And the Birds Rained Down Read online

  ‘Was Ange-Aimée a friend of yours?’

  ‘She was the queen of our ward. Everyone respected her. She walked like a queen, talked like a queen, and I was her friend. Her lady’s maid.’

  ‘Her lady’s maid?’

  They are whispering more than speaking. Charlie is using his velvety voice, the one he uses to approach a frightened animal. Marie-Desneige is more and more at ease. She is used to dormitories, secrets whispered between beds. Using a hushed voice, barely audible, she recounts some of her life in the asylum with her friend who believed she was the queen of Scotland and who gave her stockings to wash and hems to mend in exchange for her protection.

  ‘Nobody would have dared take on Ange-Aimée, Queen of Scotland, England, the Carpathians and the United Nations.’

  ‘The Carpathians isn’t a country.’

  ‘Neither is the United Nations.’

  They laugh, amused at having thought almost the same thing at the same time, surprised to find themselves on common ground.

  ‘And why Marie-Desneige?’

  ‘There were a lot of Marys. Mary Lynn, Mary Ann, Mary Beth, Marie-Louise, Mary Kate, Mary Margaret, Mary Jane and just plain Mary. But there was only one Marie-Desneige. She was the prettiest one.’

  ‘It’s a nice name.’

  This is said in a goodnight tone, and indeed, they say nothing further and fall asleep.

  CHARLIE'S THIRD LIFE

  The photographer finally had a name. She would be called Ange-Aimée, the name of the Queen of Scotland and the Carpathians who ruled over the lunatics – no matter that she already had a name. Marie-Desneige decided how things would be, without really meaning to or realizing it.

  Life in the lakeside community revolved around Marie-Desneige’s needs, whether expressed or not. She got her cat and her curtains, and the photographer as a friend. The cat was a two-year-old male tabby that she called Monseigneur; the curtains had a dainty floral pattern, a pale salmon pink, that brightened up the house both inside and out; and her friend Ange-Aimée went from the royal protector she had been in another life to become her lady’s companion.

  Marie-Desneige was adjusting wonderfully to her new life. She had learned how to handle propane, could peel potatoes without cutting her hands and studied the colour of the sky every morning, but being alone in her house with no one around, that she couldn’t handle. Charlie realized this one day when he came back from hunting and discovered her in his cabin, buried under the bundle of furs, her body wearily rocking and, in her eyes, the desperate struggle of an animal in a trap.

  Ange-Aimée the photographer became a necessary presence, both to keep the demons away and to find in stores what had become indispensable: slippers, a nightgown, a knitting kit and novels to fill the evenings, romances mainly, and now that winter was coming, even more novels.

  The green room was assigned to her as a matter of course, even though she regularly returned to Toronto where she had an apartment, her darkroom and all the photos that waited for her to decide their fate. The Great Fires, Boychuck and his mystery, all of this was dim and distant now that there was this little old woman on the lam trying to make a life at the end of the world with two men even older than her.

  ‘I always knew I would have a life,’ Marie-Desneige said to Ange-Aimée in the early days of their friendship. ‘I never gave up hope of having a life of my own.’ And Ange-Aimée the photographer, deeply moved to be witnessing the dawn of a new life, slipped into another skin.

  A bit like when a newborn arrives in a family, a sort of grace descended upon the community and ensured there were no concerns other than the well-being of the new arrival. The most apparent change, even though no one took notice of it, was that they stopped talking about death. The subject had been lost in the shuffle of settling Marie-Desneige in, and then in the fun of discovery. She had seen her first flock of Canada geese, her first hare tracks in the snow, a moose that came to drink from the lake, an owl in the bare arms of a birch – everything was new and fresh to Marie-Desneige’s eyes.

  Death held no interest. They no longer talked about her, didn’t even think about her. They were in the presence of a new life spreading its wings.

