Time concentrated around Gladys. Her breathing, her face buried in the pillow, her shining eyes that were growing dimmer, the rictus that was dulling her smile, the pain that came back, and Lisana almost always at her mother’s side.
Lisana standing near the bed, not moving, ramrod straight. Lisana grown larger by emotion, but impassive, smooth, like marble. Lisana who was never left alone with her because she was useless at offering care.
‘She was finally seeing death, which she had been calling for so long. She was living it through her mother.’
A contemplation of death, is what Suzan understood in those long hours of Lisana’s sentry duty in Gladys’s bedroom.
‘She was contemplating death, which was taking hold of her mother.’
Suzan believes that it was during all those hours watching the gradual march of death that her fascination with it evaporated. ‘There was no more mystery. Death was there, visible, palpable. Death had laboured breathing, death smelled like medication, death was shrivelled up in the bed. There were no more dark tunnels, no more twilight to cross, nothing to see on the other side, only life leaving a body. Her desire to die died with her mother.’
Suzan understood nothing of Gladys’s insistence at having Janelle at her side too.
The scene was repeated regularly, almost a constant. Gladys would ask for Janelle, and when she had them both by her side, despite the exhaustion and weakness that left her so little voice in the final days, she would say their names, she would call them from the well of her strength, and what with her confusion (or a wilful confusion, Suzan wondered), she would mix up their names, saying Lisana when speaking to Janelle and Janelle when looking at her daughter. With the same tenderness and the same affection in her eyes and her voice. Then, when she was soothed, reassured, her smile would spread, her body would settle into the bed, and she would sleep deeply.
The most astonishing thing was that Janelle stayed. She didn’t leave the room. She who was horrified by death stayed with Lisana until Gladys would moan, grimace in pain, or choke on her secretions. In which case she would call Marie-Luce, who would come right away.
On the morning of the fourth day, Gladys said: ‘Today I want to sleep a lot.’ Marie-Luce increased the doses of hydromorphone and fentanyl.
As the hours went by, her breathing grew lighter, her hands turned blue, life deserted her while she was submerged in a deep sleep. At the beginning of the afternoon, they all met in the little room. There was a moment when she was aware of their presence. She wanted to smile (at least, that’s what they believed), but she didn’t have the strength.
The freight train pulled into Clova. They heard the whistle, the hammering of the rails; then, in the crowded room, a voice was heard, ‘sixteen … eighteen … twenty … thirty-two … sixty … one hundred and four … ’
‘Gladys died on the one hundred and thirty-eighth clickety-clack,’ Suzan said.
‘Her face was peaceful, at rest, her features relaxed, nothing moved under the skin of her face and yet it seemed as though the smile was still there, that she was smiling at me, that she was still there in the room, and I felt at one with what was around me, the walls, the bed, the smell, all of us gathered in the gentle feeling of that room. I felt a quiver on my lips; I don’t know whether I smiled, but I know that I was at peace with myself. The most beautiful moment of my life,’ Janelle said.
But there was no clickety-clack to be heard where they were or anywhere else in Clova. The rail junctions on this stretch of track are no longer made up of splice bars and bolts; they are welded every 140 feet. You no longer hear that sound characteristic of a train moving over the rail junctions, the clickety-clack so dear to Gladys’s heart and that Suzan intoned so that her friend could die accompanied by her childhood memories.
I stayed in Clova for a few more days. I had everything I needed to write up my report. But I stayed there, not really knowing what was holding me, the woman who was so expertly ignoring me and who I was tracking in my thoughts, or the obsession that had taken hold, the school trains, ever since Suzan had told me about them during our walks. I came and went between the restaurant and Patrice’s house, where he welcomed me with his invariable and inevitable ‘So?’ casually tossed off but that was no less a question. ‘So?’ was what was going on at the inn, it was my progress with Janelle, and, what interested him the most, because he had been bitten too, whether I had managed to get more information about the school trains. And he would tell me in turn what he had discovered during my absence.
