Everything happened too fast, everything always happened too fast, as if he’d been stupid to the point of not being able to foresee the death at the heart of the carnage, nor to anticipate the impact of the projectiles so he could heave himself at Latimer, or the force of the insults so he could help Pete Landry, so he could throw Latimer to the ground and breathe by his side in the mud. When he saw his little Françoise, my daughter, my love, heading into the woods barefoot, two or three miles from Boundary Pond, he almost hit a tree, and left his car in the ditch to run towards Frenchie, his daughter, his angel.
Wait for me! Wait for me, baby doll, but Frenchie started to run too, too fast, faster and faster, with her bare legs and feet, don’t, don’t touch me, Dad. And coming over a stone, she tripped like Zaza before her, like Sissy, what did it matter, like Sissy in the mud, her hair streaming down her back like an endless, luminous, wedding veil, so much beauty, my love, a long and vaporous pale silk dress catching the shimmer of the setting sun. Don’t!
When he knelt down beside her, he saw Latimer’s fear in the eyes of his daughter, then Sissy’s fear, don’t… while a thin thread of blood came into view on her right cheek. My girl, he murmured, stroking her brow, kissing her brow, but Frenchie drew away, pushed herself away from him, but Frenchie got up, why? cuts on her feet, and took off in the opposite direction, towards Meyer’s arms, her veil swirling behind her, towards the arms of her mother, her veil catching the dying light, endlessly.
Lamar remained there, on his knees on the moss, staring at the blood fallen from Frenchie’s cheek onto a white stone, a tear, a drop of red rain. Without thinking, he then headed back towards the cottage, where the men were gathered, where his daughter was lying on a couch. Hearing someone, Plamondon or Cusack, speak Meyer’s name, Bob Lamar saw red, as red as Latimer’s blood on the dark sand of Omaha Beach. He’d go right now to have the head of that bastard Meyer, because this war, this massacre, this carnage, all began with him. He leaped into his car and found Meyer at the West Forks crossroads, where he was waiting for Frenchie in the black night.
There too, everything happened too quickly. The kid got away and his nightmares caught up with him, Latimer, Landry, the dead bodies behind which Françoise was slowly walking, blood on her black cheek. The blood came from him. He was the cause. And so he did what he had to do. Night was falling when he hid his car and made his way towards Otter Trail, there where it had all begun, Zaza, the war, his friendship with Landry. At the end of the path, he knelt down for one last prayer: no one, not even me, will from now on hurt my only child.
In the silence of the forest Michaud heard only the sound of his breathing, hoarser at each step, and the beating of his heart pounding heavily from his breast to his skull. The light began to fail, and the trees all around were darkening visibly. He switched on his flashlight, whose beam jolted with every one of his steps, casting light only on the awkwardness of his progress, the clumsiness of his body, too heavy. Then he spotted Cusack’s light, shining on the still forest a hundred feet away, but illuminating only death, dead leaves, dead needles, rotten wood. With one last push Michaud increased his pace, bounding over obstacles with his light. When he caught up with Cusack he found him crouched at the foot of a tree, in contemplation of the silence and dead leaves.
The men had arrived too late. Before them swayed the legs of Bob Lamar, who was hanging from a grey maple whose leaves had reddened before their time.
AFTER LAMAR
After Bob Lamar’s death, some people said the nightmare was over, but a nightmare of such scope cannot end so quickly. The rumours surrounding it continued to make their way from one cottage to another, sowing pain and confusion in their path. You just had to prick up your ears to hear people whispering that it was madness that had acted that way, madness brought on by the war, and then hatred, hatred and anger, pride, a boundless vanity. You put all those feelings together and you could line up the seven deadly sins against a wall and fire on them full force to soothe your own rage, to forget your own sins. To this rumour was added another, which made its way through the woods and ended up at the lake. At the start of Otter Trail you could hear the cries of Zaza Mulligan, muffled by the heavy treetops, or turning themselves into a kind of pagan chant, a phantom melody recalling funeral prayers or supplications echoing down the viscid corridors of hell. Then to this voice there was added that of Sissy Morgan, leaping from the clearing to the path, setting the trees ablaze as it passed, triggering storms and violent winds in those parts of the forest where no one, for a long time, dared to venture.
The nightmare had carried off the dream, and Bondrée was no more than ruins. As soon as Bob Lamar’s body had been found in the woods, the mothers decided that was enough, the fathers stowed away the chairs, the barbecues, the awnings. Within a few days Bondrée was shut down for the winter, and perhaps forever.
