I'le Dor, page 15
“I’m going out to take a wreath. Would you like to come?”
Libby struggled to hide her surprise at the unexpected invitation. But she accepted. And Michelle, at last, seemed to soften.
29.
LUCIEN LISTENED AS Libby agreed to accompany Michelle to the cemetery. Was Libby just curious, or did she really care about what went on here? Michelle, too, had lived in a city for a long time. Now that her children were gone, maybe she would sell the store and return to Montreal. Only Susan had been able to live in Ile d’Or. She loved the north. Loved the life. When she’d felt like doing something different for a while, she’d set traps in the woods, skinned rabbits and scaled logs for a season somewhere on the way to Rouyn. That was Susan. Unpredictable. As the eldest daughter who went along on some of her father’s shorter trips once she had left home, she’d learned a lot.
“See you later,” Libby said.
Michelle looked back at him as she took out her car keys. “How is Madame Dion?” she asked.
“Pas pire.” Not bad. Considering.
As the door shut behind the women, Lucien slumped onto the stool behind the counter to drink his coffee. Charmaine did not come in until ten most days and nor did most of the customers. It gave him a chance to go through the newspapers from Montreal, set up the coffee pots, and do whatever tasks he had left from the night before. Sometimes he was so tired by the time he locked up that he left cups unwashed and crumbs on the counter. Susan would have made sure everything was in shape for business the following day, but he had stopped following much of a routine. Everything was slightly askew except when Charmaine worked evenings. He liked being behind the counter after she was there, knowing it would be as neat and clean as Susan would have left it.
A gust of cold air burst into the store with the arrival of one of the local policemen. Gustave headed toward the counter, his glasses clouding over like windows in winter. Sitting on a stool, he put the glasses on the counter in front of him and gradually the fog began to clear.
“Café au lait,” Lucien said. “Coming up.” Gustave liked his coffee around this time every day.
“Alors, mon ami,” the policeman said, his moustache still white at the edges. He ran his fingers over his red cheeks and screwed up his lined face in a broad smile. He must have been here for fifteen years now. Jutras had left long ago and might be dead, for all Lucien knew. Soon the priest would likely come in also. He and Gustave would talk about the hockey game in Montreal the night before. Nothing had changed much, except these men were less colourful than Jutras and Father Chicoine had been. Nor did they curse as much. Even younger than he was, at least ten years younger, neither of them had been here since the beginning of the town. This thought suddenly made Lucien feel old. The day would come when there would be a premier who was younger. A pope, maybe. Although he supposed the latter was unlikely for a long time.
“What do you hear from Susan?” Gustave asked, never hesitating to say right out what everyone else was thinking.
Lucien was still surprised. “Got a lawyer,” he murmured.
Everyone thought Susan would get tired of Montreal, even Lucien, although he had not let on to Libby how much he hoped that would happen. It was not as if she had never gone off before. There was the time she went over to the sawmill for a couple of months, the children all somewhere else that summer, working at jobs or camping. Everyone knew that Susan was a woman who often needed some new challenge and that Lucien had married her because she was like that. She was not like him, she was more like Guy. Except without the drinking, without the anger.
“Merde,” the cop said, his face reddening as he saw Charmaine come in. Not far behind her was the priest, Father Jean. The three men watched Charmaine rub the palms of her gloves together and bend her fingers before taking them off. Putting them in the pockets of her white parka, she unzipped her coat and hung it on a hook. Before going behind the counter, she straightened out the newspapers as if Lucien had not already done so. The priest leaned over and took a copy of Le Devoir. After all, the editor was from Abitibi, a few miles away in Rouyn. A separatist, too. He was not, for practical reasons. It might mean the parishioners would not have enough money for the church so he did not preach that even though he thought that the French should be maîtres chez nous. It was one of the paradoxes he faced daily, like the women who talked about pills and condoms. He turned his head the other way then. The pope did not have to raise eight children in shacks in the bush. Putting some change on the counter before going out the door, he could feel that Gustave was not far behind.
Lucien went into his office and sat at his desk, surprised to see an envelope he had missed the day before. It had the name of some firm in Montreal on it. Maybe it was from the lawyer. Instead he found a letter from Susan inside. I don’t want a divorce, she wrote. She wanted to talk about money and how to divide it. Could he come to Montreal to meet her? It might be all right now, she wrote, but I don’t want to get into a situation where later you might change your mind and not want to send as much. She wanted it settled.
Lucien put the letter down. It sounded like divorce to him. As if she had forgotten how their lives had overlapped almost since they were children. As if she had forgotten everything that mattered. His sweat on her body, the wetness under the dark thatch of hair on her pubic bone that was the semen flowing from him, the hairs on the edge of her dark nipples which lay flattened from the touch of his tongue.
The front door of the shop opened and he heard Charmaine speaking with Madame Robichaud, his mother’s next-door neighbour. He knew that his mother and Madame Robichaud often talked about moving into apartments, hopefully in the same building.
“Bonjour, Lucien,” the older woman called out to him.
“Bonjour, Madame Robichaud.”
