On the third page of the Blueline notebook I used to jot down any ideas and thoughts relating to the novel that might have been called Fall Day, my notes ended with these words: “The first will be called Ferland and the second McMillan.”
* * *
Under the carpet of the trunk of her car, where the spare wheel should have been, Heather found a gun engraved with her initials, H. W. T., and two boxes of bullets put there in case of danger. She doesn’t know what the W stands for — her father’s name, maybe; that face she remembers vaguely, its features blurring when she exposes them to too much light — but she is sure the gun belongs to him. After she’s checked that it actually works, she practises by shooting one of the Buick’s doors, where three almost straight rows of holes are now lined up.
This isn’t the first time Heather Thorne has held a gun in her hands. As soon as she grips the weapon, the smell of powder returns to her memory, and she remembers how to support its wooden butt on her shoulder to absorb some of the recoil, and remembers, too, how the breech slides when you eject a cartridge. She squeezes the trigger a final time and closes her eyes until the echoes of the shot die away. The men called Ferland and McMillan can now arrive.
* * *
At dinner, P. talked to me once again about the philosophical trend he’s interested in at the moment, a new materialism that some call object-oriented ontology, “Oh Oh Oh,” for those in the know, perhaps hearing in the acronym the legendary laugh of a Santa Claus who already understands everything about the world of objects. What I like about this particular approach is that it doesn’t consider matter to be inert and passive, but, instead, to be endowed with vital properties that render it active, productive, and creative without human intervention.
But I’m not one of those in the know, and this idea that matter can act by itself — that conscience and subjectivity may be nothing but accessories to the world — matches up with what I’ve always naïvely believed. It confirms to me that humans have no right or reason to keep themselves on their pedestal. Of course, the only things I know about this “new materialism” are what P.’s told me about it, but the fascination I feel is enough to make me believe my place in the universe is beside the wooden table, beside the tree, beside the stone that erupted from the ground during the frosty snap.
* * *
The dinner dishes are put away, the cat’s in, I’ve brushed the calico, and P. is in his bedroom reading Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object or one of his other books about existential materiality that he’ll tell me about tomorrow. It’s bombyx time, the hour when the house sinks into shadow and I take refuge in my study to focus on an idea, a dream, an image that’s important to me or that deserves attention as the day draws to a close. It’s also the time of day that I’m alone with myself or the cat, who right now is washing himself in the armchair and taking particular care to clean away all traces of mud on his paws.
The La Languette notebook is sitting upside down on my desk, still open at page 3, the one on which I named Ferland and McMillan. This morning, after I reread the sentence about those two men, “The first will be called Ferland and the second McMillan,” I tried to relegate it below the banality of the daily tasks — fixing the fence, painting the porch, pouring wine for dinner — but it never left me for a single second. It was right there in black and white, “McMillan, Ferland,” “Ferland, McMillan,” when P. was telling me about the book that had come in the mail for him, as the cat was chasing a chipmunk, when a branch fell off the maple tree, scraping the roof on the way down, when a deer crossed through the backyard and I thought of the nature-defying hunt Ferland and McMillan would have undertaken had I not abandoned the La Languette notebook on its third page.
And moreover, it seems that the story gestating in this notebook, after sketching out the basics near a frozen river criss-crossed with animal tracks, hadn’t come to an end when I shut the notebook and put it away at the bottom of a drawer. Everything unfolded as if the tale, once it had been set in motion, had taken on a life of its own, though it might always have known a whimsical life of its own, regardless of whether or not I intervened, a life analogous to all these objects that have absolutely no need of me to exist and evolve. How else to explain why Heather is so afraid of Ferland and McMillan? The story continued without me — perhaps happened without me — and here I am back at the starting point again, needing to reconstruct the story if I am to learn what happened to Heather Thorne, Gilles Ferland, and Herb McMillan.
IV.
Torrential rain is beating down on Two Hill Lake, transforming the horizon into a foggy wall and obscuring the houses, the trees, even the lake. From my position halfway up the mountain, all I can see below me is a grey space, more or less oval in shape, with ragged edges, that the windshield wipers allow me to see intermittently. Parked at the opening of a barred road, I’m waiting for H. W. Thorne’s rear lights to disappear into the rain before I go inspect his property again. When I see him take a right at the four-way stop, a perfect cross at the bottom of the slope and just like the four-way stop on the 4th Line, I interrupt the wipers’ constant darting back and forth and turn the engine off.
Water is running down the windshield in sinuous waves, hiding the countryside and making the inside of the car feel like a watertight cube plunging to the bottom of a turbulent sea. Disturbed by the thought that the windows might give way, and an icy wave gush into the car, I grab my bag and rush out into the rain, where I breathe in the scent as joyously as someone who has just escaped asphyxiation. I pull my raincoat hood up over my hair, already soaked through, climb the last few metres up to H. W. Thorne’s property, and set off down the driveway leading to the house.
