All that day he expected her to return. He’d felt that she had no claim on him after so long, but the child was his. In the evening, not wanting to drink, he went out and drove. He crossed the Androscoggin to Auburn, then followed the reservoir back. Christmas trees lit windows, and he recalled picture books he’d received as a boy—those sunny histories and the way he’d dreamed of empires, of those in tune with struggle and the satisfaction of struggle. He wanted to fall through, to feel whatever was holding him fall away and disappear. The frozen gusting leaves, the occasional traffic and few pedestrians all seemed driven by some pain of memory. He stopped the car and closed his eyes.
For the first time, he questioned the power of his recollections over him, those winter afternoons, when the sun set too early and his mother would bathe him. She’d sat him in the stuffed laundry basket and undressed, her shoulders and thighs like the pages of a colouring book. She held him to her belly as she washed him. The black Tinkerbell shone on her breast, the linoleum on which they lay glistening with moisture. Afterwards, she put him on the toilet’s tufted purple seat cover and drew on him with bath crayons, red and blue slashes at first worrisome but that soon became pictures like those she had, hearts and serpents and flowers. Then she wiped the mirror and held him before it until it misted over again. He thought of the power of absence. Her death was an image of him at nine returning across the Midwest: the dull humming of the U-Haul cab and beyond the windows, winter’s blue and cradling distance. He thought of himself, or of a child, alone.
Back home he tried Isa’s number in Virginia. It was disconnected. He called the police and was put through to a man who told him that her name wasn’t on the system.
Bart took a bottle from under the sink. He found the Polaroid. He considered Isa’s high, strong cheekbones. She reminded him of the Creoles in Louisiana.
He knew he’d abandoned others too often, learned to stop caring too quickly. Diamondstone had told him that only God could lighten his burdens, and Bart had believed this.
But then he’d simply walked away—because love had brought him closer to his innocence, and there was no place you arrived in the search for God. Still, perhaps Diamondstone had been right and all desires gave onto one. Perhaps Bart believed in salvation, even now, as he waited, as snow silenced the world and he considered what a person might do to bring meaning into his life.
Mid-January, a warm front arrived, deepening the blue of the sky, snowbanks revealing gravel and trash and filling the streets with mud and melting ice.
His job was as a grunt on a skidding crew. That Levon’s money had been stolen was a lie. He’d spent much of it on the truck and apartment and at the bar, but had lost the rest playing cards at a party. Zy, a cousin he hadn’t seen in years, had kept him drinking and talking about his father throughout the game. The next morning Bart had counted what he had left. He’d thought about leaving and not paying rent. Instead, he’d asked Zy for help finding a job and was hired a few days later. His duty was to hook a heavy chain to stumps or trees or to carry things for the other workers, though mostly he just stood in the mustering cold and waited.
With the thaw, everyone on the crew was fed up, the ground unlocking, leaving them shin-deep in mud. Then on Friday the radio began calling for a cold snap, expected minus forty. Arctic air and clear skies, the announcer said—With all this water, Maine is going to be the biggest hockey rink in the U.S. of A.
Bart had forgotten mud season, the scents of earth, warm wind from far away, the way sunshine made him sneeze. His mother had laughed when he’d stomped in. He thought of Isa and their child. He could hardly contain the rage of self-hatred. He felt he could pull the skidders by the chains and haul back the forest and hills like a sheet from a bed. At lunch he took a bottle from under his truck seat.
Later, after hauling the chain into place, he yelled at the operator to go before he’d taken his hand off. The links crushed the tips of two fingers. He roared and men gathered, and he punched the operator, who’d been apologetic but insistent that Bart was at fault. The foreman sent Bart to the hospital and told him not to come back when his worker’s compensation finished. Two fingertips and nails may as well have been removed, they were so thoroughly crushed.
Back home, when he parked his car, Miguel was sitting on the steps. Bart hadn’t seen him in a while.
You hurt yourself?
Yeah. It’s nothing. Bart knew that his pallor betrayed him.
