There was no evening of sandwiches, cake, and coffee with Gladys the last time she visited Chapleau. She arrived on a Thursday afternoon, left the next morning, and essentially didn’t leave her bedroom at the Ménards’, where I would also sleep (the second time we would sleep in the same bed, the strange sensation of slipping between the blades of time), and where she also received her coffee by dumbwaiter (their coffee is delicious). She only just made it down for meals.
So why make the trip to Chapleau, just to turn around and leave? The question ricocheted around the table, and there was no convincing answer other than that Gladys set off on her adventure just for the clatter of the rails, the familiar smells, the movement that plucked her out of time, ‘her love for the trains and her love …’ (I almost choked on my sandwich) ‘… for Chapleau.’
Her love for Chapleau? A broken-down little town where you could die of boredom?
I didn’t say anything of the sort, obviously. There was another town in their eyes, it sparkled, it glowed, and then Rose arrived with her cake – exclamations, congratulations, the sound of dishes – and I lost part of the conversation until I heard ‘the summer vacation in the marshalling yard.’ Chapleau had become an exciting town with its stores, restaurants, movie theatres, all the bustle of a town sprung up in the middle of the forest. ‘The Campbell family spent the summer vacation in the marshalling yard.’ The words came back, and once again we were plunged into another beautiful, wonderful story about the school train.
Like all small Northern towns that live and die in the wake of a mine or a sawmill, Chapleau had its glory days. And that was where the Campbells spent the few days between school tours for the stores, the movie theatre, the Sunday service, and the many friends who lived there. The school train would rest on a service track in the marshalling yard. They spent their summer vacation there before buying a cottage on the shores of Biscotasi Lake. One can only imagine the discomfort of the steel hull that served as their home, baking in the sun on its bed of burning hot rails. And the worry of the parents (another protest from Marta) who couldn’t stop their children from playing on the tracks. That is why, Marta explained, after a few summers in the sweltering heat of the marshalling yard, they opted for a cottage. At the end of June, they would move everything they could to the summer camp (pots and pans, bedding, food, etc.) and did the reverse when they went back to the tracks in September. Equally happy in June and September, they liked spending time together, carefree and luxuriating in all that space, but by the end of August, both parents and children were impatient to leave their summer camp and get back to the activity of the tracks and the cramped quarters of their mobile digs.
It seems that there was nothing about their lives they didn’t love. Not even the sweltering heat of summer, not even the extreme cold of the winter, not even the diet that came largely from cans (including roast beef), not even the incessant noise of the trains, nor the sudden moves in the night (objects flying from wall to wall and them tumbling from their beds), there was nothing about their vagabond life that could tarnish the pleasure they got from it.
As for Gladys, she was the friend people fought over. Not just because she was the teacher’s daughter, not only because she lived in a dream car (flush toilet, linoleum, etc.), but because she was a dream herself. Likeable, lively, bubbly, always laughing, attentive to everyone … I won’t list all of her qualities, because I will grow weary.
The boys were secretly in love with her and were crestfallen when she set her heart on the most feral among them. Ronnie compared them as a couple to Beauty and the Beast. Not that Albert Comeau was repulsive or unkind or depraved in any way. He was a silent boy, withdrawn, attentive in class but not a good student, who at recess was more inclined to follow a hare’s tracks than to join in the children’s games. ‘And not particularly handsome,’ Marta added. ‘Not really ugly either, but still, you had to wonder what she saw in him.’
A bottomless pit of melancholy was what Gladys found. A well of dark night to lose herself in, she who was so lively and jovial but didn’t have enough sun to brighten his days. I had a long conversation with Suzan about it, and she didn’t offer any other explanation for Gladys’s attraction to a boy so lost in his thoughts. ‘She had found someone to give what she had too much of.’