The rain is less intense under the tree cover, but the water that has accumulated on the branches is falling in heavy drops and crashes on my hood with a noise like gunshots. By the time I am in front of the house, the rain has intensified and I have to walk with my head bent over, one hand shielding my eyes, just to be able to see a little better. I take shelter under the awning on the east side of the house, where H. W. Thorne has stacked firewood, and look in my bag for a clean tissue to wipe off my glasses. When I put them back on again, I notice an enclave in the undergrowth, where several trees have been felled to install a bench made of granite blocks.
I head toward the enclave and catch sight of another block of granite in front of the bench, this one standing vertically — a tombstone with an inscription I can’t clearly make out from this distance. I approach and walk around the bench to read the epitaph through my rain-spotted glasses. The words engraved on the stone read, “Heather Waverley Thorne, 1963–1980.” Slightly stunned, I sit down on the bench and wait for the rain to stop.
* * *
V. has stuck a note to his door: “Out chopping wood. Back at four.” From this I guess that he’s waiting for someone and doesn’t want to miss their visit. It’s 3:45 by my watch, and apart from me there’s not a living soul around. I decide to go sit on the patio. If someone else shows I’ll give up my place and come back another time.
The low table has been cleared, and a fine layer of pollen covers its polished glass surface. With my index finger I write a few words on the table: “Heather Waverley Thorne, 1963–1980.” Then I wipe my finger on my pants, where it leaves a yellowish trail, although a more lacklustre yellow than that of the daffodils growing in a circle at the bottom of the patio.
I’m quite surprised to see the flowers, because V., as far as I know, is not the gardening type. But do I even know V.? Discovering Heather’s tombstone proves — contrary to what I’d concluded when I went through the village cemetery — that V. did not lie to me. It follows that he must either be a character I have created, or exist as a consequence of my desperately wanting to rely on the testimony of an old friend in order to understand what made up my past, just as I rely on P. to gauge the state of my mental health.
The noise of an engine makes me jum
p and I meet V. as I descend from the patio. A man I immediately recognize gets out of his truck. It’s R. — V.’s brother — and he has come to tell me V. had an accident in the woods, nothing serious, but he won’t be able to see me today. R. has just driven V. to the emergency room in the nearest town, and he’ll probably have to hang around for a few hours before a doctor lets him leave.
I listen to R.’s explanations and don’t interrupt, all the while staring at the V-shaped notch between his eyebrows and trying to remember if V. has the same mark. Then I look at his hands again, they’re powerful and rough, and tell him he’s got the wrong person, that I’m not the person V. was expecting.
R. corrects me and says that V.’s message was clearly intended for me. “You’re Beverley, right? Beverley Simons?” I lower my head so he doesn’t notice my face’s sudden pallor and murmur to myself that perhaps I am called Beverley — of course — Beverley Simons.
* * *
I carry the bags of soil we bought at the hardware store over to the house, panting like an ox. P. tries to help, but I won’t let him. I want to exhaust myself physically so that I don’t think any more. Once the bags are piled up near the entrance to the basement beneath the porch, I grab a shovel and try to dig a hole behind the house, wide and deep enough to plant a tree of an as-yet-undetermined species. (I’ll decide tomorrow, when I go back to the Saint-Vital greenhouses.) With every strike of the shovel, I hit different-sized rocks that I have to pull out of the ground, either using a pick or hauling them out with both hands. Once I’m finished, I throw the rocks into the wheelbarrow and steer them over to the rock pile, where I tip out the wheelbarrow, swearing as I go. Then I start over, dig another hole, this time at the edge of the wood, where I’ve wanted to plant an azalea for a very long time.
When, finally, I go back inside, I toss my clothes in the laundry basket and take a shower. A trickle of brown water runs over the tiles, whirls around the plughole and then disappears into the network of pipes that run along the basement ceiling. I imagine its journey to the ditch where the light gush of it must disturb the dirty surface of the greasy water accumulated there. Next, I examine my hands and forearms, now marked with new cuts and a few scrapes revealing the delicate subcutaneous pink. I lather them with soap, so that the burning stops me from thinking, and sit down on the floor of the shower.
Legs pulled up against my body, I notice a few bruises forming on my right leg and hip, where I must have banged myself on the shovel or the pick, or used my weight to propel the wheelbarrow forward. My whole body is covered in grazes, bumps, and wounds; all the stigmata of country life and the novel I’m determined to write even as I order myself not to think.
I stay in the shower for another ten minutes or so, letting all those litres of water swirl pointlessly down the plughole, when P. knocks on the door of the bathroom to ask if everything’s okay.
No, everything is not okay. My name is Beverley Simons. My name is Andrée A. My name is Heather Thorne and I died thirty-five years ago.
A hot, damp wind perfumed my bedroom this morning, imbued with scents hard to define: the hint of storms close by, and of aged wood; the smell of hay, grass, and barely blooming flowers. It roused an intangible feeling of happiness in me, straight out of childhood days when joy was pure and uncontaminated by the burdens of daily life, when all it took was a warm wind blowing the cotton curtains in my blue bedroom for me to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the euphoria of play, of racing under the trees, would only be multiplied by a humidity that gave the smells body and made me feel the summer was tangible. I would walk in the dense air as if in my element, and nothing made me happier than seeing the curtains of my blue bedroom lifted by a wind heavy with the weight of its mixed perfumes.
