And the Birds Rained Down

by Jocelyne Saucier

  He gets up to feed the stove again and the feeling of his body being cut to the quick by the cold finally drives him to Marie-Desneige’s bed.

  ‘You see. That wasn’t so hard,’ she says, opening up her bed to him, and he stretches out at her side, the frost of their breath meeting in a little white cloud that gets lost in the night.

  Chummy comes to join them.

  Their first night in the nest of pelts.

  YOUNG GIRLS WITH LONG HAIR

  Spring took a long time coming. The ice on the lake didn’t break up until mid-May, and it wasn’t until the beginning of June that you could really feel comfortable. There were still patches of snow in the forest. The north wind snatched shivers from you even in the sun.

  In mid-June, the ground seemed ready to receive the first marijuana plants. The seedlings had been cluttering up the hotel’s kitchen for a whole month already. They had to be planted before they started to wilt. The plantation was on the side of a hill, near Tom’s camp. The operation was not very complicated but it required a few days’ work, which meant that Marie-Desneige and Ange-Aimée were alone at the camp while the men tended to their plantation.

  Ange-Aimée had long ago figured out what was going on. The lack of concern for money, the fat joints that Steve and Bruno passed back and forth at the hotel, the bags of fertilizer piled up in the kitchen: it was more than enough evidence for a woman of the world.

  As for Marie-Desneige, she didn’t understand it. They explained it to her over and over, but nothing stuck. It was beyond her comprehension. Cigarettes that you smoke to escape reality, to travel in your head, as they said, without suitcases or landmarks? She couldn’t understand why sane people would want to dabble in madness.

  So the two women had a few days, which they spent in long walks. Everything was in bloom. Summer was eager to make its appearance, and the two women followed the trails that took them to a cascading stream, and further down, a spawning bed for pike, and further still, a patch of tiny violets, northern woodland violets, Ange-Aimée said, remembering her other life. They’re edible. You can make jam with them, and so the two women crouched down in the undergrowth.

  They visited Tom’s camp, a dump that defied words, and passed Ted’s camp a number of times before convincing themselves they could take a peek. The winter’s conversations had made it a mythical, almost sacred, place – at the very least, forbidden. No one had been inside it since the previous summer, and so it was with a great deal of caution, marked with curiosity and respect, that they entered Ted’s cabin.

  Ange-Aimée, with her photographer’s eye, quickly spotted the canvasses, intrigued. There was nothing naïve or clumsy in them, as she had imagined. There was a thick sfumato shot through with black lines, behind which you could detect the presence of a true artist. Under the smoky grey, stains of colour that came together in an arborescence encircled with an indigo-blue line. The three canvasses repeated the same composition. The one on the easel was more fraught with emotion. The canvas was lit in its centre with a depth that the others did not have.

  ‘They’re dead, all of them, and there are lots of people in the cave,’ Marie-Desneige said.

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘There are six of them, maybe more, the pink spot inside the orangey splotch. It could be someone smaller, a child perhaps, a very young child, probably a baby, and they’re all dead. Look at how the blue around them is hard and cold. Maybe the orangey splotch is pregnant actually, the mother hasn’t given birth yet. The pink spot is a child waiting to be born or a very young baby in the arms of its mother, and there is nothing moving in the cave.’

  A cellar, not a cave, the root cellar where Ted’s father, mother and five brothers and sisters had died. The only point she had wrong was the cave. As for the rest, it was astonishing. Marie-Desneige had decoded the painting with such insight and lucidity that Ange-Aimée could also see the child in the orangey splotch, the mother’s protective stance, and, on the side, in the yellow smudge, the father, also a protector, and on the father’s lap, another child, in coral. He died crying, Marie-Desneige said.

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘I spent over sixty years deciphering everything that was said and not said around me. The gestures, the looks, everything they missed and that they thought went over my head, I understood; I stored it all up and at night, in my bed, I would play back the movie of my day, analyzing every scene, dissecting the slightest word, the smallest gesture. I looked back at everything. Survival in the asylum means that you always have to be on the lookout. It sharpens the senses.’

