Which stops her from lingering on the thought of the imminent absence of their grandparents from their lives.
And the presence of this mother they don’t even know.
All the unshed tears begin to flow. Luckily, her sisters don’t see them, they’ve just gone to sleep, somewhat reassured, whereas her heart is beating wildly. She doesn’t want to leave. There are still two hours before her grandmother will come to wake her. Perhaps she will die in the course of those two hours or, if she doesn’t sleep, maybe the time won’t pass, maybe the moment for getting up and dressing in her new clothes simply won’t come. Or the train will be derailed as it pulls into Maria Station tomorrow morning. And she falls asleep in spite of herself.
At dawn, Joséphine finds the three little girls entwined in Rhéauna’s bed, like three motherless kittens. And finally, she, too, allows herself to cry.
Her shoes are too small, her hat scrapes her forehead and her coat – which her grandmother has bought two sizes too large so it will last for several years – floats on her back. Looking at herself in the mirror just before she leaves her room, she tells herself that at least it won’t be so hard for her to leave as it will be shameful to show herself like this in public. They will have to cross the whole village to get to the station, and she would like it if no one sees her decked out as she is in clothes that don’t suit her, in colours that are ridiculous for a little girl from the country. She is going to leave a crowd that’s not sorrowful but joyous. And the final memory of her in Maria will be of a scarecrow that looks disgraceful but is dressed in new clothes and waves goodbye to a crowd that is laughing at her.
Her sisters don’t laugh, though, when they catch sight of her. They gawk at her and nudge one another. Béa feels that she has to tell her sister she’s beautiful but Alice merely stuffs her thumb in her mouth, a bad habit she’s barely been cured of. Rhéauna tells herself that it’s the first change brought on by her leaving: her sister Alice is a baby again!
All five are on the veranda, somewhat stiff, formal and silent. The buggy is waiting at the bottom of the steps. And for once, Méo has decorated Devil who looks dashing with his straw hat that Rhéauna envies him because he looks so good in it. Her grandfather takes the pipe out of his mouth, hits it against his heel to empty it though he knows that he should have done it on the road, where Joséphine won’t have to sweep it up, grumbling about how bad it smells.
“You’re as pretty as a princess, sweetheart! Do you know that?”
Rhéauna makes a face, one of her ugliest, that makes her sisters laugh – what a relief! – and makes a little bow that could pass for a curtsey if you didn’t realize that she’s being ironic.
“Yeah, sure. A princess in a poor people’s fairy tale! Cinderella of Saskatchewan! Snow White of the Prairies!”
Joséphine chooses to find it funny and swats her bum to make her come down the steps.
“Your coat is red, Nana. You forgot Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Little Red Riding Hood wasn’t a princess, Grandma.”
Her grandmother looks her straight in the eyes.
“No, but she knew how to stand up for herself.”
“Okay. The Little Red Riding Hood of the village of Maria. I wonder what kind of Big Bad Wolf I’ll meet on the train!”
She knows that she’s hit the mark because what worries her grandmother most in this whole adventure is the four train trips she will have to make before she gets to Montreal.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you, sweetheart.”
She drapes a little midnight-blue velvet purse around her neck – it clashes a little with the red coat – that is held in place by a leather strap.
“Everything’s in there, Nana. Your name and address and the phone number for the general store, the numbers of the three people you’re going to stay with and even the one in Montreal for your mother, who’s got her own private number, lucky her. Your train ticket. Some money. You can’t get lost. Someone will look after you on every train. They’re used to carrying children travelling by themselves. Did you put your favourite books in a bag like I told you? It’s going to be long, especially between Winnipeg and Ottawa, you’ll need something to do …”
She’s rambling; she’s said it all a hundred times these past few days but she can’t think of anything else: the fine words of appeasement that she prepares at night when her husband thinks she’s asleep, the words of consolation that come so easily when Rhéauna isn’t there – all get stuck in her throat just when her granddaughter needs them most, and she could kick herself.
Rhéauna gives one last apple to Devil who, knowing nothing about the drama going on around him, chews with obvious enjoyment, cranes his neck to pick up from the beaten earth the pieces that have got away from him. When he’s finished swallowing the sweet flesh, he turns his head a little in the hope that another apple will suddenly appear from the little girl’s pocket. But everyone is already in the buggy and he hears the click of Méo’s tongue. He doesn’t hurry the horse, no switch will stroke his flank, so he advances slowly, lazily, like on a Sunday afternoon when the ride is only a ride and there’s no important race at the end.