My dad’s done that. Lots of times. I guess it’s normal when you work with machines.
I guess. Book going okay?
Yes, except my mom and dad are fighting.
Oh.
Where’s your wife? Is she at the hospital to have her baby?
No. She’s with her family.
Glittering water dripped loudly along the eaves.
Anyway, Miguel said, you probably need to rest. See you later.
Inside Bart didn’t take painkillers or drink. His fingers pulsed. Sweat gathered along the elastic of his underwear. He sat and let sensation build, a nerve in his arm like a live wire. It was as if every emotion he’d known was in his hand.
The first time he’d kicked drinking had been at a state park near Natchitoches. He’d slept for a week under a picnic table. He’d forgotten how hard it was. He wanted to tear everything away, to dress in fresh clothes, eat, lie down and sleep, start over. He wanted to wake up from all of this, to decide. Had he always been afraid to act? He knew how easily he could be eclipsed by emotion.
He got up and began to pack. He would go to Virginia and find Isa. He took the Polaroid and in the closet he came across a bag. It held one of Isa’s notebooks and some old ID cards: Jude White. Even from the head shot Bart could tell the size of the man, the flattened face and goggle eyes, dumb and powerfully innocent, not someone who could be anything other than what he was. Bart suddenly felt exhausted. He needed to lie down. This ugliness burned into him and filled him with sadness, a sense of helplessness before the inevitability of their lives.
He slept fitfully and dreamed the swamp, mud whose depth he could sense beneath him. In the ambient night he knew another person was there, and at first he thought it was Diamondstone. But the presence had the gravity that a child feels with an adult. He couldn’t move, waiting, recalling even in his sleep the father that memory had held unchanged all these years, the huge man staring at him from across the street. He wanted to escape, to plunge into the dark water.
He woke. The lit window had frozen in a scrim of ice. He opened the door, the cold a searing band at his temple, up into his hair. The sky seemed too brilliant, the moon oddly distinct, full but for a faint crescent as if the white had been blurred against the vivid blue. The world looked tilted, stark, naked with cold, a vague garden of ice sprouted from the sopped parking lot. He returned inside. There was half a bottle of bourbon in the cupboard. He poured it into the sink and went back to bed.
Again he dreamed the swamp, the sprawl of silent mud. He was kneeling, gazing into the water, thirstier than he’d ever been. He woke and stood and reeled against the wall. His hands shook. He made it into the bathroom. He turned on the light. He hadn’t shaved. His skin looked rutted and old. He held to the sink. He was barrel chested, arms swollen from months of exertion. He stared at the serious imposing face. He’d killed a man and would be, was perhaps already, a father. How was it that he’d still felt like a boy?
He went to the door. Snow had started falling. He picked up the phone and called the police. This time a different man confirmed Isa’s name. He was abrupt and told Bart he would call him back. Twenty minutes later the phone rang. Now the man spoke slowly, pausing, now repeating, it seemed. Bart didn’t respond. The man spelled out an address in upstate New York. Then to Bart’s surprise he continued speaking. Gradually, Bart understood that this was about a child.
He changed and put his jacket on. He took his bags down the stairs. Ice cracked over the frozen mud. The truck’s heaters beat at the air. Only the
pain held him. So many times he’d wanted to disappear into a last sudden movement. He drove carefully now, going into slight fishtails then slowing before he accelerated again.
He considered self-hatred, or was it simply responsibility? All that a person might claim in a life, all that had to be claimed because it couldn’t be undone. He passed the cemetery, then turned around and pulled off near the gate. He left the engine running. He got out and walked through the graves. Snow creaked beneath his boots, the night a cavern at the corner of his eye. He’d once told Isa that his father’s name was Barthélemy, but that had been a lie. The day of his mother’s funeral he’d seen a tombstone in the old French part of the cemetery. Barthélemy was written on it. Because he’d never known his father’s name, he’d decided this must be it, that his own name must have been taken from this. Perhaps he’d simply liked it better. It had been a boy’s lie.
