I'le Dor, page 3
The sky lightened as the car sped along the shore of Lake Ontario, past billboards, past Grenadier Pond. Alarms would be sounding, blinds opening and letting in slits of light, traffic would gather momentum as the city sprang into the rhythms of another day. Toronto was home now insofar as it could be when another landscape was so deeply embedded.
Soon she would be there, Libby thought. With only forty minutes between flights, she hoped her bag would arrive in Ile d’Or at the same time she did.
“It will be enough,” the agent had assured her, but she worried when boarding for her plane was delayed.
Businessmen, dark-suited, filled the lounge, glancing at their watches. Their newspapers were open to stock market quotations. Finally with all passengers settled and belted, the aircraft rumbled toward the runway. When it stopped for another plane to land, Libby glanced at her own watch, aware by the time they were aloft that her forty precious minutes had dwindled to twenty.
As the ground receded and the shadow of the plane on highways and fields gradually became smaller, she thought about the dream again. About a horse sinking. She’d dreamed it over and over. And never recounted it to anyone. Maybe in going back to Ile d’Or she would be able to confront what had happened to cause the dream. Maybe she would stop feeling that she was guilty of something.
She reached into her bag for the magazine her son, Paul, had given her. She hoped he’d marked the page for her to read. While looking for a turned down flap, a photograph of Dan Robinson surprised her. There he was, standing beside a cabin not unlike the ones in early photographs of Ile d’Or. She read the caption — Dan Robinson in the bush. She didn’t know that he’d been on expeditions like the one she began to read about. There must be endless things she didn’t know about Dan. A tall, bearded, black man, whom she’d met only a few months earlier at a party, she’d watched him quietly surveying the room. Aware that his gaze stopped when he noticed her, she was surprised when he headed in her direction. His was a face she’d seen in newspapers, magazines, on television, once at a meeting — a lawyer concerned about human rights. Now he was also a politician, the only black alderman on City Council.
“Elizabeth Morley?”
She’d nodded, intrigued that he knew her name.
“I liked your show at the Moritz Gallery,” he continued, his voice a low, embracing rumble. Her watercolours were dramatic, he’d said. Her colours vibrant. “There’s a distinct style emerging.”
“I’m working in acrylics, too,” she’d said, hiding her astonishment that he’d been following her work.
“Dan Robinson.”
“Glad to meet you, Dan.” His articles in the press and commentary on the radio had often made an impression on her.
He seemed to take a long time to call but, when he did, she’d readily accepted his invitation to have lunch with him.
The plane began to descend toward Montreal. As the ground rushed to meet them, Libby was relieved to think she’d make her connection after all. But as they rose abruptly, she held tightly onto the arms of her seat, feeling the way she had the one time she’d been on a ferris wheel. The suddenness of the wheel rising, then cresting before taking the plunge down again. When the pilot announced they would circle while another plane landed, she sighed. It would be impossible to make her connection after all. And by the time they arrived at the terminal, it was only sixty seconds to take off time.
Nonetheless, Libby ran frantically through the airport to the gate announced by the attendant just before her flight from Toronto landed. When she arrived, her mouth was dry and her face as brilliant as a boiled lobster.
“The passenger from Flight 400 has arrived,” the man at the desk said into a telephone. To her, “It’s all right. You can stop running.”
The suitcase, Libby panicked. Where was her suitcase? Probably still in the hold of the other aircraft.
“Don’t worry,” the man said.
As the plane flew north, Libby’s eyes were drawn to the shimmering lakes below. Likely the same scene her mother had looked upon forty-six years earlier, returning to Ile d’Or after the birth of her first child. Elizabeth, soon known as Libby. She’d heard her mother’s stories about the small bush plane picking up a high-grader en route. He’d sat beside her in handcuffs while she held onto her baby. It was a full day’s journey then, by train, by boat, and finally by plane. Through and over vast expanses of trees, rock and water to what was in those days the far north. A place where babies were born out-of-town, expectant mothers going away to stay with relatives in Montreal or Toronto for a few weeks because the two medical beds in Bourlamaque were reserved for mine emergencies. They went to Ottawa, and Rouyn or Noranda also. Now the trip from Montreal to Ile d’Or was as quick and uneventful as a subway ride in Toronto from Finch to Union Station.
On the way into town in a taxi, Libby saw a new, glass-fronted city hall and unfamiliar tracts of ranch-style bungalows. It was a mystery to her where the money came from that kept Ile d’Or alive as the gold must surely be running out by now. When she reached her hotel, she struggled in halting French to explain to the receptionist about her lost suitcase. She was glad she had packed an extra sweater, a toothbrush, and her sketchpad in her small carry-on bag.
“Ah oui, Madame.”
There was a later flight and it would arrive then. The woman smiled and handed Libby the key to #407, a room that turned out to have sloping floors, stark yellow walls with chunks of plaster missing, and a light bulb hanging from the ceiling on a single black wire. She’d chosen this hotel because it was closest to the mine and the company houses where she’d lived. It surprised her how shabby it had become.
