Behind the first cat, there’s a woman sitting at her desk. She motions at me to come in. A gust of wind blows my scarf and I take it off, the better to feel the soft fall on the other side of the arch, and join the woman, Heather, who needs me to untie the threads of this story I’m tangled up in, in which I don’t know what role Gilles Ferland might play, and from which I should have expelled H. W. Thorne before he got too involved. But the dice have been cast, and the sheer fatigue I am experiencing at the very idea of retracing my steps far outweighs any exhaustion the presence of these two characters causes me. I’m getting old, it’s true, and no longer have the courage to press the Delete key and write over my own palimpsests or trample in the shade of too many dying butterflies.
I open the door and sit down at the desk. Outside, my scarf is flapping around the arch in ghostly shapes reminding me that only death, only the absence of wind is able to eradicate our obsessions and lay them gently on the ground.
Winter is ending again. In two days it will be spring.
At dusk I saw two white swans in the branches of a spruce tree. People would say it was an illusion. People would say it was two heaps of snow. People would accuse me of dreaming. And I would answer them no, with my very own eyes I saw two white swans about to take off.
* * *
Today, it’s murky out. I was waiting excitedly for the forecast big downpours, even if it meant bailing out the water that seeps into the basement every time the thaw gets under way, but all that’s been falling since dawn is a little spitting rain that turns the landscape all grey and brown and will barely melt the snow in which I walk with difficulty, thinking how at this latitude the equinox is nothing more than another climatic lie, like those January suns accompanied by only biting cold.
To counter the effects of these lies on my low morale, I walk in paths that neither P. nor I could muster up the energy to dig out after the latest snow fell, trusting that the warmth would soon bring trickles that would become flows of slush, streams, muddy grass between the snowbanks, and that we’d be able to wade around in our rubber boots and get drunk on the smell of humus I associate with the joy I felt as a child when, in the evenings after school, I realized winter was over.
For now, I sink up to my knees in the leather boots I bought on sale at Canadian Tire in anticipation of the cold season, and huff and puff, nevertheless enjoying the almost warm wind blowing the branches, and the softness of the rain on my face, dripping down my neck and making me feel alive.
After a first trip, I cross the paths a second and then a third time, crushing the snow and opening up the path, growing wider and harder because of my repeated marching, happy to feel my thigh muscles contracting almost painfully with each new step, and the blood warming the cheeks I offer up to the fine rain. At the end of an hour of this labour, I collapse near a pine tree, my body too weary to carry me any further. The lenses of my glasses are covered in water droplets that, little by little, obscure the sky, and I stay there, a woman alive beneath the clouds.
* * *
Sitting on her old stump, Heather has started reading Paterson, and stops at this verse she does not understand:
Clearly, they say. Oh clearly! Clearly?
What more clear than that of all things
nothing is so unclear, between man and
his writing, as to which is the man and
which the thing and of them both which
is the more to be valued
* * *
I went back to visit V. in the mountains, telling myself it had to be impossible for him not to know H. W. Thorne since their houses are not far apart, and in such a remote area you always know your neighbours. He seemed surprised to see me back again, conscious, as I was, that old friends generally don’t renew their ties in spite of the promises they exchange on the doorstep. “I’ve come about the man with the gun,” I said, before even saying hello, and he asked me to come in.
The kitchen still smelled of fresh coffee, but V. offered me a beer instead and suggested we drink it on the patio out back in the sun. From there, the view was over the south side of the mountain, rather than Two Hill Lake. There was still a layer of compact snow under the trees, but around the patio there was a wide expanse of brown grass where a few little green shoots were starting to poke through. In two weeks, murmured V., as he pointed at the snow-covered undergrowth, all this will be forgotten. And then he reconsidered, well aware that whoever experiences snow like this every year cannot forget it — even at the height of summer, even when everything is in bloom. And really, that’s what makes the summer so precious: the memory of the snow, the memory of it returning.
After we’d exhausted the subject of the temperature, V. offered me a second beer and asked me to tell him about the man with the gun. So I told him everything, starting with his meeting Heather after the accident and continuing on right up to the photo of Heather in his bedroom, or was it his office, but the further along I reached in my tale, the more strangely V. looked at me. We were finishing up our third beer when he admitted to understanding nothing about my story, and rephrased in his own words those H. W. Thorne had spoken: “Bev, the woman you’re telling me about is not who you think she is . . .”
In the snowy undergrowth, the words reverberated like an echo from the shadows, she’s not who you think she is, Bev . . . V. told me that Heather Waverley Thorne had died at the age of seventeen, some thirty-five years earlier. “If the woman you’re telling me about is claiming to be called Heather — Heather Waverley Thorne — then she must be an imposter. But you know that as well as I do,” he added, as the echo faded away in the spring air.
We’d been chatting for two hours, and a faint numbness swept through me as my hair stuck to my skull and an unpleasant layer of sweat covered my forehead. My first reaction was to burst out laughing. Where did this name Waverley come from, Wave, like the sea, like the ocean? And why had V. called me Bev, short for Beverley?
