The last summer we spent at Bondrée was, however, suffused with another odour, one of flesh, both sex and blood, which rose from the humid forest when night fell and the name Tanager echoed on the mountain. But nothing hinted at that tenacious perfume when the campfires, one by one, were lit around the lake, those of the Ménards, the Tanguays, the McBains. Nothing seemed able to cloud the sunstruck indolence of Boundary, because it was the summer of ’67, the summer of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and the Montreal World’s Fair, because it was the summer of love, as Zaza Mulligan proclaimed while Sissy Morgan lit into Lucy in the Sky and Franky-Frenchie Lamar, with her orange hula-hoop, danced away on the Morgans’ dock. July offered up its splendour, and no one suspected then that Lucy’s diamonds would soon be reduced to dust by Pete Landry’s traps.
The springing of those traps resounded as far as Maine, because Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, who were considered the sort of girls to be forgotten after one night, would soon brand Bondrée’s memory with a red-hot iron. In the process, they demonstrated that people like Pete Landry, bound too tightly to the woods, never quite died. Like Landry, they headed down the tortuous paths of a forest well-trodden by man to become legends in their turn, in tales where the redhead and the blonde would in the end be confused, since there where you saw Sissy, you were sure to encounter Zaza. The urchins of the time even made up a silly song they chanted to the tune of Only the Lonely every time the two girls flounced by, but what did they care, they were Boundary’s princesses, the red and blonde Lolitas who’d made men drool ever since they’d learned to draw their gaze with their well-tanned legs.
Most of the women didn’t like them, not only because they’d one day or another caught their husband or fiancé ogling Zaza’s navel, but because Sissy and Zaza didn’t like women. Zaza tolerated only Sissy, and vice versa. The others were just rivals whose potential for seduction they appraised, elbowing each other and sniggering. Neither did the men like those girls, who seemed to have no better goal than to excite in them what they thought only lurked in other men. They were for them just fodder for their fantasies, conjuring the worst obscenities, Zaza with her thighs spread wide, Sissy on her knees, cock-teasers they would discard along with their Kleenex, ashamed, when their wives called them in for supper, of having behaved like all other men.
So they weren’t surprised to learn about what happened to them. Those girls had been asking for it, that’s what most of them couldn’t help thinking, and those thoughts sparked in them a kind of treacly remorse that made them want to pound themselves with their fists, to slap themselves until they drew blood, because the girls were dead, good God, dead, for Christ’s sake, and no one, not them nor anyone else, deserved the end that had been reserved for them. It took this calamity for them to think of those girls as anything but schemers, for them to understand that behind their rancour was only a vast emptiness into which they’d all stupidly thrown themselves, seeing nothing but the tanned skin camouflaging that emptiness. If life had not pulled the rug from under them, they might have filled that gaping hole and loved other women. But it was too late, and no one would ever know if Zaza and Sissy were rotten to the core, destined to become what they called “bitches” or “old bitches.” And so they resented them, almost, for being dead and for instigating that soul searching where you took the measure of your own ordinariness and pettiness, of the ease with which you were able to damn and judge others without first taking a good look at yourself in the mirror.
Fortunately September had arrived, because by the end of summer no fewer than half the members of the small community despised themselves enough to have to acknowledge it, while the other half, in taking stock of themselves, were learning to value the merits of mendacity. As for me, I was sheltered from the guilt gnawing away at the adults. I did not know the true meaning of the word “bitch,” nor the burden of sin contained in a simple thought, the awful temptation that can poison one’s mind as much as a done deed. If I avoided mirrors, it was not because of Sissy or Zara, but because I was twelve years old and I found myself ugly. But I revered those two girls with silky hair who smelled of peach and lily of the valley, who read photo-novels and danced rock’n’roll like the groupies who waggled their hips on TV to songs translated by the Excentriques or César et les Romains. To me they represented a quintessence of femininity to which I hardly dared aspire, a magazine femininity reserved for girls who had long legs and lacquered nails. I observed them from afar, and tried to mimic their moves and their poses, their way of holding a cigarette, all the time dreaming of the day I would exhale into the air around me the smoke from a Pall Mall the way Zaza Mulligan did, tilting my head back and making an “o” of my lips out in the midday sun. I picked up a wisp of straw and held it delicately between my index and middle fingers, saying foc, Sissy, disse boy iz a frog, until the cry of a loon or the hammering of a woodpecker brought me back home to the lake, the river, and the trees.