Although she wasn’t tired, she lay down on the thin mattress on a bed with an iron frame. A low rumbling sound permeated the room. The mysterious muted thunder from somewhere deep within the earth she recalled from childhood. What was it like down there? she’d wondered, even more aware of the silence when it stopped.
Startled by a loud noise on the street below, Libby stood up and went to the window. Peering out, she saw a small crowd gathering around a car that had bumped into a pole. It appeared no one was injured and she figured by the time she reached the sidewalk, it would be quiet again. She wanted to go for a walk, to find some of the old familiar places.
As she stepped out through the hotel’s main door, a man who appeared to be the driver was talking to a policeman. After looking them over briefly, Libby glanced toward the centre of town. There was plastic over the foundation of one house, cardboard in the windows of another. A man’s white jockey shorts and some blue sheets hung on a line. When she turned toward the road to the mine where her father had worked, she saw the large black, iron letters that spelled out Ile d’Or at the edge of town. The same letters she’d climbed as a child.
A path had led through the bush, past a playground and the manager’s large shingled white house, to the mine. Libby’s father’s office had been on the second floor of the main building. He’d worked at a drafting table, drawing precise lines labeled with his careful printing. When he went underground, it was to deal with mechanical problems and emergencies. She wasn’t allowed to use the telephone that was in their kitchen for more than a minute or so at a time and not often.
“The mine might call,” her mother said.
“He’s the best damned engineer in the north,” was how she often heard her father described. “That Walter Muir.”
Drunk or sober.
It was hard to imagine how he achieved such precision with the bottle he sipped from that he kept hidden in a brown paper bag in a drawer. He drank Crown Royal straight in those days and he smoked pack after pack of Sweet Caporals, his fingers a rust colour that came of chain smoking and that gave his teeth a telltale yellowish tinge.
Off at an angle Libby noticed a lane where rocks jutted up between two slumping buildings covered with brown insulbrick. In spite of solid new houses she’d seen driving in from the airport, everything felt tentative, as if it could disappear in a moment. Except the rock and the bush and the grey slime left by the mine. Despite what had happened, she wished Dan were with her to see the rock at the centre of everything. Why hadn’t he told her he knew this kind of country?
Turning back toward town, she came to a nightclub on the main street where she’d had her first drink. The Flamingo. It was the one rumoured to have been built with money made from selling gold smuggled out of the mine in the 1940s. High-grade, her father called it. The real thing, not the pyrite or fool’s gold she and her friends sometimes found in rocks in the bush.
Even someone who wasn’t actually working in the mine could find others to bring small bits of high-grade ore out, it was said. There would be subtle pressure.
“Your kid has to walk to school,” the outside man might say quietly to one of the underground workers. And it was known that the mob was involved, dark figures off in places like Buffalo and New York City. Any smart miner knew what it could mean if you were once involved in high-grading and tried to back out of it.
So the illicit trade could happen whether a man worked underground or not, although there always had to be someone on the inside. It was Cathy McNab, the mine manager’s daughter, who had finally filled Libby in on these sordid details. Her own father, Walter Muir, had expressed his disapproval that she played with some of the children who lived on mine property, but he hadn’t explained why very well. She was afraid to ask what the repercussions might be for her. They were left implied.
Libby looked at the pink flamingo in the window, under a large pink sign that extended out over the street. It looked the same as when she’d had her first drink there, a rum and coke, in her teens. When her mother found out, she was horrified. But her father said not to worry so much about it, that when Libby went to university in Montreal in the fall she’d drink there anyway.
Some postcards in the window of early log cabins and aerial views of the mines distracted her and Libby decided to buy one later for her son. As she moved away from the window, a hand grasped her shoulder and she turned around to see a face that didn’t seem to have aged at all.
“You must be a Dion,” she said.
She would recognize those features anywhere. He wasn’t Guy, the young man who had courted her almost desperately as a teenager. The man she now thought of as her first love. But reminiscent of Guy, this man, aside from a small tattoo under his ear, looked like his father.
5.
WHEN LUCIEN DION awakened that morning, one colder than any yet that fall, he’d had a premonition of something about to happen. It was more than sensing the first snowfall or ice beginning to form around the edge of the lake, but that was all he could have told anyone. He pushed back the green sleeping bag he slept under now that he’d moved out to the cabin on Lac Leboeuf and pulled on a pair of socks. His jockey shorts were on the floor beside the bed on top of the white T-shirt he wore under his sweater. Susan would be horrified if she could see how he lived now. Pulling on his underwear, he headed for the bathroom.
As he stood in front of the mirror, he shivered at the prospect of winter alone, of winter without Susan beside him in the bed. She’d slept on the left, one arm down over the side, while he curled around her with his right arm raised over his head. Sometimes he’d reached out to hold her. He still reached for her in his sleep and groaned when he woke up to find he was holding onto a pillow or part of his sleeping bag.
