Travelling Light Page 5

  After they finished their glasses of beer, Green and his father got back into the car and kept driving up and down streets lined with three-storey tenements and steep iron staircases plastered with ice and snow. They finally found the coal yard in what had been the stable yard of an ancient farmhouse, now tucked between the concrete piers of an elevated expressway. While the roar of traffic stroked the air like a rasp, Green’s father purchased six fifty-pound sacks of coal, which fitted neatly into the trunk of his Pontiac.

  Green never heard another word or read another line from Maggie. Other lines in his life have crossed, occasionally sparking, blowing fuses, but she stays apart from all that. Her ghost is pure, and savage.

  She’s like the scent of burning coal. These days, when Green, on his travels, smells burning coal — it might be on a winter’s day in Cork — the scent seems to enter him, not as an ordinary sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, but as love enters the body, or stringent loneliness, or awareness of being lost without bearings. The scent of burning coal possesses him, for a few seconds at least, and everything mixes together, past and future, but mostly past, and in those few seconds, it all comes at him, all at once — he feels it squeezing his lungs, but he has learned to keep breathing.

  RICH KID

  They used to meet beneath the electric crucifix on Mount Royal. She sold roses and carnations from table to table at sidewalk cafés on Rue Saint-Denis, and she would tell the boy, “Meet me sous la croix. Bring a blanket and something nice to drink.” In those summer nights he trusted her more than he would later, but not enough so that he didn’t say, Promise me you’ll be there?

  Near the crucifix were many secret spots where they would lie on tufted grass that grew between outcrops of grey limestone and crumbling rivulets of shale, the underbrush littered with discarded cigarette packs and worse. She liked strawberries and he’d buy a basket of berries at the Atwater Market and carry them up to her, in a paper sack stained with juice. Lying in darkness, they could hear wheels rattling on the carriage road and the patter of drivers pointing out the sights of the city to tourists. The crucifix, lit up to be seen from the villages twenty miles around, made a wild electric sputtering. She had been thrown out of her last apartment. She was staying with a girlfriend, she said, in a room on Carré Saint-Louis. She smelled tart and untended, like an old, neglected orchard.

  The bed they slept in, come autumn, when she found a place of her own in Saint-Henri, was a narrow army cot with blankets abrasive as sharks’ hides. Cats possessed her neighbourhood that fall, stalking the alleys at night; he could hear them scratching at the cardboard he had taped across broken panes in her kitchen window.

  The previous winter she’d shared an apartment with a gay biker, Serge. She claimed Serge had killed a Russian sailor with a baseball bat in an alley behind the Iroquois Hotel. The only time the boy met the biker was just after Christmas, when he came by to collect a bag of tools stored under her kitchen sink. The three of them sat in her kitchen smoking hashish, and when she told him she was still planning to paint his portrait, Serge got up and kissed her. In February she met a United States Air Force sergeant in a bar on Crescent Street. One weekend in March the airman took her down to New York State and married her in front of a justice of the peace, but she was back in Montreal by Thursday with a black eye, driving a Mustang with orange New York plates.

  Late afternoon in the kitchen, she boiled water for tea. Light had long since left the streets that side of the Ville-Marie Expressway, and Saint-Henri seemed a dead zone, its streets rusting and stealthy. They lay in the narrow bed, clothes piled on the cold floor, cats scratching and nibbling on their toes. Naked, she was small-breasted and clumsy. He could hear the clock on the kitchen stove ticking. He wondered if the airman might show up.

  A few days later she drove down to Plattsburgh, New York, in the Mustang. But three weeks later she was back in Montreal again.

  Encouraged by his parents, the boy left the city that spring, went out west and found work on a cattle ranch, making hay, castrating. He steered a swather through hayfields, then a buck rake, then a baler, cutting the grass, curing it, and squeezing it into dead blocks of feed. Working with a small surgical knife and disinfectant, he performed his first castrations quickly, but then there would be another and another and his wrists would grow tired as the pearly testicles piled up in the thrashed mud.