Over at the Lamars’ there was a constant coming and going around the cottage, unfamiliar cars parking in the yard, friends or family members come to comfort Suzanne and Frenchie, though nothing could erase the marks made by Bob Lamar on the body of his daughter, though nothing, it seemed, could persuade Suzanne Lamar to remove the old negligee in which she wandered like a lost soul, dragging herself in her pink slippers down to the lake, asking herself how she came to be at this lake, then climbing up towards the garden to be greeted by the helplessness of a sister-in-law who dared not take her in her arms for fear that the simple stroke of a hand might turn Suzanne into a harpy who’d claw her cheeks.
Out of a sense of decency people tried not to pay attention to the doors opening and closing on bewildered whisperings and the cries of Frenchie reaching out for the arms of Mark Meyer, but the cottage was weighed down so heavily that you couldn’t ignore the fact that it was sinking into the earth, and that soon men muffled in thick scarves would come to set it ablaze, as others long before had put to the torch Peter Landry’s shack, so there would be no hint left of that heaviness, which yet would go on pressing down on what was there until all memory of that summer would be wiped away.
As for Stan Michaud, he handed in his inspector’s badge three days after having found Bob Lamar’s body. He then jumped into his car to head out to Portland and the Evergreen Cemetery, where there lay, side by side, in death as in life, the remains of Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan. Crouched down among the tombstones, he sought in the gathering dark the names carved into pink granite where a tree cast its shadow, then he murmured sorry, Elisabeth, sorry, Sissy, as Bob Lamar’s body swayed to and fro in the setting sun.
After having deposited two roses on the still fresh earth, one red for the redhead, one white for the blonde, he tried to think of what he could say to the young girls, since he had no more questions to ask them, no why, Zaza, no who, Sissy. Rest in peace, that was all, and he crossed himself. He was in total darkness when he turned his back on the gravestones and looked across to the glow hovering over the city.
Contrary to what he’d promised Laura, Jim Cusack, for his part, didn’t have the courage to quit his job, as Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan had against his will become his Esther Conrad, boomerangs whose targeting he wouldn’t be able to escape just by hiding himself as far away as possible from violence. Before slamming shut the police station’s door behind him, Michaud had nevertheless forced him to take a few days of vacation he didn’t know what to do with. Stretched out in his yard, he tried to lose himself in pictures that smelled of the sea and cut hay, images where Laura ran and made the bottom of her dress rise up, or dared him to follow her into the icy water, come on, you coward, but Bob Lamar’s rigid face kept coming back to him, and the shadow of old shoes grazing the bark of the tree from which the body was dangling. Those visions obsessed him, just like the smell of the urine-soaked shoes. He tried in vain to replace that persistent scene with Laura’s joy, Laura spinning her skirt, Laura biting into an ice cream cone with two scoops, one yellow and one orange, sun and fruit me
lting together in the light of day, but the ground always gave way with an avalanche from on high that buried Laura and her smile, leaving at the surface only a long lock of red hair that sank into the earth as he was trying to drag it out. Cusack woke from his nightmares every time, crying out his wife’s name: Laura! Laura! But no voice ever answered him.
I never gave Sissy Morgan’s watch to her parents. Either I was too timid, or I was afraid to face their pain, or I felt the object was mine, that it was Sissy Morgan’s gift passed on to the littoldolle who had survived her. I have it still, in a small box covered in green velvet, forest green, the deep green of Bondrée. When I open the cover, I feel as if I’m opening a music box out of which drift the airs of the summer of ’67, and on the top of which two figurines in brightly coloured clothes turn round and round. I wear the watch rarely, except when I want to live in the time of Bondrée and force the past to remember itself. Then there are dozens of figurines that appear in the midst of the plashing of fresh water, the whispering of the waves and the wind, the chirping of crickets.
I’ve never gone back to Bondrée. The following spring my parents sold the cottage, unable to imagine that the sound of the waves might one day cover over the anguished moans coming out of the forest. With the money from the sale they bought a tent trailer and a new car, with which, from one July to another, we navigated the roads of the Beauce, of Mauricie, or Abitibi, never stopping for more than a week in one place, never more than a week in a place where a remembrance of beauty might wound one or other of us. As the years passed, my new treasure chest doubled in size, filled with black pebbles and cormorant feathers, but never did it equal the magic of that of Bondrée. Once the chest was forgotten, I met an improved version of Mark Meyer, whom I left behind me along with the chest when we were back on the road, then I encountered one or two Zaza Mulligans, one or two Sissy Morgans, whom I saw from afar swinging their hips as I exhaled the smoke from my king-size Du Maurier.
