The mess on the table reminded me of how drunk I’d been the day before yesterday. I pulled a chair into the shade at the edge of the wood and sat listening to the chirping juncos that had gathered there as well. The snow had receded further into the undergrowth, revealing ground strewn with broken branches, pine needles, dry fluff, and brown spotted leaves. I looked at my hands, which were also spotted, and bent down to gather a pile of leaves soaked in the damp soil and applied them to my hands. You never know what mixture might miraculously return your youth to you, that’s what I was thinking at that moment — there had to be a herb somewhere, a plant whose essence had the power to soften age spots, or some water so cool it would grasp the skin and take away its endless tiredness. Then I took off my shoes and started paddling in a pool of melted snow.
It was just starting to rain when I decided to leave, my hands and feet covered in the spring mud Heather had put all over her body back there, near the stream flowing over the moss, either to camouflage herself or because she was losing her mind. Probably for both of those reasons. That’s what happens when you’re alone. That’s what happens when you’re afraid. You hide away and start imagining stories, each one more real than the last.
Right now, Heather is telling herself a guerrilla story in which each tree is hiding a bearded man pointing an object made of metal and wood at her. A gun, she thinks, as she takes advantage of the rain that’s also pouring down on the 4th Line and covering the sound of her advance to crawl through the wet leaves to the bank where her Buick is.
When she reaches the bank, her hands scraped by the rock, she hides behind the car to examine the cuts bleeding pink blood diluted by the rain. Wondering about the realness of this blood, she turns back to the forest and whispers to a woman as real as her stories, “Tell me I’m not going crazy, tell me this is going to stop.” And I don’t know how to reply to her, because I too am moving forward, barefoot on uneven ground.
* * *
To get home, I walked along the stream to Castonguay, so-called after a man who died nearly two centuries ago but who left his mark in the place names here, probably because, before either the route or the village existed, he built himself a cabin at the stream’s source. The hill where I live was, at the time, virgin land that the Castonguays, the Paradis, the Royers, the Saint-Pierres and others had hacked away at with axes and chilblains. I needed to remember that, to remember that the world hasn’t always been the way it is, won’t always have the astonishing beauty bestowed on it by the rain near the stream.
To fix these pictures in my mind, I stopped by the little waterfall that feeds into the northeast tip of Raspberry Tree Lake. I went down into the ditch to inhale the moisture and removed a piece of the stratified rock constricting the flow of the river in this place, a beautiful sharp stone with which I traced an H for Heather in my left palm, joined to the inverted W for Waverley made by my lifelines — my death lines, my fortune lines, my destiny lines. Then I traced another H at the bend of my right wrist, above the M or the W, depending on which way you read it, that is already there. This letter will represent the mark of the stream, the mark of the past that must not be forgotten.
When I plunged my hands into the cold water, a thin trickle of blood was carried by the current, dissolving in the foamy whirlpool eroding the first river bend. Two Canada geese took flight from the lake above us, Heather and Waverley, descendants of the long line of geese that return every year to this spot. I let out a goose cry to greet them, and they disappeared in the colours of the sky, like those proud birds of Riopelle’s.
Afterwards I walked some more, finally arriving at my house soaked from head to toe and with an almost invisible bloodstain where I’d wiped my hand on my pants, but feeling every bit as content as if the gates of paradise had been opened to me. I thanked the rainy sky and went back to work.
* * *
A trail of damp tracks marked the path from the kitchen to my study, where I lit the lamp whose weak glow once again cleaved the cat’s body in two. I took off my shirt and pulled an old wool sweater on over the t-shirt I wanted to keep on in order to write with the rain imprinted on my body. As I wait for Heather to appear I draw a wrecked Buick being eaten away by rust. I sketch out the skeletal silhouette of a few leafless trees and see Heather crawl around the car on her elbows, breathing haltingly and glancing behind her to let me know that she thinks someone is there.
She crouches down by the driver’s door and manages to open it with her outstretched right arm, then slips quickly into the vehicle. She grabs the axe lying on the back seat and looks to the setting sun as she wipes her face, the mud already starting to dry. She waits for a few long minutes during which nobody comes, and then she rummages frantically in the glove compartment. After a few seconds she finds what it is she’s looking for, an old lead pencil and an ad for motor oil. On the back of the ad she writes, “The first is called Ferland and the second McMillan.”
Then she puts the note in an obvious position on the dashboard, grabs the axe, and gets out of the car. She hides behind the pile of branches she’d stacked up at the edge of the clearing, anticipating brutal cold, and, holding the axe in front of her, waits for Ferland and McMillan’s shadows to stand out in the moonlight.
* * *
The first is called Ferland and the second McMillan. I read this phrase again by the flashlight Heather left in her car and consider, again, how angry Gilles Ferland had been when, just before Christmas, he’d ordered me off his property, and I think about the words I myself put in the mouth of one of the two men in La Languette, Gilles, fuck, tell me we didn’t just do that. Behind the branches, Heather looks nervously at the path that her daily comings and goings have created.
