The class is divided in two parts: first, the lecture in which future drivers are taught the history of the city; some key dates; notions about architecture they’ll be quick to forget; and second, equine anatomy. All apprentices wait impatiently for the start of the practical part of their training, experience to be gleaned on the ground, acquired in the driver’s seat or the hand on the shoulder of a horse with its nose plunged deep in the barrel of oats, soiling the drivers’ boots in the stable. The one explanation that matters most. The drivers’ course lasts two months, including the final examination, with a view to obtaining a permit to drive a horse-drawn vehicle.
Generally, after visiting the stable, the group is decreased by half. The baby boomers on the verge of retirement take to their heels when they observe the sorry state of the premises. Sensitive souls take off with the same haste former coachmen do the final sorting, bringing along the newcomers with barely concealed bad faith. Simple math explains the sour reception: they are paid by the trip. More drivers, fewer trips. The cohort of newcomers, usually friendlier and interested in informing the tourists who climb on board, with better hygiene, attract more customers than the old ones. As there is no money to be made in May, contributing to the training of newcomers brings in a small sum, enough to repay La Mouche for debts accumulated before the official start of the profitable season, which always turns out better — as is well-known — with no broken arms or fractured shoulders.
* * *
OTHER DRIVERS CONTINUE TO arrive. The Indian has reached the northern boundary of Griffintown. To the east, Roger and Joe are walking briskly to be among the first to choose a horse and a calèche. From every direction they are gaining ground: Georges, Lloyd, and Robert in the west, Christian and Gerry in the north on the Indian’s trail. Others follow, spitting, coughing, cursing, hoping. This procession marches past accordingly, noisy, hands held out in front, all under the eye of La Mouche, an old crook with a twisted smile who, from the roof of a warehouse, casts disapproving looks on the comings and goings of those who will cling, feet and hooves, to Griffintown. The moneylender watches the arrival of one person in particular. It is said that the person who put Paul Despatie on the throne of Griffintown has disappeared, that she joined Mignonne in death. But La Mouche doesn’t believe a word.
He senses her presence.
* * *
THE FAR OUEST ALSO includes the old city, a tourist neighbourhood that’s more and more residential. For the drivers it’s the proscenium, a site for performance and parade, one where it’s wise to straighten your spine and play your character well. At the end of the day you go behind the stage, to the rundown backstage, a zone with its own founding myths and laws, where a person can drive in peace, whip in hand, a beer between the legs. Going back to the stables under the rose-coloured sky of July after a profitable day trotting along William Street makes the life of a driver acceptable. Closer to the heart of Griffintown, the hum of the city fades; at the patched-up tin castle, the skyscrapers form nothing but a string of starry shadows in the distance.
A railroad goes by in the southwest and not far from there lies the canal and all its tributaries, including the stream of sooty water that runs behind the stable and onto the bridge that joins the Far Ouest and Pointe-Saint-Charles.
At the end of the day the drivers unhitch their horses and cool them with a shower, dry them with a scraper, then confine them to rest in their stalls, where a cube of hay and blessed peace await. Unlike saddle horses to be ridden — that sleep standing up with eyes half-closed, resting one leg at a time — calèche horses lie on the ground, collapse, exhausted, their heavy eyes tightly closed, to dream of being unharnessed, of grazing or of rolling in the snow.
* * *
THE FAR OUEST HAS as many errand boys as stands: ghostly coachmen, former drivers who haven’t won the battles with their demons. When a driver has to be away for a few minutes, the errand boy keeps an eye on his horse. If the moon is bright enough, which is to say rarely or never, he might board customers while they wait for the driver to return. At noon, the errand boys go out to fetch sandwiches in exchange for a few coins; the better their tips the less they tend to get lost along the way or to make mistakes in the orders. Now and then, once or twice during the season, Paul is given the task of counting the drivers’ rides to see if the amount they declare at the end of the day corresponds to the true number of rides. The errand boy is a humble and mischievous individual, the joker in a card game, who takes his little job very seriously, clinging to it as to a lifeline. Sometimes the dark side surfaces and an errand boy disappears for a few days, a few weeks, coming back more wilted than before, morose, despondent, silent, and motionless, holding a can of beer, unwilling to do any favours, but present all the same. During those moments a driver offers him a sandwich.
