Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  “I’ll tell Nana you want to talk to her …”

  She brings her hand to her heart.

  “How can I do it, Méo? How can I do it? Don’t go. I’ll look after it … It’s my role to look after it.”

  He kisses her, on the mouth this time, a wily type who has no other argument.

  “You’ve got through so many other things, Joséphine …”

  She can’t hold back a sob. And he doesn’t try to soothe her.

  “Not like that, Méo! Usually it’s the others who decide to leave.”

  “Open your windows, poor things, before you suffocate!”

  It’s too hot in the girls’ room. In mid-August, the nights are cool and they’re afraid of getting sick because they are sensitive to the cold, that she can understand, but there’s a limit! They are feigning sleep, Béa actually mimicking – badly – a gentle snore, so their grandmother opens the window herself, grumbling. Immediately the wind sweeps into the room, lifting the white lace curtain that the little girls often pretend is a ghost come from the depths of the prairies to chop them into little bits and eat them raw. It’s cold, it’s damp, it already smells of the autumn that’s on its way but it’s healthy, too, if you cover up. She’s told them hundreds of times …

  “Sure it gets chilly and damp early around now, but it’s cool, fresh air and it’s good for you! Béa, I know you aren’t asleep. Get yourself under the covers before you catch your death of cold!”

  Béa obeys without opening her eyes, as if she were moving in her sleep.

  “Don’t try, I know you don’t walk in your sleep!”

  Joséphine sits on the edge of Rhéauna’s bed.

  “Don’t you pretend you’re asleep, Nana. I don’t believe you either.”

  Rhéauna opens her eyes, looks at her grandmother who, how strange, avoids making eye contact. That’s new. Generally she kisses them, one after the other, pulls up their covers and wishes them good night, looking at them with a kind of concentration filled with goodness and love that turns their hearts upside down. This time, nothing like that.

  “I have to talk to you, Nana.”

  The tone is serious, the voice hesitant. Rhéauna understands at once that it won’t be a pleasant conversation and that she’ll have to avoid it. So as not to suffer. She is surprised to think such a thing and she frowns as she does when she can’t find the solution to an arithmetic problem. Suffer? Where did that come from all of a sudden? Just because her grandmother wants to talk to her …

  “Why do you want to talk to me, Grandma? I didn’t do anything. Béa started it …”

  Her grandmother cuts her off with unusual abruptness which worries Rhéauna even more.

  “It’s got nothing to do with what happened at supper, sweetheart. Now come with Grandma. She’ll make you a nice cup of cocoa.”

  Cocoa? At this hour of the night? Béa and Alice open their eyes, raise their heads from their pillows. Their grandmother, sometimes accompanied by their grandfather, tucks them in every night and, often, it’s one of the most agreeable moments of the day. But this is the first time she’s pulled one of them out of bed, just like that, at a time when they’re supposed to be asleep. They suspect that something serious is brewing, although they are envying Rhéauna, lucky her, who has permission to get up, go downstairs and settle down over a nice, hot cup of cocoa!

  “Can’t you talk to me here?”

  Joséphine bends her head slightly, smoothes the beige-and-blue blanket, clears her throat.

  “No. I have to talk to you by yourself …”

  “Do you think I did something bad?”

  “Of course not. But I have to tell you something very important.”

  This definitely doesn’t augur well and all of a sudden the two youngest stop envying their older sister. Experience has taught them that “something important” always means “something horrible.” They watch their grandmother and their big sister leave the room, both of them worried for reasons they can’t identify, and they consider themselves lucky that they can stay warm breathing good fresh air, even if it’s cold, while some strange conversation is going on in the kitchen. If they were more courageous and if it weren’t so cold they would slip onto the upstairs landing and try to hear bits of what’s said down below. They sense, though, that it will be better to stay safe in their bed. Safe from what? Knowing that they won’t be able to get back to sleep, they exchange a worried look. The moon has just appeared between the clouds, the light that bathes their room is an unhealthy blue. The ghost of something threatening glides into the room and starts to prowl around their beds. They are scared.

  Joséphine has heated the milk, saying nothing. And Rhéauna, who could use a comforting word, watches her, silent, too. She suspects that in the next few minutes her life is about to change. In her head, the mind of a ten-year-old child who is intelligent and full of life, everything is orderly, regulated, compartmentalized, both feelings and everyday actions. That’s what reassures her most of all, and this surprising break in the order of things is a sign, she’s sure of it, that something dramatic is about to happen. To her. To her who barely five minutes earlier was trying to concoct some way to take revenge on her sister Béa and pay her back. Is that why she’s going to be punished? Because revenge, the mere idea of revenge, is a mortal sin worthy of a visit from her grandmother to her room practically in the middle of the night to give her some bad news? That’s it, she knows it, she’s going to get some bad news after she’s finished that darn cocoa. If she refused it, if she pushed aside the cup, would it make any difference? If she got back into bed right away, could she divert the course of events to avoid the calamity that’s liable to appear at any moment? A calamity! That’s it! It’s a calamity that her grandmother is going to tell her about!

