On her knees in the middle of the street, a bearded woman is crying as if she were in front of her father’s coffin. La Grande Folle, her feathered cap set down beside her, hair pulled back in a hairnet, the entire contents of her purse spilled onto the sidewalk: pills, powder, blush, an assortment of artificial fingernails, garters, a rock of crack. Tears are pouring over her painted skin.
Leaving the Far Ouest, she meets a horse, a golden palomino with rose-coloured nostrils, its chest injured, dogtrotting along as though nothing has happened, an animal so beautiful, so vivid, a vision of such splendour that he aches all the way to his testicles.
La Grande Folle vows never again to set foot in Griffintown.
* * *
The Rose with a Broken Neck
It would be said that she had wanted to enter Griffintown the way one desires to sleep with someone: to satisfy an urge. But tenderfeet were never welcome on the territory.
At first she thought that plow horses’ features were ugly: absolute snobbishness on the part of a former rider. She no longer liked western culture, or cowboys’ horses, quarter horses, or mustangs, all of them the same chestnut colour with a white line along the nose, back as straight as a riding crop and not very tall, disposition unflappable and predictable, constantly trying to slow down, while she adored thoroughbreds eighteen hands high, the kind that throw their riders to the ground and have to be dominated. She rode like a despot, always wearing spurs, claimed she adored horses but kept them highly charged, between panic and elation. They were well advised to obey, that was how she led them, and some matched her temperament perfectly. But that wasn’t the way to love horses. Around Percherons and Belgians she let her guard down. Never had she felt such empathy with animals as she had at her first contact with calèche horses. Their shoulders and overdeveloped forequarters demanded respect.
Marie had wanted to save a horse, even if it meant perishing with it.
And then she had broken her neck as if it were the mundane stem of a flower, snap. Marie had sunk into a deep coma, with no dreams of animals dependent on her for survival. No nightmares about a horse’s head hoisted by a chain above a well. Without John’s voice like a beacon in the blackness to call attention to the traps and to highlight the landmarks. Lost alone in this starless night, Marie sank down, very far down, as one descends into a tomb.
Three weeks later, when she emerged from that long barren dream, she felt on wakening, in every fibre, that never again would she be able to climb onto a horse. Now any movement passed through her lips and onto her eyelashes like a shudder.
Marie looked all around the room in search of her yellow dress. All she found was a faded bouquet of roses and her mother kneeling beside her.
* * *
JOHN HAS BEEN PARTIALLY disfigured by the flames. With first degree burns all over his back, severe ones on his hands, on the front of his thigh and his face, the coachman is waiting. A signal or a cry, the voice of Marie. Often at night he dreams that he is on fire, immolated again, and he wakes up screaming.
The flames have tanned his face and his flesh to the colour of the skin of a bison with its fat melted off by the powerful July sun. He is half-hidden under a cowboy hat. As the heel is missing from one of his boots, he has on a running shoe in its place and is leaning on a cane. He looks like a little old man — which he hates. That’s not the way he had imagined his last calèche season. Love and death were not part of the plan when he made the decision to come back to Griffintown to make some money and pay off his debts. He knocks himself senseless with bourbon and waits for a signal.
At his window, the leaves of an oak tree have changed quickly from a luminescent ochre to the colour of burnt sugar. They have started to fall. He sees autumn, in the mist, being born.
John will never try to find out what happened to the horses, especially not the Haflinger, who must have been terrified by the flames even more than by the amphibious vehicle in the tourist area. John imagines them let out to gallop, running towards the horizon at daybreak, heads held superbly, vigorously. Although he has never been as attached to them as Marie, their nobility and the ferocity that drove them could still move him when he was hungover or worn-out. He plugs his ears when he hears them whinny in terror in his memories, above all does not want to recall the echo of their uncoordinated gallop as they ran away. The stable has collapsed, the coachmen seem to have scattered, wounds were taking their time to heal, and his face, painful, is oozing a purulent fluid.
Yellow, plated with gold, amber, mica: the oak leaves now in a range of colours coming from the entire palette of the embers he had braved to rescue the Rose with a Broken Neck. He recalls, wincing, the blue sparks he walked through, treacherous, sharp as blades, much worse than the orange ones that had licked his thighs, set his clothes on fire and roasted the skin off his back. He lost his camera in the blaze; he’ll never see the snaps of Marie he took that day. It would be better to stop thinking about that, to concentrate on the leaves on the tree that are freeing themselves slowly, one by one. Wait for a signal. Swallow an ounce of bourbon. Wait for the nurse. And on the best days, replace waiting with hope.
* * *
NOT ONE COACHMAN SET foot in the Saloon after the blaze. Entering the tavern, Dan notes that Laura Despatie has been there, that she’s eaten a pickled egg and left the jar out again. As she did last time, she fiddles with Boy’s eye sockets, which he doesn’t appreciate. Boy no longer has the leaden gaze of Armageddon. Henceforth there are two holes, that’s all. Only black in place of the eyes. Which is even worse, because Boy has lost all his former dignity, is now nothing but a hopeless framework speckled with dull hairs.
They’ll have to take him down and hang something else on the wall; an illuminated clock for instance, or how about a new flat-screen tv? At worst, a classic deer’s head.
In addition to not picking up after herself, La Mère forgot to switch off the light before she left the Saloon. “I bet she didn’t even lock the door,” Dan muttered to himself.
In the office, the same sticky light. Dan rarely goes in there; he does his books sitting at the bar after closing.
And that is when he sees her: sitting at his desk, her body violently twisted to the right, a bullet hole in her left temple. Blood all over, on the wall, on her, on the wooden floor near the wastebasket where she spat her chewing tobacco and missed her target four times out of five.
