And the Birds Rained Down

by Jocelyne Saucier

  Copyright

  Dedication

  i

  The Photographer

  ii

  Bruno

  iii

  Steve

  iv

  The Great Fires

  v

  The Community by the Lake

  vi

  Charlie's Third Life

  vii

  Young Girls with Long Hair

  viii

  The Collection of Impossible Loves

  ix

  A Wolf in the Night

  x

  Two Graves

  xi

  And the Birds Rained Down

  xii

  xiii

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Translator

  Colophon

  English translation copyright © Rhonda Mullins, 2012

  original text copyright © Jocelyne Saucier, 2011

  First English edition. Originally published in French in 2011 as Il pleuvait des oiseaux by Les Éditions XYZ inc.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities. Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also appreciates the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Saucier, Jocelyne, 1948-

  And the birds rained down / written by Jocelyne Saucier ; translated by Rhonda Mullins.

  Translation of: Il pleuvait des oiseaux.

  Issued also in a printed format.

  ISBN 978-1-77056-333-9

  I. Mullins, Rhonda, 1966- II. Title.

  PS8587.A38633I413 2012 C843'.54 C2012-905221-3

  This title is available as a print edition: ISBN 978 1 55245 268 4.

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  for Marie-Ange Saucier

  In which people go missing, a death pact adds spice to life, and the lure of the forest and of love makes life worth living. The story seems far-fetched, but there are witnesses, so its truth cannot be doubted. To doubt it would be to deprive us of an improbable other world that offers refuge to special beings.

  This is a story of three old men who chose to disappear into the forest. It’s the story of three souls in love with freedom.

  ‘Freedom is being able to choose your life.’

  ‘And your death.’

  That’s what Tom and Charlie would tell their visitor. Between them they have lived almost two centuries. Tom is eighty-six years old and Charlie is three years more. They believe they have years left in them yet.

  The third man can no longer speak. He has just died. Dead and buried, Charlie would tell the visitor, who would refuse to believe him, so long had been the road to reach Boychuck, Ted or Ed or Edward – the variations in the man’s first name and the tenuousness of his destiny will haunt the entire tale.

  The visitor is a photographer who is as yet unnamed.

  And love? Well, we’ll have to wait for love.

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER

  I had already driven many kilometres of road under threatening skies, wondering whether I would find a clearing in the forest before nightfall, or at least before the storm hit. I had travelled all afternoon along spongy roads that led to labyrinths of quad trails and skidding roads, and then nothing more but clay ponds, beds of peat moss and walls of spruce, black fortresses growing ever thicker. The forest was going to close in around me without me laying my hands on Ted or Ed or Edward Boychuck, whose first name changed but whose last name remained the same, a sign that there was some truth in what I had heard about him, one of the last survivors of the Great Fires. I had set out with directions that seemed sufficient. At the end of the road that runs along the river, turn right and keep going for about fifteen kilometres to Perfection Lake, which is easy to spot with its jade green waters – glacier water from the Quaternary Period – and shaped like a plate, perfectly round, that’s where it gets its name, and after looking out over the jade plate, take a left at the rusted-out mine headframe, keep going straight about ten kilometres, be sure not to take any of the crossroads or you’ll end up on the old logging roads, and then, you can’t miss it, there is only the one road leading nowhere. If you look to the right, you’ll see a stream that cascades into volcanic rock – that’s where Boychuck has his cabin, but I might as well tell you, he doesn’t like visitors.

  The river, the jade lake, the old headframe. I had followed all the directions, but there was no cascading stream or cabin in sight, and I had come to the end of the road. Farther along there was a fallow field, barely in good enough shape for a quad and not something my pickup would want to cross. I was wondering whether I should backtrack or settle in for the night in the back of the truck when I saw smoke appear at the base of a hill and form a thin ribbon swaying gently above the trees. It was an invitation.

  Charlie’s eyes, once they spotted me in the clearing surrounding his collection of cabins, gave off a warning. You don’t set foot on his property without an invitation.

  His dog had announced me well before my arrival, and Charlie was waiting, standing in front of what must have been his living quarters, since that was where the smoke was rising from. He had an armful of small logs, a sign that he was about to make his supper. He held the load against his chest throughout our exchange, which kept us outside a door he clearly had no intention of opening to me. It was a screen door. The other door, the main one, was open inward to let the heat of the blaze escape. I couldn’t make out anything inside the cabin. It was dark and chaotic, but the smell it gave off was familiar. It was the smell of woodsmen who have lived alone, steeping, in the forest for years. Mostly it was the smell of unwashed bodies; I had never seen a shower or a bath in any of the living quarters of my old forest friends. It was the smell of burnt fat; they mainly ate fried meat, thick stews and game that required a good dose of grease. The smell of dust fossilized in layers on anything that lay still. And the stale smell of tobacco, their drug of choice. Anti-tobacco campaigns hadn’t yet reached these men. Some still chewed their square of nicotine and religiously snuffed their Copenhagen. It’s hard to understand how much tobacco meant to them.

