And the Birds Rained Down

by Jocelyne Saucier

  She went back outside and set about searching for what was waiting for her and what she hoped she would not find. The daylight tinged with dusky grey gave less depth but more contrast to the trees and their foliage, the clumps of grass and the slightest rocky protuberance in the ground. The photographer could see very well in it. The lines of shadow gave things more presence, nature laid out before her with more substance; everything was better defined in the sleepy light of the end of the day.

  The graves awaited her behind the camp. Two rectangles of earth at the foot of a tall larch, very little space between them and, naturally, no cross, no inscription, nothing to indicate that these were resting places. Two graves side by side: it could only be Marie-Desneige and Charlie. Tom had buried their bodies to protect them from animals, as he had done for Ted, and next spring, nothing would show. Vegetation would take over the rectangles of earth. One dies in the forest as one lives: discreetly, carefully, trying to make no more noise than a leaf in a tree. The photographer could have waxed philosophical – death normally lends itself to that sort of thing – just as she could have asked herself where Tom was, but the combined exhaustion, rage and pain caused her to collapse between the two mounds of earth, and she remained that way for a long time.

  She had not fainted. A woman of her build is not so easily incapacitated. Her legs had suddenly refused to carry her, and she found herself nose to the ground between the two graves – strangely, she felt comforted being so close to her friend. Here lies a little old lady, the mound of earth said. Here lie her hopes and dreams, her life contained in just one year. The rest is of no importance, she did not take it with her, but at her side is her companion, her lover. He loved her like one would love a bird, a rare bird that had come from a long way to nest in the hollow of his hand.

  Charlie would continue to watch over Marie-Desneige, the photographer thought.

  The anger had dissipated. There was room for nothing but the comfort of knowing they were together. She refused to torture herself with the moments that had accompanied their decision, the words they had exchanged, the last look before the pinch of strychnine. What followed – their death, their burial – she pushed it away with every ounce of strength in her mind. She wanted only to think of their final companionship, their two bodies resting side by side under the layer of earth that protected them and the dusk light that bathed their graves.

  But her thoughts turned to Tom. Where had he gone to die? The dead don’t bury themselves. He had to have found a place where his body would be protected from animals.

  The lake, she told herself, remembering the missing canoe. The lake was the only place he could die in decency.

  This thought brought her to her feet and forced her to go check whether the canoe was somewhere else along the shore.

  The light was laden with a nighttime grey that was thickening around the outline of the trees and revealed only shapes, furtive movements of silhouettes, shadows amid the shadows. A hare brushed up against her as it ran by.

  She walked along the shore up to the big piece of granite and retraced her steps, scanning the black waters of the lake in case she could spot the canoe drifting.

  She was sad, sadder thinking of Tom than of Marie-Desneige and Charlie. They had died together, whereas Tom was alone throughout. Had the thought of someone kept him company in his final moments? Tom’s life, in spite of all the stories he told, remained a mystery.

  She stayed in front of the lake and kept him company until night fell completely and she could see nothing more. She returned to the camp blindly, feeling her way through the darkness and the heaviness of her thoughts.

  The night was cold. Her whole body shivered.

  She stretched out on the bed, pulled Marie-Desneige’s parka over her, hoping to find some warmth and comfort in what was left of her friend. But sleep came only in waves. Too many images jumbled together, too many emotions. She dreamed, half awake, of dogs tearing each other to pieces and wolves howling at the moon. I forgot about the dogs, she thought sluggishly. Where did they bury the dogs? And she plunged into a wave that carried her off completely.

  They are in front of the graves.

  Tom is slightly drunk. He has kept his equilibrium, one foot firmly planted and the other ready to take flight, intoxication he consciously delights in the whole time it takes to dig the graves, and now he has just one desire, a glass, and another glass. He wants to die drunk.

  It’s his final wish.

  Charlie accepts, he understands. His old friend wants to go back home. He wants to die where he lived. Marie-Desneige doesn’t understand, but she knows that you have to respect a man’s dying wishes.

  And while Tom sinks further and further into his own private world, Marie-Desneige and Charlie prepare what will be his resting place. They line the bottom of the grave with thick bear skin. It will make for a comfortable bed, Marie-Desneige thinks. It won’t make a difference to him, Charlie thinks. He won’t have time to feel anything.

  Tom is seated, his legs hanging over the grave, his dog beside him. One eye on the bear skin and the other roaming. He is waiting for the moment when he will see his life flash before his eyes. What will he see first? A woman? What woman would be willing to die with him? In every dream where he saw himself dead, there was a woman stretched out alongside him, white and flowery, slowly disappearing into his side.

  He presses his dog against him and slides into the grave.

  He is not drunk. Well, not as drunk as he had hoped to be. He is completely aware of what is happening. He sees Charlie and Marie-Desneige in a halo of light above him. They are tall, looming and alive. They are immense, and they have promised to stay with him until the end.

  ‘This is where I’m going to spend the winter, Charlie my boy. It’s not all that big, but it’ll do.’

  He is standing in the grave, glass in hand, empty bottle in the other. All three of them know what the empty bottle means. Drink, stretched out on the bearskin, is the only one who doesn’t know.