  The photographer remembered what Bruno had said about his aunt. She sees things others don’t.

  ‘What else do you see?’

  ‘That right now you want to take me to the other cabin. Your pores are dilated, you’re warm, you’re excited by the idea of the canvasses that are waiting in the other cabin.’

  ‘There are hundreds of them.’

  ‘Well, my poor dear, you’ll have to wait because my bones are tired. Maybe tomorrow, if it’s a nice day for a walk.’

  Ange-Aimée had turned back into the photographer. All those canvasses piled up in their mystery, right there, close by, containing the story of a life, the story of a boy walking through smoking rubble, a man imprisoned by his ordeal – the story that had escaped her during her research into the Great Fires was encoded in stains of colour that only Marie-Desneige had the key to.

  But Marie-Desneige, at that moment, was very old. Pale, almost anemic, she was resting on Ted’s chair, her back breaking with fatigue. The walk, on top of interpreting the paintings, had exhausted her. It was too much to ask, something that Ange-Aimée keenly regretted. Tomorrow, she decided, no walk. I’ll come get the paintings and I’ll bring them to her. Just a few, seven or eight, no more.

  She was disappointed by how little commotion the news caused. The men had finished work at the plantation and were promising themselves a spot of fishing the next day as a reward for their labours. The trout from the lake’s cool waters had more appeal than a riddle scribbled deep inside a painting. If Ted had wanted them to understand something, he would have done better than that, was Tom’s only reaction. Bruno and Steve had smoked more than their fill; they were sluggish, buried under wide smiles, and the news only swallowed them up further. Nobody was surprised that a boy believed to be blind could eighty years later paint the scene that Marie-Desneige had shed light on. Only Charlie showed any surprise, but this was for Marie-Desneige, a long admiring look that no one missed.

  So the next day was spent fishing. The trout were in a deep bay behind a point across the water from Ted’s camp. It would take only twenty minutes by canoe to get there. The canoe was an old wooden craft. It could hold only four people at a time, so it took two trips to carry everyone to the other shore. The dogs followed swimming.

  It was an enchanted spot. Hidden behind a narrow strip of land, the bay was home to a play of shadow and light on the lake’s waters. On the shore there were a few rocky escarpments, interspersed with blond, sandy breaks, tiny beaches bathed in sunlight, and behind lush vegetation, a cedar forest with a smell of camphor that kept mosquitoes at bay. Therein lay the whole advantage of the spot.

  They had a summer camp, a cabin in every way similar to the ones that served as their dwellings on the other shore. Furnished much more summarily, it had only a small, rudimentary stove, three bed frames piled with furs, a table, three chairs and, leaning against the wall, a counter and a few kitchen items. It was astonishing to think that three old men, almost a century old apiece and living in the middle of the forest, had felt the need for a place twenty minutes from their hideaway where they could get away during the sunny days of summer. Like city folk with their cottages, the photographer thought.

  Ted was bound up in this place. He had been a silent companion but a devout fisherman, and the whole day, each time a trout nibbled, Ted came back to mind.

  They talked a lot about Ted, how
he cast his line, never a wasted movement, always in a patch of shade, and the beginnings of a smile when he got a bite, but never a word, not even when it was a nice catch; Ted’s victories were private. Like the rest of it, he let nothing out, no shift in mood, no impatience; he remained silent on anything related to himself. And finally they talked, to the photographer’s great satisfaction, about the paintings he had left behind that might contain parts of the answer to the mystery of Ted, but they were sceptical. No one had the answer, not even Ted, so why would he have gone to the trouble of explaining in paintings what wouldn’t be understood?

  Charlie disagreed. ‘Ted probably had a life much fuller that anyone could have imagined. Of the three of us,’ he said, ‘he was the one who had the most to say, maybe too much, too much to be expressed in words. A man who spends the last twenty years of his life tearing out his hair to put meaning in stains of colour has a great deal to say.’

