I'le Dor, page 9
Now she felt a flush rising over her face, embarrassed that she was almost spying. She moved away quickly from the house, wondering where Michelle lived now and what they would say to each other if they met. It could happen any time, on the street or in one of the stores. It crossed her mind that she could look up Michelle’s name in the phone book, but she wasn’t sure that seeing her was what she wanted.
16.
THE CEMETERY WAS empty except for the Chevy parked at the entrance. Someone driving by on the highway might wonder why Michelle’s car was there again and then going around the next curve have already forgotten.
A breeze blew as Michelle walked through the dark grass carrying an assortment of branches and green leaves with a waxen texture that would stand the early wrath of winter. Stopping in front of Father Chicoine’s grave, she frowned.
“You old bastard,” she muttered.
Oh, there’s that Dufresne girl again. The priest still speaking from beyond the grave. Outlived all of us. Not like her sister, in that car accident. Sixteen and drinking too much already.
A priest’s grave set among those of his parishioners was more egalitarian than when they’d come into the confession box. They still sometimes stood there and cursed him. As if that could change anything. He’d listened to their sins; often petty, inconsequential things that nonetheless made them squirm. It was a bloody shame to have been relegated to this northern place with no easy way to get out and let off steam. He’d been stuck here. He couldn’t go to the Purple Pig or The Flamingo. Nor could he drink except in the privacy of his quarters where he kept some whiskey in a purple and gold cloth bag in a drawer beneath his underwear.
He did what his place in the town required, gave advice, exhorted from the pulpit. The politicians left the priests alone as long as they were supported, the grand alliance between church and state, the arbiters of society. And the politicians came to confess also, often the most crooked of anyone who sat outside his window and said they’d sinned.
“My son,” and then the requisite number of “Hail Marys.”
Alors, Michelle, you can stop crying. Still, the high-grading was a messy business. He listened to the middle-men who went off to New York or Montreal to sell what was passed on to them and then gambled there. He knew they solicited men who worked underground when they were all drinking in the bars. Not everyone was tempted, but there were always takers.
I didn’t condone it, but it’s not the kid’s fault. Pauvre fille. “Your kid goes to school along that trail, no?”
One man threatening another. Nothing more needed to be said.
“Father Chicoine, you were a bloody hypocrite,” Michelle muttered.
He was, too. Spouting off from the pulpit.
Oui, mon enfant.
17.
AS SHE WALKED along the main street toward the mine where her father had been the engineer, Libby came to a path that led over a rise to bunkhouses covered with green siding. She’d heard one had been turned into a bed and breakfast. Back then, the men who worked underground had lived there, at the edge of town. At the sound of the metal triangle ringing out like a chime echoing across the wilderness, the miners had streamed into the cookery for meals.
She recalled that in winter, when the path was narrow, the only adult who had ever moved aside so the children would not have to jump into deep snow had been Arthur White. The name, one she’d forgotten until that moment, sent shivers through her. She remembered the night she woke up to find her mother missing. It was during the war and her father was still overseas. She ran from room to room looking for her mother, even looking under her mother’s bed and in her closet. When she finally came home, Libby was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase just inside the front door, huddled to one side, crying. The other children were still sleeping.
“I just went to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes,” her mother said, somewhat sheepishly pulling out a white pack of Sweet Caporals. “I’m sorry. I was gone for less than ten minutes.” She must have thought no one would wake up in the few minutes it would take.
A man’s shape appeared in the door, looming up behind her like a large ghostly presence. “What is it, Charlotte?”
“It’s all right, Arthur.”
Libby was relieved that night to see Arthur White’s face. He lived in a log cabin near the mine and, like a kindly relative with no children of his own, gave all the children on mine property the best chocolates and candies at Halloween and Christmas.
“All right, then,” Mr. White said, closing the door gently behind him as he disappeared into the night. He didn’t come to the house again, but once stopped Libby on the path to town to ask how her mother was doing.
“Will you say hello to her?” he asked. “Say hello to Charlotte.”
“Oh, yes,” her mother said when Libby told her. That was all.
“Why doesn’t Mrs. White live with him?” Libby asked.
“She doesn’t like it here,” her mother said. “She lives in Montreal. You really can’t blame her, but I’m sure he misses her.” Her face was suddenly as red as her brightest lipstick.
Wally, who was the youngest of the three Muir children, started to cry. Her mother ducked her head and disappeared into his bedroom.
Libby veered off the path toward the small log cabin where Arthur had lived. It had also been the mine’s guesthouse where visiting engineers and geologists had stayed. In this cabin she saw Arthur White hold up rocks with veins of gold in them and listened to him explain the difference between the real thing and pyrite. Fool’s gold. Something every prospector needed to know. His voice came back to her, explaining how the veins had formed.
As she walked around to the back of the cabin, Libby was surprised to discover it was being dismantled log by log, that the entire rear wall had been demolished. She peered into the room where Arthur White taught her and her friends how to play cribbage. Even more, she recalled the chocolate fudge he gave them when they turned up on his doorstep on Halloween.
