And the Birds Rained Down Read online

  Ted was a man made for eternity. He couldn’t die in his bed like just anyone, with no other sign than a silent chimney.

  All he had on was an undershirt and long underwear when they found him in his bed, half covered with a sheet, no sign of struggle against pain, and, Charlie hastened to add, no foam around his mouth.

  ‘No foam? You’re sure?’

  I wanted reassurance. I never liked the idea of death by strychnine. They joked about it easily, but it wrenched my heart.

  ‘Just reached his expiration date,’ Tom said again.

  And Charlie added that there was almost a smile on his face, so content did he look to be leaving.

  ‘A smile for death is the final courtesy.’

  Ted leaving a smile on his corpse. It was hard to imagine because I had never seen him smile.

  I wanted to see where they had buried him.

  So we set off. The dogs leading the way, Charlie’s bear step heavy and silent, Tom limping along at his side and me bringing up the rear. You could almost have believed it was a nice summer day, that work awaited us somewhere and that Ted was sitting on a stump in front of his door expecting us. But Ted wasn’t going to be joining us in our work any longer. No more felling trees for Ted, no more repairing the cabin, no maintaining trails, no more hunting moose. Ted was somewhere else, smiling down at his corpse.

  Shoots of grass had started to appear on his grave, a rectangle of earth of very modest dimensions, it seemed to me, for the man he was. His cabin was a few metres away, lifeless, without the slightest wisp of smoke. It was toward the cabin that our thoughts went. The remains buried beneath our feet were nothing. Ted’s true headstone was his cabin.

  We had to go in. To pay our final respects or out of curiosity, I couldn’t say. I was convinced that we had to go into his cabin, to see what his eyes saw all these years. Smell the odours that surrounded him. See, smell, hear, touch. We had to fill ourselves with Ted’s life to say our goodbyes.

  We went in. Me first, with Tom and Charlie hanging back for a moment. They had gone in to take out the body, but now they hesitated.

  At first glance, it wasn’t much different from Charlie’s cabin. A twenty-square-metre room. Two windows facing each other. Under the right-hand one, a sink in old enamelled cast iron and a counter that was really just an extension of planks covered with linoleum, at the end of which the woodstove sat imposingly, the centrepiece of any self-respecting cabin. At the back, in the darkest corner, was the bedroom, a mattress on a wood base hewn with an axe. The dining room, unlike standard practice, was in the other dark corner of the room. A table, again in two-by-fours, and a single chair. Everyone knew Ted didn’t entertain. And in the sunniest part, under the left-hand window, the one that was south facing, an easel, in the same two-by-fours, on which rested a canvas covered with a smoky grey streaked with black and a few dabs of colour. The colours were indistinct. Red, orangey or yellow, it was hard to tell. They overlapped, intermingled, consumed each other. It created the strange impression of a world dissolving in a muffled cry.

  There were other canvasses propped up against the wall, covered with the same greyish coating and a few bursts of colour, like flutey notes in a requiem. Nothing terribly cheering. Nothing to leave a smile on a corpse.

  We went through the other cabins.

  Like at Charlie’s lair, one was used for the woodpile, one was used for storage, between them was the outhouse, and in back, on much more careful foundations and completely closed up without a single window, a cabin with a lock on the door.

  A lock in the woods. It was an insult. A serious offence. Ted knew it and still he had locked the door to his cabin.

  We broke the lock with the butt of an axe, and we found ourselves in the presence of something unbelievable. From one end of the cabin to the other, canvasses similar to those we had just seen, hundreds and hundreds of canvasses, stacked one against the other, all creating the effect of being smothered while the world crumbles around you.

  There was an empty space of a few feet amid the canvasses at the centre of the cabin, a sort of nave that received a bit of light from the door.

  That’s where we were, Tom, Charlie and me, asking ourselves what we were going to do with all this.

  Tom thought we should let nature reclaim the cabin.

  ‘Time will return all this to the earth.’

