And the Birds Rained Down Read online

  It was more than she had hoped for from her meeting with the lady at the museum. She had come merely to confirm her intuition, and she left with a story that reconstructed the identity of the very old woman who had started her on this quest.

  The little old lady of High Park was one of the two young girls with long hair. Miss Sullivan had clearly identified her. First, on the painting that depicted her at sixty-something, and then on the one where she was shown with her twin sister.

  ‘One hundred and two? She would be one hundred and two years old. Is that possible?’ the photographer wondered.

  The smile of a person who isn’t in the habit of smiling is a thing of rare beauty; it lights up her entire face. Miss Sullivan’s smile was a radiant sun.

  ‘Angie was always mischievous,’ she replied. ‘She likes a bit of fun.’

  Miss Sullivan was thrilled to know that Angie Polson was alive. She hadn’t had any news for such a long time. No appearance by the former marvel of Matheson, no letter sent General Delivery for Theodore Boychuck for over twenty years.

  She was not surprised to learn of Boychuck’s death.

  ‘He trailed death behind him.’

  Theodore Boychuck’s death, however, meant the end of her collection. The AP MP TB notebook was her last active file. She was expecting no more.

  ‘Ill-fated love is impossible these days.’

  The photographer felt relieved as she left her. The life of this woman who had never found, or even searched for, what she needed was tragic.

  They are feeling sluggish. Time stretches out each gesture, each thought. Charlie is lying on his left side above Marie-Desneige, who receives his caresses. Charlie’s hands are soft and penetrating. They explore her knees, her ankles, missing nothing. They come and go on her thighs, inside her thighs, slowly, methodically, they caress, palpate, knead, and when they reach the crease of her bottom, the pubic bouquet, the hands slowly drift off course.

  He leans over her. His great tousled white head starts to sniff her entire body. ‘You smell like vanilla,’ he tells her when he gets tangled in her hair. He nestles in her neck, moves down her shoulders, takes a long draw of her armpits. ‘You smell like spring,’ he says, and she smiles. ‘And you don’t smell like winter anymore,’ she tells him in turn, and they both smile at the thought of the strong odour of wool underwear that permeates their winter bed.

  Charlie’s great head moves down along her chest, burrows in the hollow of her breasts, two little empty wineskins that he caresses with his fingertips and then more boldly, more generously, while he moves further down still, breathing in deeply, exploring, leaving his hot breath along her skin as he travels. Marie-Desneige lets him breathe her in like a flower to be picked, water to be drunk. She lets Charlie’s hot breath envelope her, penetrate her.

  He is at her stomach. Soft, tender and with the scent of cinnamon, he says, when after stopping at the navel and its odour of deep earth, he discovers the purplish scar under the fold of skin at the spot that hides an old wound. The scar is long, horizontal and hard to the touch. He raises his eyes to Marie-Desneige.

  ‘It’s from the baby,’ she says.

  He blows on the scar, he caresses it, kisses it, and then refolds the skin over the wound. Nothing shows, the past can be left alone.

  He slowly lets himself slide where Marie-Desneige waits for him and breathes in the odour of land and sea, he smoothes her hair with his tender fingers, he covers it with his hot breath and then he raises his head and sees Marie-Desneige smiling at him and calling him, and he comes back to the smell of her hair, spread out alongside her.

  Thus begins the slow work of bodies coming together, which in their case is difficult, because they have neither the youth nor the training required. But slowly they find their rhythm. Legs interlace, tongues entwine, bodies embrace, rock each other under the layer of fur. But age soon rears its head, breathing becomes laboured, and in Charlie’s case comes out in coughs, and the bodies have to separate, abandon one another, side by side, defeated by the effort.

  They do not actually consummate their relationship, never will; it has been too long for both of them.

  ‘You had a child?’

  Charlie’s voice is hesitant. He wants to comfort, console, bandage wounds, but in his voice there is his own wound, that of a man emasculated by old age.

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Was it a girl or a boy?’

  ‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Did you have other children?’

  ‘No, I suppose that they did a hysterectomy while they were doing the Caesarean.’

  Marie-Desneige snuggles up to him, very feminine, worried about what he is thinking.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, knowing that he will ask what for.

  But he doesn’t ask.

  She explains that she has never experienced this, kisses, embraces. She has only ever known business hastily done in a stairwell, behind a hedge, skirt hiked up, and a man in a hurry to get on with it and finish, sometimes a resident, sometimes an attendant, as young or as old as she, but she didn’t complain. She always liked bidiwiwi.

  ‘Bidiwiwi?’

  ‘We didn’t have another word for it.’

  ‘And you liked … bidiwiwi?’

  ‘A lot. Even when I was forced, I managed to get pleasure from it. But I’ve never been kissed, never caressed.’

  ‘This is your first kiss?’

  ‘My first kiss and it’s much better than anything I could have imagined.’

  ‘You will have all the kisses you like, I promise you. All the kisses you never had, millions of kisses, billions and trillions of caresses.’

  ‘We’ll have to live a very long time for that.’

