I'le Dor, page 10
The telephone rang. It was his mother. She’d missed him the night before. And would he be coming for dinner? “I am making your favourite, Lucien,” she said, her voice slightly plaintive.
“Ah oui, maman, but I didn’t say I’d be there,” he said, trying not to let his irritation show. He was wondering what Michelle would think about Libby being in town. Did she know that Libby was here?
“No, but you usually call,” his mother said.
“I’m sorry. But do you know who’s in Ile d’Or?” She would never guess.
“Nick Petranovich.”
“Really?” Lucien was startled. “I didn’t know that.”
“Michelle told me. So, who else is here?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. For a moment, he had forgotten. “Elizabeth Muir.”
“Muir,” Maman said. “Do you mean Libby? Charlotte’s daughter?”
“Yes, that’s who I mean.”
“Well, invite her to dinner, too,” his mother said, something that shouldn’t have surprised him as much as it did. Although she was aging and hadn’t been the same since Guy’s death, his mother’s hospitality was still legendary in the north.
“Not tonight,” Lucien said. He wanted more time with Libby before he took her to his mother’s house. “Before she leaves.”
“This is so unusual. We don’t get visitors in November. How long is she staying?”
Who would stay very long at the beginning of winter when the weather would only get colder? When the wind would blow down the streets carrying the snow into drifts and no matter how many sweaters and scarves you wore, would cut right through all the layers and make you shiver? Only someone who lived here would look forward to skiing and skating, to curling on the ice in the club down near the mine, to walking on the thick snow and hearing the crunching sound. Sometimes he even looked forward to it.
“I’m not sure. Sounds like it will only be for a few days.”
20.
A TALL CHAIN link fence separated the mine from the highway. From where she stood at the gate, Libby could see a blue and white fleur-de-lys at the top of the head frame. A young man in yellow hardhat and heavy work boots stood on the other side, just inside the fence.
“You can’t come in here,” he said. Vous ne pouvez pas aller par ici.
“My father worked here,” Libby said. Mon père a travaillé ici. It hadn’t dawned on her that the fence and the fleur-de-lys might be intended to exclude her.
“Oh, yes,” he smiled slightly. “What did he do?”
“Ingénieur.”
“I’m the engineer now. My name’s Jacques Paquin.”
“Paul’s son?” she asked. When her son was born, they’d called him Paul. She’d never said where the name came from when she suggested it as Barton had liked it right away, too.
Jacques nodded.
“Well, I’m Elizabeth Morley. My father was Walter Muir.” That should gain entrance. How could someone so young deny her that?
“Je ne m’en souviens pas,” the young man said. I don’t remember him.
It seemed inconceivable to Libby that her father had been so soon forgotten when his presence was writ large on every corner of this mine. The mill. The hoist house. The small cars that carried ore up from underground. The tracks that crisscrossed the surface. The assay lab. The men in their grimy clothes emerging from the cage that came up from the dark spaces under the earth. Noises, smells, memories of her father’s work came back so sharply that she could not believe this man didn’t share them.
“My father worked in that office.” She pointed at a square building covered with large sheets of green asbestos.
“That’s where I work,” Jacques said.
“Is there anyone who can speak English anymore?”
“Yes, but everyone speaks French now.”
Libby did not turn away as she thought he intended her to do. It felt to her as if they’d reached an impasse and she wondered if he would now ignore her.
Raising his hand to his hat, he straightened it. “Do you want to see the office?” he asked finally.
As she followed him up the incline toward the main building, Libby visualized the oak desk where she’d seen her father reach for a bottle of Seagram’s V.O. in the lower drawer. Inside, she saw the white, porcelain fountain where she had stood on tiptoes for a sip of water. The secretary had worked on the payroll in the office next to the fountain and the same wooden stairs still led up to the floor where her father had sat at his slanted draughting table on a high seat like a bar stool. When the door behind them opened, Libby almost expected to see her father come through it with a slight whiff of alcohol on his breath. When he blew his nose, laced with thin purple veins, it would start to bleed.
“Miss Muir,” he would say. “What are you doing here?” The reddish moustache above his lip would quiver. He would take her up to sit on his high stool where she would read his small, neat printing on the blueprints
“He’s the best engineer in the north.”
How many times had she heard that? Often, in the same breath, “It’s too bad he drinks so much. His poor wife. Poor Charlotte!”
A man in a jacket and tie glanced at them. He stopped outside the manager’s office. His hair, mostly grey, receded slightly at the temples as he stood there, seemingly waiting for an explanation.
“Her father worked here,” Jacques said.
“Who was your father?” the man asked kindly. Qui était votre père?
“Walter Muir,” Libby said.
A wide smile crossed his face. “Ah, oui. Walter Muir.” Gesturing toward his office, he broke into English. “Come in.” When they were inside, he pointed to a photograph on his wall among a series of black and white shots of men, some in shirts and ties, some in hard hats, all of them waiting for the photographer to capture them. “This is her father, Jacques. He and this man, John McNab, and these others, built this mine. They were here at the very beginning.” He turned to Libby. “I worked here in summers as a young engineering student. Your father hired me. I’m Maurice Gauthier.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Libby said.
