I know plenty of people who would have punched me in the face for less than that, but not Menaud. He liked playing the tough guy, he liked to say he’d been in prison, and he was the only man I’d ever met who you could flatter by saying his father had been a thief and his mother a whore.
He gave me a big smile with his rotten teeth.
“Yeah, maybe that’s what happened.”
I took off on my own. I wasn’t afraid. In those days people told all kinds of stories about drivers picking up white-faced hitchhikers who vanished without a trace right in the middle of a trip. No one had ever told me about a woman in a red coat haunting the Cabot Trail, and anyway mine wasn’t even thumbing a ride. She was just there, looking out over the high seas with her dry hair, as if our nights were her days, as if she saw, in the midst of the storm, an enormous sun shining over the strait. Of course, I know I didn’t see a ghost on the road that night. I may be old now, but I’m not crazy. Except it’s remained a mystery to me, not knowing who put that woman in my head, who’d given her that silhouette and that face that I’d never seen anywhere. There’s something unknowable in all that, like how you can never really tell if it’s the water, the wind, or the salt adrift in the wind that carves animal shapes and women’s faces out of the fjords.
The Montagnais who cut wood with the rest of us in the camp, I always asked him to tell me what the Indians called the places we went. One day when we were really far north, I asked him the name of the lake where we’d stopped for lunch. He shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t know?”
“It’s not that. Your lake has no name.”
“What do you mean, no name?”
“No one ever comes here.”
Unless they had a good reason, the Indians never strayed from their traditional portages and their navigable waterways, and they felt no need to give names to places they never visited. It was a European obsession to go everywhere and it became an American obsession to build roads that led nowhere. Those roads, Menaud and I, we’d done at least half of them. We couldn’t count them in those days, we couldn’t know where they would lead. America was a kind of big asphalt map traced right onto the land, a continent to rediscover. I’m sure they’re all labelled now, those roads, mapped so you can follow them with a finger on your GPS. My son-in-law has even bought a car that talks. It’s always telling him he’s taken the wrong road, and I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let a machine speak to me like that.
After 1971 I never heard from Menaud, I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and I decided that one morning he must have gone back to the mud at the fort of Louisbourg, or where he came from. We’d travelled together for a long time, he and I, and we’d probably still be travelling together if I hadn’t met Louise during my last year at university. We’d never much called each other my beauty or my love, nor later my wife or my husband, but one day she said to me, “If you like, we could get married.” It’s not a great love story, certainly, but it’s ours. I’d never thought about marriage before, but I said yes right away, and later I realized that was exactly what I wanted. We had four daughters more beautiful than their mother and more intelligent than me. They’re big now, but they can’t leave hold of their mother, whom they telephone three times a day. They have the whole world at their feet, and you’d think they were afraid of everything. It’s something I can’t understand.
Louise is a doctor, and I was a forestry engineer. She’s spent her life taking care of people, and I’ve spent mine taking down trees. That’s the way it is. In a few months, she’ll be retiring too. And we’ll travel. We’ve travelled already, but not much in recent years. Louise likes it a lot, but not me. They always hold us by the hand on those tours, and it seems to me that you can’t really travel bundled up with other little oldsters in a bus, with guides who explain everything you see through the window like you’re all six-year-old children. I’d like to show her the ground we covered, Menaud and I, back then.
Meanwhile I garden, I read, and I do errands. About four o’clock I go out to buy what we need for the night’s meal and the next day’s lunch. They’ve built a big supermarket right next to Canadian Tire, on the other side of the overpass. You have to turn right for the groceries and left for the highway. I often turn left. Louise knows it, just as she knows that I always come back in the evening with the supper.
Cryptozoology
Late June.
Half asleep, Jim hears the rain falling non-stop onto the truck, the two woodsheds, and the piles of wood waiting to be dried, cut, split. He imagines the rivulets streaming down the little dirt path winding its way to the road for kilometres through angiosperms and gymnosperms, the great cavalcade of all the species present at that latitude, spared by the forestry company because it wasn’t worth their time to clear the concave tongue of land stretching from their camp to the road between two mountains. Half asleep, Jim knows his land and knows that the rain is irrigating the sugar maples, the cherry trees, the paper birch, the black ash, the trembling aspen, the red oak, the linden trees, two white pines as tall as the CN Tower, the rotten trunk of an American elm, centenarian three times over, that had to be cut down because it was sick with bark beetles, the balsam fir, the white spruce and black spruce, the Canadian thuja, the red-fruited sumac from which Doris, in the summer, makes a kind of acid lemonade, and the mountain ash with their big orange fruits that drive the birds crazy. Jim hears a great mad wind that’s blowing through the trees and whistling between the walls and under the outhouse roof.
Half asleep, he’s on the same plane as the other forest creatures, waiting for the storm to calm where they lie on their beds of branches, leaves, and moss, less comfortable than his own. Though he’s seen the bad weather heal itself a thousand times, part of him thinks the squall will last forever.
Half asleep, Jim tells himself that the rain will stop and that, as always after a storm, the animals will come out of their shelters in search of sun. As the first light shines through, the partridges let their chicks frolic out in the open on the gravel paths, and the rabbits swarm like insects along the roads, veering off very late, sometimes too late, when they hear tires crunching on the gravel. It’s during this brightening that he’s seen the rarest animals. The black bear on the woodcutters’ camp road. The moose that crossed the Joe Roth River while he was teasing trout massed in a shadowed bowl, with great arcing casts. The lynx by the lake, crouched in grasses, under branches. Half asleep, Jim can tell by the weight and smell of the air that the rain won’t be stopping for a while and that he must summon the patience of the other animals, those that hunt, those that answer to the periods of the moon and only come out at night.
He gets up and puts water on the stove to heat in an old iron kettle, and goes out on the porch to gather logs and birch bark from the wood box. The air is cool, humid inside and out, and the cabin floor is as cold as a steel spoon before you dip it into the soup. His father stirs in his bed and opens his eyes. The water begins to rumble in the kettle. His father emits a sigh that becomes a rattle, then a coughing fit, and asks:
“What’s new?”
“Not much, pa. You?”
His father sits up in bed.
“We wanted to go fishing with Luce. We took the rods and the tackle, then Luce waited in the boat while we loaded the cooler on, then the worms. She was wearing your mother’s hat, with a really nice army jacket.”