A Dismal Thing To Do (13 page)

As he was pondering this interesting subject on his way back, Madoc noticed Annabelle had acquired tablemates. These proved to be a couple name Flyte from downriver a way. Maybe Flyte was the man’s real name, though it could well have been a
nom de guerre,
since he made no bones about having been a draft dodger from Boston during the Vietnam War.

“Didn’t they declare an amnesty some years ago?” Madoc asked him.

“Yes, they did. I could have gone back, but I decided I’d rather stay in New Brunswick. It’s a better way of life, to my thinking. Besides, I’d met Thyrdis here, and she was none too keen on leaving her own people.”

“They’ve turned their house into a lovely gift shop,” Annabelle put in. “Janet and I have been down there a couple of times. That’s how we happened to recognize each other. Let’s see, you’re Donald, aren’t you? And you’re the one who makes those cute mugs shaped like pigs and chickens?”

“I’m a potter,” Donald replied rather stiffly. “I make a great many things. Most of my designs are more serious attempts to interpret the medium, but we’ve found we have to bend a little if we want to stay in business. I guess you farmers don’t have that problem, eh, Madoc?”

“Oh, we do plenty of bending.” Madoc was quite willing to be a farmer for the evening. “Potting business pretty good, is it?”

“Not so bad.” Donald picked at the frayed cuff of his tweed jacket. “Of course, this is our slow time of year.”

“Not that we care,” said his wife staunchly. “It gives a breather to prepare for the tourist season.”

“Thyrdis does some beautiful things.” Donald abandoned the cuff as a bad job and began running his fingers through the fringe of a woven sash he was wearing. It was similar to the one around Pierre Dubois’s waist except that it had a blue stripe down the center instead of a red one, and might have made more sartorial sense with something other than that ratty but respectable suit.

Madoc nodded over toward the piano, where Cecile was evidently getting ready to play. Pierre was standing ready to turn her music for her. “I see there’s another of your customers.”

“Cecile?” said Thyrdis. “She bought one of my shawls a while back, but she isn’t wearing it tonight.”

“I meant the chap with the sash.”

“Oh no, that’s not one of mine. I never work that pattern.”

In a pig’s eye you don’t, thought Madoc. He’d seen enough Welsh tapestry weaving to have an eye for a pattern. Having verified his suspicions about the whiskey from a surreptitious sniff at Donald’s glass—rotgut with a dash of caramel, obviously, though Donald didn’t seem to be minding—he let Annabelle carry the conversational ball while he took inventory around the room.

It intrigued him to note how many of the men in the room were wearing those same woven sashes. Most of them had the blue stripe like Donald’s, five went in for a shade like spruce green, but only Pierre Dubois had a red one. The greens included Blaise Bergeron, his brother Etienne, their cousin Achille, who was obviously much the eldest of the trio, and a couple of other men around Achille’s age, one of them called Jelly McLumber—short for Gilles, Madoc supposed—and the other Clarence Grouse. Several more Bergerons were in the blue stripe squad, along with a fortyish Jelly Grouse and a young Clarence McLumber, a pair of Fewters who were connected somehow with the old woman from Pitcherville, another McLumber who turned out to be the popeyed youth from the hardware store, Fred Olson’s wife’s cousin Henry Skivins and his nephew Bartlett, though what they were doing together in a place like this was more than Annabelle could fathom, and that odd Mr. McAvity from over by the Forks who collected butterflies. There were a couple more whom she’d never set eyes on before. Madoc counted twenty-three in all, and these out of a crowd of maybe a hundred at the most, including the women and the staff, if such they could be called.

Of course it was by no means unheard-of for young fellows to copy the style of some man they admired. Pierre Dubois was a charismatic type, not that Canadians went in much for charisma, as a rule. But these weren’t all kids by any means, and they weren’t actually trying to ape Dubois. Madoc didn’t see another buckskin thrum in the place. The men were wearing pretty much what anybody would wear on a Saturday night to a hunting lodge in the boondocks: anything from a sports jacket like his own with a light pullover under it to a red-and-black checked flannel shirt or a snowmobiling outfit. Only the sashes were uniform. Madoc wondered if “uniform” might possibly be the operative word.

