Travelling Light Read online

  The turn for our road is at Maguire’s. The Maguires are poor and dirty and they say my mother is crazy, they are the ones. Maguire has a boy, Pardieu, who speaks English and French at the same time. He and I sometimes go into the muskeg to kill beavers that dam the culverts beneath our road. Last year Pardieu came with us when we hunted moose. Old Maguire was a soldier in the old, old war; he was gassed and gets money. Last winter he killed a black bear and stretched out the skin on the door of his barn. He said he would take the skin to the base one day to sell it.

  Pardieu has only nine fingers. The mother is fat and smells of vinegar. Old Man Maguire smells better, of smoke in the woods. In the springtime they make syrup up in the stand where the maples are. In the winter they cut pulpwood.

  When Maguire was nailing up the bearskin, his wife pointed to me and said to her sister from Saint-Viateur, standing on the porch beside her, “C’est le petit gars là, the boy in the bush with the crazy woman.”

  Maguire’s skinny cows are out in the road. My father slows and honks his horn. I lean from the window, put my lips around the Mackintosh box, and blow. “Stop it!” says my mother, putting her hands over her ears.

  From Maguire’s it is another three miles in to our house. Before we are there our dogs have heard us and are out, dancing in the road. The great thing, my father says, is to be able to anticipate an attack. One war may be over, he says, but other wars always begin.

  We spend the afternoon working in the garden. When he’s ready to leave, he puts on his uniform and kisses us goodbye. After he has driven down the road my mother brings a chair out to the porch and sits for hours, watching the skeletons of trees against the red evening sky.

  My father zips into his sky-blue flight suit and walks out to his ship.

  Pardieu comes up the road. We pick up the canoe and carry it to the landing.

  My father settles into the cockpit and locks down the canopy. He runs through a check in twenty-five seconds, then ignition.

  Pardieu and I lay shotguns in the bottom of the canoe and start paddling. The canoe slides through brackish water. The muskeg smells of animals, birds, rotting pine.

  My father has clipped on his oxygen mask and is starting to boost, tapping the throttle stick with the heel of his hand.

  We’ve stopped paddling. We’ve loaded our guns and are trying hard to listen. The canoe rocks gently on the water.

  My father streaks above us all, screaming.

  SMELL OF SMOKE

  Green remembers failing sunlight when he last saw her. Four o’clock in the afternoon and shadows of the arborvitae hedge and the maples, firs, and birches were already stealing across the lawn towards the swimming pool. It was still summer and it was almost over.

  His mother and a couple of his aunts were reclining on chaise longues. The women had been sunbathing and were just starting to notice the freshness in the air. Maggie had disappeared into the cabana, wearing a two-piece bathing suit. She came out rubbing her wet hair with a towel, dressed in blue and white striped bellbottoms, a wide leather belt with a brass buckle, a T-shirt, and sandals. She was tanned from days of sailing on Green’s little pram, the Nutshell.

  He was stretched out on a chaise on the same side of the pool as the women, but separate from them. Turquoise water glinted between him and Maggie. He was still wet. They had raced twenty-five lengths and he had won. His skin stank of chlorine. He was shivering.

  When Maggie called goodbye across the pool, his mother and aunts waved. As far as they were concerned, it was only the beginning of the end of another summer, and Maggie was only returning to Boston, where she took studio classes at the Museum of Fine Arts School — the “Museum of Fine Rats” she called it. Green watched her walk down the gravel path carrying her bathing suit and towel, pass through the gate, get into the white sports car, and drive away down Bord-du-Lac Road.

  Maggie’s parents’ house was one of the oldest on the Lakeshore. In the days of New France it had been a manor house and a fur-trading post, and there were gun slits in the basement, where the seigneur and his family and servants barricaded themselves when the Iroquois and the New Englanders — les bostonnaises — raided up and down the St. Lawrence. The fieldstone-and-rubble walls were three feet thick. The gun slits were stuffed with pink insulation fibre.