I dreamed of also having a friend, to whom I could say foc while swinging my hips, but the only adolescent my age at Bondrée was a girl from Concord, Massachusetts, who took herself for Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, and who spent her days fanning herself on her parents’ porch. Taratata! In any case, I could only manage a few words of English in those days, see you soon, racoon, and other such fooleries, and I was sure that Jane Mary Brown, that was the girl’s name, couldn’t even translate “yes” or “no” into French. Franky, I not gave a down, I’d retorted the day she shut the door in my face, cheerfully butchering Clark Gable’s famous comeback to Vivien Leigh in the dimming light of a Virginia in flames. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Jane Mary Brown had been dealt with.
Françoise Lamar, whose parents had bought the cottage next to us the year before, spoke for her part an English as impeccable as her French, despite a first name that drove her crazy every time an anglophone tried to pronounce it. It was her mother, Suzanne Langlois, who’d insisted that her daughter have a suitably French name, even if Franky was born of an anglophone father right in the heart of New Hampshire. At the beginning of summer 1967 she’d risen from the chaise longue where she baked herself from morning to night, to cozy up to Sissy and Zara, and she’d begun to smoke Pall Malls she concealed under the elastic of her Bermuda or polka dot shorts when she left the family cottage, slamming the screen door. I don’t know how she managed it, but it only took her a few days to be accepted by the Sissy-Zaza duo, which I’d thought was impregnable. From that point on there were no longer two pairs of legs stretched out on the rail of the Mulligans’ motorboat, but three, wrapped in a cloud of white smoke, as the radio blared out the hits of the day.
So began, long after the tale of Pierre Landry, the story of the summer of ’67 and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, starting with that friendship and the three pairs of legs you saw everywhere, that you saw too much of, that were omnipresent, with the dirty jokes and guffaws that followed in their wake, dropping with the Kleenex into the open drains.
For the merchants of Jackman and Moose River, to whom he sold his pelts, Pierre Landry soon became Peter or Pete Laundry, a wild man jabbering a rudimentary “franglais,” and scenting himself with beaver oil. And that’s what he was, a wild man, an exile, but one who had not yet severed all ties with his fellows. Near Moose Trap he sometimes received visits from a hunter in October, a fisherman in June, with whom he shared a forty-ounce Canadian Club, but he spent the winters on his own, taking pleasure in the frozen beauty of Boundary, which, with his Canuck accent, he’d rebaptised Bondrée, the rough country of Bondrée. Among his more loyal visitors there was a young man who went by the name of Little Hawk, a rangy type with a nose like an eagle’s beak, to whom Landry had taught the rudiments of trapping, which he himself had learned from his father and grandfather, both of whom had lived off what the Beauce had to offer in furred and feathered creatures. Little Hawk was his friend, the only man he allowed to tend his traps, the only human being, in fact, wi
th whom he was prepared to share the reality of death. He and Little Hawk didn’t talk the same language, except for a few words, but they shared a language all the same, that of the gestures and silences survival demands. When Little Hawk stayed for the night they sat on Pete’s shaky deck and listened to the forest, the growling and squealing of animals devouring each other. It was from the way Little Hawk then inclined his head that Pete had seen that they were the same, two people acknowledging the sad necessity of what some called cruelty, but which was only an echo of the earth’s ancient breathing. Then one day Little Hawk stopped coming. Landry waited for him, and concluded by his absence that he’d fallen into the trap that he himself had avoided by leaving Québec, refusing to be thrown into a war about which he knew nothing, and where death for him had no meaning. Little Hawk hadn’t been so lucky. Like thousands of other young Yankees, he’d won Roosevelt’s lottery for a one-way trip to Europe, called up along with all those who were deemed fit to fight and who asked themselves no questions about their aptitude for dying or for rubbing shoulders with death.
