I'le Dor, page 6
When she heard the door slam late in the night, she’d listen for her father’s unsteady gait in the hall. She’d count how many times she heard caps come off bottles of beer in the kitchen. He should have been grateful he didn’t die in the war. Instead he did this stupid drinking thing that made him stagger home and fall downstairs. Please Daddy. Won’t you stop? She wracked her brain for something she could say that would make him stop. Crash. Once he fell down the basement stairs and landed in a heap at the bottom. Libby thought he was dead that time. When he rose slowly, his eyes befuddled, blood dripped down his forehead. She’d cried softly as she watched him lurch toward the bedroom, a dirty handkerchief pressed against his forehead.
“Not again, Walter. Not again,” her mother said plaintively. “You promised. You heard your father, Libby?”
“Umhn,” she’d nodded, but Libby had ceased to believe him. Oh, sometimes his resolve lasted a week, a month, but never longer and she imagined herself part of some other family who lived far away. Sitting on the far side of the rock across from their house, she forgot her mother had sent her out to pick blueberries. Or that her father had gone to the sump again. Instead, she studied the contours of rocks and the shapes of trees. And one day she took a scribbler with her and began to sketch the trees in the margins, small white spring flowers, the clouds, and the swings in the playground in the distance. When she did this, she forgot time altogether. She forgot everything.
Lucien put his hand on her shoulder. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
She read the names on the monument once more. Tremblay, Hawryluk, Kalliomaki, Martin, McDougall, Dufresne, Paquin, Paquin, Paquin. Then she counted them again. Twenty-seven.
“What happened to Guy?” she asked quietly.
Lucien’s hand dropped to his side and he cleared his throat. “He drank himself to death,” he said. “They found his body in the Leduc Hotel. But they didn’t find him until the smell got bad. Until you couldn’t even recognize him. They called me in to do the I.D. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’d burst in the heat. We didn’t let Maman see him.”
There was a green Export cigarette package on the ground next to the monument. Her parents, Charlotte and Walter Muir, had smoked Sweet Caporals and Guy’s Maman, Buckinghams. Libby didn’t want to think about her father’s drinking or about Guy Dion splattered on the walls of a hotel room. It was easier to remember the twenty-seven men killed on the battlefield.
Lucien picked up the empty Export package and crushed it in his hand. “Let’s go and eat,” he said.
10.
MICHELLE SORTED THROUGH the fall merchandise, deciding what she would put on sale as the Christmas season approached. It didn’t take her full concentration and she found thoughts of Nick Petranovich breaking into her awareness. His presence had brought memories to the fore in a way she hadn’t faced in a long time. Right back to her earliest childhood when they were all newcomers. Not many knew about the areas around Amos and Senneterre that were settled earlier, that the reason it was possible to get to Ile d’Or by water then was the river that ran from these early settlements to the newest gold find. It was a means of transport that drew prospectors, miners, money. And new towns were born almost overnight with roads built of cordwood and hastily constructed houses.
Michelle had her first drink in a bar when she was just fifteen. When Duplessis was in power, no one was ever stopped for drinking under age. No one ever seemed to be arrested for putting moose meat into the hamburger in the local restaurants either. Everyone knew in October or November when the season began and the hunters drove into town with a moose strapped to the roofs of their cars, the darkened hamburger would appear soon after.
There was a tap on the glass and Michelle looked up to see a shadow on the other side of the door. It was dark now and she had already locked up, but she went to see who was there. It was Marcel Blouin.
“What is it, Marcel?” she asked, thinking he likely wanted something to eat. The boy scavenged and often prevailed upon the town’s residents for food. Everyone knew that his mother drank too much and that his father had taken off long ago.
“There’s a man in town from Toronto.”
“Yes, I know.” It had been a couple of days since she’d seen Nick. He’d said he would call, ask her to dinner. She was surprised by the sense of disappointment she felt that he hadn’t yet.
“Did you know him from before?” Marcel persisted.
“Yes.” She’d known him as a child, she told the boy. Why did he want to know? Marcel always asked so many questions. He was a bright kid, probably bright enough to go to college, but odds were he’d never get there. Maybe he was looking for a father; maybe that was why he attached himself so easily to strangers.
“I’m hungry,” he said. J’ai faim.
If she were at home, she would make him a peanut butter and jam sandwich and watch him eat it hungrily. As it was, she decided to give him enough money to buy a hamburger. He’d like the dark red meat more than something she could cook for him. She always gave him either food or money. At the beginning, she did it for the company. Now it was because she saw he needed the food. She’d given him work to do to earn it: he helped her out in the store sometimes, taking out the garbage, running the vacuum over the floor. And cut her grass at home with the old push lawn mower. In the winter, he shoveled the sidewalk at both places.
“I don’t know how long the man is going to stay,” she said. “I don’t suppose for long.”
The boy nodded, his straight dark hair falling forward over his eyes. He brushed it away and turned to the door. He shrugged.