She watched Jacques nod almost imperceptibly, his lack of interest palpable. He ran his fingers over some rock samples while the manager asked about her family.
“I was sorry when your father died,” he said. “How’s your mother?”
“She’s okay,” Libby said. Her mother had arthritis that was often painful and these days was sometimes dizzy. Not too long ago she’d fallen. It was fortunate she hadn’t broken anything. Libby supposed overall her mother wasn’t doing too badly.
“I’m glad to hear it. Please give Charlotte my regards.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll certainly do that. She’ll be delighted, Monsieur Gauthier.”
“Jacques, show Walter Muir’s daughter whatever she wants to see,” the manager said.
Nodding, Jacques headed quickly toward the door. Libby spun around to follow him up the stairs to his office, the same one that was once her father’s. Her eyes were drawn to the bottom drawer of the oak desk. She thought of the child who had for the longest time imagined when the bottle was empty it would disappear and her world would be safe again. When her father was out of the room, she couldn’t resist pulling out the drawer. Another brown paper bag was what she found and she fingered the edges of the paper and opened it carefully, still hoping it would be something other than the dreaded bottle.
Oh, Daddy.
Inside was always yet another Seagram’s rye whisky.
Jacques cleared his throat noisily, leaning against the draughting table. His eyes were narrow slits as he watched her. He looked impatient, as if she were a strange animal who had wandered into his territory.
“Do you want to see anything else?” he asked.
Through the window, she could see the conveyor belt carrying crushed rock to the mill.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like to see the mill.”
As she stood staring into the dark mass in the settling tank, she could hear her father’s voice over the drone of the motors as he’d explained how the rock was drilled and blasted and brought to surface. Whenever he stopped, Libby asked another question.
“It has to be crushed until it’s finer than sand before the gold can be extracted,” he said.
Tons of crushed rock later, in shift after shift of sweating, groaning men, blast after blast shaking the town at regular intervals, after the rock was ground to fine sand, there was one small bar of solid gold. It took her such a long time to grasp this whole process, but now she wondered that so much work went into something the value of which she’d never understood. She’d asked her father many questions, which he’d answered thoughtfully, but she shied away from this one without knowing why. Yet it was why they lived there in spite of the danger lurking under the earth for the miners. And for the children who flew model airplanes on the waste that was trolleyed out to form a large pile of grey clay. No fence kept her and her friends from playing there, on a field of poison that was as large as a baseball diamond.
“What’s it like underground?” she’d asked her father. “How can the men see?”
“When we get back to the office, I’ll draw you some pictures.”
Later her father had sketched a man setting up holes for dynamite on a rock face and told her how other men on another shift cleared away the debris blown out a few hours earlier. There were only two shifts so there was time in between to clear poisonous gases from the air. Then the rock was put in trolley cars and dragged over to the grizzly. Her father said the man who had to hammer the rock to break it into small enough pieces to go down through the ore pass had almost the worst job in the mine.
“What’s the worst one?” Libby asked.
Her father blushed. “Honey man,” he replied.
“What’s that?” she asked, startled at his embarrassed demeanour.
“Well…” His voice was low and he turned his head slightly away.
“What’s that?” she repeated.
When he started across the room toward his desk, she didn’t ask the question again. She was afraid if she did he would open the bottom drawer and pull out the bottle.
Jacques began to move away from the tank and when Libby realized she was alone, she turned to follow. “Will you show me the gold?” she asked.
The door of the oven was open and she could see the flame where liquid gold streamed through a narrow opening into a mould. Amazed at the ingenuity that found a way to create this marvel from barren earth and sheer rock, Libby asked herself another question she’d never broached with her father. To what end? Did it have something to do with why he, Walter Muir, was so gentle one day and staggered home a day later from the bar in the hotel? Where was the good man from a fine family her mother had said he was?
Jacques leaned against the wall, reading a piece of paper tacked to it. “Did you know my father well?” he asked.
“He lived on the same street. We played together,” she said. “Where is he now?”
“He went to work for the government in Quebec last year. He’s an inspector. He goes around to mines to check on safety.” Looking away, he took in a deep breath. “Did you know Guy Dion, too?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “I knew Guy, too.”
“You know he died?”
“I found out yesterday.”
“My father still won’t talk about it.”
“They were good friends as kids.”
“All their lives. Until about a year before Guy died.” He paused. “I guess you know Lucien, too.”
Libby nodded again. “I had dinner with him last night.”
“Yes?” Jacques said, his voice warming into almost a welcome now. “When I talk to my father, I’ll tell him I met you. It’s Muir, isn’t it?”
“That’s it. Elizabeth. He might remember me better as Libby.”
