I think of Heather, equally alone in her car, who does not know that for a large part of the world, a saviour was born this night. Holy Crappy Owl, on whom the irony of my thoughts has not been lost, is hopping about on his perch squawking bullshit, bullshit, this is all bullshit. Bullshit, the two junior owls repeat in unison, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, amused by the sound of this word whose vulgarity they only half comprehend. Then they wish me a merry Christmas, just as P., his beard white and cheeks red, comes into the house, bringing in with him a soft breeze in which a few Christmas flakes are gently twirling.
Sundays as they used to be lived had the advantage of compelling us to slow down, whereas today, we no longer dedicate any day of the week to the rest that mind and body demand.
On Sunday mornings, when other obligations don’t force me to leave the comfort of my study, I sink into the slowness of that earlier time. I sit in my old cracked leather armchair, between the cat’s seat and one of the windows looking out onto the woods, and open one of the poetry collections piled up on my black table or the bookshelf: E. E. Cummings, Nicole Brossard, William Carlos Williams, Renaud Longchamps, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Emily Dickinson, Roger Des Roches, Louise Dupré, and so many more. I dive into the heart of words summoned up to counter the futile agitation of people who fear what the silence they have thrown themselves into will reveal, and reflect, with Brossard or Longchamps, on the nature of man and rock.
I have just finished Entre moi et l’arbre — “Between Me and the Tree” — by Jean Sioui, a Wendat author whom I knew as a student during my single year of teaching, then as a spokesperson for his people. He’s someone I respect for his proud humility. I underlined certain passages in the collection, to come back to them another Sunday, but for now repeat these lines:
The greatest tremors
Are born of the spectacle of forests.
This is what Heather, who has left her car to walk around, also thinks. She feels the shivers that come from both the beauty of the forest and the mysterious aura emanating from the apparently random arrangement of the trees its density grows. She experiences a state of grace, alongside the shuddering familiar to those advancing toward the essence of what they cannot understand.
I walk alongside her in the majesty of the fall, and am carried away by the peaceful feeling of the falling leaves, and then I leave Jean’s collection of poems at the foot of a tree, so that some hiker equally fascinated by the beauty of the forest can lean against its trunk and feel the weight of the sap beneath the bark as he reads. With my lungs full of fresh air, I come straight back to my leather armchair, where the cat is waiting to settle in my lap and let me carry on with the idea of the forest as I pet his belly, eyes closed over his animal heat.
* * *
The terrifying infinity of the world pushes me to hope that I am wrong to think that there is no omniscient, omnipotent force breathing in synchronicity with the universe. I focus on this breath, one that inhales and exhales galaxies, that is like the ebb and flow of the oceans, and try to imagine what propels it — what movement, what other calm ocean, surrounds it. Blinded by the constancy of the stars, I balk every time before this incomprehensible being called God, this being who perhaps has no other name than the terror eternity evokes in me.
I look at the forest, beyond which I know there are fields, another forest, and a town, all of which are arranged on the curve of a circle that closes around the first forest, and wonder about the nature of the night that embraces the universe. Does it give way to another night, then another and another, or does this darkness shelter the white gaze of a god whom too much light would kill, just as it would destroy all obstacles to its spreading? And would the light recreate, in this way, an eternity of which it would be the all-powerful god?
When does a line end? What can you expect to find beyond a circle, if not another circle?
* * *
It’s freezing on the 2nd Line, and I envy Heather the warmth of a fall in which, wearing only a leather jacket, her neck exposed to the sun peeking through the trees, she can come and go without a scarf. Not wanting to go mouldy in her damp vehicle, she sets off on one of the daily walks she now has to force herself to take. Besides, she thinks, she’s started to smell the rot, a kind of green odour clinging to her skin. She thinks her limbs might end up falling away from her body one by one — as if she were already dead, as if she were experiencing the process of her own putrefaction.
She sits on an old stump whose moss she’s scratched off with her blackened nails, rests her elbows on her knees, and stares into the distance. Then she leaps up and shouts, What am I doing here? What am I doing in this damn forest? She waits for an answer to push her out of her torpor, because she knows that one fine day a man, a woman, or an animal will walk around the car in which she is sheltering and alter her destiny. I don’t yet know the face of this man, woman, or animal. In fact, I don’t even know if it will be a living creature or a storm, a sudden squall, that will abruptly put an end to Heather Thorne’s too-slow existence. I don’t know because the cold that has paralyzed the 2nd Line for weeks has plunged me into lethargy, and even evoking the fall cannot shake it off.
The cold is killing me and I don’t understand how, year after year, we survive its repeated attacks of frost; how the birds that plunder the feeders every morning manage to get through the glacial nights in which snow squeaks underfoot and freezes in drifts that take on the texture and appearance of rock. Only the faint hope of a kinder sun keeps us above the surface of this whiteness. And, perhaps, rage — the rage of a gusty wind piling the snow on branches that bow, lean, and swell, before projecting powdery clouds that look like the mists of some violent paradise.
III.
The man with the gun lives on the other side of the mountain. The man with the gun is called H. W. Thorne.