Childhood is the fount of all things, I told myself, everything starts in those dawns and nights when the body is learning and the skin is open to the heat, wanting, according to the colour of the moment, to establish the foundations of laughter or of sadness. The thick morning air I was breathing in, as I petted the cat lazing on my bed, would not make me feel quite so euphoric if it hadn’t come from such a distant place, if the scents it carried had not been augmented by memories of soft leaves and moist skins prefiguring the apprenticeship of the senses.
* * *
P. has just finished reading the first 139 pages of my manuscript. He has just come downstairs to say, “You’re crazy,” with a smile from ear to ear. The air is heavy and I am happy.
* * *
Where was I in 1980, the year Heather Waverley Thorne died? If I can rely on the few scraps of her story I know, then Heather Waverley died in winter — or rather, just before winter, before the cold snaps that discourage us from walking on isolated roads. That puts us, at the very most, two or three weeks before Christmas.
At that point of the year 1980 I was wandering the streets of a cold city thrown into shadow by its dour facades; I was studying Aristotelian logic, Kantian dualism, Federico Fellini’s cinema, occasionally warming my stiff hands in bars redolent of beer, smoke, and boredom. But how can it be that I have no clear memory of that year? Why did nobody ever tell me about a young girl found dead in the snow, near an isolated road that I also walk on any time I come back to the village?
But who, in fact, did tell me that Heather Waverley Thorne was indeed found in the red snow of La Languette on a December morning? If Heather Thorne dies in an unfinished novel, murdered by a couple of men who went crazy, does this have anything to do with Heather Waverley Thorne’s passing? Can I conflate the two deaths, or are they distinct, one fictional and bloody, and the other caused by an accident or some illness I know nothing about?
* * *
The second cat’s ashes arrived in a cardboard box with his name — “Beauboule” — written on it. Inside the cardboard box, decorated with a delicate paper flower and a few fake stones supposed to look like diamonds, was a wooden one also decorated with flowers, these ones a soft yellow, and a golden plaque that also had his name, “Beauboule,” engraved on it. In the wooden box was a small white satin bag containing his ashes, a few plastic hearts that reflected the light, and an envelope with a little sachet that also had the cat’s name — “Beauboule” — slipped inside it. The sachet contained a piece of fur with the mixed orange, gold, and red markings that only occur in cats. When I saw this lock of clean, well-brushed fur, I envisioned the whole cat once again, the cat in his entirety, and then the mouth and nose that emitted his own special wormf, frounch, wormf, sounds. Tears fell from my face onto the paper flowers.
From now on, every time I want to see the second cat again, I’ll open the box, open the envelope, open the sachet, and speak his name, Beauboule — Beauboule, my love — and lose myself in the depths of his yellow eyes.
* * *
In my La Languette notebook I wrote that the events leading up to the story would occur at the end of November or the beginning of December — in other words, at the time of year when you’re not sure, thanks to the cold and the snow, whether you should be calling it fall or, even though fall isn’t officially over, winter.
Because of the incoherence of this country, and because I hadn’t considered the season fully before covering the countryside with snow and having two men and a young girl meet deep in the heart of it, here I am flummoxed by the ambivalence of the northern climate. Should I imagine winter or fall when I refer to this unfinished season? It’s exactly this sort of detail that, if you would rather not have to constantly explain yourself, must be clarified before you begin a story that will leave traces in the snow.
* * *
I am sitting on V.’s patio, under the parasol his brother recently set up, having had enough of roasting in the sun whenever he sat out there. He’s the man who opened the door when I arrived and announced, somewhat brusquely, that V. had gone to the hospital to get his bandages changed after his accident in the woods. “I don’t know how long it’ll be befor
e he’s back,” he added, anxious for me to leave. Seeing that I wasn’t moving, he sighed and said I could wait if I wanted, and then hesitated before offering me a coffee. I agreed, reluctantly, because R.’s suddenly standoffish manners were making me uncomfortable. He was talking to me as if I were an intruder, not a girl from the village and an old friend of his only brother.
Keen to thaw R. out a little, I suggested that we be a little more informal. “Sure,” he replied as he opened the parasol, “we can try it if you like, but I don’t see what it will change.” And he was right: given the nature of the situation nothing would change. I immediately regretted my decision to wait for V., and accepting the coffee I’d now have to drink, if only to meet R.’s diffidence with courtesy. And besides, what was R. doing at V.’s house? Didn’t he have a job, a house, a family?
As if he’d read my mind, R. told me he’d moved into V.’s “until further notice.” Apparently V. wasn’t doing too well. Unexpected events had been bothering the man recently and R. was worried about him.
After alluding, vaguely, to the events that had upset his brother — an old lover, an old dream going up in flames — R. stared straight ahead at the undergrowth and silence fell between us. Beneath the parasol’s orange light, his features were accentuated, and I could make out the sense of purpose that also characterized V.’s face. This was one way the two brothers were alike. It wasn’t so much the shape of their noses or chins or the plumpness of their lips, but their gazes, their smiles, the way they moved their bodies, that indicated their shared lineage and close bond.
Back Roads Page 10
