trailer or now and then on park benches, more because it appealed to him than from misfortune. On his return in the spring he was sometimes seen dozing at night in his calèche until he found an apartment not far from the stable in Griffintown and repatriated his possessions. Spring affected John like a difficult waking after a legendary night of boozing.

  He had never felt like part of any group, couldn’t join the ranks. As a kid he played hooky more often than was warranted. John had given up school at fourteen to stick out his thumb and head for the southern US. This renunciation arose not from a desire to bungle but from a simple sense of inadequacy around people in general. John had an undying feeling that he was a nuisance and ill-mannered — except in the presence of coachmen. Most of the horsemen felt the same thing and that may have been what explained the empathy they felt with one another. John was not exactly like Alice, Gerry, Lloyd, and company, but had told Marie this: “I’ve always valued those guys. They have no choice about being honest, or the strength to not be.” And when she asked him about the horses, he would reply that he respected them without revering them, that most of all he liked to photograph them.

  Marie had landed in Griffintown while John was trying to get away from it and, abruptly, he had an urge to snatch her from this patch of thistles. He wanted to be bound together with Marie as powerfully as she wanted to join the horses.

  That detail most assuredly changed the course of history. Their own and that of Griffintown.

  * * *

  FALLEN FROM THE SUN, scorching drought. From the roof of his trailer, Billy spies Le Rôdeur belting eastward, a bottle of cheap whisky in his blood, cactus in his throat, a crumbly heart, rust in all his joints, creaky ankle, death rattle with every breath …. The last of the Irishmen is more and more convinced that they won’t see the errand boy again after the winter; that, struggling painfully, the man is living his last season.

  Le Rôdeur stumbles, pulls himself up, awkward, pitiful, panting, grimacing because of a pebble in his boot. King of nothing and serf of no one, helpful only when it suits him. He’s been keeping a low profile at the calèche stands during the past weeks. The horsemen, particularly the errand boys, come and go, depending on their mood, following their lucky star or obeying their demons, slipping away only to resurface. But deep in Le Rôdeur’s eyes there was a flash of madness. Something’s wrong.

  If he were a calèche horse he’d be sent away to make glue, thinks Billy as he guzzles his beer.

  * * *

  ADVANCING THAT WAY FOR some time now, the errand boy runs into La Grande Folle coming alon
g the rail line, taking her frills and ruffles to the west, red-eyed, seams of her dress about to burst, a mauve feather boa around her neck and her big purse full of sour candies. Together, and apart from the others of this world, Le Rôdeur and La Grande Folle work black magic that smells like something burning and dilates the mucus membranes in their larynxes. To them, he is on the other side of the mirror. After meeting his demon in the night, Le Rôdeur continues his epic until the blazing light of day and suddenly, on the road, when he notices her, first he squints: jean jacket, boots planted in the gravel, psychedelic skirt, long electric auburn hair with split ends, falling to the middle of her back. Upright, loving, strict, potato-coloured eyes. In short, an angel. Who holds out a hand bearing fruit.

  From her cracked gaze it’s easy to see that Roberta has also suffered in the past. Not so vulnerable now, she has brought a thermos of coffee to back her up and a story to tell, that of a little girl toying with the dream of a horse of her own. Impossible, because her parents didn’t have two cents to rub together. But the little girl had managed to saddle a cow and mount it; she took it all over the village and everyone had a good laugh. In the fields, when the cow began to canter, with a look that was sheepish and rather grotesque, the little girl closed her eyes and imagined she was on the back of a purebred.

  “That little girl is me,” declares Roberta.

  Le Rôdeur sobs in spite of himself, begging her to leave him alone. He’s coming down from speed.

  “No,” says Roberta, “I just came to say you’re not alone.”

  Exhausted, he gives up and agrees to follow her wherever she wants to take him. Twenty minutes later they arrive at the Mission.

  * * *

  A BED JUST FOR him. Lying down, Le Rôdeur feels as if his bony carcass is going to fall apart; he has slept sitting up for fifteen years now and doesn’t ask himself any questions: one eye open, one ear pricked. On this bed he’s been given, stretched out as in a coffin, he dozes off in the middle of a small, windowless room, its door closed, so that when he wakes up, he has no idea what time it is; then he thinks he’s dead or in jail or a police station. Roberta’s voice reminds him that an angel has been watching over his destiny ever since he escaped from the Far Ouest and now that angel wants to know his name.

  To tell Roberta his age would be easier: forty-five, looks sixty. He must go back to a far-off time now misted over, a tightrope walker on his own timeline. When he starts to sit down, a flash of pain shoots through his face. Roberta arranges a pillow behind his back.

  “Léopold. That’s what they call me,” he declares in an expressionless voice.

  The words jostle together in his throat as if saying his name were painful.

  Roberta offers him a tin cup with good hot coffee; he agrees to eat a little — a bit of bread, some ham, a ripe pear — while she explains that he is in a homeless shelter. With the small amount of pride he still possesses he has never before thought of himself as homeless.

  In the shower the fine shell that envelopes him cracks, then gives way. Le Rôdeur melts under the scalding water, leaving all the room for Léopold, skin pink and streaming.