  Charlie was not convinced.

  ‘Ted didn’t do all this to add a layer of compost to the earth.’

  I wasn’t sure of anything. My head was spinning. I suspected them of having waited for this moment to spring the other news on me.

  ‘We had a visitor.’

  They weren’t proud of themselves.

  Neither was I.

  I too had a visitor to tell them about.

  Now we have come to the third witness, Steve, disillusionment embodied, another man who has rejected the world. He found his freedom in managing a hotel that no longer serves any purpose. The only way to reach it is via a dirt road that intersects an isolated byway beyond which there is only forest and lignite, a poor man’s coal that no one wants, and unless, like the photographer, you’re drawn to the song of desolation, you’ll feel that time has distended, that this place is out of sync with reality.

  Steve is maybe fifty, maybe younger – he is ageless. He is the man who takes in the strays from the road.

  What you have to understand about Steve and Bruno is that they are drawn to the illicit. Their friendship is based on their shared need to feel they are on the other side, on a slope that’s a little steep, a little slippery, that they alone know about. It gives them an extraordinary sense of freedom.

  Steve is tall, all arms and legs, with a tautness in his eyes and a special way of keeping the eyes of others at bay, but if your eyes hold his for a certain amount of time, he will lower his guard and let you approach. There is nothing he likes better than talking with strangers the road brings his way, even though he pretends otherwise.

  Bruno is younger, more tractable; he has not renounced the world. He has friends everywhere. He comes and goes, is always on the move. He is the least pensive of anyone in this story.

  They will have to put their flair for the illicit into action yet again, because another visitor is coming their way, and she will need a new identity and a new way to live her life.

  STEVE

  Her hair, above all her hair, that was what I saw first, a shock of white hair above the dashboard, hair so diaphanous it could have been light, a splash of white light, and under the radiance of the hair, two terrified black eyes. She was tiny, shrinking into the seat; I could see nothing else.

  I had heard the motor of Bruno’s Caravan and had gone outside well before he arrived. Seen from afar, the white spot on the windshield could have been anything. Bruno’s van was loaded to bursting. Tools, building materials, clothes, special treats for the old guys.

  It was only when he reached the level where I was standing that I understood that the white spot I had seen was the head of an old lady.

  He greeted me as he always did, two fingers raised to his cap, which meant that everything was all right, but I could see from the slowness of his gestures that he was completely stressed out. Not a word, no explanation after the two fingers to the cap – all his attention was on the tiny little thing, the old woman, shrinking into the seat, whose large black eyes took in everything around her. She was delighted and terrified to be here.

  Bruno gently opened the door, closed it soundlessly, and then with the tread of a wolf, with the tread of a cat, which was so unlike him, he went to open the passenger door, and the old woman slowly unfolded from the seat. Who was she? I thought maybe a former wife. The old men had left behind full lives. I thought in particular of Charlie, who was duly married and could be reclaimed.

  The old woman was truly tiny, the size of a twelve-year-old child, very fragile, a porcelain doll, and made only small movements. She leaned on the arm Bruno offered her, and with the tre
ad of a teeny mouse, she let herself be led toward what I still called the Lebanese man’s hotel in spite of the little of him that remained. The owner had not asked me to render accounts in years.

  ‘The bags,’ Bruno said, motioning to the back seat with his head, and I went to pick a brown suitcase off the heap, to the great relief of the old woman, who followed me with her eyes.

  Slowly we arrived in the great hall, them in front and me behind. The room was intimidating, I admit. The few guests I had always circled it with their eyes suspiciously before entering. That’s because hunting trophies that the owner and his friends had left behind were hung on the walls: moose antlers, gaping bears’ mouths, lynx, wolves, clawed and hairy, with ferocious eyes, some stuffed in their entirety, arched on a pedestal, ready to pounce. The effect was striking. I had kept everything as it was, hadn’t bothered to change a thing.