The longest-serving of all the errand boys is a well-known tramp. With his long grey hair, his gold teeth, and his perpetual road department jacket, ripped off from a blue-collar worker, Le Rôdeur has been hanging around Griffintown longer than most of the drivers. He left the Far Ouest before the end of the last season, on all fours like a horse. Billy saw him limp towards the east along the railway track with a severe cough, clearing his throat as if breathing his last. It would have taken a clever chimney sweeper to get rid of all the soot that lined his larynx. He was at death’s door. Winter may well spell the end of him and the night will cover his broken body with its shroud. Had Le Rôdeur already joined Mignonne?
That is the sad prospect Billy envisages, sitting on the roof of his trailer, when he notices in the stream where they drown kittens an object that is both familiar and no longer in use. A boot. Coming down from his perch and approaching the stream, he recognizes the boot, which is drifting on the surface of the troubled waters, at its heel a long trail of weeds. He uses a branch to get it. The boot belongs to his boss.
Squinting, Billy looks around suspiciously. In the blue-tinged, shadowy light that envelops the stable, La Grande Folle’s grotesque and terrifying silhouette stands out on the wall. Shoulder against a beam in the garage, a cigarette in one hand, brandishing the garden hose above a cauldron with the other, she has kept on her feathered hat and is now posing in the twilight, all seven feet of her if you include her showgirl’s headgear. To Billy’s eyes she seems straight out of a dreary, degenerate theatre.
* * *
GEORGES HAS HIS EYE on the Clydesdale and the forest-green buggy. He informs Billy what he intends to do and asks where Paul has gone, but no one knows. Maybe he’s crossed the border in search of new horses? Impossible to say just now; Paul Despatie does not deign to answer his messages.
The coachman starts to decorate the calèche, tying plastic vines and roses and stuffed teddy bears to the roof. He stows a blanket in the rear trunk and scatters some trinkets under the driver’s seat to show others that the calèche has already been spoken for. Then he steps into the stall of the big bay horse he covets and urinates into the straw to mark his territory.
That year, Lloyd is also among the first to drag his carcass to Griffintown. Even though it’s a little early to get the season underway, the driver seems anxious to harness the horses, probably because of debts run up at the end of the previous, disastrous summer he’d drowned in alcohol. In August he’d got into the habit of turning up at the stable in the morning, eyes already glassy and speech confused, staggering and expressing himself in a franglais impossible to decode. After noon at the calèche stand, Lloyd passed out in his horse’s diaper and the animal made his way to the stable on his own. Paul had let the driver go before the end of the season and Lloyd, out of ideas, had resigned himself to making a deal with the moneylender. To repay his debt to La Mouche was becoming urgent.
Over the years Lloyd has become attached to a big blackish-brown mare with a nervous temperament he called Charogne or carrion, a former racehorse with tattoos on the neck just under the mane, which is fine and glossy. The tattoo was a dream of the driver who would have preferred t
o become a jockey.
The spotted Appaloosa is reserved for the Indian and always has been; they’re a winning combination and all the rage among European tourists. A cream-coloured palomino waits quietly for the return of Robert. The horse is impossibly coloured maiden’s blush, built like a little buffalo, watching from the corner of her eye for Gerry to arrive. The old horses — Champion, Majesty, Luck — are reserved for tenderfeet because they are calm, practically deaf, horribly slow, and thus less inclined to cause accidents. They are just as reassuring.
