‘She was in a pitiful state. At first I thought she had a bad cold, then I thought it was the beginnings of pneumonia, she looked so bad.’
Gladys left Metagama on the fourth day of her rail journey with a travel bag Suzan had given her, filled with warm clothes.
Direction: Chapleau. It was the only one possible, because it was Thursday.
‘You’re too old for foolishness.’
That was all Suzan managed to get out as a goodbye.
The rain was torrential, and they were clumsily holding umbrellas. For once the Budd Car was on time, and Neil McNeil, the conductor, hustled Gladys onto the train to get her out of the rain. Suzan asked Neil McNeil, whom she knows well, who is a friend of sorts, to seat Gladys far from the drafts, and then she ran through the rain and straight to the phone, convinced of the urgency of the situation without knowing why.
Her first call was to the Ménards, Ronnie and Marta, both former pupils of the school train who now live in Chapleau. She wanted them to intercept Gladys if by chance she had intended to continue on to White River.
The second call was to Lisana. Suzan took a moment to think before dialling the number. She didn’t know what state she would find her in, didn’t know whether Lisana would speak to her, whether she would hang up or pepper her with insults (it had happened before) or her usual complaints. She went with a casual approach: ‘Hello, Lisana, it’s Suzan. Is it raining there?’ – (…) – ‘I’m asking because it’s raining cats and dogs here, and your mother has just taken the Budd Car to Chapleau. Did you know?’ – (…) – ‘She’s not in great shape, and I was wondering …’ and then, nothing. The line went dead. She doesn’t know whether Lisana hung up or whether her satellite phone had died because of the storm. The line was crackling, spitting, it was unbearable at times, but she is convinced that Lisana was on the line; she could hear her breathing between the bursts of static.
Then she phoned the Smarzes, or at least tried. There was a terrible rumbling on the line. She did, however, manage to make intelligible the words she was yelling at the top of her lungs and that Frank understood, because she heard him shouting his head off at the other end of the line.
It was the beginning of many, many phone calls.
A few more words about Suzan. At this stage in the story, she is the one with the best clues to follow Gladys through the labyrinth of her race or her escape or her mission; none of it is clear so far.
It was the last evening for Suzan and me, in the little house under the trees. The air was mild, a train had just gone by, the house was settling after the clatter, and probably because I was going to leave the next day and an imminent departure draws out last confidences, she told me what she had thus far held back. A sentence that rang like a bell. A sentence uttered by Gladys.
‘That child bathed in my tears.’
It was something that came to her the first time she found Lisana in a pool of blood, words that kept haunting her, a painful, obsessive mantra that she had repeated only to Suzan.
‘That child bathed in the tears I didn’t shed when Albert died.’
According to Suzan, that was the source of her immense guilt, her stubbornness, her refusal to surrender Lisana to anyone else’s care, her support in anything that could keep the crises at bay, a life dedicated to her daughter: everything, absolutely everything, according to Suzan, came from the tears she refused to shed when her husband died.
Albert Comeau died in the Lake Shore Mine accident in 1958. There is nothing remarkable about that: miners died all the time, misfortune regarded as inevitable and endured in silence in order to not add to the terror that spread through the mining village with each accident. The terror of the miner who would refuse to work his shift. The terror of the wife who would stop her husband from working his shift. The general terror that no one spoke of so that life could go on. Hence the silence. An accident at the mine was never discussed, in private or in the street.
Gladys did what was expected of her and lived through her sorrow, holding firmly to the bastion of her silent tears, a courage she bitterly reproached herself for because – and it takes a mother to feed on such an obsession, according to Suzan – she believed the tears that swam in her belly had contaminated the unborn child. Gladys never wanted to explain her daughter’s impulse for suicide in any other way.
Suzan obviously rejects the explanation. People are not destined for suicide before they are even born. Suicide isn’t encoded in our genes. She could have added that suicide had become a way of life for Lisana, that the poor girl had made it a life preserver that kept her afloat through her dark waters, that the very idea of ending it gave her the strength to carry on, but these weren’t things Gladys could hear. Nothing could convince her that this was not her responsibility to shoulder.