  “I don’t want any cocoa, Grandma …”

  Her grandmother does not turn around to answer her.

  “I’ll just make one for me then.”

  Rhéauna gathers her courage and hurls herself into the void with her eyes shut.

  “It isn’t very nice, Grandma, I mean what you’re going to tell me, is it?”

  Joséphine has leaned against the stove as she continues to stir the cocoa in the pan.

  “Yes, Rhéauna, it’s something nice. Very nice, even.”

  “So why is your face so sad?”

  “Because for me it won’t be very nice …”

  She sits down close to her granddaughter, runs her hand through her hair that’s so beautiful, black and shiny like that of her ancestors. The hair of the Cree people, rich and glossy as ebony.

  “The good news, Nana, is that your mother wants to see you.”

  An enormous burst of happiness shakes Rhéauna who is on her feet at once, forgetting all the negative thoughts that have been stabbing her for several minutes.

  “Mama’s coming to see us!”

  Her grandmother takes a sip that she finds too hot and blows on the liquid so she won’t burn herself with the next one.

  “No, sweetheart, it’s you who’s going to join her.”

  At first, Rhéauna doesn’t understand. Or arranges not to understand. She hasn’t seen her mother for years. Among the very few and vague memories of her, she sees an agitated woman with unsettled moods, very funny when she’s feeling good but capable of being easily angered and unfair at the slightest opportunity – because she’s tired, she claims – a whirlwind of energy that nothing can break down and that’s hard to follow day by day. All that is so far away! In both time and space. Her early childhood she had spent at the other end of the continent, in a country called the United States, in a state known as Rhode Island, in a city on the seaside called Providence. But her memories are like a vast pool of troubled water where a few vague images float. The sea, when she thinks of it, is above all a smell. Of salt and humidity. Here in Saskatchewan, the humidity is different from that at the seaside and it never smells of salt water. There’s no salt water anywhere, just prairies, flat and m
onotonous, whose movements, however, sometimes resemble those of the great Atlantic Ocean that rocked her first years. The same swell, calm or furious, but made up of fields of hay or corn instead of real waves that break on the beach. And around here, the only beach is the road that runs along the cornfield, and not one wave ever comes there to die. Instead of kelp flung up by the sea there are only abandoned birds’ nests and spilled cobs of corn trampled by malevolent children. The horizon is as far away, as flat as it is here, but without being liquid. And the dangers hidden there are different, but according to her grandparents, just as devastating. You can’t drown in a field of grain but you can get lost.

  And now four or five years after getting rid of her and her two sisters, her mother is calling her from the other end of the world. What for? Why doesn’t she come here? Why does she not take the trouble to cross the continent herself and visit them if she misses her daughters so badly?

  Her grandmother has often explained, especially when huge packages – full of useless things that made the three girls happy – arrived from Providence at Christmas or their birthdays, that if their mother had sent them to Saskatchewan to her own mother it was because life in Rhode Island was too harsh, and her job in a cotton mill drained her energy and she wouldn’t have been able to raise her three children as she wanted, especially since her husband had been lost at sea during a heavy storm. Their father, whose only legacy was a weird name, Rathier, dead at sea. At least that was how their mother explained his absence. The girls were too small to remember him, however, and Rhéauna often dreamed of a giant sailor who watched over her when she had problems or when she was afraid of the monsters lurking in their bedroom closet, who also smelled of salt water. And of fish, because apparently he’d been an excellent deep-sea fisherman who often stayed out in huge boats for months in search of big fish, and no one understood how they stayed afloat: the boats were made of metal and everyone knows that metal doesn’t float! She also tried sometimes to imagine the accent he must have because he was French from France and he talked very differently from all the French Canadians who’d taken refuge in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, to try to fight poverty by working in the American cotton mills. The Frenchman from France had fallen in love with a Cree from Saskatchewan and that had led to what it led to … And now the whirlwind of vague memories, exotic smells, vague images and a foreign accent came back all at once to haunt her in the middle of the night, in the month of August, just as she was about to get ready for the new school year! Her routine was going to be changed, her life disrupted, just because her mother wanted to see her?

  “In Providence? I’m going to Providence in Rhode Island in the United States?”

  “No, your mother’s back in Canada. She’s moved to Montreal. That’s not quite as far as Providence … It’s in the province of Quebec, you know. I’ve often talked to you about the province of Quebec.”

  Rhéauna has no interest in the province of Quebec, even though her grandmother has always described it as a kind of earthly paradise for those who, like them, here in Maria, have chosen to speak French in an English-speaking country that doesn’t want them and looks down on them. In Saskatchewan, it’s hard, every day is a struggle; in Quebec, or so they say, it’s easier because there are more people who speak French …

  “What about my sisters?”

