And the Birds Rained Down Read online

  ‘She just wanted something to keep her busy.’

  Keeping busy, to Bruno’s way of thinking, was frivolousness in its worst, most consuming form, and he believed his mother was as empty-headed as they come …

  But that was unfair. His mother had answered a plea for help that his father had ignored, and she was the one who was being criticized. It was unfair and I told him so.

  ‘My mother just wanted something to do, to let off steam, to keep busy preparing meals and organizing a family celebration around the long-lost relative, and then when everything was done, when there was nothing left to keep her busy, so long, Gertrude. The poor lunatic was to be sent back to where she came from. Except there was a snag.’

  The snag was the fiery eyes that sought out Bruno in the living room bursting with uncles, aunts, cousins and second cousins – a long sidelong look that snaked its way through the crowd and came to rest on Bruno’s earlobe.

  ‘They had all filed past her, all astonished by her excellent mental health. They were making comments and being mildly appalled. I refused to take part in the circus. But when an old woman just out of the asylum seeks you out with her eyes … ’

  The dissident nephew approached his aunt, and once he leaned over her, he understood.

  ‘It was my earring that had caught her eye.’

  She pointed to his earring and told him, in a confidential tone, as if to warn him of a serious misunderstanding, ‘You’ve made a mistake. You’re a boy, not a girl,’ and he, in the same tone, said, ‘You’re right, auntie. When I got up this morning I thought I was a girl,’ and, understanding the game, she said, ‘It’s true. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s what in the morning,’ and they laughed the same laugh.

  This incident and others that followed – because regularly that day they found themselves laughing at private jokes, shared flights of fancy – convinced him to stay at his mother’s the whole time his aunt was there. His mother, naturally, had no idea what was going on. I understood. This woman was the only member of her species, alone on her own planet, and Bruno likes those who are unique.

  ‘She sees things we don’t see.’

  But on the evening of the third day, they were no longer laughing. Her departure was set for the next morning, and she watched the preparations warily. He had not seen that look in her eye before. It was anger dug up from deep inside, sixty-six years of internment, a devil’s cauldron of emotions. He felt like she was on the verge of hurling it all their faces and yet she didn’t. She held back. Sixty-six years of holding back. She knew that anger was no good, that authority punished anger, and authority at this moment was the two people who were packing her suitcase; she turned her eyes, wild with the rage of impotence, to Bruno. It was to him that she said, ‘I don’t want to go back there.’

  ‘That was yesterday – a century ago. What would you have done if you were in my position?’

  The same thing, Bruno. I would have done the same thing, I thought. I wouldn’t have let the old aunt be sent back among the headcases, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a hell of a problem here, a problem whose head is starting to seriously bob on the other side of the window.

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Don’t worry. That’s my problem.’

  His mother hadn’t suspected a thing when he offered to make the trip to Toronto in her stead. Even he hadn’t suspected a thing at that point. All he wanted was to spend a little more time with his aunt.

  ‘That’s all I was going to do, I swear, but this is how it turned out.’

  As they headed south, he saw her shrink in her seat and withdraw. She became a small caged animal, and she said not a word the whole time they were driving south, and then suddenly, as if everything had already been decided without him knowing, he turned around.

  ‘She smiled with every wrinkle on her face.’

  It was then, and only then, that he realized he was heading north to bring her here, but as for the rest, what they were going to do with her, he didn’t know any more than I did.

  ‘What about your mother?’ I repeated, because it seemed to me that that was a major problem.

  ‘Don’t worry about my mother. I’ll handle her.’

  ‘And the others? In Toronto, they’re going to worry. They’re going to call the police.’

  ‘It’s not your problem. I’m telling you, I have a plan.’

  The aunt was now fully awake. I could see the white head moving from side to side, sending off its spray of light. This woman grabbed you by the heart. Her story was devastating.

  We went back to the great hall where she was waiting for us, smiling like a lost child. Bruno served her a sandwich and a cup of tea and explained that she needn’t worry, that he would take care of everything. Tonight she would sleep at the hotel, which he indicated with a large sweep of his hand, and tomorrow we would see about the rest.

  Bruno gestured to the high ceilings, the panelled walls, the inlaid floors, the grand staircase winding above the great hall, all in varnished oak dulled by dust. The state of the place didn’t make it very inviting. But that didn’t seem to worry her for an instant.

  We brought her to her room, the green room, the room the photographer had stayed in the week before. I wanted to whisper a word in Bruno’s ear, but the thought got lost in the shuffle again.

  She liked the room’s silence. That’s what she said: ‘I like the silence in this room.’

  We got her settled in with the few things from her suitcase: toiletries, drugs – lots of drugs – and a few old-­fashioned articles of clothing, including a horrid purple bathrobe that Bruno, disgusted, hung in the closet.

  ‘How about a pink terrycloth robe, would you like that, auntie?’

  Pink terrycloth!

  That was that. We were taking her on. Rather than being alarmed, I felt relieved, which was even more worrisome.

  We left her silently contemplating her room, and we went down to the great hall where a tasty joint and a good discussion awaited us, at least that’s what I thought, because on top of the issue of the aunt we had to sort out, I still hadn’t said anything to Bruno about the photographer, and I wanted to talk to him about Darling, my dog.

