On the ground, a few steps away from the hunter, is Heather’s axe, its blade glinting in the moonlight.
II.
Six months have gone by since my encounter with Heather, six months during which I watched the snow falling with a growing sense of oppression. Was the winter ever going to end, or had the northern hemisphere entered into a glacial age scientists had not anticipated, or had they, in league with the government, knowingly suppressed their knowledge of it? Had they feared panic and a mass exodus of the well-to-do invading countries south of the equator and decimating their populations? Had they foreseen a subsequent increase in suicides among those who didn’t have the means to flee, and the resulting morbid spectacle of frozen hanged bodies swinging in the glacial July winds?
I couldn’t stop these macabre scenes invading my thoughts whenever I thought about the cold’s unrelenting power and my utter impotence in the face of its fatal effects. I watched days’ worth of snow accumulate, and witnessed nights that got the better of another squirrel, of Ti-Boutte Côté or maybe Ti-Boutte Chouinard, of two or three more of the redpolls that were less and less plentiful at the feeders. I saw my own blue-tinged body swinging from a leafless maple, the maple which would never have leaves again, and I could not imagine how my life would be able to continue in permanent winter, how the house could be kept warm, and how our means of subsistence could possibly be enough to fight against walls of ice slowly encasing all living things.
Only the off-seasons do not aggravate my anxiety, transitional months without the extremes that constitute a threat — times like last autumn, for example, when I abandoned Heather and waited for the arrival of days proving to me that the natural order of the seasons hadn’t been scuppered by some atmospheric phenomenon or planetary unravelling caused by humans’ idiotic greed.
Those days arrived, slowly, and now here I am, on a day in which it seems possible to believe in spring’s coming and the return of blackbirds and swallows. The streams are thawing now and still I could pick up my tale right where I left off and carry on with the scene in which P. is digging a path through the snow reaching up to his thighs, except that the scents of the coming summer are so insistent I can’t quite conjure up a winter I so eagerly want to be over.
This story, I decided when I got up this morning, will be told in real time. In other words, I’m not about to drag out the winter just to avoid the lengthy pauses caused by chores that often interrupt the writing process, things like taking care of the birds and the cats, the pain and joy of my loved ones, all the things demanding the pen be put down and my eyes turned away from the work.
There’s too little of my life left not to delight in the play of the light, its movements evident even in the words I’m writing in black ink: “sun and more sun, anemones and violets, laughter, bare feet on the burnt wood.”
As for Heather’s existence, that will also proceed in regular fashion, at the heart of a fall unspooling in parallel with other people’s seasons.
* * *
Yesterday, P. and I finally repaired the fences. We straightened the posts, strengthened the cross rails, removed anything that was too damaged, and replaced the broken pickets with pieces salvaged from old sections. We made our presence felt on this parcel of land as it tried to slide back into chaos, an attempt at domestication that will only be apparent for a few weeks, until more parts of the fence are felled by bad weather, unruly grass has grown on the low hill covering the septic trench we dug to treat our waste water, and moss and weeds, despite our best efforts, have reached the flagstones by the house steps, bringing with them the soil in which they take root.
It takes so little — and so little time — for human constructions to fall into ruin, disintegrate, and disappear. The things we build lack the longevity of trees, trees that don’t require repair or strengthening, and manage perfectly well without us; they lack the doggedness and determination of the wild roses that scratched my arms when P. and I were putting the fence back up on the section of the property adjoining the road. There, in mid-June, the gentle slope is covered with thorny bushes and their abundant pink beauty as soon as the flowers bloom, though we must stop them from multiplying if we don’t want them to reach the house and attack it just as moss and grass have done the flagstones. It’s like in one of those apocalyptic movies where concrete cracks open and roots push through, and walls collapsing under the weight of trees quietly return to earth.
I share my thoughts with P. as I clean the wounds on my arms, paying special attention to the M-shaped cut where my right wrist flexes, something that must have happened when I was picking up shards of glass from what had once been the house’s garbage dump behind the old barn. The mark gouged into my flesh looks like the wound Heather got when she extricated herself from the car, and which then started to bleed as the hunter moved toward her — and toward the axe on the ground, its blade gleaming in the moonlight.
Heather’s intention is to get hold of the axe and strike, if necessary, or use it to dissuade the man if he suddenly becomes aggressive, as happened in that jumble of images that flooded her mind of a young woman lying on the ground near a snow-covered path. Tabarnak, tell me we didn’t just do that. But the man has noticed Heather’s furtive look at the axe, and the plan visible in her glance, and so he picks it up and sends it flying into the woods behind him.
Without a word, he moves closer to Heather, staring at her face as if he’s trying to recognize his own in it, and then, with trembling hands, he offers her his water bottle, holds out a tissue, looks her right in the eyes and murmurs, “You aren’t who you think you are. You aren’t Heather Thorne.” Quickly, he looks away, adds that he’ll call for help, both for the car and her injuries, but Heather says no. The Buick is part of the scenery now, and there’s no point trying to retrieve it. She can already see the brambles taking root, the rodents sheltering in it, the shell breaking down and rust mixing with clay.
