Édouard’s steps are surer, his movements sturdier. It isn’t so much his gait as the fact he looks at the sky, the trees, and places his hands on tree stumps. As if he were coming out of himself after staying rolled up in a ball, a clenched fist, so that no energy whatsoever might escape. Madeleine is waiting for him beside a freshly dug hole. In an old shredded blanket lies Shabby the cat. He did not survive the heat wave or the commotion in the house or simply his eighteenth year in this world. Hugging the small, expired body one last time, Madeleine wept, but she could not help thinking that it had come at the right moment. Édouard gently lays the departed at the bottom of the hole and then, holding his shovel, straightens up.
“The first time I travelled by train, I couldn’t sleep for the first three or four days. I couldn’t get used to the rocking, the noise of the cars, the wind. And going through remote areas that were completely uninhabited, I had the sensation of being the first man ever to have set foot there, and the thought obsessed me, kept me from closing my eyes. After a few days, of course, my body gave out. I fell asleep somewhere near Reno. When I woke up it was dawn. I looked around and I thought the train was sliding over water. We were on the track that splits the Great Salt Lake exactly in two. Because of the railroad ballast, the lake is divided in half, and the composition of the water isn’t the same in both halves. The northern side is full of wine-red algae, but on the southern side it’s green. The clouds were perfectly mirrored on the surface and took on the colours of the lake. The train rolled along slowly. The air was warm and soft. There was no sound; it was as if the universe had come to a standstill. Right then, I had the feeling that I would never again be hungry or cold or in pain or afraid.”
Édouard deftly throws a handful of earth on the cat’s body.
“That’s what I wish for him, for your Shabby. That’s what I wished for Dad. That’s what I wish for every one of us.”
Copying her son, Madeleine pours a little earth on her pet, the earth he was so fond of. Édouard picks up the shovel and calmly fills the grave, with his braid keeping time on his lower back. Madeleine is impressed by the sureness of his movements. She thinks about the organ that continues to bond to him, generating day after day new connections with the body to which it now belongs; she thinks about this piece of another human being, which is keeping her son alive.
“Now we both have another being inside us.”
“Let’s hope there’ll be no more,” Édouard adds. “There’s no room left.”
Madeleine takes a deep breath of salt air. The summer wind carries the messages of migrating whales.
“Just one more month,” she says.
Édouard sighs happily. In a month, the dangerous period will be over. The risk of rejection will become almost nil. And the boat that Yun has been slaving away at every day will be able to cast off. He squeezes Madeleine’s hand.
“Are you certain?”
He repeats the question as a matter of form. The discussion was concluded days ago. Together they finish burying Shabby, Madeleine’s interlocutor, guest, hot-water bottle, guardian, night-light for nearly a third of her life. She takes her son’s arm, looks out over the acre of land that belongs to her, and considers the extent to which she never belonged to it, the extent to which her desire drew her far from the demands of the soil and its shoots, far from the roots that probe the soul. Far from a house that was never open enough. The two of them stop in front of the slowly swaying willow. Two grey stones have been added at the foot of the tree. Madeleine casts Édouard a questioning look.
“For the little girls,” he explains.
Madeleine nods.
“These grounds are getting crowded with the dead.”
She feels as though she is standing in the palm of a large, restless hand. She must readjust herself with every step and test the floor she is treading; the angle is constantly shifting, as are the forces changing it from moment to moment. She endeavours to walk without holding the guardrail, to trust only the rhythm of the rolling as she tries to learn its syncopations.
The luggage and equipment have all found a place in the boat. The berths have been clothed with clean sheets and thick blankets. The provisions are hanging in a net over the little galley. The camera and about fifty rolls of film are tucked away on the deck in the small cabin that in another life was an old-fashioned car. Outside, on the passenger side, Joanna’s bicycle has been solidly secured. As for Édouard and Yun, they’ve settled down under the deck, amid the waves lapping against the hull.
On the pier a few people are waiting in the spindrift. Paul, looking melancholy, is worrying at his rabbit’s foot, while the watchman waves a spotless handkerchief. A few of Édouard’s friends who have gathered are trying to play him a farewell song, but their instruments are stifled by the wind rushing into them. Even the doctor has come, dressed in a fisherman’s raincoat, clearly delighted at the chance to be by the seaside. Madeleine could swear that there, behind them, she has caught sight of Frank and Missy and all the other travellers who have passed through the village, leaving footprints and the indelible impressions of backsides in the sand. She gives them a joyous wave, while Joanna, like a star from the Fifties, smiles and blows them kisses. Édouard weighs anchor as Yun contemplates the shore with an earnest expression, trying to commit its shape to memory so she can include it in the map she is drawing in her mind. There is a bitter onshore wind blowing. Fall is approaching and the warmth of the South throbs on the horizon like a sack of gold at the foot of a rainbow.
They button up their raincoats and lower their hats down on their heads, as if this detail was the last thing that needed to be attended to. When the boat finally casts off, Madeleine has the sudden sensation her lungs have filled with twice as much air, and she hangs on to Joanna’s arm for fear her feet will slip off the deck. The boat heads out clumsily toward the mainland, toward that immensity still unseen, though its mineral rumbling can already be detected. In a few days they will plunge into the maw of an immeasurable gulf that will slowly narrow and gulp them down into the interior, between cliffs bristling with life, reeking of history, shimmering with strength. They’ll avoid the shoals and greet the pods of cetaceans, as they brush by a string of salt-corroded cargo ships and let themselves be guided by a thousand beacons into the heart of America, where they will cut across the Prairies or slide along the Appalachian crests, and there they’ll catch the scent of the deltas and the lakes welling in prehistoric craters. And Madeleine, her fingers buried in her jacket sleeves, will no longer feel her as-yet-unsteady steps on the deck, will no longer hang on to stones and walls, and will stop counting, so that she may, finally, for the first time, be but one.
A PENNY (MONETTE AND ANGIE)
The grass is so high that it stands a good head taller than Monette. This doesn’t bother her, and using a branch she found where the trail begins, she knocks away the stalks that bar the path. She insisted on taking the lead; Angie is close at her heels, brushing the burrs off the little girl’s pink T-shirt and scanning the bushes for snakes and venomous spiders. The cicada’s song covers everything: the crunch of their steps, their thick breathing in the vegetable humidity, and the rustling of potential enemies on either side.
With her free hand, Monette still keeps a firm grasp on the molasses cookie, which she nibbles at parsimoniously. As far as Angie can see, a significant portion of the treat is crumbling its way out of the wrapper, but her sister is too absorbed by the walk to pay attention. Angie recalls the story of Hansel and Gretel and the bits of bread they strewed to be able to find their way again. She turns around several times to see if the birds are snapping up the cookie crumbs.