  In November he returned to Montreal without informing his parents and called her early one Sunday morning from a phone booth on Peel Street.

  Her telephone rings and rings until the receiver is knocked off the cradle and clatters on the floor and a male voice swears dimly in Québécois. The boy asks to speak with her. The man calls out her name and the boy hears her shout, “Tell that maudit kid to leave me alone!”

  The first snow of the season is hustling and blowing at the corner of Peel Street and Rue Sainte-Catherine like salt thrown across a city that’s barely alive. The boy’s hands are pale from the cold, jittery from caffeine. He hangs up the phone, but in another day or two he’ll go to her apartment down in Saint-Henri, he’ll try to see her.

  TO THE DEAD GIRL

  . . . because her body was gold and the ticking of her heart was smooth, joyful, and inexpensive, like the best of the counterfeit watches, the knockoff Pateks and Rolexes, on display that winter morning in the window of Meyerowitz Bijoutier, corner of Sainte-Catherine and the Main, Montreal, 1978.

  Though her body waited all night (so the newspaper said) trapped against a bridge pier by a slab of pack ice and twenty feet of ancient, sodden telephone pole, both of which had been rollicking downstream before they were snagged on the icebreaker piers of the Pont-Victoria.

  How cold was the current sliding below the bridge? Five degrees Celsius? And how many ships laden with soybeans, wheat, venereal disease, were slipping through the Seaway channel that morning, ice marled thick on their bows?

  If they had left you a while longer the current might have swept you off again, and you, the slab of ice, and the telephone pole would have continued your journey downstream. Instead, three boys walking across the bridge on a dare happened to notice you. At first they thought you were waving, but it was only the current rocking you, I suppose. And they thought they heard you screaming, but it must have been ice grinding against the bridge pier.

  The way you used to sway and argue, the siren-and-light-bar nights of your youth and glory, with talent bookers for the nightclubs of La Tuque, Rouyn-Noranda, and Schefferville. With your boyfriends the camionneurs, the CEGEP instructors, the shop stewards. And the poetics you learned. And those beautiful haïtienne hookers, your companions-in-arms. The way six of you would crowd into one booth in the front window at Mr. Steer Steakhouse on Rue Sainte-Catherine.

  But you are dead, dead ten years. They fished you out of the river and it wasn’t until after they had hauled you aboard the police launch that someone noticed the bullet hole in your neck, beneath the soggy fall of your hair.

  They ran your convent school photograph (obtained from your brother in Temiscamingue) on the front page of the Journal de Montreal.

  And months later they happened to arrest your murderer, after picking him up for something else — possession of drugs, or stolen goods. Suffering heroin withdrawal in a cell on Drolet Street, he blubbered your story to his cellmate, who belonged to a car-stealing crew out of Saint-Leonard and needed someone to dime out.

  Now hardly anyone remembers your name or that of the man who killed you in a motel room after sharing a takeout order from Chalet Bar-B-Q, the “repas familial”: one whole barbecued chicken, coleslaw, French fries, extra sauce, and four dinner rolls. A few hours later he lifted you from the trunk of his 1974 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and dumped you into the ri —

  Enough. Tell me what you remember of your life, not your death. What will become of us? I can hear our St. Lawrence River rushing down to the sea. I don’t want to forget you and k
now that I will.

  THE SERVANTS’ WAY

  Mr. Heaney had been dreaming again about World War I and the battle of Vimy Ridge. His father, a young lieutenant, had died there, in the Flanders mud, when Mr. Heaney was two years old.

  He had been having the same dream since he was a little boy. The dream was always in a sepia tint, and it flickered, the way old World War I newsreels did. When he grew older, past the age his father had been when killed, in the dream he was his father. He had been dreaming the war for such a long time that it handled in his daytime mind more like a set of actual memories than a dream. Jackhammering in the street reminded him of machine-gun fire. Woods in late autumn recalled a ruined forest after an artillery barrage — wrecked stumps, shattered limbs, mad swirls of green leaves shaken down by artillery concussion. He had never actually seen that ruined forest, though he’d spent college summers in the woods, working as a logger. But the memory felt authentic.