  But their old friend still lurked, no matter what they wanted to believe, and sometimes she took advantage of their inattention to slip into a conversation that had nothing to do with her. For instance, there was the snow, not yet very deep but staying on the ground. Winter was definitely pressing to settle in. They would probably need more ­firewood than last year. They were wondering whether they would dip into Ted’s wood supply. And Marie-Desneige wanted to know who Ted was. While they were explaining, death breathed easily. She had reasserted herself. But not for long. Boychuck was of greater interest alive than dead.

  Through a strange conversational detour one day, death managed to fix their attention on Charlie’s salt box enthroned on the shelf above his bed. Ange-Aimée, because that’s what she had to be called, was at the hideaway for a few days and had brought from Toronto an enormous Italian cake that was so heavy and sweet they had to sample it in small mouthfuls. There was no reason for any interest in the salt box. It was on its shelf, and they were around the table, eating the terribly sweet cake. There are only so many ways to explain what happened. Only a malignant presence, lurking somewhere at the far end of the cabin, frustrated and vengeful, could have forced their eyes toward the tinplate box after Tom, for no reason, made this reflection about the overly sweet cake.

  ‘It’s so good, I think I’ll go without salt today, Charlie my boy.’

  All eyes, including those of Marie-Desneige and Ange-Aimée, who knew nothing about anything, turned toward the box. Somebody had to explain it. It was Charlie who did.

  Instinctively, he had spotted death’s presence and set out to chase her off. He explained that the box contained a medicine of last resort. ‘There is no doctor or hospital here,’ he said, ‘and there are limits to what a person can endure.’ A flash of panic passed through Marie-Desneige’s eyes. ‘Nobody here wants to die,’ he hastened to add, ‘but nobody wants a life that is no longer his own either.’ Marie-Desneige closed her eyes. How long had she been imprisoned in a life that was not her own, how many years had been stolen from her? Charlie had to be aware of the thoughts raging behind Marie-Desneige’s closed eyelids. ‘And that,’ he said, pointing to the tinplate box, ‘is what makes the sunset worthwhile when our bones are aching, that’s what gives us the desire to live, because we know we have a choice. The freedom to live or to die, there’s nothing like it to make you choose life.’

  So there. It was said. They wouldn’t revisit the topic. The cabin breathed more freely. Death could forget about it. It would stay relegated to the shadows for the time being. The conversation then latched on to something more substantial, because Tom started to tell Charlie’s story to convince Marie-Desneige, in case she had any doubt left, that no one here wanted to die. ‘This stubborn old mule brought his salt box here out of pure bravado,’ Tom said, gesturing to Charlie.

  ‘This is my first life,’ Marie-Desneige said, ‘and I’m hanging on to it.’

  Many other conversations followed this one. Winter would soon cover the forest with her icy stillness. The only place for a little entertainment was around the fire, and that winter was particularly entertaining. Conversations had never been so lively. They revealed a Marie-Desneige braced, determined to live the life that had been given to her, outraged, deeply outraged – her life had been stolen from her, she often repeated.

  These conversations generally took place at Charlie’s. They involved the three elders and sometimes Ange-Aimée. It wasn’t unusual to see Bruno and Steve arrive on a Skandic. If there were six in Charlie’s little cabin, they would move to Marie-Desneige’s, her house being larger and already equipped with three chairs. They just had to bring two chairs and the metal pail from Charlie’s to seat everyone.

  There were memorable moments. Like the time Bruno brought Chinese food from
a restaurant in a neighbouring town. Six aluminum dishes filled to the brim with fried rice, stir-fried vegetables, garlic spare ribs and breaded shrimp. Two hundred kilometres there and back. The dishes were cold. They put them in the oven and they came out bubbling, steaming and fragrant. They talked about it for days.

  The winter was particularly cold, hard and brazen. It stung the nostrils as soon as you stuck your nose outside. Tom had a flu that kept him in bed for two weeks. Ange-Aimée was the nurse. Charlie spent his days at Marie-Desneige’s. The sound of the nails in her house exploding in the cold terrified her. Steve and Bruno handled the rest, checking the hare traps, drilling holes in the ice, carrying water and firewood. They took care of everything because Tom was still weak from the flu and Marie-Desneige was scared by the noises in her house.