  Tom downs his last glass and goes to lie down next to his dog.

  Charlie follows each of his friend’s gestures. He is worried. He wants it to go well, the strychnine to do its work properly, that there be no blood or vomiting.

  ‘Tom,’ he tells him, with a voice that is too slow, too intent, a voice not his own, ‘Tom, don’t forget, just a pinch, twice that for Drink, otherwise…’

  ‘Otherwise it won’t be pretty to watch, eh? Don’t worry, I’ve always known how to conduct myself, particularly when there are women around.’

  With that, he takes the box out of his pocket and approaches his dog. With an almost tender gesture, he opens the dog’s mouth and drops in a little white rain. Before administering his own fatal dose, he wants to take a final bow, a tip of the hat.

  ‘Go on, a long life to the both of you, and my best wishes to the world.’

  And he swallows his pinch.

  The effect is not long in coming. Spasmodic movements, convulsions, his arms and legs stiffen, they get intertwined with the dog’s legs which scratch him, strike him, lacerate him – the clash of bodies is a horrible thing to see. Charlie had warned him, you’re going to get torn apart, but Tom wouldn’t bend. ‘I want to be with Drink,’ and Charlie let him have his way. You couldn’t oppose Tom’s will. But in that moment, he wants to get down into the grave, remove Drink and let his friend die in peace. It’s already too late. The foam has started to form. The end is coming, and Charlie holds Marie-Desneige close to him. Marie-Desneige, who has not said a word, who watches, hypnotized, as death does her work.

  The movements that come afterward are heavy and slow. They bury the bodies, Charlie with a shovel and Marie-Desneige with small fistfuls that she lets trickle into the grave. They know that next it will be Darling’s turn, Steve’s dog, and then Kino, Ted’s dog. This is what they had decided the night before. Tom in one grave with Drink and the two other dogs in another. Everything had been said the night before. The goodbyes,
words to seal a life, the final handshake, all that had happened the night before at the summer camp. ‘I don’t want to see another winter,’ Tom had said. ‘I’ve lived long enough. This is where it ends for me.’

  The dogs’ death and burial go as planned. Now they move on to the next step of what awaits them, which is highly uncertain.

  They go to the camp and gather what they need. Pots, furs, an axe, a fishing rod, tins. It’s Marie-Desneige who thinks to leave a can of peaches on the shelves. ‘For Ange-Aimée,’ she says. ‘Should we leave her a message?’

  ‘Better not,’ says Charlie.

  They pile their effects in the canoe. Marie-Desneige takes her place in the front, her cat curled up against her. Chummy has found a place to stretch out amidst the jumble in the middle of the canoe. Charlie is in the back. The canoe is weighed down, but he manages in a few pushes of the paddle to extricate the keel from the hold of the sandy bottom, and they are off.

  On the shore, a distant presence watches them set off. Death knows she can bide her time. Those two can hope all they like.

  AND THE BIRDS RAINED DOWN

  In spite of it all, she managed to find a home for the exhibition. Just when she thought she had exhausted all hope, having gone to the last gallery on her list, a young woman who saw the gallery owner turn her down offered her a space that was not a gallery or even an artists’ centre, nothing at all quite yet, said the young woman, but a valiant beginning.

  The young woman was herself an artist, a glass blower named Clara Wilson, and the place looked like anything but an art gallery. It had been a cooperage for what had been the British Empire’s largest distillery. The place was heavy with industrial architecture from another century but was full of possibility, explained Clara, pointing to the rods that would be installed on the ceiling, the steel beams that would be exposed, and the deeply recessed windows in the brick walls, absolutely untouchable, she insisted, for their Victorian beauty. Work would be limited to the essential. Clara was part of a group of cultural activists, and they had limited resources. But everything would be ready in the spring, May at the latest, which suited the photographer, who had a great deal to do in the meantime.

  She had not returned to the hideaway. What she had seen had convinced her. Not to say that at times she didn’t want to erase the memory of the graves and imagine her friends somewhere, deep in the forest, in a new cabin making another life. But then an image would come to her and wipe out all hope that they were alive: the image of Charlie’s shelves with the glaring absence of the tinplate box. And more merciless than the absence of the box of strychnine was the absence of the cardboard box.

  That box was precious. It contained Charlie’s identification papers, the real ones and the fake ones, and cash, lots of cash. Charlie had shown her the contents just before she left for Toronto. For Marie-Desneige, he had told her, if ever she is no longer happy in the forest. The photographer had been impressed by the number of bills it contained. Denominations of one hundred dollars held in large elastics. Several rolls, thousands of dollars, the photographer guessed. She couldn’t help but whistle in surprise. My government cheques, Charlie had explained. I never managed to spend it all.

  For Marie-Desneige, he stressed again.

  And she had promised. She would find somewhere for her. She would take care of her, if one day Marie-Desneige no longer wanted to live at the hideaway.

