Back Roads

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Just as Vince takes a seat opposite mine at the table, R. appears in the kitchen, bringing fall scents with him too. Vince offers his brother a coffee, but R. pretends that he has to go out right away, that he needs to cord wood at his house. Neither Vince nor I are fooled: R. is simply unable to breathe the same air as me. But finally I’m ready to confront his animosity, because there are too many unresolved questions between us, too many grey areas in which the shadow of Gilles Ferland’s face can be discerned. I tell him, “I won’t bite, Réal,” speaking his name for the first time since we met at Vince’s, and this unsettles him slightly, though not enough for him to accept Vince’s coffee. He lowers his head and opens the door to go back to where he came from, to the void he evaporates into every time he leaves Vince’s house.

  “She said she won’t bite you,” mutters Vince, clenching his fists, and Réal stops in the doorway, surprised by his palpable anger. “Sit down for a couple minutes,” he orders, and Réal reluctantly comes and sits down to my left, at the far end of the table. The silence weighs heavily for a few moments, as loaded as Vince’s anger, and I jump right in and ask Réal what he knows of Gilles Ferland, whom I saw here with him a few weeks earlier, how long they’ve known each other, if he has a snowmobile and if he hunts in La Languette, but Réal’s face closes up with each of my questions and eventually he pushes his chair back violently and tells me to leave Ferland in peace, that the past is the past and we can’t change it.

  Ten seconds later the door slams, but Réal has revealed enough for me to know that Gilles Ferland’s life is one of troubled secrets that provoke rage when some stranger, who has by chance shown up in the survivor’s guilty present, desperately scratches the ground in an attempt to exhume them.

  * * *

  The south wind did bring snow, and Réal Morissette, propelled by a cocktail of anger and despair, strode through the blizzard ripping at the La Languette trees with a yowling that could have been mistaken for the wailing of an animal in heat.

  His face red from the driving snow, Réal followed the track of the myriad paths he’d taken a thousand times, familiar with every landmark, every fork, every rise and fall, remembering he’d killed a deer at the bottom of that slope, or this stream where he’d taken off his boots one spring evening to relieve his hurting feet in the icy water, or to quench his thirst on a blazing hot day. But the succour of these places in which he could usually find solace reminded him that there is no peace for a man whose conscience is burdened with a lie.

  At the junction of two paths, he turns right, hoping to lose himself and then, in his gut, he experiences the mounting, paralytic fear of someone who suddenly realizes all the trees look the same, the stumps and mounds too, who realizes his footsteps have disappeared behind him and that he risks wandering even deeper in, where nobody will ever find him again. And yet Réal Morissette knows the forest too well to be lost, even after walking for several more hours and well away from the roads dissecting the territory.

  Tired of fighting the pain tearing him apart, he heads north and ends up in a clearing swept by powdery snow whirling in spirals, trying to breach the wall of trees but being pushed back into the centre of the clearing, where the snow again lifts up in the spirals that the old folk around here associate with witchcraft. He moves on through the blowing snow, lifts his arms to the sky and pleads with the devil to take him, but the witches are the ones whipping him, whistling with the wind right into the heart of his cries. At the end of his strength, he eventually lets himself slide down the trunk of a damn tree and, through his tears, mutters the name of a deceased young girl: Heather, Heather Waverley.

  The snow took Heather by surprise, and in vain she blows on the twigs, which blaze up briefly before breaking up and falling through the criss-crossed branches.

  The phosphorescent clock on the dashboard shows only a quarter after four and night is already falling, a night that will be long and sleepless. Making the most of the last rays of the setting sun, Heather picks up the axe with the intention of cutting a few pine branches to make herself a bed, but the dark is coming on too quickly and she returns to the car with just two small branches.

  For the umpteenth time she counts the matches still in the book — eight — and decides she can sacrifice another one or two. She pulls some twigs out from under the car where she’d put them to keep dry, stuffs them beneath the branches, lights a match, and then starts the whole aborted operation over again, blowing, bending her body over the dead fire, pushing the twigs toward the middle, blowing, blowing, and finally a flame strong enough to fight the snow flickers up. Heather Thorne lets a squeal of joy escape her mouth, immediately regretting her exclamation as it reverberates through the forest, and then she moves closer to the burgeoning fire with frozen hands.

  * * *

  An unfranked envelope addressed to A. A. M. was left in my mailbox during the night. I found it when I was trying to fix the letterbox lever, which had lost one of its screws. I opened it hurriedly, amid the wind and blowing snow, and the envelope fell to my feet. It contained a white sheet, letter size, on which a few words had been written with a black marker: “You’re barking up the wrong tree. Heather never had a chance of getting out of there. You should be the first to know that, given that the crime was signed with your initials. A piece of friendly advice: shut your fucking mouth or get out of here before it’s too late and it all starts up again.”

  I read the message a second time and remained at the mailbox, arms dangling at my sides, until the ink started to run in the snow and the letters started to look deformed, “your” becoming “her” — “her initials” — and the word “crime” enlarging and covering the entire page. What crime was I being accused of, I wondered, as black water soaked into my woollen gloves.

  I picked up the envelope, now just a wet rag, put it in one of my pockets, went back into the house, and placed it, along with the letter, under a pile of dictionaries so that they’d dry and get their shape back, but the ink permeated the cover of my Petit Robert dictionary, imprinting symbols like hieroglyphs on its white exterior.

  The letter is now illegible and I am the only person, apart from whoever wrote it, to know its contents, which as the ink dilutes them are gradually becoming more distorted and making me doubt the accusation of the letter and the threat easily read between its lines. How to judge the truth of a message that has been erased? How can you even claim that it was written?

  * * *

  “Particles derive their mass not from themselves but through mating furiously with the void,” writes Étienne Klein in Le monde selon Étienne Klein, which pushes me to wonder if the writer’s weight is the consequence of his own coitus with the void. I rummage furiously in the void, dig it out, and at last open John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat in which I have underlined the following phrase in red ink: “An important aspect of the uncertainty principle . . . is that it does not work in the same sense forward and backward in time.”

  I appropriate the sentence and write a few more words on scrap paper: “A text behaves in different ways, depending on whether it draws from the past or anticipates the future. Time varies according to a text being projected forward or backward and the speed at which the past evolves. It is possible to modify the past with a single stroke of a pencil, a single roll of the dice, or by pressing the Delete button. But the trace of the suppressed past lives on.”

  Then I rip up the scrap paper and ask Holy Crappy Owl if two plus two still makes four. “Five!” he exclaims while he counts the wing feathers he spreads out in front of himself: “Five!”

  I don’t want to think about Heather. Not now.

  * * *

  Sitting near the fire in which only a few embers remain, Heather wonders where she’ll go now that the cold and snow have arrived, and then she hears a feeble barking, more like a whine. “Jackson?” she calls out hesitantly. “Jackson, my love?” When another whine reac
hes her, she jumps up and runs in the direction the moans seem to be coming from.

  * * *

  The anonymous letter is lying on the table in front of P., who is trying in vain to figure it out, since the paper on which it was written is now nothing more than a surface impregnated with washed ink. He also examines my dictionary’s dustjacket, on which a few words whose meaning escapes us are imprinted. I pull the paper toward me and repeat from memory the letter’s contents, uncertain which possessive adjective preceded “initials” — was it “your” initials or “her” initials — and then draw his attention to the tone of the message, which, despite offering “friendly advice” actually expresses a deep hostility.

  P. doesn’t like its tone either, nor the anonymity that accentuates the threat. He asks what I’ve got myself into now, what corpse I’ve unearthed, to incite such fear, such hatred, and the violence that will necessarily follow. I reply that had I known I was exhuming a dead person’s remains when I called Heather Thorne by the only name belonging to her, then I’d probably have hurled the shovel as far away as I could. But it’s too late for any of that, the ground has been disturbed and the dead woman unearthed by her creator — if that’s not too eclectic a way of explaining Heather Thorne’s return from heaven or hell.

  I twirl my glass of wine around in my hand, tilt it a little to appreciate its colour, and ask P. what he would do in my position. It’s a ridiculous question, he says, because he’s not me and I’m not even sure myself what position I’ve been assigned. So for now, I decide to do what A. A. M. would do: continue writing the novel, continue digging up the earth, until my hand touches the contours of Heather Waverley Thorne’s coffin.

  * * *

  Despite her fatigue, Heather is still pursuing Jackson’s yapping, but the further she runs, the further away it sounds, as if Jackson were toying with her and wanted to take her back to a different time in her life. She is experiencing the strange sensation of each step being a step in the direction of something forgotten, that she’s not moving toward what she could call her future, but sinking into a torpid cycle whose slowness is tied up to the very limits of its own duration. She feels, furthermore, as if she’ll soon reach the ultimate boundary, one where time will stop before embarking on its race to a denouement occurring in a forest that is also retreating, folding up on itself in the imperceptible but constant movement of a slight breeze, one that nevertheless makes trees turn and twist in their trunks, millimetre by millimetre, toward the sun in the east, and new beginnings.

  Exhausted by the toll of long hours of walking in which all she can rely on to move forward is the gentle wind, she decides to stop for the night, convinced she’ll be able to catch up with time’s languor and that Jackson will again be there tomorrow to guide her to her final destination.

  * * *

  I lean over the dashboard, which endlessly shows quarter after midnight, and in vain I search for Heather. Close to the Buick, sooty branches resting on a pile of ashes indicate to me that she left some time ago. On the ground, footsteps whose prints have widened come and go in multiple directions and are then lost where the snow has melted beneath the cover of the trees.

  I walk around the car and notice that Heather has taken her gun with her. The axe is still lying near the dead fire, though, shining in the light of the third-quarter moon. I grab it and, as I raise my arms and brandish its sharp edge in front of me, I hear a yapping, quickly followed by a wail, and I understand that Heather is about to find Jackson.

  * * *

  December 5. Time is short. I trash Heather’s car with the axe. I shatter the front windshield, the rear windshield, tear up the seats, smash in the doors, sweating like a convict and emitting a raucous cry with every blow because I don’t want Heather coming back to shelter here. The Buick belongs to another part of the story and I need to move backward if the story is to continue.