With no one to talk to about the beauty of the forest and the wildlife procreating there, Landry walled himself off in silence. At first he still talked to the trees and animals, and addressed the limpidity of the lake. He also talked to himself, commenting on the weather, describing the storms, even telling himself some lame jokes, stories of fishermen tangled in their own lines, but speech bit by bit abandoned him. He thought in words, but they stayed inside him, melted into his thoughts, lost themselves in the shapes of things there was no more point in naming. If the idea survived, it no longer expressed itself in sounds. During the time when Little Hawk paid him visits and shared his speckled trout, he’d rediscovered the true meaning of speech in the nights punctuated by silence. Little Hawk was not talkative, but he’d revived in him the desire to say things about the sky, to utter the word “blue” or “cloud,” midnight blue or thunderclouds. Once Little Hawk left, the blue no longer had any reason for being, nor did the smiles he tried to muster in the little mirror over the mottled basin where he washed himself and his pots and pans.
Then the blue was suddenly back with the arrival of the picks and shovels, the throbbing engines putting up cabins and putting down a road, blue and all the colours of creation, what with the sudden appearance of Maggie Harrison running along the lake in her scarlet dresses, dancing beneath the moon, and setting the skies to reeling. If he’d had the power Landry would have sent packing those infernal machines that seemed to have no goal other than to destroy everything that belonged to him, the silence, the clear water, the ethereal flight of the loons, but Maggie Harrison’s long black hair soon muffled the constant din. He instantly fell in love with this woman whose skin was too pale, and in his imagination he rebaptised her Marie in a stream’s pure water. Right away he began to watch her, swimming out from shore, striding along the beach with her dog Sugar, Sugar Baby my love. Concealed behind trees, Landry saw her dance with the waves, and whispered Marie, Baby, my love. Softly he repeated the words that expressed his love, softly, not to startle her, my love, because Maggie Harrison, along with the colours of creation, had given him back the longing for rapturous words, Marie, sweet bird, Tanager of Bondrée.
The honeymoon lasted for a time, then other, brutal words silenced Pierre Landry’s love song, obscene words, bastard, savage, uttered by men who’d seen him step out of the woods to walk on the beach. Bastard, savage, when he’d only wanted to come near, when he was just trying to stroke the contours of what had restored to him the spoken word. He’d stretched out his arms and Marie had pushed him back, get away from me, just when he was going to touch her hands, her eyes, her red lips that said don’t, her glistening lips that gave onto a great black hole and cried don’t, go away, don’t touch me!
That same day Pierre Landry buried himself in the woods, and he was never again seen near Boundary Pond. It was Willy Preston, a trapper people called The Bear, who found him in his shack a few weeks later, probably dead about the time of the new moon, his corpse eaten away by flies and maggots. Near the shack lay the body of Sugar Baby, Sugar Baby my love, disappeared that morning, disembowelled by a trap. A little after sunset Preston was seen coming out of the woods, holding to his body Sugar Baby’s remains. Maggie Harrison’s lament was then heard tearing through the ethereal flight of the loons, its echo merging with their complaints and sending shivers down the spines of even hard-working men. After two or three nights the echo went silent on the slopes of Moose Trap, and Maggie Harrison left Bondrée, leaning her shadow on the stooped shoulder of her husband. Like Landry, they were never again seen in the region, neither him nor her, crying out the name of Sugar Baby.
Among all the people who visited Bondrée at the time, only Don and Martha Irving, along with the Tanguays, Jean-Louis, Flora, and old Pat, had known Pete Landry, as far as you could know a man who came out of the woods only to melt back into them. They’d seen him not there but in the bay later called Ménard Bay, grumbling as he demolished his shack in order to rebuild it farther on, where the shovels and machines would not reach. They’d also seen him at the mouth of Spider River, stark naked, scrawny, his hip bones forming a bowl for his hollow belly, washing his clothes in clear water, without any soap to dislodge the grime.