  Charlie’s cigarette roamed from one end of his mouth to the other like a small tame animal, and when it finished burning, it rested at the corner. He still hadn’t said a word.

  At first I thought it was him, Ed Boychuck, or Ted or Edward, the man who had survived the Great Fires and who had fled from his life into the forest. He was spotted only occasionally at the hotel where I had spent the previous night. The hotel was preposterous, a huge construction in the middle of nowhere, with three storeys of what had probably been the height of elegance, now a relic of civilization lost in the woods. The man I took to be the owner but who was merely the manager – Call me Steve, he said after we exchanged a few words – told me that the hotel was built by an eccentric with cash to burn, a Lebanese man who had made a fortune in doctored liquor and had then set about losing it in megalomaniacal construction projects. He believed that the railway would make its way toward what promised to be a new Klondike, and he wanted to be the first to snatch up the business that was sure to follow. His final obsession, Steve said. The new Klondike was nothing but a big hoax, and no train appeared spewing its steam in fro
nt of the Lebanese man’s luxury hotel. He went to the States, where he expanded into a chain of hotels for truckers.

  I like places that have given up any pretence of stylishness, any affectation, and that cling to an idea waiting for time to prove them right: prosperity, the railroad, old friends … I’m not sure what they’re waiting for. The region has a number of these sorts of places that stand the test of time as they revel in their own dilapidated solitude.

  My host at the hotel had talked all evening about the hardships of the place, but I wasn’t fooled. He was proud to tell me stories of bears devoured by ticks and the hunger that waits outside your door, of the moaning and creaking carried on the wind at night, and the mosquitoes, don’t get me started on the mosquitoes, they all come out in June, mosquitoes, black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, it’s better not to wash – there’s nothing like a thick hide to protect you against the little beasts – and the cold of January, good god! The cold of January. There is no greater source of pride in the North, and my host wasn’t going to let the chance slip by to complain about it so that I could quietly admire his courage.

  ‘And Boychuck?’

  ‘Boychuck is an open wound.’

  This silent, motionless man on the doorstep couldn’t be the man I was looking for. Too calm, too sturdy, almost debonair in spite of his eyes searching mine for what they were hiding from him. Animal was the word that sprung to mind. He had the gaze of an animal. Nothing fierce or threatening. Charlie was not a wild animal. He was simply on the lookout, like an animal, always asking himself what lay behind a movement, a flash of light, an overly emphatic smile, or words that sounded too smooth. And my words, in spite of the conviction I put into them, had not yet persuaded him to open his door.

  You don’t just land on the doorstep of someone who has lived close to a century with an improvised spiel. You need tact and skill, but not too much. Old men know a thing or two about the art of conversation. It’s all they have left in their final years, and words that are too slick make them wary.

  I had started with a few words about the dog, a lovely animal, a mix of Newfoundland and Labrador, who had stopped barking but was keeping an eye on me. ‘Nice dog,’ I said, as much to praise the dog as its master. ‘Labrador?’ The only response I got was a nod of the head and a look that said he was waiting for the rest. I hadn’t come all this way to talk about his dog.

  ‘I’m a photographer,’ I told him straight away. I had to dispel any misunderstanding. I wasn’t selling anything, had no bad news to deliver, wasn’t a social worker or a nurse, and most certainly wasn’t from the government, the worst of the lot, as I had learned from all the elderly folks I had visited. You’re not from the government, I hope? If I took too long to explain my presence, the question was never long in coming. We don’t want some bureaucrat coming here telling us something’s not quite right about our lives or about our papers, that there are letters or numbers that don’t add up, that something in the files is suffering from inconsistency. And what about me? You don’t think I’m suffering? Vamoose, government, go on, scram!

  ‘I’m a photographer,’ I repeated. ‘I take pictures of people who survived the Great Fires.’

  Boychuck lost his whole family in the Great Fire of 1916, a tragedy he trailed behind him wherever he tried to make a life.

  The man I saw before me carried no such wound inside. He was smooth and compact, a monk in stone. He seemed impervious to everything, until I saw him lift his eyes to the sky, grow sombre at the threatening clouds, which were growing heavier, more laden – Charlie’s eyes, when they returned to me, held the lightning of the coming storm. An animal, I thought again. He responds only to nature.

  I explained what had brought me there, taking care to give him names: I had met so-and-so who told me about someone who knew someone else, I explained the trail I had followed, all the old acquaintances who, each in turn, served as safe conduct and led me here. ‘A very nice spot, I can see why you choose to live here, Mr. Boychuck, with this magnificent lake at your feet and all this beautiful nature surrounding you, but if you have a moment to spare, I’d like to sit down with you and talk about all this.’

  It was dishonest. I knew I wasn’t talking to Boychuck, but a bit of wiliness is sometimes necessary.