  The lakeside community grew closer over the winter, huddled together in the heart of the deep cold, never very far from one another. Marie-Desneige blossomed like a young girl under all the attention. There were no more incantatory songs to make your blood run cold. She was still haunted by irrepressible fears, the worst being the feeling that her body was slipping away from her. And every evening, fearing that that horrible thing would happen again, she would knock at Charlie’s door.

  She didn’t spend a single night in her own home. She was used to dormitories, she explained to Charlie, was used to falling asleep under the thick odour of a dormitory, twenty women around her, their warm breath, the weight of their dreams intermingled and, close by, in the bed next to her, her friend Ange-Aimée.

  Charlie would be waiting for her. He would have unrolled the pelts and filled the stove with dry birch logs, waiting for the shiver that would let him know the precise moment she knocked at the door.

  She would arrive wrapped in her coat, her eyes pleading with him to protect her from herself. All she had on under her coat was her nightgown, a thing of wonder in Charlie’s eyes, a nightgown in white flannelette lit up at the neck with pink trim, the only feminine clothing he had seen in a dog’s age, as the two women at the camp covered themselves during the day in thick shirts over their men’s pants.

  Marie-Desneige would go straight to her bed and slide under the furs. Charlie waited until then to turn out the light. He would not have greeted Marie-Desneige in Stanfield’s, the long wool underwear that covered his whole body and never left it in the winter, not even to sleep, a second skin, as fragrant as the first one but smooth and uniformly grey. So he waited to be in the dark to strip down to his Stanfield’s and slide under the covers in turn.

  Chummy, during the depths of the cold of winter, was also in the cabin. Stretched out on his side in the middle of the room, he formed a sort of rampart, an invisible barrier that allowed them to believe they were protected from too much intimacy. They could talk without worrying what would come to mind because they were in the dark, at a distance from one another, and would soon be submerged in a sleep that would wipe away all that had been said. Everything was in place for the long conversations that acted as a lullaby, Marie-Desneige falling asleep first and Charlie waiting for this moment to slip out of bed and put another birch log on the fire.

  Their nighttime conversations found no echo the next day. The first up, Charlie fed the stove, boiled the water for the tea and set about preparing breakfast. Marie-Desneige got up in turn and came to help him. An old couple, Charlie sometimes thought, and it surprised him each time that this thought did not turn his mind to the woman he had left fifteen years before.

  The first time Tom discovered them this way, he felt as though he had walked in on an old couple in the middle of their morning routine. Marie-Desneige in her nightgown, Charlie dressed, but his bed unmade, and the bed of pelts spread out nicely in the other corner of the room. There was no doubt about it; they had spent the night together.

  Well, Charlie my boy …

  He’d arrived, as was his custom, for his morning chat with Charlie and discovered him shacked up, as it were. He could have felt insulted, betrayed or dispossessed. These morning conversations had been something exclusive, a ritual they never missed. And here was his companion alone with a woman in a nightgown. But twisted feelings didn’t last long in the forest – it would have made survival impossible. Tom sat down at the table in calm uncertainty, waiting for his inner turmoil to subside to find the right thing to say.

  He got used to seeing them together. When she was not at his place, he was at hers, or they headed out together through the deep snow to observe the signs of a spring that was taking its time in coming. She, so tiny and fragile, a little bird always on the verge of being carried off by a wind of panic, and him, large, so heavy and so slow, a block of granite that it seemed nothing could shake.

  All he had to do was lay his hand where she showed him and she would resurface. There, she would say. It was the lungs or the stomach or the liver, an organ was cold and was in danger of disappearing. Charlie’s hand slowly, gently filled the gap, and Marie-Desneige, serene again, smiled at the life that had returned to her.

  An old bear holding an ethereal creature down to earth.

  Methinks you’re beginning a third life, Charlie my boy.

  It is cold in Charlie’s cabin. There is a full moon. The cold is sharp and biting. The stove barely manages to sustain a circle of lukewarmth, which fails to reach the corners of the cabin.