  Charlie’s words had a persuasive effect, and the next day, and those following, for the entire summer in fact, they tried to understand the mystery of Ted.

  The paintings were brought to Marie-Desneige, five per day, no more, Charlie made sure of it, and carried back to their cabin, labelled and placed in chronological order. They told the story of the Great Matheson Fire, the photographer realized fairly quickly, as Ted had experienced it during his six days of wandering.

  In total, three hundred and seventy-seven paintings that, for the most part, repeated the same motif, flashes of bright colour under a veil of smoke, but they found some in the lot that were luminous in the foreground. For example, paintings illustrating the initial moments after the fire. The photographer recognized them without Marie-Desneige having to decipher them, because of the golden light that survivors had talked to her about and that, on the canvas, consumed all the space, the charred tree trunks forming only a thin serrated line in the background. But it took Marie-Desneige’s eye to detect the presence of bodies in the hazy black at the bottom of the painting.

  Throughout the summer, the photographer put the pieces together, because Ted had not painted as one would write a novel, taking care to tell a story. He would be interested in a scene, and paint one or more versions of it, store them in the cabin and then launch into another scene, two days or five days later; the chronological order of his memories mattered very little to him. He painted to be free of them, to magnify them or to leave them to an improbable posterity. The thick layer of paint that covered the canvasses suggested that he had spent a lot of time on them.

  Ted was not blind the whole time he wandered. The photographer doubted whether he had ever been, even partially. There were canvasses that illustrated episodes where the young Boychuck had been made out to be completely blind. The scene of the survivors in the pond, for instance – a completely surreal scene. Three men plunged waist-high in the muddy waters of a pond, a moose bathing in the same water, and a bird perched on the right shoulder of the youngest man. The photographer had a hard time recognizing the old man who had told her the story, the young man with the bird perched on his shoulder, but all the details were there, superimposed in thick flows of colour. It was impossible to escape this apocalyptic vision. He staggered through the rubble, the young old man had told her, as if he were walking in footsteps that were too big for him, as if he were walking in the footsteps of God.

  Certain canvasses revealed episodes completely unfamiliar to her. No survivor had ever told her about the two young girls who had drifted down the Black River on a raft. Their hair, magnificently blond and luminous, covered their entire bodies. They were lying face down on the raft, and you could see only a trail of gold in what Marie-Desneige recognized as the black waters of a river. But she had been unable to interpret the trail of light in the black expanse. They needed other paintings that repeated the same motif from a different angle, and then still others where the young girls were standing or kneeling on the raft, for her to be able to make out human forms under the mass of hair. The same young girls appeared again in another series; Marie-Desneige recognized them immediately as they waved their arms above their head. They cried and they pleaded — they had spotted someone on the opposite shore who could help them, she said.

  They appeared again a number of times over the summer. Charlie and Tom, who had been keeping their distance, started to take an interest in the young girls’ story. Because it was just that, a story, which began when we saw them in the distance on the river, and then closer up, paddling with their hands, and then they were seen capsizing, or at least that’s what Marie-Desneige presumed. This series was confused and hard to read, and the further they got into it, the less they understood. The paintings were nothing more than drips and splashes of vibrant colour. Ted had taken up spatula and drip painting.

  The day came when Marie-Desneige, managing to read a particularly muddled painting, announced that it was a portrait of young girls. She showed them the lines to follow in the thick paste outlining the contour of the faces, the mouths, the cheeks, and where a flash of pink light bled through, the eyes and, what made the characters recognizable in the midst of it all, the golden filaments that intertwined them, their hair.

  ‘The Polson twins!’ Tom exclaimed, astonished at having recognized someone in all this chaos.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Polson twins were beauties, and their hair! Pure splendour! But Ted got it wrong. Their hair wasn’t that long; it wasn’t down to their ankles.’