I didn’t go back to Metagama. The trip is long and complicated, and I had too much to do to go down the rabbit hole of connections between Northern trains that get you there and bring you back on a schedule that suits them. I stayed in touch with Suzan. But we never again spoke about what she had confided in me on that last evening in the privacy of her little home.
My friend Bernie was the only one I could talk about it to. Bernie repeated the sentence in one tone and then another, as one would heft and weigh something being explored with the hands. We were in his basement, a cozy room where he is surrounded by everything that has been his life, photos, books, trophies from his soccer days, and in this snug atmosphere of a retiree’s basement, he let the words sound in his head before making this comment: ‘Gladys thought she was strong enough to take her daughter’s penchant for death on her shoulders.’ And about Lisana’s obsession with suicide, he said, ‘There is a sense of power in playing with your life.’
Bernie was a sort of sounding board during the years I tried to understand the reasons behind Gladys’s comings and goings on the train. I would bring him somewhat haphazardly the new details from my investigation, we would put them in the pile with what we knew already, and while the new concoction was setting and we were having a coffee, I would leave him to his thoughts. After coffee and the long pause that followed, I knew that commentary would emerge that would shed light here and there on my understanding of events. The commentary often wouldn’t be meant for me. It had travelled a long path and settled into the depths of his thoughts. I think it was his role as a remote observer that let him be so flexible and free-thinking.
This is not the case for Suzan, who was too close to the events. She is behind the flurry of phone activity that followed on the heels of Gladys from Chapleau until they lost her in the confusion of train lines and pointless suppositions. Suzan has a remarkable memory. Nothing is missing, everything is there; her account of the disarray was flawless. It is almost as if she took notes as her phone buzzed and as her thoughts grew muddled and unmuddled.
So I could have avoided the trip to Chapleau. I already knew from Suzan the little there was to know about Gladys’s brief and mysterious trip to Chapleau. But a group of veterans of the school train were expecting me, and I didn’t want to miss out on their stories.
In Chapleau I didn’t have a single conversation like those I had with Suzan in the little house under the trees. The people I met, all welcoming hosts, were exceedingly generous when it came to telling me about their beautiful, marvellous life on the school train but evasive as soon as a shadow appeared in the conversation. But I spent wonderful evenings with them nonetheless.
Chapleau. It’s a strange place. A town of a thousand residents (1,170 according to the last census) that appears to have none, things are so still, with no noise or movement, a sea of tranquility – an inland sea, set in the middle of nowhere, with the closest town a two-hour drive away. There used to be a different sort of life there. You can feel the former busyness under the sleepiness. At least that was the impression I had alighting from the Budd Car. Probably because there were so many tracks leading to the station and so little activity around it.
Th
e Ménards, Ronnie and Marta, were expecting me. They had been warned of my arrival by Suzan. Ronnie is a francophone but speaks such bad French that we quickly switched to English. His wife is a unilingual anglophone. Her parents were Finnish, but she lost her language at the same time as she lost a ‘t’ in her first name (Martta, previously) to become as Canadian as they come. The same thing for Ronnie, who was originally called Ronald.
I stayed with them (they wouldn’t hear of me going to a hotel – Chapleau has three!) in their large, ultra-sophisticated house where they raised their five children, who were now scattered to the wind. I say ‘ultra-sophisticated’ not because of the value or refinement of the furniture or decor, but because the blinds go up and down on their own, the lamps go on as you approach, your bedroom door opens at the sound of your voice, and a dumbwaiter brings you your coffee in the morning as soon as you set foot on the floor; an escalator might as well set you in your chair for breakfast. It is so futuristic that I started to think I would see Yoda or some other creature from another planet appear. Ronnie is a compulsive do-it-yourselfer, a fanatic of technology and gadgets of all sorts, and he dreamed up and perfected everything his knowledge, skills, and crazy ideas permitted him to experiment with in his house, a house they are now prisoners of (it is unsellable – who is going to pay money for a house in Chapleau?), Marta more than him, Marta who confided in me that she would leave ‘this armpit’ any time (one of the few sounds of discord heard in Chapleau; Marta does not participate in the general enthusiasm).