Jacques walked with her back to the gate near the office. “Where do you live now?” he asked.
“Toronto.”
“Mais maudit, c’est une grande ville là, n’est ce pas?”
It was a large city. Not like New York or Tokyo, but it was large. Ile d’Or and Toronto were different in far more ways than just size. Even with the cosmopolitan population of Toronto, there was a vibrant undercurrent that flowed throughout French Canadian society. Despite the communities that had enlivened Toronto over the years, the undercurrent there felt to her nonetheless muted. Warmth emanated from the lilt of the spoken language here, from expressive faces and gestures, from an enthusiasm that was immediate and embracing. Jacques hadn’t been like that when she encountered him at the gate, but she understood he’d been cool then to an Anglo in his midst who was also a stranger.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a large city.”
She crossed the highway and waved at him as she started back past the rocks, toward the town.
21.
NICK WATCHED THE boy slather his hamburger with ketchup and mustard. It looked tempting, so he put some on his own, along with a dill pickle and some sliced onion. What would Michelle have to say about the kid? Would she be at home now making something fast to eat? Or had she become a gourmet cook? She’d said she would make time to have dinner with him, but he found himself nervous at the thought of asking her, of eating across from her. It had been a couple of days and he hadn’t yet phoned her. It was ridiculous, he thought, someone he’d known briefly in his teens, kissed once, awkwardly. How could that prove to be anything but a relaxed opportunity to reminisce? They had so much they could talk about.
“Hey, mister,” the boy said.
“Yes.”
“Can I go back to Toronto with you?”
“I hardly think so,” Nick said. “Why would you want to do that?”
The boy grimaced. “Not much here for me.”
“You’d need to speak English.”
“You think I can’t learn. I want to. Then I can make a lot of money.”
“What would you do with it?” Nick asked, fascinated by the boy’s ongoing ability to surprise him.
“Buy a motorcycle.”
He supposed the boy wasn’t so different from him, caught up in dreams. And with more reason than he had, living an impoverished existence, foraging for food. All Nick could think of was escaping to some remote country to hunt for big game or take photographs. Or writing a novel that would immerse him in a different reality. He wanted to blot out all his memories of Marie living in Texas having a good time with Henri Tremblay. His friend. His friend no longer. And he still didn’t want to go back to his practice. His patients had become a burden.
“So?” the kid said.
“No,” Nick said. He’d already raised a daughter, what did he need with a vagabond boy?
“Hey, Mister, I know which whores do blow jobs.”
“C’mon. It’s time for you to go home. Don’t talk like that.” Nick turned to look at the couple in the next booth. They didn’t seem to be listening and he wondered why he felt he’d be embarrassed if he’d found they had.
“What do you want?” the boy asked.
Nick sighed. Not anything the boy could offer. It made him sad to see the desperation in Marcel Blouin’s eyes, but how could he take that away? “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go talk to your mother. Maybe we can work out some kind of arrangement for you.”
“You want to sleep with my mother?”
“No,” Nick said, shocked at the speed at which the boy had jumped to that conclusion. “I’m worried about you.”
The boy grimaced and shoved his chair back. He swore under his breath. Turning toward the door, he disappeared through it. Nick wasn’t sure what he’d said or done to make the boy so upset, but he felt relieved to be on his own again.
The waiter brought coffee. Nick asked for the bill, and then drank the hot coffee slowly. A sequence of blurred images flowed across his vision. His father coming in from the mine, reaching for the belt if Nick said anything. Especially if Roman was already angry. Nick could never read his mood right away. He wasn’t alone in having an unpredictable parent. Libby’s father sometimes staggered down the lane when he’d been drinking, wandering into whatever house had a door open. Susan’s mother had often come to the front door and shouted in a loud voice, her words slurred. Yet he knew that the boy’s experience was worse than all of that. Many of Nick’s contemporaries were separated or divorced now, had been through stuff that had left its mark, but they still had opportunities if they looked for them. He wasn’t sure what his own were, but he knew he would uncover them when he was ready
The waiter poured more coffee into his cup.
“Half,” Nick said. Merci.
Reaching into his pocket for his wallet, he put his credit card on top of the bill. He wasn’t sure where he would go from here or how long he would stay in Ile d’Or. Maybe he would drive out of town by the other route through Mont Laurier and the Laurentians and stop in Montreal on his way back to Toronto. That highway went through a long stretch of forest, mile after mile of mind-numbing sameness, before it reached Mont Laurier. The drive was broken by one very large park with hunting and fishing. From the highway, he recalled seeing cabins and canoes, a restaurant of some kind, men with tackle or guns.
On the street, Nick looked up at the sky and noticed clouds forming on the horizon. “Dreamer,” Marie had called him. “Star gazer. Even when you’re at home, you might as well not be.” She’d wondered if it were something about people who came from the north. Who knew? he thought, musing that her criticisms often seemed more a pretext for something deeper. But he could never fathom what that was.