Thirty-eight words. That’s all I managed to write yesterday after following H. W. Thorne’s truck. Thirty-eight words that boil down to this: “The final straight is a phrase that has always chilled me to the bone, because it prefigures death, the final hour, the final space we travel through before the endless blackness. The final straight hurtles into the darkness.”
My intention, when I wrote the first three words of this fragment, was to write about the book or film that is called, in my memory at least, Final Straight Before Death, and to allude in it to the numbness that takes over my legs every time we leave the crossroads on our way home from the neighbouring village and set off up the last portion of the straight road before we get to our house. This is when a single question consumes my mind: will this final straight be my final one?
But tiredness stopped me, an exhaustion commonly preceding the task of having to explain everything this expression means for me. The ambition of words, when it exceeds my ability to grasp it, leaves me feeling profoundly defeated. Which is what happened yesterday when I was confronted with this final straight, which had suddenly taken on a cold metallic hue.
If I had continued, I’d have ripped up my manuscript and scattered the shreds outside. So, instead, I put my pen down and picked up, from the pile of magazines lying on my black table, the latest issue of Country Living, flicking through it until I found a picture to distract me from the steel blue of the final straight. Then I looked at the sea through the window, its curtains blowing in the wind. I looked at the sea and dived in, salt filling my mouth, sun filling my eyes, since, in any case, I’d been unable to remember the paltriest scene or line from the movie, or was it a novel, whose title had once gripped me to such an extent that every attempt to work out what it had awakened in me made me feel nauseous.
Seeing me frozen over the magazine’s glossy pages, P. suggested that I go out and get some fresh air. He was right. I needed to exit the smoky atmosphere of my study — and fast — to escape both the rigour of words and a seclusion that would end up suffocating me. Since the cold was still clinging to the countryside, I
jumped into the car and headed to the 4th Line, a road I’d not travelled for a long time, its winding curves allowing me to forget that a straight line can lead to death.
I had just started driving around the first bend when I spotted the red truck in the exact same place it had been parked when Heather came out of the woods to observe the migration of some Pyrrharctia isabella. It looked as if the man with the gun had come back to park there and wait for Heather, or he was waiting for me, to lead me toward the end of my story.
I slowed down as I passed the truck, and there he was, the man with the gun, his body hunched over the steering wheel. He turned his head as I passed and our eyes met, I raised my hand or he raised his, I can’t remember now, in recognition, and I carried on driving over the hill where Heather’s house should, in principle, appear.
I turned around at the crossroads, and when I came back the truck was driving toward the village. I followed it right to the other side of the mountain, then it turned into a lane leading to a house that was almost entirely hidden by trees.
There was just one name on the mailbox: H. W. Thorne. It chilled my blood to read this name, in red paint in the middle of a rectangle whose edges were fading. This name, Thorne, that I thought belonged only to Heather, detached itself from the black surface of the mailbox to mock me, or so it seemed, and remind me that the mysterious man who’d appeared in the woods the night I’d launched Heather’s car into them was not acting solely according to his own will, but according to laws I didn’t know since I hadn’t decreed them myself.
Beyond the trees that hid H. W. Thorne’s house, if that really was his name, a lamp had just been lit, and I noticed that dusk had fallen without my noticing. Disoriented by this sudden darkness, I knocked over a sign as I turned around — “No Hunting” — and I raced back home wondering if H. W. Thorne was Heather’s father, brother, uncle, or husband, or if he was just a usurper. Sitting at my desk now, I wonder when I will go to visit him, and what attitude I will take with this man who has inserted himself, uninvited, between Heather and me.
* * *
Since yesterday, a third cat has been living with us, a little calico with multicoloured fur — beige, brown, white, and black — whom we encouraged to come inside to get her out of the cold. For now, she prefers it in the basement, where we’ve put a few blankets and a litter box. Our house is now a three-cat house, each one having its own floor. Now all we need is a fourth cat to live in the attic, so that at any time of day someone looking from the road would see a cat framed in one window of each storey.
* * *
It was near Lake Drolet, which I’ll now call Two Hill Lake — “to give the landscape a voice,” as P. says — that I kissed a boy for the first time and felt a red pulsing rise in my temples, then a dampness between my legs, filled with the scent of soft flesh, and a need to get away at all costs before my body toppled over on the wooden dock.
I’ve forgotten this boy’s name, but not his face, his black eyes, so black, the warmth of his breath, or the slightly bitter scent teenage desire gives off, like a mixture of fresh, pink meat, and milk that’s beginning to curdle. For months, the disturbing odour of lingering guilt emerging from this smell followed me, accompanied by a feeling I needed to expiate myself of a sin whose dizzying possibility I had barely anticipated.
A few decades later, I think about that boy every time I look at Two Hill Lake, its waters still giving off an aroma that my fear of vice and its consequences has transformed into a stench. I hate Two Hill Lake and turn my gaze away from the dark mass it makes at this time of day to look, instead, at H. W. Thorne’s house. From the road, all I can see is the crescent of light hanging over the front door and the yellow glow of the ceiling pendant illuminating the glass squares of the door from the inside. One lamp in another room is also on, but the wide pine branches along the driveway that leads to the house mean that I can barely make it out.
