I'le Dor, page 5
Laundering the miners’ clothing was sometimes lucrative when contracted out because some dense gold dust might have settled in pant cuffs and pockets. Nick wasn’t sure how the laundry staff got rid of it to earn their profit, but he supposed that those who sought buyers knew the men who would take the fine dust. A bit like the townspeople knew the local stockbroker and some of them bet on penny mines trying to strike it rich. Some of them did, too. As far as he knew, all of that was legal.
The sound of blasting rumbled underneath him and Nick felt his bed move ever so slightly. Falling asleep soon after, he dreamed of the subway running only a block away from the first apartment he and Marie had rented near Bloor Street. Marie was standing at the door, peering in at him. She had no clothes on above her waist. He leaned against the wall and looked at her breasts, one of them dripping gold. A river of gold.
“Want some?” she asked.
He tried to catch the gold in a plastic bottle, but she kept dancing around so he couldn’t.
“You’re useless,” she said.
He wanted to kill her. As he struggled to breathe, he woke up, afraid he’d hurt her. Then he remembered that she was in Texas. This was another dream, worse even than the ones he’d dreamed about his father for so many years. He didn’t know why those stopped because they went on for a long time after his father died. Then one day he realized it had been months, even years, since he’d had any.
Looking at the red light on the clock radio beside him, he saw that it was almost six. It wasn’t too early to go to the cookery. No one there would recognize him any longer; he wouldn’t be able to go in and eat a huge breakfast of eggs and bacon, toast, marmalade, coffee just because he was Roman Petranovich’s son. Porridge if he wanted it. Sometimes he’d eaten there with his father when Roman was in a good mood, expansive, showing off his son who would soon be old enough to go underground and work in the mine. But Nick had other plans. He would go to New York and study photography. He did, too. But after a matter of weeks, he decided that he wanted to be a doctor. It took forever, but he had been determined. Now he wondered if he would have been happier if he’d stuck with photography.
By the time he showered, shaved, and dressed, it was eight o’clock. He went out and headed toward a small restaurant on the main street. He liked going there because there were photographs on the walls of the early town site, of scrubby trees and houses in bleak landscapes, of mine shafts. Roads of gravel and wooden sidewalks on the commercial streets. It wasn’t the only place he’d walked by where he’d seen such photographs through the front window, but he’d tried this one and would likely keep coming back to it. As he walked, the boy from the other day, who had peered at him over the rock, suddenly jumped out from the dark corner of a building and stood directly in front of him.
“Hello,” the boy said, as if they were old acquaintances by now. His lightweight jacket had ragged edges and he wore no mitts or gloves.
Get lost, Nick thought. He shrugged, buried his ears in his collar and pushed his scarf up over his chin. It bothered him to have to pull out French phrases from the recesses of his past. He’d be glad to have the language come back to him, but he didn’t want to be forced into it by unexpected intrusions.
“Cold?” the boy asked, putting his hands up his sleeves. Froid?
Now he’d likely offer to show him some coffee shop. But Nick beat him to it. “Hey,” Nick said. “Come with me and I’ll buy your breakfast. Where do you live anyway?”
“Je ne comprends pas.”
Oh, well, polish up your fractured French, Nick thought, talking to himself. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine what life this boy had stepped out of, one where the father drank or maybe the mother, where the dishes were strewn around the kitchen and in the sink, unwashed for days, perhaps weeks. Empty bottles, broken glasses, dirty bathtub, towels on the floor, hairs in the sink, a yellowed bowl in the toilet, a cracked toilet seat, broken windows. It had to be something like that. Maybe Michelle would know.
Nick soon made himself understood and the boy ended up sitting across from him at one of the tables, gobbling up fried eggs and sausages. He looked almost gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes. The town must not be doing as well as it appeared on the surface. Nick couldn’t understand what the kid was doing wandering the streets on his own and how he had come to attach himself to a man who was to him a stranger.
“What’s your name?” Nick asked.
“Marcel.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Don’t have one.”
That’s where questions would get you, Nick thought. He’d trapped himself in one line of inquiry and didn’t know how to recoup. Pretty stupid for a shrink.
“Okay, kid,” he said. “Do you have a last name?”
“Blouin.”
That was the name of the lake where Nick had gone to swim with Guy Dion and Paul Paquin when they were the age of this vagabond boy. A gravel road ran out of town and crossed the railroad tracks until it passed a one-lane road down to a spot on Blouin Lake where small bush planes took off and landed. He, Guy, and Paul rode their bicycles down to Hall’s Landing where they sat and watched the single engine planes glide in above the trees. They landed on floats on the water, rocking from side to side as the pilot steadied the aircraft, leaving a long trough of waves behind as they pulled into the dock.
He wondered about Guy. His name hadn’t come up yet in conversation, but he’d noticed a headstone in the cemetery. Dead for a year now? He would have been a young man when he died, probably around the time of his own fictitious obituary, Nick thought. How could he have forgotten to ask Michelle? He remembered when Guy and Libby Muir had seemed so entangled with each other; Guy enamoured for sure, although he’d never been able to tell with Libby. He’d certainly seen them together often enough, back then when they’d all known each other. Even though he was older, as was Lucien, their lives had been intertwined because they all lived either in company houses that belonged to Alpha or not far away from them. He’d forgotten how much that sense of being part of something had mattered to him.When he saw Michelle, he would ask her about Guy, and about Libby.