He was the son of a trapper who had his camp near the Nemegosenda River eight kilometres from the tracks. The young Albert made the trip to class by canoe with his little sister. Along the way, they stopped at a point in the river to pick up two young Ojibwe children. In winter, they got to school by dogsled. It was a pretty dangerous mode of travel for schoolchildren who were all of, what? Twelve? Fourteen?
‘Albert was ten at the time, his little sister six, and the two Ojibwe boys were about the same age.’
My eyes must have flown open in surprise (and disapproval – what sort of parents let their children travel that way on a river, which by definition is not calm waters?) because Ronnie hurried to explain that in the forest, children grew up fast. And Marta added: ‘But it doesn’t make for children who are good at school.’
If there weren’t parents who could help with lessons and homework during the long month when the school train was teaching children to read and write elsewhere, students left to their own devices got lost in the mishmash of abstract concepts that were as foreign to them as the Empire State Building. This was how it was for children of immigrants and Ojibwe children, whose parents spoke no English, the language of the school train. It was how it was for Albert Comeau, son of a francophone father and an Ojibwe mother.
‘He had a hard time concentrating on verb conjugation, so when it came to history, how could you expect the poor boy to understand the Treaty of Westminster?’
And who came to the rescue of the poor boy when he was struggling with a verb or calculating fractions? Gladys, obviously, princess of knowledge and light, who would sit next to him and guide him through the snares of grammar and math. They were prepubescent and then adolescent; no one was on the lookout for feelings developing, not even them, who thought their only tie was schoolwork, except Suzan, with whom Gladys would share confidences in their narrow little bed. Albert had long slender hands, Albert had a purring voice, Albert had feline gestures, Albert’s eyes took you into distant waters, Albert had something the other boys didn’t, he was different, unique, the only one of his species, and Suzan understood before anyone else that Albert and Gladys were a couple in the making.
Of the unlikely couple they eventually made, I retain the image Ronnie created. Beauty, because Gladys was indeed a pretty girl (I saw her wedding photo), with a promising future (she had her teaching diploma), everything you could wish for in life, and she went and chose a young man who was not unintelligent but who had no future other than the forest (in the picture, he looks uncomfortable in his suit), the Beast – ‘I say that without malice; Albert was a friend.’
Latent during the years on the school train, their love became official when they were seen arm in arm on the streets of Chapleau, ‘him with hair as black as a crow, hers blond as wheat,’ just happy to be breathing the same air and walking in step.
Gladys was willing to live anywhere with her Albert; she was prepared to follow him into the forest, but Albert didn’t want a cabin in the middle of the woods for his princess, and he is the one who walked away from his life. When he found out they were looking for miners in Swastika, he brought his young wife there, and they made their home in the little house on Avenue Conroy. ‘The rest is history.’
Gladys and Albert’s love story ended on that discreet ‘the rest is history.’ They weren’t going to dwell on the matter. In fact, almost immediately, Rose (or Varpu – I often confuse their voices) hastened to add: ‘Chapleau was the town where she fell in love … ’
They wanted me to understand that it was out of a sense of romance that Gladys made that impromptu trip to Chapleau. Romance that seemed incongruous from such old people. But I didn’t cast doubt on what t
hey were saying, and I wouldn’t have succeeded anyway. These men and women are fortresses; their convictions are impenetrable. They can say what they like, but they had a harsh life in the middle of the forest. But not once during our evenings together did I hear them complain about it. Quite the contrary. They are proud of their microwaves, their large-screen TVs, the many gifts life has given them after years of hard work. More than once I had to rave about a glass-top stove or a pleather armchair. And then be rewarded with a smile that radiated the joy of having arrived at their singsong future.
They do not have the souls of complainers, and Gladys will remain in their memories a woman forever in love with a man whose presence she wanted to find again on the trains.
I left Chapleau on the Sunday Budd Car (just one hour late – ‘You got lucky,’ Ronnie said), steeped in their stories and their optimism. I had the feeling that somewhere there awaited a life that would smile down on me with all of its goodness.
