And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by Jocelyne Saucier

  So, the Restaurant Clova.

  The place could seem absurd, an aberration set just metres from the railway tracks with nothing around it but scattered homes and a great, still calm. And yet, at the end of the day, pickups and ATVs arrive. Men descend from them. A few women. They live around the lake, the amber waters of which can be spotted from there. They come from the surrounding outfitters. They almost all know one another. And at the end of the afternoon, many of them leave their lake or their forest and come to socialize at the Restaurant Clova. They have a drink at the bar, take a seat at a table in the restaurant section (their pizza is delicious), and if it’s Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, they wait for the 5:20 train that will arrive hours late.

  I understand that travellers from Montreal may think it’s a gathering of hillbillies. A scene from a Western. The restaurant is a low building, not entirely ugly, and a very dark red. It’s the porch with the short canopy roof that makes it look like a Western. It has two long wooden benches where people wait for the train. No matter whether they’re waiting for mail, a package, a friend, or clients for the outfitter, on and around the porch there will be around fifteen people who have come to witness the event that is the arrival of the train. Beside it, close by, the little station that has sat idle for years has become part of the scenery, almost a commemorative ornament from the time when Clova was a major railway stop. The station is charming, with its hipped roof, dormer windows, and cornices.

  I arrived in Clova on October 2. Janelle and Marie-Luce had been there since the day before, shut up with Gladys in a room at the inn. I was staying with my friend Patrice and eating at the restaurant. Coffee after coffee, I whiled away the hours, hoping to see someone arrive from the inn. From there I could watch the comings and goings of everyone who was rushing to Gladys’s bedside.

  Suzan and Lisana had arrived in the morning on the train from Senneterre. Frank Smarz and his wife, Brenda, arrived the next day in their pickup truck. They were all staying at the inn, and they came to the restaurant, each on their own schedule, sometimes alone, sometimes in twos, rarely in threes. I would see them pick at their meals, and I wondered how I could make an initial approach. There was such silence at their table.

  There is nothing better than a smoker in need to attract attention. At the end of a meal, I saw Frank Smarz reach for his jean jacket pocket, then go to the bar, come back empty-handed, and I blessed the day I started to smoke again. I got up to offer him a cigarette, and we found ourselves on the porch, two smoking pariahs who had no choice but to talk to each other. This is how I learned the whole story, or at least its substance.

  Janelle appeared in the evening when young people and old loners descend on the restaurant. The restaurant becomes a bar, and the porch becomes a pot den. It could have been any bar in Montreal, if it weren’t for the confident patrons’ nonchalance and the complete lack of concern about dress. The youngest ones are employees of the outfitters in the area. As for the older ones, some of them have come to hide in Clova. Hide from what, no one knows, and no one wants to know.

  Janelle appeared, and I already knew both that she wasn’t for me and that I would not escape her. I know how to spot in myself my shock when faced with a woman I will pursue for the smell of her skin, her breath in the morning, her eyes rolling back in her head, until our fireworks end. An elusive woman, who comes out of nowhere, who looks like no one I’ve ever seen. I don’t fall in love with my cousin. And Janelle is a sort of UFO. A woman who bursts into your life and who sears you clear through. When she appeared in the door of the restaurant, I felt it in my whole body.

  There was an abrupt dissonance in her gestures and eyes that I think I’ve described, and a way of moving, somewhere between disjointed steps and the undulations of a dancer, which is not without its charm. I was on alert, disoriented, turned to stone. Which in me is the sign of an impending lightning bolt of love. I never resist it, despite what it will cost me, which I already know. I watched her head to the bar. She sat down, ordered a beer, and started a long conversation with the waitress – tattoos, piercings, half-shaved head; she wouldn’t look out of place on Rue Saint-Denis. I took the opportunity to slip to her side. I tried several times to insert myself in the conversation, but every time she gave me the cold shoulder. Later, when we established the intimacy that she was quick to slip away from, she explained that she thought she was dealing with the internet beau. ‘I didn’t want anything to do with it anymore, and anyway, quite often, these guys try to put one over on you with their photos.’