  Tom didn’t know much about the two beauties. Born in Matheson to a Scottish father and a Latvian mother, they had become a town attraction. People came from as far away as Hearst to see them. Their beauty only grew, and in adolescence, the parents resolved to hide them from the eyes of the world. Too beautiful for such a small village. Tom didn’t know anything about their odyssey on the Black River. He vaguely recalled that one of them married a man from Cochrane and the other set off on the road with a musician.

  One thing was certain. They had made a big impression on the young Boychuck. There were thirty-two paintings devoted to them. Was Ted in love with one of them? Or both? It was a good question.

  The day after the discovery of the portrait of the Polson twins, Charlie took Marie-Desneige to rest at the summer camp. It was the only way to put some distance between her and the paintings. The exercise was exhausting her.

  The photographer took advantage of this day of rest to continue sorting and labelling the paintings. The most difficult part was giving each one a title. In the case of the series about the Polson twins, the titles were ready-made: Young Girls With Long Hair 1, 2, 3, up to 32. But certain paintings remained untitled and waited along a wall of the cabin until the photographer had the right inspiration. There was Child in the Stream – that was what she called it in her mind, but she could not resign herself to giving it such a banal name. The drama that this child had lived through deserved more thought. There was also the entire series about the carnage in Nushka, apocalyptic images that could not find a voice. She had, however, isolated two paintings from the series, both Crying Cow. The title chose itself. The cow was literally in tears. In Crying Cow 1, the tears fell one by one like drops of rain on the devastated landscape, while they came in torrents in Crying Cow 2. She didn’t understand why Ted indulged in such fantasy.

  Marie-Desneige and Charlie returned at the end of the day, relaxed and smiling. The break had done them good.

  They got back to reading paintings, but this time they were careful to give Marie-Desneige breaks. Deciphering the paintings was more demanding than it seemed, and after four or five days of work, Marie-Desneige would become flat and slow, with almost no visual acuity, One day older, she’d say with a weary smile, and Charlie would bring her to the summer camp.

  In the North, summers are short and intense. A dry heat, with no breeze, still, that traps the air and leaves no other choice but to dive into the lake. And that’s probably what Marie-Desneige and Charlie were doing. They came back from their breaks smiling mor
e than ever, their hair dripping wet. Marie-Desneige as a prow head at the bow of the canoe, barely recognizable with her hair plastered to her head, and Charlie, in the back, paddling with a princely motion.

  They were well into the summer when they came to the painting that would lend a whole other meaning to the photographer’s quest. The painting was striking in its realism, completely different from the rest of Ted’s oeuvre, a portrait that the photographer immediately identified. The woman painted in light tones on a purplish background had a gaze you could not take your eyes off. Enveloping, soft, almost caressing. This woman’s presence was entirely in her eyes, either blue or green, it was hard to tell their colour, but the light that radiated from them left no doubt in the photographer’s mind. The woman was younger by twenty or thirty years, she had less pronounced wrinkles, hair not yet completely grey, but the same pink light in the corner of her eyes. There was no doubt: it was the little old lady from High Park, the little old bird lady. One hundred and two years old, the photographer still wondered, was it possible?

  On the painting, the sparkle of light was not mocking but loving.

  ‘She’s in love,’ Marie-Desneige announced.

  ‘In love?’

  ‘With the person looking at her.’

  They are at the summer camp, lying on a bed of furs, still dripping with water. They have just been swimming, and Marie-Desneige is exhausted from fighting off a panic attack. It came on without warning. They were swimming hand in hand, and Charlie felt Marie-Desneige’s fingers tense slightly in his hand. They were up to their shoulders in the water when it happened.

  Charlie immediately knew what was happening. She had a hard, concentrated look in her eyes.

  He took her in his arms and brought her back to shore. She did not protest, did not move or say a word. She let herself be carried along, and once they reached the summer camp, when he wanted to lay her down on the furs, she stayed in his arms. She didn’t want to let go of him. He held her close.