I got lucky, as Ronnie said, with just an hour’s wait. That wasn’t the case for Gladys, who waited seven hours at the Ménards’ before the Budd Car took her to another train, then another, a cavalcade.
Delays on trains in the North aren’t a matter of a few minutes or even a few hours. If you don’t take the precaution of asking about the predicted delay for your train, you can wind up waiting an entire night at a station at the end of the world, alone or with other equally lonely travellers. The locomotives are from another age, and the track crosses long distances in isolated territory. A rockslide or a mechanical breakdown can stop the already slow advance of the train (never more than fifty miles an hour), not to mention that in summer the intense heat reduces the speed to five miles an hour, and your train that was already a milk run becomes a snail.
All this means that you never know when you’re going to board the train or when you’re going to get off and, if you’re a regular, you don’t wait at the station. In Chapleau, for instance, you wait at home or at your hotel after having called the Riverside Motel. That’s where the Budd Car crew stays, the ones who take over from the crew that makes the trip from White River, and the receptionist at the Riverside Motel tells you how much longer you have to wait. No one gets impatient, no one grumbles, it’s just the way it is.
I am at the fifth day of Gladys’s journey, which until now has been simply a little trip to stretch her legs, which anyone could track and comment upon. After Chapleau, or rather, after Metagama, it will be a cavalcade, because at Metagama, in the middle of the night, Suzan will barge into the Budd Car, and from that point on no one will be able to track what would become a frantic race.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Gladys had slept at the Ménards’, had had her morning coffee, and well before 1:15 in the afternoon was ready to take the Budd Car, which wouldn’t arrive, didn’t arrive, until 8:00 p.m. This time the delay was due to the locomotive battery, which for reasons unknown had run down.
A long seven-hour wait coupled with intense phone activity.
Those around Gladys were worried. From Swastika to Metagama to Chapleau, people phoned each other to find out whether she had slept well, whether the cough had worsened, whether she had shown signs of fever. From Swastika to Metagama to Chapleau, people were convinced that she was in no shape to continue the trip.
Suzan was at the centre of the telephone tag. Frank Smarz and Ronnie Ménard didn’t know each other, so she was the one to pass information between them. The weather had improved, satellite communication was good, the trains went by her door without her having to pay attention. She waited, took calls, made calls, got tangled up in the calls, trying to understand what was starting to take shape in her mind.
She had phoned Lisana early in the morning. To reassure her (‘Your mother is fine, she is in Chapleau at the Ménards”), wish her a nice day (‘It’s nice and sunny here, is it nice there too?’), and convince her to do what she had to do to get to the end of the day. She knew how hard it was. So she didn’t get too worried when she heard Lisana’s anguished ‘I can’t.’ ‘Come on, it’s not that hard. Pull back the curtains, look at the beautiful sun outside. It’s the first step that counts. The rest happens all on its own.’
She kept her on the phone for a while. She spoke slowly, carefully, leaving long silences for Lisana, who didn’t say anything except, from time to time, ‘It’s too hard,’ which Suzan whittled away at, wore down, buffed to make it ‘just a grain of sand, a tiny little grain of sand, trust me, it will pass in no time.’ The conversation ended with no resolution from Lisana and the promise from Suzan that she would call her back that night.
All day, Suzan wondered whether she should call her back. She dialled the number a few times, but then put the phone down. She was afraid of Lisana’s reaction, that she might feel harassed and stop taking her calls. It was only a little after 8 p.m., when she had confirmation that Gladys was headed toward Sudbury, that she had the conversation that convinced her to light a fire alongside the track to intercept the Budd Car.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
It was September 28, the fifth day of the train journey, and Gladys has just boarded the Budd Car. She will meet Janelle, who will be my beacon in what Gladys was thinking. She was her travel companion and, surprisingly, her confidante. I say surprisingly because Janelle is not the kind of person people confide in. She will also be my point of no return. I will never again want to abandon this investigation.