* * *
The cat is running like a crazy horse from one end of our property to the other, his fur pressed down against his sleek body by the wind rushing past him; his fur like the white manes whipping against the muscular necks of animals rendered wild by a taste of the plains. The cat is running like a crazy horse and the cat is happy. The cat, mon amour.
* * *
In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig writes:
Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.
This is the direction I must follow, under the aegis of the trails and lateral knowledge we typically apprehend only out of the corner of our eye, that get lost in the periphery of our gaze and muddled as soon as we turn our heads, erasing the detail that we only half perceived, vague signs whose meaning we might have understood had we not insisted on following the pointers left by those who walked straight ahead.
I have to leave the path again and again, stepping over holes, stumbling on sharp stones and falling into side pits full of rubbish, corpses, obstacles, and truths too raw to be offered up to the sight of anyone who cannot bear death’s omnipresence.
* * *
Still hiding behind the heap of branches, Heather can distinguish more shadows the moonlight has not washed out, among them the silhouettes of two drunk men, one of them very tall — Ferland — and looking even more so as the moon seems to stretch his body unsteadily over the whole forest. The other one is shorter and stockier and belongs to McMillan, whose thick red hair is reminiscent of the shining fur of a fox, and whose shadow begins to start like a yelping beast backed into a corner, while the taller one’s arms move forward, snaking between the branches, Come on, baby, we aren’t gonna hurt you, and then an axe falls down on the snaking arms and on the piled-up branches, sending a few chunks of bark flying, Let me go, you fuckers, get off me! Then a nervous fox backed into a corner appears in front of Heather’s panicked eyes, who strikes, dammit, and strikes and strikes the shadows the moon has flat
tened on the ground near her shining axe blade.
I pulled on my rubber boots and left the road to walk in the ditch, along the stream of scattered coltsfoot, little yellow flowers that bloom even before the snow has completely melted. Today, however, there is no more snow in the ditch, nor in the fields, nor in the undergrowth. All that remain at sparse intervals are a few hardened patches covered with sand, gravel, and all the black winter residues that block the sun’s rays and stop iced matter from turning into brown water.
I push this residue aside with my feet, lift up a few stones, and pull up some roots without meaning to, discovering as I go a plastic bottle stuck in the sludge, a page from a newspaper reporting on some violent act I’d rather not know about, and a cartridge from a buckshot implicated in another violent act. I pick up the shell, imagining that it might still smell of fire, lead, powder, and, in fact, it does give off a gun-like burnt metal smell — unless I’ve dredged that particular scent up from some memory of the hot summer when my father was teaching me how to shoot wooden targets. I associate this memory with the photograph of Heather brandishing a gun, and recall the note she scribbled in a rush before wrestling with the shadows attacking her: The first is called Ferland and the second McMillan.
I examine the shiny cartridge and decide Ferland and McMillan must have come this way, that these men are everywhere beyond the road’s unnaturally flat surface that the mundane barbarity of idiocy occurs. I put the cartridge in my pocket and follow the winding stream home. It is bordered here and there by cattails, their fluff sticking to my clothes. In front of the house, behind the guardrail at the edge of a slight drop in the ground, Alberte’s dismembered body sinks into the coltsfoot.
* * *
William Carlos Williams is taunting me from the pages of Paterson, challenging me to carry on reading. I feel as if I’m never going to finish the book, as if Paterson is rejecting me, or that I might penetrate its opaqueness only to find myself suddenly standing in front of a void. I can’t stand seeing Paterson on top of my pile of half-read books, so I pick it up and leaf through it, stopping at the place on page 193 where another reader — Heather, I assume, or P. — has underlined a sentence warning me about authors influencing their characters: “Norman Douglas (South Wind ) said to me, The best thing a man can do for his son, when he is born, is to die.”
I read the sentence again and can no more understand its meaning than figure out why Williams chose to cite this fragment of conversation with Douglas. To provoke readers, of course, and force them to ask whether the father, the mother, the creator, should hide themselves behind what they’ve put into the world, even at the risk of suffocating, castrating, or erasing it. Williams wants to tease us, as did Douglas, imbued with sufficient self-regard to deem the father’s death necessary.
Sensing the advent of one of those brutal headaches that distort the words lined up on the page, I close the book and curse Williams, disinclined to share whatever was his point of view regarding sentences he’s throwing our way — and, naturally, I curse Douglas too, because he surely had no children, and only a father who had no interest in committing suicide before little Norman was born.
I remain preoccupied by the subtext of Douglas’s affirmation: is it time for me to die and entrust the entirety of the story to Heather? I’m tempted to ask P., who’s reading quietly in the living room, but I know it’s too much to ask someone else to pronounce on my and Heather’s possible deaths, and even more because her world is its own, and any outside interaction might start tremors that could destabilize the ground on which Heather and I are coming into being.