Michelle watched him cross the street and go into the hamburger joint, coming out a few minutes later with a brown paper package. Did he ever take food home for his mother, she wondered. She knew the public health nurse and the social worker had been in, but nothing seemed to change and the boy remained there. He probably protested loudly to anyone who even suggested he might be better off elsewhere, making up stories to cover his mother’s negligence.
As soon as Marcel was out of sight, other thoughts preoccupied her. Nick had flirted with her once, long ago. He was older than her, but every so often they would meet at the teenage dances at the Rialto. All the kids went, even those who were not much more than children. That time, when he had asked her to dance, he had nuzzled her neck and later stolen a kiss when he followed her into the dark hallway that led to the washrooms. Even now she felt desire rise in her. The thought of someone’s penis inside her, it could be Nick’s, excited her. But she didn’t care much whose it was at this moment as long as she could have an orgasm that she didn’t cause herself, a long moaning release from the tension building in her since she had encountered Nick at the cemetery.
Moving toward the back where she kept a sewing machine for small alterations to her customers’ purchases, out of sight of the window, she began to touch her breasts through the soft cloth of her blouse. Then her pubic area. Rubbing against the top of her clitoris through her slacks, she began to groan. Once she had let out a quiet gasp and the throbbing subsided, she knew to have sex with any man would be a disaster. She would get in over her head and not be able to see if things were going badly. She would need more than anyone could possibly offer. Since Dominic, there had been the occasional fling, but nothing lasting and it was ages since she’d even been on a date. She’d been unsure she would be able to differentiate between a truly caring man and one who wanted only to hurt her. With an intensity not felt in a long time, hatred for what her former husband had done to her welled up. Even more she hated that she might let someone else do the same thing.
She stared blindly at some bills on her desk. What was Nick really doing here? If she went out to dinner with him there would be an opportunity to figure him out a little. Not that it was of any consequence to her, she would say were anyone to ask. She was simply curious.
Returning to the front of the store, she moved some vests on a rack, marking down prices with a red marker. Not as low as she would make them in a month or so. Some winter jackets and coats. Slacks. The dressy outfits might still sell at full price, at least until most people had finished shopping for the season. When Michelle went to Montreal on buying trips, she always had particular customers in mind and called them when she returned. It was guesswork to some extent, but when she saw the fashions she knew the styles and fabrics that would appeal to different women. Since she also did the alterations, she could take in a tuck here or there and shorten skirts and slacks even if a size were slightly off.
When customers asked her to look for an outfit, for a cruise or party or wedding, it pleased her. Especially when it was the manager’s wife. Or someone who worked in the office at the mine. They didn’t know how their predecessors had spurned her family; that it had been Walter Muir who’d told his daughter, Libby, not to play with Michelle. Libby was a year older than her, but the town was small then, and anyone who lived nearby became a friend. It didn’t matter that Libby met with her anyway for a while; she knew and felt some stigma attached. She felt it from the other kids, too, and soon even Libby stopped talking to her. Nick probably felt that way about being called a DP when he was growing up, although they hadn’t talked about it. Maybe she would ask him.
She felt sure that she and Nick had many overlapping memories that would shape their conversation when they went out to dinner. Their fathers. Their mothers. What would happen when the gold ran out? She didn’t like to think about that. When gold was still sold for thirty-five dollars an ounce, it took a ton of ore for seven dollars worth of gold. A ton of ore! But even in those days there was talk about the gold running out some day and Ile d’Or becoming a ghost town. No one believed it when it was still early times. Even though it meant long hours underground setting off dynamite in jagged rock walls where samplers had hammered away small bits of rock to be assayed for mineral content. And then the question of how long it would all last would loom again. Anyone in the business knew what could happen.
11.
L’ANGE BLEU SAT on an outcrop of rock on the highway to Montreal. A large sign on top in flashing blue lights could be seen for miles. Across from it, the head frame of an abandoned mine jutted out of the surrounding rock.
“They have good food,” Lucien said. “Better than The Flamingo. Better than La Cabane.”
“It’s new, isn’t it?” Libby asked.
“Ah oui, it’s been around a few years, but new since your time, for sure.”
Inside l’Ange Bleu the lights were dim. The tables looked full, but the waiter soon cleared a place for them. Lucien nodded and smiled at people who greeted him, but he didn’t engage in conversation. The waiter knew his brand of beer and Libby asked for a gin and tonic.
“My wife’s an Anglo,” he said, amused by her surprised look. Had it been Guy who said it, Lucien suspected she wouldn’t have been. Unlike him, Guy had associated freely with the Anglos.
“Someone I know?” she asked.
“Mais, bien sur, of course you do. Susan Lambert.”
Lucien had tried to forget the events of the past year. Ile d’Or had been his home his entire life. For almost fifty years now. As he approached that milestone, he’d felt solid about everything. And he’d looked forward to spending time with Susan now that the children were no longer at home. They’d talked about travel as something to anticipate. Maybe to France. Or to one of the French-speaking islands. Haiti. Tahiti. Somewhere.
“Paris,” Susan had said, eyes gleaming.