* * *
THE TENDERFEET WILL SOON arrive in Griffintown, but Paul is delayed. Something’s out of place, like a horseshoe landing crooked on the ground. Billy has spent a lot of time brooding on the roof of his trailer, keeping an eye on the stream while waiting for his boss, or at the very least his left boot. He recalls conversations he’s had with Paul, when the other man appeared exhausted, sick of pulling Griffintown’s strings. Paul has let it be understood that he sometimes has an urge to give it all up and make a new life for himself by the ocean in the South, far from the horses, even farther from the drivers. Billy has never taken it seriously; after all, he too was sick and tired of riffraff. But he has a tough hide. Maybe without knowing it he’d ignored an alarm signal. Maybe Paul is driving down Route 66 and where he’s going he’ll never need cowboy boots again. So why did he drop just one in the stream?
* * *
ONE MORNING, AFTER HE'S fed the horses, Billy hitches up Maggie and goes to a print shop on the outskirts of Griffintown to make a wanted poster using an old photo of Paul. Wanted: Man wearing one boot, railway track tattoo on arm and possibly a bullet hole. Wanted dead or alive. Ransom offered $$$.
Thinking it’s a joke or a setup, the employee smiles until the sight of the man standing at the counter makes him change his mind. Faded jeans, genuine cowboy boots, John Deere cap, contraband cigarette stuck to his lips; no doubt about it, this is a genuine desperado.
I used to ride my bike to school, and after a bad raid I never knew if I might have to take a detour round some place that had caught a bomb, though it didn’t happen often down our way. They never actually hit our school or anywhere close but twice they closed off a road near- by because of an unexploded bomb that had fallen in the night. All through the war we never actually missed a day of school because of enemy action, as they called it.
The photo, dog-eared and yellow, shows a serene Paul smoking a cigarette on the square opposite the Basilica, in front of his finest buggy, the one shaped like Cinderella’s coach, hitched to Mignonne. Billy remembers as if it were yesterday. He’d snapped the photo a while before but for once, his boss appears happy. Totally different from the troubles that have been making his life miserable in recent times.
Outside, a delivery man is honking his horn; the calèche is parked in the wrong place. Seeing that Maggie has folded her ears, stiffened her hindquarters and begun to stamp the ground, annoyed, Billy rushes to pay the bill and leaves with a hundred posters under his arm. On the way home he slaps them onto every telephone pole.
The smile of Paul Despatie, repeated a hundred times like an appeal, like an unintelligible omen. Or a bad joke.
* * *
MARIE STILL HAS TROUBLE believing there are horses in the city. In her mind they still belong in the country, where she had to leave them behind when she chose to live in the metropolis. The years spent in the big city haven’t quelled the wild, physical desire to ride horses; to approach them, befriend them, rest her shoulder against theirs, lay her hand on their noses and slide it towards their warm breasts. Those movements remain etched in her and ask to blossom again. A simple stamping in the distance revives that memory and makes it crackle.
One day when she was on her way to the old city, Marie noticed horses pulling calèches and wondered where the stables were. Driven by an urge to spend some time there, she signed up for a calèche drivers’ course. The rest followed in a quick and strangely concrete way. She had never set foot in Griffintown. She felt at once excited and vulnerable, suspected that the stable she was about to enter would be nothing like the riding schools she attended in the past. More than anything, she feared horses suffering because of human error.
Walking on Griffintown’s scarred streets with the other tenderfeet, Marie notices the Wanted poster on the telephone poles. She feels as if she’s on a film set: the air vibrates softly and something misty and volatile floats there, gold dust mixed with powdered rust. The tenderfeet feel slightly suffocated but they’ll have to learn to live with the smell if they want to become drivers. Then, in a blind alley forgotten by God and man, the stable appears set in a crude patch. The smell is becoming unbearable and the putrid fumes so challenging that Marie, though she’s accustomed to the smell of a stable, has tears in her eyes and begins to cough.