He knew better than to ask. Flyte would no doubt say they were trying to reaffirm the ethnic spirit of the region, or something equally high-minded and obscure. If there was any such movement afoot, why wasn’t anybody talking about it? Or peddling sashes for the good of the cause?

Cecile had been strumming rather aimlessly on the piano keys. Warming up, Madoc had supposed, to warble some cheerful ditty about unrequited love or untimely demise. Instead, she suddenly whipped into a jiggy barn dance tune. A Bergeron kid with a concertina stepped forward to help her out, and another of the tribe stepped to the microphone.

“Oh super,” cried Thyrdis. “Etienne’s a fabulous caller. Come on, everybody.”

She made sure her woven dirndl was firmly hitched, flung her long woven scarf backward over her woven blouse so the ends could swing wide as she pranced and twirled, and ran with Donald on to the floor. Annabelle turned to Madoc with such a look of pleading that he couldn’t have resisted if he’d wanted to, which in fact he didn’t. In the first place, he’d far rather be hopping about than sitting here swilling whatever this stuff was that Armand called wine. In the second, he was intrigued to find out why not only Donald Flyte but every single blasted one of those twenty-three sash wearers—young, old, or in between, with or without a partner—was leaping out to join the sets like a bullet from a gun.

Etienne was indeed a first-rate caller, and Annabelle an adept partner. Madoc didn’t get to keep her to himself much, however. Etienne went in for a lot of intricate switching about. Madoc could swear he’d had a swing around with every woman on the floor and half the men before they’d been at it ten minutes. It was like being one of the little pieces of colored glass in the kaleidoscope he’d played with as a kid.

Lots of the dancers were good, but the beau of the ball was Pierre Dubois. He was everywhere, thrums flying, feet stamping, white teeth flashing from behind that curly black beard, never missing a figure. He was also up to something. Madoc didn’t know what, but he watched the red toque systematically bobbing its way to each and every one of the men wearing the woven sashes. On one pretext or another, Dubois would take that man’s hand. Often as not, especially if the man wasn’t one of the better dancers, he’d leave the floor soon after he’d been touched.

Was this some part of a secret ritual, a mystic laying-on of hands, a grip of brotherhood? Or was Dubois passing on a message? He couldn’t be handing out notes, not in that number and not at a gallop, with so many people around and so many chances to fumble the passing. Maybe he squeezed their hands in Morse code, but how much could he convey in those brief contacts? Enough, apparently, or he wouldn’t be taking the trouble.

The kid from the hardware store was among the last to receive the magic handshake. Madoc was clear across the dance floor at the time, and he had a feeling Dubois had made sure he was before approaching young McLumber. Somebody must have tipped him off that the Mountie was present. If Dubois was any judge of men at all, he might be having a qualm or two about this particular recruit. The kid had impressed Madoc as a know-it-all just in that brief transaction over the Loyalist Blue paint. Get a few beers under his belt and he’d be shooting his mouth off right and left. Most of the men touched had shown more sense than to let on anything of importance had passed between them and Dubois. Young McLumber was looking so damned guileless that any policeman worth his salt would have collared the fellow on general principles.

Well, this wasn’t Madoc Rhys’s collar to make, but at least he now knew whom to lean on should it become necessary to unravel the tangled web of those multicolored sashes. The caller was out of breath; the dance was winding down. Madoc bowed to his partner of the moment, who happened to be an elderly man in a lumberman’s plaid, found his panting but joyous sister-in-law, and escorted her back to their table.

A
FTER THE DANCE, THE
band played a couple of more or less recognizable golden oldies while Cecile and the concertina virtuoso refreshed themselves, Cecile with
a petit verre
and the kid with a Pepsi-Cola. Dubois was all over Cecile again, gallantly pulling out a chair for her, fetching her wine from the bar, getting himself a beer to keep her company. It was only his second or third drink of the evening, Madoc noticed, and nobody could say the man hadn’t earned it.

Annabelle didn’t want any more wine. She had a
café noir
and a slice of
gâteau
that wasn’t up to her own standard, then began to fidget.

“Madoc, don’t you think it’s about time we started back? Bert will be wondering where we’ve got to.”

