Seizing Heather Waverley by the arms, he tries to catch her unfocused gaze and begs the young girl to refute the scene in front of her, of lifeless bodies lying on snow-covered ground spattered with red. “Heather, tell me you didn’t just do that?” he says, “Heather, tell me, for fuck’s sake!” But Heather did indeed shoot Gilles Ferland, two shots it took, and then Herb McMillan, who hadn’t noticed a thing. Two shots each: Bang! Bang!
Vince gently takes Heather’s gun away from her. She doesn’t resist. Then he goes to help the injured woman, Beverley Simons, who is talking deliriously about Virgin birds and, unable to reach her arms up to where the birds actually fly, tracing wings on her stomach. Quickly he removes his coat and sweater and tucks them under Beverley’s head, dabbing her temples with one of the sleeves. “Go for help, Wave, fast,” he says, and Heather Waverley Thorne disappears into the forest without a word.
Early in the morning a dozen police officers arrived with dogs, followed by several snowmobilers eager to help and wanting to mitigate the events, news of which had spread like a trail of powder through the territory. But nobody needed help any longer, and no amount of goodwill could diminish the drama that had occurred in the middle of the blizzard, its delirium so powerful and remembered so vividly that it would be dubbed “The Deranged of December 1980,” as the storm which had transmitted its fury and craziness to anyone and everyone who’d had the audacity to venture out in it. Nothing could alleviate the harmful consequences now: Herb McMillan was dead, Gilles Ferland too, and Beverley Simons’s blood had drained out onto the fresh snow where two red swans had unfolded their wings.
On December 8, 1980, from dawn to dusk, La Languette had never before been such a screaming forest, screaming along the paths and trails through which police and snowmobilers had roared their engines shouting Heather, Heather Waverley, because a young woman had disappeared, leaving nothing behind her but the crime’s weapon, an old hunting gun her father had given her when she’d attained the age at which women need to be able to defend themselves.
As for Howard W. Thorne, the delirium touched him where his heart beat, and he needed to be taken out of the forest on a stretcher along the road to La Languette amid winds fighting for the privilege of ravaging the newborn dawn, embracing in wild dances and stealing the breath of the creatures dressed in wool trying to fight its strength and dominance.
The anarchic weather, which made the darkness of uncertain days tip over into the whiteness of endless nights, lasted until Friday, December 12.
That morning, Heather Waverley Thorne was found in a clearing, leaning against a tree and facing the rising sun. It was Réal Morissette — who until then had refused to be involved in the search or a hunt, depending on whether you thought of looking for Heather Waverley Thorne as an attempt to save the life of a woman numbering among the Delirious, or as a criminal investigation — who made the macabre discovery, which could just about be called that if you agreed that the peaceful smile fixed to the young woman’s white face could be defined as a vision of horror.
Refusing to touch the body, he’d called for help and sat there, next to Heather, until the engine noise reached him and, on the other side of the clearing, three machines appeared, their bodies reflecting the first rays of sun — like insects whose shining forewings buzz in the luminous dawn.
On the 2nd Line, during those few days in which the region’s inhabitants lost any sensible consciousness of the world, the man called P. paced around the rooms of his house, imprisoned by the blizzard that blocked the roads and cut the power, isolating him even more. In a moment of pained rage, he hurled the silent phone against a wall, making a photo of the woman he lived with, Andrée, fall off it. Andrée who had furtively sneaked off into the endless night so she could determine, when the darkness finally disappeared, whether her body would make a shadow on the ground or if she was no more than another woman’s shadow.
It seems as though I’ve been walking for months and months on the unstable terrain into which I sink with each step, and where all my landmarks are melting into a powdery snow that blinds me. I lost the backpack I’d brought with me, I lost Heather, and until this morning, I’d lost my bearings, convinced that the house whose roof I was hoping to eventually see through trees beaten down by the storm had disappeared, just like Howard W. Thorne’s house had disappeared. In vain I searched the mountain for his house, but all I found was a structure on the verge of collapse, near which, on a pink granite rock, the initials of a young girl named Heather Waverley, little more than a child, were fading. But at last the light of the sun penetrated the frosty December air and there was the house, intact among the trees, on the hill beyond the arch where the April heat is melting the last few patches of snow.
I watch my body’s shadow cut the ground in front of me, its furrows trying to become rivers, and walk through the arch. A man and two cats are watching me from the windows; at first, they don’t recognize me, and then they rush to the front door.
Vince has prepared salads, sandwiches, and appetizers and laid them out on the glass table in the middle of the patio. I can see him talking to a woman I don’t know in the kitchen where a few guests are gathered, and after he’s done he comes out to give me a bottle of cold beer that I clink against his, toasting friendship and life and then drinking in silence, happy that winter is behind us at last. Around the house, the grass is beginning to grow. Two robins alight on the turf but are immediately chased away by Vince’s border collie. “Jackson,” Vince calls, and the dog bounds up onto the deck and rubs against our legs.
“Do you remember Beverley Simons?” Vince asks suddenly, biting his lip as if memories of the young girl had filled him with nostalgia. “I dreamed about her last night,” he says, “a wild and crazy dream set in the woods near the La Languette wayside cross.” I answer yes, that I remember Beverley Simons as well as if I’d last seen her yesterday.
We finish our beers and Vince gets up to fetch some wine. “Don’t worry,” I say, “Leave it to me.” The house smells pleasant and spring-like and I stop in the middle of the kitchen to take in the surroundings, which are just as I imagined they would be. Sitting on a small set of drawers is a photo of Vince, taken at La Languette in the company of a young woman who looks strangely like me. “Her name was Heather,” says Réal, who’s come to join us. “Heather Waverley. She died in a car accident about a week after that photo was taken.” I say, “Yes, Heather Waverley, like on the pink granite plaque.”