He tried to keep his mind still. He had a vague memory of flowering trees and a stone building. He saw it now, set back against the forest. His hand ached in the cold. The thaw had exposed most of the stones. After a while he found it. Amy Beaulieu Gray 1951–1976. Gently he knelt on this hidden, untended earth. He’d thought of Isa as someone who could save him. He touched his mother’s gravestone. She’d been twenty-five. He counted the years. And then he realized she was gone.
Virginia–Louisiana
February 1994
The interstate south past D.C. was extraterrestrial, military, walled with concrete barriers and embankments, the sky yellow, the colour of lights in a highway tunnel, bypasses with suburbs clustered about like galaxies. The city was eerily empty. Sunday. Every street looked the same, squat buildings like bunkers. His dream of that old, innocent America was far away. He had never felt so aware of pain. He’d thought he would be the one to destroy himself.
An aging doctor in the hospital had explained it. Afterwards there had been blood tests, papers to fill out. Words and lips, the echoing hallway. For several hours no one had noticed the car stalled on the meridian, no snowbanks to stop her. They’d done all they could. For years Bart would seek words to explain this until he gave up, forever dreaming that she was closing her eyes, seeing the night sky. It’s a miracle, the doctor had said—the way things give back.
Bart had to stay two weeks for the paperwork to go through. For the first time, it was effortless not to drink. The nurses made him spend entire days with them so that he would learn. They packed a bag, clearly worried, not letting him leave until they’d explained everything. There were boxes of formula, books even, a child’s car seat that one woman brought from home.
It was a miracle, he repeated to himself. He recalled something Diamondstone had said—We ascend by affliction. Then he didn’t think for a while.
In Virginia he stopped at the house. The door was unlocked. The hollow pulse of those first steps froze him. The place was a shell, rooms stripped to the joists, hanging wires and insulation. He’d thought she would return here. He’d risked coming with the hope that he might find something of her that he could keep for the future. There was only a manila envelope on the floor, from an investigation agency.
He continued south through the day, stopping to mix formula or to soothe whatever unrest and tears. By that evening he’d reached warmer weather. He crossed into Louisiana. He felt steadier, strong even. Later he took a motel room. She was a quiet baby.
He watched her sleep for a while, then went out. Night sounds emanated from the swamp across the highway, the darkness staticky, lit with phosphenes. He was twenty-six. Power lines hung against the sky, barely visible. He crossed the empty lanes. A truck passed, a clapping sound under the hood. He stood at the edge of the mud, in the grass, the gleam of water through the trees. He knew this place. Everything suddenly seemed clear and simple, the emotion he felt for that tiny child that was a part of him. Perhaps Diamondstone had truly believed that the only power greater than worldly suffering was God’s love. Bart was no longer sure. Another truck went by, piling up the darkness and letting it spill in, fuller than before. The humid air rushed over him. He waited a while longer, just letting himself breathe. Then he went inside to sleep.
BOOK TWO
Part One
Québec
1918–1963
The rest of her life Georgianne would return to those first years, pausing over the Bible, gulf wind and white cedar, the sound of river ice on waterfall rocks. As a girl she’d never been more than a few miles away: on land, the clapboard houses scattered between embouchure and a waterfall the height of a barn; or at sea, a Jersey village brief as a trick of light on the rearing coast. It had been hers. She knew its history, the lure and flight that had brought families from Gaspésie or the nearby Isle of Anticosti, the first settlements when a certain Capitaine Fortin discovered a school of cod out past Rigge-Point in the 1860s. The name, Rivière-au-Tonnerre, she loved to clarify, came not from the first waterfall where the houses ended but another, three miles in, two hundred feet high and with the spring debacle loud enough to merit its thunder.
