For most of the day, Victor Morgan and his daughter made the rounds of the cottages, talking to people who didn’t dare any more say that kind of girl, but who shook their heads when Morgan asked them if they’d seen Elisabeth Mulligan two nights ago. About three o’clock they were finally able to reach Zaza’s mother on the phone, back from a trip to Boston with her husband. No, Zaza wasn’t with them, Zaza was in Boundary, Sarah Mulligan replied, then, after a heavy silence, she added that she’d be there with George before nightfall.
Contrary to what Pete Landry thought, Little Hawk did not really win a one-way trip to Europe. He won a trip there, and, you might say, half a trip back, because he left behind him more than his blood. In the midst of the killing, he lost the faculty most men have of distinguishing good from evil, and acquired something more rare, the rage of a man ready to kill anyone who would threaten his son, his daughter, his brother, his dog.
On Tuesday 6 June 1944, after a tense crossing on the USS Augusta, Little Hawk took part in the first wave of the Operation Neptune assault on Omaha Beach in Normandy. A few harrowing minutes after his barge landed, he was thinking about Moose Trap’s cool forests, while clutching to his chest the bleeding body of his barracks chum, Jim Latimer, the best poker player in the 1st Infantry Division of Uncle Sam’s army, whose cries were still echoing in his ears, shut up, Jim, shut up, as the crazed cacophony of the dying answered back to the detonations of weaponry. It was Latimer who saved his life, the broken body of Latimer, jiggling in Little Hawk’s arms, convulsing under the impact of the bullets. Latimer had been dead for some time when Little Hawk laid him down on Omaha’s cold and blood-drenched sand in the middle of dozens of other boys pitting their fair-haired America against the blond Aryan youth, but Little Hawk kept talking to him as he ran through the projectiles, swearing he would avenge him, would free him from the carnage, promising him life and what was impossible, resurrection and happiness in the bosom of a nature that would never die.
Officially Little Hawk didn’t die that day, only his vision succumbed and a kind of blindness took its place, with the same pictures flashing by over and over, red and deafening. Thanks to this sightlessness he later survived the battle of Caen, escaping the German Tigers’ roaring maws by heaving himself into mud-filled holes that the war machines blew open, growling, roaring in his turn, a maddened animal daring anyone to get near him without putting his life on the line.
Sent back to America because of his psychic trauma, Little Hawk was interned in a military hospital, among syringes and white blouses that were as threatening to him as so many Gewehr 43s and Wehrmacht uniforms. Then one day, encouraged, perhaps, by the surprising calm that came in the wake of his agitation, the doctors released Little Hawk into the world. He wandered for a while, lost in the alarming tumult of the city, and then set off for Peter’s Woods, where, despite the silence, a roiling anger erupted within him when he found Pete Landry. The man was a wreck, a slobbery ruin reduced to a shell by a woman in no way obliged to offer him her body, but who, worse than that, refused his gaze. Little Hawk instantly developed a hatred for this woman, fed by the fury he had contracted in Omaha Bay, and the long suppressed howl finally burst from his breast the day when, a few weeks after he’d tried to rouse Landry from his torpor by taking him to gather up his abandoned traps, he found him hanged in his shack.
The night following this discovery a wolf bayed until dawn in Peter’s Woods, then the animal took off on a hunt around the lake and caught Sugar Baby, Maggie Harrison’s beloved, who howled in his turn, two wounded beasts blind to the fate of the damned. Cured for a time of his rage, the wolf then came out of the woods, leaving Landry’s body suspended in his shack at the heart of this kingdom whose clown he had, despite himself, become. Came out of the woods, swearing that no one, ever, would lay a hand on his son, his daughter, his father, his brother.
