And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by Jocelyne Saucier

  ‘A patient, resilient smile,’ Marie-Luce told me, ‘as if we were suggesting going for a drive and she had a better idea.’

  The train trip, Montreal–Senneterre, was what she wanted, required, demanded, with a smile directed (solely and exclusively, Marie-Luce told me) at Janelle.

  The Montreal–Senneterre line, like the Budd Car but running north-south, does three return trips a week, and there is no departure for Senneterre on Sundays. ‘A blessed day of all days, because it was Sunday.’ They thought they had an excuse.

  ‘Sunday? It’s Sunday today?’ Gladys inquired.

  They thought she was confused, but they quickly understood that Gladys had a route all traced out that she would not be deviated from.

  ‘Today is Sunday … tomorrow is Monday … We can take the train to Senneterre tomorrow morning,’ Gladys finally announced, with a smile dulled from effort (‘to Janelle, once again, all of her attention was on Janelle’), before asking her whether she had called Lisana, her other obsession.

  It was a long day, with a lot of pressure. There was no longer a question of hospitalizing Gladys. No question either of having an old woman dying in Janelle’s bed. ‘It was possible; I could have given her end-of-life care, but just seeing Janelle’s terrified face, I couldn’t consider it.’ The day dragged on.

  The strangest thing, they told me, was seeing Gladys so serene, so confident. They went into the bedroom just to watch her sleep, to see the woman’s beautiful, large body stretched out on the bed or curled around the pillows, like a fetus with its cord, or settled into any other position that kept her comfortable. She was taking joy in her body, in the life she had left.

  The bedroom radiated the same peaceful abandon, whether or not she was sleeping. Abandon to her body, abandon to her two angels (‘That’s what she called us’) when they would tiptoe in to give her a bite to eat, rearrange her pillows, refresh her with a cool cloth, and explain once again that she had to go to the hospital, that she was in no shape to travel, and, relaxed and smiling, she welcomed them as if they had just brought her good news, saying she was going to take the Montreal–Senneterre train the next morning.

  ‘We didn’t know how we were going to get through the day.’

  The only time they saw a flash of worry in her eyes was when she asked Janelle whether she had called Lisana. But she never asked to speak to her daughter. That is what the sisters couldn’t explain, not now and not then.

  Janelle called Lisana twice during the day. The first time in the morning when Gladys had already fallen back into a deep sleep. Lisana was raving. Her karma, the neighbours, their eyes coming through the walls, her karma again, and then, as if she had grown tired of her own confusion, she became more coherent, wondering what she would do with her day, whether Homeland was on Showtime today. Janelle got the impression of organized, self-aware confusion.

  The second call happened in Gladys’s presence, in Janelle’s bedroom, the phone on speaker. They thought that getting the mother and daughter communicating would create an emotional shock that would release each from her own obsessions.

  But there was no communication and no emotional shock. Janelle carried out the conversation on her own, under Gladys’s silent smile. Not one word, no reaction, just that smile, which showed her satisfaction in listening to the two women speaking. And nothing Lisana said was addressed to her mother. She was raving less, less worried about her karma, almost relaxed. Although karma came up at the end of the conversation when Janelle asked her to convince her mother to give up on the idea of making the train trip. ‘My mother’s karma is to die on a train,’ Lisana said, and Gladys smiled in agreement.

  They have no idea how the decision developed in the hours that followed.

  ‘There was no decision. On our part, I mean. I don’t remember a moment when my sister and I decided anything. The decision happened without our noticing. At the end of the afternoon, we knew we were going to take the Montreal–Senneterre train.’

  ‘Gladys always knew, she never doubted it. She always knew I would go with her. She is a formidable woman.’

  At the end of the afternoon, Marie-Luce went to the pharmacy to stock up on items for end-of-life care.