“Merci,” the boy said, wiping his arm across his face.
Nick was so deep in thought that he had momentarily forgotten Marcel’s presence. He nodded at the boy, then chuckled softly as he noticed that Marcel’s plate was so clean he might have picked it up and licked it.
“Do you want anything else?” he asked.
The boy’s eyes lit up. “Chocolat,” he said.
“A croissant?”
Marcel shook his head as if only an imbecile would ask such a stupid question. “Non,” he said. “Chocolat chaud.”
Of course, Nick thought. Just what a tough kid who knew all about hookers would ask for. How was he supposed to know? Well, he’d order another coffee for himself at the same time. Or maybe he’d have a hot chocolate, too. Hot milk mixed with chocolate, topped with whipped cream. He looked around for the waiter, thinking that once they’d had their drinks he wanted to get rid of the boy. He hoped he could do so easily.
9.
AFTER LUCIEN RETURNED to the pharmacy, Libby remained seated in the restaurant under a black and white photograph of a mine shaft, set down in rocky terrain. She studied it for a long time. Did she remember the bare land where trees had been cut down or was she just remembering the many photographs her father had kept in albums and of stories she’d heard?
She stood up to examine the other photographs that were hung around the room. Log cabins surrounded by birch. Lac Leboeuf, seen from the rise at the end of town. Scrubby trees everywhere. The houses for the miners, the lakes and rivers used as the primary means of transportation at first. Images from her childhood that were so familiar had become a historical record.
A colour photograph of a sky as wide as over the prairies, a thin strip of pink on the horizon with the head-frame of a mine etched against it as the town’s sentinel caught her attention. Looking at these photographs, even a stranger would be able to tell that mine shafts were the centre of everything. Much like the Eiffel Tower was the symbol of Paris, she thought. In linking the two, she wondered how she might paint them together, their surrounding landscapes nonetheless so disparate. She tried to remember the mine where she’d worked in the assay lab during summers while at university, out a few miles from town, off the highway. They tested for lead, zinc, and copper in the lab, not gold. Yvette, the woman who had taught her how to measure the samples and mix them with hydrochloric acid, spoke only French. Libby began to dream in French that summer. But when Yvette wasn’t there, the rest of the women all spoke English.
Libby was seventeen her first summer at the mine. She knew about the man who owned the whore house and what whores were, but she didn’t know much about sex yet, hadn’t paid much attention to her mother’s awkward attempt to explain what she called “the birds and the bees.” That seemed preposterous now, but that summer had changed things. When the women in the lab started to talk, her eyes widened.
“Seven inches,” said the tall blonde with greasy hair.
“You’re kidding,” laughed the redhead.
“No, it’s true. Big and hard and at least seven fucking inches.”
Did they ever wonder what she thought? Talking as if the daughter of the engineer at Alpha would understand whatever it was they knew. Maybe not caring if she did. Whatever their reasons, she was careful not to let them know what they talked about confused and shocked her.
Libby smiled at this recollection of a time when she was still so incredibly young and naïve. As the waitress poured more coffee into her cup, she returned this smile. Almost as if they shared some secret knowledge.
“You’re English, aren’t you?” the waitress asked, looking pleased with herself.
Nodding, Libby was surprised at the intensity of the other woman’s scrutiny, as if she were trying to figure out not only who Libby was but also why she was here. As if she prided herself on keeping up with everything in town and would be able to pass this on as some nugget to her friends and family later. This English woman came into the restaurant with Monsieur Dion. Libby could hear the gossip that would emerge. At least it would have when she was a child or teenager and some stranger had appeared in Ile d’Or. Well, she didn’t intend to tell the other woman that she’d lived here, nor about the two children she’d just described to Lucien. Her daughter, Rosemary; her son, Paul. The waitress probably knew the three Dion children, grown up and working in other parts of the province. And that was enough, Libby thought. It was other names and faces she began to think about now. Guy’s, in particular. His mischievous grin and his dark eyes darting everywhere. He never missed a thing.
When she finished her coffee, she left the restaurant and walked until she found the playground beside the path to the mine. A barren lot where once there’d been a slide, swings, and a set of teeter-totters. She could almost hear the voices of children playing “Truth or Consequences. ” Libby, kiss Guy Dion. That was the consequence, but Guy ran off into the bush.
After wandering from the playground to the rocks across from the fence outside the mine and down a path to a trail that led out of town to the ski hill, she was tired. Stopping on her way back to the hotel only long enough to buy a newspaper, all she wanted was to put her feet up. Spreading the newsprint pages across her bed, she lay down on her stomach with her head raised and her hair falling over her forehead. As she skimmed through the pages, names jumped out at her. Paquin, Dion, Frechette, Charlebois. No English ones any more. Finally she fell asleep, sprawled across the pages. A horse neighed in the distance and she ran toward it. Coming suddenly over a rise in the land, she saw it sinking into mud. Susan was crying. And there were other voices. Calice. Tabernacle. She awoke sweating, jumped up and went into the bathroom where she drank a glass of cold water. The horse. The horse. Always there, creeping up on her unexpectedly. Riding through her life. Sinking into quicksand.