“Oh, what a beautiful princess you make, Elizabeth.” Or witch. Or pirate. And then came the reward, the sticky, yummy fudge.
As she picked her way around the door of an old car and a pile of logs, Libby recalled what Sheila had once told her about Arthur White. About his arrival at their house on rue Champlain, on another day, in a dazed state.
“I wondered if Elizabeth and Sheila could take part in a bubble gum blowing contest,” he said.
“Libby’s gone away to school in the city,” her father replied. “Sheila’s shooting partridge. We had some for our supper.” So maybe she was too old for the contest, he suggested. Sheila already knew how very proud of her he was and he’d called her Miss Muir as he told her. This is what she’d told Libby, gloating a little Libby had thought at the time. But she’d ignored that, wanting to hear the whole story. Sheila had been twelve that year and since she liked guns, she was the one their mother taught to shoot. The previous winter, their father had taught Sheila you never point a gun at a person, not even the old pistols her father had from some ancestor who was at the Battle of Waterloo. Then he showed Sheila how to clean and load the 410. It was funny about their father. He never went fishing or hunting, but he’d taught Charlotte how to shoot, and then Sheila, and their mother never missed a season.
“Oh,” Arthur said. “I have lost track. What about Wally? Is he too old for bubble gum now, too?”
“Come in,” their father said. “You can ask him yourself. We are just finishing dinner. I’m sure there’s more to eat if you’d like something. Isn’t there, Charlotte?”
According to Sheila, Charlotte had flushed deeply, and said of course there was. There was always enough for friends and visitors.
When he came inside, Sheila said she could smell whisky in the air. This was a surprise, as Mr. White was known never to touch a drop. Even in the bush.
“He’s the quintessential gentleman,” Mrs. McNab had said one day when their mother was having tea with the ladies in the living room.
As a child, what Libby had liked most about her mother was how she could do just about anything. In hunting season, she’d go out early to the single track dirt road that led to the lake where she stopped on a sandy stretch to shoot partridge. She also played a mean hand of poker at the dining room table with other women. On other occasions, there might be women around that table drinking tea from dainty cups and talking about the curling bonspiel. Or the bean supper at the church. She didn’t like driving the car in town much and hadn’t learned how until she was over forty. Still, she managed, although she could never back up as easily as go forward. If she overshot the mark when she was parking, she would drive around the block and try again.
“Thank you,” Arthur said. “I’ve already eaten. But I would like to come in for a while.”
They all sat in the sunroom with magazines spread out on the couch and a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. Her father turned down his military music.
“Sheila was marching,” he said. She still stood at attention with the broom over her shoulder, their father’s model soldier.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have children,” Mr. White said.
Her father looked bewildered, as if he didn’t know what to say.
“Evelyn never wanted to come up here.” Mr. White said. “She never wanted children either. Now she wants a divorce.”
“Sheila,” Charlotte said, gesturing toward the door. “Could you go and do the dishes?”
Sheila didn’t want to leave the room. Here was a story she wanted to hear unfolding.
“Aw, Mum.”
“Sheila,” her father said sharply.
So she went into the kitchen and tried to listen through the sound of the running water and the splash of the dishes, but she couldn’t make out much except this wasn’t the Mr. White she’d known forever. This wasn’t the man who always had answers for every child’s question and was like an uncle who made up for all the times parents yelled at you by being calm and kind and, well, almost perfect.
When Sheila and Wally both went to the bubble gum blowing contest on the weekend, Arthur White gave her his cribbage board. His favourite rock went to Wally. There was something else for the McNab children and a small rock for Jeannie Petranovich. He seemed pleased at their squeals of excitement.
Their mother looked baffled when she saw their prizes. Sheila heard her tell her father she didn’t like it, that it didn’t make sense to her. A few nights later, in the midst of a party at a neighbour’s house, Arthur left hurriedly. Only a few hours later, as Sheila listened to her parents talk in hushed voices, she overheard that Arthur was found lying inert on the floor beside the wood stove with a bullet hole in his head.
“His gun was lying beside him,” Sheila had told Libby in a low voice, as if it were a secret.
Sheila said she’d had nightmares for years after that and at some point decided she didn’t like guns after all.
As Libby walked away from the cabin and around a corner to a rise in the road where she could see a chain link fence around the mine, she was still baffled by Mr. White’s suicide. He’d been so cheerful all the time, and generous. She remembered that Sheila had told her his wife, instead of joining him, had decided to divorce him. Libby thought he must have talked to some people about that, since it became part of the gossip that survived him. The death didn’t seem to have affected her mother as much as Sheila, although how could any of Charlotte’s children have known how she felt about it. All Libby knew was that her mother had continued to shoot partridge. And sometimes Sheila had still gone with her.
18.
SNOW FELL ON the cemetery.
It covered Father Chicoine’s grave like a soft white blanket.