I was coming back along the lakeshore when Gilles Ménard, wearing an undershirt, arrived at a run, his face white, and burst into the cottage without even knocking. Then I heard his voice, and my mother let out a mouse’s squeal, like those she emitted when she was insulted or got bad news. Three minutes later my father came out with Monsieur Ménard, two ashen faces that left in the direction of the McBains’ cottage, where my father never set foot. They’re English, he said, we don’t understand each other, or they’re rich, we’re not part of the same world. This visit to the McBains meant something serious had happened. Right away I thought of Zaza Mulligan, who hadn’t answered Sissy’s calls, and was nowhere, except no one could be nowhere. If you existed, you were sitting, standing, on all fours, or lying down somewhere, and you were talking. It was Zaza’s silence, her nowhere silence, that had panicked Sissy Morgan. I’d seen it in her cat’s eyes when she’d taken my hands and begged me to look everywhere, giving me a golden watch that made a soft tick-tock up against my ear. Look, Aundrey, look everywhere, and I took off running, telling myself that there must be a place that was Zaza’s somewhere, a cabin, a ditch, a clearing where she couldn’t hear Sissy, unless she’d become completely deaf. Still I cried Zaza, Zaza Mulligan, picking up every object that might show that she’d been there recently. I’d been given a mission from which nothing could distract me. But neither the stuff I gathered nor the pride I felt in becoming Sissy Morgan’s accomplice led me to Zaza’s somewhere.
I still had the watch in the back pocket of my jeans, which reminded me that Zaza was doing something in some unknown place. I’d forgotten to give it back to Sissy at the same time as the earring that looked like a tear or a raindrop that had fallen from a crow’s nest. Sissy didn’t want any of the other things, but I’d saved the matchbook and the bag of chips in case Zaza had dropped them when her red hair vanished into the greenery of a tree. Every chance I had, I patted the bump the watch made in my right buttock, telling myself that Sissy would never have entrusted this jewel to the little snot-nosed kid who’d replaced the littoldolle of once upon a time if she hadn’t feared the worst, which I couldn’t help associating with Gilles Ménard’s waxen face, transfixed by some terrifying tableau in which Zaza played a part. It was Zaza’s inexplicable lack of response that had set Gilles Ménard running, I would have sworn, and that had flung my father after him as if he were being pursued by an icy wind.
I wanted to catch up to them when they came around the cedar hedge separating our cottage from that of the McBains, but my mother ordered me not to move, you don’t leave the yard, Andrée Duchamp, and told me to play with my sister, who was trying to build a sandcastle with a twisted plastic shovel. Unlike the two men, my mother had red cheeks, and the little purple circle that appeared in the middle of her forehead when her mind couldn’t contain everything stirring inside her began to show itself, a sign that you’d better not get on her nerves. I asked what had happened, but again I just got an old person’s answer. Supposedly, nothing was going on. My father had gone to the McBains’ because only a few of the English, and the Maheux across the lake, had telephones. As for the reason for this urgent call, that was none of my business.
No point in pressing the matter. When my mother sealed her lips, they were welded together. I went to join Millie on the beach, and helped her shore up her castle, while glancing over at the McBains’ and straining my ears in case I could catch a bit of conversation thanks to the echo over the lake. My father and Monsieur Ménard reappeared on the McBains’ porch while Millie was telling me she was going to put butterflies in her castle, yellow-orange and edged in black. Papa and Monsieur Ménard shook McBain’s hand, exchanged a few words with the aid of signs to make up for the linguistic deficiencies on either side, and went back to the cottage with their ghastly faces. My mother rushed out as soon as they stepped into the yard, with a clean shirt for Gilles Ménard, whose undershirt was covered with sweat stains, and she urged my father to bring her up to date. The police are coming, he whispered, give the kids their supper, we’ll wait in the yard. Just then my brother arrived,
his bicycle wheels screeching on the gravel, and wanted to know why Papa looked like he’d seen a ghost. You’ll find out soon enough, my father answered, and shooed him into the cottage with us.
Clouds were piling up behind the mountain, masking the sun and promising us one of those torrential rainfalls dear to Bondrée’s microclimate. I still don’t know how to explain the phenomenon that occurred five or six times every summer, when the clouds, rising up from an invisible horizon, suddenly gathered over Moose Trap, and then swooped down towards the lake. The sky turned a purple grey and the trees swayed gently, catching the wind’s horns, brushing the brow of the animal that would soon unleash its fury. That evening, however, the weather’s unsettling light didn’t make its way into the cottage. It clung to the windows, and gave the kitchen-living room-dining room a gloomy look. Usually I loved those lifeless colours that preceded a storm, as we waited for the noise, the cracking of the roof that echoed that of the sky, the salvos of water striking the windows, but this was not a normal time. Something terrible was going to descend on us along with the rain.