I get out of the car, careful not to slam the door, and, because it’s so dark that I can barely see three feet in front of my nose, I follow the ruts gouged into the snow by H. W. Thorne’s truck up the driveway. Approaching the house, I crouch behind the low branches of a Virginia pine at a spot where I have a view of the entire property. Seen up close, H. W. Thorne’s house looks like the kind of place you’d call inviting, the warmth emanating from it accentuated by its red shutters. But for all that, a powerful malaise grips me as I take in the paint flaking off the eavestroughs, the chimney smoking weakly, the dry trees along the porch. It’s as if the house is hiding from some kind of imminent catastrophe.
For a moment I feel as though I’ve been transported into one of those movies in which the camera slowly zooms in on the place where drama is about to unfold and the music builds and heightens the tension though, because I am concentrating on the image, I don’t notice it until the discordant crescendo that accompanies the hand, dagger, or bloody hammer shown to us in close-up to justify the scream accompanying the music. I hold my breath and look toward the lit window, where I can see H. W. Thorne sitting in an armchair behind which hangs, in a wooden frame, the photograph of a young woman whose features I can’t quite make out but who seems familiar. I leave the cover of the Virginia pine, move closer to the house, and see it is actually a photograph of Heather, likely taken a few years ago. In the middle of the picture, Heather is laughing and pointing a gun at me.
The colour drains from my face and I suppress a gasp, which would, in a horror film, have filled the screen. I stand up and run to my car, not worrying about being unmasked. A few yards from the road I trip and fall prostrate in snow hardened by the red truck’s tires. When I lift up my head, two feet are planted on the ground in front of me, shod in sturdy winter boots just like the ones the La Languette snowmobilers were wearing in the violent scene I’d imagined a few months before. I know the boots aren’t real, that they only exist in the movie where the camera moves toward H. W. Thorne’s house and pushes aside the branches as it goes, but this time I let out a cry.
When I get back to my car, I turn the heating on full blast and wait for the spasms in my right knee to stop before setting off again. The dark mass of Two Hill Lake is spread out at the foot of the mountain. I’ll have to ask M.-J., who’s been my friend since forever and always will be, what was the name of that boy with black eyes, because I know she kissed him too, before me, after me, whenever.
* * *
A pine grosbeak has just smashed into one of my study windows and is lying in the snow, wings half open, eyes set in black water. It’s the second time this week that a grosbeak has knocked itself out on the window, perhaps confusing the weak light of my lamp with sunshine rising on a new spring. The first one survived, or at least it managed to take off again, but this one might die right here in the snow, simply for having believed in that non-existent sun.
This morning I hate winter, and I’m starting to hate this window of mine that kills birds, but through which blowing snow and wind still manage to enter and allow me to plan all possible worlds for Heather and H. W. Thorne.
* * *
Three days a week or more, I have to explain the same fucking rules. Aside from writing, it’s what I do for a living: I edit.
I edit to pay the bills, I strike through, I insert, I rage, day in day out, never-ending, on days when, for purely financial reasons, I cannot write “Heather left the narrow clearing in which her car was stuck with the aim of finding some water. She found some not far off, at the bottom of a slope, a stream in which she is reflected but does not recognize herself. She says, ‘My name is Heather Thorne,’ but in the reflection the clear water returns, her lips are barely moving.”
* * *
As the blowing snow dances among the tops of the trees, and the glacial wind lifts the wool scarf I’ve tied around my neck, I ask the night if my last days will follow this horizontal line, this path with neither bend nor slope that could be called the final straight before death
. I contemplate the possibility that the hours before an announced or hoped-for death may never be so unwavering. I am aware that hours exist which relentlessly fold themselves back into the past, hours that coil up and cling on to any hint of life still remaining, and reject the terrifying perspective of an arrow striking the heart at this moment of our vanishing and heralding a collision, an explosion caused by our meeting a void absorbing the light caught on the shards of black glass lacerating the very fabric of thought.
Vertigo overwhelms me and I have to lean on the fence to catch my breath and distance myself from the concrete conception of the death I was on the point of bringing on, or so it seemed, leaving me feeling like those elderly people who simply decide, one day, that the road stops there; they’ve made it down the final straight and calmly dive into the scattering shards of black glass as they put their barely sipped cup of coffee back down on the table.
These dark thoughts make me feel nauseous in their turn. I try to shake it off, take a few steps toward the house on my tingling legs, and stop under the arch where Heather stood not long ago. The cat in my study watches me from the window. The second cat, slightly unbalanced on its three legs, looks out from a window on the second floor, and is staring at something invisible to my eye among the storm-frightened trees. And, in the dirty glass of the door leading to the basement, the aloof silhouette of the small calico cat appears like a cut-out, gazing at the blowing snow. To perfect this picture and stop the house from collapsing, I draw another cat spying out on the night from behind one of the dusty attic windowpanes, a grey cat with green eyes, whose yowling pulls me out of my trance.
Back Roads Page 6