  On Monday, October 1, I walked into class not realizing that my life was going to be turned upside down. Seven hundred kilometres from my classroom, three women weighed down with luggage (Marie-Luce hadn’t managed to convince her sister to leave anything behind) and stunned by their own determination boarded the Montreal–Senneterre train. And farther away still, in Sudbury, Suzan and her son were starting the trip to Swastika.

  I couldn’t say whether it was space or time that sealed my fate or whether the two colluded against me, nor whether, in this space-time, I could have found a way to escape. I don’t like the idea of destiny; I don’t accept the idea that written somewhere in the sky or in my DNA there is a life that awaits me. And yet, when I think back to all the facts and everyone’s acts recorded here, I can see myself putting my foot in the trap the evening of October 1, and I can’t help but think that there was a misdeal. I’m not made for the whirlwind that followed.

  Senneterre is a small town where nothing happens except for its forest festival and the trains pulling into and out of the station. Chance would have it that I was born there, and the days passing me by or my lack of determination have made it so that I am still there. I serve as the local dreamer. Hard work is what’s valued here, and I do nothing with my hands other than turn the pages of a book, so I have been designated an intellectual. I have no illusions about the title. I have never read Baudelaire. I read fantasy, science fiction, biographies, and anything I can get my hands on about trains. History, technical manuals, life stories, the great builders, hoboes from the 1930s, ghost train hunters, it all interests me. If a sign of destiny were needed, you would find it in my passion for trains.

  Why didn’t I become a railwayman like my father, my uncles, and all the young men seeking a future for themselves not too far away? Probably because they were men who were larger than life in my mind. My father, who was not actually a colossus, seemed like a giant when I would see him in the marshalling yard. I would look for him among the men who would lumber between the long freight trains and, once I spotted him, I wouldn’t take my eyes off him, a short man who had become a giant because he would single-handedly dismantle a train. All of his gestures, the lever he would release, the brake hoses he would separate, the movements he repeated from one car to the next, I was familiar with them, and every time it was the same rapture to see the cars separate, slide along the track, and join another train, thanks to the expert hands of my father, my uncle, all the men who performed the slow, heavy, behemoth ballet.

  I don’t have intelligent hands. I wouldn’t know how to slip like my father under the joint hooks and in five seconds release the brake hoses. The only thing my hands are good for is turning pages, and I became an English teacher.

  People call me ‘broken arm’ or ‘broken hand.’ It isn’t said to be mean; it is said relatively kindly because I am still ‘a local guy.’ Regardless, a broken hand has a hard time winning the heart of ‘a local woman.’ They want a man who is capable of uncoupling, putting away, cutting. Unable to impress the sturdy girls from Senneterre with my page-turning abilities, I play on my bookish aura with girls who arrive from other places. I lose myself between their dreams and mine, and then, obviously, after a certain amount of time, they go back from where they came.

  I don’t remember the moment I became a member and then the president of the Senneterre Historical Society, which gave birth – quickly and at my initiative – to the SOS Transcontinental movement. It was naturally, almost by osmosis, that I slipped among the former railwaymen who were trying their best to return to a time when our little town was a major railway centre.

  Like the Bengal tiger, like the Asian elephant, like most Northern trains, the Montreal–Senneterre line is endangered. At the Historical Society, we call it ‘the Tr
anscontinental’ to give it a bit of panache and protect it from the assaults of time. That was its name when it ran from Halifax to Vancouver, with the valiant pioneers of the North aboard, entire families and their household goods, peasants who came from Central Europe with only their sheepskin jackets and the vast Canadian North they had been given to dream about. Of this mythical train, there remains only the Montreal–Senneterre section, which is, in my opinion – and you will forgive me my favouritism, my bias, my complete lack of objectivity – the most interesting, the most alive, the most attractive of the Northern trains. I have done them all, and only our line offers so much to experience and contemplate.

  I won’t attempt an exhaustive list here of all the charms and attractions of the Montreal–Senneterre line, but I want the potential and hypothetical reader who has followed me through these lines to know what they would be giving up if the axe were to fall on our Transcontinental.

