Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  Rhéauna has leaned her head against the back of her seat without watching the landscape pass by as she usually does. Worried, her grandmother bends over her.

  “You haven’t got a headache, have you?”

  Rhéauna opens her eyes. Makes a slight, sad little smile.

  “No, but I was wondering …”

  “What?”

  The little girl looks at her grandmother, knitting her brow.

  “Why does Mama absolutely want you to buy clothes for me here? Wouldn’t it have been easier to wait till Montreal? The clothes must be a lot nicer, a lot more stylish in Montreal, mustn’t they? And I wouldn’t have had as much baggage to cart all the way there.”

  Joséphine has asked herself the same question several times and she’s not too sure that she has found the right answer.

  “I don’t know … Maybe she knew you were going to be staying with all kinds of people and she wanted you to be pretty … Especially for your aunt Régina who’s so critical …”

  “Aren’t my clothes from here nice enough for Grandpa’s sisters?”

  “Maybe that’s what she thinks.”

  “Was she ashamed of her clothes when she was in Maria?”

  Joséphine lifts her bangs which have fallen over one eye.

  “When your mother was in Maria, Rhéauna, she was ashamed of everything.”

  “Was she ashamed of you?”

  “I said everything. That means us, too.”

  Joséphine feels a pang as she thinks back to the terrible scene her daughter had put on just before she left thirteen years earlier, in the cursèd year 1900. Her fierce determination, her need for freedom in a village that could only stifle her because she felt so confined here, her desire for vast horizons from which every trace of grain – goddamn corn, goddamn wheat – would have disappeared; the ocean as far as the eye could see with real tides and real surf; dangerous water instead of the exasperating calm of the fields of oats. On one hand Joséphine, who wondered who it was, in her family or Méo’s, that had passed on to Maria her need to be away from her birthplace – to resume wandering after years of an intentionally sedentary life; on the other hand, the other Maria, ready to pounce, for whom leaving meant survival. With no possibility of compromise between them, no comprehension either. The mother had dreamed of peace and quiet, of stillness, and she’d found them; the daughter swore by the vagabond life and adventure.

  But as her mother had predicted, Maria soon paid the price of freedom. She’d become a prisoner of the water as she had been of the land. Because you had to earn your living to survive. As much there as here. And the cotton mills of Rhode Island – the goal of her journey, the promise of quick money, the easy life of big cities with people less narrow-minded and more fun than the walking dead you met in Maria – in the end did not represent at all the deliverance she dreamed of. All the same, though, maybe she had managed to get rid of the suffocation that she felt in Saskatchewan, which would have killed her if she’d stayed in Maria. At least that was what her mother hoped, though she had never been aware of any sign of freedom or happiness in her daughter’s letters. Even with that Simon Rathier, a stranger she had married on a whim, who’d given her three children before he disappeared in a storm. But when all’s said and done, maybe Maria simply had no talent for happiness.

  And when they arrived by train from Regina, those three poor, little, trembling, hungry things from whom Maria had been obliged to separate because she couldn’t provide for them, their grandmother had understood the desperation of her child who was too proud to come back and hide herself away in the hamlet where she’d been born but who didn’t want her children to suffer from her own hardship and her obvious deficiencies.

  And now the oldest was going to retrace part of the same path, once again without asking for it.

  Rhéauna looked away to watch the wind play in the tassels of the corn.

  “Anyway, I hope she won’t be ashamed of me …”

  Joséphine pats her hand, brings it to her lips, kisses it.

  “No one will ever be ashamed of you, Rhéauna. Never.”

  On the eve of her departure, Rhéauna becomes guilty of one thing that from time immemorial has been forbidden in Maria – her grandparents are uncompromising on the matter – and that she dreams about nearly every night when the weather is mild. All the children in the village talk about it, but no one since Maria Desrosiers, it seems, and therefore since the end of the last century, has dared to do it, even the biggest show-offs among the boys. Because it’s dangerous. According to the old folks anyway who can back up their fears with horrible stories about children with their throats slit, slashed open or made unrecognizable because they’d tried too hard to defend themselves. Against what? Ghosts or wild animals from the beyond or from deep in the prairies, stemming from their religion or that of their Cree ancestors. What matters are the atrophied limbs, the chewed-up faces and the lives ruined because someone dared to disobey his parents. On fine summer days then, all the children dream of becoming the first human being since Maria Desrosiers to break that law and survive.