I spent four days in their high-tech house, and during those four days, I was the king of the carnival. They dragged me to this neighbour’s and that neighbour’s, all former pupils of the school train, all very old, who welcomed me with coffee, a heap of sandwiches, and cake, their usual meal at the end of the evening, from what I understand.
There was John Keller (age sixty-three, missing three fingers, which he lost in a sawmill), Christopher Young (older, a good musician – how his mother had managed to drag a piano into the forest, I don’t know), Varpu Armala (of Finnish origin – her cardamom cake was a delicacy), Matti Valitorppa (also Finnish), and Joe and Rose Gabriel, the only couple of the lot, aside from Ronnie and Marta, my hosts. They enjoyed these get-togethers. Sometimes Christopher played a bit of piano, Joe and Rose danced a little, they laughed, kidded around, told the story of their lives in the woods as if it were a fairy tale. Not one sad, bitter note, no sorrow about how hard life is in the forest, everything was bursting with joy and pride. To hear them you would think there were only happy times along the school train line, except sometimes there was a false note or two from Marta, who would lend a bit of grit to the conversation.
I recorded it all, noted everything (their names, their ages, etc.) on Bernie’s recommendation. My iPhone is filled with their old stories. I would put it in the centre of the table, and I would let the conversation roll.
What did I take away from it? Great nostalgia and their refusal to dwell on anything. Even John’s missing fingers were material for amusing stories. They had a distinguished guest, a young man (I was forty-three at the time) who had made the long journey just to hear what they had to say, and they were not going to hold back. If I would have arrived from Papua New Guinea, I would have had the same effect.
The evenings were pleasant. Their cheer is contagious, and I was filled with stories of the school train. There were moments when I felt like I had a class from the school train around me, they were so there, these old children of the forest caught up in their memories.
Rose told the story of her first day on the school train: ‘I wasn’t even five years old, still too young for school, and I cried my eyes out when I saw my sisters leave in the morning, dressed in their Sunday best with ribbons in their hair. I cried so hard that my mother eventually gave in. One fine morning, I had ribbons in my hair too, and, arriving at the school train, my sisters said to Mr. Campbell, “This is our little sister, Rose,” and, as simple as that, I had my first day of school. Mr. Campbell gave me a sheet of paper and crayons. On the sheet, I remember it clearly, there was the outline of a rooster to colour. But I didn’t dare. It was too pretty for me to scribble on. I had never coloured anything in my life. Everything was too beautiful around me. My head was spinning from it, I was swivelling in my chair to take in everything. And then, at the end of the afternoon, I fell asleep with my head on the desk. When I woke up, Mrs. Campbell was there, bent over her sewing machine – I was in their living room! It was so much to take in!’
Matti told the story of an Ojibwe man who arrived one morning with his two children. He stayed with them for school that day, all three sitting cross-legged on desks. At the end of the day, the father thanked Mr. Campbell for having given his children an education, and he took them back into the woods. ‘We never saw them again.’
The clickety-clacks came up again in conversation and were no longer a source of amusement. Suzan is ‘a little clickety-clack herself,’ Marta said. ‘Only in Metagama can you soothe yourself counting train cars.’
