October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  The cabin turned out to be less than fifty metres into the bush. Grey, dilapidated, peaceful under its sheet-metal chimney, it was covered by a thin coating of snow. The door sagged open on its hinges. When Gode forced his way inside, he gave out a loud, prolonged yelp, and a second later the others heard him call out.

  “Guys! We’ve got company …”

  The Lafleur brothers found him crouched in front of the old sap boiler, his box of provisions on the tamped-earth floor beside him. He had made the acquaintance of the cabin’s occupant, an enormous, semi-somnolent porcupine, prickly and black, calmly curled up beside a mound of pale brown capsules: its own pile of scat. The harsh light coming through the open door caught the silvered tips of its quills. The intrusion of the three men elicited only a brief grunt of protest from the animal.

  “Look at that! He lives in his own shit, just like a fat capitalist bastard.”

  They left the animal in peace and surveyed their new digs and its possibilities. The floorboards were rotten in places, some of the slats threatening to give way under their weight. Metal buckets once used to collect maple sap were rusting away in a corner. Those still in decent shape were arranged along the opposite wall. And covering everything, everywhere, was dust, sawdust, spiderwebs, and animal droppings.

  René Lafleur took the lid off the stove, cleaned all the old leaves and cobwebs out of it, and was stuffing the firebox with dead sticks when Jean-Paul stopped him with a gesture.

  “No fire.”

  Across the room, Gode had opened one of the boxes and was displaying its contents:

  “Irish stew. Meatball stew. Oh, wow, canned spaghetti …”

  “Has anyone seen a can opener anywhere?” asked René. He was taking an inventory of the second box. “Green Giant whole kernel canned corn … Le Sieur number 3 green peas … Del Monte sliced pineapples … Hey! Weren’t they the guys who kicked Arbenz out of Guatemala?”

  “I can’t believe they’re making us eat our Chef Boyardee cold.”

  “Where’s the can opener?”

  “There is no can opener.”

  They ate sardines, Weston sliced bread, and Spam from cans that could be opened with little keys soldered to the lids. Later, in the attic of the cabin’s half-rotted extension, they found an axe with a broken handle and used it to pierce the bottoms of some cans of preserves.

  Early that afternoon they walked, sheltered by a fence row of trees and thorn shrubs studded with piles of rocks, then, bent double, followed a ditch to an abandoned barn, where they gathered armloads of old straw to take back to the cabin. The tractor was nowhere to be seen, and the road they had taken to get there the night before was deserted.

  It had stopped snowing.

  Back at the cabin, they tore up some of the floor planks and attacked the frozen ground with the axe, taking turns breaking up the hard brown earth and scooping it up with their hands. They carried the earth outside in the boxes they had used to transport their food. When the hole was deep enough, they spread the straw on the bottom of it, and it was there that they slept that night, and every night after.

  The next day they resumed their work, using the axe as a pick to widen and deepen the hole. When the excavation was big enough, they went back to the barn to get more straw. They arranged two-by-fours over the hole and spread a thick mattress of straw on the bottom to finish it off. They slept fully dressed, as if they were corpses and the hole was their tomb, with a piece of panelling pulled into place above their heads, covering the opening like a door, or a lid.

  The porcupine went out at dusk to dine on the tamaracks that grew in the area, and they heard it grunting and muttering to itself when it came back in the middle of the night to reclaim its sleeping quarters under the old sugar boiler. In the morning, they found it curled up in its usual spot close to its mound of scat, which had been augmented by a fresh contribution.

  It started snowing again.

  One moonless, foggy night when the smoke wouldn’t be seen, they lit the fire. They devoured a slightly heated can of Cordon Bleu meatball stew and made tea by melting snow in one of the sap buckets. Smoke went everywhere but up the chimney, and soon the entire cabin was full of it. Coughing, they burned damp floorboards and green wood and had to huddle close to the old stove in order to feel the fire’s warmth on their skin.

  René found an antique in the attic: an old rocking chair, which he attempted to repair with sticks and a handful of rusty nails he painstakingly straightened with the back of the axe.

  “When I’m done with it, it’ll be as good as new.”