Leaving his office, he walked over to her, knowing she would tell him about all her grandchildren. Two in Shawinigan, one in Quebec City, two in Chibougamau, three in the Gaspé. Lucien had stopped counting. Her husband had been the butcher at Mulholland’s until it closed after the first big supermarket opened. Many of the smaller stores had also shut down then, except for a few dépanneurs that stayed open for longer hours.
“And Juliette?” he asked. The youngest, the daughter who had come years after all the others and had never done what you would have expected.
“Working in a small French restaurant on Yonge Street,” Madame Robichaud said. “She says Toronto’s a friendly city. She likes it there.” She looked bemused.
Lucien was glad at least that Susan had not gone to Toronto. He knew she could probably manage anywhere, but the thought of her in Montreal gave him some hope still for their marriage. Odd as that might seem were he to articulate it to anyone, he thought. Yet if she’d opted for Toronto, still the bastion of WASP commerce, he felt he would have given up all hope by now.
30.
FROM THE RISE at the far end of Ile d’Or, the main street stretched out until it disappeared over another hill in the distance. The street was typical of towns of that era in Abitibi, lined with more bars and hotels than anything else. The Purple Pig was long gone, but there were other places men could find hookers without anyone noticing. Archie’s was still a dry cleaning store, but now in the hands of a French man who had never bothered to change the name hanging over the window. The Flamingo had been there so long that it seemed likely to last as long as the town did.
Beyond the rise, the car passed the mine where both Libby and Michelle’s fathers had worked. A mile or so after that were the two graveyards. In the Catholic one, neat lines of head stones bore a sea of French names interspersed with occasional English, Polish, Ukrainian, or German ones. Across the road in a smaller cemetery, grass long, the Protestants, mainly English, were buried under tombstones that stood in uneven lines. Michelle turned into the Catholic cemetery and parked just inside the gates. They walked quietly between the rows until Michelle stopped.
“This is Francine’s grave,” she said, pointing at a tombstone with a picture of her sister and the keys from the car in which she’d been killed encased behind a clear cover underneath a black and white cross. Watching Libby as she gazed at the photograph, Michelle turned away and moved a little ahead, toward another tombstone.
“This is Father Chicoine’s,” she said with a tinge of bitterness in her voice.“Right next to my sister’s. In the end, the same thing happens to priests as to teenagers who drink too much.” The bastard liked to drink, too.
Oui, oui, but don’t be too hard on me, a breeze seemed to murmur.
Michelle reached for strands of hair loosened by the wind. “You weren’t at the funeral so you didn’t hear old Chicoine then. Nothing he said did anything to alleviate the suffering of my family. Nothing to lessen mine for sure.” It was probably what had hastened her departure from the church, she added after a brief pause.
Libby was silent. She didn’t know what to say. Finally, “I’m sorry.”
“Guy’s over there,” Michelle said.
Walking slowly along the next row until she reached a grey stone monument with Guy François Dion inscribed on it, and the dates, 1937-1982, Libby struggled to hold back tears. She tried to remember the year Guy had come to Montreal to visit her.
She had been lying on the bed in his hotel room on Sherbrooke Street, a block from her residence at the university, her bra tangled in the sleeve of her sweater. Looking into his eyes, she was about to push him away when he put his hand under the woollen sweater and stroked her nipples. Her body had started to throb and she’d liked the feel of his fingers. So afraid someone might know what they were doing, her body had nonetheless stiffened. When he pulled her to him, she’d felt something hard move against her stomach.
“We’d better not, Guy.”
He pushed his tongue between her teeth, exploring the inside of her mouth with it.
“Don’t Guy.” She tried to stop him.
Reaching down between her legs, he rubbed his hand against the outside of her pants. Frightened by the knowledge that the one thing a girl must never do was to get pregnant, she had shivered.
“Touch me,” Guy whispered.
When she reached tentatively toward the hard thing against her stomach, he moaned and there was a sudden wetness in her hand. She drew away, pulled her sweater down and huddled in the corner.
“We’ll get married,” Guy said. “Please marry me, Libby.”
“I can’t, Guy,” she said.
“Why?”
Libby had not known what to say. Slipping her hands up her back under her sweater to fasten her bra, she swivelled around to reach for her shoes on the floor beside the bed.
“Is it because you don’t love me?” Guy asked plaintively.
“No.” Not able to imagine life without him, Libby couldn’t figure out how he fit into her future either.
“Is it because I’m French?” Guy then asked, starting to sound angry. “Is it because I work at the mine?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
As far as she was concerned, it had nothing to do with either. Or maybe it did. It certainly influenced her parents, but for her it was because of the places she wanted to go. And even more, the vivid flashes of colour that came in visions. She felt she had to remain open to something that would encourage that. And she sensed that marrying Guy would prevent her from ever discovering what these yearnings were all about. But only two years later she’d married Barton Morley, still not knowing quite what to do either with those vivid flashes or her longing for something more.