None of it made any sense. V. shouldn’t have claimed that Heather was an imposter or that I was in league with her. And V. can’t have forgotten who I am. The heat had confused me. The heat and the snow sparkling in the sun. Clearly, I’d lost the thread of the conversation and must have misinterpreted V.’s words when he’d told me about some young woman who was dead. It was that simple: I’d misunderstood, drunk too much alcohol, misheard, with the result that the names were all mixed up. I’d confused Heather with Esther, Waverley with Beverley, Beverley with Andrée.
I laughed again, a little hysterically perhaps, realizing V. didn’t think I was funny at all. He was staring at my face as if he no longer recognized me, which was really and truly the case, and obviously found my fit of laughter somewhat out of place. So I stood up, slowly unfolding my tingling limbs, and headed to my car. In my rear-view mirror I could see V., puzzled by my drunkenness, getting smaller and smaller in the distance, and then, just before I turned off to take the road that cut the mountain in two, I saw him raise his hand in farewell or goodbye, his smile identical to Heather’s in the picture hanging on the wall of H. W. Thorne’s bedroom or office.
On my way back, trees swayed in the light, the mixed-up words pinged around in my head, and I couldn’t understand what had just happened. Instead of going straight home I went to the 4th Line, where I walked up to the carcass of Heather’s Buick, and a crow flew out of it. Heather wasn’t there, but the trampled grass near the car indicated that she’d been there not too long before. As I approached, I noticed that since my last visit, the vegetation had grown up on the right side of the vehicle, blocking the passenger door and covering the axles.
Instead of abandoning myself to more nervous laughter, the intensity of which would render my face muscles tense again, I lay down on the swaying ground. The sky was shining through the branches and, half drunk, among the cawing crows, I no longer knew whether I was alive or not.
I didn’t want P. t
o see me in this state.
* * *
A dog just passed by in the forest.
“Jackson!” Heather shouted.
Then the dog disappeared.
The second cat isn’t doing well. The second cat is sleeping badly, his head resting on his bowl, as if he wants to absorb from the tinned salmon the memories of rivers where he fished. The second cat will die soon, and all we can hope for now is that he has a few more summer days remaining.
* * *
It’s hard to write when you know someone in your house is going to die. It’s hard not to get caught up in sadness and regrets, to resist the temptation to go sit under the pines, ass in the damp snow, bleating like a calf, a tiny little calf that will not have a chance to grow, that won’t see the summer, that won’t see the fall, that will barely see anything, dammit! It’s hard not to think about the one who’s about to depart, or about this miserable life we so want to render gentle, even if nothing can really mitigate the life of a creature from whose body violence and stupidity have chopped off a leg.
And how not to think of one’s own death, about the stupidities one inflicts on oneself, day after day, all as idiotic as the day before, contemplating this time lost between two breaths of fresh air, two genuine moments of plenitude? I don’t know how not to. I don’t know how not to and I give up. I order myself to stop. I shout to myself that it’s enough, shut up, this won’t get you anywhere, so be quiet. Death will come regardless — death that might be a deliverance, but still I don’t care. I don’t want to be delivered from the wind. I don’t want the second cat to be delivered from the summer we’d wanted him to enjoy.
So I imagine him limping on his three legs, breathing in the scent of the cedars, pausing by the wild roses, a happy cat in the June splendour. Stop, for Christ’s sake! Stop! Shut your stupid mouth and write, smile at the cat, tell the cat you love him, write, write his name, Beauboule, then go back into the cold wind of the woods with Heather.
* * *
And the wind was cold. But the forest was deserted. “Heather!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Heather!” I shouted ten times, twenty, pulling at the ferns and brambles clinging to the side of the Buick with my bare hands amid the muted croaking of the crows complaining. And the day came to an end on my standing shadow.
* * *
Interlude. I wail. With my ass in the damp snow and my face to the sun.
The dark-eyed juncos are back, a sign that spring is no longer an illusion and only a few days of snow remain for our eyes to contemplate. I saw a junco yesterday, as my butt was getting damp, and thought snow bird to myself, because that’s what my mother used to call the juncos that heralded the final snowfalls. I also saw flies mating on the doorframe, a few more shoots of green grass coming up in the big brown stretches we’ll soon have to clean up. And I heard a mourning dove close by, cooing its love song that sounds like the loon’s lament. Today, April 13, the mercury will hit 19 degrees.
* * *
Beauboule is resting. He looks almost serene. The calico is purring at my feet, and the first cat is chasing field mice and voles behind the house. I wonder whether V., when we were chatting on his patio with beers in hand, really did call me Bev. I try to remember our conversation, his reaction to the story I was telling him, and then those words he could have taken straight from H. W. Thorne: The woman you’re telling me about is not who you think she is. Which was when, if I’m not mistaken in my reconstruction of that warm, sunny afternoon, V. called me Bev. Bev, the woman you’re telling me about is not who you think she is. Those were his exact words, their echo then ringing out in the shadows of the undergrowth: Bev . . . not who you think she is . . .