It’s up to me to decide if my presence in Heather’s life is in fact necessary, and, too, if the loss of the father could in some absurd way be beneficial to the orphan.
I put Paterson down on the black table and tell P. I’m leaving for the mountain and don’t know when I’ll be back.
Since my last visit to H. W. Thorne the trees had closed in over the drive leading to his house — all I could see of the road is grey — and so I set off with a certain amount of apprehension.
There was no sound other than that of my feet on the gravel, not even a bird or two singing. A dark, cloudy, threatening mass had settled over the mountain, spreading its shade right over to the other slope. As I looked around, I’d had the impression the place was dead, or was pushing the living away, a sensation belied by the flight of a partridge, the noise of its flapping wings almost overwhelming me. The sound of my heart reverberating in my temples melded with the crunching of the gravel and I’d stopped for a moment to regain my composure. “Calm down, Michaud, it was just a startled bird,” but these words I’d been repeating to myself for years when I needed to contain my anger or reduce my fear and anxiety, Calm down, Michaud, don’t have the desired effect. Something was not quite right, as if nobody had lived here for a long time, even though I’d seen the man with the gun in the winter, and the ruts dug by his truck’s wheels were still fresh.
In front of the house, however, there was no truck, and H. W. Thorne must then have been absent. My determination started to waver, but I decided to wait a while, hoping I’d have more success with him than I’d had with V.
I approached hesitantly, aware that I’d be violating a place whose welcome had so far been refused me. I also feared making H. W. Thorne angry if he found me sitting quietly on his porch upon his return, or strolling around the weed-infested garden. Nonetheless I made the circuit of the house, just in case the truck was parked out of sight.
Behind the house was a large wooden deck like V.’s, facing the forest. On the patio, two chairs were set around a low table on which I thought I could see some glasses and a few bottles of beer. V. wasn’t the only person to have added on a deck, but I was struck by its design, the smallest detail of which, right down to the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, matched my memory of V.’s deck exactly. Were I to advance across the few metres separating me from the low table, I was convinced I’d find in one of the abandoned glasses a few sips of beer indicating H. W. Thorne had only just left. This certainty didn’t just come from the similarity between the places, but also because, I suddenly realized with biting lucidity, I was the one who’d constructed this set and poured the beer now sitting at the bottom of one of the glasses.
I let myself slide against the bannister, its handrail as solid as any other, and sat down on the ground, one buttock on a flat stone and the other one at an angle, arms resting on my knees and my gaze lost in the undergrowth where the snow had recently melted. But I was so overwhelmed that I no longer knew if spring had actually arrived or if I’d sat in a snowbank, the existence of which I needed to deny at any cost, though without which the very reference points on which my own existence relied would disappear.
I closed my eyes and touched the ground to make sure it wasn’t cold as snow, and forced myself to crawl on all fours — to smell the new earth, the dry hay, the little tufts of young grass poking up here and there. Then I touched, turned over and smelled the earth until I could be certain that I wasn’t wrong about the course of the seasons. The earth was real and so was its damp coolness; the hay smelled of hay, and the mud stuck under my short fingernails. But the deck adjoining H. W. Thorne’s house hid a truth that I didn’t dare admit: I was responsible for V. and H. W. Thorne having to leave their houses simply because I’d refused to learn who Heather Waverley Thorne was, and — if what V. had told me was true — what the circumstances of her death were some thirty-five years earlier, according to V., and why she’d come back to haunt me.
I stood up and brushed off my clothes. I looked
at H. W. Thorne’s house and wondered if it was real — if H. W. Thorne had ever existed, and if V., my childhood friend whom I’d not seen in thirty years, was just the product of my imagination.
* * *
Some mirrors seem to want to reflect the world in its entirety but only send back light in order to magnif
y the contours of the beings gazing at their reflection. And some are closed mirrors, like the calm waters that slowly obscure the ovals of faces desperate for shade. Heather and I look at ourselves in one such mirror and add a touch of grey to our eyelids, just enough to weigh them down and for us to gently nod off, succumbing to sleep carried in by wispy winds of oblivion.
It’s May 11. In three days my father will have been dead for forty-seven years. In the red-brick garage adjoining my family home, his old blue Buick Electra continues to disintegrate. All I have to do is think of it, and I’m on a summer road trip, feeling the wind whipping at my temples.
I’m nine years old and life is good. The warm water in the distance laps at the sand where I’m about to go and run around in my blue swimsuit with white polka dots. It’s summer 1967. The summer of love. Kawasaki 750s and tanned girls with their hair flapping as the freedom-scented air roars past. On the radio, the hits play one after another and make the tanned girls dance without cares. The Buick is a Batmobile barrelling toward the horizon to take on bad guys, a racing car nothing can stop. My astonished eyes take in the endless back roads where I’ll learn to read and write, my hair blowing in the wind as I cling to the shoulders of a man who will soon die, but who is firmly holding on to the steering wheel of the Batmobile and whistling an old Maurice Chevalier tune.
Back Roads Page 8