  People called it the Lakeshore, but the lake was really just a widening in the St. Lawrence River. The water had current, it had a flow.

  The restless youngsters of New France and the fanatic Jesuits in their black robes used to set off from there, paddling upstream, plunging into the Ohio country, then down the Mississippi, baptizing Indians and claiming an endless Louisiane for the kings of France.

  Now the Lakeshore was merely a Montreal suburb where businessmen built comfortable houses, paid yacht club dues, and took the train into the city five days a week. There were Indians in a village on the other side of the golf course, but they kept to themselves.

  Blood and furs, fortune hunting, holy anointing oil, the transportation of faith — all that had been forgotten.

  The Harrisons had no roots in Montreal. Maggie was born on an airbase in Labrador and her parents were from out west. Mrs. Harrison wore turquoise eyeshadow and a matching hair band. Maggie’s father was an Air Canada pilot, flying DC-9s across the Atlantic every week. He drank rye and played golf. According to Maggie, he grew up on a ranch in Alberta, and he walked the fairways with a bowlegged strut.

  Maggie and her parents spoke to each other in language so spare, so cleansed of inflection, Green thought they might as well have transmitted their communications using semaphore flags.

  One afternoon when Green accompanied Maggie home, she left him in the kitchen with her mother, who, without asking if he was hungry, fixed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mrs. Harrison always fed Green, who was too unsettled in her presence to feel much of an appetite. Maggie reappeared a couple of minutes later carrying a compact vinyl suitcase, the type that was called a train case.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Green was standing in front of the dishwasher attempting to swallow the sandwich, which was sticking in his throat.

  Mrs. Harrison said, “Where?”

  “Green’s for the weekend.”

  “Well. Take care.”

  The next thing Green knew, he and Maggie were out of the house, spinning along Bord-du-Lac Road in her white sports car.

  Green’s real name was Robert Greenaway Metternich. Maggie was the only one who called him Green. The nickname was a joke, of course, but because it was hers exclusively, it had the click of intimacy to it. She used Green all summer, in public, around the yacht club. Green had no pet names for her. Maggie felt private enough, intimate enough.

  Green wondered if anyone knew what they were doing. The unusual thing about their romance was the difference in their ages. Maggie was twenty-one that summer. Green was fourteen.

  His parents occasionally questioned him, but they really had no idea how he spent his days, or what he thought about. There would be long spells with no questions whatsoever, then one morning his father would fire a volley across the breakfast table. “Are you sailing today?” “Did you read the editorial in the Star?” “Who are your friends at the club?”

  Green did not give out more information than was absolutely required. He tried to emulate Maggie’s laconic interchanges with her parents. The Harrisons’ western Canadian accents were terse. Perhaps the brutal winds that came out of there — the Alberta Clippers — had taught them to shape words closely and to slip them out between barely parted lips, afraid that if they opened wider the cold would penetrate their mouths, freeze their tongues, crack their teeth.

  Maggie’s house and Green’s were three-quarters of a mile apart on Bord-du-Lac Road. Both houses were quiet almost all the time, but Green decided hers was quieter. From just inside the front door he could hear the clock on
the electric range ticking, though the kitchen was at the other end of the house. Perhaps the purity of the silence was also a western thing.

  Early one midsummer morning Green was getting dressed in a kind of stupor. Pulling on his shorts very slowly, tying the laces of his sneakers, looking out over the lawn at the silver maples and watching cars go by on Bord-du-Lac Road. He heard the words inside his head, then repeated them aloud. “I am in love with you, Maggie Harrison.” He kept his voice low. He was an only child in a big house, so it wasn’t likely anyone had overheard. The house was so solidly built that it ate sound.

  “I love you, Maggie, and I want to marry you.”

  Saying the words made him dizzy. He thought he must be leaving his childhood, shedding it like a carapace. And suddenly he felt so open, so soft and unprotected, that he had to sit down on the edge of his bed.

  He never repeated the words to Maggie. He cannot remember many of their conversations, but certainly he did not. He did not use the vocabulary of longing, because there was nothing unrequited in their relationship. Nothing unconsummated. He had everything he wanted before he knew what that was.