  And here was this little old lady, who definitely bore no resemblance to an animal tamer, leaving the arm of her protector and creeping toward the most formidable piece in my bestiary, a wheat-blond lynx, growling with all the ferociousness its large pink muzzle would allow, immortalized in a powerful leap, its two front paws ready to rip in two anyone who approached. And that is just what the old woman did. She approached the pedestal, her gossamer head level with the back paws that anchored the animal’s leap, and she remained there for a moment, still, not saying a word, and then she turned toward us. Her wrinkled face showed both fear and fascination with the fear. With a thin delicate finger, she pointed to the monster stuffed with blond fury. She had no idea what it was.

  ‘It’s a lynx, auntie, a lynx. Come sit down. I’ll make you some tea.’

  Auntie?

  He sat her in a rocking chair near the window, her suitcase at her feet, and he went into the kitchen. I followed him. He had some explaining to do.

  ‘Exactly what have you brought us?’

  ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘Is she really your aunt?’

  ‘My father’s sister. I didn’t even know she existed. No one knew.’

  ‘Can you tell me why you brought her here?’

  ‘I don’t know why. You have to help me.’

  He was nervous, lost in his gestures. He had decided to make her a sandwich and was looking for the ham in the cupboard, the bread under the sink. His hands came and went without knowing what they were touching.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Gertrude.’

  ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘Yes, but we’ll have to find something else for her.’

  I only half understood, but I was reassured. If we had to produce fake ID for the woman, it wasn’t hard. We had done it for Charlie, and then for Tom. I don’t even remember their real names. Ted didn’t need any, because he was running only from himself.

  Bruno handled the paperwork, fake and real. He was in charge of external affairs. The old men and I took care of the plantation. It was an arrangement that had worked pretty well. In fifteen years, no one had come to sniff around in our plant beds. A few strays from the road, hunters and fishermen, sometimes came to get lost at my doorstep. They were looking for untouched spaces where man hadn’t planted his astronaut foot. I sent them west. There were enough forest roads to keep them driving in circles for an entire afternoon. There were also nostalgics for the Great Fires, Ted’s fan club: memoir writers, historians loaded down with tape recorders and cameras, and briefcases stuffed with papers. They stayed for hours talking about it and went home without further ado, happy not to have to get lost in the forest. They were satisfied with what I told them. The photographer was the only one I hadn’t managed to scare off. A strapping woman, that one, even a bit husky. I would have to have a word with Bruno about her.

  But for the time being, there was this little old lady waiting in the great hall.

  ‘What’s she done? Has she killed someone?’

  ‘Right. With an axe and her little white hands.’

  Okay. Serious conversation would have to wait.

  We found her dozing in the rocking chair, her head hanging over her chest, arms resting on her thighs, hands open. She lit up the room. We backed out, which seemed to take an eternity, and slowly closed the door behind us, another eternity. The door creaked and whined because its hinges had never been oiled, and we looked at each other, astonished by our precautionary gestures, or embarrassed, rather. We weren’t in the habit.

  Now he had to explain what the woman was doing here. If it was just a matter of getting her fake ID, he didn’t have to bring her to me. So whatever it was, it was a lot more complicated.

  A lot more complicated, in fact, than anything I could have imagined. The story of Gertrude, who became, at our hands, Marie-Desneige, was long. Very long. She was eighty-two years old when Bruno brought her to me, and her story had begun sixty-six years earlier when her father admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. She had been sixteen.

  It was a horrendous story. I kept interrupting Bruno, because each new part of the tale added to the horror. I kept saying ‘It’s terrible,’ him agreeing, ‘Yes, terrible,’ and he would continue, not happy about the story he was telling, but he would continue. We spent almost an hour getting indignant over Marie-Desneige’s past.