Arthur White confessed to me. Confessed to touching that woman. Mother of children who didn’t come to the church. Worse than adultery. Raising Protestants.
His wife came to get him, travelled back on the train with the body. But it was lost at some junction, the wrong body turning up in Montreal at first. Not buried in the Ile d’Or graveyard, Arthur was buried somewhere on the side of the mountain.
I should have been buried there, not in this forlorn place where I didn’t belong right from the start. Although better than being in a city where I would have been insignificant. Here everyone knew me, listened to me. Even now, they remember. They say they don’t. But I still haunt them, all those who were here at the beginning of this town.
Across the highway, all the weeds were covered by the white flakes.
19.
THE DESK WAS stacked high with enough paper to discourage almost anyone from trying to find something. But Lucien was determined as he tried to ferret out the unpaid bills without disturbing the rest of the pile. No wonder his accountant was upset at how disorganized he’d become in the last months, he thought. The clutter he’d let accumulate here was almost hopeless to sort through, but he consoled himself that even though he was making a mess of things since Susan left, he still wasn’t losing any customers. They come in to buy soft drinks, toiletries, cigarettes and prescriptions. Sometimes they come just to talk. If they told their doctors some of the stories they tell me, some prescriptions would be unnecessary. His interest in people was like his father’s. Not like Guy who retreated into a world of his own at some point, although he was the gregarious one as a child. Maman’s favourite. The baby.
“Monsieur Dion,” Charmaine called from the cash register.
“Pardon?”
Lucien didn’t hear what she asked him, only his name. Monsieur Dion. Like his father. Libby must have called his father Monsieur Dion when she’d worked in the store that summer long ago. His father liked to listen to the local gossip also, except when he became it. Lucien remembered when he and Guy fought over a lighter Guy had found under Libby’s window. His father was out somewhere while his mother was visiting her sister in the Gaspé.
“I didn’t know I lost it,” Lucien said. “Where’d you find it?”
“Near a ladder,” Guy said. He was angry.
Lucien took out a cigarette and lit it with a shrug, wondering how Guy knew about the ladder under Libby’s bedroom window. “Keep your mouth shut, kid,” he’d said. Buried in Lucien’s tone were all the threats he’d ever made. Remember the time I caught you in the bush with Libby. Only five years old, peering at each other’s genitals to see how they were different, they’d looked up at Lucien with frightened eyes when he found them. Up until then that was all it took to keep Guy quiet. This time Guy swung his arm and blood spurted in a jagged stream from Lucien’s nose. Only when the back door opened and their father stumbled in did the fight stop.
“What the hell?” Papa said.
There was a large red mouth on his right cheek and lipstick smeared on his collar. When he saw the way they looked at him, he went over to the mirror. “Oh, mon Dieu,” he said, reaching for a cloth and starting to scrub at the red imprint of a woman’s mouth. Then he noticed his collar and grabbed at the buttons, taking the shirt off and throwing it on the floor. Stomping over the tiles, he reached for a beer in the refrigerator.
“Oh, mon Dieu,” he said again. “What a mess. Please don’t tell Maman.”
“No,” Guy said. “You can tell her.”
All these years later, Lucien still didn’t know if his mother had ever learned about his father’s affair with the mine manager’s secretary. Lucien didn’t know who the woman was that night. It was only later he learned, mortified to overhear whispers that the woman was pregnant, that the child was his father’s.
Papa sighed, his head in his hands. Pursing his lips and grimacing, almost as if he were about to cry, he gestured with his big hairy hand toward the chairs. Picking up a deck of cards they played poker with some nights after supper, he began to shuffle. He didn’t say anything at all, just waited. Lucien sat down at the table, his eyes not daring to meet his father’s. Guy moved slowly across the room and pulled out the chair across from Lucien. Their father made a fan of the cards, lips compressed, eyes alert. Guy’s card was the king of spades. Then Lucien took one, jack of hearts. Then it was their father’s turn. His was the ten of clubs.
“Your deal, Guy,” their father said.
“What is it, Charmaine?” Lucien asked.
A roll in the cash register was creating a balloon of white paper rather than one bill at a time. She was having trouble getting the roll set up, so he did it for her and showed her how at the same time.
“I meant to ask you to order the cosmetics,” he said. “You’re good at knowing what we need. And you’re good at selling them.”
The smile that lit up her face extended right from her lips through her cheeks and around the edges of her eyes. All she needed to know was where to find the order forms and that was easy enough to show her. She nodded and started to turn away.
“Oh,” she said, catching herself. “Doctor Cloutier called in a prescription for someone. He asked you to call his office.”
When Lucien got Doctor Cloutier on the other end of the wire, he was surprised to hear that the prescription was for Michelle Dufresne. He hadn’t seen her in the store for a while. When she’d first returned to town, young Jacques Paquin told him that her daughters had come with her. Paul Paquin had been Guy’s best friend and Jacques, his son, continued to come into the store often even after his father and Guy had an ugly argument. The rift was still there when Guy died.
