Surfacing (2 page)

That won’t work, I can’t call them “they” as if they were somebody else’s family: I have to keep myself from telling that story. Still though, seeing the old road billowing along at a distance through the trees (ruts and traces already blurring with grass and saplings, soon it will be gone) makes me reach into my bag for the Lifesavers I brought. But they aren’t needed any more, even though the new road turns from pavement into gravel (“Must’ve elected the wrong guy last time around,” David says jokingly) and the familiar smell of road dust fuming behind and around us mixes with the gas-and-upholstery smell of the car.

“Thought you said this would be bad,” David says over his shoulder, “it’s not bad at all.” We’re nearly to the village already, the two roads joining here but widened – rock blasted, trees bulldozed over, roots in the air, needles reddening – past the flat cliff where the election slogans are painted and painted over, some faded and defaced, others fresh yellow and white,
VOTEZ GODET, VOTEZ OBRIEN
, along with hearts and initials and words and advertisements,
THÉ SALADA, BLUE MOON COTTAGES
½
MILE, QUÉBEC LIBRE, FUCK YOU, BUVEZ COCA COLA GLACÉ, JESUS SAVES
, mélange of demands and languages, an x-ray of it would be the district’s entire history.

But they’ve cheated, we’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.

CHAPTER TWO

We slur down the last hill, gravel pinging off the underside of the car, and suddenly there’s a thing that isn’t supposed to be here.
MOTEL, BAR BIÈRE BEER
the sign reads, neon even, someone is trying; but to no avail, there aren’t any cars parked outside and the
VACANCY
notice is up. The building is like any other cheap motel, long grey stucco with aluminum doors; the earth around it is still chunky and raw, not yet overgrown with the road weeds.

“Let’s pick up a few,” David says, to Joe; he’s already swerved the car.

We head towards the door but then I stop, it’s the best place to leave them, and say “You go in and have a beer or something, I’ll be back in about half an hour.”

“Right,” David says. He knows what to avoid.

“Want me to come?” Joe offers, but when I say No relief gleams through his beard. The three of them disappear through the screen door of the bar and I walk the rest of the way down the hill.

I like them, I trust them, I can’t think of anyone else I like better, but right now I wish they weren’t here. Though they’re necessary: David’s and Anna’s car was the only way I could make it, there’s no bus and no train and I never hitch. They’re doing me a favour, which they disguised by saying it would be fun, they like to travel. But my reason for being here embarrasses them, they don’t understand it. They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs.

There was a covered bridge here once, but it was too far north to be quaint. They tore it down three years before I left, to improve the dam, and replaced it with the concrete bridge which is here now, enormous, monumental, dwarfing the village. It’s the dam that controls the lake: sixty years ago they raised the lake level so that whenever they wanted to flush the logs down the narrow outflow river to the mill they would have enough water power. But they don’t do much logging here any more. A few men work on railway maintenance, one freight train a day; a couple of families run the stores, the small one where they used to speak English, the other where they wouldn’t. The rest process the tourists, businessmen in plaid shirts still creased from the cellophane packages, and wives, if they come, who sit in two’s on the screened blackfly-proof porches of the single-room cabins and complain to each other while the men play at fishing.

I pause to lean over the railing on the river side. The floodgates are open, the froth-coloured and brown rapids topple over the rocks, the sound rushes. The sound is one of the first things I remember, that was what warned them. It was night, I was lying in the bottom of the canoe; they had started out from the village but a heavy fog had risen, so thick they could hardly see the water. They found the shoreline and followed it along; it was dead silent, they could hear what they thought was the howling of wolves, muffled by forest and mist, it meant they had taken the right direction. Then there was the pouring noise of the rapids and they saw where they were, just as the current caught them. They were going backwards, the howling was the village dogs. If the canoe had tipped over we would have been killed, but they were calm, they didn’t act like danger; what stayed in my head was only the mist whiteness, the hush of moving water and the rocking motion, total safety.

Anna was right, I had a good childhood; it was in the middle of the war, flecked grey newsreels I never saw, bombs and concentration camps, the leaders roaring at the crowds from inside their uniforms, pain and useless death, flags rippling in time to the anthems. But I didn’t know about that till later, when my brother found out and told me. At the time it felt like peace.