I’ve never gone back to Bondrée, but I learned from Emma, whom I see two or three times a year, when the sun is shining and we want to lift our glasses to summer friendships, that all the cottages, including ours, have been abandoned, beginning with that of Gilles Ménard, who took it down with his bare hands before turning his back on Bondrée forever with his wife and child, although not before first imprinting within himself a picture of the forest from before the felling of the large trees and the drying up of the pure water. One of the last to leave was Pat Tanguay, fallen from his boat one August morning in 1972, whether struck down by old age or drawn in by the shimmering water. His hat floated peacefully in Ménard Bay, his small craft adrift, then his body washed up on the beach bordering the bay, there where his daughter-in-law, thirty years earlier, had sunk her feet into the mud on her way to visit Pete Landry. After the ambulance come to gather his remains had pulled away, Jean-Louis and Flora, his son and daughter-in-law, got into their car, Pat’s old hat on the back seat. The noise from their engine was the last to blend with the birdsong.
Today Bondrée must resemble one of those holiday ghost towns that you sometimes like to think embody the past and the lives of people who once stayed there, where you spread a few coloured garments on the beach, where you imagine some voices, Michael, Marnie, supper time, Sugar, Sugar Baby, come on, my love, where you long for the sweetness of summers that elude us, while picking up a broken toy buried in the warm sand.
Most of the cottages must still be standing, but the paint is peeling and the vegetation has moved onto the terraces, the porches, the verandas with their broken window panes. Here and there a shed has collapsed, a dock has been borne away by the waves, but a few perennials still survive in the overgrown gardens of Stella McBain and Hope Jamison, where the red is dominant, bright red, tanager red. In our yard, under the now gigantic pine, a rusted tin box is sticking out of the ground, wherein a few unidentifiable feathers lie atop the dust of some ancient snakeskins. An old transistor radio sits under the Mulligan porch, as well as a faded record album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Up Otter Trail, however, the last vestiges of Pete Landry’s shack have disappeared, and no one could tell that a trapper once lived there, and dreamed, while singing to himself sweet Maggie, Tanager of Bondrée. In a few decades the same fate will have befallen the cottages built in Landry’s Eden, the stone and wood will have gone back to the earth, and the trees will have moved in to obscure the road, a foreshadowing of those days when man will be gone from the surface of the globe. Nature will have asserted its rights, its proper place, waiting for other hunters to arrive, other families that will cut down trees and erect dwellings from new wood, opening onto the beauty of green shades, oblivious to the fact that Bondrée is a forest strewn with traps, a domain where the wavering of the light can easily plunge you into darkness.
I’ve never gone back to Bondrée, but I’ve kept intact a vivid memory of it that brings me near to a tenuous happiness each time a rustling of wings stirs up a scent of juniper, and a fox bolts, alive, at the edge of a path.
A NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve borrowed the words, “arg, argul, gargul,” which appear on page 103, from a friend I deeply mourn, Jacques Hardy, who wanted to put them into the mouth of one of the characters in a novel that he sadly never finished. Thank you, my good friend.
As always, I must thank Pierre, my companion, for being there, for his patience and precious help, as well as Jacques Fortin, the mainstay of the publishing house Québec Amérique, for, as ever, his staunch support. I thank as well everyone at Québec Amérique who worked to produce this novel, especially Marie-Noëlle Gagnon, Mylaine Lemire, Nathalie Caron, and Isabelle Longpré, who initiated the publishing process. Thank you to Yvette Gagnon for her linguistic counsel. Thank you to Donald Winkler for his excellent work in translating this novel. Many thanks, also, to the team of No Exit Press, in the UK – Geoff Mulligan, Clare Quinlivan, Frances Teehan, Claire Watts, Ion Mills, Madeleine Allen, Steven Mair, Jennifer Knight and Nick Rennison – and to the team of Bibiloasis, in Canada – Dan Wells, Natalie Hamilton, Stephen Hennigan and all the others – for their impressive work and for having followed me in the paths of Boundary.
Thank you, finally, to all those I have forgotten, to all those who were there by my side during the three years I spent in Bondrée, among whom I must include my mother, and also my father, who passed away long ago, much too long ago, and made it possible for me to know that place which marked my childhood, and, by that token, was bound to become a setting for my fiction.
Copyright
This edition published in 2017 by No Exit Press,
an imprint of Oldcastle Books Ltd, P O Box 394
Harpenden, AL5 1X
noexit.co.uk
© Andree A. Michaud 2016
The right of Andrée A. Michaud to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored
in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without the written permission of the publishers.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses,
companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN
978-1-84344-998-0-4 (hardcover)
978-1-8
43441997-3 (Trade Paperback)
978-1-8434730-6 (epub)
978-1-84344731-3 (kindle)
978-1-8434732-0 (pdf)
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