For Billy, covering the surrounding blemishes, shovelling stones over shit, is the activity that comes closest to a spiritual practice, along with rolling pennies. He does it every year, praying silently for abundance to come to Griffintown and for suffering and malevolence to stay away. He prays for the horses to be solid on their hooves, for the drivers to stand firm and not wobble, for Paul to come back, for Evan to disappear … for the radio to stop screeching! He’s going to punch it and go back to his task, letting gratitude sweep over him. “Thanks for the bed and the shelter where they let me sleep. Thank you for the Chinese boy who deliveries soft drinks, instant coffee, onions, and ground beef. Thank you for good health, in spite of toothaches. Thank you, I’m on my feet and grateful.”
Grey above the blackish purée, a tiny clink of gravel like a bell to announce school will start again, sounding the possibility of a fresh start.
The air is mild, the stable peaceful and clean, nearly all the stalls occupied; in the fridge, some leftover shepherd’s pie and cans of Dr. Pepper wait for Billy. He starts to hum a song of which he remembers half the lyrics. He mispronounces the words but he stays in tune.
The small stones muffle the putrid fumes; at last the season for the calèches can begin.
* * *
ON THE VERGE OF daybreak, after drifting for nearly a week, Paul is the last to cross the limits of the territory feet first. La Grande Folle finds him near the stream, on his side like a drunk collapsed in an impossible position.
La Grande Folle touches his shoulder and, sensing the worst when there is no reaction, rolls him onto his back. Paul turns to her a martyr’s face, complexion leaden. His features are bloated, his body soaking wet, purple marks around his wrists and two red holes at his heart.
She lets out a long cry, her voice wavering strangely between a man’s hoarse sound and a woman’s falsetto, falls silent. Never taking her eyes off the corpse, La Grande Folle steps back to Billy’s trailer where he is already putting on his boots.
“Paul is dead!” shrieks the bird of ill omen, pointing at the black water. Her makeup is running, a treacherous shadow covers her temples and chin.
“Take the dress off and give me a hand,” Billy orders, his jaw clenched.
They hoist the corpse into a wheelbarrow. Paul’s body is folded like a pair of scissors and his hands and feet, rigid and streaming wet, stick out. Billy recalls that in the cellar there’s a huge freezer where Paul used to preserve the ducks and deer he hunted in the fall. Panic-stricken, the groom gets the idea of placing the remains there; he would have to act fast. From the freezer they take a moose hock and a partridge, then stow Paul’s corpse, which will remain there until they find a more dignified burial place.
The owner has been eliminated. The order of things, until now unchanging, has just been overthrown. There will be questions of honour to be weighed, maybe a revenge to be orchestrated, and probably a message to be decoded. The horsemen will have to re-establish some kind of justice and impose it. As a rule, police don’t come to the Far Ouest; the authorities let the horsemen deal with these matters among themselves — as long as their stories don’t go beyond the boundaries of the territory.
What happens in Griffintown stays in Griffintown; that’s always been the way.
The murder is signed, its author meaning to be known; what did he want to do to the horsemen? Billy never tried to stay in the know about what was brewing behind the scenes; he was content with running the stable, which was quite enough. Today, he is sorry he didn’t try to know more.
In the stable, the horses are hungry.
THE SECOND BOOT
*
UPRIGHT AND GAPING, AS dark as an enigma, Paul’s boot sits on the table in the place of honour, next to the jar of instant coffee. The leather stiffened as it dried and is now rippled like cardboard. Billy has made the coffee strong this morning; he sweetens it generously, and while sipping this watery brew, he thinks about the death of his boss. For the groom it’s a personal matter.
He remembers a film he saw years before with a cowboy on the lam who’d hidden his weapon in the very bottom of his boot and used it to lure a wealthy businessman. Spotting the boot through the window of a train, the businessman had deduced that a bandit who’d taken refuge on the train’s roof was trying to find a way to get inside. He watched silently, intently, finger on the trigger of a revolver, not knowing that the mouth of a cannon was nestled in the welt of the boot. There were two holes in his forehead before the man understood what was happening to him.