  That night though, you can’t say it is mild. The beautiful July nights are far behind, nearly forgotten, the cold damp weather has come early. A chilly little wind is playing in the corn, and the owl that lives in the barn is hooting in a sinister way almost non-stop. At any other time, Rhéauna would have thought he was warning them about the presence of nocturnal creatures – delicious bats with their unpredictable flight patterns, for instance, the wind’s favourite food; a predator in search of fat hens; or sinuous, hypocritical snakes – but this time she’s sure that he is mourning her departure. No, not sure, she knows that isn’t so. The owl doesn’t even know that she exists; but the thought that even nature is lamenting the final separation that will take place tomorrow morning feels good and, with her elbows resting on the windowsill, she lets herself imagine that Maria, its nature as well as its inhabitants, will never get over her disappearance.

  But this waking dream, though fairly satisfying, isn’t enough. She has just one chance to prove to everyone that she is the bravest or that all the stories about injured children, she is beginning to suspect, are only there to scare the youngsters, force them to be obedient, and she decides to take that chance, to play with fire, to risk everything. If she emerges from the adventure crippled or disfigured, her mother will be the only guilty party and will have to content herself with seeing a monster disembark from the train at Windsor Station. It will be her tough luck.

  Rhéauna doesn’t take the time to think, she doesn’t want to fall into the ridiculous terror that characterized her whole childhood and she gets dressed, taking every possible precaution to avoid waking her two sisters. Who may not be sleeping either, come to think of it. What is she to do if they decide to follow her? Send them back to bed? Encourage them to come with her? But both stay motionless and Rhéauna, relieved, tiptoes out of the bedroom.

  She is about to make herself guilty of the unspeakable, the forbidden, the unthinkable: she is about to step into the field in front of the house to listen to the corn grow!

  According to legend, when the Great Manitou had finished drawing Saskatchewan with a piece of charcoal – a few strokes for a flat horizon, an elevation or two to break the monotony, a group of clouds in the sky because they’re pretty – He thought that it was very empty so He created grain. For colour and movement. Wheat, oats, rye and other grasses appeared then and, finally, the majestic sweet corn that can attain eight feet at the end of August and, with the help of the wind, can imitate the sound of the sea so well that it is hard to tell them apart though He has never known the sea. Then He populated it all with plains animals, with fat, mouth-watering fowl, with hideous creeping things, too, earthworms and snakes of all kinds – the worms to aerate the soil, the snakes to control the population of small animals – before He decided to make the first human being. A Cree, of course. To reign and keep watch, to organize and safeguard. The legend d
oes not say whether the first Cree was a farmer, if he immediately understood the importance of the grain or discovered the sweet taste of corn and its nutritional virtues right away, but tradition has it that, from the outset, he had devoted boundless veneration to it, quickly elevating it to the rank of myth, his first one and, perhaps the most important, that he had even invented a legend maintaining that when the Great Manitou finished creating Saskatchewan … So it’s a legend that bites its tail and therefore can’t be verified. Like any good self-respecting legend.

  The same legend also claims that, for some reason or other, the Great Manitou forbade humans to listen to the corn growing, though it makes a terrible racket at night. They are allowed to listen to the crackling and whistling sounds as long as they’re not in the middle of a field – if they’re walking along a road with their family, for instance, or smoking a pipe on their own front steps to drive away the mosquitoes after supper. They aren’t allowed to go down the steps, cross the road and walk into the cornfield with the intention of listening to it grow. Especially adults. Why? Some, rebels and hotheads, like Maria Desrosiers, claim that it’s a story made up to stop the young folks from going into the cornfields to do what is forbidden outside them. If they’re wrong, as generations of curés have maintained, the true reason has never been known. And no one tries to find it any more. That’s it, that’s all. No need to think about it, just obey. Other stories, even darker and more grim have been tacked on over the years: the stinky creature Boulamite who smells like mothballs and bites the feet of children caught wandering in the cornfields after nightfall; the boogeyman, Bonhomme Sept-Heures, who carries on his back a big burlap sack in which he keeps the heads of naughty children and – this is the slightly secret version that is only revealed to those on the verge of adolescence – the fairy Mortal Sin herself and her promises of licentiousness without punishment. Sceptics claim that it’s the meeting place for religion imported from Europe and the more natural, less twisted one of Saskatchewan’s original population. And that it was there that the Christian god replaced the Great Manitou. Permanently. Never, according to them, had the god of the Cree displayed such bad taste as to make up stories in which what is natural isn’t and what is not is. For the Cree, nature and religion are one; for the Europeans, nature was pagan, lawless, and had to be renounced as much as possible and, above all, separated from religion. Why? Other legends. Countless. Inexplicable. Endless.

