And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by Jocelyne Saucier

  Janelle believes that is the moment she was chosen, that from her salt-pillar observatory, Gladys had observed her, sized her up, missed nothing of what she said on the phone, and chose her for some unknown reason.

  The other travellers returned, the Budd Car started rolling, the two women returned to their thoughts, and the softness of the night gradually enveloped them in its pale blue cotton batting.

  Neil McNeil, the conductor, doesn’t remember the two travellers, and yet they were the only women on board; there was nothing noteworthy until Metagama.

  He had a lot on his mind. He had left two fishing parties along the line three days before, and now he had to pick them up despite the seven-hour delay and the dark night. The first group consisted of three men, regulars. They got off at Biscotasi Lake with their motorboat, fishing gear, jerrycans, and a big plastic barrel that contained their tent and provisions. Neil McNeil had helped them unload their equipment from the freight car. They had agreed on the day and approximate time the Budd Car would pick them up. The same thing for the second group of anglers, who got out north of Wakami Lake. Neil McNeil is used to these chancy rendezvous, which worked out most of the time, but they were problematic this time because of the extremely long delay. He kept leaving his passengers to go to the train driver’s cab to make sure there was enough visibility on the track.

  ‘The train station at Clova is pretty …’

  The old woman was trying a new approach. Janelle had again forgotten her. Nice and warm under her blanket (the night had grown cooler), she was listening to Shania Twain on her iPhone. Gladys repeated what she had said about the Clova train station, and Janette took out her earbud.

  ‘She had eyes like embers, but blue like the sea, eyes that burned, feverish eyes that looked deep into mine, and she was shivering.’

  ‘It was the only thing to do: I offered her my blanket. The woman was sick. You know me, I’m no Mother Teresa. I’m not the type to go around saving humanity, but it was the only thing to do.’

  So Janelle crossed the aisle to cover Gladys with her blanket and sat down beside her just to talk about the place, Clova, where she had never been but that Gladys knew well. She was about to go back to her seat when Gladys did something surprising: she spread part of the blanket over Janelle. (We wondered long and hard, Janelle and I, over what to think; did Gladys at that point feel so weak that she needed a travel companion? Or did she already have in mind what she was going to entrust her with?) It was a decisive move. From that point on, the two women didn’t leave each other’s side.

  Janelle felt trapped but didn’t resist, because it looked like it would be an interesting conversation. Gladys had a lot of stories to tell. She had travelled almost all of Canada by train, trips that had their share of adventure, and obviously she told her about the school train in great detail, as was her habit. Janelle also had stories to tell, not all happy ones, that took place on the rails or the road, which she contributed to the conversation with a deadpan tone, as if none of her stories concerned her, only to give Gladys a rest. Janelle doesn’t have much interest in herself or her life, however adventurous it is, so I got only pieces of it here and there. Before the trains, there was the road. Janelle had had several cars, minivans mostly, into which she would cram her essential possessions and that became her mobile home. She would go from place to place, taking a job as a waitress, a cook, a cleaner; whatever it was, the important thing was that the job keep her afloat for a while, at least until the boss did or said something she didn’t like, until the lover of the day made some mistake, any excuse to hit the road again for another motel, hotel, or restaurant, preferably somewhere at the end of an isolated road where she would disembark as an alien. And she was now on the trains because she had lost her driver’s licence for reasons she refused to tell me (drinking and driving, I’m pretty sure – she loves to be drunk as much as she loves to be free).

  The two women kept talking, curled up under their blanket, while the Budd Car sliced through the night at an unusual speed to make up for the delay.

  The first stop, to bring the people who had been fishing at Wakami Lake on board, brought a gust of cold air into the car. The party, a man in his fifties and a young couple, were visibly relieved to be on board, but, without making a big thing about the long hours spent waiting near the railway track, they started down the aisle, trailing in their wake the cold night. The man greeted Neil McNeil with a clap on the shoulder, ‘Good to see you, my friend,’ and they calmly took their seats.

