Empire of Wild

by Cherie Dimaline

  “You’ll get him back,” Zeus said. “I’ll help. I’m a really good helper.”

  Joan smiled, for the first time since she learned about Mere, because this boy was so certain of his promise.

  They parked the Jeep in the driveway and then both of them went down the hill to the trailer where a wild animal had killed Mere in the night, to finish cleaning. They even peeled swatches of red-splashed bark from the shaken birch trees, revealing underneath the resilient glow of something new.

  5

  NAMING THE BEAST

  “You know what a man and a dog have in common?”

  Ajean asked Joan over tea at the round table in her small kitchen. Empty bottles and full ashtrays crowded every surface in the place.

  Joan shook her pounding head, sore from whisky and tears, both of which were a bad idea to indulge in all night.

  “Fucking.” Ajean laughed hard and deep.

  “Gross.” Both the idea and the word seemed awkward coming from a toothless mouth. Why was Joan still here with the old woman?

  “S’true. They even have a way of doing it named after dogs.” Ajean leaned conspiratorially over the table, the tip of her grey braid dipping into her milky tea. “It’s when the man is in behind, you know.”

  “Yes, yes, Ajean, I know what doggy style is. I don’t know why you’re bringing it up, though.” Joan dug around in her purse on the wooden bench beside her and mercifully found a bottle of Tylenol. She unscrewed the cap with difficulty and fished out three. It hurt to swallow.

  “Never mind, you. I could still have my choice of snag.”

  Joan glanced at her. Ajean could be telling the truth. She was lacking teeth, but she had the thickest braid in the over-sixty set and a beautiful tan face with wrinkles permanently etched into smile lines even when she scowled.

  Last night’s wake would go down in community legend. It started off with soup and bread and ended in a jig-off between old man Giroux and the Longlade widow. A tie was called and they went off to the bathroom to make out.

  Joan was so worn out with her grief she gladly accepted the bottle when it passed her way the first time, and the second time, and soon she was hogging it all to herself. She’d woken up on Ajean’s crochet-covered couch with a blinding hangover.

  She didn’t like being so vulnerable. Sure, Ajean had been ancient for about a hundred years and Joan was related to her in that way that almost everyone was related in Arcand, but to be so horribly hung over and broken open in front of her? That was uncomfortable. Also, why was the woman insisting on talking about sex over their morning tea?

  She prayed to the gods of Tylenol to hurry up and get to work. “We don’t need to talk about, you know, relations right now, do we?” she said.

  “Relations?” Ajean quirked a brow at her. “Oh, you mean fucking.” She laughed again. She raised the heavy mug to her thin face with a shaking hand and took a sip. Then she set it down and crossed the short distance to the fridge, pulling out a plate of sliced cucumbers lying in a pool of vinegar, dusted with salt and pepper, which she brought back to the table.

  “There is no one right time to talk about men and women, it’s all the time. And I’m only telling you so’s you know what to do about your old man.”

  Joan’s eyes snapped open wide and too much light got in, which was like being hit with a Taser in the middle of the forehead.

  Ajean popped a cucumber slice into her mouth and gummed it a bit, watching the shock and embarrassment slide over Joan’s face.

  “Yes, yes, you wouldn’t shut up last night, you. After everyone left, you talked a blue streak.”

  Joan was seized by a sudden urge to use the washroom. But dread filled the spaces left in her guts and she was unable to move.

  “Did I?” She ran a hand through her long, tangled hair. “Did I, uh, talk to anyone else about Victor?”

  Ajean shook her head. “You saved your confessional for me.” She sucked the vinegar and salt off her fingers. “You just yelled at the others about leaving too early and then chased them into their cars, trying to wrestle the guitars from their hands. Then you sent them to the devil, spat in their headlights and said you could do it yourself, anyway.”

  She slapped the table and laughed. “Oh boy, could you ever. You took off your pants and sang Johnny Cash on the front stoop in those men’s underwears of yours until Rickard from next door threw a boot at you like you were an alley cat.”