Heather Thorne doesn’t want help. She just wants to know the identity of this man who seems to have risen from a past the brambles are concealing, and why he claims the name that emerged from another woman’s stunned face is not her own. So, arms dangling, she stays put, lost in the smell of the man’s breath. It has a slight smell of juniper and reminds her of the joys of childhood.
* * *
It’s bombyx time again. After the night when one of those insects died on my desk, I tried to immerse myself in the night-time world of moths, convincing myself that a writer ought to be able to name a creature dying right in front of her, but this universe is so complex, and my ignorance so vast, that I give up trying to identify the species currently hurling itself at my lamp. It’s as likely to be a Notodonta tritophus as a black witch moth, and its evocative name might lead me into one of those stories where death hinges on the beat of a wing.
In any case, I’ve learned from my partial and disorganized reading that the word bombyx references a category that groups together various moths belonging to different families, from Lasiocampidae to Notodontidae, and that there are probably as many types of bombyx as there have been July nights since I was born.
So I drop my arms and resign myself to ignorance, preferring imprecision to a desire to name that could lead to obsession and fill my evenings with research distracting me from my principal preoccupations — getting to know Heather Thorne and the man she met in the woods. Ever since they met, I’ve been repeating over and over again what the man said to Heather: You aren’t who you think you are. You aren’t Heather Thorne. These words, spoken by a stranger whose appearance I’d not expected, disconcert me as much as they must have done Heather, because they also put my own identity into question, and even affect my ability to name whatever appears in my study when bombyx time comes around again.
Might I have been mistaken? Maybe the woman I saw at the wheel of the Buick on the 4th Line wasn’t Heather Thorne, and I’ve borrowed some nameless woman’s identity. Could it
be that Heather Thorne is an imposter?
I look at my reflection in the window beyond the cat’s armchair, the shape of my face imprecise and my pale lips stuck on the man’s words, “You aren’t who you think you are.” I ask myself if the image in the window is true, if it’s the reflection of the woman I believe I am. I move closer, lean toward it and, with my forehead pressed against the cold glass, smile at the woman disappearing in the steam of my feverish breath.
* * *
The man with the gun has just come out of the forest and is sitting in his truck, which is the same red colour as his shirt. He has both hands on the wheel and is lost in the dawn, staring at its first rays as they appear behind the slope where a sparrow hawk is gliding. “My name is Heather,” the injured woman had said as she leaned against a tree. “Heather Thorne.” But the man knows that’s impossible. He only knows one Heather Thorne, a young girl whose skin is blemished from the thousand suns that used to warm the sides of the mountain overhanging the village, and the woman claiming to be Heather Thorne cannot be that young girl.
* * *
William Carlos Willams’s Paterson sits on the black table next to my desk. A bookmark partway through reminds me I’ve not finished reading it yet. I started it during the winter, with the cat on my lap, snow and hail blowing against the windows, and each time my eyes drifted from the text I thought of Heather. I open the book to page 28, to where another bookmark placed across the page points my attention to a letter signed “E. D.” that seems to stimulate my deliberations on my relationship with Heather. “With you,” E. D. claims, “the book is one thing, and the man who wrote it another. The conception of time in literature and in chronicles makes it easy for men to make such hoax cleavages.”
I don’t know who E. D. is, since Williams doesn’t bother to enlighten us as to the identity of his correspondents, but this doesn’t really matter because the two sentences attributed to E. D. suggest to me it’s actually Williams speaking, still and always Williams; who draws words from other sources, makes them his own and gives them new life within the architecture of Paterson. In the present example, it’s neither E. D. nor Williams expressing themselves in the two sentences I’ve quoted, but I, Andrée A. Michaud, who am at one with my book; I, Heather Thorne.
* * *
The thick fog the wind drives up from the waterlogged earth is like blowing snow. Hair plastered to my temples, I move through the fog as trees and fields disappear ahead of and behind me. Alone in a cocoon of pale light whose shifting shape moves with me, it’s impossible for me to guess what awaits beyond the slope or to touch the furtive shadows slipping in and out of the folds of the misty curtain covering my steps.
I’ve been walking like this since dawn, and in the damp silence calming my thoughts, I close my eyes from time to time, trying to distinguish the face of the man with the gun. Sometimes a set of features floats into view, the blue of an eye looking intensely my way, and then the blue dilutes into grey, carrying the rest of the face with it.
A vehicle approaches, and I can just about make out the headlights without being able to calculate how far away it is. I leave the road to get closer to the cries of a loon taking off from the water by the Martinique, an old restaurant and bar I visit now only in my memories. On the path through the bush around the lake, I sit down on a wooden chair that was perhaps abandoned by a reveller who’d used it to take in the breeze at the edge of this forest-ringed lake. I try to retrace the sequence of events from the moment when the man with the gun arrived on the scene, but I can’t manage it.