  The arrival of the fishing party created a bit of a stir in the general sleepiness. People started talking again in low voices. The car was bathed in a bluish light. The hum of voices accompanied the rattling of the car. It made for a hoarse, gentle music, a lullaby modulated to the swaying of the car sometimes broken up by Gladys’s deep, wheezing cough and, soon, in the steel hull wrapped in the night, all that remained were the murmuring voices of the two women and soon, nothing: Gladys had dozed off.

  Janelle wanted to take the opportunity to return to her seat, but she had barely twitched when she felt Gladys’s hand slide onto her thigh and squeeze it.

  ‘I sat there wondering what I was going to do with this old woman. There was no doubt about it. She had glommed on to me. I couldn’t get rid of her. She was old and sick, and she had decided that she would travel with me or I would travel with her. I don’t know who was travelling with who in her mind.’

  What worried her was the transfer for Toronto. It was already complicated enough, and if, on top of it, she had to trail a sick old woman behind her, it was going to be even trickier. Janelle had made the trip from White River to Montreal many times, and she knew that the worst part was catching the connection to Toronto. The Budd Car would drop her at the station in downtown Sudbury however much behind schedule, and she had to immediately jump in a taxi to get to the other station ten kilometres north of the city, in no man’s land, an industrial area where not a soul lived. The station opened only at midnight in anticipation of the arrival of the train, scheduled for 1:15, but that could keep you waiting until dawn. Janelle remembered the feeling of being god knows where waiting for a ghost train in a ghost station.

  Behind the black screen of the window, she couldn’t see the villages stream by in the night. From the hammering of the wheels against the joints of the track (the clickety-clacks so dear to Suzan’s and Gladys’s hearts), she knew that the Budd Car was moving at maximum speed and that they might arrive in time to catch the Sudbury–Toronto train, if it was delayed enough. Otherwise she would have to find a hotel room for her and the old woman, because she had resigned herself to not abandoning her.

  The stop at Biscotasi Lake seemed to her to take forever. They had to hoist into the freight car all the fishing equipment (boat, etc.), which slid from their hands in the dark, and it was only after fifteen long minutes that Janelle saw in the aisle behind Neil McNeil the three smiling fishermen joking about the local bears they had time to make friends with, their only comment about the wait in the cold night before dropping into their seats and falling asleep almost immediately.

  With no other stops on its itinerary, the Budd Car got back up to speed, to Janelle’s great relief.

  Twenty minutes later, there was the screech of wheels on the track as the Budd Car’s emergency brakes were applied: fire was blazing near the track at Metagama. Someone was signalling they wanted to come aboard. Suzan.

  Suzan in slippers and pyjamas, with just a wool jacket thrown over her, an angry Suzan.

  She had phoned Lisana a few hours earlier, and she was seething with helplessness and indignation. Helplessness because all she had was her instinct and a few words from Lisana to convince her of the urgency of the situation. And indignation against herself. She had been pathetic, she had failed pathetically. She hadn’t found the right words to say to Lisana, and worse, she had said the thing she shouldn’t have. Suzan would have liked to start the conversation over, to listen to Lisana, really listen to
her, her voice, her tone of voice, its exasperated slowness, when she said, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ She should have grasped the nuance. Lisana was beyond her I can’t do it, she was at the end of her rope. She couldn’t do it anymore. And Suzan, rather than paying attention to the weight of the words, gave her the usual spiel. ‘Yes, you can do it. You’re stronger than you think. Believe me, you can do it.’ Then Lisana, even more exasperated: ‘No, I’ve tried and I’ve tried. I can’t do it anymore.’ Suzan didn’t know how to keep on encouraging her, telling her over and over, ‘It’s the first step that’s the hardest, the rest just takes care of itself,’ while at the other end of the line she heard, ‘I can’t do it anymore,’ repeated with increasing desperation and finally, in a flat voice, ‘My hand just won’t, my hand can’t do it anymore,’ to end the conversation. Lisana had hung up.

