The teacher had his quarters on the train. Three tiny rooms with the modern comforts of the times: a kitchen, a bathroom, and a central space that, depending on the hour, served as a sitting room, dining room, or bedroom. The little Campbell household was home to four children, a dog, a cat, and a skunk they had tamed and that then left them for no reason, as well as the many visitors that their extraordinary presence on the train attracted. Life was exhilarating, fascinating, thrilling, exciting, always in motion, a perpetual merry-go-round. The Campbell children grew up with the swaying of the train and the feeling that their parents were humanity’s benefactors. Gladys more than any of them because, as the eldest, she helped her father in the classroom with the little ones and her mother in the family home. Her mother who, in addition to her household tasks (which were no doubt many), helped women write letters or fill out a list for orders at Eaton’s or provided care for sick children.
The school train was much more than a school. It was where they offered evening classes for adults (reading, writing, counting, and Canadian democratic institutions for immigrants), medical care and vaccinations (a doctor came twice a year), bingo nights, radio evenings (particularly during the war). They welcomed hoboes for hot meals during the Great Depression, children in makeshift beds on blizzardy nights, and an entire small community on its own for Christmas. Gladys often talked about how much fun they had making decorations and trimming the tree with the children on the school train. Fun that would wane as the stops went by, to be completely depleted by the time they had to organize their own family Christmas in Chapleau. After each stop, she would say, laughing, they threw the tree and the decorations out the window and started over at the next stop.
Life on the school train was made up of these pleasures and these labours. Gladys maintained a strong predilection for the swaying of the train, time without end, the trees, lakes, and rivers that slowly streamed by, and the cool smell of resin that greeted her when she got off the train in one of the forest hamlets that stubbornly continued their uncertain existence, where she would find a child of the forest who had grown as old as she had.
But there was no nostalgic escape in the journey Gladys had taken this time. Suzan Sheldon can testify to that, as Gladys had stayed overnight at her house in Metagama, a ghost settlement lost along the Sudbury–White River line (just a few houses, no sign announcing their presence).
So now I’ve come to Suzan, a child of the school train, close friend of Gladys, the only one she truly confided in. (Brenda, her friend in Swastika, got only a few crumbs; she knows it and she chews on them bitterly.) But Gladys confided nothing during her last visit with Suzan. Gladys arrived in the rain, with no luggage and no Lisana. Suzan thought that the tragedy that had been a long time coming had finally occurred, that Gladys had come to digest her sorrow at Suzan’s. But Lisana was fine, Gladys said. The two women have known each other for too long to make each other believe in lies. They spent two days together talking only about little memories and the rain that wouldn’t stop. Not a word about whatever had brought Gladys to Metagama without warning, and that seemed to weigh a ton. Unlike the others who found themselves on Gladys’s route and who languished in guilt, Suzan regretted nothing of what wasn’t said. She is convinced that she wouldn’t have been able to change Gladys’s mind. ‘Behind her eyes, behind what she refused to tell me, it was the same old Gladys, determined, wilful Gladys, convinced she was on the right path, and no one, absolutely no one, could have diverted her from it.’ But she still grabbed the phone as soon as Gladys left.
Metagama is accessible only by train. To get Suzan’s account, I had to retrace Gladys’s journey on the Budd Car. This is what they call the self-propelled car that makes the trip from Sudbury to White River. The Budd Car crosses flat, even bleak, countryside, plenty of peatland and stunted forests, nothing grand enough to move the soul of a traveller, but fortunately, here and there, graceful distractions: the shimmering of a lake wreathed in foam or of a river the train runs alongside for a moment, that is lost and found again, cool and crystalline. You have to be from the North to appreciate the austere beauty.
The Budd Car travels west on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and returns east on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. I arrived on a Tuesday, so I had to wait until Thursday to return to Chapleau, where I was going to meet other former pupils of the school trains.
This meant that my conversations with Suzan took place over the course of two days. I slept in the bed where Gladys had slept on her last visit. ‘We didn’t even sleep together,’ Suzan told me going into the bedroom in a tone that was meant to suggest how strange the last visit was. She had to explain it to me. This bedroom belonged to her son, Desmond, who came to see her every weekend. It was also Lisana’s when she accompanied her mother to Metagama. As for the two old friends, they shared a bed, a habit that lingered from the years on the school train.
Suzan was the daughter of the head trackman in Metagama, and because she was the youngest in a long line of children (there were six of them) often left to their own devices because of a sickly mother, she was regularly cared for by the Campbell family, who all but adopted her. So she was an addition to the four Campbell children, and she shared their nomadic lifestyle, for which she has nothing but praise and admiration, as well as sharing Gladys’s bed, where they spent long hours talking. ‘When one of us finally fell asleep, the other would move so we were lying head to toe, because otherwise the bed was too narrow to sleep.’ And she laughs – she is quick to laugh, always ready to burst. ‘If you sleep with feet in your face, you will never be under the weather.’ Suzan also had things she liked to say.