So I scroll back up through the text and write it, again, until the word gun is tapped out on the keyboard and the loon takes off. Gun, she thinks. Gun. In the forest, Heather keeps an eye on the long metal and wood stick slung over the shoulder of the man approaching her, although she’s still unable to see his face, nothing but a black oval behind the ringed halo of his flashlight. It’s not until he comes closer that she can make out his high forehead, his smoothed-back hair, the wrinkles on each grizzled temple like the branches of an apple tree, and an uncomfortable feeling convinces her she knows this man.
The feeling becomes more concrete when the man locks eyes with her and the combination of his irises, blue encircled with yellow, and the heat of his breath imbued with sweet odour, catch on the edge of an old memory. I try to draw out the stare, and to discern what these smells anchored in Heather Thorne’s childhood might be, but the spell is abruptly broken when the man turns his head away from her. His face becomes blurred, and the childhood scents dissipate in an unanchored haze. Once again Heather is a woman alone and paralyzed by fear.
In the fog coming off the lake in thin curls, pierced now by the first rays of sun, all I make out are the outstretched wings of a bird of dawn and twilight, frightened by the over-loud clacking of a keyboard.
* * *
I took out my sketchbook and tried to draw an Identikit picture of the man with the gun. The face in front of me is that of Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski — which is utterly ridiculous. Unless, that is, Heather feels, as I do, a particular attraction to the ageing Hollywood actor and has substituted his features for those of the man with the gun, either to control her fear or to convince herself she’s in some kind of imaginary universe in which all dreams are possible. Just like that woman who liked going to the movies on slothful days.
But fiction cannot rely on illusion more than it does on reality, or it will crumble as soon as the slightest tremor shakes it. What I must look for are the features of a man suddenly discombobulated by an unexpected autumn meeting deep in the forest; who is maybe wondering, as I am, what made him enter the forest in the first place.
I tear up my sketch of Bridges, open my manuscript to read over the latest pages, and pick up my pen.
* * *
Heather Thorne, still rattled by the man’s words and preferring not to think too much about them, has applied more mud to the wounds on her hands and thigh and the join of her wrist. Right in a fold of the leather jacket that should have protected her a wide gash of unexplained origin reminds her of its existence every time she moves her arm. Then she turns around and takes shelter in her vehicle resting among trees that will soon take root in it, the smell of rust already forming. It’s daytime now, and she limps her way out of the forest to the exact spot where she crashed just as a woman on the radio was announcing that the next day would be glorious.
The sun has just risen behind the hill, forcing her to blink in the light, so much brighter than the shadows in the woods. She looks down and notices the body of an orange and black caterpillar on the ground, one of those furry caterpillars children call woolly bears, but Heather Thorne has only adult words in her head. “Pyrrharctia isabella,” she murmurs. Isabella tiger moth. She cups the insect’s body in the palm of her hand and surveys the gravel path. Three other caterpillars, two heading west and one east, are progressing slowly over the small stones; an exodus of caterpillars which, in another time, she would have called the caterpillar migration, a long and daring march toward hibernation. But today the weather seems conducive more to catastrophe than to the seasonal journeys of certain species. Heather knows the Isabella tiger moth is looking for a place to overwinter, but she can’t stop herself imagining the cataclysm imminent in the death march of these insects almost certain to be crushed by vehicle wheels — as will thousands of other Isabella tiger moths also crossing roads beyond which they think they’ll find shelter from the cold.
In the too-perfect silence, Heather is alive to the drama at odds with the gentle wind bearing the humidity of the season. And she can see it in the tracks left on the road by the vehicle of the man — you aren’t who you think you are — tracks in which the caterpillar, Pyrrharctia isabella, was resting earlier.
* * *
“Like Heather, I’ve always been fascinated by the mass of caterpillars that can be seen crossing the road in both directions as soon as we reach
mid-September, though also somewhat perplexed by this species migration, which strikes me, every time, as a suicidal impulse pushing Pyrrharctia isabella toward the warm expanses of bitumen where certain death awaits.
“This insect’s appearance on our roads brings to mind the slow breakdown of a world in which survivors flee in silent chaos, and north and west no longer exist. It makes me think of the pointless dispersal of a handful of condemned people totally unaware of the imminence of a collision about to wipe out the earth and scatter its pulverized fragments among those of all the rest of the planets that are a testament to oblivion’s eroding pace.”
As I write this, I realize that Heather is encroaching on my territory as if she were absorbing me, the way an ischiopagus fetus absorbs its twin and creates a sickly creature that no longer knows which of its prior four hands belong to it and which is holding the pen.
I should be wary of Heather. She’s one of those people who drags you into their orbit and makes you lose track of what’s real, all the while dropping a trail of breadcrumbs in their wake — which the birds then peck away, the better to confuse you.
* * *
The scratches I got when I mended the sections of fence among the wild roses with P. are slowly fading. Fine pink lines — not to be confused with the harsh, defined cuts of a razor or a knife — mark my inner arms where the skin is so tender, but in a few days they’ll have disappeared to make room for other scratches, the depth of which will show whether I’ve been cording wood, gathering branches, piling rocks at the edge of the property, or picking berries and caring little about getting scratched by the tangled raspberry canes.
Back Roads Page 3