I tried to remember further back, to remember if, at any other point in our conversation, he’d called me by some other name — Andrée, Andrée A., or even Heather. I replayed our chat on a loop, but did not hear V. say my name. All I could hear was Bev, and I understood that V. really was confusing me with Beverley, a girl with brown hair and around my height who used to be part of our group. I realized V. must have thought I was Beverley, the brown-haired girl who lived at the top of the tall hill. He thought I was Beverley Simons, and that I’d lost weight over time.
I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed that in truth, after all these years, it would be possible for someone to take me for Bev, who also had a narrow nose and blue eyes. “My name’s Beverley,” I said to the reflection I was staring at, “Bev to my friends, but you can call me Andrée, Andrée A.,” and I let the tears flow that I’d been holding back for so long, a few bitter tears from Beverley’s blue eyes.
* * *
Night has fallen. The first cat has come in and is sleeping on his armchair. All is right with the world, or at least with the usual order of things, but tonight I can’t seem to find my place at the heart of this orderliness which usually guarantees my equilibrium. I haven’t stopped thinking about V. all day, about his too-close resemblance (apart from his wrinkles) to the young man he used to be, and I wonder if V. really is V., or if I’m getting things mixed up by thinking he’s V. when really he’s T. or D. or L.
I also think about that name, Waverley, which, apart from the shushing sound of waves, doesn’t bring anything specific to mind. Waverley, whose first letter matches the second initial marked on H. W. Thorne’s mailbox. What if there is no H. W. Thorne other than Heather Waverley, and the man with the gun is still waiting to be named?
I line up the first and last names of my characters, each one more elusive than the last, and try out various permutations, a few slight modifications, until my bedroom walls start to move like waves and a powerful feeling of nausea sees me rush to the bathroom, where I vomit up bile in front of photos of Walt Whitman and Stephen King.
Once I’m back in my bed, I tell myself that maybe V. is called D. or T. or even L. for liar, D. for dissembler, T. for trickster, because it’s obvious V. knows more than he wants to admit, more than he’s ready to tell me. I put my head down on the pillow and sleep on these questions: Who is V.? Who is V. and what does he want from me?
* * *
It’s a time of death. When I opened my bedroom curtains this morning, I saw a body stretched out on the ground right outside my house. The cat, I thought for a devastating fraction of a second, racing in my pyjamas down the stairs and outside. Even though I knew the body lying on the road wasn’t the cat’s, I ran through the mud, fuck the slippers, right up to the lifeless body, so my fear could understand that what my eyes were telling me was true: the sight of the body that had made my heart pound in my chest for a brief but intense moment of pain was real, but the body out there was not my cat’s.
On the damp asphalt lay either Alberte or Albertine, one of the female raccoons that come every night, spring and autumn, to empty the bird feeders with their gaggle of lesser Alberts, Albertes, and Albertines. I moved a few steps closer and recognized Alberte, big bloody Alberte, whom I could not mistake for any of the little Albertes because of her size. I examined the animal’s stomach, in which there was no longer any breath, and then murmured, “Dammit, Alberte, what were you thinking? You know they drive like maniacs along here.” Then I cursed the vehicles that pile the carcasses up at the sides of the roads, whether summer, spring, fall, or winter, though fuck it, it’s in spring first of all — spring above all — that they take away the animals’ mortal winds.
I looked at Alberte’s tail one final time, a horizontally striped tail, not like the cat’s tail at all, and went back inside, my heart broken by the thought of Alberte mown down in the middle of the night, of Alberte, whom I’d assumed, for a brief but intensely painful moment, was the cat watching the birds from the section of the fence that disappears into the cedars.
When P. looked at me quizzically, I said, “Alberte is dead, I’m going to go get her.” But P. told me not to worry, my slippers were all dirty and he’d take care of it. There was nothing else to say. H
e put on his shoes and went out to pick up the body and move it to the ditch, because we don’t leave an animal’s body in the middle of a road where it will be run over by sixty wheels every hour. P. was wearing his work gloves and picked Alberte up with the respect due to every living thing living no longer, and we didn’t say another word about it, or barely, because every attempt to discuss the event of a death, and not the death that will one day happen, can only exacerbate the intensity of the desiccated feeling already devastating us. We didn’t want to be gloomy, our spirits weighed down by death, such a heavy word, for the rest of the day. But there, we know, is Alberte in the ditch, dead and already decomposing.
* * *
I try to shed a bit of light on Heather’s middle name and end up concluding that Waverley is the thing about Heather I’ll never figure out, an unknowable part of a character only accessible to the author through other characters. Waverley proves to me that I’ve not invented everything, after all.
* * *
When I parked in V.’s driveway, his car wasn’t there.
I knocked on the door just in case, but there was no answer. Not knowing how long he would be, I decided to wait for him on the patio at the back, the sun still beating down. Strangely, V. hadn’t tidied away our glasses, nor the bottles we’d emptied and the ashtray we’d filled, as if he’d gone away in a hurry immediately after I’d left two days earlier. There was a little bit of beer in one of the glasses on the table, which I swallowed in one go, even though I was expecting it to be warm. The beer was still cold, not flat, and it didn’t have the bland taste of drinks left out. Which meant that V. must have gone out just a few minutes ago, soon after getting himself the beer he’d not finished.
Back Roads Page 7