  You can’t live in the forest without a dog. Ted, Charlie, Tom and I each had ours. They accompanied us, listened to us and understood us. A dog that buries its nose in your crotch when you think no one knows you exist is a familiar comfort. I’ve slept with Darling more than once – the nights get cold in my little cubbyhole. I’ve only ever slept in the office. I could have chosen a room upstairs, but I’m set in my ways. That’s where I slept when the Lebanese man was here, and that’s where I continued to sleep once I had the hotel all to myself.

  Darling hadn’t barked at the photographer’s arrival. That’s what worried me. She had stayed quiet, no growling or anything, and then she went to rub up against the photographer’s legs and hadn’t left her side all evening. That woman had a gift with dogs.

  Darling was supposed to warn me when someone arrived. That’s the job of any dog worth its salt, Darling even more so, because of the plantation and the old men. Ted feared nothing from anyone, historians or other worshippers of times gone by, but Tom and Charlie had left behind lives that could catch up with them. Jerry, the hotelkeeper in the next town where I went to cash their pension cheques, reminded me regularly of the illegal nature of our situation, trying to bump up his cut. But he had too much to hide himself, so I could trust him. Illegal activities get along quite nicely with the shenanigans of others. Only the pure of heart are dangerous. And the photographer, without a doubt, was one of those. What would become of us if Darling stopped barking when the pure of heart went by?

  I wanted to talk about all this with Bruno. If I had known that Ted was dead, we would have talked about that too, but I didn’t know. I should have known. I should have sensed his absence. Ted was our role model, our inspiration, the soul of the place. We all admired him tremendously. We knew his s
tory. The boy who had walked through the smoking rubble. The man who appeared and disappeared. An open wound. Ted was a legend. When the Lebanese man saw him coming, he knew that the train tracks would never reach his hotel; if Mr. Boychuck had come to settle here, there was no hope for the place. He handed me the keys and went to seek his fortune elsewhere.

  We smoked our joint but we didn’t talk about what was on my mind. Bruno was in a rush to leave, in a rush to get to the old men’s camp, in a rush to put his plan into motion – he was going to learn everything at the old men’s camp.

  The story takes shape quite slowly. Nothing happens very quickly north of the forty-ninth parallel. Tom and Charlie start their days by stretching their limbs, sore from sleep, and then slowly making their way to the woodstove to kindle it for the morning and potatoes with bacon. Each at their window, they study the day before them. No matter whether it’s sunny or snowy, it’s a nice moment, because they are able to observe it all: the snow, the wind, a rabbit’s tracks, the gliding flight of a crow, life renewed – nothing they haven’t seen before.

  After bacon and potatoes and sweet tea comes the first cigarette, and with it, the first real thought of the day. Before that, there are only indistinct rumblings of the brain. They need a rush of nicotine to awaken their brains and make their thoughts distinguishable.

  Since Boychuck’s death, their first thought of the day is for their old friend. All those paintings they discovered in the locked cabin have left them with endless questions.

  Charlie is on his second cigarette, and he is waiting for Tom for their morning chat. That’s the way it is every day: Tom, after stoking his stove, leaves his cabin, passes in front of Ted’s, stops there long enough to wonder once again at the paintings lined up like a mummified army, and continues along his path, wondering what Charlie will have to say about it – Charlie had gone there as well the evening before, at dusk. They each have their hour.

  ‘What possessed him to leave all those paintings behind?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It’s his legacy.’

  ‘His legacy, come off it. He didn’t have a woman, no children, no family. They all died in the Great Matheson Fire. Why on earth did he saddle us with them?’

  ‘We don’t have to do anything with them.’

  ‘That doesn’t stop us from thinking about them.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what he wanted.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That we think about him.’

  ‘Come on.’

  Every morning, they have this conversation, or one like it, which gets them nowhere. But these are their last moments alone, just the two of them, because very soon the lakeside community will have added to its numbers the tiny old lady with the fiery eyes and the husky woman who used the pretext of the Boychuck legend to pay them a visit.

  But we must pause and introduce the Great Fires that ravaged Northern Ontario at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  And love? We’ll have to wait a while longer. It’s too soon for love.

  THE GREAT FIRES

  Northern Ontario was ravaged by the cruel, devastating Great Fires at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  The fires were carried by violent winds over fifty, a hundred kilometres, destroying everything in their path: forests, villages, towns and lives. It was a sea of fire, a tsunami of flames that advanced with a hellish roar, impossible to flee. You had to run faster than fire, throw yourself in a lake or a river, hang on to an overloaded rowboat or a tree trunk, wait for the monster to gorge itself on its own fury, for the flames to devour one another, for nothing more to be left, for it to move on to other forests, other towns, leaving nothing behind but black, devastated earth, the smell of the end of a battle, and whatever would be discovered, or not discovered, under the ashes.