Billy plunges an arm into Paul’s boot, takes out something powdery — a sheaf of dried-out couch grass. Better than a drowned kitten.
The sound of tires crunching over gravel breaks into his contemplation: La Grande Folle has called a taxi. Rather than put back on the crinoline and the rustling skirt that make up the bottom of her femme fatale’s gown, she has on jogging pants. With her girdle, the flesh-coloured thong that climbs up her narrow thighs, and her feathered toque, she looks like an angel fallen into disgrace. La Grande Folle belongs to the night. Dawn slows down her metamorphosis, displays her man’s features, the beginnings of a beard; it reveals his male features and his false eyelashes.
Billy doesn’t know much about La Grande Folle, only that she was once the cellmate of his friend Ray, the groom who now rests in peace between a patch of thistles and a heap of scrap metal, under a makeshift stone on which can be read the following epitaph: Died with his boots on. Next to Ray, beneath a cross, lies the big shattered body of Mignonnela-Blanche. The Griffintown graveyard is home to just those two. In the secrecy of the earth, the skeletons of Ray and Mignonne are united. Both died in the stable. The other drivers and horses will pass away more discreetly, in the outskirts of the Far Ouest, in places without a soul where even the hooves are silent.
While he plucks the partridge taken from the freezer, Billy wonders how to dispose of Paul’s remains. He skewers the bird but doesn’t know what else to do with it.
* * *
GEORGE IS THE FIRST person to whom Billy announces the boss’s death. He tells him in the harness shed. The star driver frowns, looks down. The angle of his cheekbones takes shape, becomes briefly striking, then relaxes. Men of few words, both are silent; they go down to the cellar, backs bent so they won’t hit their heads. As a precaution, Billy has locked the freezer using a padlock that hangs at the end of a twisted chain and has secretly stowed a loaded shotgun behind the freezer next to the mousetrap. After making sure the gun is still there, he opens the lid of the freezer. It takes Georges’s breath away. He recovers, then unexpectedly, he kneels to pray. Crosses himself, gets up. Before he goes back up the ladder, he confides to the groom:
“If I get my hands on whoever did that I’ll rip his stomach open with a hoof pick and make him gobble his own guts.”
* * *
A PROCESSION OF DRIVERS sombre with grief files down to the cellar all day long. Most observe silence and lower their gaze before the body, folded like a pair of scissors. Others mutter a long series of oaths. Evan, Paul’s assistant, is astonishingly silent, helpless for a good three minutes. Then he points to Paul as if he wanted to fight with the other man and lets out:
“You can’t do that to me!”
He delivers the freezer a good hard kick and climbs up the ladder, limping slightly.
* * *
AT THE HÔTEL SALOON the prevailing darkness contrasts with the radiance of spring. Inside, night persists, less opaque than just after dusk. Two p.m. and the place is crammed with drivers who are arguing, and spluttering. One has already fallen out of his chair, twice.
The place is run by Dan, a cousin of Paul’s. A manager boasting legendary composure, always dressed to the nines: bartender’s vest, bowtie around his neck. Over the years Dan has served countless pitchers of horse piss to customers, most of them regulars. The success of the place is due partly to the fact that Griffintown is dry, as they say, meaning that no business in Verdun is authorized to s
erve alcohol. It’s said that Marguerite d’Youville, who had made a bad marriage that united her with an erratic drunk who devoted himself to trading eau-de-vie with the Natives, had handed over that part of the territory on condition the Law of Temperance be applied, banning taverns, clubs, and bars — and the sale of alcohol. Mother Marguerite headed the congregation of Soeurs Grises, grises (i.e. tipsy) because the bad reputation of François d’Youville had tainted them. She had decided that no one would be grise in Verdun any more, save the sisters.