  “I think you’re wasting your time. We aren’t going to be hanging around here very long.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll leave it here for someone else …”

  And they sang songs by Félix Leclerc, Claude Gauthier, Pauline Julien. They sang Georges Brassens’s “Song for the Man from Auvergne,” four hunks of wood, four hunks of bread. They almost never mentioned Lavoie, the government minister. Or Ben, their comrade who’d been arrested and had gone a bit crazy, spilling his guts at the coroner’s inquest. Rue Collins was behind them now. Time to think about the future, the coming winter. Find a house. Get some money. Hit a credit union in a small village somewhere. Make plans. Stay in their hole until spring.

  Early one morning they heard three shots — sharp, incisive, fired in rapid succession. Then silence. René was already up, the 12-gauge levelled at the half-closed door. Gode poked his head through the gap in the floorboards, bits of straw clinging to his shaggy hair.

  “.30-.30. Deer.”

  When the weather was clear they didn’t light a fire. They ate Spam and canned peaches in syrup. Lunched on Weston bread and Paris Pâté. Four hunks of wood, four hunks of bread.

  After they’d heard the rifle shots, they jumped at the smallest sound. Eyed the edge of the clearing anxiously, spoke in low voices. Godefroid was small, a hundred and forty pounds, five-seven, blue eyes. René was bigger: wanted posters everywhere had him at a hundred and eighty pounds on a five-foot-ten frame, brown eyes and hair. They were the same age: twenty-three. Jean-Paul was four years older, built like a brick shithouse, weighing more than two hundred pounds and six feet tall in his stocking feet. The official photograph published in the newspapers and on television made him look like a serial killer. The first time he sat on the rocking chair after his brother repaired it, it collapsed under his weight, and he sat there, his arms and legs in the air, laughing as hard as the others.

  One night they were awakened by what sounded like a police siren. Once they’d rubbed the sleep from their eyes, the only logical explanation they could come up with was that one of the ring-billed gulls they’d seen flying behind the manure spreader had been wounded and had somehow got into the cabin to hide.

  René was the one to risk pushing back the panel and sticking his head up through the hole. A cry.

  “There’s two of them!”

  In the feeble yellow beam of his flashlight, he saw what looked like an enormous ball of spikes electrified by a high-voltage current, vibrating and clicking, shooting out silvery flashes and emitting a series of continuous, piglike grunts.

  “Well, guys, it looks like Drapeau has found himself a girlfriend.”

  Drapeau was the name they’d given the porcupine.

  “Hey, René!”

  “What?”

  “How do they do it without skewering themselves?”

  Gode was making his way through the bush, the 12-gauge in the crook of his arm. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as a four-or five-year-old, walking behind his father through the immense forest that stretched all the way north to the huge bays of the frozen sea. The sudden detonation came like a holy revelation. Grouse lined up like bowling pins on the branches of the spruce trees.

  Now he was following a barely discernable path, tense, his senses alert as his eyes swept the network of bare, grey branches around him. The relentless sky was the colour of steel. The snow was almost completely melted, a
few patches here and there under the low conifer branches. Which meant he left few traces of his passing, so to hell with Jean-Paul and his security measures.

  The only problem was the carpet of half-frozen dead leaves under his feet, which made as much noise as a mountain torrent if he wasn’t careful. A squirrel running through it sounded like a herd of buffalo. He stopped, pointed his shotgun into the underbrush, safety off, heart pounding. Another good reason to keep his eyes peeled.

  He came to the edge of the woods. A field opened up ahead of him. Caution told him he should stick to cover, but he preferred the little voice in his head that told him to keep going. There was a low stone wall dividing two fields further on, punctuated by patches of thorn bushes. As he got closer, he could see fruit on the branches — Saskatoon berries, some crabapples, even a few wild apple trees forming a narrow row along the fence.

  He’d already strayed too far, but he knew that nothing would stop him from going to take a closer look.

  He walked, reached a clump of Saskatoons first, passed them, and stopped by the apple tree. The flat brilliance of the fruit against the dull sky. The moment he reached out to pick an apple, there was an explosion. The next instant he was on the ground, not knowing what had happened or why.