Since Susan left, she’d only written to give him forwarding addresses. Every three or four weeks there was a new one. Once he called her and she asked him not to call again. Over twenty-five years of marriage and she didn’t want to talk to him. He bit his lip and brushed his cheeks with his hands, wiping away tears. Then he pounded his fist on the counter around the sink.
“Maudit, tabernacle.”
As he drove into town, Lucien fiddled with the radio until he found a station he liked. What did he have to do at the pharmacy? Maybe he could leave ordering new supplies for the cosmetics section to Charmaine now. She was young and inexperienced, but she’d learned quickly. He thought of the highway at the other end of town that went south through endless miles of bush unbroken before Mont Laurier by more than an occasional motel or cabin on a lake. Or a gas station. It hadn’t changed much since the first road was built, except that the part that was gravel when Lucien was young was paved at some point after their family’s first trips out to the Laurentians and Montreal in the late forties. As a child, he’d watched the tops of trees until he was mesmerized, birch against pine, poplar against pine, branches reaching toward the sky.
Nor was the town very different, except most of the English people were gone and there were new houses at the far side of town, near the water tower, and on the road to the airport. If you’d lived in Ile d’Or all your life, as Lucien had, it was hard to imagine why anyone would ever leave. The local politicians had shown some foresight in attracting business to an industrial park and developing the airport for flights to the far north so that commerce went on even when some mines began to close down. If you did leave, as many of his contemporaries had when they married or found work elsewhere, it seemed they wondered why anyone stayed. For Lucien, moving somewhere else was inconceivable. Even after Susan took the bus to Montreal, leaving behind only a note and some clothes she no longer wanted.
That note had been on the kitchen table when he came in from the pharmacy only a three months earlier, her words on the paper rising like a cold wave to encompass him. His jaw had become tight, as if caught in a vise that extended right around his head. He swore now as he visualized her final words. Feed the dog.
Braking, Lucien pulled over to the side of the road on the outskirts of Ile d’Or and put his head down on the wheel. It was at least ten minutes before he was ready to drive again.
In town, Lucien parked in front of the nightclub with the pink flamingo on the overhead sign. It was the first nightclub in town. Now there were others, modern and with better entertainment. All the same, the old timers, of whom he knew he was one now, still went into The Flamingo for a beer, or something stiffer, after work. He merely glanced at the sign as he got out of his car and headed for Pharmacie Dion, the store his father had owned until his death. And when he died and left everything to his two sons, Guy, too far-gone with the booze to give a damn, had wanted nothing to do with the business.
As he was about to turn into the pharmacy, Lucien saw a woman looking at the postcards in The Flamingo’s window. She looked familiar, yet he knew she was someone who didn’t belong in the town. A visitor. A tourist. In November? Who would come to Ile d’Or in November? And that feeling of some impending event heightened. He knew this woman from somewhere.
“Elizabeth,” he said, reaching out to put his hand on her shoulder. “You are Elizabeth Muir, aren’t you?”
“You must be a Dion,” the woman said.
“Lucien,” the man said.
“Lucien?”
“Yes.”
“Mon dieu, but you’re like your father.”
6.
LUCIEN LOOKED JUST like Monsieur Dion had thirty years earlier when Libby worked in his drugstore for a summer. A handsome man with a square face and lines that came from laughter, Monsieur Dion was like someone who always anticipated good weather. He was as jovial and outgoing as Walter Muir, when sober, was quiet and introspective. Libby had watched him with curious anticipation, waiting for him to say something unexpected.
“You want to run the shop, Libby,” he once said. “Just brush up on your French a little.”
“So you still live here,” Libby said, smiling warmly at Lucien.
“In a cabin out on Lac Leboeuf,” he said. “When my father died, I took over the store. I’m on my way there, but I’d like to have coffee with you. I haven’t had my breakfast yet either. Will you join me?”
Libby nodded. “How’s Guy?”
Lucien lips were pursed and his eyes narrowed into slits that seemed designed to avoid scrutiny. “He’s dead,” he said. “Last year.” He turned away abruptly and went into the store beside the nightclub. The sign, repainted in white with black letters, still read Pharmacie Dion.
Libby watched him through the window, a numbness making its way through her throat and stomach. How could Guy be dead? If there was one thing about Guy she recalled vividly, it was his curious eyes darting so that he wouldn’t miss anything, his need to know what was going on everywhere. How animated he always was. Full of life.
What would Guy make of her now? Her reflection in the glass of the store window, long gold earrings thrust through her ear lobes on small fishhooks, looked out of place here. Although her mid-length brown winter jacket, pulled from her closet as the warmest she owned, seemed to fit into what anyone here might wear. She watched flakes of snow flutter down through bare branches to the road without really seeing them.
When Lucien returned, they walked to a restaurant further down the block where so long ago Libby and Guy had eaten French fries and gravy washed down with large glasses of Coca Cola. Lucien held the door open and gestured at a table near the window where she sat in the chair he pulled out for her.
“Why did you come back?” he asked. “You haven’t been here for years.”
Libby shrugged. “Maybe that’s why,” she said, almost as if she believed what she was saying. “It’s been too long.”
“How long are you staying?”