  She did once say, “Green, if you were twenty-one, I would marry you.”

  She was peeing when she said it, in the pink bathroom attached to her bedroom, in the fur-trade house. Her parents were in Laguna Beach, California — they flew everywhere for free. Maggie and Green had just had sex in the basement and she had shown him the gun slits. Green pulled out handfuls of pink insulation fibre and peered through a narrow opening between the stones. It was dark, so he could not see the lake very well, but he could smell the water. He pressed his mouth and nose right up against the slit so that his cheekbones were touching cold, sharp rubble, and he breathed in the darkness and moisture, the scent of Indians, muskets, and fur.

  He could imagine himself inside her skin, feeling what she felt, and so he understood how to touch her. How roughly, how softly, with what rhythm, and for how long.

  It did not seem strange that she should pee in front of him, so unembarrassed, with her underwear crumpled in a ball beside the sink. It did not seem strange to be so intimate with a twenty-one-year-old woman.

  And when she said that she would have married him if he were twenty-one, he understood she was not being serious. Marriage was as unlikely as a visit to Mars or a walk on the moon.

  He used to have a Polaroid snapshot that showed half a dozen young people sitting on a diving board at the club. Maggie and Green were both in the Polaroid, but not sitting together, and no one seeing the photo would ever think of them as a couple. Green was just a boy, sunburnt and squinting, Maggie a wry, pretty young woman. Nothing in the photo connected them, but that was the night it had started, in the parking lot on the lake side of the road.

  He doesn’t know why she chose him, what role he was playing in her life that summer, if he was standing in for someone else or representing something, or if she was just a girl who got excited breaking rules. Screwing one of the older boys around the club would have been breaking the rules, but a pretty ordinary infraction. Screwing Green was more dangerous, though it was difficult for Green to see himself in those terms. At fourteen he was shy and polite — “well brought up,” people at the club would say.

  Perhaps she was looking for danger, but in a regulated dose. Danger that she knew she could handle. That was Green. She could handle him perfectly.

  She did try to get him to dance at the club, but he would not, afraid of looking ridiculous. Not that the club dances were extravagant or formal, as they had been in his mother’s era. On the Lakeshore in 1968, barefoot girls and boys in madras shorts hopped and shook to the call of a record player set up on the concrete patio by the club pool. There were bowls of potato chips, hamburgers on a grill, ice chests of Cokes, and Green, who was neither young enough nor old enough to feel at his ease.

  Just the summer before he had built a diorama of the Normandy invasion on the Ping-Pong table in the basement, meticulously hand-painting hundreds of miniature troops and constructing the cliffs of Normandy from bricks, screen mesh, and plaster of Paris. He used matchboxes for German pillboxes and more plaster of Paris for the ocean. He painstakingly assembled, painted, and decaled plastic Messerschmitts and Spitfires, suspending the tiny planes on nylon thread with puffs of cotton wool to simulate an anti-aircraft barrage. He stole fine white sand from the sandboxes in Pointe Claire Park for his invasion beaches.

  He had not anticipated the power of sex, the authority it would exercise over his happiness.

  Whenever they slept together, his self-consciousness eased. He felt closer to a line of balance, almost graceful. He had grown four inches during the previous year and was so unaccustomed to his height that he could trip and fall over while walking on a smoothly clipped lawn. Maggie made him feel powerful. When they were sleeping together, she made him feel he had radiance in the world.

  “Sleeping together” — they did not sleep much. During sex he was always hyper-awake. Afterwards they usually couldn’t fall asleep without the risk of getting caught. Sleeping happened only on those weekends when both sets of parents were away.

  The first time he slept with her in his bedroom he awoke before dawn, startled to feel her presence. She wore one of his shirts, nothing else. It had been a warm night and the sheets were bunched at the foot of the bed. She lay on her back. Her heat impressed him. He found himself studying the patch of fur between her legs. His own pubic hair was sparse; hers was thick. In the moonlight he could not tell its colour, but it gleamed. It could almost be blue, he thought. He ran his fingertips lightly through her bush and she stirred but did not awaken, and he fell back to sleep with his hand cupping her there. In the morning they had sex again, then she showed him how to make coffee using his mother’s percolator.

  At the end of summer Maggie went back to Boston and the School of Fine Rats, and a couple of months later her father was transferred from Montreal to Vancouver. The house with the gun slits in the basement went up for sale. Green got the news in a letter from Boston that he reread a dozen times and eventually lost; he was still too young to be able to hold on to such things, to value scraps of paper. One afternoon in October, on his way home from school, he went by the Harrisons’ house and peered in through a window and saw the rooms were bare. A realtor’s sign was plunged into the lawn. The Harrisons had already moved on.

  Maggie had first brought him back to the fur-trade house after a Friday night dance by the club pool, when her parents were in La Jolla, or Santa Barbara, or Phoenix.

  It was dark and she had tripped over a sprinkler while crossing the lawn. He remembers her small, fierce shout, like an animal snagged in a leg trap. He knelt down beside her on the grass. She was rubbing her big toe. There was a pungent aroma of chemical fertilizer and pine needles composting. She had placed her hand over his heart and looked straight at him, unsmiling. He was unaccustomed to such focused attention from anyone and it was hard not to look away. There was intensity in her gaze that he had never encountered before, also a coolness. She was looking at him, and seeing him.

  For about a minute they stayed like that on the lawn, motionless. Then she got up without a word and he followed her inside.

  About five months after Green last saw Maggie, he and his father were driving through an unfamiliar section of Montreal on a Saturday afternoon in January. Green’s father was searching for a yard he had heard about that still sold bags of fireplace coal. Cordwood was available everywhere, and cheap, but Green’s father had a nostalgic longing for the resiny aroma of coal smoke and the hissing, clinking noise of coals glowing in a grate.

  But coal was hard to find. They had already tried two or three yards where split hardwood was selling for only eleven dollars per cord, delivered, but at each yard the foreman claimed they hadn’t sold coal for years. “Depuis dix ans, peut-être!”

  But Green’s father was determined to find c
oal. It was a very bright, very cold winter day, ten degrees below zero at noon, white smoke licking from furnace pipes, snow in heaps. The sky was electric blue, the river had frozen. They kept driving through the unfamiliar part of the city, looking for a coal yard — Green’s father had been told about a place somewhere off Upper Lachine Road, or maybe Boulevard Saint-Jacques. They heard on the radio news that a pack of wolves had crossed the river and were frisking on the runways at the international airport.

  “Anything you want to talk to me about?” When he said this, Green’s father was leaning over the steering wheel, scanning unfamiliar street signs. “Anything at all?”

  Green said there wasn’t.

  Then his father asked him to check to see if there was a city map in the glovebox. Green unfolded the map and they kept searching for the coal yard without finding it. Then Green’s father nosed the car into a parking space burrowed out of a snowbank in front of a workingmen’s tavern on Saint-Antoine Street and asked Green if he would like to have a beer.

  Green had never been inside a tavern before. There was a slag of orange sawdust on the hardwood floor and men sat alone at small tables, reading tabloid newspapers and sipping slender glasses of beer. The television screen mounted in one corner showed a blank green eye. It would be switched on for the Saturday night hockey game, nothing else.

  In those days, in the province of Quebec, women by law were not allowed into taverns. His father ordered them each a glass of beer and showed Green how to sprinkle salt on the beer, to bring up the head. Green wondered if the entire outing had been carefully planned, if his father had been looking forward all week to this first glass of beer with his son, this little ceremony of masculine initiation.

  Green understood he was supposed to put away the summer, forget it. That made sense. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to.

  In her only letter, Maggie had written I wish we could do the things we used to do and I hope your mama doesn’t read this. I’m going to Europe next summer. I’m going to wear sandals & smoke Gauloises & sip absinthe & be lonely.