  ‘So what’s stopping us?’

  ‘Promise me that as long as I’m alive, you will never touch your box of salt.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Promise me that as long as you’re alive, you will never let me go near your box of salt.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Even at the peak of a crisis, even when I beg you, promise me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  A WOLF IN THE NIGHT

  ‘No, that man couldn’t love.’

  The photographer had returned to the hideaway with this crazy love story, wondering who would react most strongly. They won’t want to believe it, she told herself. And yet the one person who should have been touched by the romance of the story was rejecting the very idea of Ted being in love.

  Marie-Desneige was decided. A man who has images of such horror within him, who is fuelled by them to the point of obsession, is incapable of love. When suffering takes hold of someone, it leaves no room for anything else. I have seen men and women suffer to the point of loving their pain, stoking it, adding new torments to it. I have seen them mutilate themselves, heap abuse upon themselves, roll around in their feces, and I’m not even talking about suicide attempts. An attempt is suffering; suicide is the decision to put an end to it. And there were plenty of attempts. Suicides too.

  She had never said so much. They listened to her attentively. They were on what they called Marie-Desneige’s veranda, the space at the front of the house they had thought of screening in but never had, though the idea remained, and they talked quietly on that mild evening at the end of the summer, each sitting on a stump, paying no attention to the buzzing of mosquitoes, as if they were truly protected by screens on Marie-Desneige’s veranda.

  The air was filled with the smell of earth and grass that has been scorched all summer by the sun. A light breeze had come up. The evening was mild, cocoon-like, perfect for conversation.

  The photographer had arrived at the end of the afternoon with a restaurant meal for everyone. Fries, salad, roast chicken and a love story that, now that Marie-Desneige had declared Ted incapable of love, went off in every which way. No one understood anything, but they accepted Marie-Desneige’s opinion. She had access to a part of Ted that remained
off limits to them in spite of their years of companionship. His paintings, it seemed, contained more than anything he could have told them, more than he knew about what drove, obsessed and tormented him.

  ‘Too many deaths,’ she explained. ‘Too many bodies, too much black coiled at the bottom of his paintings, never any light, or, if there is any, it’s to illuminate blackened bodies, cries of horror, hands outstretched where death surprised them. No one can live with that deep within. Ted tried to free himself from it, to hurl all of that horror onto the canvas. Maybe he succeeded in a sense. His final painting, the one on his easel, had light – very little, a faint glimmer, but enough to create a space from which he could slip away gently. That’s what I hope for him, it’s what I hope for all of us. To slip away gently.’

  On that, their old friend, feeling their call, rose from a secret place and went to meet their thoughts. Death is never very far from the elderly.

  To die at ninety-four isn’t so bad. Ted may not have been the happiest of men, but he had held his own, and he died free, with dignity, not even needing help when his hour came. Charlie respected that. Leaving without insisting on goodbyes is a sign of respect for those you leave behind. Goodbyes do no one any good. And then he thought of Marie-Desneige. If one of them were to die – and it would happen, it had to happen one day – on that day, would he be willing to part without a goodbye? The thought muddled his mind.

  Tom was also tangled up in his thoughts. It was the end of August. Fall was coming soon and then winter, and he was wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to end things there, in the balmy warmth of the end of summer. He remembered the previous winter with bitterness, the flu that had kept him in bed for weeks, spoon-fed bouillon by the photographer, as helpless as a newborn. The flu had left him weakened, with lungs that did not inhale in unison and the feeling that his body did not want to follow him.

  Death had no hold on Steve or Bruno, but they felt her prowling around Tom and Charlie.

  ‘If the little old lady in High Park is really one of the Polson twins, what are you going to do for your exhibition?’ Steve asked to lighten the mood.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ the photographer answered.

  They knew about the project. She had talked to them about it before visiting the lady at the museum. The idea had slowly developed as the paintings were deciphered, and she realized that a number of them had echoes in the photos in her portfolio. That was how, from one painting to the next, from one story to the next, she arrived at the idea of a dual exhibition, with Boychuck’s paintings and her photos of the survivors.

  In some cases, she could even imagine the copy on the card accompanying certain pairs, the card for Castaways of the Pond, for example – that was what she had called the painting of the three men who had taken refuge in a pond, with an enormous silhouette of a moose behind them and a bird perched on the shoulder of the youngest man, Joseph Earle, the one who had told her the story and of whom she had a picture. It was a working title. She had also considered The Last Humans on Earth to express the feeling that inhabited the three men in the pond or, more explicitly, Waiting for the End of the World.

  The text should first describe the scene, because Ted had painted a black maelstrom surrounded by a ring of diffuse light, which murky forms emerged from. The photographer had not yet decided what would come next in the text; it was heading off in too many directions at once. The light was what she wanted to explain first: the golden light after the apocalypse, the hand of God held out to these men in the pond that they were reluctant to take, not knowing whether they were still alive or already in the other world, and the boy with the vacant gaze whom they had seen pass. She didn’t know if she should mention him in the text too.

  The text that would introduce the photo of Joseph Earle was, however, very clear in her mind.