  The legend then had become a double-headed creature with two different origins, the second one eventually winning out over the first as Europeans and their descendants settled the prairies, driving the Cree off their land. And that is the one that is believed in Maria, Saskatchewan, now in the early years of the twentieth century. The one that Rhéauna Rathier, daughter of Maria Desrosiers, is going to disobey. Twenty years after her mother.

  Muffled up in the winter parka that she dug out of the big cedar chest and that reeks of mothballs – in fact, that is what attracts stinky Boulamite in the fall, apparently – Rhéauna hurries across the little road that separates her from the cornfield. What has she got to lose, after all? When all is said and done, in her present state, death, no matter how atrocious, would be welcome. She inches her way through corn nearly twice her height, strides through the chilly, humid night. She pulls her parka tight so her body won’t lose any heat. What strikes her first is the strong smell of humus that the recent heavy rains have watered and of ripe grain ready to be cut, threshed, winnowed, plucked, stored. Or in the case of corn, eaten, just as it is, hot, with butter and salt. Her mouth is watering and she smiles in the dimness. If only her grandparents could see her. Or her sisters. To think about eating corn at a time like this!

  She strides ahead, pushing aside the stalks that are in her way. She tries to go in as straight a line as possible, to avoid getting lost. In the daytime, it’s fairly easy; if she gets lost because she has gone in a circle without realizing it, she can simply call out and Grandpa will be there. But now, in the middle of the night, it’s not the time to turn to the left or the right if she wants to find her way. She looks at the sky. Dear God, it’s so beautiful! She doesn’t know how to read the stars as some people in the village claim they can do, to explain the past and predict the future armed only with the position in the sky of certain planets at your birth and their location at the present time. Nor could she use the stars as a guide and find her way again, like her father, the master mariner, though he did lose his way on the ocean. And perished, the idiot.

  But to hear the corn grow she’d have to stop walking and prick up her ears, wouldn’t she? She makes too much noise with her fall boots and she’s the one who makes the cornstalks crackle as she pushes them aside to advance. To stretch out on the ground as in winter when she and her sisters make angels in the snow with wings unfurled? No, the ground is probably too wet and she doesn’t want to come down with a cold. To die, yes, that would be fine to save herself from exile, but not a bad head cold, they’re too horrible … She stops under the starry vault, grabs two or three stalks bodily and shuts her eyes. What will she hear first? The much-anticipated crackling, as dry as the crack of a whip when an inch or two of a corn plant shoots out of the earth all at once, according to legend, or the arrival of creatures of the night that have smelled her, who’ve come now to eat her up and at this moment may be slithering through the tall corn so they can burn her feet or cut off her head? She smiles again. This time, though, it’s a tiny little smile. It’s funny, here, in the midst of danger, when she should be shaking with fear, she feels instead as if a kind of peace has fallen over her. Does it mean that danger, at the very heart of itself, no longer exists? So that when you are far removed from it, it makes an impression while in its presence, when you ought to be shaking, crying and asking for a favour, you think that it’s ridiculous?

  She waits. Two minutes. Five. Nothing. Oh, the wind is there. It’s always present on the prairies, but she knows it well and manages to disregard it. No, what she is waiting for is a good loud crackle, just one, just to say that it exists, that corn really does grow with a sound like a loud crack of a whip and always at night.

  Then comes the thought that the corn, in the end, is perhaps perfectly ripe, that it has finished growing, that it’s too late to hear it come out of the ground.