Quickly, my mother turned on the ceiling light, refusing to let the mauve turn to darkness, then she brought out the baloney, the mustard, the sliced bread. We had to make do with sandwiches, and she didn’t want to hear any complaints. My brother and I looked at each other, calculating the risks of having her explode if we opened our mouths. Millie finally broke the silence, saying she wanted ketchup, not mustard, and my guileless brother took the opportunity to ask who was dead. A hand came down onto the sliced bread, and my mother muttered that if one of us wanted to play the show-off she’d send us to our rooms until the following day. Clearly someone was dead, otherwise Mama wouldn’t have spelt out each syllable like she did every time she got panicky, because my mother panicked calmly, squashing a sandwich or a tomato, meticulously and methodically slicing up a carrot until it was totally annihilated, while her red patch widened over a pallor that only appeared when her alarm was reaching the point of hysteria.
I again thought of Zaza, too young not to have any other place to exist, and I checked Sissy’s watch, which I’d wound up to ward off bad luck. At the very same time a pile of clouds broke away from the mountain, and my father pointed it out to Gilles Ménard. Facing the lake, Papa and Ménard stood around, nudged a rock with the tips of their shoes, heads lowered, turned to check out the road, and again buried the tips of their shoes in the sand. From time to time Gilles Ménard lifted an arm, which he let drop right away next to his body, then he took his head in his hands and knelt down. He told my father what he’d seen, he described the horrors baying at his heels. A corpse, perhaps, curled up in the underbrush or hanging from a beam, a second Pete Landry come to lend a hand to the first one’s ghost, now so transparent that on nights when there was a full moon it wouldn’t even be able to make a girl’s hair stand on end.
I knew nothing then about this Landry except what the children had bruited about: that he was a trapper who liked birds and had tried to fly off while tying himself to a rope. But from time to time I’d visited the site of his old shack, where you could still see the foundations beneath the beams and the soot-blackened joists. In ten or twenty years you’d have to dig down to unearth the ruins of that burned-out shack, but it would still be there, witness to a man’s passage through the heart of the forest. Landry’s leavings would survive him, more troubling than the imprints of other men because they were linked to violence and to the impertinence of those who thought you could destroy a ghost, that you could kill what was already dead.
The first time I came across those ruins I took to my heels, certain that Landry’s ghost would behead me if I loitered in the vicinity. That same night, I asked my parents about him. They replied that Pierre Landry was just a poor soul, an unhappy man, and they avoided my questions concerning his suicide, explaining that Landry had died of an illness, because suicide didn’t exist among the Duchamps, the Millers, the Maheux, or the McBains. It was one of the many subjects that were out of bounds thanks to fear, fear of hell and of torment, of the shameful consequences of despair.
I waited a week before going near the shack again, keeping my distance while asking myself what would happen if I called out to Landry. Pete Landry, I whispered finally, covering my mouth with my hands, and I thought I heard something stir in the bushes, while one of the collapsed beams tilted slightly, like one of those gravestones from behind which vampires emerge. Again I took flight, tumbling head over heels, my eyes peeled for the vampire whose great black cape would soon swoop down on me to suck at my jugular. Still, I returned a couple of days later, drawn by the fascination all children have for caves swarming with creatures that never see the light of day. The place was not sinister, but Landry’s shadow was abroad there still, seeking an escape from its burned-out purgatory. In time the shack’s surroundings came to seem less hostile, which did not stop me from making a wide detour when I approached this part of the forest, fearing to see the debris rise up, propelled by an anger hidden under the black earth. You mustn’t mock the dead. Above all, you mustn’t stir up ghosts.
Disturbed by the idea that a new darkness was being linked to Landry’s wanderings, I was going to ask permission to go and join my father when a police car came and parked beside the cottage. Hearing it, my brother leapt from his chair, ignoring Mama’s injunctions, while she grabbed Millie and me by the collar to stop us from following him. I didn’t struggle, my mother was stronger than me, just like the clouds moving in sombrely over the lake. In a few moments the rain would reach our shore and start manhandling the waves that throw boats up against the docks. I hope old Pat’s not still out on the water, my mother murmured, her blue eyes rimmed by those shadows reserved only for mothers.