  Joseph Earle, January 1995. Born in Matheson in 1900. Arriving in Ramore at age ten, he worked on the family farm, held different jobs before becoming a gardener for Ontario Northland Railways, a job he held until his retirement. He now lives in the Croatian quarter of Timmins, formerly Schumacher. He was sixteen years old at the time of the Great Matheson Fire. Shown at the far right in the painting, he is with his cousins, Donald and Patrick McField.

  Joseph and his cousins were surprised by the fire as they returned from the family still. The three young men had spent the night making alcohol that they sold to a bootlegger in Matheson. Moonshine, the old Joseph had said, proud of this fact, as if to say, I didn’t spend my whole life soaking in holy water. It was an amusing anecdote, and the photographer could have used it in her accompanying text if she hadn’t been worried about heading down paths that would take her farther from what she was trying to say. She wanted simple text. Her thinking wasn’t yet very far along, but she knew that the emotion the paintings exuded would be amplified by the testimony of the photo and that nothing should get in the way of the synergy between the painting and the photo. So not too much chattering on the cards.

  But anecdote sometimes gets at the essence of things, and she knew that she could not avoid the story told by a pair she had entitled The Miracle of a Birth, once again a working title, because the old man in the photo had yet to be born when he was depicted in the painting – he was still in his mother’s womb, which was buried under two feet of earth. The scene in and of itself was not terribly disturbing: you could see only black mixed with long brown smears under a sky compressed by thick drips of grey. The interest of the painting lay in a light stroke of the brush from which emerged a point of light in the black impasto, the air hole through which the mother of the child to be born breathed. The text would have to explain this; otherwise it would be impossible to understand. The couple chased by the flames, Black River as their obstacle, neither of them knowing how to swim, a shovel abandoned on the shore, they dug a hole for shelter, a violent gust of wind, the flames rushed toward them, the man having just enough time to cover his wife with earth and to jump in the river clinging to a willow branch.

  The branch broke, and I found myself without a father. It was young Boychuck who got us out of there. Seventy-nine years later, the miracle child inside him still marvelled at having had a life to live. His name was Thomas Verner; he had large doe-like eyes and a permanent smile.

  Thomas Verner, May 1995. Born in Matheson in 1916. He spent his whole life on a farm, first in Charlton on the farm of the uncle who took him and his mother in after the Great Matheson Fire, and then in Belle Vallée, where he raised five children. He lives there to this day.

  He lives there to this day. The photographer wondered whether she should go back to Belle Vallée to be sure. The photo was taken two years earlier. The old man with the angelic smile trailed an oxygen tank behind him and breathed though a nasal tube that he did not tolerate well. He removed it all the time and put it back just as fast, when his lungs whistled impatiently.

  Thomas Verner was the youngest of her collection of old folks. A number were in danger of breathing their last breaths before the exhibition. ‘Tell me you’re not going to make the rounds of all your old fogies to find out if they’re still sucking air,’ Charlie objected. ‘Are you this interested in the lives of others because you don’t have one of your own?’

  She thought then of the old maid at the museum who collected impossible loves just as she collected old miracle survivors. Was her own life tragic as well?

  Tom and Charlie weren’t thrilled about her plans for an exhibition.

  Bruno and Steve were more co-operative. They had helped her organize and label the paintings, packing the ones she had taken to the Matheson museum and the ones for the exhibition, over one hundred of them, grouped in series, well identified and numbered, all were waiting in Ted’s cabin to be loaded into the pickup to be transported to Toronto.

  Something lingered in the air of this waning summer evening, something that reached them without them realizing it. The mildness of this late evening demanded that they turn their minds to tim
e gone by, that they linger over it, that they consider it carefully before letting it go.

  That’s what they did, each in their own way, without realizing it.

  One year had gone by since Marie-Desneige and the photographer had suddenly appeared in their lives. One year and one month, Charlie counted, still amazed at what had happened to him. An old man in love, that’s what I’ve become, and he felt buoyant thinking about Marie-Desneige’s little laugh in the furs. How much more time will we have?

  Marie-Desneige was sitting at his side, as she always was. Everywhere they went, fishing, in the forest, picking berries, they were always together. The hours, the days, the months, the weeks – she lived them in detached moments, one by one, without considering the passage of time. How many more days, how many more months? The question did not have to be asked as long as there was this man whose broad hand kept her here on earth. It was his strength, his weight, his gravity, his earthly attraction.

  Tom looked at the couple they formed, sitting beside one another, calm and peaceful in the falling night. How had they arrived there? The loves he had known had been like lightning bolts, meteoric, scorching. He had never given them the time to get to this state of completeness, jostled about as he was by life. How had they managed it? He was curious, not envious or bitter. He could have been – he had lost a lot in this affair – but he was not a man to brood. He had learned that you have to adjust how you row when the wind changes direction, and he quickly developed other habits now that they had formed a sort of community with these two women who just happened their way. Not envious or bitter, but curious. He wanted to put his finger on the thing that had always escaped him.