Things are much different in Griffintown now. The Saloon is very close to a Métro station and a few strides from the stables. They serve beer, chips, pickled eggs, beef tongue, and roast beef on Friday. It didn’t take long for the place to become a hangout for a motley crew of workers from a nearby factory that made multi-coloured plastic suitcases: Anglophones of Irish descent, Polish immigrants, and coachmen. Other distinctive signs: close to the entrance is a post for tying up the horses as well as a drinking trough: entrance is through swinging doors; the front is adorned with three small holes made by stray bullets and on a shelf inside stood several jars of banana peppers that have never made anyone’s mouth water. They lend colour to the green marble of the walls and accumulate dust. But more than anything the soul of the place is the head and shoulders of Boy on the wall between the unisex washrooms and the counter where Dan polishes the beer glasses. On a small plaque you can read R.I.P. Boy, Norm’s first horse. Norm is Paul’s father, Normand Despatie, who died at the age of thirty of pneumonia. He’d had time to set up the business in Griffintown and to bring a plow horse from the Beauce: Boy, the founding horse. The matte patina of his hair and the dried matter around his eyes show that he has watched over the small society of horsemen for years and years. For so long, to tell the truth, that no one notices his presence.
But they all would have howled if anyone had dared to take him down. Boy’s mounted head is treated with a deference like that reserved for statues of the Blessed Virgin in the Notre-Dame Basilica, or the monument on Place d’Armes in memory of Chomedey de Maisonneuve. It’s no longer noticed, but it’s reassuring to know it’s still there. When he learns of his cousin’s death, Dan’s attitude is unchanged. He merely undoes the bow tie that suddenly is squeezing his throat, pours himself a big glass of horse piss, sits on a stool at the bar, and chugalugs his beer.
Then, all afternoon and late into the night, the drivers drink hard and argue loudly, recalling good times with Paul and memories of horses ridden in the old days. They use that time to shed light on certain legends and make a start on new ones. They invent ways to torture the person or persons who bumped off Paul, plans that involve their horses: legs and arms attached to four heavy Percherons and the spectacular quartering that would follow. Then, abruptly, the drivers fall silent; something in this story is fleeing between their fingers. Alcohol eases the torments for a few hours but the next day — aided by a hangover — worries, agitation, and something like an appetite for revenge will stir in them.
They ought to meditate, pray in silence beneath the mounted head of Boy, give proof of humility. But it’s too late. Paul remains bent double in the cellar, one floor below his desk, face leaden, body increasingly rigid, frozen in an impossible torsion at the back of a padlocked freezer, with vermin reproducing all around it. Who could have committed this act that cannot be undone, and, in doing so, shattered the order and the hierarchy of the Far Ouest?
The blow was meant to be fatal. The man who ran the business had been attacked. But the horsemen have hides like leather; it will take more to scatter them. Order will come back to Griffintown.
* * *
THE DOOR TO PAUL’S office is locked. Billy will have to see about that, too. He doesn’t know where to start. He considers buying a dog, a pit bull — an animal that’s prompt and swift, with a fine, discriminating ear — to guard the premises when he’s asleep. He rejects that idea: he already has enough animals in his care. Besides, he only shuts one eye to sleep.
Standing in the kitchen near the microwave, Billy is waiting for his frozen meal to be ready when he hears sounds on the Basin Street side, to the west: a car door opens, then closes. He steps discreetly into the sitting room, wraps himself in the curtain, and then, like a sentinel on duty, waits. His heart is pounding. He wishes he hadn’t left the weapon in the cellar, behind the freezer. It’s idiotic; he ought to keep it within reach. With a muted and drawn-out rumbling, a Mercedes with tinted windows drives past the stable like an eel carried by the current in a river.
“Scrounging, eh, troublemaker?” says John as he enters the living room.
Billy jumps, then is relieved to see that it’s only John. A complex equation with multiple unknowns fills his thoughts. It’s heavy to bear; he needs peace and quiet. He could not, for instance, tolerate the presence of Evan.
In the dangerous streets of Griffintown it’s rare to see vehicles other than the drivers’ jalopies, heavy dump trucks filled with straw, hay or loose stones, Paul’s pickup, to which a trailer was sometimes attached …. Paul’s truck! Where could it have been abandoned?
“Nearly all the calèches are at the wall. What’s going on?” asks John.