A little later, a few of Réal’s friends arrive, two men whose faces are very familiar to me and a small woman whose wide-set toes are exposed in sandals that aren’t right for the season. They frown at me, as if I were also familiar to them, though from some more distant, hazy time in their lives. I welcome the diminutive woman with a discreet nod, but she slips away immediately, and I leave the kitchen while the two men, who’ve taken Réal aside, ask who I am. I can’t hear the name Réal gives them, and I prefer it that way.
It’s midnight by the time I tell Vince I must be getting back. In my rear-view mirror, I watch his silhouetted figure shrink in the porch light, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see him again.
* * *
P. and I take advantage of the vegetation not having grown over the fences yet to put them back up. We work until the middle of the afternoon, our bodies sweating because of the clothes we have to wear so as not to get scratched by the rose bushes. When we’re finished, I take a shower and announce to P. that I’m going for a walk on the 4th Line and will be back in time for dinner.
I park the car just before the first bend and follow the lane to the cabin that goes around the hill, barely a hill, where blueberries abound in August. A hundred metres from the road, I enter the forest and walk to a clearing planted with young trees. Through the undergrowth I can make out the carcass of a rusty Buick, the doors of which have been torn off. I move closer, push aside the dry grass, rocks, thistles, and dead leaves
that surround and conceal it, and finally find the axe, extremely well preserved, its shining blade reflecting the sun coming through the red trees.
Before retracing my steps, I examine the vehicle’s dashboard. The clock has stopped at quarter after midnight. I compare the time on my watch to the clock’s and realize that the wound on my wrist has opened up again. I must have aggravated it looking for the axe or caught myself on the rose bushes. I walk back to the road and down to the stream that forks near the ditch and apply a bit of mud to the wound.
An animal — a hare, fox, or porcupine — is sneaking around in the undergrowth behind me when a Buick appears at the top of the hill, its chrome gleaming in the twilight. As the vehicle approaches the animal flees, a few leaves rustle, and a bird takes to the air. When the Buick’s driver notices me, she raises her hand in greeting, returns my smile and brushes an impudent lock of hair away from her face. Then her smile freezes, her eyes widen in disbelief, and the lock falls back down onto her forehead as the car skids onto the gravel where the Pyrrharctia isabella are laboriously moving forward. A cloud of dust surrounds me as the Buick crashes into the glowing forest in a squeal of blue metal.
When I leave the 4th Line, I know who I am.
My name is Heather Thorne.
* * *
Saint-Sébastien-de-Frontenac, March 2014–January 2017
Acknowledgements
First of all, my warmest thanks to P., for P. M., with whom I wandered my back roads with a glass of wine. A particular thank you to Y., an old friend who, unbeknownst to him, was my inspiration for the character of Vince.
I would also like to express my sincerest gratitude to the whole Éditions Québec Amérique team for their support and patience. A big thank you to Jacques Fortin, Caroline Fortin, Marie-Noëlle Gagnon, Mylaine Lemire, Nathalie Caron, and everyone else who worked behind the scenes to produce this novel.
Thanks also to the members of the Arachnide team for their own impeccable work. In particular, I would like to thank Noah Richler, who provided me such a warm welcome to the press. Many thanks, also, to Gemma Wain, Maria Golikova, and Joshua Greenspon. Deepest gratitude, at last, to J. C. Sutcliffe, for translating this novel without getting lost in any one of the paths less travelled I explore in it.
And finally, thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support.
Translator’s Note and Acknowledgements
With every translation there is a challenge. For me, for this book, it was most of all the fact that Andrée Michaud’s style and voice are very different from how I write, leading to a first draft that was akin to the book writing a straitjacket on. Michaud is an exceptional stylist, and it is a daunting if not impossible task to trace all the tiny whorls and loops of the author’s prose. A good translation will land very close to its original, knowing where to swerve away to preserve the text’s intention, and when to mimic the French more strictly to convey something crucial. Some translators — including me, usually — often prefer to keep full stops as they are in the original and then punctuate sentences internally as needed, to suit the target language. But this technique could not work for Andrée Michaud’s style, given its unusual grammatical constructions, and resulted in ungainly English sentences confusing to parse, let alone to read in any fluent way. Adhering too closely to the original, both syntactically and stylistically, meant, paradoxically, that the text lost some of its character and verve. Thankfully, Noah Richler was a wise and thoughtful counsellor. He persuaded me that I might confidently step further away from the dictates of the French language while still being true to Andrée Michaud’s intentions in order to retain the novel’s singular voice.
A further note: all quotations of books are from published versions of either the original English or original English translation, except for the quotations from Jean Sioui on page 70 and Étienne Klein on page 241, neither of which have been translated yet. I have done my best to render these with the sensitivity they are due.
I would like to thank Andrée A. Michaud, Noah Richler, Elizabeth Mitchell, Gemma Wain, and Maria Golikova.
ANDRÉE A. MICHAUD is one of the most beloved and celebrated writers of the Francophonie. She is, among numerous accolades, a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and has won the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing, the Prix Ringuet, and France’s Prix SNCF du Polar. Her novel Boundary was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and has been published in seven territories. Back Roads is Michaud’s eleventh novel and the third to be published in English. She was born in Saint-Sébastien-de-Frontenac and continues to live in the province of Quebec.
J. C. SUTCLIFFE is a translator, writer, and editor. She has written for the Globe and Mail, the Times Literary Supplement, and the National Post, among other publications. Her translations include Mama’s Boy and Mama’s Boy Behind Bars by David Goudreault, Document 1 by François Blais, and Worst Case, We Get Married by Sophie Bienvenu. Back Roads is her first translation for Arachnide.
house of anansi press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.
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