  That was our first contact, the only one for three long days. I didn’t see her again at the restaurant until they all gathered there in a sort of funeral meal. And that was when I saw Marie-Luce for the first time. She had stayed at Gladys’s bedside all those days, with someone from the group bringing her meals from the restaurant.

  The person I saw most often and with whom I was able to have actual conversations was Suzan. She went for long walks in the sandy streets of Clova, going wherever they led and stopping at the restaurant for a coffee break before going back to the inn. Probably because she is old and lives in proximity to death, there was no sense of impending mourning in her. On the contrary, she told me. She was relieved that mother and daughter were finally reunited.

  Lisana, what can I say about the Lisana I met in Clova? Silent, absolutely impenetrable, and yet a presence that could not be ignored. She walked into the restaurant and there was a vibration in the air. But no one turned when she walked by. People are used to strangers in Clova. They come from all over for the fishing, the hunting, for whatever they are after, and people don’t ask questions. They see them come and go, others will arrive, and they are welcomed with the same graciousness, the same detachment. The residents don’t bother about who they are, what they’ve come to do. A supreme indifference that cracked in the presence of Lisana. Nothing obvious, just a slight disquiet that my focused attention noticed immediately because I was on alert whenever someone arrived from the inn.

  Yet there was nothing in her appearance that set her apart from the other women who frequented the place. Jeans, running shoes, a fleece jacket, and hair carefully gathered in a nice, smooth ponytail. (‘I made sure of it,’ Suzan told me later. ‘I wanted her to be a credit to her mother.’) Nor did she have that lost, troubled look they would tell me about in Swastika. A mass of contained energy, that’s what she was, energy that spread in sustained vibrations.

  She came to the restaurant with Suzan. Never, except for the funeral meal, did I see her sit down at a table with the Smarzes. And I never saw the headphones that so intrigued me during the investigation. In fact, there was nothing that would attract attention if it weren’t for the tremendous energy she emitted. And no one from the group at the inn mentioned any mental health problems. Not even Suzan, who was rather chatty when she would come back from her walks.

  These people who are now part of my life, I met them at the Restaurant Clova. Only Gladys remained a stranger, out of reach, shut away as she was in a little room at the inn. But daily, almost hourly, I got news of what was going on at the inn, thanks to Frank Smarz (he was a heavy smoker, and I was his supplier) and Suzan, whom I would sometimes accompany on her walks. I didn’t know at the time that these moments spent together in Clova would be the prelude to long conversations we would have later in Metagama.

  She is a personable woman, curious about others, who doesn’t make a mystery out of life. Our conversations headed off in every direction but, as soon as the words school train came up, I would jump on the slightest remark to come back to it. It was so fabulous; I could hardly believe that I had never heard the story. I have piles of books on my bookshelves about trains, but none of them mention it. Suzan opened the door to a new world for me, and I already knew it would never cease to intrigue me. Suzan herself was a world to discover. An old woman who lived like a hermit along the railway tracks. ‘Semi-hermit,’ she pointed out. I still knew nothing about the possibilities for contempla
tion offered by the clickety-clacks.

  Calm and serene, she was more inclined to talk to me about what she had seen on her solitary walks through the streets of Clova than what was going on at the inn. She had not ventured beyond the church that now serves as a shed for the couple that lives in the presbytery. Beyond the church, there is what remains of the large village Clova once was, an enclave of houses abandoned to the forest. She didn’t know about the ghost village. In fact, no one in Clova gives it any thought. I know the place well. I go there sometimes when I want to travel through time, to wander around what once was and is no longer. There is always a surprise waiting for me. A carmine red patch in the middle of the wild grass, flowers I don’t know the name of, that stubbornly live on without the woman who planted them, watered them, carefully weeded around them, and I think of that woman, of what she lived through in a house that must have been close to the red patch and of which nothing remains, not even a cement block eroded by weather. I have discovered papers forgotten in a dresser, children’s scribbles, bills, letters to a parent far away. I love these walks, nostalgic for a time I never knew that I like to imagine. But sometimes it’s incredibly sad. I offered to take Suzan there.