  If the table wasn’t so hard and far away, Joan would have dropped her head. “Christ.” Johnny Cash, of course. That was thanks to Zeus. Because the man had called himself almost a full-blooded halfbreed in an old interview, he played Cash on repeat at all hours.

  “That’s okay, that’s okay.” Ajean patted Joan’s shoulder. “But maybe you can go out there and try it again tonight. I wouldn’t mind if he threw the other one so I had the full pair.” She glanced over at a shiny rubber by the door. “Good for fishing, them.”

  She laughed real big, letting the puffs of sound fall between them.

  “Listen, Ajean, I don’t know what I said last night, but I’m not one hundred percent sure it’s him.”

  “As if. You know it’s him. What more do you need?”

  Joan felt these words on her skin as much as in her ears, they fell with such weight. “But my mom—”

  “Listen girl, your mom’s a good worker and she’s got them good boobs and all. But she don’t know about these things. Now your mere, on the other hand, if the Jesus had spared her for a bit longer, she’d be able to help you.” Ajean made the sign of the cross. Joan noticed that one of her work-whittled fingers was smothered by a family ring with two rows of cloudy birthstone gems. Probably an Avon special; all the grannies around here had them. It was an enormous source of pride to accumulate the most gems. It was also a feat of Herculean strength that their tiny hands could support such a weight, never mind that their small frames had supported so much life.

  “Jesus had nothing to do with her staying or going. That was all devil.” Joan didn’t even realize she’d said these words out loud until she felt the back of Ajean’s hand with that same heavy ring connect with her upper arm.

  “What a thing to say. No devil could catch up to Angelique Trudeau. Don’t say his name aside hers.”

  Joan bent her head, spending a minute examining the faded fruits printed on the placemat in front of her, waiting out Ajean’s anger. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.

  “No, my girl. Your man—and it is your man to be sure, even if he doesn’t know it—”

  Joan interrupted. “He’s sure he’s someone else.”

  Ajean was quiet a moment. When she spoke again, all the teasing and mockery was absent. “Hunters came back with nothing.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s because the killer already left the territory.”

  “I thought it was a pack that got her?” Joan asked.

  “No. I cleaned her with cedar and dressed her myself. It was no pack.” She sipped her tea. “It was just one.”

  “One dog?”

  Ajean shook her head.

  “A wolf, then?”

  “Of sorts.”

  Ajean took another sip of tea and then turned the cup clockwise on the table in two full circles. “Rogarou came for her.”

  Joan stared at her. She had heard enough rogarou stories growing up. Tales of a human-sized black dog that guarded the roads were a good way to keep kids from wandering too far alone. She felt the piss wanting to exit her bladder even now when she heard the name. Maybe every kid from around here felt this way, but for Joan, there was something more to the terror. Leave it to Ajean to scare her in the midst of her grief. At least it was distracting. “A rogarou? No one noticed a giant dog wandering around.”

  Ajean was solemn. “Don’t pretend you don’t know about him. You came in this very room not so long ago, screaming over it.”

  Joan blushed. Yes, she had her own rogarou story. “I was a kid,” she said. But she
remembered the smell of it even now, the way that wrong scent had pulled all her nerves to the surface of her skin like a magnet. She’d come across that same smell not too long ago. Her skin crawled, remembering.

  “Ajean, is it just halfbreeds who have a rogarou?”

  “We don’t have just one. There’s lots of ways to become one.” She counted on her fingers. “Being attacked by a rogarou, mistreating women, betraying your people…that’s the ones we know around here, anyways.”

  “But is it only us?” Joan interrupted.

  Ajean used a teaspoon to scoop up the sugary syrup from the bottom of her cup and deposit it on her tongue. She swallowed, eyes closing on the sweetness, then said, “When I was in school, one of the grey nuns told me about these wolf men, stories from her home. Sure sounded like Rogarou. Almost. Less style. And I don’t think they could dance like he does.”

  “The nun, where was she from?”

  Ajean laughed. “Oh shit, she was mean. Fat and mean. She came from Germany. I got beat once when she caught me making fun of her. She had a good left hook, that one.”

  Joan put both hands flat on the table, holding herself upright. “I know who it is.”

  “You do?” Ajean leaned in.

  “The rogarou. He’s the goddamn rogarou.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Heiser.”

  “Who the hell is that?” Ajean scrunched up her face. “Never heard a man of that name around here.”

  “No. He’s not from a community. He works at the tent. Where I found Victor.” She stood, her thoughts coming too fast. “Could that be why Victor is all fucked up?”

  Ajean smoothed out the placemat in front of her. “The Jesus tent? Gee, I don’t know. Don’t know anything about those wolves from other places.”

  Joan got up and paced the small kitchen, knocking over a collection of empties near the fridge. “Why, though? Why would he come for Mere? Why would he have Victor?”

  “Who knows why they do what they do?” She rubbed a finger along her gum, then picked up some spilled sugar with her wet finger and popped it back into her mouth. “Are you sure?”

  Joan nodded. She was sure. “It’s him, it’s got to be. I know that smell. What the hell else would smell like that?”

  Ajean thought for a second. “Death.”

  Joan felt the word slip into her stomach, making her queasy. “It’s him.”

  “Well then, you know what you have to do now.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  Ajean looked at her, serious and direct. “Go get your man from that wolf.”

  * * *

  Before she fell asleep in the moonlight pushing through her window, Joan thought about their fight.

  When her father, Percy Beausoliel, died at Commodore’s halfway through a Labatt 50 while watching the Habs beat the piss out of the Leafs again, he was not a rich man. He’d spent a lifetime building houses for other families up and down the Bay, mostly gabled cottages with two-car garages. Over time, he had managed to purchase small parcels of land on his traditional territory. He wanted not only to keep some of it out of the hands of the dickholes from the city but also to build four homes: one for himself and his bride, and one for each of their children. By the time he slid off his stool and smashed his flushed cheek on the foot rail, felled by an aneurysm, he had amassed just under eighty-six acres in total. Sixty acres sat in one parcel about forty miles north of the Bay just past Honey Harbour. A trickle of a creek wound its way diagonally across it, ending in a small, deep pond just before the concession road in the southeast corner. The solitude and the water made it home to a number of deer families, wild turkeys, ducks, even some beaver. Joan’s brothers, George and Junior, took that parcel together, vowing to one day put up a monster of a cabin. For now they were content to hunt the land.

  Flo was more than happy with her small cabin by the marina that could be cleaned in less than an hour and where she could watch the boats moving back and forth between the islands. She didn’t want any of it. So the other parcel of twenty-six acres, out past Lafontaine, went to Joan.

  Joan wasn’t a big hunter. After puberty set in and her interests diversified beyond those of her father, she didn’t even really fish. But her land made her happier than she could have imagined. Her plot was less densely wooded than her brothers’, with a central, small, open field greened by ostrich ferns. Black birch trees peeled and perfumed the shaded undergrowth. The Chicken of the Woods fungus climbed trunks and fallen logs like fleshy scaffolding for industrious squirrels. Reddish soil underfoot was knocked loose in spring by the new growth of fiddleheads and later by morels, like sweet, brittle claws. Walking there in summer was to be surrounded by the tiny flutter and flicks of insects that fed the birds, who in turn sang into the soft down of their nests. The place reminded her who she was.

  She thought Victor loved it just as much as she did, until the night he suggested selling it to developers. He even brought home the paperwork.

  “Look, babe, let’s just discuss it. This is a shit ton of money—life-changing money!” He laid the sheets of paper on her lap. She refused to pick them up, but she did see the number. Six hundred thousand. It knocked the breath out of her lungs, but she turned the whoosh into a sigh.

  “It’s not up for discussion.” She wiggled into the back of the couch so that the papers slipped off her knees and onto the floor between her socks and the coffee table.