As Mama no longer seemed aware of our being there, I led Millie into the room we shared, and gave her permission to play with Bill, my battery-powered robot, to whom I’d given that name because he walked like Bill Cochrane, our second neighbour to the left, who had returned from I don’t know what war with a stiff leg, a medal, and a beastly character, if beasts grumble all day long. Cochrane wasn’t the only one in our entourage to have been in one war or another, but you always talked about it under your breath, so as not to bring back bad memories. If one of those men behaved strangely, you said that he’d done the 1939 war, he’d done Korea, he’d survived the landing, as though that explained everything, and you kept your trap shut.
While Millie was launching Bill down from the chest of drawers, I lay on my stomach on the bed near the window, which was the best place in the cottage to keep an eye on the backyard and to listen in on what was being said there. The men were talking softly and I only heard murmurs through the wind’s gusts, with a word or two sticking out from time to time, words that sounded like “wound” or “tear,” words stained with blood. Gilles Ménard was talking the most, waving his arms and still clutching his head, then the rain came, drumming violently against the window and onto the ground and the cottage roof. The police took shelter inside their car while Papa and Monsieur Ménard came in, looking for raincoats and flashlights. I took the opportunity to leave my room and press my nose against the big kitchen window, from where you could see almost the whole world if you put your mind to it, transforming Moose Trap into an Everest crumbling under its avalanches or Boundary Pond into an ocean criss-crossed by pirates’ flags whose tatters were whipped by the offshore winds. Every tree became an entire forest, every stone a monolith as big as the Rock of Gibraltar, which my father had shown me in one of those magazines that makes you realise you don’t know anything, and every stretch of beach was a desert full of rattlesnakes, sand hoppers, poisonous lizards, and other creatures right out of the scary stories in our after-supper books. Bondrée was a world unto itself, the mirror of all possible universes.
We shouldn’t be too late, my father whispered, kissing my mother on the brow, right on her red circle, then Gilles Ménard followed him out to our old Ford,
which made its way off through the rain. Dusk had fallen early, what with the downpour, and already the road in the headlights’ beams was all gleaming mud that exposed the ruts carved out by the last deluge. Zigzagging through this mud, they took a left turn towards the crossroads leading to the highway, and their lights vanished behind the trees.
Close the curtains, Andrée, my mother sighed, in a voice so tired that you could feel the weight of everything she feared. When she used that voice you heard the future hurtling towards you with its big boots, and you wanted to hide six feet underground as if it wouldn’t know where to find you. Her head bowed, she stood still on the carpet in the entranceway, facing the door, but all she could have seen was her own reflection in the window. Her hair and clothes were soaked, her mascara was running, and she seemed depleted of all energy. I’d only seen my mother like that when her father died, Grandpapa Fred. For weeks, after Papy’s burial, she kept disappearing. Her body was still there, bent over the sink or the kitchen counter, but everything that was my mother had vanished into thin air. Her hands hung loose, our questions slid by her ears, and she had to drop her knife or her potato to remember her body. Those absences scared me, because the unnatural grimace that froze her features belonged to someone I didn’t know, and whom I wouldn’t want to meet in the dark.
I closed the curtains violently to bring her out of her trance, and she instantly reappeared. In a fraction of a second she became again the strong-willed and determined woman I wanted for my mother, even if her self-assurance got under my skin more often than not. It’s as dark as November, she exclaimed, then she quickly went to change and to dry her hair. From the bathroom she ordered us to put on our pyjamas, even if it was only seven-thirty, and then she brought a 7UP to my brother, who was sulking in the living room because my father had shut him out of his meeting with the police, and hadn’t wanted to take him with them. To kill time, she proposed a game of Monopoly, but no one was in the mood that night to lust after Atlantic Avenue. She brought out a deck of cards for Millie, who liked building castles so she could fill them with butterflies, and she emptied the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer, muttering that the men would be hungry when they got back.
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