  The only visible result of his shotgun going off was a brief rain of broken twigs and an exploded apple, the core still swinging in his field of vision. At the same time, the air around him filled with grouse beating the air with their short wings, their darkly barred tails spread into fans, easily a dozen of them. They flew off in single file over the field, leaving him with his nerves shattered, his heart gripped by nostalgia, almost in tears.

  He said nothing about it to the others.

  The beam from an electric spotlight cut through the darkness and stopped on the cabin. Godefroid stood at the door with the shotgun. Blinded, he raised his open hand and shielded his eyes. The voice of a man came at him through the explosion of light.

  “Hey, guys, don’t shoot! It’s us …”

  Bernard Saint-Laurent and another young man, their arms full of provisions, came toward the cabin, breathing heavily in the darkness. Behind them was a woman from one of the support groups. Brown hair, late thirties, almost old, compared to them. In his glasses, Saint-Laurent looked like an intellectual. He had a vaguely displeasing mug, with a kind of horse-like jaw that seemed to dislocate itself when he spoke. He was the liaison between the two cells. The other was thin and bearded. For a few moments all they could hear was the heavy sound of their footsteps on the frozen leaves.

  Gode backed up to let the newcomers in and leaned the rifle against the cabin wall. Soon the space was filled with tense faces, their fantastical silhouettes projected against the brutally lit walls.

  The Beard set down the cardboard box he’d been carrying. Drapeau, not pleased, hunched his back and with an impressive clatter of quills sought refuge in the darkest corner of the cabin.

  “Have you tamed that thing?”

  “It wasn’t too hard.”

  Jean-Paul regarded the newcomers with a worried look.

  “You were careful, I hope?”

  Saint-Laurent spoke quickly before the other two could: “We took the back roads. No one followed us, we would’ve seen them …”

  Jean-Paul seemed to think about it.

  “We’ve brought you some newspapers,” the Beard said, holding up a Montréal-Matin.

  “Anything new?”

  “Yeah. De Gaulle died …”

  “Is this where you sleep?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Curled up in the straw. The Lafleur boys are the bread, and I’m the baloney.”

  “I mean news about the others,” said Jean-Paul.

  Saint-Laurent assumed an air of importance, of being in the know.

  “The guys have issued a new communiqué. With a picture of Travers sitting on a case of dynamite …”

  “Bullshit.”

  “But guess what: the next communiqué is going to be addressed to U Thant and sent directly to the UN.”

  Gode gave an incredulous guffaw.

  “Why not send it to the Pope?”

  René aimed a thin stream of spit at the floor.

  “What else?” asked Jean-Paul.

  “We brought you a can opener.”

  “Have you guys considered my proposition?” asked Saint-Laurent.

  They turned to face him. Jean-Paul stared at him intently for a moment.

  “You can’t stay here,” Saint-Laurent said. “You’ll freeze to death for one thing, and you’ve burned your bridges in Quebec. There’s people waiting for you in the United States. I can get you across the border whenever you like … There’s people in New York and Algiers. Black Panthers. You could be in Algiers in no time.”

  “Before thinking about sending us to Algeria, you should have started by giving us better instructions on how to get here. We spent the first night between a woodlot and a fence, freezing our asses off.”

  “Everything’s all set,” Saint-Laurent went on as though Jean-Paul hadn’t spoken. “I can get you across the border any time.”

  “You can tell our ‘American friends,’” Jean-Paul cut in, “that there’s no way we’re leaving Quebec. This is where the struggle is, not in Algeria. We aren’t going to abandon our friends. We aren’t going to abandon the political prisoners.”

  “Our girlfriends are in prison … You can tell them that,” added René.

  After making arrangements for another mission to top up supplies the following week, the visitors were about to leave, to slip back into the night, when Jean-Paul held the Beard back for a quiet word.

  “I don’t want to see him here again,” he said. “And for fuck’s sake, find us another place to hide out.”

  CHEVALIER BRANLEQUEUE

  (1932–1999)

  Where else in the world would you find churches almost the size of cathedrals in villages with populations, including idiots and rubes who rarely came in from the fields, that never exceeded 3,000 souls?