  They give him a razor; his long salt-and-pepper beard is dealt with. As best he can, Léopold trims the bushy hairs in his side whiskers, disciplines them with a small black plastic comb from the kit that also contains a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, shaving gel, nail clippers, matches and a sports deodorant. Roberta gives him a few coupons for the canteen. She is still at his disposal. He’s not required to say anything to her, but she knows he’s there and, for the time being, that’s enough. She says she worries about him. Léopold spends his days thinking about a remark he thinks is beautiful, intoxicating even: “I care about you.” In bins of clothes available to the homeless he unearths a perfectly worn-in cowboy hat that would make the Griffintown coachmen green with envy.

  A doctor comes to examine Léopold, especially his throat. A nurse unplugs his ears with a syringe. Clots of wax the size of small pebbles emerge. Over the following days, Léopold feels under attack by the volume of the rumbling all around: sounds of footsteps, men’s murmurs, clinking keys, car traffic, ambulance sirens, police cars, fire engines: he could be forgiven for thinking tragedy might strike in five minutes, that the whole city is being torn apart. Smoking a cigarette with Roberta, he hears the crackling of the fire as it burns the tobacco she inhales. His accomplice has lips as fine as rolling paper.

  She helped him find a casual job as night watchman in an office tower. With his first pay he bought a bike from a junkie around Square Viger and offered it to Roberta, who quickly turned it down. She reminds him that if he wants to make her happy he just has to tell her something he remembers from his childhood, as she had done with her story of a broken-in cow.

  “No cows in my story, no poor relations. Orphanage, prayers, a shelter. And a teacher who grips me hard when he sticks it in me in the dormitory.”

  Suddenly Roberta’s eyes become ochre and bright.

  “Go on, Léopold.”

  He lets it all out. His childhood spat in words that burn, leaving blisters on the roof of his mouth. He feels as if insects are running along his pharynx and shooting invisible stings into his throat. He has a feeling that he now has finished roving. In a few weeks he will be diagnosed with cancer of the throat.

  * * *

  MARIE CALLS JOHN, IN her head for a start. A grey day, face silky with mist. They won’t be able to hitch up today. She phones Billy to be sure, then John, presumably to inform him. She finds the courage to invite him to her place. They’ve never seen one another outside the Far Ouest. Marie has never tried to make reality and Griffintown touch and embrace.

  The coachman would like to bring something to show that he has manners. Flowers? No, too many implications. It’s a bit early for a bottle of white wine so he takes along his box of photos; no doubt Marie will find them interesting. Arriving at her place, he holds out the box and looks for a chair to sit on. There is just one easy chair right in the middle of the living room. He sits on it. Marie stands next to him.

  “Would you have anything to drink?” he asks a moment later.

  While she is bustling about in the kitchen, he notices the little wooden and plastic horses all around and thinks when she comes back with a bottle of vodka, two glasses and ice, that Marie has become a genuine driver, which is in part his fault; that she’s been dispossessed of her belongings the better to melt into Griffintown; that she has nothing now and has already started to decline. This is something she is unaware of.

  In a gulp he drains the drink she pours for him.

  * * *

  THE BLACK-AND-WHITE photos are arranged thematically in different cardboard envelopes, the most voluminous being the years of John’s calèche, a kind of more or less private photographic journal.

  When he started out, he took many photos of horses, lighting them to emphasize their weight and their ancient features, their composure inherited from a time when things were done slowly and humbly, within the rules: tidy seams of heavy rope stuck by hand into harnesses give a patina to overly ornate old wooden calèches, breeding horses with total respect for their lineage. John would photograph them from a distance and in profile, then, less and less fearful or suspicious, resulting in the series, “Heads and Forequarters,” outlined under various angles often determined by the degree of luminosity and its power of reflection according to the model’s coat: light-coloured, dark or in between for the Belgians that were often warm chestnut. His attention was then drawn to the eyes of the horses, their ears and their powerful shoulders.

  In the series “Objects,” John likes to photograph inanimate objects that seemed to him filled with meaning. An old horseshoe hung above the door in the small sitting room adjoining Paul’s office, Boy’s head and shoulders in the Hôtel Saloon, the skeleton of a little bat washed by the snow, uncovered near the thistle plant where the three-legged tomcat devours his catch and Marie puts down her bike, accidentally crus
hing some tiny bones, Paul’s cup on which can be read: I like my beer cold and my women hot. There is a trace of lipstick on the cup. That detail makes John smile. He has also photographed the crack in the ceiling where Ray decided that all his work was done. But the coachman’s favourite is a bouquet of daisies he immortalized just as they were beginning delicately to fade. John knew how to fix the nascent weariness he’d spied at the tips of the petals that had been the harbinger of the season’s end.

  Over the years, after a lifelong interest in animals, John began to train his lens on the coachmen, most of whom turn out to be much less hesitant than he expected: Evan — the pre-Afghanistan one — looks something like James Dean: tanned face, cowboy jeans, and a sleeveless T-shirt that showed his collarbones and the top of his torso. Ray, standing next to a haystack, leaning on the handle of his pitchfork, offers his most beautiful toothless smile. Elsewhere Paul, taken by surprise in his office, hand up like a movie star trying to escape his photographer. Billy from the back, unaware of the photographer’s presence. Trish, Trudy, and Patty like triplets trying hard to look their best, sitting erect on an old church pew near the entrance. Lloyd giving him the finger. Joe, Gerry, and Alice standing in front of the city hall, proud, their expressions vulgar. Then Evan, the post-Windigo Evan, in close-up to capture the tears tattooed on his cheek. One of the most beautiful photos in the series. They’re all there. Just about. Or nearly.

  “Only one missing is me,” observes Marie.

  “We’ll take care of that. Bring a dress. We’ll take the photo at the stable.”