  Last night’s dream had been pungent and Mr. Heaney lay in bed soaked by dread. He could still hear whistles screaming up and down the line, to signal the start of the big offensive. He could smell the gun oil and wet woollen uniforms. Soldiers huddled at the bottom of a trench still lurked at the edge of his vision.

  He rose from bed without disturbing his wife, Alix. The stillness of early morning — once the dream cleared — was his purest, most blessed time of day. As soon as he was up on his feet World War I started fading, as it always did, and by the time he’d pulled on his dressing gown, it had disappeared.

  Heading to the bathroom, he passed his children’s bedrooms. Clare was pregnant and married to a resident in cardiac surgery at Stanford. Jean was at the University of Toronto working on her PhD. His first son, Bobby, had died in a skiing accident. The only child left at home was Michael, eighteen, and Mike was leaving in a couple of hours, driving out west in his new old car, headed for a summer job on Vancouver Island.

  In one corner of the bathroom there was a scale and a set of small dumbbells. Six months after his heart attack Mr. Heaney had resumed his morning exercises. The sound of his own breathing was a comfort, the sense of his heart knitting together, nourished by exercise.

  After stretching, he showered, shaved, then walked down the hallway towards Mike’s bedroom, pressing footprints onto the lush carpet. Pausing at his son’s door, he pushed it open a few inches and peered inside.

  The room was slightly less of a disaster than usual. Most of Michael’s gear was already packed in his car. The bed was unmade, of course. Mr. Heaney walked across the room to look out the window. The night had been chilly and clear with a full moon, and there was a beard of frost on the grass. The milkman’s truck had already gone by. The morning newspaper lay out on the driveway.

  He had lived in Westmount all his life. In 1939 wearing his militia uniform he had stood at attention at the corner of this very street watching King George VI and Queen Elizabeth being driven by in a Packard. When the Second War came, he hadn’t been allowed to join the overseas army because of what the doctors called a heart murmur, though his heart didn’t give him any trouble for another thirty-five years.

  Pinned to the wall above Mike’s bed was a road map with three thousand miles of Trans-Canada Highway, from Montreal to Vancouver Island, traced in red Scripto ink. Mr. Heaney had fixed up a summer job for Mike at a sawmill on the island.

  “Won’t it be dangerous?” Alix had said.

  Mr. Heaney traced the red line with his fingertip. He wasn’t going to leave for the office until after Michael was gone and he knew for certain that Alix was going to be all right.

  He went back to his own room and started dressing.

  Mike Heaney ran along the road circling Westmount Summit. He nodded at other runners and they nodded back. Running wouldn’t be the same if you had to talk to people.

  It was a beautiful day to travel. Road sand left over from winter gritted beneath his shoes, and cool, fresh air made his head ache a little. The road around the summit still made him think of Hilda, his girlfriend until she’d dumped him on the first day of spring. They used to go for walks around the mountain on the coldest, bluest January afternoons, then eat supper at her parents’ house, then watch television, then make out on the living room sofa while the trees made weird groaning noises with the cold. And back in September, in the earliest days of the relationship, they spent evenings on a blanket in the summit woods, smoking pot and looking out across the urban valley of Côte-des-Neiges and the thousands of headstones in the Catholic and Protestant cemeteries.

  What had really hurt his parents, what they hadn’t been able to overcome, was not being able to bury Bobby. His brother had been heli-skiing in the Monashee Mountains in British Columbia when he disappeared into a crevasse of a glacier. The guide and the other skiers saw it happen but were afraid to go too near, and within minutes of the accident it started snowing heavily and the helicopter pilot insisted on lifting them all off the mountain. It snowed for ten days: five or six feet of fresh powder. When the weather cleared, a search-and-recovery team from Banff was landed by helicopter, but almost immediately an avalanche buried two of the team. They were dug out unharmed but the helicopter pilot insisted on taking everyone off the mountain. An assistant head warden of Banff National Park and a geologist explained to the Heaneys that glaciers were unstable, that fissures opened up and closed again, that they might not be able to recover Bobby’s body even in the spring. And they were right. They never did recover him.