  First there is the close encounter with nature. The train crosses seven hundred kilometres of deep forest and puts all of its splendour and its pain on display. Rivers, lakes, great tranquil expanses, the earth-shaking furor of the waters, a spectacle that is constantly changing. Then the injuries, the long black tree trunks rising out of land ravaged by clear-cutting and forest fires.

  But it’s inside, in the only car, that you get the true Transcontinental experience. Because of its passengers. I still sometimes take the trip I know inside out just for the surprise that awaits me. It never disappoints. I know that in the little community that forms over the hours (the trip takes eleven, twelve, thirteen hours, if not more), there will be someone who will create a moment of humanity that can be produced nowhere else.

  Despite what people think, the Transcontinental line crosses inhabited territory – sparsely, very sparsely, and for long stretches not at all, but still inhabited. First by Indigenous people, Atikamekw territory (two reserves, Wemotaci and Obedjiwan). Then by the intractable Parent and Clova, barely one hundred people who have chosen to live in what one could think was death throes but that has a beautiful, raw vitality. Then by all the lonely souls who smell strongly of cabins in the wood and tart wind in the resiny underbrush who board and alight without a glance at anyone. Exclusively men. Although I have seen an old woman, at least eighty years old, get off the train where a younger man was waiting for her, probably her son, and farther along, the smoke that rose up between the spruce, probably the son’s cabin. Which one of them was the forest hermit? I made up a whole story around their encounter.

  And then there are those who this life attracts. Fishers, hunters, and kayakers who come in by the dozens for expeditions of ten or twenty days on the Bazin and Oskélanéo rivers. Nature lovers who have their cottages equipped with solar panels and a parabolic antenna somewhere on the shore of a lake. And there are all the others who come from different worlds and who never fail to surprise me. A train buff smiling broadly because he has finally stepped onto the train that was missing from his collection. A woman who’s lost, a train stray (every time I see her, she has forgotten where she has come from and where she is going). A European in search of the ‘Indians’ from his childhood books, whom my friend Ricky quickly spots. Ricky is Atikamekw and, for a few beers, he tells the European all the stories he wants to hear, and for a few more, the European gets to hear powwow chanting. Many of us know Ricky’s game. None of us step in, not even the conductor, when Ricky is dead drunk. He lives alone in the middle of the forest, banished from his reserve, and the train is his amusement park, and those of us in the car seeing him toy with the European also find it amusing. It was one of those moments that make the Transcontinental unique.

  But even with two cars chock full, the Transcontinental doesn’t earn its keep. It’s still around because it’s an essential service. For the people of Clova who have their groceries delivered by train, for the Parent clinic that sends and receives medical supplies, for the Atikamekw who travel between reserves or who go shopping or to the hospital or to college in La Tuque or Shawinigan. For all these people, the Transcontinental is a service that – we are all aware of it – will become less and less essential now that there is a forest road that takes the same route. Right now, it’s just a side road for forest trucking. But as soon as it becomes passable year-round, and it will soon, we all know that will signal the death of our Transcontinental.

  I was settled in, reading my copy of Rail Fan Canada, when I got a call from Clova early in the evening. It was Patrice, a friend, also a big fan of the Transcontinental, informing me that an old woman was dying in Clova because she couldn’t get a train to Swastika. The story was confused; it took me a while to understand what it was about and if we could take advantage of it. The old woman was going to take the Northlander to get home when the line – and I knew it for a fact, having been on the last trip of the Northlander – had been retired the day before. How the old woman could have believed she would get to Swastika via the Transcontinental, Patrice had no idea, but we both knew it was a path to follow. An old woman dies because they took away her train; it was a sledgehammer of an argument to defend our own position.