Then the owner of the Leduc Hotel had found Guy in one of his rooms. Not quite a year later, Susan left town. He hadn’t known then that she’d followed the engineer who arrived that summer to do some work on the hoist at the mine.
“Susan?” Libby said. “Susan?” Her tone was perplexed and a frown crossed her forehead. Susan was the girl in her dream. Someone she thought would surely have left Ile d’Or. And certainly not someone she thought would have married and settled down in a mining town.
“Always up to something as a kid,” Libby said. Never getting caught. “Remember when she stole chocolate bars and gum from Marcel’s variety store.” It was next to the dry cleaners, no longer called Archie’s but still known by that name by the early residents. “I was mad at her, but Susan just laughed and passed a box of Chiclets to me. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘have some.’ I couldn’t say no.” Susan was twelve then, a year older than Libby; Cathy McNab was a year younger. The three of them had been inseparable for a while. “She was always after the two of us to do something that would get us into trouble.” She paused. “When did you get married? I thought she left Ile d’Or. The year before I went to university in Montreal, didn’t she run off with the circus or something silly like that?”
“Semble folle, je le sais, but it was a way to get out of town. That’s all. Maybe that’s all it is now also,” he said, then added, “She was pregnant. She came back.”
“And you married her?”
“The child was mine.” He didn’t tell her that the summer Susan got pregnant was the same one Urho Tomi’s dog wore kotex pads. That when Susan saw the spaniel with the pad, she’d already missed her period. When he forgot to bring the rubbers, at first she’d said no. It was the only time he ever forgot in all the times they went down behind the curling rink in his father’s car to the shack by the railroad tracks. You would think after being careful for so long that just that once they might have been lucky.
“So you kept the baby?”
“No, she had an abortion in Montreal.” He gripped his knife and fork so tightly that his knuckles were white. He cut into his steak.
She looked at the red trickle on his plate and was glad she’d ordered fish.
“More wine?” he asked.
“J’en ai assez mainentant,” she said. “For now anyway. This trout is great, by the way.”
“Bon.” He began to talk about fishing down at the river. “Pickerel, pike,” he said. “Bass, sometimes.” The trout were in the small spring-fed lake out farther.
“I remember it,” she said. “I learned to drive on the dirt road from Lac Leboeuf to Trout Lake. There was always a dark green canoe at the smaller lake.” She and Guy had paddled over to the opposite shore to walk farther into the bush.
He was silent.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said. “Rien. I was remembering that old blue Nash you drove around and around the block before you got your license.”
As she listened to the familiar cadences of his voice, the same ones that had moved her when she’d heard Michel Tremblay and Roch Carrier, Libby could smell leaves burning. See the rocks across from the house on rue Champlain. He was quiet for a while, too.
“Tell me more about you,” he said finally.
“Such as what?”
“Such as what you do comme métier.”
“I’m an artist.”
“Une artiste,” he said. “Little Elizabeth Muir an artist. Mais, c’est merveilleux, n’est-ce pas?”
“Thank you.” She told him about exhibitions of her work in Toronto and Vancouver and the paintings in juried shows. “I frame most of my own paintings now.” She’d worked late into the evenings before the show at the Moritz, the mattes carefully chosen, to get them ready.
Recently she’d sold a couple pieces to corporations. A painting and one large piece of sculpture. “I paint in a downtown studio I share with two other women. We visit galleries with slides and samples of our work and invite the owners to the studio. It’s a tough business, although we’re getting better at promoting ourselves. It seems to help that there are three of us. We encourage each other and sometimes we collaborate on something.”
What she didn’t tell him was that the horse haunting her dreams still, the horse from the past she shared with Susan, emerged unexpectedly on her canvas, a head breaking through mud. The dream had recurred off and on for as long as she could remember, always in black and white. She used to awaken to the thought that there would have been blood. Surely there would have been. On her canvas, the colours were vivid, bright reds, vermilion and the horse’s eyes sometimes mainly yellow.
“What happened to your husband? Wasn’t he a doctor? I always thought of you as a little housewife with your doctor husband.”
“So did he,” she said, laughing. “Yes, he was a doctor.”
“It was big news when you married him,” he said. “Now, mon Dieu, you’ve been married, divorced, and have grown-up children. You’re an artist. The time she flies.”
“I paint under my former husband’s name.” She held her arms tightly across her chest. She was thirty-five when they separated. That spring Barton had told her that their differences were irreconcilable because she wanted to have her tubes tied. It had astonished her so much she’d stepped backwards as if he’d struck her. They had two children already and didn’t plan to have any others. It made no sense to her. Maybe it would have if she’d already seen him with the woman on the subway platform at the Rosedale station, but that didn’t happen until later. Just after they were separated.
“Morley. Elizabeth Morley,” she said.
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Probably because I’d already begun to sell under that name. Anyway, the name Muir belongs to my childhood.”
“I thought when we were kids you’d marry Guy.”
“He asked me.”
Lucien drew in a long breath and took a sip of wine. “Tell me, Elizabeth, isn’t there a man in your life?”