  Lisana was in crisis. There was no doubt about it. Suzan called back immediately, no answer. She called and called again, still no answer. No answer at the Smarzes’ either. It was almost midnight, and she remembered that the Smarzes were in the habit of disconnecting the phone before going to bed.

  Lisana was in crisis, and Gladys was off gallivanting on the train. There was nothing to understand, except that she had to do something, and fast. But what?

  Suzan built the fire and didn’t have to wait long before the light of the Budd Car appeared in the night.

  When he saw her climb into the car in pyjamas (he didn’t have time to lower the steps), Neil McNeil thought her son had had an emergency, but he soon understood that this wasn’t about her son.

  What followed was reported to me in great detail by Janelle, Suzan, and Neil McNeil, although none of them had the same understanding of what happened.

  Momentary madness, is what Neil McNeil thought. ‘The momentary madness of a hermit. Living in a cabin in the middle of the woods with only your thoughts as company, sometimes old anger, old pain, can bubble up to the surface, and everything gets confused. You have to be strong to resist it. I have seen a raving lunatic board the train screaming his head off that he was going to kill someone, who and why I never knew, maybe he didn’t know himself. He was old, over eighty. There are no young forest hermits. You have to have a life behind you to have something to think about when you go deep into the woods. That one should have been long dead in his cabin, but he had the time to get to the train before having his brain addled by someone who did something shitty to him from another life. Like Suzan when she arrived in her pyjamas and ran down the aisle like a chicken with her head cut off. Suzan is not a true hermit. She has a phone, the train that goes by her house, and her son Desmond who comes to see her every week. And she’s not old enough to have her brain addled. But there was a short-circuit, a compulsion, that was sure. She wouldn’t stop shouting: “Get back home now. She’s going to do it.”’

  When she told me the whole story in the little house under the trees, Suzan had a hard time explaining how she had become a hysterical old woman screaming like a lunatic in the Budd Car. In the moment, she said, she wasn’t even aware she was screaming. Her brain just kept playing in a loop, a blade sunk into Lisana’s wrist, and that image didn’t jibe, ‘I mean, not at all,’ with Gladys’s calm assurance. ‘She was speaking to me as if I were a child who had just had a nightmare.’

  ‘Easy, Suzan, calm down. Nothing is going to happen.’

  ‘Calm down? Lisana is going to do it. You should have heard her. I just spoke to her on the phone.’

  ‘There’s no need to worry, Suzan. She’s not going to do it.’

  ‘I’m telling you she is. She’s going to do it.’

  ‘I’m telling you she isn’t. She’s not capable of it anymore.’

  ‘She’s going to do it. I’m telling you. Get back to Swastika now.’

  ‘Believe me, she hasn’t been capable of it for some time now.’

  ‘Go home, Gladys. I’m begging you. She’s going to do it, I swear.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry. Nothing is going to happen.’

  Despite her reassuring words, Gladys wasn’t calm or peaceful under the blanket she was sharing with Janelle. ‘She was extremely tense, frozen stiff, a steel bar, her fingers digging into my thigh.’

  Around them a confused murmur of sleepy voices protested weakly. Neil McNeil approached, tried to calm Suzan down, but it was like trying to drive back a furious sea. Suzan was shouting louder and louder. There was a minefield between the two women, the cutting edge of a sharp ridge. The exchange grew narrower, closed off. Janelle felt it in the hand on her thigh that became like an eagle’s grip (‘I had bruises’). There was no way out. An increasingly hysterical Suzan was ordering Gladys to go home to Swastika immediately, and Gladys, in the same calm voice, the same firm hand under the blanket, kept repeating that she was worrying for nothing.

  The sleepers, now fully awake, were complaining loudly. Neil McNeil, well aware of the growing delay, was trying to calm both Suzan and his passengers at the same time. Then, seeing one of them get up looking like he meant trouble, he said, ‘Make up your mind, Suzan. Are you staying on or getting off? Decide now, because we have time to make up.’ And to make the urgency of the situation crystal clear, he added, indicating Janette: ‘She has to catch the Sudbury–Toronto train.’