  Yesterday, without telling his parents, Mike had retrieved some of his brother’s camping gear from the attic. He hadn’t told his parents that he planned a visit to the glaciers on his way out to the Coast. And he hadn’t told them that he had no intention of returning to Montreal in September, or going back to university. He needed to start his real life, and out west seemed the best place to do that.

  Before getting out of bed that morning he had been listening to Mr. Dylan on headphones. The songs had all taken on new meaning since his decision to go out west. They were like the voice of his own feelings and memory, Dylan whispering, I shall be released.

  Alix Heaney glanced at her husband while he sipped coffee and studied the architect’s plans. For two years she had wanted to get the kitchen redone and now they were finally going ahead with it.

  Her husband sighed. “Do we really need all this, Alix? The kitchen seems fine to me.”

  An estimate had been included with the plans, and she had been shocked by the figure, but she did not want to grow old with everything getting old around her. Her parents had died in a house full of 1920s furniture. She wanted everything modern and well designed, the most functional and beautiful appliances, the best lighting and tile.

  “The kitchen seems fine to you because you spend absolutely no time here except when you’re eating breakfast,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve ever actually used the toaster, let alone the stove or the dishwasher.”

  Mr. Heaney smiled and laid the architect’s plan aside. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. Are you ready for more coffee?”

  She’d had a terrible sleep, finally dropping off just before dawn. In the dream she was at their summer cottage in Maine. She was leaning across the old iron range and polishing the tiny kitchen windowpanes when the contractions stuck in her throat like a piece of meat. She went to the crank telephone on the wall and tried calling old Mrs. Snow, who lived in the farmhouse on the main road. The phone rang and rang and no one answered. Ocean light poured in, gleaming on floorboards she had just finished painting with shiny boat enamel. She grabbed her red coat and headed to the car. Crouching over the wheel of the DeSoto she drove fast for the main road. The sandy little track was littered with yellow leaves. The car startled a doe and fawn, and the deer went bounding into the spruce woods. The pain was terrible. She leaned forward and bit the steering wheel, clamping her teeth around the plastic and
biting down as hard as she could. Then the baby started coming out of her. Then, before she reached the Snows’, the dream stopped and she awoke.

  Standing in her kitchen in Westmount, Alix lifted a soft-boiled egg from a pot and put it in a silver cup, which she set in front of her husband. She could still feel the steering wheel’s dense pressure on her teeth, the neutral taste of hard plastic.

  “I had a peep in Mike’s room,” Mr. Heaney said. “What an unholy mess.”

  He tapped open his egg and began to eat it with a spoon.

  Alix began washing dishes. There weren’t many — her own juice glass, a marmalade knife, a plate with crumbs of toast and butter — but she filled the sink and swirled hot, soapy water in the glass.

  “Leave that for the dishwasher, why don’t you,” said Mr. Heaney. “Come and sit down.”

  She watched him scooping his egg. She’d always loved his hands, the strong knuckles, well-shaped fingers, neatly pared nails. He was a fastidious man.

  The fresh morning — trees out in new leaf, the smell of wet grass drifting through the kitchen window, the sharp sunshine — reminded her of the Life magazine story about the wives of the astronauts and those brilliant Florida mornings when their men rocketed into space leaving behind game, pretty, utterly bereft wives.

  In another hour or so Mike would be blasting off. Alix looked at her own hands. They seemed a pair of sad, tired things, birds in a cage.

  She heard her son on the back porch, knocking sand from his shoes. Mr. Heaney folded his newspaper as Mike came inside. He was wearing grey sweats, the sleeves too short for his long arms. His cheeks were flushed from exercise. He shut the door and kicked off his shoes.

  “How many miles?” said Mr. Heaney.