Arrival on the premises is by way of a swamp of shit and mud that’s called the parking lot. She is aware of the suction effect around her boot, the inelegant and ugly sound that accompanies it, and it amuses her until she can’t extricate herself and begins to sink in. Billy comes to her rescue. By way of thanks, Marie offers him one of the peppermints intended for the horses. He sticks the candy in his mouth, revealing blackish stumps. The decrepitude here has poisoned even the teeth of the groom.
The stable is partly occupied by draft horses, giants squeezed into tiny stalls. First pain. Taking advantage of the group’s departure to check out the premises, Marie puts her palm on Pearl’s black crupper, making her flinch, surprised. From that first contact, the mare is aware of a benevolent tremor. Then Marie makes her way to her flank and they peer at one another. She puts a green apple on the cube of hay, breaking it into two equal parts with her thumb in an unconscious gesture she has repeated a thousand times. The mare makes short work of it while Marie sticks her hand into its watering trough to get rid of the dirt lodged there: a stem of hay, some pigeon fluff, a tangle of grimy filaments and cobwebs. She lets the water run until it’s clear and notices a scratch running down the creature’s nose; she vows that she will take care of it. Half-heartedly, the mare takes advantage of Marie’s proximity to see if by chance there were some sweets in her pocket. She finds a few pink candies and munches them, satisfied. Marie plunges her face in the animal’s long mane and inhales deeply.
“Looking for work?” Billy has observed the scene. If this girl worked for Paul the horses would be in good hands.
“Yes, I’ve signed up for the driving course. I’d really love to work here.”
“Fantastic. You start in two days. I’m Billy.”
At once disarmed and amused by the turn of events, Marie gets ready to rejoin the group when suddenly her attention is captured by the sight of a horse with a greyishbrown coat waiting patiently to be harnessed. John appears with the harness and a kettle of feed.
“Beautiful animal,” observes Marie.
John isn’t very fond of humans, especially the new drivers. He can’t stand their lack of know-how, thinks their ignorance is dangerous. And this little girl is way too pretty to be working on a calèche.
Marie slides her thumb to the corner of the horse’s lips to check the enamel of the gelding’s teeth and determine his age. Reflexively, he pulls open the mouth.
“I’d say he’s eight or nine. A beautiful horse but he’s badly shod. You can see that where the pastern is swollen.”
That’s a girl who knows horses. John can see right away that she knows her way around a horse, though she’s not the kind who claims to know everything and spends hours grooming hers in the stable but ends up wearing him out from asking too much of him. Little girls are demanding and may seem pitiless; he knows this only too well. The previous summer he and Billy had to use firecrackers to help Lucky get to his feet after a young woman driver had pushed him too far. Horses give all they’ve got, far more from bravery than from pride, then they collapse, broken. Small, precious, cavalier despots; John loathes them.
In a concert of clacking dry leather and met
al knocking together, the driver tightens the girth, pushes back the mare to face the calèche, adjusts the breeching strap, checks the angle of the reins, ties off the last braids, hoists herself onto the driver’s seat, grabs hold of a long riding crop.
“Squeeze in there if you don’t want your foot run over by a hoof or a wheel.”
In the man’s eyes there is something harsh and ravaged, the hollow echo of a field of ruins. Marie takes one step back.
* * *
LATE THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, when two or three horses are waiting in the alley to be hitched up for the night rounds, the drone of a big truck with a tired engine can be heard.
“Billy!” barks Lloyd, fixing a bag of oats for Charogne. “Here’s your shitload of gravel!”
Without leaving his cab the driver pours a mountain of grey rocks right next to Cinderella’s coach. Armed with a rake and a shovel, Billy begins as he does every summer to hide the tainted pudding that covers the ground.
For the veteran horses, the sound announces more comfort. Stone dust absorbs half the surrounding mugginess, tempers the air in the stable, offers a climate that’s better for wrecked joints and sensitive hocks.
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