I was just about finished with my coffee when the noise of an engine travelled to us from the road. V. was back at last. I stood up to go greet him, but a man was already approaching the patio. Gilles Ferland. He was wearing a Red Sox ball cap and his face was covered in mosquito bites. We looked each other up and down for a few seconds, and then I announced to R. that I was going. As I passed Ferland, I could feel the current of animosity running through his muscles and felt as though I was in the darkness of Saint-Vital’s 4th Line on a December evening. A shiver ran from my feet to my head and I jumped into my car.
* * *
Night is falling and I’m sitting with P. on the porch loveseat. I can hear spring frogs croaking in the swamp that separates our property from our neighbour’s; their call reaches me through a kind of gelatinous screen distorting the sound. Mixed in with it is the almost deafening ribbit, ribbit of the wood frogs who’ve made their home in the forested area on the other side of the stream, so loud I can hardly hear what P. is telling me. I stretch toward the little red table in front of the loveseat for the bottle of Wild Turkey and help myself to another glass. I never drink bourbon, but tonight I need a rather tougher stimulant than my habitual after-dinner coffee.
P. doesn’t dare tell me I’ve had too much to drink, because he’s realized that I’m in one of those states where I can’t hear or listen to anything. During dinner he’d tried to figure out why I was so on edge, but I didn’t want to talk to him about Ferland, or R., afraid that he’d challenge me or accuse me of being paranoid. I changed the subject and brought it back to what we’d been discussing before we were distracted by a phone call and dragged back to our everyday preoccupations: the fence that needed to be put back up, the wild roses that need pruning, the porch we have to paint. I wanted to talk about the moon which had just risen behind the mountain and would soon be making the dogs howl. I wanted to describe to P. the hypothesis which argues that Theia, a planetoid the size of Mars, collided with Earth to cause the formation of the satellite ruling our tides and our lunatics’ moods.
I sketched out Theia’s shape with my hands, and, as the first dogs started to howl, I watched the sky in which heaps of pulverized matter were flying, flaming rocks of fire that would explode and then merge in explosions muffled by the distance. For a moment I forgot all about Ferland, Heather, H. W. Thorne, and the others, instead imagining the stories I would write about how the stars came into being, deep in the core of a universe of infinite darkness into which my weightless body would ultimately drift.
Now I’ve fallen back down on the ground again, my feet resting on a wooden crate that looks further away with every sip of bourbon, each taste at the same time lengthening my interminable legs. At the end of my feet, I see Heather keeping watch over the woods from inside her car as she asks herself why the trees are swaying so, and where the two men are hiding — the two men she dreams about, leading her to scream to the point that she is jolted out of her sleep and compelled to position herself near the broken window that protects her no more against the bad weather than it does the covetous hands heading toward her through the unending forest and about to enter this zone outside of time over which the storm will soon break.
“Storm,” I say to P. as I put my glass down on the red table, “we have to watch the storm,” and I go to bed, my long legs vaulting me up the stairs that fade into the darkness.
In the collapsing bed, I tell myself that maybe Heather is right and perhaps she and I are stuck, like Schrödinger’s cat — like the second cat could have been — in a place where we are simultaneously dead and alive. If this is the case then someone must apprehend us, between night and daylight, and confirm that we exist, if a delivery man is not to turn up at the house one fine day to give P. a box decorated with delicate flowers and the name “Heather” written on it.
It’s raining on the 4th Line. I forgot to bring my raincoat, and all I have for protection is P.’s father’s cap, the one P. bought for him on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. P. always leaves this cap, which has the logo of the famous Martha’s Vineyard Black Dog sewn on it, in the car in case it rains, as it is doing today. I’m slightly uncomfortable wearing the cap of a dead person who is not a blood relation, but don’t want to retrace my footsteps to put the Black Dog where it belongs, on one of the back seat’s head rests, from where it can watch the road.