  But suddenly, joy of joys, there’s a huge crackling sound. It’s not the sound of footsteps, or an animal’s call, or the wind in the corn, it is the genuine crackling of something huge that is emerging from the earth, pushing with all its might, of a creature in full growth that wants to live, to declare its presence, an expression of nature exploding with life, and Rhéauna gives a shout of joy. She’s heard it! She’s heard the corn grow and no animal, no baleful creature, has struck her down and devoured her alive, or carried her off like a trophy to deep inside some hiding place.

  She doesn’t wait to hear it again, she has heard what she wanted to hear; she turns around and gets back on the road without losing her way. She would like to plant herself in the middle of the little dirt road and howl her happiness. But she has to control herself, reveal nothing to anyone and go away as her mother had done, convinced that legends are just legends and the whole wide world less dangerous than she’d thought. She still doesn’t want to go but at least she’s no longer afraid.

  She finds both her sisters lying in her bed. Eyes wide open. Seemingly worried, even terrified by what she has just done. Alice raises her head as soon as Rhéauna shuts the door behind her.

  “You went out in the corn, didn’t you?”

  Béa leans on her right elbow.

  “Did you see Boulamite?”

  “Did you see Bonhomme Sept-Heures?”

  “Frogs?”

  “Snakes?”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Are you dead?”

  Rhéauna bursts out laughing, she can’t help it. She bursts out laughing and elbows them aside so they’ll make room for her in the bed. At last, something warm! Alice shrieks beca
use her big sister’s feet have just brushed against her leg. They can hear Grandpa’s voice in the bedroom next to them.

  “What’s going on? I heard the stairs creak, now you’re yelling in the middle of the night! Am I going to have to get up?”

  The three girls, who know what it means if their grandfather gets up when everyone is in bed and supposed to be asleep, calm down immediately.

  “It was me, Grandpa, I went downstairs to get a drink of water.”

  “Okay, but make sure you don’t have to get up to pee, Nana! I don’t want this to go on all night, this fooling around! If your glass of water makes you want to pee, use the chamber pot!”

  Concerned all the same, despite her sister’s laughter, Alice repeats her question:

  “You aren’t dead, Nana, are you?”

  Rhéauna turns around, hugs her, plants a kiss on her temple.

  “No, I’m not dead and, if it makes you feel any better, I can tell you I’m more alive than ever …”

  They spend the whole last night in the same bed. And they don’t sleep much. Now and then a little snore goes up in the bedroom when Alice or Béa falls asleep briefly, abruptly for little moments that are more like a loss of consciousness than what their grandmother calls sleepyheadedness, but Rhéauna stays awake. She’ll sleep on the train to Regina, even though the trip is fairly short.

  She describes for them her foray into the cornfield, the lies they’ve been told all their lives, the beauty of the sky when you are deep inside the pitch-dark, the exhilaration of the wind that sways the tremendous stalks and ruffles your hair; she talks as well about her departure the next morning, about their separation, which shouldn’t be very long, about their departure, too, imminent and so unsettling, she knows that, but they’ll have to see it as the beginning of a great adventure, though she herself is not convinced. She goes so far as to predict that they’ll be happy with their mother in that province full of possibilities where the people who talk French are the great majority in a city that they say is huge and already filled with cars, whereas here in Maria there are only two; that has at least ten nickelodeons if not more, and streetcars and buses and electricity everywhere. In the end she is caught up in her own story and lets herself imagine Montreal in the summer, Montreal in the winter, its long right-angled streets, car horns even in the middle of the night, and the unbelievable smell that escapes from the doors of the numerous restaurants, too many to count, so they say. And the mountain right in the middle of the city, because there is a mountain, a real mountain, in the very heart of Montreal! An enormous playground that will be the opposite of the boring prairie where nothing ever happens. She arranges things so that she doesn’t have to think about the red-brick schools and the mean little girls from the cities who’ll make short work of the poor Rathier sisters, come from the depths of the prairies, talking with an accent you could cut with a knife and helpless in the face of big-city sophistication. She repeats the word sophistication in her head; she has just learned it and she thinks it’s the most beautiful word in the French language. Or at least one of the most complicated ones she knows.