Because Patrice has boundless curiosity. You talk to him about something, an unusual fact, a piece of trivia, and if there is something unfamiliar or unclear to him, he will go straight to his computer. He is an odd character. His presence in this almost non-existent place fuels the rumour that people come here to be forgotten. No one in Clova understood why he moved into his brother’s house after his death. Patrice has no troubled past or great sorrow dogging him. He is a bookseller, a book lover who has a bookstore on AbeBooks, a website for rare and used books. When his brother died, he closed up shop in Montreal and moved his bookstore to the little house on the lake, and from the privacy of this place he engages – daily, lovingly, passionately, hungrily – with the world.
The school train story obviously intrigued him, and he googled everything he could. There was very little; the internet has only snippets of information to offer, but enough to fuel a budding obsession.
So I stayed in Clova for two days after Gladys’s death, without knowing what I was doing there. Later, I thought of Léonard Mostin, left to his own devices in a virtually nonexistent place also with something to write, much more substantial than my little report, and who was wondering whether life had played a trick on him.
I got nothing out of Suzan regarding the school trains during those two days. She was much too busy (the coroner who came from La Tuque, having the remains transported to Swastika, announcing the death of their sister to the Campbell siblings, etc.) to resume our conversations. The little group at the inn splintered as the days went by. Brenda and Frank Smarz headed back to Swastika on Saturday. Marie-Luce went back to Montreal on the Sunday Transcontinental. Alone, without Janelle. I realized that only later, there are such crowds on Sunday when the Transcontinental pulls in.
Janelle, whose every millimetre of skin I had roamed during the endless nights dreaming of her on Patrice’s sofa, Janelle, whose presence I felt no matter where she was, Janelle, central to my thoughts day and night, Janelle had gotten away from me. I had not seen her board the Transcontinental with her sister and then get off.
On Sunday morning, the residents of Clova come to pick up their provisions for the week that arrive from Senneterre. I helped Patrice with his grocery boxes. Patrice doesn’t have a pickup or an ATV (another oddity that makes him suspect in Clova), and we loaded up his boxes on the Nath Express, a massive ATV with storage space in the back, which serves as a taxi. It was only after loading up the last box that astonishment in Patrice’s eyes caused my own to look toward the three women, Suzan, Lisana, and Janelle, on a bench on the porch of the restaurant.
Once we had that sort of intimacy that I can’t quite define and that included conflagrations in bed and the conversations that would follow, she told me about her own astonishment at finding herself there: ‘I knew I was taking on Lisana. Maybe I always knew, despite myself. But I knew it for certain when Gladys introduced me to Lisana and joined our two hands. There was nothing to do, nothing to say. You don’t go against the wishes of a dying woman. But what awaited me on the other side of that wish was shrouded in darkness. I was there, on the bench, utterly stunned.’
She took the Transcontinental the next day with Suzan and Lisana. Direction Senneterre and then Swastika.
I was to leave that day for my Monday classes. A colleague had agreed to fill in if I promised to be back on Monday morning.
I ate at the restaurant before hitting the road. All three of them were there. Suzan, Lisana,
and Janelle. At the end of the meal, I went to say goodbye to them. Suzan was cordial, Lisana didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at me, and Janelle, courteous, almost friendly, asked about the kilometres I had to travel, the road conditions, the model of my pickup, which surprised me coming from her. Even more astonishing, she got up from the table, and walking me to the door, she told me with the same civility, the same detachment, as if we were still talking about my pickup: ‘Anyway, we wouldn’t have lasted.’
I drove the 250 kilometres as light as a bird returning to its nest. She had sensed me, she had seen me circling her, I existed for her.
Back home, I had awaiting me my report, which didn’t want to be written. It was so short, a few pages, a speck of dust, but each time I sat down to it, the speck of dust would kick up in a thick cloud. A Hydra with a thousand heads appeared as soon as I typed the first word. I hazily knew that what lay ahead was too vast to be contained in a few pages, and I would spend hours in front of my blinking cursor, awaiting the second word.