If Madoc knew Bert, Bert was pounding his ear quite peacefully and had been for some time. But Annabelle was right about leaving. They wouldn’t be the first, by any means. Some of the early dropouts from the dance floor were already gone. Others were getting ready to brave whatever might be happening outside. Madoc dropped money on the table, got their coats from the rack over by the stuffed bears, and helped Annabelle on with hers.

As they made their way to the door, followed by a good many pairs of thoughtful eyes, Annabelle got stopped by various acquaintances wanting a final word. While Madoc was standing patiently in the background trying to look like a brother-in-law who’d taken out his sister-in-law merely from a sense of family duty and intended to take her straight home from the dance, as in fact he did, he noticed young McLumber being given a polite but firm
congé.
Pierre Dubois was doing the talking. Armand Bergeron was standing with his arms folded making it clear just by being there that McLumber needn’t try to put up an argument.

And that was interesting, too. The hardware clerk had a pretty full load aboard, no question about that, but so did almost everybody else in the place. No doubt the cheap drinks were the main reason why many of them had come. This wasn’t a rowdy crowd, but it wasn’t what you’d call subdued. The kid hadn’t been acting any more boisterous than a good many others, including some of his fellow sash wearers. But perhaps he’d reached the limit of what he could handle and Armand knew it from previous experience. Or perhaps that innocent act he’d put on during the dance had alerted Pierre Dubois to what he ought to have realized before he let McLumber become a member of the sash society, or whatever the hell it was. Anyway, the kid was going, on a snowmobile to judge from the outfit he was wearing, and Madoc was still left standing.

Not for long, though. Annabelle was really anxious to get back to her family, and kept working her way toward the door. They made it, and none too soon. A snow squall was just beginning to splat wet flakes into their faces.

“I hope we get home before the worst of it,” Annabelle said nervously.

“We’ll make it, never fear,” Madoc reassured her. “This won’t amount to anything.”

A few other cars were already on the narrow lane. A couple more pulled out while Madoc was letting his engine warm up. These made it poky going. They were snug enough in the car once the heater began to function, but the sticky snow soon coated the windows until Madoc had hardly any visibility except for the two fans kept clear by the windshield wipers. He didn’t much like that, but putting on the defroster would mean freezing Annabelle’s legs, so he just kept poking.

“It won’t be so bad once we get out on the road,” he remarked to Annabelle.

She, to his surprise, didn’t answer and he realized she’d fallen asleep. The wine and the workout on the dance floor must have done her in, not to mention the lateness of the hour. She’d been up since half-past five or thereabout, most likely, and would be again in the morning, which was closer than he’d realized.

He let her sleep and wished he could do the same, with Janet beside him instead of Annabelle. To keep himself alert, he thought about those twenty-three woven sashes. Armand Bergeron hadn’t been wearing one, but it was dollars to doughnuts he knew why the rest were. If he didn’t, he was a rotten innkeeper.

Why were two of Armand’s young relatives involved and not the others? There’d been a lot of Pepsi-Cola floating around the bandstand, maybe that meant some of the boys were too young to qualify. And the girls would be out just because they were female. The feminist movement still hadn’t made much headway among the Bergeron clan, obviously, if a woman of thirty or more still had to bring her male friends home for the family to check out, and didn’t dare drink a beer in public.

Cecile was too restful a topic. Madoc was beginning to nod when he was startled wide awake by a sharp crack not far off. It brought Annabelle upright, too.

“Madoc, what’s that?”

“Sounded to me like a rifle shot.”

“Huh. Somebody jacking a deer, I’ll be bound.”

Madoc didn’t contradict her, but his own thought was that this would be one hell of a time and place to commit the illegal act of startling a night-feeding animal with a sudden flash of light and shooting it down as it stood momentarily paralyzed by the glare. Maybe if the lead car happened to catch a deer with its headlights and there was a rifle handy and somebody drunk enough to yield to temptation—but the headlights wouldn’t be bright enough, not tonight. This damned sticky snow was coating the glass, reducing their beams to a gentle moonlight glow.

Now what? They could hear clashing and strong language up ahead. Madoc stopped just in time to avoid rear-ending the car in front of him, and prayed the car behind would do likewise.

“Stay here, Annabelle. Sounds as if there’s been a pileup ahead of us. I’d better go see what’s happening.”