Janelle is a wanderer, there is no other word for it. She comes and she goes, place to place, with such flimsy, tenuous reasons to move from point A to point B that one wonders whether it is all merely to keep her teetering, out of reach, sheltered outside of time. It’s no surprise that the two women connected on the Budd Car. At this point in her life, Gladys was also a wanderer.
Janelle was coming from White River, where she had been a waitress at the Mitz Café, and was going to take another job as a waitress almost a thousand kilometres away, in Clova, at the only restaurant going. The reason she left her job in White River was as senseless (‘the boss had bad breath’) as the one that would take her to Clova (there was an internet beau).
There is something about her that attracts your attention without you quite knowing why. Something off-balance, I would say, both in her movements and her features. At first glance, she is a rather plain woman, late thirties, early forties, nothing remarkable, except that she never stops moving. Abundant hair that she puts up in a complicated arrangement or lets fall in thick, wild clumps. Almost always the same uniform: tight jeans, a thin black camisole under a fleece jacket, and, on her feet, no matter the season, big white running shoes. Nothing particularly noticeable. But it doesn’t take long for her to catch your attention. A slight disjointedness in her movements, as if each of her gestures were restrained for a nanosecond. There is also something hesitant in her eyes, a point that moves between her features to create the impression of a shifting space between her longish nose, her mouth, and her eyes, which are a pretty golden brown, very mobile. It’s quite unsettling. Her beauty reveals itself up close. At night, when she sleeps, everything falls back into place, nothing moves anymore, and she is the most beautiful woman there is.
Janelle is a seasoned traveller. She knows what you can’t expect on the Northern trains, and she boarded the Budd Car with a well-stocked cooler, a blanket, and a pillow for the long trip ahead. At Chapleau, she didn’t get off to stock up like the other travellers coming from White River. She had barely dipped into her cooler. Which wasn’t the case for the other passengers, who had emptied theirs during the breakdown that had them waiting seven hours for a backup locomotive to arrive from Sudbury. It’s a well-known fact that the Budd Car has nothing to offer passengers, not even a glass of water.
So the only people left in the car were her and the old woman, sitting on opposite sides of the aisle.
‘She hadn’t moved in her seat. It was fascinating, how still she was. A man and a woman just as old had
accompanied her to her seat. They said endless goodbyes with a thousand and one recommendations for the trip, her health, the return trip, rest. She smiled, coughed, agreed, coughed some more. It was a terrible cough. But it was clear that all she wanted was for them to go and leave her in peace. After they left, she let out a long sigh, and then I saw her turn into a pillar of salt.’
Janelle doesn’t like old people. They scare her. She’s always worried they are going to die on her watch. And that is the worst thing that could happen to her, since she runs away from responsibility and is scared to death of death. So they made a strange pair going train to train, night and day, until the old woman couldn’t do it anymore.
Gladys was the one who made the first move. Janelle had turned her back to her statue of a neighbour and took advantage of the stop at Chapleau to call friends all over the place (there’s no WiFi or cellphone network on Northern trains). She spoke loudly, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, sometimes in both in a single conversation, a single sentence (she is Franco-Ontarian and therefore perfectly bilingual). She was trying, in fact, to reach her sister in Montreal, where she had a room in which she stored her things. That room was the only anchor in her vagabond life.
‘Are you going to Montreal?’ The question caught her off guard; she had completely forgotten the old woman. Gladys had to repeat the question for Janelle to realize that the woman who was speaking to her was the same one who had been immobile a few moments earlier in the seat across from her. The woman was smiling widely, not as old when she smiled, and she was waiting for an answer to her question.
Janelle answered that she was passing through Montreal, but that she was going farther, much farther, to Clova, a place no one knows, and then, as is done between travellers, she enquired as to the woman’s destination. Gladys hesitated a moment (Janelle got the impression she was improvising), then said, ‘I’m going to Toronto’ (and then another moment of hesitation, the impression of improvisation grew), ‘but I may go on to Montreal.’
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Page 7