  “Your sisters will join you later.”

  “What do you mean, join me? Aren’t I just going to visit my mother?”

  And it is there, she can sense it, that the crux of the mystery, the heart of the calamity that will land on her at any moment, is hidden. Oh, she knows what it is, she has guessed it, and she’d like to flatten her hands over her grandmother’s mouth to keep her from uttering the next sentence. But that wouldn’t change a thing. Even if they’re not expressed, the facts are still the same. She is condemned. To cross the continent. Just once. In one direction. Her mother had entrusted them to their grandmother, promising to come back for them someday, she remembers that very well – tears, kisses, oaths – now that day has arrived, even if she and her sisters finally doubted their mother’s intentions, and she has to accept it.

  No.

  She’s not obliged to accept it.

  Her grandmother must have read the determination in her eyes because suddenly she takes her hand and strokes it as if to console her.

  “You don’t want to see your mother again?”

  “I want to see my mother again, here, in Maria, with everybody, not in Montreal. She was supposed to come and get us, wasn’t she? Why does she just want to see me? Why aren’t my sisters coming?”

  “I told you, your sisters are going to join you later on …”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Nana, I forbid you to use that tone of voice with me!”

  “It isn’t you I don’t believe, it’s her … If she says she wants to see all three of us how come I’m the only one that’s going?”

  “Because you’re the oldest … Because she wants … I don’t know … maybe she wants to test it to see if she can bring up children.”

  “She already showed us that she can’t, didn’t she?”

  “Nana, don’t talk about your mother like that! She’s a very brave woman … And stop arguing as if you were an adult! You’re still a child, and you’re going to do as you’re told.”

  Immediately she regrets her words and gets up to hold Rhéauna against her belly that’s so welcoming, witness to numerous confessions, wet from countless tears and smeared with the snot of overly sensitive children.

  “That means I’m never, ever coming back here, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  “What will I do? How will I be able to live without you and Grandpa?”

  “Maybe we’ll be able to come and visit you now and then …”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course, I promise.”

  Rhéauna looks up. Her eyes are dry and that worries her grandmother.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You know very well that all I can promise you is to do everything I can to let us see each other …”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What it means is that at least I’m going to try, Rhéauna. That’s the best I can do.”

  “When do I leave?”

  “Fairly soon … Some time next week …”

  “On the train?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a long ways away.”

  “It’s all arranged. You’ll make three stops and, at each of them, one of your grandfather’s sisters will be waiting for you or else one of your second cousins. Your great-aunt Régina in Regina, your great-aunt Bebette in Winnipeg and your second cousin Ti-Lou in Ottawa.”

  “Aunt Régina isn’t very nice.”

  “She’s had a hard life.”

  “That’s no reason to be mean like her.”

  “You’ll just spend one night at her house. Same as with the others. Between trains.”

  “How long will it take me to get to Montreal?”

  “Three or four days I imagine.”

  “I’m going to spend three or four days all by myself on the train?”

  “Don’t be afraid, everything will work out. There’ll be people to look after you on each train, that’s their job, they’re paid to do it. And I’ll give you a piece of paper with your name on it and your address and the phone number of the general store written on it. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Nothing. I’d’ve liked to go with you, I’d have liked to see Maria again, but I have to stay here to look after the others.”

  Rhéauna grabs her grandmother’s cup and takes a long gulp. It’s warm and sweet and it makes her feel better.

  “Don’t let me go, Grandma.”

  “If I don’t let you go it will start all over again later on. She’s your mother, Rhéauna, she decides …”

  “No. You’re my mother.”

  The
little girl looks up at Joséphine’s troubled face. The grandmother could think of nothing to reply, especially not a protest.

  “Keep me with you. Keep us with you. I don’t want to go to Montreal. I don’t want any province of Quebec. I don’t want my mother.”

  “Don’t say that. You mustn’t say that.”

  “I don’t want my mother and that’s that.”

  She runs out of the kitchen and Joséphine hears her noisily climb the stairs as she does when she’s mad or has just been punished.

  Joséphine has been expecting this moment for so long, she has already suffered so badly that she can’t show her pain, can’t express it as she would like. She feels it, yes, but from very far away, buried in a corner of herself so remote that she can’t dig it out and transform it into words, into tears, into curses. She stands there in the middle of the kitchen for a long moment, suffocating. She had entertained the hope that she would keep her three grandchildren forever because their mother would never be able to make both ends meet where she was, in Providence, or because she realized that she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. All that time she had played at being their real mother, no doubt she’d become that – and now came the moment of separation. A punishment? Because she’d believed that she could think of them as hers without saying too much about their real mother or dangling the hope of seeing her someday? A usurper receiving her punishment, that’s what she will become.