They slept together whenever Gladys came with Lisana to spend a few days. Like the two sisters they could have been, and were, when all is said and done, they had so much in common. Both with a ready laugh, tall, and thickset (they traded clothes), a happy childhood they liked to think back on, and the same worries. They both had a child who had reached age fifty without becoming self-sufficient. Lisana, who had no appetite for life, and Desmond, struck very young by what his mother called ‘the malady of words’ and who had nothing but that in his head, ‘the poem he wrote, the poem he is going to write, the poem that won’t be written,’ all of which left his pockets empty. Her son lived and still lives in Sudbury, where he earned his living from small carpentry jobs and whatever his mother gave him to sell. To help her ‘handyman poet’ (no sarcasm on Suzan’s part, just a twinge of sadness infused with amusement), she started doing handicrafts. Mittens and ushankas made from old woollen garments, second-hand clothing her son brought her from Sudbury on the Saturday Budd Car, along with her groceries for the week. He made himself useful, repaired the generator, cleared snow off the roof, built stores of firewood, and went back home on Sunday afternoon. It is an arrangement that suited them both.
But – and there is a but, and not a minor one – the two women’s children couldn’t stand each other. As soon as they were in the same room, they would turn their backs on one another. ‘As if they were the like poles of two magnets,’ Suzan sighed when the conversation got to that point. (Desmond, whom I met at a Tim Hortons in Sudbury, had another explanation: ‘I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me. There was something in her that struck a nerve. I couldn’t tell you what it was. A huge void, or a vortex. It would take me days and a lot of work to extract myself from it.’)
So Gladys avoided the weekends. She would arrive with Lisana two or three times a year, loaded up with provisions, new clothes (for Suzan), and used clothes (for her mittens and ushankas), and would spend a few peaceful days in the little house under the trees.
Suzan’s house is indeed as calm as they come. All you can hear is the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds. It is the old house of the head trackman, her father, which she and her husband fixed up into a four-season cottage and which she has lived in alone since her husband’s death twenty years ago.
A terrible racket took over Suz
an’s peaceful, solitary house every time a train passed. When one did, it was impossible to hear each other speak, and you had to stop any conversation. Suzan would stop rocking in her rocking chair, attentive to the noise and the vibration that seized the house, and once silence was restored, would say ‘fifty-nine’ or ‘seventy-two’ or ‘eighty-seven’ – cars; she had counted them!
Aside from the Budd Car, there were around ten freight trains that passed by Suzan’s door, and every time, I would see her counting the cars in her head.
A childhood game, a game played by children of trackmen driven mad with solitude in the immensity of the forest and that still amuses the old woman she has become: Clickety-Clack.
‘It’s the sound the wheels of the cars make at the junction of rails. Two series of wheels at either end of the car, so two clickety-clacks per car. You have to add up the clickety-clacks and then divide by two to get the total number of cars.’
It was our first evening together when she explained the clickety-clacks to me. I had arrived at her house in the afternoon with my big bag. You don’t just show up at the home of someone who is isolated without bringing your share of provisions, and I had way more than was needed to feed me for two days. Cheese, jam, salami, treats, and a few nice bottles of wine, without knowing whether she preferred red or white, because Suzan communicates with the outside world by satellite phone, and sometimes it is impossible to hear each other, particularly in bad weather. It took me days of torturous calls to make the arrangements to show up at her place.
I played Clickety-Clack with her, and I understood how fun it could be. It was zen. The sound is so powerful that it drowns out everything fluttering around in your head. You no longer belong to the order of thought when a train goes by; it transports you to a place where you never go otherwise. But I couldn’t get the count right. I would say sixty-two, and she would say fifty-eight, and I knew from her smile that she had won.
The nostalgia of the train, the nostalgia of the whistle of those powerful beasts that awaken what lies in wait deep down inside us – was that what brought her back to this place in the middle of nowhere?
‘It could be worse. I could be living in a condo with a view of the wall across the way or in a condo association meeting or being boiled in chlorine in a pool in Florida.’
A bit of footwork. She didn’t want to answer the question. Or didn’t have an answer to a question that was no longer asked of her, since she had grown so accustomed to this life. But I insisted. She had lived in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver, had held different jobs, had had an active life, was a woman of her times and then, once she was widowed and retired, she had found nothing better to do than to come back here (I almost said: to this godforsaken place) to listen to the passing trains and count their cars?
‘Clickety-Clack isn’t just a game of solitaire. I played it with Gladys too. When she came to Metagama, we would play Clickety-Clack, and she would win every time.’
But of course. Gladys played Clickety-Clack, and she won with the same subdued but victorious smile. It was hardly a surprise. Gladys is the queen in all the stories of the former school train pupils, and she is the daughter of the venerated William Campbell (not a negative word was ever said about him), who invented the game in anticipation of the trains that would pass close to the school train (‘Practically grazed,’ Suzan said. ‘We were just feet from the main track, and it was a terrible racket every time; we couldn’t hear each other speak, and Mr. Campbell would always have prepared mental calculations for us’). Mr. Campbell, always in a suit and tie, even in the middle of the forest. Decorum, order, discipline, and fervour. Every morning he would raise the Union Jack at the back of the car to greet the wild children of the woods. Washed, hair brushed and braided, and in their best clothes, they were also dressed up in honour of the day of school. They numbered seven, eight, twelve, sometimes only three or four. Some of them were just learning the alphabet, others could list all the prime ministers since Confederation; some had just arrived from Ukraine or Yugoslavia, others had never seen anything but the forest where they were born. It was a mixed-grade, multi-ethnic class, with a teacher mindful of each one of them. On the blackboard, on the left, the schoolwork for the day was listed by grade, and on the right, mental math exercises awaited the passing of trains. Addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and, for those who weren’t ready for such things, the little ones, a semicircle with two dots on top, the smiley of today’s emoticons, communicating their duty to stay quiet during the clickety-clacks.
