THE LONGEST YEAR
DANIEL GRENIER
TRANSLATED BY PABLO STRAUSS
Copyright © 2015 Le Quartanier
English translation copyright © 2017 Pablo Strauss
First published as L’année la plus longue in 2015 by Le Quartanier
First published in English in 2017 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
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This is a work of fiction. The events and characters in this book are fictitious, and where real historical figures and events are depicted liberties have been taken for the benefit of the story.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Grenier, Daniel, 1980-
[Année la plus longue. English]
The longest year / Daniel Grenier ; translated by Pablo Strauss.
Translation of: L’année la plus longue.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0153-7 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0154-4 (epub)
—ISBN 978-1-4870-0155-1 (mobi)
I. Strauss, Pablo, illustrator II. Title. III Title: Année la plus longue. English
PS8613.R4486A6613 2017 C843’.6 C2016-901573-4
C2016-901574-2
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover image: Original photograph Three “Johnnie Reb” Prisoners, captured at Gettysburg, 1863 by Mathew B. Brady / Library of Congress; photo tinting by Dynamichrome Limited
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
Alma wanted to go to sleep right there, in the heap of blood and shit. But they got back on the road. Wading through the creek, they’d dye the water red. They’d steal fruit to fill their mouths with the living taste of sugar, reach camp after nightfall, lay down on the bare ground, and when Alma looked up at the stars her head would fill with the strains of an old, unrhymed song.
Catherine Leroux, La marche en forêt
The clanking arms of the column near him made him soar on the red wings of war. For a few moments he was sublime.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Of course I don’t think I’m going to die. That would be un-American.
Pierre Yergeau, L’écrivain public
PROLOGUE
NU NA DA UL TSUN YI
JULY 1838
RED CLAY, TN—OHIO RIVER, IL
What we could see, from behind, was a silhouette. He sat down on a rock a little off the road to pick a stone out of his left boot. The boot came up almost to his knee, fit a bit tight, wasn’t his size. How, he wondered, had a stone clambered up high enough to slip inside? He massaged his toes and the sole of his foot. Open carts, coaches, covered wagons laden with furniture and men and women ambled by in front of him. Horseshoes kicked up dust. On the horizon a troubled sky loomed, and soon the dust would turn to the kind of silty mud liable to swallow up an unwatched child. At the edge of the boundless flatlands, a screen of rain was advancing and lightning was spreading its fingers across the sky from cloud to cloud. In the distance a violent storm pounded down on the prairie. You couldn’t yet hear the rain, crashing down like still waterfalls, but it was on its way, there would be no escaping it. He knew it and so did the others, marching forward, faces drawn. The accumulated experience of each rain shower and every thunderstorm, on the plains and in the woods, sat heavy on this ragtag group of wrinkled elders and pregnant women and long-haired boys, sat with the weight of several thousand years. They weren’t all Cherokee. Some old Seminole warriors had joined them, and a handful of Choctaw, the ones who hadn’t followed their people years before. The Seminole were easy to pick out with their European dress and dark, almost black skin.
He wearily shook his boot out onto the ground in front of him. The rifle he had leaned against a rock started silently sliding to the right, and he caught it by the leather strap with his free hand at the last second. He heard the rhythmic sounds of human and animal footsteps. You couldn’t make out head or tail of this long march. The convoy must have been a good half mile long, and when he turned his head it was people and animals as far as the eye could see. The women carried children and wore blankets to shelter them from squalls. As days went by a living line had formed, roughly along the path of the trade road. Here and there along the way, men had broken off to light fires, have a drink and a chat. Some stood behind jury-rigged counters selling old tools and provisions, expensive but poorly stitched moccasins, dented cookpots, rotting furs.
They’d left Red CLAY at the Tennessee border in late May, over six thousand strong, after first militia and then regular corps men appeared in their villages, practically right in their homes, making it abundantly clear that this business had gone on long enough. Eight years they’d been given to leave of their own free will. Now, five weeks later, they were closing in on the Ohio River. They’d have to cross with several hundred head of livestock and wagons packed with keepsakes, chests, and mattresses. Even in defeat they were proud Indians, warriors and tribal chiefs, and still spoke with their heads held high. They’d left their dead behind, stripped naked, but were weighed down by what few possessions they’d managed to salvage. They’d been warned the ferryman would jack up the fares at the crossing. They weren’t pioneers joining the gold rush or settlers looking for farmland. They were savages.