There was another game, almost as contemplative as Suzan’s Clickety-Clacks, that I find sad. You would have to feel you don’t belong in the world to have invented it. And, in fact, the game was called At the End of the World. It was their favourite pastime to stand along the tracks when a passenger train went by and wave as the cars passed, hoping a traveller would look out the window, notice one of them, wave back, and the lucky person, the one who was waved at, could fantasize that a stranger was carrying their image to a faraway world. ‘It was our way of travelling.’ And naturally, everyone thought the stranger was waving at them, and everyone took the trip of their dreams. ‘I went to Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg.’ (That was Christopher, I think.) ‘I made trips to Vancouver several times.’ (Varpu, a reedy little voice, barely audible.) ‘For me it was always Rome.’ (Ronnie.) ‘Yeah, where else would a Catholic and papist go?’ (Christopher.) ‘We can’t play anymore, what with only the Budd Car left – who wants to go to White River?’ (Marta, obviously.)
I listened several times to the bit about At the End of the World, and every time I wondered where my sadness came from. Children hailing dreams when a train went by: there is, undeniably, poetry in that. The image is laden with solitude, though. Children lost in the middle of the forest who have only the track to amuse them and who as old folks still enjoy it like a princely gift: I have a hard time piecing that together.
I listen to the recording again and I hear: ‘The railway was our life.’ It is Varpu or Christopher or someone else. The words are the end or the start of a story, and I understand that the railway was the lifeline for the forest communities, their only connection to the world. Everything came to them by train. Their provisions, the mail, orders from Eaton’s, a visit from a distant relative, good news and bad news, games, dreams, and the marvellous school on wheels. ‘We cried with joy when we would see the school train arrive.’ (Not all, it seems, because you had to have finished your homework and lessons for the month, and there were dunces among them – Ronnie, for instance.)
They were children of the rails as much as they were children of the forest, and many of them continued to live their lives on the railway. They became brakemen, conductors, telegraph operators, dispatchers. Except for Ronnie, who left school at twelve, barely knowing how to read, write, and count, who became a stationary machinery mechanic in the sawmills in Chapleau and elsewhere, and who was snapped up at top dollar. Which explains the voice-operated doors and the coffee that would arrive by dumbwaiter in the morning.
Ronnie’s is a true success story, both for him and for the school train, even though it didn’t manage to take him to the end of his schooling. It is a story with two words: Popular Mechanics. It all started there, a magazine spotted on the school train bookshelf on young Ronnie’s first day of school. The full-colour cover showed the cross-section of an aircraft cockpit. After that day, the little boy who was both ignorant of and hungry for the world had only one
idea in mind: to learn to decode the signs that would let him read what was in the magazine. The rest of the curriculum didn’t interest him. When he no longer had trouble getting through Popular Mechanics, he quit school to go work at the sawmill in Nemegos, where they took him on as a labourer. But he never failed to show up at the school train for each month’s issue. If Ronnie missed it and the school train was already at the next school stop, he would happily walk ten, fifteen, or twenty kilometres, through rain, snow, a blizzard, or temperatures of minus-forty degrees to catch up with the precious bookshelf and his magazine.
More than the career as an expert in industrial mechanics, it is the image of young Ronnie walking all those kilometres along the railway track that I remember from the story. A boy of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, walking through the snow and the shadows of the night (the return trip was made at dusk), fearing nothing because he has the tracks in front of him.
‘The tracks were our life.’ The words kept coming back, a nostalgic refrain in the weathered music of the aged, and I understood these words, which I also heard time and again: ‘Gladys is from the tracks,’ and that explains, they believe, her flight along the Northern rails. They needed no other motivation. Gladys was born on the school train, spent many wonderful years there, met her Albert there. Everything that was good and beautiful in life was given to her by the rails. ‘It’s no surprise that she took the train that morning.’ They believe that, on the morning of September 24, Gladys set out on the rails with no itinerary in mind, not thinking about what came next, ‘like a bottle in the ocean,’ a bottle that would drift along on one train and then another, no matter the direction. What was important was to be carried, tossed, rocked in a steel hull, similar to where she had come into this world.
‘And Lisana?
‘Lisana …’ (There was hesitation, heavy with what went unsaid, and they launched into explanations that explained nothing but their refusal to dwell on a topic that made no sense.)
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Page 6