Michelle came to stand beside her. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Libby was startled as she looked up to meet the gaze of the other woman. “What happened to Guy?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “All I heard were bits of gossip. He drank a lot. He turned up at Paul Paquin’s house one night really drunk. He and Paul had a fight and after that Paul never spoke to him again.”
They were quiet as they headed back toward the Chevy. Libby slipped in and leaned against the headrest. Michelle’s hands gripped the wheel, her knuckles almost white with the pressure, as they drove out of the cemetery. When they turned away from town, Libby was about to ask where they were going. Something made her hesitate and she didn’t say anything, curious to see where Michelle would take her. When they stopped near a beach not far from Lucien’s cabin, she was surprised to see the water covered with gulls.
“If they don’t head south soon, they’ll get stuck in the ice,” Libby said.
“Some do sometimes,” Michelle said. “They die unless someone chops it away.” She turned off the ignition. “I’m stuck here,” she said, turning toward Libby with what seemed like resignation.
“I thought you wanted to come back.”
“I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” Michelle said. As she stepped out of the car and slammed the door, the gulls, startled by the noise, rose from the water and headed across the lake in a large V-formation.
Coloured balloons had surrounded the swim area at this beach during summers of long ago and boys had paraded across the sand in their tight trunks with the bumps in front. Sometimes one of them looked at the girls, who pretended not to notice. Even Jutras was there in his bathing suit and Libby discovered then that he was not that much older than she was. When her father went to his house later to get a dog for her birthday, he must only have been in his early twenties.
“I only stay because it’s familiar,” Michelle said. “It’s a tough town under the surface. It always was.” She pointed toward a field at the far end of the beach. “The horse sank over there,” she said.
“The horse,” Libby murmured. “What horse?”
“The one Susan used to ride,” Michelle said. “You know she left Lucien? She’s gone to Montreal. I don’t think she’s coming back.”
Michelle knew. How?
Libby listened to the throbbing of the mill across the silent stretch of pine trees. The vacuum pumps at the mine had mufflers on them made out of forty-five gallon oil drums that created a constant thumping, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If it was quiet at night, you could hear them pulsing in the background. Anywhere within a one-mile radius of the mill, you could hear the pumps. Along with the French language, it was the background noise of her childhood, interspersed with the mine whistles at shift change. And the blasting.
Did she stay in Toronto because it had become familiar? As she’d stayed too long in her marriage? In neither case had she intended to. Barton, who had read poetry to her, who had seemed interested in everything about her, had objected when she’d started to paint when Rosemary was a baby. Utterly baffled, she’d continued clandestinely, hiding her canvasses in the closet in the baby’s room, a place she knew was safe from Barton’s scrutiny. Only years later did she understand that her images frightened him. There was so much about her that had bothered him. Like conversations with a man next door who kept a motorcycle on the lawn, the man who reminded her of Guy although she never said so. One day Barton came along the street and, having seen them talking, strode into the house without speaking, his anger palpable. When she entered the kitchen, he’d banged a cupboard door. “I don’t want you talking to him,” he’d said, the vein above his right eye bulging.
“Good God, Barton.”
“He’s violent,” Barton said, his voice tight.
The vein moved like a snake across the part of his head where the hair had begun to recede. A stark blue under seemingly transparent skin, that vein seemed to have a life of its own. It became for her an unwelcome barometer. Wary when it began to throb, she listened to his voice rising in tandem. Perhaps he was the violent one. All she’d ever talked to the neighbour about was art. Now she thought she also might be as stuck as the gulls were. Every time she visited Sheila in Vancouver, she considered moving there. Once she took Paul with her to see if he would like it. For the first four days, the city was shrouded in fog and even when it lifted, Paul said he would prefer to live in Toronto. Soon he would be gone and she would be alone in the house on Walken Avenue. Then she could move anywhere she wanted.
“Did you know I was there when the horse sank in the quicksand?” Libby asked. “I saw the farmer shoot him.” She could still hear the sound of the gun and see the horse’s head suddenly thrust back as the bullet went through his skull. Maybe what she needed to absolve her feeling of guilt around this misadventure was for Michelle to say there was no gun and that the farmer had not shot the horse. She visualized the words, Je me souviens, on the license plate of Michelle’s car. To remember let all the debris emerge from under the surface.
“I don’t think it was quicksand,” Michelle said. “A bog maybe.”
“Maybe.”
Even the unravelling of her marriage might have been for reasons she still understood only vaguely, Libby thought. Barton must have met the woman he later married before he moved out on that cold February day, before he left the rotting fence posts for her to deal with in the spring. Maybe her art was always just an excuse for what he would eventually do.
“In my dreams, it’s always quicksand,” she added.
31.
SAINT SAUVEUR, A pale yellow brick building, once the French Catholic school run by nuns, was on the main street of Ile d’Or above the stretch where the hotels and bars were, beyond The Flamingo. Beside it was the house where the sisters had lived, next to it was St. Luc’s Catholic Church, and beside the church, the priest’s residence. As Nick walked past, he thought about how much influence the priest and the nuns had on the town when he’d lived here. So much had changed. Or had it? he wondered.