  Boychuck’s name affected him more than he would have cared to show. I saw his eyes falter, and then the sky darkened, the earth grew flatter, the storm raged with impatience, and Charlie’s voice was finally heard.

  ‘Boychuck is dead and buried.’

  He was not going to tell me anything more. I felt in his manner that the interview was over and that I should go back to wherever I had come from with the little I had just learned. He was about to turn his broad rustic back on me when the skies opened up. It was coming down as if from a showerhead. With a movement I barely felt, a gesture of natural authority, he opened the screen door and, his hand on my back, heavy and light at the same time, pushed me inside.

  ‘Get inside. You’re going to get wet.’

  The voice was no more amiable than the rest of him. He went straight to his stove, a miniature wood stove – I had never seen one so tiny – and stoked his fire without giving me a second thought. The fire was dying. He had to restack the kindling, blow on the blackened embers, add some bark, blow again, and when the flames leapt to life, he closed the stove door and vents and went to what, in the darkness, I took to be his kitchen counter. Judging from the number of potatoes he was peeling, I took it that I was invited to stay for supper.

  The rain on the roof was deafening. It was falling more heavily, and at times we could no longer hear each other, and then the wind chimed in, gusting, surging and howling, and the thunder and lightning came. We both knew I couldn’t go back to my pickup.

  ‘You’ll have to sleep here.’

  I impressed him more than once during the evening. About a fern, lichen or shrub I knew the name of, while he, who had intimate knowledge of them, couldn’t name them. He could describe a plant from the underbrush with the precision of a master botanist – its companions, its habits, how it collects the dew, protects itself against dryness and windburn – all without knowing its name. ‘It’s wild lily-of-the-valley,’ I told him, after he wondered whether the plant’s fruit was truly venomous. Partridge poison, that was his name for it, a lily of the underbrush. ‘The fruit is edible,’ I explained, ‘but in moderation. If you eat too much, it can give you the runs.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’

  I am not a botanist, a naturalist, or anything like that, but twenty years of wandering in the company of such folks gave me a certain familiarity with the forest. I had made it something of a speciality. I used to call myself a vegetative photographer, because of all the veins of leaves I stooped over to capture on film and the contemplative life I led. At some point I got tired of it. I wanted to return to humanity. I wanted faces, hands and eyes; I could no longer lie for hours in wait for a spider to trap its prey. Chance put me on the trail of the Great Fires, or their survivors, all very old folks of course because the first Great Fire was in 1911, and that’s where the conversation ground to a halt. Charlie refused to go on once the subject was broached.

  But the evening was pleasant nonetheless. He was delighted for the company, you could tell. His features relaxed, but you couldn’t hear it; he still had that grumbling, resonant voice that had made such an impression on me when I arrived.

  We talked about our lives, mine on the road, searching for a new face or a new encounter, and his in his cabin, watching time go by, with no worry other than living. Even that was a lot, according to him, and I had no trouble believing him, because there is plenty to do to avoid freezing or starving to death when you’re living alone deep in the woods. I emphasized the word alone, but he smelled the trap. He was a trapper, so he had an instinct for danger, and he wasn’t going to let himself be caught in such a poorly laid device.

  ‘I have Chummy,’ he said, indicating the dog with his eyes.


  The dog was sleeping fitfully near the door, each clap of thunder making his fur bristle head to tail until the flat calm returned, when he slept, his breath deep and regular, until the next crash.

  As soon as the dog heard Charlie speak his name, he got up and went to lie at his master’s feet.

  ‘Eh, Chummy, tell our guest how we make a good team, you and me.’

  Charlie’s hand meandered through the dog’s fur, stopping at the neck and at the base of the ears, where it detected clumps that it removed in small woolly tufts. It roamed, soft and vigorous, an expert at scratching and massaging, along the length of the dog’s body. Chummy grunted contentedly while his master continued his conversation with the visitor, every once in a while tossing a few words his way.

  ‘Isn’t that right, Chummy, aren’t we good together?’

  I was impressed by the thick, coarse hand, stiffened with age, that became pliant and supple in his dog’s fur, and even more so by the voice that, when it spoke to the dog, softened, becoming velvety and intimate. He explained in this tender bass voice that Chummy was afraid of storms. ‘It’s the thunder that scares him,’ he said. ‘You have to reassure him, so that’s why I keep him inside when there’s a storm.’ The cello voice trailed off somewhere, and he resumed that tone of the lord of the forest who won’t let himself be imposed upon.

  The supple hand and velvety intimacy of the voice came back a little later when he unrolled the bundles of fur to make my bed.

  The storm had not waned any. The roof dripped smack in the middle of the one-room cabin. Charlie knew the leak and had placed a pot on the floor. The tink of the water in the pot, the rain drumming on the windows, the crackling of the fire in the stove, and Chummy snoring comfortably under his master’s stroking: the cabin was filled with the sounds of a warm, comfortable life. I was delighted to have been invited to stay.