  The Great Timmins Fire was the most violent. Four scorching hours and nothing was left of the small mining town. The survivors had taken refuge in Porcupine Lake. Hours of pure horror watching the flames hurl themselves at their homes, stores, the train station, all the things they had just barely finished building; the town was only two years old. But the tragedy didn’t end there. The fire then headed northeast and devastated the town of Cochrane, eighty kilometres away, which had burned the previous year and would burn five years later, in 1916, during the Great Matheson Fire.

  The Great Matheson Fire was the most deadly. Two hundred and forty-three souls perished. Those were the official numbers, anyway – they didn’t take into account the prospectors, the trappers and the wanderers, those nameless people, with no nationality, who do not exist, who travel from place to place. This was a new frontier, and it attracted adventurers of all descriptions. A few were found in dried-up streams, but most ended up as nothing more than small piles of charred bones that the wind blew far from the accountants’ figures. Five hundred dead, some said.

  And then, six years after the Matheson Fire, on October 4, 1922, there was the Great Haileybury Fire, the most spectacular of the fires because it razed the county seat of the district – the only town in Northern Ontario that had a bit of sophistication. It had tramways, a cathedral, a convent, schools and a hospital, all in freestone – buildings that were thought to be fireproof and yet disintegrated like wisps of straw under the wall of flames. Only millionaire row was spared: twelve large, stately homes built by the nouveau riche of Haileybury. They had made their fortunes in the silver mines at Cobalt, a small town a few kilometres away that had burned three times in isolated fires, but that the fire, in one of those inexplicable reversals of fortune, had spared this time.

  The whims of a fire cannot be explained. It can climb the highest peaks, rip the blue from the sky, spread in a reddish glow, swelling, whistling – good god, it can leap onto anything that lives, jump from shore to shore, plunge into ravines soggy with water, devour peatlands, but leave a cow grazing in a circle of grass. What is there to understand? Fire, when it achieves this power, obeys no one but itself.

  Even more miraculous than the cow in a circle of grass, there were children found in a stream. The photographer heard many stories about this. At first, she didn’t believe them, but people insisted. One child had been found the next day in a stream, covered in mud, but alive. ‘The next day’ was the part the photographer couldn’t bring herself to believe. A child is a child. Having the instinct to stay submerged during the fiery storm is one thing, but to spend the entire night amid the ghosts of the inferno without panicking is unimaginable: fire leaves in its wake earth that gasps, trees that slowly burst into pieces, charred remains that crackle and whistle. How could a child wait quietly for someone to come save him when all around him monsters are stirring in the night?

  The photographer heard the story of a little girl, six years old, who was entrusted with the care of two babies who were found the next day, eyes red from smoke and tears, but alive. Only the little girl had severe burns. Then there was a boy of five whose parents had handed him over to two men who were fleeing toward town in a hay wagon, believing that their child would have a better chance of making it. They managed to save their small farm, but the two men who were taking a trail barely wider than their wagon at one point believed they wouldn’t make it out alive – with reason, as the trail had become a tunnel of flames. Rather than put the life of the child in danger, they left him in a stream before entering the tunnel of fire. All that was found of them was the frame of their wagon, but the child survived. His father found him the next day.

  The boy’s story had been told by an old woman of ninety-one. Rose Kushnir. The photographer refused to believe her until she said that she knew the boy as a young man. He survived, Rose said, but he left part of himself in that stream. He never knew how to talk to people; the words wouldn’t come. It was like talking to a ghost.

  Rose herself was a miracle. She and her family had survived by digging the earth between the rows of their potato field with their own hands, and they remained face down, each in their furrow, while the waves of flames rushed
above them. Her mother’s back and behind were burned – she had covered her youngest with her body to protect him.

  The tales of the survivors were all horrific. The photographer started having nightmares. But she never gave up her quest.

  Going elder to elder, she came to know the Great Fires as if she had been there herself. She encountered these old people just about everywhere. In Matheson, Timmins, Haileybury, in towns of unimaginable sadness, hamlets in the middle of nowhere, in sparkling clean hovels (the Dambrowitz sisters refused to install electricity, but played concerts, one on the piano and the other on the cello), in seniors’ homes (the people she met there were practically all senile) – anywhere people talked about the Great Fires, it was with an astonished pride at having survived.

  The Great Fires had their heroes and their martyrs. Boychuck was neither, but he appeared in all the tales of the survivors of the Great Matheson Fire, even in the stories of those who didn’t know him, who had never seen him, who had nothing to offer on the subject. Ed Boychuck, Ted or Edward, no one could agree on his first name, was an enigmatic figure of the Great Matheson Fire. The boy who walked through the smoking rubble: that’s what he was called most often.

  He was fourteen years old on that hot day of July 29, 1916. A sturdy boy, not very talkative, but a good worker. He had been hired on to a team of masons who were building the home of a Matheson merchant. His family lived some ten kilometres away, and he made the trip morning and night along the railway tracks, the only real route in a land still too new to afford roads suitable for vehicles.

  It was a hot, dry day. You would have thought you were in the Sahara if not for the evergreen forest spread out like an offering to the sun.

  Young Boychuck was spotted all along the railway track heading toward Ramore. The fire was not yet a threat. There was smoke pretty much everywhere, but people were used to that. It was summer, bush-fire season, and smoke was just part of the landscape.