From time to time I would receive an email from Patrice asking me how it was going, whether I would soon be reading VIA Rail the riot act, whether I was going to make them understand that the survival of the Northern trains was a matter of life and death. More than anyone in Clova, he needs the Transcontinental. He ships his book orders by train. The disappearance of the Transcontinental would mean more than the end of his small business: his entire life would fall apart. He found in AbeBooks the freedom he didn’t have when he ran a store in Montreal. No more waiting for customers, no more redoing his store window, no more accounting, nothing to distract from his true passion. He just has to write up descriptions, put them online, respond to orders, ship the books, and every month he receives a cheque from AbeBooks. He always has his nose in a book. Novels, poetry, travel writing, it doesn’t matter. With a predilection for books that interest no one but the person who has been looking for them for years – literary treatise, obsolete grammar manual, handbook of a lost art – and who wants to know where and how he made such a marvellous find. Patrice has email correspondences that have been going on for years with customers around the world. These exchanges are the spice of his life.
He is the one who found for me The Bell and the Book, a book that covers twenty-seven years of life on the school trains. Andrew Donald Clement, the author, a travelling teacher, has practically become a friend. So have the Wrights, Helen and Bill, whose correspondence (1928–1964) I read, a rare, unpublished document (I read it on CD), carefully preserved by the Chapleau municipal library, unearthed by Patrice after days – and nights, I’m convinced – of online research. Their correspondence is brimming with epic, amusing details about daily life on a school train. Helen Wright’s ice cream recipe (lard and evaporated milk) is a thing of brilliance. And obviously I read School on Wheels, a booklet in honour of Fred Sloman (forty years on the Capreol–Foleyet line), the most recognizable figure of a bygone world.
My cursor continued to blink without me. I was fascinated, awed by the books, which I would read and reread. I couldn’t sit down to write my report while there was this fascinating world drawing me in. And what seemed extraordinary about it was that a humble little English teacher in a humble little town had spent time not long before with a person from that world.
I thought I had forgotten Janelle and the shaking earth when Patrice announced to me by phone that she had returned to Clova. And without knowing whether it was really her who was drawing me back there or what she could tell me about Suzan’s and Gladys’s lives on the school trains, I headed back to Clova.
I knew I had gone there for her when I saw her behind the bar. Two months had gone by, it was December, a Saturday night, and the place was packed. Snowmobile season had just started, and people came from all over. They had driven hundreds of kilometres through labyrinths of snow, snowmobilers arriving in backfiring hordes at the Restaurant Clova.
I saw surprise in her eyes, and a twinkle of amusement, then a flash of pleasure in seeing me at the end of the bar. I was reassured. She served the long line of snowmobilers, quick and efficient, a simple ‘What’ll you have?,’ moving to the next customer, and when she came to me, she asked: ‘What’s your name?’ Bingo!
I don’t know what to call what happened between us. Love? It’s such a fickle word, so sensitive. It wants, then doesn’t want, to be named, wants for a time, then tires of itself, would like to but it gets complicated, and complicated is what things got between Janelle and me. Did I mention that we travelled to Paris together to meet Léonard Mostin? I don’t think so, I don’t know, I don’t reread what I’ve written.
We never had true intimacy, laying ourselves bare, which involves much more than going to bed – which we did with fervour and devotion, but without me laying a finger on Janelle’s secret depths. Janelle does not reveal herself, does not surrender; she never showed me the divine path to a truly romantic relationship, the inner receptacle that holds a person’s intimate feelings that you open in the surrender of lovemaking.
It’s true that our relationship was warped from the beginning by the whole story (Gladys, Lisana, Suzan, the school trains) to which she now held several keys and that she would tell me about night after night, day after day, and that served as her shield, because I never tired of it and there was always something to tell.