  He bent down and retrieved them, then read bits out loud, as if literacy were the problem. “A one-time payment in full of $600,000, if accepted within 40 days of offer, after which time the offer will be null and void. JT Development Corp will cover all costs associated with survey, legal fees and contracts. This offer is $180,000 over the assessed property value.”

  He stopped and searched her face. She pulled a foot up and tucked it under her thigh. “Victor, I am not selling my dad’s land.”

  It was his turn to sigh. “But that’s just it, Joan. It’s not your dad’s land anymore; it’s yours. And I thought it was ours. Besides, you’d still have your brothers’ plot in the family.”

  She shot him a look. “Yes, it is ours to enjoy, to build on. It’s not yours to sell.” She returned her gaze to the TV. She couldn’t recall being more disappointed in him, ever. So she told him just that. “I can’t believe you would even ask. It’s like you don’t know me at all. That makes me feel really lonely, Victor.”

  He stood up, tossing the remote onto the cushion beside her. He refolded the pages and tucked them into his back pocket, then walked to the front door, where he grabbed his grey wool jacket off the hook.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Going to the traps. Since you’re already lonely, you might as well be alone.”

  That was the last time she’d seen him until he turned up as the Reverend Wolff of the Walmart Ministry, or whatever the fuck it was called. She’d got up and watched him out the window as he walked away from their home, his back a small wisp of grey against the blast-orange sunset that was all emergency and warning.

  6

  THE ROAD

  Joan had grown up with stories. They’d covered her childhood, expanding and connecting until they tucked around her like a patchwork quilt. She didn’t mind them when she was very small, but at around age seven they started to feel like the worry of old women with more time than teeth. The hours she was stuck spending with her mere and great aunts, in between euchre and rushing down to the shore to jump off the dock with her cousins, were the boring bits of the day. The year she turned thirteen, she decided she was too old for stories.

  Two months after that monumental birthday, on the first day of summer holiday, her mother drove her and Mere over to Auntie Philomene’s. As the Ford Fairmont bounced over the back roads, she leaned her head on her grandmother’s smooth shoulder. Mere still smelled to her like Chantilly perfume and Ivory soap and safety. Flo drove away as soon as she’d unloaded them, back to the job site. Summer was busy season for the crew.r />
  Philomene’s apartment was all wood panelling and framed pictures hung according to a dozen different ideas of what was level. Her great auntie and Mere were already at the kitchen table, with mugs of tea and a deck of cards laid out in front of them, when Ajean came over from next door.

  “Holy, Joan, you sure grew up,” Philomene remarked, scanning her. Then she picked up the cards to shuffle.

  “Got boobs and everything, my girl,” Ajean said, without a hint of tease in her voice.

  “Taking after your favourite auntie, then,” Philomene said.

  The old ladies looked at one another. These kinds of changes caused them new concerns, and they needed new ways to keep her safe.

  Joan went over to the door, quietly pulling her sneakers back on. She had to get the hell out of here.

  “Hey, come sit.” Ajean patted the chair next to her. “You can deal the first hand.”

  Joan stayed where she was. She wasn’t going to start her summer vacation the same way she’d been doing since forever, hanging out with old ladies doing old lady things. “I’m gonna walk over to Tammy’s.”

  Tammy was the one cousin who would understand that thirteen meant something different was going to happen this year. And she lived near town, another bonus. “I’m probably going to stay at her place. So we can do stuff.”

  Her aunts and Mere looked at one another. Joan clarified. “Fun stuff.”

  “You shouldn’t be on the road by yourself,” Philomene said. “Summer people are around and we don’t know them. Plus, Dorothy said people saw a rogarou out there by Pitou’s place.”

  Of course. A rogarou. It wasn’t enough to imagine a man being turned into a vicious dog, she was also supposed to imagine that he was haunting the road into town. All the other kids from her class were no doubt at water parks or loitering at the mall, not having to deal with stories about monsters and the old women who told them.

  “Here.” Ajean held out the ace of spades to her.