‘And it worked, it worked like a charm on the school train. No strap, no dunce cap, no need for discipline, we were all so happy to be there! The older kids added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, while the little ones, not a move, not a word, all smiles, eyes wide open, let themselves be carried off by the trains.’
And Suzan then added, which greatly surprised me: ‘Like Lisana, when she would see us stop rocking in our chairs. She would take off her headphones and wait for the train with us.’
‘Headphones. She had headphones?’
I remembered the episode of the headphones in Bernie’s story: Gladys talking to him at the kitchen table while Lisana, headphones on, was riveted to the TV in the living room. I was intrigued by the headphones, by the fact that this woman people said was lifeless, apathetic – ‘disconnected from herself,’ as Brenda had said – could be interested in television and now trains, the clickety-clacks.
‘The poor girl couldn’t do without them. She wouldn’t have lasted an hour without her horrible music. I wouldn’t be surprised if she kept her headphones on to sleep.’
‘She counted the cars too?’
‘No, what she wanted was noise. It’s incredible the decibels that poor girl needs in her head. She needs noise, a lot of noise, a deafening din that keeps her far away, far far away, in a world that doesn’t need her to be here, there, or anywhere. All she wants is to be absent from herself.’
It was almost refreshing to hear it. Madness, mental illness, no matter what you call a disturbance of the brain or the liberties it takes, it all creates distance, and I only ever heard hesitant, cautious words about Lisana, words that were afraid of their own shadow.
Suzan wasn’t afraid of Lisana. She had known her as a small child, had held her on her lap, had seen her crash at the cusp of adulthood, and had accepted it without worrying about the prickly person she had become.
‘But what good are trinkets when you have lost the will to live, I ask you?’
She was referring to Gladys’s small pleasures.
‘That’s the best she could come up with after the psychiatrists and psychologists came and went without giving her back her daughter. She threw the Prozac and the other stuff in the garbage and fought on the only battlefield she knew. Happiness. Pleasures big and small, particularly small. Happiness was her medication.’
Suzan was the only one who cast a critical eye on Gladys, the only one to openly express doubts about her stubborn attempts to keep her daughter on the sunny side of life.
‘I ask you again, what good is birdsong when you wake up wanting to die? That was the cross Lisana bore every day. Opening her eyes and discovering that another day awaited her. You should have seen Gladys fight every morning to convince her to get on with a new day.’
Suzan had witnessed the long negotiations. Every time it was the same war of attrition between mother and daughter. Gladys had to argue for Lisana to agree to get out of bed, creep to the table, eat something, submit to the first acts of the morning that would get her to the end of the day.
‘Lisana would say that she couldn’t do it, that it was more than she could bear, and Gladys, calm and patient as always, would explain that the first step was the hardest, and that the rest took care of itself. And then, indeed, after a halting start, the rest wasn’t so bad.’
People felt sorry for Gladys, for the hardship her daughter put her through. They railed against Lisana as much as they complained about ho
w blind Gladys was, even though, according to Suzan, there were moments of closeness between the two women, moments when they leaned on each other, when they found the balance that had held them together for all these years.
Suzan had a sense of those moments when the mother and daughter would exchange a look after a train went by or on certain stormy nights. Lisana loved claps of thunder, lightning, the furor that took over the sky, and Gladys, sitting by her side, would watch the storm go by with her daughter, as if it were a carnival parade.
‘There was a depraved joy in Lisana’s eyes, whereas in Gladys’s there was the twinkle of a flame. Who drew the other into whose world? It was hard to say. But after the storm, there was the same contentment in their eyes, the same relief.’
During Gladys’s last visit to Metagama, there was a moment when it seemed as though Gladys was waiting for the storm with Lisana. It was her second night there, and the rain was coming down in sheets. Alarmed by something strange in her house, Suzan got up and spotted Gladys sitting in the rocking chair and, beside her, the other chair, empty, rocking.
‘I could have sworn Lisana was there, beside her, in the chair that was rocking all on its own.’
There was no Clickety-Clack during Gladys’s last visit, nor any long conversations. Nothing could distract her from what had brought her to Metagama and that she refused to say. They ‘hadn’t even slept in the same bed.’ And yet these were their favourite moments, the long hours spent fending off sleep by rehashing old memories and their worries for their children.
Suzan believed and still does that Gladys never intended to stop in Metagama, that her visit wasn’t really a visit, that she was forced to because of the fatigue from travelling.
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Page 5