Now I’m in the village, walking through it, waiting for the nostalgia to hit, for the cluster of nondescript buildings to be irradiated with inner light like a plug-in crêche, as it has been so often in memory; but nothing happens. It hasn’t gotten any bigger, these days the children probably move to the city. The same two-storey frame houses with nasturtiums on the windowsills and squared roof-corners, motley lines of washing trailing from them like the tails of kites; though some of the houses are slicker and have changed colour. The white doll-house-sized church above on the rock hillside is neglected, peeling paint and a broken window, the old priest must be gone. What I mean is dead.

Down by the shore, a lot of boats are tied up at the government dock but not many cars parked: more boats than cars, a bad season. I try to decide which of the cars is my father’s but as I scan them I realize I no longer know what kind of car he would be driving.

I reach the turnoff to Paul’s, a rough dirt path rutted by tires, crossing the railroad tracks and continuing through a swamp field, logs laid side by side over the soggy parts. A few black flies catch up with me, it’s July, past the breeding time, but as usual there are some left.

The road goes up and I climb it, along the backs of the houses Paul built for his son and his son-in-law and his other son, his clan. Paul’s is the original, yellow with maroon trim, squat farmhouse pattern; though this isn’t farming country, it’s mostly rock and where there’s any soil it’s thin and sandy. The closest Paul ever got to farming was to have a cow, killed by the milkbottle. The shed where it and the horses used to live is now a garage.

In the clearing behind the house two 1950s cars are resting, a pink one and a red one, raised on wooden blocks, no wheels; scattered around them are the rusting remains of older cars: like my father, Paul saves everything useful. The house has added a pointed structure like a church spire, made of former car parts welded together; on top of it is a
T.V.
antenna and on top of that a lightning rod.

Paul is at home, he’s in the vegetable garden at the side of the house. He straightens up to watch me, his face leathery and retained as ever, like a closed suitcase; I don’t think he knows who I am.

“Bonjour monsieur,” I say when I’m at the fence. He takes a step towards me, still guarding, and I say “Don’t you remember me,” and smile. Again the strangling feeling, paralysis of the throat; but Paul speaks English, he’s been outside. “It was very kind of you to write.”

“Ah,” he says, not recognizing me but deducing who I must be, “Bonjour,” and then he smiles too. He clasps his hands in front of him like a priest or a porcelain mandarin; he doesn’t say anything else. We stand there on either side of the fence, our faces petrified in well-intentioned curves, mouths wreathed in parentheses, until I say “Has he come back yet?”

At this his chin plummets, his head teeters on his neck. “Ah. No.” He gazes sideways, accusingly, down at a potato plant near his left foot. Then his head jerks up again and he says gaily, “Not yet, ay? But maybe soon. Your fadder, he knows the bush.”

Madame has appeared in the kitchen doorway and Paul speaks with her in the nasal slanted French I can’t interpret because I learned all but a few early words of mine in school. Folk songs and Christmas carols and, from the later grades, memorized passages of Racine and Baudelaire are no help to me here.

“You must come in,” he says to me, “and take a tea,” and he bends and undoes the hook of the wooden gate. I go forward to the door where Madame is waiting for me, hands outstretched in welcome, smiling and shaking her head mournfully as though through no fault of my own I’m doomed.

Madame makes the tea on a new electric stove, a blue ceramic Madonna with pink child hanging above it; when I glimpsed the stove on my way through the kitchen I felt betrayed, she should have remained loyal to her wood range. We sit on the screened porch overlooking the lake, balancing our teacups and rocking side by side in three rocking chairs; I’ve been given the store cushion, which has an embroidered view of Niagara Falls. The black and white collie, either the identical one I used to be afraid of or its offshoot, lies on the braided rug by our feet.

Madame, who is the same thickness all the way down, is in a long-skirted dress and black stockings and a print apron with a bib, Paul in high-waisted trousers with braces, flannel shirt-sleeves rolled. I’m annoyed with them for looking so much like carvings, the habitant kind they sell in tourist handicraft shops; but of course it’s the other way around, it’s the carvings that look like them. I wonder what they think I look like, they may find my jeans and sweatshirt and fringed over-the-shoulder bag strange, perhaps immoral, though such things may be more common in the village since the tourists and the
T.V.
; besides, I can be forgiven because my family was, by reputation, peculiar as well as
anglais.

I lift my cup, they are watching me anxiously: it’s imperative that I mention the tea. “Très bon,” I manage to get out in the direction of Madame. “Délicieux.” Doubt seizes me,
thé
may be feminine.