I walk with my head bowed, because the cap is too big for me and slips down over my forehead with every step I take, so far that the visor obstructs my view. I grope my way forward, watching the water drip from the visor onto the soaked ground, and tell myself I’m an idiot for wearing this cap that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t know if Heather will be near the Buick, or if she’ll even want me in the vicinity, but I’m taking the chance because I need to see her, to touch her injuries and compare them with my own, and to hear her hoarse voice like my own. Basically, I need to know if there’s really a corpse under the tombstone near H. W. Thorne’s house, or if the young girl meant to be there somehow outlived the mourning of her loved ones.
After leaving a very narrow, snaking path between the trees, I finally see the branches that were broken when Heather’s car crashed through. I hurry in the direction of the accident and pull up sharply a few metres away from the Buick. Heather’s upper body is framed in the broken window that still has a scrap of purple leather clinging to it. And she’s pointing a gun at me.
For an instant, time stops. I can’t hear the rain falling anymore, I no longer feel my clothes sticking to my skin, the mud has no smell, and I don’t see Heather cocking the gun. When a bird, blue, maybe black, takes off from the roof of the car, I think the sound is a shot and crumple to the ground.
* * *
A band of yellow bleeding into red appears at the edge of the night, a corona surrounding the darkness as if the sun were setting at the same moment everywhere and spreading the hues of an impossible twilight across the bottom of the sky. If I didn’t know it was an illusion, I’d have thought the end of days had arrived, annihilating the Earth in bursts of blinding colour.
* * *
Did Heather really shoot at me, did the bullet really pierce my leather jacket, or did the fear of dying make me anticipate the shot — and the shock its impact would cause?
For several long minutes, I was deaf, as happens to anyone when their senses are exposed to a super-loud explosion, and hurled to the ground with a searing pain in their chests. Night fell and I was still there, curled up on the spongy ground and waiting for coyotes surely attracted by the scent of blood to come shred my flesh.
I no longer remember how I got home, but excepting the bruise marbling my right breast — which hit a root when I fell — my chest is in one piece. I can’t remember any of it anymore, except for Heather’s face, white as plaster, and the noise of the gun that deafened me.
V.
Even though summer has arrived, an autumnal atmosphere blankets the entire countryside today. A fine cold drizzle spatters the windows and the wind is blowing so hard you’d think it wants to tear all the new leaves from the maples, their weakest branches bending over sharply before snapping back to their original position, shaking their heads like shackled animals.
Sitting in front of the blank page, I remember Heather’s unblinking face as she pointed the gun at me and try to put it out of mind, focusing instead on the image of H. W. Thorne’s truck disappearing into the night. I interrogate myself once more about the origins of this man claiming to belong to the same story as me, wondering by which obscure path or secret corridor he came out of the shadows and into the forest, and I decide, for lack of any more plausible option, that he simply came from the night — that night is where he was born and where he appeared, at the heart of the darkness I myself created, and into which, whether I want to or not, I shall have to plunge.
* * *
Since H. W. Thorne was born of darkness, I waited for night to fall before proceeding
to his house. The rain had stopped, but the wind was still howling, pushing clouds through the sky that hid the moon before carrying on their northward race.
Thorne’s truck was parked in front of the house, just as I expected. The naked bulb hanging in the hall cast light over the yard through which I walked with the impression of encountering floodlights installed by an adherent of jungle law who’d not hesitate to shoot at my slightest wrong move.
For a moment, the pain that had been throbbing in my chest by Heather’s car resurfaced, and instinctively I brought my hand to my right breast. Convinced this sudden movement would trigger a barrage of bullets, I quickly crouched down and rolled outside the perimeter of light, my body entirely folded into the fetal position you instinctively adopt when an attack feels imminent. But no noise came from either the house or the woods. By the time I’d stopped panicking, two feet — two real feet — shod in heavy boots stood in front of me. Then a flashlight shone out, blinding me as I tried to identify the man who, towering over me, seemed even more imposing silhouetted against the hall light. “Get up,” said the voice of H. W. Thorne. Then he turned off the flashlight and headed for the house.