  I went to the station to wait for the train and find out more. I didn’t know which of the Villeneuve brothers, Claude or Jean-Pierre, was the conductor that day. When I spotted Claude coming down the footboard, I knew he was in no mood to talk. His gestures were slow and deliberat,e as if he had to displace a ton of air. The passengers got off one by one, looking like survivors. Among them, the German man, the train buff with whom I had exchanged a few words on the Northlander. His specialty was endangered trains.

  I had the rails in my bones. There was no way I was going to be able to resist this story.

  Where did the idea come from that Gladys would meet her maker in Clova because she had missed the Northlander? That she thought she was headed to Swastika?

  From person to person, I managed to untie the knots of the confusion.

  From Suzan, who as she was leaving from Sudbury called Lisana, who told her that Gladys had taken the Montreal–Senneterre train – again from Suzan who then called Frank Smarz – from Frank Smarz, who alerted the Englehart dispatcher – from the dispatcher to the rail traffic controller in Montreal – from the controller who finally reached Claude Villeneuve who was at La Tuque – from one to the other, there was enough bewilderment and haste for communication to break down.

  As for the main parties concerned – by which I mean Marie-Luce and Janelle, because as far as Gladys goes, we’ll never know what she was thinking – they were disoriented, utterly stunned. They were aware of the absurdity of the situation. Particularly Marie-Luce, who had never set foot on a Northern train and who, in discovering the decrepitude of the car, pictured herself in a bad film playing the role of someone she didn’t know.

  They had bought tickets all the way to Senneterre. It was caution on Marie-Luce’s part, as she knew there was a hospital there. But in the meantime, they hadn’t the slightest idea of what awaited them over the seven hundred kilometres and the hours stretched before them, except that they had to be ready for what would come. They had done what they had to do before leaving. Marie-Luce had called in sick to work, they had a well-stocked cooler, pillows, blankets, and everything that would be needed for comfort in the throes of death, which could occur anywhere, at any time. As far off as possible, Janelle hoped; in Senneterre, Marie-Luce hoped (‘In the meantime, we were operational’).

  Janelle told me that she has never felt so alive. She was sitting close to Gladys, and she felt that every minute, every second, would be taken away from her if every one of her thoughts wasn’t for Gladys. She was unaware of the scenery streaming by the window or the few travellers who had taken their seats in the car.

  Gladys was showing no sign of weakness or illness, as if she had been granted clemency. She was where she wanted to be. Everything about her emitted quiet strength.

  As for the conductor who presided over this stretch of the Transcontinental, I trie
d several times to contact him, but he slipped through my fingers for reasons that I now understand and that, as astonishing as it may seem, are of a spiritual nature. He is well known among the fraternity of conductors. He was in charge of the Toronto–Montreal line but sometimes filled in elsewhere. This meant he occasionally found himself on the Transcontinental, and the Villeneuve brothers know him well. He is Indigenous, from the Atikamekw nation. A giant, Claude Villeneuve told me. A giant who is always smiling and a man of great humanity. Was it his great humanity that made him abandon the trains for the priesthood? It’s a question that will go unanswered, like so many others, because the only time I had a semblance of a conversation with him, he ended it on the pretext that he had a mass to celebrate. My other calls went straight to voice mail. He will be missing from this story and anonymous – as he wished.

  The absence of his testimony in no way compromises the rest of this story, because nothing of note happened on that stretch of the Transcontinental.

  At Hervey Junction, there was a crew change. The Atikamekw conductor got off there, taking with him his precious anonymity, and Claude Villeneuve, my fellow townsman, boarded.

  An aside here on the Villeneuve brothers, an institution in Senneterre. There are three of them: Jean-Pierre, Claude, and André. They have all been train conductors from a young age, Jean-Pierre and Claude on the Transcontinental and André on the freight trains. And like me, they don’t feel at home with the administrative jargon of the railway. When you ask Claude what he does for a living, he answers simply that he drives trains. And in my account, I will add the title of conductor, because he does that too.