She had spent more than two months in Swastika. Why had she followed Suzan and Lisana? It was the only thing she could do, she told me. There was a voice inside her telling her that was what she should do. ‘I now know it was in Chapleau, when she saw me in the Budd Car, that I was chosen. She knew she had found the person who would accompany her to the end, and at the end, there was Lisana.’
She would hear Gladys’s voice everywhere in Swastika. She would go into the streets, to the park, to the station promontory, and she would hear Gladys telling her that she was on the right path, that she was going to find what she hadn’t been able to give her daughter. ‘I say Gladys’s voice, but it was my voice that was speaking. It never stopped in my head. You can’t imagine how much I talked to myself, how much I spoke to her, Gladys. I asked her why she had chosen me. Did I look like Mother Teresa? I asked her what made her believe that Lisana and I could have been sisters. Was I suicidal? Was I depressed, neurotic, on the verge of killing myself without knowing it?’
She got to know the neighbourhood friends (‘kind, attentive, even with Lisana, but from a distance, and deeply affected by the death of their friend’); she got to know Gladys’s house (‘all the frills, everywhere, it was oppressive’), and she got to know Lisana. ‘Not easygoing, not chatty, but after a few days of living together without me asking anything of her, not trying to console her, encourage her, get her to do anything, she understood I would leave her alone. That’s all she wanted, to be left to her darkness.’
At the time I knew nothing about Lisana. Her obsession with suicide, her repeated attempts, and Gladys’s fight to keep her alive. I learned about it once I was deep in my conversations with Janelle.
The people from whom she was renting a room in the basement got used to seeing me arrive late Friday night and leave late Sunday afternoon. The room was uncomfortable, just one window, tiny, blocked by snow, so there was little light inside and a bathroom that was shared with fellow lodgers. Luckily, Patrice would leave us his house from time to time. He can’t stand the invasion of snowmobiles (Iit’s a nightmare; there are days when it’s all you can hear’), and he takes a break from AbeBooks for one week a month to restock his inventory. He goes to one region or another and makes the rounds of library book sales, flea markets, and thrift shops, and he comes back with boxes filled with wonders to unpack.
It was during our first weekend at Patrice’s that I learned that he was the internet beau. I saw Janelle’s profile lying around with similar profiles in the mountain of papers cluttering up his desk. Janelle spotted what I was looking at but didn’t seem bothered. ‘Not a reliable lover, your friend; he casts his line
all over the place.’ Much later, when our affair burned out, I got this explanation from Patrice: ‘It keeps me entertained,’ he said. ‘I write to them for a while, and when it stops entertaining me, I tell them where I live, and poof! They disappear. Janelle was the only one who wasn’t afraid of Clova. When I saw that you clicked with her, I let it drop. She did too, by the way. But she wasn’t the woman for you either.’
Aside from the snowmobiles, winter in Clova is magnificent. Mainly for the quality of the snow. It is a dazzling white and takes on austere and voluptuous shapes that make it seem like it settles and sculpts itself to the sound of some music directing its movements. But to this powerful white I prefer the hour when the snow awaits the sunset and takes on a cloak of transparent blue. It was during Clova’s blue hours that Janelle and I took our most beautiful walks.
She liked Shania Twain, Jill Barber, Mark Knopfler, had no interest in books, none in sports, but would have liked to travel abroad and visit other countries. That was all I knew about her, aside from the fact that she was relieved to get back to her life after having spent over two months in ‘a candy store.’ She didn’t like Gladys’s house. She would have left much earlier, but there was Lisana. The funeral was done, the house was going to be put up for sale; a place had to be found for her.
I didn’t manage to find out where Lisana was now. Janelle explained in detail the problem of Lisana, who was going to find herself alone with nowhere to live. The neighbourhood friends wanted nothing to do with her (‘it was obvious’), Suzan couldn’t take her on (‘her son is allergic to Lisana’), and the woman in question could not have cared less about what the future held. ‘I was the only one left. Gladys had dumped a helluva problem in my lap.’
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Page 14