The door was open when I climbed the few steps up to it, and H. W. Thorne was waiting for me in the small living room to the right of the front door, with a bottle of cheap gin between his legs. “Drink,” he ordered, holding out the bottle to me as soon as I was sitting in the armchair facing his own. As I brought the bottle to my lips, the overpowering smell of the drink made me bilious, the alcohol burning my throat and then the centre of my chest, right beneath the spot where Heather’s bullet would have entered. As I pulled the bottle away, I felt a little cold liquid dribble down my chin and neck and wet my t-shirt collar. I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm, like cowboys in saloons or crooks in noir films do, and took a deep breath. H. W. Thorne and I were ready to talk.
* * *
When P. smelled the traces of the cheap gin on my skin and neck, he asked if I’d been at the village hotel or getting drunk with Heather. I replied, “The man with the gun is born of the night,” and, adding that I didn’t feel like laughing, went upstairs to change.
Now P. is asleep, the cat is snoring in his armchair, the calico cat’s just gone down to the basement, and I can see my hands tremble as I think back on my conversation with H. W. Thorne in the little living room where a photograph of Heather in hunting clothes occupied pride of place on the low table. I pointed at the photo, whose polished frame contrasted with the dust covering the table, and asked Thorne if she was his daughter. He took a big slug of the cheap gin, lowered his head, and said, “Yes, that’s my daughter, Heather Waverley.”
I had just asked the question for form’s sake, because unconsciously I knew, ever since Heather inhaled the smell coming off the man with the gun — a mixture of forest, childhood, and peaceful days, rather like the smell trailing in my own father’s wake — that H. W. Thorne had to be the man with broad shoulders who held her hand when she was a child and took her to see the hares on the La Languette trail. I had simply inverted the roles. In the story I was writing, it was the daughter, Heather Waverley, who was dead. But in the unwritten story, the father, the man with broad shoulders, was the one who had died.
This is the kind of ghost you have no interest in reviving, but then you describe a smell or draw a rough portrait, the ghost comes back to life, and you find yourself grappling with a stranger who’s taken the father’s place, and one daughter who’s replaced another and must be eliminated for the world to achieve equilibrium once more, for no equilibrium is possible when the resuscitated body is not the person lying in the tomb.
* * *
According to H. W. Thorne, Heather Waverley died on December 7, 1980, though her body was only found on the 12th — this, after a strange journey that would flummox the coroner and prevent him from determining the exact time or even date of death.
It was a Sunday, one H. W. Thorne would never forget. Heather had gone for a walk in La Languette, as she did almost every Sunday afternoon. She’d taken her father’s Buick and had parked near the crossroads at the foot of the little bridge that spans the river. At 3 p.m., H. W. Thorne felt a sharp pain in his chest and dropped his book, a John Irving novel Heather had given him. The book fell to his feet, in front of the same armchair in which he was presently sitting with, between his legs, the bottle of cheap gin he would mechanically lift to his lips as he told me what he knew of Heather Waverley’s death — which was not much, in fact, what with all leads obfuscated and so much mystery still surrounding her death, even now, thirty-five years later. He was, however, sure of one thing: Heather had died at 3 p.m., when The World According to Garp hit the floor.
* * *
It’s pointless trying to find a message in the book Heather chose to give to her father. John Irving’s The World According to Garp was simply the first relatively neutral title that came to my mind as I wrote the preceding lines, not wanting anyone to strive for a connection between the novel Thorne was reading and the way the story unfolds. It’s just a prop. I wanted Thorne to drop a book, any book, and for the sound of it falling to ring out as loud as the drama whipping Thorne’s life. A glass would have done the job just as well, maybe a cup, or a pipe, which would have left a stain on the living room carpet. The broken or knocked-over glasses will come later.