  The ghost village had shrunk since my last visit. There were no more than five houses left, so dilapidated that we didn’t dare go in any of them for fear that the floor would give out under our weight. Through the windows, we saw collapsed ceilings, sinks torn off the wall, gutted sofas, and, what surprised Suzan, beer cans all over the floor. Atikamekw youth, I explained. They don’t feel welcome at the bar.

  Our visit to old Clova was short. We walked along what used to be the streets and that are clearly used only by ATVs and the rare walker, like us.

  It was once we had returned from the ghost village that she told me about the cemetery in Clova, ‘the prettiest little cemetery in the world.’ I didn’t know it, had never been. Suzan discovered it by chance on her walks by following the sand road that runs along the lake. You really have to want to see it all to get there. No signs, no path going there except for ATV trails criss-crossing in the woods, and, if you follow the one that goes up a hill, you can see a clearing in the forest that is indeed a little jewel of a cemetery. And there, still, there is nothing to make it official. A chain with large white links that hangs around a mossy square, wooden crosses, modest headstones, some thirty graves set against a backdrop of greenery. The impression of a secret place, of being at the centre of the beauty of the world. The light that slips between birch and the amber waters of the lake below add to the gentleness of the place. ‘A nice place to watch eternity go by,’ Suzan said.

  I explained to her that no one dies in Clova anymore, that the little cemetery is a vestige of a not-so-distant past when Clova had a population of six hundred. There are now no more than thirty-odd people who live there permanently, most of them retirees who have come from other places, attracted by the beauty of the lake and the low cost of living, and they will die back where they come from.

  But we knew, both knew with certainty, that there would be a death in Clova very soon. ‘I think it will be tomorrow,’ Suzan said.

  It was Wednesday, October 3. Gladys died the next day, just as the freight train was pulling into Clova, making the earth tremble.

  It would take Gladys four days to reach the end – and her ends, because no one now doubts they were gathered together where she wanted them. Four days, and at no time did they feel exasperated or despairing about the death that was long in coming. She waited with them, confident despite the hours and days that passed, no resistance other than that smile that slowly returned as she emerged from deep, comatose sleep. She accompanied them throughout, captain of her life until the very last.

  They were living in a bubble. They were the only guests at the inn, occupying the five rooms on the ground floor. They lived in the unreality of days and nights spent at Gladys’s bedside in a downy cocoon, a sort of floating. They have gentle, gratifying memories of it. Even Frank Smarz, who is not a man easily moved wherever the wind blows, talked about a sort of grace they had been offered.

  This floating that was with them in their steps and their thoughts came from Gladys’s room. No haste, no muffled conversations when approaching her room, they went weightlessly, drawn by the call of her smile or, if the hydromorphone was taking effect, by the peaceful abandon of her body in the bed. The soft, cozy room, like the room of a newborn, spread its silken threads throughout the inn. In the hallway, the rooms, and the spacious lounge in the basement. The inn is the former Clova school, and what is now a lounge used to be the games room. And that’s where they spent most of their time. Waiting for what was taking its time coming. They played cards, watched TV, distractedly, half-heartedly, their attention consumed by what was going on upstairs.

  They no longer had to worry about anything, there were no more calls to make or receive, no more flurry of train schedules. They just had to be there, with nothing to do but wait.

  Marie-Luce was relieved to see them arrive one by one. She hadn’t left Gladys’s side since settling her into the little room at the inn. Janelle was trying to help her as best she could, but it was beyond her. She would leave the room at the first signs of Gladys nodding off and would go get some air, never very far, because Gladys would ask for her as soon as she woke. Janelle would come back, sit on the edge of the bed, take Gladys’s outstretched hand, and, even before Gladys had asked the question, she would repeat what she had said an hour before, two hours before, every hour since they had arrived in Clova. ‘Yes, Gladys, yes, I called her. Yes, she’s coming.’ And Gladys’s patting … ‘My Lisana isn’t easy to love, but you’ll see, you’re going to love her.’