  She understood from the great relief in Charlie’s eyes that he was prepared to sacrifice anything for Marie-Desneige’s happiness. Their attentiveness to one another, that tenderness in their eyes, all of what she had taken as a pleasant little amorous friendship, one last affair of the heart, was a much deeper feeling. They loved each other as people love each other at the age of twenty. The absence of the two boxes on Charlie’s shelves could mean only one thing: they had decided to perish together, absolutely and definitively, leaving no trace.

  She ended up accepting the unacceptable. How can you stand in the way of love? Over the months, the two missing boxes became a supremely romantic image. Charlie and Marie-Desneige walking hand in hand, Romeo and Juliet heading off to meet their destiny.

  Steve and Bruno, however, were alive. Steve was in jail in Monteith, with no hope of bail, the judge having decided that that there was too much evidence that this man would return to the woods the first chance he got. As for Bruno, there had been no news. He wasn’t there when the police raided and had not shown his face in the area since. Neither was it in the photographer’s interest to hang about the place, because they were looking for accomplices.

  That’s what she had been given to understand by Jerry, the hotel owner who served as a mail drop for the government cheques that Steve went to cash at the end of the month.

  ‘And the others?’ she had asked without naming them.

  ‘The others?’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

  It was clear that he had never believed that Tom and Charlie existed, even less so the reclusive old woman deep in the woods. He believed only in petty trafficking, in what he could skim here and there from other people’s schemes.

  She had not gone back to the short, potbellied man’s hotel.

  The months that followed were filled with preparing for the exhibition. It was all she had left of the year spent with her old friends in the woods. Three-hundred and sixty-six paintings, Ted’s haunted pain and Marie-Desneige’s gaze, which had shed light on every splash of colour. The paintings for the exhibition were cluttering up her apartment. The others were in a warehouse in the north of the city.

  Sometimes she would wake up at night, roused by a nightmare that she couldn’t remember any scenes from, and would walk through the rooms of the apartment to find a burst of colour in the paintings that would take her back to the deep woods and her friends.

  Work was her salvation. Aside from the exhibition, different commissions occupied her almost to the point of exhaustion. She had plenty to think about, to do and to decide. Fortunately, there was Clara. The young woman was a whiff of spring, her friends just as sunny, and she let herself be caught up in their energy. They were thrilled with the idea of presenting the work of an unknown artist, an original, an independent who had had no teacher, a raw talent, a force of inspiration, a grand master of composition. There was no shortage of praise. They admired her photos as well. She was very pleased with her bellowed Wista for producing this textured light and the depth of gaze.

  The project took off like a shot. At times it made her dizzy. They wanted to pull out all the stops for this exhibition. They had not made whiskey in the old distillery for years, but the immensity of the place, the old stone and the old-fashioned cobblestone roads, fuelled rumours of all sorts, the most reliable of which was that it was being turned into something bohemian chic, with restaurants, theatres, galleries and boutiques, a bit in the image of Yorkville of days past, but more European. Clara and her friends wanted to be front and centre when the arts, the evening strollers and fine dining took the place over.

  For the time being, the old distillery served as a shooting location. A Hollywood crew shooting a period farce had been charmed by the young people and had left them part of the cooperage.

  The photographer had carte blanche. They liked the concept of the exhibition. Paintings and photos that spoke to one another, and particularly this whole new story, the Great Matheson Fire, a half-blind boy wandering through the rubble looking not for one lover but for two, absolutely identical, who would hold him the rest of his life in the tangled threads of a love that could not be. Love, wandering, pain, the deep woods and redemption through art – all themes dear to the hearts of young artists who love it when life scrapes the depths before ascending to the light.

  At the centre of their interest was the series Young Girls with Long Hair, from which they had decided to keep only five pieces. The arrival from the distance of a raft on the river, streaks of gold in the black waters. The raft, seen from closer up, and two young girls with golden hair paddling
with their hands. Seen from closer still, the young girls see someone on the shore, signalling to them, beseeching them. The drama of the next scene when the raft capsizes in an eddy of black water. And the final close-up on the strange beauty of their faces.

  The series should have been accompanied by the photo of Angie Polson, the only survivor of this romantic tragedy. But the photographer’s failure to act, that missed click in High Park when she had the old woman before her, deprived the series of the only possible photo of Angie Polson.

  In its stead, there was the portrait Ted Boychuck had painted of her. In this portrait, Angie Polson was younger than the little old lady of High Park, twenty or thirty years younger, but with the same twinkling pink light in the corner of her eyes.

  Under the portrait, a caption card.

  Angie Polson, between 1965 and 1975. Born in Matheson in 1902. With her twin sister, Margie, she survived the Great Fire by escaping along the Black River on a makeshift raft. In 1920, she left Matheson for Toronto. The rest of her life is a mystery. She was last seen in Matheson in 1972 and in High Park in Toronto in the spring of 1994. Her twin sister died of cancer in 1969.

  Clara didn’t like it. Too cold, too official, the text disavowed any emotion; it hid the beauty, the love, the passion, and The rest of her life is a mystery was untrue, patently untrue. We know that her life was consumed by a failed love triangle involving her sister. And that this love was hopeless because they loved a man who was incapable of love. And that this man is dead, leaving behind him an oeuvre that pays tribute to their beauty. So why be evasive, elusive, dodge the question?