Her grandmother when she was alive was not afraid to reveal secrets and terrible truths.
To honour an ancient custom they had placed at the edge of the village a high wooden cross on a stone pedestal to hold the devil at bay. The township was big, however, and many were the villagers who lived on unhallowed land.
The grandmother didn’t believe that the devil had residence in America. She did see him implanted where he was born in Europe along with Communists and Protestants. She said that the cross was useful all the same to protect them from the little gods who had come to America in boat holds or who were already there at the time of the Indians. The grandmother had talked to her a lot about those spiteful gods that reigned as despots on parcels of land of no more than a few acres. They were bonded to the earth, and their aspect changed according to the seasons. They were robust in spring and alluring in summer and not far from obese just before harvest but when winter moved in to dislodge autumn they began to waste away. They hid themselves, grey shadows on snow, behind bushes and their hair fell out and their eyes sank deep into their orbits and they could no longer close their mouths completely over their pointed teeth. They were the earth and relied on the earth and served the earth. They worshipped the sun and at twilight they dreamed up ghoulish dances to bring down the rain.
They knew the earth needed light and water but also blood. They were the ones who sometimes sucked blood from the necks of cows and ripped out their viscera in a cruel game and left mutilated bodies lying there so the crimes would be blamed on extraterrestrials or wolves. They were haughty and sadistic and even if their names were forgotten and no one believed in them, they demanded sacrifices from the infidels. They stole from houses what was their due as offerings and whispered their rage and desires into sleepers’ ears at night so that the earth might obtain in good time all it thirsted for.
With her sister behind her murmuring “my love” she realizes that to her too he’d said that what was happening to her would not happen to her sisters and that she was the single chosen one. With her sister at her back murmuring “my love” she realizes that they had been sacrificed both of them on the altar of the minor gods and that this sacrifice had saved neither one nor the other. In this house and in the other houses of the township, on the hallowed land of the village and beyond the tall cross, everyone is sleeping and everyone’s eyes are closed.
*
The light had not totally left the world but the sun yes and the brightness was like a memory of itself that likened everything to its own imprint on a poorly exposed piece of film. The adolescent was walking with the dogs on the fields of the Lord between the roads that framed the blueberry plantings. For hours she’d been looking for tracks. With darkness coming on she now knew she’d find no more.
She went back to the house. Lucie was sick in bed. She’d got a runny nose from going into the camp refrigerators without her wool scarf. The adolescent got undressed and lay down to watch her sleep. Lucie had a big compress over her forehead and eyes and she rasped as she breathed.
For several days she’d been hearing the wolf at night as it howled outside. Those were the tracks she was looking for and she’d found some but she knew they were dog tracks. No one was talking about the wolf and no one had heard the wolf except her, who even thought she could understand its baying. Every night, far, very far beyond the borders of the village, past the railway line and the rock quarry, the wolf howled and said to her “When the time comes, when I’ll have decided, you’ll go mad.”
The people in the village were not like the animals and they didn’t expel the weakest members of the pack. They kept the demented in houses and fed them but everyone looked at them as if they were dead, with death in their eyes. She didn’t want to be gazed at like that. She didn’t ever want to go mad and she did everything she could under the covers, plugging her ears so as not to hear the baying of the wolf.
At the foot of the bed, between her legs, she felt a weight pulling on the quilt and flattening the mattress. A little girl was sitting there and looking at her.
The little girl said:
“He doesn’t touch us any more because when you get older you become fat and ugly.”
“No, it’s because I’m becoming a woman.”
“Little girls like me always go mad.”
“No. Not if they’re not afraid of being afraid any more, not if they become like me, an animal that refuses to let itself be touched or to let itself die or to let itself be caught. Me, I’m going to run in my dreams until no one can find me.”
“You won’t succeed.”
“There are afternoons when he didn’t catch us and you know it. I’m dreaming of those now.”
“At the gates of the town a wolf is howling and you’re the only one to hear it. You’re already mad.”
“You don’t understand. The wolf is with me. He’s protecting me from monsters and little gods and you.”
The little girl said:
“Idiot. He’s come to devour us.”
“Yes, but he won’t let anyone do it except for him.”
The day was going to be hard with two hands less but Friday was the day for junk food. The cadets ate Pogos and poutine and pizzas and there was less work for the women in the kitchen.
She left the house alone at dawn and alone crossed the fields of the Lord up to the Third Line and walked alone through Monsieur Béliveau’s fields and along Lac Brochet’s gravel road. Autumn was coming early and the nights were cold but the August sun that rose over the dew was as warm as that of July and this afternoon it would shine incongruously on the red leaves and the tree branches drained of all their sap.
She’d not taken a hundred steps along the hydroelectric company road when she heard behind her a horse’s hooves striking the hard-packed ground. She stayed where she was to let the horse pass. Monsieur Robertson stopped beside her. He was wearing his beautiful white hat and black leather pants and a brand new white shirt and was mounted on his handsomest horse, solid black. Together they seemed to have escaped overnight from an old cowboy film and of having trotted that far without any notion at dawn that this was a world of colour.
“Bonjour, Mad’moiselle.”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Robertson.”
“You’re all alone?”
“Yes. My sister’s sick.”
“Ah.”
He looked at her and looked at the ground and looked at her again and turned and spat on the ground.
“Good day, then.”
“Good day.”
The horse and rider moved on. They went thirty metres at a walk and then turned and came back at a trot. Monsieur Robertson stopped his horse just in front of her in the road.
“I guess no one’s ever arrived at the cadet camp on horseback?”
“Never.”
He smiled.
“Come, climb on up.”
He shifted his weight and lifted one leg in the air so she could put her foot in the stirrup and he held out his arm and helped her to swing from left to right into the saddle. She moved her pelvis around a bit before finding a comfortable position.
“Is that all right?”
“Yes.”
She stretched her arms around him and he clicked his tongue and the horse began to advance at a walk and then at a trot. After a few minutes, Monsieur Robertson asked: