There are two engineers in the locomotive, and when his fellow crew member is at the controls, Claude slips into the passenger car and goes seat to seat, greeting the regulars and explaining to new travellers what they should keep an eye out for on the Transcontinental line. Because as of Hervey Junction, nature reveals its greatest splendours. A plummeting view of the Milieu River, the feeling of gliding along the water when crossing the Réservoir Blanc stone bridge, not to mention the majestic Saint-Maurice River, which he announces to his new passengers every time it appears.
So Claude Villeneuve, engineer and conductor, takes great care of his passengers and, among those aboard, he quickly spotted the German train buff (‘I see one and I know it, even before they ask me a question’), but he didn’t notice anything unusual in the double-facing seats where ‘an old woman and her two daughters’ were sitting.
In the double-facing seats, there was indeed nothing out of the ordinary in the three women travelling together and making quiet conversation. When Claude Villeneuve boarded the Transcontinental, Gladys was telling one of her wonderful stories about the school train.
Gladys had not said a word since the departure from Montreal. Comfortably settled into a nest of blankets and pillows, she hadn’t stopped smiling, ‘a Mona Lisa smile,’ Janelle told me, ‘an inner source,’ and she closed her eyes for long periods ‘as if she wanted to better savour the pleasure of being there.’
But it was something else entirely. Gladys was counting the connections of the tracks. Or trying, rather. Because there came a moment when, with a sad smile and eyes closed, she sighed: ‘No clickety-clack. There is no clickety-clack.’
Obviously, they didn’t get it. Marie-Luce thought it was the beginnings of delirium and wanted to take her temperature. Gladys opened her eyes upon feeling the thermometer and, seeing their frightened eyes, laughed gently. ‘No, no. I’m not losing my mind. It was a memory that came back to me.’ And half to reassure them, half out of her own enjoyment, she told them the story of the clickety-clacks, a story that delighted them just as it did me in the little house under the trees.
They were under the spell of the story, also relieved not to be facing the inevitable already. Gladys was relaxed and smiling, and, for a moment, they forgot what lay ahead. The tension dropped a notch, and Gladys, lulled by the swaying of the train, let herself be carried off in the stream of memories.
‘I was born on a school train. Would you like me to tell you the story?’
And she told the story for almost an hour. Without a single break, with no faltering of her voice, with great care for every detail, every image that came back to her memory, a light at the back of her eyes that revealed the pleasure of reliving the blessed time when a taste for happiness was given to her on the school train.
And now I will try to record as faithfully as possible what they in turn told me.
‘This story made the rounds of the school trains. It was told travelling teacher to travelling teacher, school stop to school stop, from one school train line to the next; everywhere they told the story of the miracle child from Kormak. Because a miracle is precisely what it was. The miracle of Finnish women. Do you know what a Finnish woman was? Of course you don’t. A Finnish woman knew how to read and count. A Finnish woman knew that brown bread was more nutritious than white bread. A Finnish woman could set out alone into the woods with her rifle and come back with two or three hares, start a batch of beer and a load of laundry, get down on her knees and scrub the floor. You don’t get cleaner than a Finnish woman’s house, even when it’s just a cabin in the middle of the forest.
‘Luckily, it was in Kormak when I decided to leave my mother’s belly. One month before the due date and during a storm that left five feet of snow on the tracks. Trains weren’t moving in any direction, and it was forty degrees below zero.
‘I say luckily because Kormak was a small Finnish community huddled around a sawmill. There were also a few French Canadians. And when my mother had her first contractions, what do you think my father did? He ran to the first Finnish house.
‘When he came back to the car with Helmi Pillonen, the hot-water pipes had frozen and burst. I won’t explain the heating system on the school trains, it’s too complicated, but let me tell you that my father dreaded the thought of the pipes bursting from the cold, because the car would be unusable for a month, the time it would take to repair it, and it was terrible for the reputation of a travelling teacher.
‘My mother was carried by sled to the Pillonens’ sauna, and that’s where I was born. All the Finnish people had saunas near their homes, even in the middle of the woods, and all Finnish women gave birth in the sauna. For the heat, for the ready hot water, for the privacy, and so as not to disrupt the household. Sometimes they gave birth alone, sometimes helped by a friend. I was born in the heat of a Finnish sauna while it was cold enough to split pipes and while my father was worrying himself sick in the Pillonens’ house. Not on the school train, in a Finnish sauna. But the story took on a life of its own and, having heard it so often, it’s what I say too.
‘The next day, the track was cleared, and the story made the rounds that a child had been born on William Campbell’s school train during the worst snowstorm ever. Lots of people came to Kormak to congratulate my mother, my father, the Pillonens, anyone and everyone who had contributed to the extraordinary, marvellous history of the school trains. You see, everyone knew about the school trains back then. They were a source of national pride; they talked about them in the newspapers. So the news of the first baby born on a school train attracted a lot of people. People from the government, people from Canadian Pacific, journalists, and even Mr. MacDougall in person, the founder of the school trains, a man my father held in great esteem. There were so many people around the Pillonens’ sauna that the French Canadians of Kormak, all Catholic obviously, called it the Bethlehem manger.
‘A doctor from Chapleau also came to examine us both, my mother and me, and we were declared in perfect health even though I cried the whole time. “It’s normal,” the doctor said. “She’s spitting up, keeping nothing down,” Helmi Pillonen said. “It’s normal, it will pass,” said the doctor. And my father let him leave because he believed more in the wisdom of a Finnish woman than a licenced doctor.
‘I cried day and night. I cried until I was blue. I cried so much, my mother told me, that she would cry too. Helmi Pillonen started to believe that my mother’s milk was no good, and she asked for a neighbour who was nursing to feed me too. I spit up her milk and cried even harder. It was another neighbour who had the right idea. She said: “This child is allergic to milk. You have to find another way to feed her.” And the women went through their vegetable stores and fed me broth. My mother told me there were four women in the sauna when I had my first bottle of vegetable broth. “You suckled it so hard,” my mother said, “your cheeks caved in, and in no time you were sleeping.” The women left, and my mother finally had her first night of rest.
‘We spent a week in the Pillonens’ sauna, my mother and me. I sucked back bottle after bottle. They gradually added meat broth to the vegetable broth. That is the miracle of Finnish women.
‘And my father, who had also witnessed the drama of the crying and the miracle of the broth, decided to name me Gladys. “She will be called Gladys,” he told my mother. “She will be happy and will never cry her whole life.”
‘So far, I have been faithful to my name, and I won’t make a liar of my father today or tomorrow. Don’t worry about me. There won’t be any crying, any wailing. I will go quietly.’
They had passed Shawinigan without noticing the arrival of new passengers or the crew change in Hervey Junction. Gladys’s story had lulled them, calmed them, practically released them from the clutches of anxiety. ‘It was almost as if we were expecting a miracle too,’ Janelle told me.
A mother recounting her childhood memories to her daughters, Claude Villeneuve thought, when he took over in Hervey Junction. ‘The mother is a little tired,
and the two daughters are very attentive.’ Those were his first impressions.
It was near La Tuque that he received the first call on the radio. Nothing alarming. They were just asking him to confirm that he had aboard the woman from Swastika, an older woman named Gladys Comeau. Claude said he did, and as no one asked anything more, he returned to his other travellers. Who were now numerous because a large group of Atikamekw passengers had boarded in La Tuque.
They had passed Parent when Claude received the second radio call. This time, it was urgent. The rail traffic controller was forwarding him a message passed from Swastika to Englehart to Montreal, asking the conductor of the Transcontinental to make sure that the woman from Swastika had emergency care.
The chain of calls that ended up reaching Claude Villeneuve came originally from Frank Smarz. There was panic in Swastika. A needless panic, according to Frank Smarz, Suzan’s ramblings notwithstanding. Since the previous day, he told me, she had been burning up the phone lines with fantasies you couldn’t make heads or tails of and trying to drag him into the same waters. This is why he didn’t bother – he emphasized the expression – when he saw her on Avenue Conroy with her son.
Suzan and Desmond didn’t need a crowbar. Lisana opened the door even before they had knocked. Desmond went in with his mother’s suitcase and hurried off. ‘There was something in that house that didn’t want me there.’
When we had this conversation a few years later in Sudbury, he still hadn’t managed to put words to his sense of unease. ‘Probably a survival instinct. There was a dark joy in Lisana’s eyes and a horrible racket in the house.’
The racket was back. After the silence that had so affected Frank Smarz during the days he went over to check the taps, the deafening cacophony from every last shouting device in the house was back. Suzan wasn’t concerned. She knew Lisana’s habits. But she still asked her to turn down the television, and that’s when Lisana made, in a triumphant voice, an announcement, which Suzan first refused to believe but which gradually sunk in as Lisana revealed the horrible thing that both delighted and terrorized her. ‘Mom and I are going to die together.’ And she explained the pact they had made.
Suzan believed it; her dark instinct believed it. In that moment and during the hours when she raced about setting things in motion to undo the pact, she truly believed that Gladys had abandoned her daughter with the promise that they would both die, together and apart, as was their desire. It was absurd, she now agrees, but in the moment and in the haste of what Lisana had just told her (cancer, massive, aggressive, announced a month earlier), she truly believed that Gladys had headed off on the train, leaving her daughter the ultimate freedom to die as she wished. ‘But I’m not capable of it anymore,’ Lisana said, offering up a wrist that showed a latticework of old scars, with no purple trace of recent laceration.
Frank Smarz believed none of it. He had noticed that Gladys had seemed less energetic lately, less lively, and the house wasn’t being kept as well. But terminal cancer, that he wouldn’t have missed. As for the horrendous pact, it didn’t even merit thinking about. ‘Pure fantasy,’ Frank Smarz said for Lisana’s benefit, and, glancing at her wrist, he added: ‘Some sorrows just evaporate, apparently.’ Pure mean-spiritedness that Suzan put down to the ‘enormous stupidity’ of that man.
While all of this now seems to her to be unbelievably absurd, Suzan feels like she had slipped into a reality that always escaped her. Something between the mother and daughter she had always been excluded from. That same thing that had held them together for all those years and that allowed them to part one morning in September with no tears or heartbreak, almost with delight, if one were to believe the tone Lisana used in announcing that they were going to die together and apart. A suicide pact. Lisana believed it or wanted to believe it, but Gladys? What had she said to her daughter that morning that allowed them to part on such a promise? If there had been a promise, obviously.
The question is enough to swallow you up. It churns endlessly in my head. I have nothing to enlighten me, except Suzan’s dark instinct and the nameless thing she sensed the presence of. At the other end of the spectrum, there was Gladys’s instinct for life, the unflagging optimism that had always kept her on the sunny side of life. That is what my friend Bernie tells me and repeats whenever I ask him the question. ‘That woman was born on the sunny side of life.’ He considers a thought that has not yet taken shape. I sense he is occupied by an idea that just won’t come. Snippets of it get away from him sometimes, and I write them down. ‘Surrender is not in the plans for that woman. She could paddle with a twig.’ Cryptic sentences that don’t help my own thinking.
All of this was just ramblings and fantasy, according to Frank Smarz. If it had been up to him, he never would have placed that emergency call that made its way to Claude Villeneuve.
Claude had received a call about a runaway a few years earlier. The girl (‘thirteen, tops’) had got on the train in Montreal. Claude had spotted her among his passengers and had immediately alerted the Sureté du Québec, who picked her up at the Senneterre station. The story had a happy ending.
He did not anticipate having another runaway on his hands. The old woman was in bad shape, he realized later. After the Atikamekw group got off at Wemotaci and another group of travellers at Parent, all that remained was a small group of around ten passengers, and in the calm that was restored, the coughing fits filled the space. It was bothering the passengers. The fits wouldn’t stop, with loud breathing, almost a moan. In the car, people exchanged questioning looks and didn’t dare speak. He himself wondered whether it –wouldn’t be better to let them off, the woman and her daughters, in Parent, where there is a clinic and a highly skilled nurse (Anna, who was often aboard) who would know how to take care of the old woman. But they had just passed Parent.
Before joining the other engineer, he stopped in front of the double-facing seats. The old woman, between coughing and dozing, feebly tapped the thigh of what appeared to be the younger daughter – a mother and her daughters is what he had believed all along – while the other was refreshing her face with a wipe. The younger one, completely absorbed by her mother, didn’t even notice him, while the other daughter hastily reassured him. ‘It’s fine. I’m a nurse.’
He went back to the locomotive with all that the eyes of the woman, the nurse, did not tell him. ‘I was not reassured, not at all.’ So he didn’t doubt the urgency of the situation when he received the second call about the woman from Swastika. He went back to the car immediately.
The atmosphere had grown heavy; the air had thinned. From one end of the car to the other, there was a palpable sense of discomfort. Not one word, not one gesture – the passengers were paralyzed, Claude told me. ‘They felt threatened by what was going on in the double-facing seats.’
The situation had gotten worse. Gladys was breathing in raspy, wheezing fits and starts despite the inhaler Janelle was holding to her mouth. She was shivering under the blankets. Marie-Luce was massaging her feet and her legs. ‘We were wondering whether what we were dreading had arrived.’
Claude was also afraid death would leave an indelible stain on his train. ‘In thirty years of service, it had never happened to me. I didn’t want a tragedy on my train. I didn’t want to go on to my retirement trailing a body with chattering teeth behind me.’
They were approaching Clova, where there was no clinic, no emergency service. They had to hope the old woman would make it as far as Senneterre. That’s what he asked Marie-Luce. ‘There is a hospital in Senneterre. Do you think she can make it that far?’ He regretted his question, because the old woman roused herself and launched into a litany of denials, the same words coming back like a heartbeat, ‘No hospital … no hospital … no hospital.’ Her daughters, resigned and conciliatory, repeated the words back to her, ‘No hospital, okay, Gladys, understood, no hospital,’ and the older one, the nurse, Marie-Luce, wanting to convey that they had the situation in hand, turned to Claude and told him i
n a flat voice, ‘Don’t worry, we have everything we need.’ Claude wasn’t reassured. He insisted. ‘We’re arriving in Clova; if we pick up the pace, we will be in Senneterre in two hours. Would that be okay?’
It was the word Clova that precipitated everything, left no further option, sealed their fate. She had barely heard the word when Gladys, in a single motion, got up from her seat and said, as if she had just discovered her destination, ‘Clova, this is where we are getting off, this is where it ends for me.’
Nothing could stop her; Claude, Marie-Luce, Janelle all knew it, and they all told me so in trying to convince me that you could not go against Gladys’s will.
They collected their bags and Gladys her strength and, under the astounded gazes of the travellers and Claude, who thought the old woman was drawing her last breath, Gladys walked straight and with no one’s help down the aisle of the Transcontinental.
‘A queen,’ Janelle told me. ‘She left like a queen.’
Gladys brought her eight-day journey to an end.
I know the little community of Clova, and I am not surprised that they let visitors lock themselves away in a room for days without growing alarmed or intervening in some way. If there is one thing people in Clova prize, it’s freedom. Live and let live is the local credo. Even if in this case it was Live and let die. The old woman who arrived there via the Transcontinental collapsed on the outdoor bench at the Restaurant Clova, exhaling all the air from her lungs, like a whale run aground on a sandbar. The woman was at the end of the line, and no one thought they should notify anyone. You get here on your own steam, and you leave the same way.
I first need to explain the Restaurant Clova, because it is an important site that bears witness. That is where I sat down with the idea of mounting a case against the railway companies who let an old woman die along with the Northern trains. Nothing very thorough, just a few pages, but resonant, that would alert those whom it may concern. I had no idea that years would go by, pages would accumulate, and I would still be at my keyboard wondering what to do with all this clutter. At times I felt like I was writing a long letter to myself.
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Page 12