The telephone rang. When she reached for it, she had no idea how long she’d been asleep or what time it was.
“What about dinner?” Lucien asked. “I can’t leave such an old friend of Guy’s back in town to have dinner alone. Please join me.”
His voice aroused vague fears in her and she found it momentarily hard to remember the man on the other end of the line was not a stranger.
“Will you meet me downstairs in the lobby?” Lucien asked. “I’m just about to close the pharmacy.”
Still feeling anxious, she nonetheless agreed. It could be anything she was afraid of, the noises from underground. The thought of those dark recesses where only men could go. It seemed foolish now to have come here. When she looked in the small, cracked mirror over the wash basin, she saw tiny lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes, lines that would deepen as she became older until her face became her mother’s lined face. Maybe it was old age creeping up ready to snare her that frightened her. She backed away and took her purse from the bed. A strip of light from the hall filtered in along the edge of the door, onto the faded orange carpet peppered with cigarette burns. It was a mining town, after all! Libby had to remind herself.
Downstairs, Lucien leaned against the receptionist’s desk. He took a drag on a cigarette and blew smoke out into the room. His face softened when he saw her. The receptionist looked surprised.
Like the waitress, Libby thought. At some level, it amused her. At another, she felt almost spied upon. Everyone would know something without really understanding anything. But maybe that was true of her also. She thought she knew a lot, but what did she actually know?
“My car is parked over there,” Lucien said as they stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“Can we walk a while?” she asked.
“Bien sur. ”
A block away, they stopped in front of the Second World War monument in the middle of the boulevard that led to the mine. Libby read the names listed under the dates, l939-1945. Tremblay, Hawryluk, Kalliomaki, Martin, McDougall, Dufresne, Paquin, Paquin, Paquin. Three names from one family. Twenty-seven men from Ile d’Or killed in that war. Yet the town had barely been born.
“Do you remember when the war ended?” she asked.
Her father had written from overseas that soon he would be coming back. The Muir family had lined up in front of their white house for the cameras to snap photographs of the Union Jack raised on the lawn with the neighbourhood children gathered around. The end of the war meant the dangers they’d heard about regularly over the radio were over, but to the Muir children it mainly signified their father would soon be coming home. It was a few more weeks before Walter Muir actually arrived on the steps of the house on rue Champlain and practically as soon as he’d had a chance to sit down, Libby ran to the shelves to find a book for him to read. Her father, who had gone overseas to protect Britain and because of something he talked about called democracy, was finally back. Nor had she understood what it meant that as a Captain and an engineer, he was called upon to train young soldiers who would go to the front. That assignment meant he did not manage to go overseas himself until the last year of the war and never saw battle, something that had disappointed him. But he’d come back to Bourlamaque, unlike those men whose names were listed on the monument.
“Sheila scarcely remembered him and Wally thought this man at the dinner table who slept in the same room as Mum was an intruder,” Libby said. “Wally was only a month old when he left. As the eldest, I guess I was the only one who really knew him, he was gone so long. Before he left, I sat in the green armchair in the living room nestled in the crook of his arm while he read about Rikki-Tikki-Tave and Shere Khan. And some book called Jock and the Bushveld which he brought from South Africa.” The books he read to her had opened other worlds. Outside snow might be falling on the northern bush, but she was in the jungle. In India. Or in Africa. Don’t stop, Daddy!
“When I found a book and asked him to read it to me, he said he had to go to the mine.”
To see McNab, the mine manager. Her mother had frequently asked Cathy McNab to come home for dinner after church on Sunday. But when Cathy came she and Libby fought over something trivial. And Cathy, a year younger, with the authority she was able to exert by fearlessly making her own decisions, would stay only as long as she had to.
“And he didn’t say he would read to me later. I was so disappointed,” she said. “He just went out the door and started down the road. I waited and waited and waited. When he finally came home, it was after supper and dark already and his words were slurred. There was someone else with him. I looked out my bedroom window and saw Black Steve.” He was called that because of his dark curly hair. The other Steve in Ile d’Or, who was blonde, was called White Steve.
“Oh, Walter,” her mother had said when he came home later. “For heaven’s sakes.” Surely he hadn’t gone away to join the army to come home a drunkard.
“Of cors’h not,” her father had replied, leaning against the wall to keep himself steady.
It was after that war, the one known as the Second World War, that Walter Muir became a serious drinker. That night was just the beginning. On weekdays, her father would go to the white stucco hotel on the main street, to the bar in the basement where the men from the mine went to drink. They called it the sump. It was in the Alpha Hotel, the hotel where Libby was now staying. Whenever she’d see her father head in that direction as she watched for him from the back window, her stomach would churn. She knew his place at the head of the oak table would be empty and they would eat their meal in uneasy silence punctuated by their mother’s occasional comments. Trying to read the signs of what to expect next, her mother’s forced cheerful tone left Libby even more apprehensive.