Rhéauna has turned around on her seat. She is watching the house move away, swaying a little because the buggy isn’t all that stable. After a few hundred paces, she starts to slip into the cornstalks too quickly, because of the gentle slope the buggy follows at this pace. The staircase disappears first, then the veranda. Never again will she walk there after nightfall, eating a slice of bread and ketchup or drinking the last glass of milk of the day. She won’t hear the laughter or the shouts of her sisters, the not-at-all-severe warnings of their grandparents. The tips of the corn hide the bottom of the door, climb, conceal the knob and the little square window. The wind creates a kind of swell that blurs the whole front of the house behind a living curtain of grain. The roof, all that’s left is the roof, which disappears in turn, as if the house has just sunk forever into the fertile soil of Saskatchewan.
Never. Never will she see this house again.
She turns her head. All the others are watching her. They are reading her mind, she knows that. They have followed attentively everything that she has just experienced and none of them has the power to console her.
She undoes the collar of her coat.
“Sure I know that fall is coming, but this is just August.”
That’s all that is said between the house and the door of the little country railway station.
Even when the people from Maria, some of them on their doorsteps, others gathered in front of the general store, wave their hands or big white handkerchiefs by way of farewell.
Farewells. That’s what they are. Farewells.
But at least no one’s laughing at her.
According to Joséphine, the train station in Maria looks like a badly wrapped pound of butter that’s been left outside on the prairie. Short and squat and sickly yellow, with no personality and, worst of all, poorly kept up, it turns its back on the village as if it wants to be forgotten and greets just two trains a day – the one from Prince Albert on its way to Saskatoon and the one from Saskatoon on its way to Prince Albert. Monsieur Sanschagrin, a retired Mountie, plays the dual role of station master and ticket agent. Grumpy and suffering from a perpetual cold, he never smiles, never says Bon voyage to people who are leaving or Welcome to those who are arriving, and rushes the unfortunate people who show up to buy their tickets at the last moment when he’s supposed to be on the platform with his little flag and his whistle because the train is about to pull into the station. If they want to go beyond Saskatoon – to Alberta in the west or Manitoba in the east – they have to be there an hour early: Chief Sanschagrin, as he likes to be called, writes slowly and doesn’t really understand the Canadian Pacific Railway schedule. It’s too complicated and the print is too small. Oh, he’d like to have an assistant – aside from old man Sylvestre who’s supposed to clean the station but spends most of his time smok
ing his pipe and looking out at the fields of wheat – a young fellow he’d allow to sell the tickets, but the young people in Maria, all of them farmers’ sons, aren’t interested in sitting behind a ticket window all day long, waiting for the two trains to pull in, when the wide-open spaces call to them and he’s there all by his lonesome, as he says to anyone willing to listen, running the whole station.
It’s another twenty minutes before the arrival of the train from Prince Albert that will take Rhéauna to Saskatoon and then Regina, to her aunt Régina’s, her grandfather’s youngest sister, a strict and taciturn woman who has always terrified the little girl. The whole family is sitting on the big wooden bench that runs along a good part of the station wall opposite Gate One – the only gate – that opens onto Platform One – the only one.
They are sitting very upright, the girls’ hands on their knees the way their grandmother has taught them, Méo stuffing his pipe after trying to send a friendly sign to Monsieur Sanschagrin who has not responded – oh, it’s all very well to forge ties over a glass of gin at the general store on a winter night, but here, we work! – and Joséphine is lost in thought. They could exchange heart-rending farewells; in fact, they need to, but when the moment comes they can’t do it, all five are glued to their bench, silent and glum. Each one in turn looks at the big clock that hangs above the ticket window. It’s nearly time. Monsieur Sanschagrin has stepped out of his cage and donned his station master’s cap. Before he steps onto the platform, just as he’s about to bring his whistle to his mouth, he turns toward the line of Desrosiers who look at him as if he were an executioner and shouts at the top of his lungs though there are only five people in the station:
“All aboard! Prochain arrêt Saskatoon, next stop Saskatoon! Allll aboooard!”
Her grandmother hugged her tight, unable to say a word; her grandfather swallowed his tears; only her sisters let themselves go and cried, copiously. With her big suitcase beside her, she herself hasn’t moved, her lips quivering slightly but not too much. Strangely enough, no goodbyes have been exchanged though both grandparents and granddaughter know that they’ll probably never see one another again. Don’t say things. Avoid them or arrange so that they don’t exist. A calculated chill instead of outpourings, though they are necessary.
She did not turn around when she climbed into the buggy so she hasn’t seen the dejection in the eyes of Joséphine and Méo from whom one-third of what is left of their reason for living is being taken away this morning while they wait for the rest to be cut off. Will the other two leave on the same day or will they have to live twice more through this intolerable scene that should be taking place amid heartbreaking sorrow and cries but is actually happening in a terrifying silence? Will they be able to bear three departures, three times on the same train?
When Monsieur Sanschagrin’s whistle echoed in the early morning chill, Rhéauna held out her ticket to the tall man with a moustache who had just asked her if she was Rhéauna Rathier due to leave for Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal. He spoke each name in a resonant voice as if they were all exotic destinations on the other side of the world. The door of the car closed with a gruesome bang, she ran to the first window, pressed her nose against the glass and then, as the train was starting to move, her sisters and her grandparents on the wooden platform waved desperately, she allowed herself to weep, to cry, to pound her fist. She wished that the other four wouldn’t see her collapse, that she could wait for the train to pull away from the station before she gave in to her sorrow, but she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to go away, to cross Canada or visit her two aunts and her second cousin, then lose her way in the big city, Montreal, with the mother she had stopped loving so long ago. She wanted to stop everything – the train that was picking up speed, the course of her life that was branching off in a direction she hadn’t chosen, the nightmare that was starting here, this morning, that perhaps would never end. She thought about jumping off the train, at the risk of breaking her neck, or pulling the alarm bell to stop it. Or throwing herself at the tall, moustached man, who was looking at her wide-eyed, to punch him and beg him to give her back her family. She thought about dying or, rather, that’s what death was: a definitive departure for an unknown destination. Alone. In a moving prison. With no hope of a change.
This time it’s the entire village of Maria that seems to be swallowed up by the fields of wheat. And rye. And oats. And corn. The steeple of the church of Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan floats for a moment above a square that’s greener than the rest, of wheat that’s not yet fully mature though it will soon be haying time, then it, too, will drown in the waves of grain and disappear for good. Never again will she see that either. She will talk about it all her life, she will describe the colours, the smells, the horror of bushfires like the one last summer, the beauty of summer sunsets and the northern lights in winter over the vast plains, the tears that will come to her eyes whenever she imagines her grandmother bending over her wood stove where a pot of beef and vegetables is simmering, or her grandfather rocking on his veranda and smoking his smelly pipe, or Devil chewing diligently on a juicy red apple. That’s all over now. She takes out her handkerchief, wipes away her tears, settles into her leather seat and looks out, shattered, at the endless plain that is running at full speed on either side of the train.
Interlude i
Dream on
the Train to Regina
She is all alone in a large empty room. Three tall doors painted white stand in front of her. That look out, she’s sure, on three other empty rooms that also … From the first door comes an old lady, tiny and dried up, who tells her that it’s too hot to wear all those clothes, she should take off her coat. Which she does. Then the lady starts repeating, non-stop: “That’s better, eh, a lot better like that, not so hot, you won’t be so hot, it’s a lot better for you,” while she dons the coat and buttons it with calculated slowness, then smoothes it to enjoy the softness of the wool. It’s too small for her, she’s all dressed up, she looks crazy, but Rhéauna doesn’t feel like laughing. She wants her coat. Because fall is coming. And it’s cold in Montreal, especially on Mount Royal. She’s going to need her red coat and she holds out her arms toward the old lady who has just stolen it from her and is now acting as if nothing has happened. From the second door emerges a kind of little girl at least sixty years old who hops like a frog; she is pudgy and red-faced, and too good-humoured to be sincere. It’s not kindness that Rhéauna reads in her eyes, it’s malice. “You’d better take a bath,you’re all dirty, what you need is a good bath, come and take a good bath, Auntie’s going to lend you a lovely swimsuit …” Since when does a person wear a swimsuit to take a bath? But she obeys, takes off all her clothes, gets into the black woollen bathing costume that will likely be very cold when it’s wet. “You’re so pretty like that! Now go and get washed …” And the sixty-year-old little girl folds Rhéauna’s clothes as she drapes them over the back of a chair that has just appeared because she needed it for Rhéauna’s folded clothes. And the lady who emerges through the third door, a blonde, whereas her two sisters – her sisters? are they sisters? impossible, she’s too young! – have hair as black as a raven, has just one leg. She is breathtakingly beautiful but she has just one leg and she has to hop over to Rhéauna. “For heaven’s sake, since when do you wear a swimsuit to take a bath? Take that off, you get naked when you want to wash! How do you reach yourself when you’ve got a bathing suit on? Rhéauna understands, blushes. She has never talked about such matters with her grandmother and she has always managed to “reach” herself with the soap and she hasn’t had to talk about it with anybody. She doesn’t want to take off her swimsuit but she can’t help it and she sees herself, yes, she sees herself pull it off regardless, transformed by forces that she doesn’t understand, that have taken hold of her body and are making her undress, just like that, in front of a stranger who has just one leg and seems to be enjoying herself. Now Rhéauna is naked in front of the three w
omen, the one with a coat that’s too small, the one who looks like an old little girl, the one who is a peroxide blonde and has just one leg. Each of the three raises an arm and says in unison: “You go next door to take a bath. Go take your bath next door.” Rhéauna is cold, she’s ashamed, she tries to hide herself with her hands that are too small, she steps toward the door – because now there is only one – and pushes it open.
Crossing the Continent Page 5