* * *
I anticipate the scene in which the clear or amber liquid draws an indeterminate pattern near H. W. Thorne’s armchair, and open my own copy of The World According to Garp, the yellowing cover showing its age. As I read the words I wrote on the flyleaf, I realize I was given this book in 1980 for a Christmas present around two weeks after Heather Waverley Thorne died. I’d forgotten this detail, just like I’ve forgotten almost everything about December 1980. Now I’m the one who drops the book, its dust jacket lands near the cat’s armchair and I pray that the sound of it falling is not tolling the bell of another death.
* * *
July 1. Canada Day. I return to the cemetery, because the first of July is also my father’s birthday. On his tombstone, the rain makes a pattern of long trees whose skinny trunks stand in relief against the black of the granite and form a grey forest evoking the sanctity of a cathedral. “Hi Dad, hi trees, happy birthday,” I say, and, after saluting the caterpillar crawling along the horizontal beam of the cross that decorates the stone — “Hi caterpillar” — I leave the cemetery with tears stinging my eyes.
* * *
It’s been a rotten spring and a shitty summer, that’s what everyone keeps saying in the face of the continuing cold weather and the rain that never stops falling over the land, on the flooded fields, on the untended gardens, exacerbating the mood of the gloomiest among us. I join in this chorus of complaining, hoping for some sign of warmth, some respite for the flowers, for the animals, for the people. And yet this summer has already had moments of such beauty for which it has been worth enduring a couple of errant days of fall, especially those few minutes during which I crouched with my cat under the big maple, waiting for the storm to arrive.
It was only six o’clock, but already an unexpectedly dark evening was supplanting the dusk. Behind the hedge of rose bushes, black clouds whirled across the sky toward the village, and we could hear the distant grumblings that heralded the storm’s imminence. The air was heavy, almost compressed, the maple leaves were barely rustling above our heads, and whatever weak light managed to pierce through the clouds had that amber tint I associate with the world’s hazy beginnings. Then a flash of lightning ripped through the clouds behind the rose bushes and the sky vibrated with a rumbling that you could believe had arisen from depths incessantly rumbling without our even being aware of it.
Sheltered under the maple, the cat and I were happy, and then the wind rose furiously, forcing the rose bushes to lean over, whipping up the dust on the road, and transporting twigs, dead leaves and other, living ones ripped from the
trees. In no time at all, we were soaked to the bone, the cat seriously annoyed and me still happy.
* * *
I know, I know, it rains a lot in this novel, and there’s more rain to come. I can’t help it. All I have to do is open the manuscript, and the skies open too, spotting the pages with either tiny scattered dots or bigger patches summing up the climate of the writing hours in which I seek the respite of grey mornings.
H. W. Thorne was practically drunk when he agreed to talk to me about December 7, 1980. After dropping The World According to Garp, still open at page 132, he’d put on his coat and boots and hightailed it over to his nearest neighbour’s, a young man named Vince Morissette who’d recently moved into a house about a kilometre away from his own. Seeing Thorne in such an anxious state, Morissette dressed quickly and accompanied him to La Languette, cursing the mounting storm. The two men peering through the windshield could barely see twenty feet in front of them; nevertheless, Thorne begged his young neighbour to drive faster, even as the mixture of hail and snow made the roads slippery, and threatened, with every gust of wind, to send them careening off the road.
The light was fading when they saw Thorne’s Buick near the crossroads where Heather had parked. Before Morissette’s car had even come to a halt, Thorne had opened his door and was running toward the Buick, hoping that Heather Waverley was sheltering there and waiting for the storm to ease off. The car was empty, but Heather’s red tuque she refused to wear three-quarters of the time, preferring to expose her hair to the wind and freeze her ears, lay on the passenger seat. This was the tuque they would give the dogs to sniff when it became clear that Heather Waverley Thorne had disappeared.
Back Roads Page 11