  THAT WAS TYPICAL OF CHEVALIER’S style. Sam had come upon this passage the previous night, while flipping through his annotated, dog-eared copy of Letters from a Chevalier in Good, Plain Joual, which had first been published by Top Flight Editions before being reprinted by the prestigious BQ. It was classic Chevalier — vigorously apostrophizing, facetiously pamphleteering — even from beyond the grave he did his best to thumb his nose at authority, whether political or ecclesiastic.

  The man who had styled himself Chevalier Branlequeue was born on the historic Chemin du Roy, the King’s Road, a few steps from the river that runs through Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, and within sight of the marvellous neo-Gothic cathedral with its twin hundred-and-ten-foot steeples imitating those on Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. Branlequeue was still in his room in the palliative-care ward of Notre-Dame Hospital, barely a few minutes dead — brought down by lungs as thoroughly coated in tar, he said, as a provincial road at election time, as well as by a few other failed organs — when sundry representatives of Quebec’s provincial government began talking through their hats about a state funeral.

  They hadn’t reckoned, however, on the old codger’s last will and testament, which gave instructions for his funeral arrangements: his body was to be dropped through a hole in the ice with the Patriot flag as a shroud, while an academic lecture was being delivered from an ice-fishing hut from his native village, which was famous for its small fish. Chevalier wanted his remains to be wrapped in the national emblem, transported to their final resting place on a gun carriage, and delivered to the shrimp and the sharks. In a typical passage, the testator added: For once they’ll have the whole bull to eat, instead of just the liver … By “they,” of course, he meant tomcod, or frostfish, which constitute the basis of the local economy in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade and are traditionally baited with a piece of cow’s liver.

  The lawyer had suggested incineration. Afterward, the ashes could be spread anywhere
, all over the Mouk-Mouk Islands, no problem. But Branlequeue had been adamant. His father was a lawyer and he himself was a Freudian guerrilla-fighter who expected to win. He had therefore prepared two wills: the official, specifying that the grisly remains be deposited in a quiet, out-of-the-way plot in the local cemetery; and the officious, apocryphal and drawn up in the hand of the principal player.

  That opened the door to La Grosse Éléonore and the vultures in three-piece suits. The Catholic-politico machinery was set in recuperation mode, beginning with the under-secretary in charge of protocol in the Quebec government who, walking the tightrope between the undeniable importance of the man’s work and the potential for controversy, slackened the already intentionally ambiguous formula for “state funerals but not really,” which was then picked up by the literary editor and obituary columnist for the Trois-Rivières Nouvelliste — a man better known, as it happened, for his odes to the dead than for his literary criticism.

  Good old human nature took over from there. From his observation point in the choir loft, had Samuel not seen, just a second before, the premier of what was still the province of Quebec advancing up the long centre aisle under the priceless pre-Conquest pascal chandelier and the famous sculpture in oak representing the mother-in-law of Christ, alone, with no first lady and without a bodyguard? And a few minutes earlier, had he not recognized the Minister of Culture, under his thick, carrot-coloured perm, dark as dye could make it, his face tinted a deep bronze with the aid of an extract of Guadeloupe sulphur, granting an interview to a television crew on the steps of the church?

  Yes, he had.

  In other words, without making too much of a fuss about it, the politicos had embraced the compromise so typical of them: the quasi state funeral. Cosily wrapped up in his own thoughts, Sam watched the ceremony roll beneath him like water under a bridge. He had made the trip from Montreal alone. In his grey Corolla or his new Protegé or his red Colt. The whole inner circle was there, assembled under his feet. He could take them all in without moving his head, contain them in a single thought. The body of the deceased was laid on a bier at the precise spot at which, subject to the same tidal forces, the great River of Literature and the remorseless Storm Surge of Politics met and joined before flowing into the eternal Sea of History. Poets and politicians, senior civil servants and novelists, critics, pillars of the law, protesters and theatre directors, university presidents, rockers, technocrats, pollsters, swashbuckling intellectuals, men who worked the fields and men who worked crowds: from ivory hunter to Ivory Tower. The nation’s great mythmakers were gathered under Nihilo’s astonished gaze.