  Bruno didn’t know why she had been committed. In fact, no one in Bruno’s family had known anything about her. They didn’t even know she existed. A letter was discovered after the death of Bruno’s father, among the deceased’s papers, in which Gertrude begged her brother to get her out of that hell. She was thirty-seven years old. The letter was dated May 15, 1951, and bore the letterhead of the Ontario Hospital, but the address, 999 Queen Street West, contained all the drama of a life – 999 Queen Street West was notorious throughout the province as the place in Toronto where thousands of the mentally ill were sent.

  There was no further correspondence. No other trace of the woman who had signed Your sister Gertrude in the deceased’s papers. The letter had gone unanswered.

  ‘It’s appalling, there’s no other word for it,’ is what I told Bruno, ‘it’s terrible,’ and he nodded his head.

  ‘Yes, it’s terrible, and yet my father was a loving man. He raised us to care about others and to want to help, within reason. That’s what defined my father, I think. Within reason. And it was the too-reasonable side of him that made him fear his sister’s supposed insanity – “supposed” because she’s not crazy, I’m telling you. She is in full possession of her faculties.’

  ‘Sixty-six years in an asylum is not reasonable.’

  ‘No, not exactly reasonable, but you have to understand.’

  His father, his grandfather, his uncles, his aunts – all those who had come before him were guilty. A life had been wasted because of them. But Bruno couldn’t help it. He had to defend his father and his blood.

  ‘You have to understand. It was ignorance, the dark ages, the fear of anything that couldn’t be seen or understood. It was the times.’

  It wasn’t like Bruno to defend the failings of another era. Nothing he was doing or saying was like him. He was nervous, agitated, his hands were fluttering like butterflies. His attention was elsewhere, behind him. He had his back to the window and couldn’t see what I could readily see as I faced the window – it was fascinating, all the white spilling onto the old woman’s chest, lighting up the room.

  ‘Is she still sleeping?’ he would ask occasionally.

  ‘She’s sleeping. Don’t worry. Go on, continue.’

  Because he had to continue, he had to explain why he had brought his elderly aunt to me, and what we were supposed to do with her. The problem wasn’t in giving her a place to stay. I still had a few rooms that were presentable enough. The photographer had told me she had slept well here. No, the problem was more serious than that. I was waiting for the rest of the story.

  The letter had gone unanswered. Bruno’s father had to die for it to be discovered.

  ‘My mother,’ Bruno began, and I
knew that it would get stuck in his throat. He had never had a good relationship with his mother.

  ‘My mother couldn’t bear it. The letter was written with impeccable grammar, not a single error of spelling or syntax. The handwriting was also remarkable: elegant, graceful, fine loops, downstrokes with pretty flourishes. All from the hand of a woman institutionalized at the age of sixteen.

  ‘That’s what convinced my mother – the letter with no mistakes – to move heaven and earth to find her relative. Specifically her use of the word whom. My mother had taught for thirty years, and she was moved to read sentences like There are those of us for whom life is cruel and unjust.’

  She found her relation in a home in the suburbs of Toronto. A home where some fifty assorted undesirables were warehoused. The disabled, the infirm, lunatics – no distinction was made. No one wanted them. No one would claim them. They had spent their whole lives in institutions. Old and a burden, they had been parked in that house, two to a small room, with a noisy TV room and three meals a day.

  I understood Bruno’s anger at the rest of the story. Because that wasn’t the end of it. His mother, after her first visit to her sister-in-law, took it upon herself to brighten up the woman’s life. She wrote her, she sent her gifts, she called at Christmas and Easter and on her birthday, she spread kindness, talked about her special project with affection. I just wrote to Gertrude; she’s bored, the poor thing. She enjoyed this image of herself, so kind and generous, but rejected the compliments she was paid on the matter. It’s the least I can do; it’s all we can do for her now.She has lived locked away for over sixty years. She couldn’t handle living any other way. It’s all we can give her, a few small pleasures at the end of her life.

  Until the day when kindness and compassion were no longer enough, and she invited Gertrude to her home. Her children were now adults, and she had spare bedrooms and time to kill, but only for a few days – the poor thing couldn’t stand any more.