  Lisana’s arrival was a liberation and a source of astonishment. They expected the agitation of a storm, and what they saw arriving was a rock, a woman whose emotions had turned to stone.

  Even Suzan was surprised at what Lisana became in her mother’s presence. Gladys was sleeping the peaceful, deep sleep that wrapped the room in a downy cocoon. Lisana, erect and immobile near the bed, watched her mother sleep. Not one move, not one word, she was absorbed by her mother’s breathing, her bony face, her shrunken body; death was doing its work. Lisana became a woman of a completely difference stature, ‘a giant,’ Suzan told me. She took up all the space in the room. Her mother probably sensed her presence because she woke up and looked at her daughter. ‘You came,’ she said simply, and Lisana acquiesced, ‘I came,’ and their eyes melted into the other’s, merged, disappeared into each other while they chatted.

  Suzan was alone with them in the room, Marie-Luce having disappeared at their arrival. They had driven at night from Swastika to Senneterre to take the train for Clova early in the morning. Suzan was exhausted from the trip. She got a second wind when she arrived in the room, buffeted by the intensity of what was going on; then, overcome by fatigue, she collapsed into the only armchair the small room allowed.

  ‘The Toyota held up?’ Gladys, tucked deep in her bed, with shining eyes and a sidelong smile, was asking for news of her car. Suzan approached, and the two old friends talked about this and that, the road from Metagama, the road from Swastika, but nothing about her own trip, her journey on the rails, and one thing led to another, they got to her health, whether she was in pain (‘Just enough to feel alive’), if she was afraid (‘Afraid of what, good Lord, I’ve made it this far’), until Gladys asked them to fetch Janelle.

  ‘We made the trip by car and by train, mostly at night, to be there, me and Lisana, at her side, and she was asking for a woman she hardly knew … You have to admit, there’s reason to be put off.’

  You don’t refuse a dying woman, and despite herself Janelle found herself back in the room she had been trying to get away from. Gladys greeted her with a long, languid smile, and she made a gesture Janelle knew well (‘She patted the covers’,) asking her to come over to the bed, across from Lisana. Which she did almost on tiptoe, feeling as if she were walking on a burn
ing rug. Once they were both at her side, Gladys looked at one, then the other, and then one then the other again, her smile growing wider, growing brighter, bringing the two women together, her daughter and the one who had brought her daughter to her, with the same blissful satisfaction. ‘My daughter Lisana,’ she said to one. And to the other, ‘My friend Janelle.’ Adding with a voice that was nothing more than a wisp, ‘You could be sisters.’ She brought their two hands together and placed hers on top. Then, out of strength, her head dropped back on the pillow. Marie-Luce was called to the rescue.

  The Smarzes arrived at the end of the day. The group that was going to accompany Gladys in the final hours of her life was complete. The inn was set for a vigil. Marie-Luce acted as steward. She decided who was on watch when, monitored medication and general comfort; she was the goto person day and night.

  Frank Smarz, the only man in the group, took care of supplies, which included the meals he brought from the restaurant, and the beer, chips, and sundry items he found in the same place, because the restaurant was equipped with a cubbyhole that served as a convenience and liquor store. It was a role that suited him perfectly. He remained in the action but was exempt from his turn on watch. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it. ‘Sitting there in front of a woman who is dying isn’t my thing.’ We would meet up at regular intervals on the restaurant porch.

  Time became elastic, it had no more substance, even for me who was monitoring from afar what was going on at the inn via trustworthy, detailed reports from Frank Smarz about how the death throes were progressing. But I found out about the strange intimacy with death that gently descended upon Gladys’s room much later from Suzan, Janelle, Marie-Luce, and Brenda (we mustn’t forget Brenda, even though once again she found herself on the fringes of that intimacy, the poor thing).