  This is the only choice I have, and for it to happen I need to gather my notes and my wits and think, think, does A plus B equal C, must focus on Heather and Jackson, must pay one last visit to Vince, to Howard W. Thorne, to Gilles Ferland and Herb McMillan, who lives I don’t know where and who might well hold the key to the whole story.

  I need, as I said, to think, A times B, to foresee the inevitable obstacles and the possible return of the small woman or maybe one of her acolytes. I must also be on my guard with the author of the letter, someone who might spring into action at any moment, and I need to give P. instructions in case things go wrong, how to repair the fences, clear the paths, what do I know? I must act quickly if I want to relive Heather Waverley Thorne’s death before she does.

  * * *

  Things aren’t right. Things aren’t right at all. The storm that washed us out a few days ago is merely a memory now, and the mild early-December temperature is hindering Heather’s walk toward her past and thwarting my plans. I need another storm, I need uncontrollable winds that will blind the clouds and hold us hostage to the story coming our way.

  Not knowing to whom I should turn, I call the cats into my study for a summit conference with Holy Crappy Owl, but the cats, what with their logic too simplistic to follow my ratiocinations, don’t understand my story at all. As soon as I start talking about Jackson’s yelping they start yawning, their way of telling me dogs hold no interest for them and advising me to get some sleep.

  But the cats don’t know that sleep no longer soothes me, that my nights are no more than a series of equations with interchangeable variables: H. W. equals A. A.; A. A. plus A. A. equals P.; when you subtract A. and A. from H. W. you get Bev; P. is bigger than R., but is R. the same as V.? How are the cats to know my dreams are filled with strangers who take turns hiding behind the features of a little woman who squeals her car tires along roads where evanescent deer and dogs are resting?

  Only Crappy gets excited as my story progresses, imploring me to find the small woman again, to lock Ferland and McMillan up before the next storm, to hide Heather in the attic and get a gun like hers. “You can find one,” he shouts, “you can find one, now hurry.” He is even more horrified than I am by the illegible letter and convinced it won’t stop there, that after the letter will come stones thrown through the windows, dead rats on the doorstep, slashed tires, who knows what, hurry!

  I order him to be quiet for a minute: “Shut up, Crappy.” His cries are making my head spin, and his jumping around and making his string swing from left to right, his twisting it around himself and attempts at a few pirouettes mean I have to get up and untangle the cord from his neck. “Crappy, shut your fucking mouth! Please!” But Crappy doesn’t get what I’m saying and carries on jiggling around shouting, “Gun, Andrée, gun, bang!”

  * * *

  Réal Morissette is staring at his brother, Vince, as he stands hunched over the photo that he’s been unable to put out of his mind ever since that so-called Beverley, may the devil take her, talked to him about Heather and Jackson. He slides it into one of his coat pockets when he goes out, places it on the table during mealtimes, even takes it to bed with him, and Réal is convinced both of them will end up crazy if Vince doesn’t let go of the damn photo. He extends an arm to grab it but Vince, his face a thundercloud, slams his palm down on the photo and then goes up to his bedroom without a word.

  He lies down fully dressed on the bed, the photo beside him, and thinks back to that November day when Réal, Heather, Jackson, and he had gone for a picnic in La Languette despite the chilly weather because nothing made them happier than warming their fingers around a thermos of steaming coffee and watching the river flow by.

  Vince has forgotten why Réal had accompanied them. Because he was his brother, simple as that. Because he liked the river, black coffee, and Heather’s company. Maybe too much, he thinks, and suddenly the urge to scream overwhelms him, rips his chest open, because he is wondering now if Réal, his brother — his only real friend, his confidant, dammit — has something to do with
Heather Waverley’s death, and if all his solicitude actually originates in a guilt predating the photograph, which would be based on his coveting the forbidden object and his desire to possess it at any cost.

  He extends an arm to light the lamp on his nightstand and looks at the photo again, a photo taken by a young man in love, Beverley had concluded. But Vince Morissette, diminished by his sleepless nights, sees nothing in it but the work of a traitor.

  Heather Thorne is lost in the heart of a forest darkened by the constant December clouds and no longer knows where she is. This morning, her first thought when she woke up was for Jackson. “Jackson!” she cried out hoarsely, and the dog answered her. To get to him, she needed to follow the line formed by the three birches facing her, and then take the path chainsaws had clear-cut behind them. But before that, she needed water, more water, because the lining of her throat was so dry that tears sprang to her eyes every time she tried to swallow. She had to find a stream or a spring, clear water on a bed of stones.

  She found one by taking a left beyond the birches and making her way to a clearing where she turned forty-five degrees to the right after skirting around a huge glacial boulder covered in moss. She scratched an arrow in it with her fingers to show her the way to go on her return. Bent over the stream, she thanked an invisible heaven for having led her there, and looked for a hollow object she could use to store water for the thirsty hours ahead. She tried to shape a piece of bark to use as a container, but the effort was futile. Never mind, under this magnanimous heaven other streams would flow.