What I’m remembering are the visits our mother was obliged to pay Madame while our father was visiting Paul. My father and Paul would be outside, talking about boats or motors or forest fires or one of their expeditions, and my mother and Madame would be inside in the rocking chairs (my mother with the Niagara Falls cushion), trying with great goodwill to make conversation. Neither knew more than five words of the other’s language and after the opening Bonjours both would unconsciously raise their voices as though talking to a deaf person.

“Il fait beau,” my mother would shout, no matter what the weather was like, and Madame would grin with strain and say “Pardon? Ah, il fait
beau
, oui, il fait beau, ban oui.” When she had ground to a stop both would think desperately, chairs rocking.

“ ’Ow are
you?”
Madame would scream, and my mother, after deciphering this, would say
“Fine
, I am fine.” Then she would repeat the question: “How are you, Madame?” But Madame would not have the answer and both, still smiling, would glance furtively out through the screen to see if the men were yet coming to rescue them.

Meanwhile my father would be giving Paul the cabbages or the string beans he had brought from his garden and Paul would be replying with tomatoes or lettuces from his. Since their gardens had the same things in them this exchange of vegetables was purely ritual: after it had taken place we would know the visit would be officially over.

Madame is stirring her tea now and sighing. She says something to Paul and Paul says, “Your mother, she was a good woman, Madame says it is very sad; so young too.”

“Yes,” I say. Mother and Madame were about the same age and no-one would call Madame young; but then my mother never got fat like Madame.

I went to see her in the hospital, where she allowed herself to be taken only when she could no longer walk; one of the doctors told me that. She must have concealed the pain for weeks, tricked my father into believing it was only one of her usual headaches, that would be her kind of lie. She hated hospitals and doctors; she must have been afraid they would experiment on her, keep her alive as long as they could with tubes and needles even though it was what they call terminal, in the head it always is; and in fact that’s what they did.

They had her on morphine, she said there were webs floating in the air in front of her. She was very thin, much older than I’d ever thought possible, skin tight over her curved beak nose, hands on the sheet curled like bird claws clinging to a perch. She peered at me with bright blank eyes. She may not have known who I was: she didn’t ask me why I left or where I’d been, though she might not have asked anyway, feeling as she always had that personal questions were rude.

“I’m not going to your funeral,” I said. I had to lean close to her, the hearing in one of her ears was gone. I wanted her to understand in advance, and approve.

“I never enjoyed them,” she said to me, one word at a time. “You have to wear a hat. I don’t like liquor.” She must have been talking about Church or cocktail parties. She lifted her hand, slowly as if through water, and felt the top of her head; there was a tuft of white hair standing straight up. “I didn’t get the bulbs in. Is there snow outside?”

On the bedside table with the flowers, chrysanthemums, I saw her diary; she kept one every year. All she put in it was a record of the weather and the work done on that day: no reflections, no emotions. She would refer to it when she wanted to compare the years, decide whether the spring had been late or early, whether it had been a wet summer. It made me angry to see it in that windowless room where it was no use; I waited till her eyes were closed and slipped it into my shoulder bag. When I got outside I leafed through it, I thought there might be something about me, but except for the dates the pages were blank, she had given up months ago.

“Do what you think best,” she said from behind her closed eyes. “Is there snow?”

We rock some more. I want to ask Paul about my father but he ought to begin, he must have news to tell me. Maybe he’s avoiding it; or maybe he’s being tactful, waiting until I’m ready. Finally I say “What happened to him?”

Paul shrugs. “He is just gone,” he says. “I go there one day to see him, the door is open, the boats is there, I think maybe he is off somewheres near and I wait awhile. Next day I go back, everything the same, I begin to worry, where he is, I don’t know. So I write to you, he has leaved your
caisse postale
and the keys, I lock up the place. His car she is here, with me.” He gestures towards the back, the garage. My father trusted Paul, he said Paul could build anything and fix anything. They were once caught in a three-week rainstorm, my father said if you could spend three weeks in a wet tent with a man without killing him or having him kill you then he was a good man. Paul justified for him his own ideal of the simple life; but for Paul the anachronism was imposed, he’d never chosen it.

“Did you look on the island?” I say. “If the boats are there he can’t have gone off the island.”

“I look, sure,” Paul says, “I tell the police from down-the-road, they look around, nobody find nothing. Your husband here too?” he asks irrelevantly.