In front of her, Dan spots the old revolver that belongs to La Mouche, the two bullets taken out of the founding horse’s eye sockets, and this note: “I don’t want to know what’s next. Farewell sweetheart. Don’t look for me in heaven. Aunt Laura.”
While taking her life, La Mère lost her beret, but her wig stayed firmly in place.
* * *
HITCHED TO A WHEELCHAIR, pushed by her mother, Marie comes back to John.
He shows her the extent of his burns, minor lesions, and sores. Breaks his cane in two and asks Marie if she knows where to find a cobbler able to stick back the heel of his boot. She tells him that she knows a miraculous salve that will fade scars once the wounds have healed.
He has seen her many, many times lean over towards the horses’ pasterns, spread a brown ointment over all their little sores and their slightest scratches.
“Now your skin is like leather, John.”
John frowns. Marie is planning to treat him with horse medicine.
“We’ll talk about horses another time, okay?”
“Yes. I’ve got something magnificent to show you.”
She points with her chin to make him look in the direction of her right hand. The tips of her fingers — index and middle — rise for a brief moment.
“See that? Something is moving in that part of me.”
She seems at once proud and exhausted.
A beautiful day. In Marie’s hands, leaning against her palm, a pair of reins stretch out again. It’s written in the sky, sown in the earth, inscribed in the leaflets of clover blossoms, in the DNA of the three
-legged cat, in the veins of the couch grass that grows all over Griffintown.
The cross on Mount Royal can be useful when the time comes to formulate a prayer. You can rest your gaze on it and murmur very softly, “Let that girl get back on her horse.”
John hopes with all his might that the electricity will come back too in the centre of Marie’s body, in her sex, between her thighs, and all the way to the tips of her toes.
THE CHOIR OF REDEMPTION
*
GOING BACK TO THE Far Ouest, Léopold realizes that he doesn’t miss the horses. The smell of wet coal and cool sheet metal float over Griffintown and interfere with his breathing. He pulls up his scarf.
The neighbourhood in November has the look of a ghost town. Crossing the border, he was expecting to come up against this silence, this defiant architecture. He has lost a lot of weight during the past months. When he spies her silhouette in a warehouse window, he does his best to straighten his spine. Despite his illness, he feels straight and dignified on the inside.
Léopold recently took part in a demonstration by the Duplessis orphans in front of the Notre-Dame Basilica. His voice joined those of a hundred broken men in a unanimous speech that carried a long way. He will be operated on during the next few weeks; Roberta has promised to be at his side. As of now, he’ll no longer be alone.
He wants to say hello to the coachmen before winter reclaims its rights over the territory, followed by night, to announce to the groom that his wandering days are over, that he’s finished sleeping in a stall and being known as Le Rôdeur. He is no longer the vagabond bastard with goldplated teeth. His name is Léopold: an orphan with a medicare card, a social identity. He will not come back to Griffintown in the spring.
On Richmond Street, when he reaches the corner of Basin, Léopold hears in the distance the echo of a man’s voice that puts him on guard, encourages him to turn on his heels and leave the premises. But Léopold does nothing. He thinks he has recognized Billy.
The Conquest of the West finally led to the dissolution of the small company of coachmen. The Men from the City have orchestrated the rowdy flight of the last heavy horses and driven the coachmen away once and for all. Cowboy bandits, outlaw crack smokers, and their retinue of creaking calèches have surrendered. The Men from the City have won, without getting their hands too dirty.
They quickly replaced the placards: Attention, calèches. Slow down! by others reading: Coming soon: upscale building complex. Construction starts this fall. Thank you to the first buyers. After that, they started to smother the putrid fumes by beginning to settle the matter of the stream. “That must be the kind of water drunk in hell,” they told one another as they pumped out all the liquid. In the dried-up bed the Men from the City found a rusted-out pitchfork, an old tv set, a typewriter, some shards and other fragments of china, a calèche wheel, a woman’s shoe, a number of bottles of spirits, a crucifix, some horseshoes, empty snail shells, soft drink cans, syringes, condoms, and, barely recognizable, the infantryman’s uniform of the One who’d run into a Windigo. Thus cleaned out, the stream also released the skeleton of a horse with hundreds of small brown snakes wrapped around its sides.
As the former delivery man advances through this landscape of ruins and desolation, he hears a lament rising up. In the remains of the calèches, the ghosts of horses stumble, then unhitch themselves, move on to a parade trot in the loose stones and fallen rocks, roll around in the coal-stained grass, mix their ghostly breath with the rumbling of the neighbourhood. The song, punctuated by a blacksmith’s hammer, swirls up into the carbonized air. It is a requiem in reverse. The dead who sing for the living, led by the resonant voice of Billy, the one who ordered Léopold to leave the premises.
They sing of the humanity at once frail and powerful that once reigned over Griffintown. But where will the ghosts go after this day of reckoning?
Where once Cinderella’s coach intended for weddings was stored, the Men from the City have erected an indecent crane. In the calèche garage, sitting on a mound of red bricks roughly covered with a tarp, Ray the hanged man is singing too, whistling every now and then, watching Mignonne shake herself in the burnt earth.
Léopold takes from his pocket his harmonica to play with his people the last bars of a dislocated melody, the one from the last chance saloon, which he knows already by heart.
He interrupts himself and muses: “I don’t want to be reincarnated as a horse.”
Griffintown
The Boot
The Second Boot
The Conquest
Lead in the Eye
One Last Whinny Before the Escape
The Choir of Redemption
Griffintown Page 12