Some people had hounded Don and Martha Irving, urging them to relate whatever they knew about Landry, but Don just mumbled that it was no one’s business, none of your goddam business, while Martha blew smoke in their faces from her fortieth Player’s of the day.
The same thing for Pat Tanguay, who refused to talk about Landry out of respect for the dead, he said, his basket of dead fish in his arms, and because he hated the inevitable gossip born of what people said, whatever it might be. Flora, his daughter-in-law, however, enjoyed circulating stories about Landry. She’d one day paid him a visit at his shack, neighbours had to get to know each other after all. Met by Landry’s cold gaze she’d retreated as far as the door, where she’d torn her pink cotton dress, a few threads of which stayed behind, caught on the door frame. Flora Tanguay never missed an opportunity to talk about that expedition, describing the beaver skins hanging on Landry’s walls like so many cadavers staring at you with their milky eyes. She invested the cadavers with the heads of lynx or wolves, and talked of blood, excess, and bestiality. She was the source for the story of Tanager, which she embroidered every which way, and altered according to her listener’s degree of captivation.
Several people claimed that Flora Tanguay ought to have been gagged for running off at the mouth and further sullying the good name of a man who, as far as was known, had never done any harm to anyone, not to Maggie Harrison or Sugar Baby, whose death was no more than a deplorable accident. Landry was just another of the forest’s victims, lost in his fascination for the beauty of flowers and birds. There was just one point on which everyone agreed with Flora Tanguay, and that was Landry’s feral behaviour, which got worse during the freeze-ups of his last winter, and brought disarray and disorder the following summer.
Still, no one thought after Landry’s death that anyone around the lake would turn deviant just from consorting with animals. The few oddballs still on the loose in the area were not really dangerous. There was old broken down Pat Tanguay, of course, who spent all his life in his rowboat, most likely to spare himself the endless prattling of his daughter-in-law, who could herself qualify as one of the local eccentrics. There was also Bill Cochrane, a veteran who heard the roaring of war engines on stormy nights, and Charlotte Morgan, who walked around in her pyjamas all day long, and, to preserve her white skin, only went out at dusk. But there was no one with an affliction similar to that of Landry, who’d ended up at one with the forest. As for Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, they were just different. Yet it was through them that the savagery had returned, because of them, they thought, without daring to say it out loud, because those girls were dead, good God, dead, for Christ’s sake! It was thanks to their
beauty and Maggie Harrison’s, and to that of all happy and desirable women, that Pete Landry’s traps had emerged from the dark earth, and with them the violence of other men.
ZAZA
Who’s there? Who’s fucking there? Zaza Mulligan cried, before a man’s shadow, enormous to her eyes, crossed the path, its back bent. For a moment she felt the coolness of the ground numb her legs, like a long wet animal rubbing against her skin, and she sought support nearby, a tree to hold on to. This was not the time to faint, not now, Zaz, not now, please. She dug her nails into an oak’s bark, took a deep breath, and again cried who’s there? Who’s fucking there? trying to keep her cool, so the man wouldn’t sense the fear oozing from her every pore, but her voice was already cracking and tears were burning her eyes, tears she wiped away with the back of her hand, to restore to the dark and eddying night some semblance of brightness.
Who are you, for Christ’s sake? And the shadow remained silent, mute and motionless. All that reached Zaza was the sound of her own breath, which she tried to connect with that of the fox that had burst out in front of her a while ago, wind on my knees, fox in the trees. This kind of thing couldn’t happen to her, not to her, not now. It’s a fox, Zaz, you’re drunk, it’s a fucking fox, or a bear, that’s it, a damned bear, because Zaza would have much preferred to face a bear than this unseen and silent man. Talk to me, please! You’re not funny!
Warding off the images flashing through her mind, one more frightening than the next, she clung to the idea that someone just wanted to give her a good scare, that’s it, a bloody scare. Mark, is that you? Sissy? Frenchie? But the shadow stayed mute, shrouded in its own slow breathing.
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