  And this is where the knot of confusion is created; this is where Gladys’s trail was lost for good, because Suzan never would have left the Budd Car – ‘I would have stayed, even in slippers and pyjamas. I would have stayed in the Budd Car. I would have gone with her to Swastika’ – if Gladys hadn’t told her what she wanted to hear.

  ‘Don’t worry, Suzan. I’ll go back to Swastika. I’ll get the Northlander in Toronto with my young friend. We’ll be in Swastika by the afternoon.’

  Pure fabrication, the young friend thought as she felt the hand relax its grip and pat her on the thigh. Gladys was asking her not to contradict her.

  Janelle was now certain that the woman was on the run. She was fleeing something, someone, her own home; regardless of what she was running from, there was this screaming hyena who wanted to bring her back to her point of departure. And Janelle, completely loyal, because she herself was always on the run, said nothing.

  There was a menacing commotion around Suzan. A passenger had stood up, a large man, six feet tall, all muscles and rage. He headed toward Suzan. She had no choice; she had to take Gladys at her word and leave the car of her own volition. She knows now that that is when Gladys slipped into the quicksand of questions without answers. She slipped away.

  After Suzan left, calm was restored, and the Budd Car resumed its journey. There were still another two hours before its destination. The connection for the Sudbury–Toronto train was in serious jeopardy. Janelle knew it but didn’t worry about it. She was accompanying an old woman on the run, and she liked the idea.

  ‘Who is Lisana?’

  The question wasn’t an attempt to untangle the old woman’s story. Janelle just wanted to know whether she would be lost in mystery the whole time or whether she would have a signpost or two to guide her through their acquaintance.

  ‘She is my daughter, and she has death in her soul.’

  The response came with no hesitation, no emotion.

  ‘She didn’t blink, didn’t stir – the only thing that was moving was her hand up and down my thigh, a sort of caress, to soothe herself or me, I don’t know which.’

  ‘I laid my hand on hers, and we fell asleep against each other. We were still asleep when the train pulled into the station.’

  In Sudbury, they took a taxi to the ghost station. The night was cold and inhospitable, the streets filled with partiers, the taxi dirty and smelly, so crossing the city was difficult. The driver kept rolling down the window and shouting at throngs of partiers who were slowing him down and, in some places, stopping him altogether. Janelle was cursing in the back seat. They didn’t have much time.

  Finally, at the end of a dirt road that crossed an uninhabited area, the little
light of the station appeared. That light in the night was a beacon of hope. The station, which opened at midnight, closed as soon as the train went by. Unless, Janelle started to worry, the train had already passed, and the station employee was just hanging around.

  He was there, the sole employee on the night shift, in what was possibly a station (from the outside, it looked more like a shed), but he couldn’t issue Gladys a ticket, neither electronic, nor paper. Janelle was telling the employee off, using every possible tone to get special authorization, when rumbling announced the train’s arrival. The Sudbury–Toronto train was pulling into the station (I hesitate to use the word after what Janelle told me about it).

  It was two in the morning. Gladys was exhausted, coughing more and more. Janelle, determined to see this adventure through, sat Gladys in a wheelchair that was hanging around (you heard right: a wheelchair in that station), headed toward the man in the peaked cap who was coming down the train’s footboard, and set about convincing him that they could not abandon a sad-fragile-poor-old woman in such inhospitable surroundings.

  The Sudbury–Toronto train isn’t a slow Northern milk run. It’s the train that leaves from Vancouver, crosses the Rockies and the Prairies, arriving in Toronto four days later. A real train with a dining car, a panoramic dome car (with a spectacular view of the Rockies), sleeping compartments, travellers who come from all over to experience Canada’s wide-open spaces, and staff in peaked caps wearing the colours of their employer.

  Janelle wasn’t dealing with a Neil McNeil or a Sydney Adams. The man she was trying to soften up was not in command of his train. He was a ticket controller in charge of enforcing the company’s rules, and, like the station employee, he was not authorized to hand out a passenger ticket. Travellers who take the Sudbury–Toronto train must have one already. Janelle had hers well before her departure from White River.