He has to be put in the know too, taken down to the cellar. With a sigh, Billy invites John to follow him into the darkness.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, THE first in her new life as an aspiring driver, Marie has cleaned out the displays in an equestrian shop and brought back a curry comb, a stiff brush, a miraculous balm that heals injuries and makes hair grow back on scars, a revitalizing cream to untangle the long manes, elastics for tying manes, a hoof pick, and sponges. She also has an expensive ointment to care for and nourish the frogs battered and bruised by the horses’ hooves, an applicator brush, and a gallon of Absorbine Jr. to relieve the animals’ aching hocks.
At the thought of being reunited with the horses, her heart pounds in her ribcage as if to extricate itself; Marie feels it beating all the way to her temples. She spends the evening on the little balcony, reviewing her notes, while her ex cleans out the apartment. The breakup, provoked by Marie, is as fresh as an open wound. He demonstrated he was wounded and angry, which was fine with her. He did not approve of Marie’s new career choice. He was judgmental and talked more and more about going back to live in the suburbs. A world had insinuated itself between them, already driving them apart: the rough, magnetic world of horsemen. Rough.
After telling Marie he’d be back shortly with his brother to pick up the appliances and the rest of his things, he slams the door. Marie closes her eyes and sees herself emerging from her body with heady fluidity. While one part of her passes out, is dissolved in the air as fine particles, something like an ancient ego, holding reins that have been too short for too long, is reborn. There is something timid, and at the same time fearsome about her, a wild fibre, an unwillingness to accommodate herself to the civilized world she’s had to muzzle in order to function well in society. One part of her could be revived. But this other part would be restored in the company of horses. The drivers struck her as unappealing and as ill-adapted as herself, even more so. Marie could finally shed her attitude of fake civility. Everyone would see behind the wilted mask a little face with distinguished features and equine eyes. By associating with the horses, a strange alchemy has forged the resemblance.
She is hungry for a new world, seeks a way to gain access to it. She will find it even though tenderfeet aren’t welcome in Griffintown.
* * *
MARIE LEAVES HER BIKE in the thistles. Three calèches leave the stable hitched to horses, one of which makes her smile: white, with the appearance of angora, a strange head and chaotic mane, pulling a garishly kitsch pink carriage, being driven by a man in a foul mood. May isn’t a busy month for calèche rides and it’s right now that, peacefully at first, the season gets underway. The drivers are content with short days; they go home, giving the horses time to recuperate from their efforts before summer really comes.
Billy, her contact, seems to be snowed under. He executes a dance punctuated by creaking leather and the distressing symphony of scraping wheels. He harnesses the horses, tightens the girth, and coordinates the deployment of men and animals.
Her gaze sweeping the premises, Marie recognizes the twins from the drivers’ course who are giving a horse a shower and saying “Hi.” Two other aspiring drivers have arrived as well: an easy-going man of fifty or so and another, younger, who looks as lost as she does. Amid the hubbub of the departing calèche and the arrival of new horses no one pays them the slightest attention. Marie makes her way to the groom.
“Hi, Billy. I’m here for my training.”
He takes the time to look her over from head to toe; Marie’s hair is pulled into a bun and she has on a flowered skirt. She looks more like someone on her way to a piano lesson than someone who drives a calèche.
“Go with Alice,” the groom stammers between dead teeth. In one corner, a fiftyish woman is bandaging a short-legged chestnut draft horse. She has a straw hat over a long braid. Slightly apart from the others, she is taking her time. Marie notices on the bench of her calèche a big bag of carrots. This detail reassures her.
“Bonjour. Are you Alice?” she asks hopefully.
The woman bursts out laughing. Suddenly Marie has a sense that they’re making fun of her.
The driver tells the others what has just happened and there is an explosion of laughter, slapped thighs, and busted guts. Even Billy, amid the storm of comings and goings he coordinates, takes a moment to laugh at Marie.
“I’m Trudy,” says the driver. “Alice is the tall skinny one over there.”
* * *
ALICE IS ON HIS cellphone, bawling somebody out. He hangs up, asks Billy if his calèche will be ready soon, lights a cigarette. Marie eyes him contemptuously, discouraged. The thought that she could give up this new venture, leave forever this unfriendly world, and go back home brushes against her. She takes refuge for a moment in the stable on the flank of Pearl, her only benchmark; she emerges a few minutes later and heads, not quite so determined, towards the shed.
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