From time to time the girls must stride over a tiny watercourse gushing across the path toward the river. Monette invariably bends down to try to see some fish and asks:
“Brook or river?”
“Runoff from the rain,” Angie explains.
As it hasn’t rained for weeks, this answer does not sound entirely satisfactory, but Angie makes no attempt to elaborate. Such rivulets and the silty furrows they create are part of the terrain. Water is so abundant in these parts.
The vegetation grows thicker and with it the insects’ song, the cries of the blue jays.
“Are we still in Georgia?” Monette inquires.
“Uh-huh,” Angie softly answers.
The little girl gives her big sister a doubtful look. She asks this same question whenever she finds herself in a place without houses or pavement, as if the state were defined solely according to its degree of civilization, its signs of human engineering. As if such an untamed environment could have neither name, nor border, nor government.
A mockingbird passes overhead and draws Monette out of her questions. The smell of oil and tar filters in through the grass, and Angie guesses they are not very far. After about forty paces they reach a clearing streaked with train tracks, which lie behind a fence too rusted and broken to warrant that name. Pulling back a section of the chain-link mesh, Angie lets Monette through first and, once she herself has crossed, puts her hand on the diminutive crumb-littered chest to keep Monette still. There is a rumbling noise to the north.
“Don’t move. The train’s coming.”
She can almost feel Monette’s heart leap as she hops up and down. The spectacle of the train is an endless source of excitement for her.
“Let’s put down a penny! Let’s put down a penny!” she shouts.
Angie searches in her pocket for a one cent piece and nimbly rushes to the tracks to lay it down. When she comes back and takes hold of her sister’s hand, Monette, to be heard above the approaching roar, yells in a high-pitched voice:
“Let’s count, okay?!”
Angie agrees without taking her eyes off the railroad. Just before the train arrives, she thinks she has caught sight of something, a strange shape heaving on the other side of the tracks. Her pulse races and then the train saws the space in half. Monette launches into the arithmetic refrain that marks the rhythm of the passing cars.
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”
The freight cars speed past, covered with dust, graffiti, and rust stains, every one numbered, every one named. None will be forgotten.
SHE IS NOT BURNED (ARIEL AND MARIE)
There is something reassuring about the structure of the horizon here. Of course, a house or a man is completely exposed on the Prairies. But, on the other hand, anyone arriving can be seen a long way off. That is why each morning, even on cold days, Ariel goes out and walks around the house, scanning the vastness of the plains. He counts the foxes and the hares bearing their pale winter fur, and only when he has confirmed that the animals are their sole companions can he go back in to Marie and the aroma of coffee, which has remained unchanged from one existence to the next.
They do not own much furniture. They took what came with the house, which seems to have been abandoned by people fleeing from a sudden apocalypse. Now, weeks after they moved in, a cake with only two or three slices missing still sits majestically in the middle of the table, as neither Marie nor Ariel can bring themselves to throw out the dessert that bespeaks those interrupted lives. Once they had given some clothes found in the cupboards to charity, replaced the curtains and acquired a few dishes from a second-hand dealer in Rockfield, they considered themselves properly moved in.
Marie took the main bedroom, and Ariel, the adjacent room, where he shoved a twin bed with a sagging mattress against the wall. This slender barrier is all that separates them when they go to sleep. Each presses a hand against the wall to wish the other goodnight. Sometimes they wake up at dawn in a state of confusion, failing to recognize the unfamiliar shadows licking at the abstract furniture, their hearts still pounding in fear of what lies in wait outside, of what is lodged in their marrow. Then they remember. The moving, the prairies, the neighbourless house. Everything has already exploded; the world has already been annihilated. That is the advantage of surviving the apocalypse: there is nothing left to either protect or fear.
A family of raccoons has taken up residence in the attic, and, out of respect, neither Ariel nor Marie goes visiting. In the spring, the constant squealing signals the birth of a litter. Marie spends a long time imagining the blind, toothless offspring whiffing the dusty air under the eaves in search of their mother’s milk, and then she places her hand on her breast, which will grow old but never heavy. Like the land where they have come to live, Ariel and she have become sterile, two celibates scraping by on nothing, a worn-out hide salvaged from their past that day after day they manage to stretch enough to make it resonate. A beat of the drum to confirm they are still alive.
The party’s cops were the first to arrive after the disaster. Impelled by an indignation that was amplified by their thirst for revenge, they forced the door of the little house after nightfall. As they no doubt expected denials from Ariel and Marie, they sat them down in separate rooms for questioning. They soon realized their interrogation was futile. He and she immediately admitted the truth, even offering to supply the adoption agency’s documents in support of their statements and as proof that they were unaware of being siblings when the elections took place. Thrown off balance by the confessions, the cops proceeded to the next stage of their plan and ordered Ariel to resign immediately. They drafted a speech for him, which in no way resembled what he would have liked to say, but he came to terms with endorsing it. He readily consented to shut himself away for the following weeks and to refrain from any contact with the media. The reporters, constantly stationed in front of the house, shivered like animals that would rather freeze to death than starve to death.
The next day Marc succeeded in elbowing his way through to them. There were only a few hours left before the press conference, which had been put off long enough for an interim leader to be found whose curriculum vitae did not include incest, procuring, polygamy, or bestiality.
“How?” is all Marc managed to articulate.
“You’re the only one I shared this with,” Ariel replied.
“And you, Marie?”
“My sister found out, but she didn’t tell anyone else about it.”
Marc looks at her in disbelief.
“Everyone knows the Leclerc clan are all hard core independentists. Do you truly believe your sister could have kept something as explosive as this to herself?”
“Yes I do. My sister sets great store on family.”
“There’s no point in playing the blame game,” Ariel decides. “It’s too late.”
It was indeed too late. The global media had latched onto the scandal. Forgetting their fight against modern science, the evangelists were marching in the streets now to demand not just that Ariel step down, but that the marriage be dissolved, that the twins be imprisoned, and that they be subjected to all manner of physical retribution involving fire and white-hot metal instruments. The Left’s reaction was hardly better, as it responded to the attacks by sparing no effort to downplay the situation, arguing that family ties are “a matter of biography and not biology,” and that, since Marie and Ariel had not grown up together, their kinship meant nothing. The party was floundering and the country’s instability had never been greater.