  From his bed, Charlie observes with concern the cloud of condensation escaping from the nest of furs. He wants her to burrow into the warmth, but he knows that Marie-Desneige won’t sleep until she finishes telling the story she has started.

  ‘The first time, I thought someone else had come to inhabit me. I believed it was an angel, a celestial being who had taken over my body. I thought I was going to start to fly. I didn’t panic. It was real and yet unreal. Like a game. I left my body where it was, and I went to tell my mother that I had become an angel.’

  Marie-Desneige tries to explain the process of becoming disembodied that she has suffered from since adolescence.

  ‘They put me away. I was sixteen years old.’

  Charlie is concerned.

  ‘I don’t feel like there is a foreign presence anymore, or an angel, or a being from the great beyond. There’s just me and a feeling of emptiness. It’s very real, but it’s hard to explain. It’s very slow at first, vague, the sensation of an emptiness that is trying to find a place. I can see exactly where it begins. In the organs, often around the liver. When the emptiness settles in, it sucks up all the rest. Leaving is easy, but coming back is dreadful. It’s the memory of that horror that terrifies me as soon as I feel the emptiness attack me.’

  Charlie isn’t worried for the part of Marie-Desneige that is tucked under the furs. He knows how warm her cozy little nest is. He has often slept in it with Chummy. What worries him is the white, luminous spot, Marie-Desneige’s head outside the nest, the condensation escaping from it that has now formed a little white cloud. It’s getting colder.

  ‘Tell me about Ange-Aimée.’

  He hopes she will fall asleep telling the story told many times before and that she will burrow down further in

  the furs.

  ‘When we met, I was seventeen and she was twenty-one. It was major nervous exhaustion that had brought her there after her first baby, the only one she ever had. They had labelled her with a diagnosis of progressive melancholia and gave her a hysterectomy. She was in a sorry state when I met her. She spent all day rocking in the day room with a phantom baby in her arms. My diagnosis was premature dementia, because of how I would see my body disintegrate. Then they said it was schizophrenia.

  ‘I rocked her baby. That’s how we became friends. I asked her if I could rock her baby. She passed him to me very carefully, and I took him just as carefully, and I rocked the baby too, for a long time, singing songs to him. And that’s how, taking turns rocking a baby that didn’t exist, we figured out how not to be where we were. We rocked the baby for a year, and then he died. We had a funeral for him, and An
ge-Aimée became the queen of Scotland and England. The Carpathians and the United Nations came later. It saved our lives. For years, we reigned over ourselves. We didn’t see the rats or the cockroaches. We couldn’t hear the cries or the howls. We had our own world, our own laws, our own fantasies. She was my queen and I was her lady’s maid. My body held fast. Sometimes I would see it go off, but I would hang on and it would come back.’

  ‘Are you cold?’

  He doesn’t want to hear the rest. He doesn’t want her to tell the story. The separation, the electric shock, the insulin comas – he can’t handle the rest anymore. They were separated. Their friendship was thought to be wicked. Wicked for whom, wicked why, when you were a patient at 999 Queen Street – these were questions you didn’t ask. Ange-Aimée was transferred to the manic floor, and hell began for Marie-Desneige. The panic attacks intensified. Her body disappeared without warning, sometimes completely. Electric shock, insulin comas – she was subjected to every psychiatric horror of the time. She doesn’t know how she escaped a lobotomy. Nor does she know what became of Ange-Aimée. She never saw her again.

  ‘No, you’re the one who’s cold.’

  From her cozy nest, she hears him toss and turn in his bed, seeking warmth. The cold cuts like a knife. The stove does its best, but nights with a full moon are cruel. Charlie gets up regularly to feed the fire. She knows he won’t sleep, that he will watch over the fire all night.

  ‘Come over here. It’s warm here. You’re freezing in that bed.’

  The invitation is tempting. He is familiar with the enveloping warmth of fur. But sleeping alongside Marie-Desneige, close to a woman, he can’t. His body refuses. It would be letting go too much.