Her first years she lived for those gulf breaths of salt and mountain air. Tall and broad shouldered, she favoured dark dresses that set off hands as big as her father’s. As a girl she’d learned that all callings were inferior to sacrifice. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father depended on her to manage the house and oversee her younger sister. She took pleasure in pumping water at dawn, in the smell of matches when she lit the stove, in sewing her sister’s clothes. She worked tirelessly, expanding the garden, turning the rot of last year’s husks. She wore her father’s old boots, and each afternoon, coming in to prepare dinner, she kicked the perfect print of sandy mud from one sole, then the other. The next day, when they’d dried, she swept them from the porch. Born in 1900, she was sure she would outlive the century and she called it her puny twin. She’d been told by her father, even by her younger sister, had even a faint memory of her mother telling her, that she should take care, cover up better. She knew the holy books called for meekness, modesty, and at church it was her pride she confessed, that she was stronger, that certain concerns need not apply.
When she was eighteen, the influenza arrived, believed to have bred in the trenches of the war, now working its way around the world, hundreds of thousands dying up the east coast, shortages of coffins in Boston and Washington. Not worried for herself, she didn’t think to worry for others. She watched as black-draped wagons rolled in, as first individuals, then families were carted into town, the Gendrons, father and wife and all five children, half the Levesques, a Lapierre and Bourque and God knows how many others. Her father had decided the family would stay at home, let it pass. One evening they heard someone climb the porch. She went to the door and saw that it was a neighbour, Jérôme Marceau. Her father had been reading aloud the funny bits in the back of the paper, though they’d heard them before. Her sister stopped brushing her hair and the oil lamp shone a silver band along it as if it were one continuous surface. The first snow of the year was falling, and Jérôme leaned against the door and knocked loudly though she was just inside. His breath misted and his face looked rucked and deflated, and he knocked again. His hand held a necklace with a dangling crucifix that tapped the glass.
We can’t just leave him out there, her father said.
That night became the winter, the yellow wings of dusk in a distant cloud-break, the lit billows of fine snow blown in from the gulf and the door opening with a sound like a seal on a jar being broken, flooding them with cold air. Jérôme’s lips were blue, and as he told them everyone was dead, his wife and daughters and sons, Georgianne’s sister watched her with dark, scared eyes. Later, when everyone had gone to sleep, Georgianne left her bed and lay with her face in her sister’s hair and lifted it and let the heavy strands fall on her cheeks.
Two weeks afterwards, morning sunlight roiled in clouds and struck her eyelids and she woke, breath misting, still no fever. The stove was open and wind through the flue had spread a ha
lf-circle of ash on the floor. She lit the first fire in a week and began eating again. Men from the village came and took the bodies away, and in May she saw her father and sister put in the ground with hundreds of others. June was unreal. She walked out past the house through the yarrow and burdock that grew up around the garden. All night she stepped past boreal fir and poplar, through twinflower and wood sorrel and nettles that she tore up with her hands and rubbed on her arms. Village dogs barked at the silent pulse of lightning over the gulf, magnesium flares from cloud to cloud. She came down out of the brush and the dogs raced towards her and set about in a circle, and she shooed them violently with a stick.
That Sunday, after church, the gossip was that a man named Hervé Hervé had come into town looking for a wife, that he had children at home under the care of his eldest, then twelve. He stood in a tan shirt rolled at the elbows and a captain’s hat, which he wore at an angle. He had an eye patch like a pirate and was a head taller than any other man and looked at them as if they couldn’t look back. Through his breast pocket showed the outlines of dark cigarettes.
She caught up with him on the rocky slope above the docks. Clouds blew past so that shadows moved along the coast like those of passing giants. I’ll be your wife, she told him. He looked at the clean hem of her dress and up along her, at her throat and finally into her face and stood there, smoking. She watched the muscles beneath his rolled sleeve. He nodded and motioned her along, and they returned to the church, where he spoke with the priest, not knowing her name yet though the three of them were alone and he could point. The next day, when the formalities were finished, they went to the house. Afterwards she helped him load everything into his boat. Then she stepped in and they sailed south across the St. Lawrence, to a town that looked held together by strung-up fishing nets, to a farm that made her think, upon seeing it, of mud.
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