A couple hours earlier he’d had a short discussion with a few young Cherokee about the danger of talking back or questioning the fares. In a tone that was respectful, though not perhaps as firm as he would have liked, he’d tried to warn them that any stunt they pulled was sure to backfire. There would be wounded; there would be a massacre. Weapons had been confiscated long before they set off. There were just too many soldiers. The nostrils of one of the Indians flared while he talked and a red violence flushed over his whole face, free of makeup and Warpaint. He knew the young man had to hold back to refrain from killing him then and there, could see the muscles tensing all along his arm and his wrist, fingers clenched tight around a walking stick he’d fashioned from a branch. The wood was polished smooth, worn down at the end, ready to break in several spots. See, there’s nothing to do but agree to the ferryman’s terms. They all understood that this was one more trial to test their will and courage, measure their determination not to disappear, fade away, and cede everything to this European civilization with its myths of new beginnings. It was but the latest in a long series of trials and tribulations that would go on for generations, in the elongated time of mountains, and it was up to them, honourable members of an ancient people, to rise to them. That’s what he told them. He almost believed it. In the meantime, like the other Whites paid handsomely by the State of Georgia and the State of Tennessee, he walked alongside them, kept them safe, made sure the convoy kept moving.
&nbs
p; Five hundred miles further out lay the fertile lands granted by presidential decree in 1830. They would remain Indian Territories for all time, according to the most plausible scenario and the treaties ratified by Congress and the Senate. Everyone knew the United States would never reach that far west of the Mississippi.
As he put his boot back on he heard high-pitched shrieking. Out behind the convoy, on the edge of a stand of trees, a group had formed. Raised voices, women’s voices, shrill cries in a dialect unrecognizable to him, a thousand miles away from his native French and adopted English and his smattering of Innu. He went to look, rifle drawn. Fifty people were crammed into a tightly packed circle around two men fighting. He broke through the crowd, giving onlookers a nudge in the ribs with his gun barrel or his shoulders and clearing a path toward the commotion of raised fists.
A roof of dust clouds hung over those gathered around a massive bare-chested Cherokee warrior who was kicking a young Choctaw in the gut. His long black braid swung like a metronome behind his back, brushing his shoulder blades with every blow. The young man put up no resistance, just kept tucking further into himself. Blood flowed freely from his nose and only by its red colour could you tell him apart from the dried earth. He could barely move to defend or protect himself. Close to his outstretched arm lay a piece of black bread. After a short break to catch his breath, the Cherokee swung back around and lifted his leg. Shod in wood-soled boots, he bent his knee and pounded his foot down on the other man’s jaw, unjointing it in a single blow and leaving his rival dead in a picture of grotesque asymmetry.
“Stop it!” he yelled. “Now!” But no one heard. His hands were wet on the rifle butt. The storm was approaching. No one took any heed, the cries grew louder, the circle closed around the fighters: one standing upright as the other came to pieces. Behind this scene the convoy marched on, breathing as one in their shared fatigue.
When he turned around we saw a face of uncertain age, at once boy and old man, an old knotty soul still capable of unselfconscious laughter or descanting at length on his ancestors’ past. We saw him close his eyes, wondered what he was doing there, alone with his history and memories in the middle of this blood-drunk crowd, people on the march and in tears and ready to beat their neighbour to death over a hunk of bread.
He turned around and asked himself what he was doing there, and we can’t help but second the notion, share in his doubts, his ghosts, his nightmares.
Because there’s no way he could have been there. At that time, that exact moment in July 1838, under that troubled sky on the American grasslands where the Cherokee were on the march, he was somewhere else. Almost all the sources confirm it.
PART ONE
GREAT SMOKIES
CHAPTER ONE
FEBRUARY 1987
HIGHLAND PARK, CHATTANOOGA, TS
Three years out of four, Thomas Langlois didn’t exist. He became transparent, a miscalculation only later corrected, a clause hotly disputed behind closed doors at Royal Society meetings centuries earlier. He was barely tall enough to look at the calendar when the very course of his existence was inexplicably called into question by the teachings of astronomers and scientists in powdered wigs. Every February, Thomas held his breath, and at the end of the month he stopped breathing altogether. He learned that an annual celebration to mark his coming into the world would sooner or later upset the equilibrium of the planets and the stars. It would be disastrous. His education instilled humility and good manners. Young man, it asked of him: What’s more important? Your birthday or the earth’s stability? So he turned transparent. He stopped living in time and dedicated himself to space.
The Appalachian Mountains were without end, their majesty affected neither by the short years nor the long ones, technological progress nor the names they shared with Indian princes. Around Chattanooga, Tennessee, these mountains formed a logical, solid chain at once circular and linear; they were Thomas Langlois’s wellspring and his homeland and they stood in contrast to the friability of his own existence. For Thomas Langlois, mountains were reassuring, almost divine. They gave him purchase in the story that denied him the right to age normally.
Thomas leaned against a mountain that met up with another mountain, his back to yet another. He contemplated it like someone puzzling out a problem. By considering the way geological strata were layered one upon another in space, and not in time, Thomas could reconcile the contradiction of his birth. He meditated on these mountains when he was young, at first because he was younger than everyone else and later because he was older. It was absurd, he got it. In 1984, Thomas’s first birthday was celebrated with very little fuss.
We’re talking about the Appalachians because they are the first thing connecting him to us, us readers: the bedrock of our connection, far deeper than themes and impressions. As this chain of mountains runs northward they meet us here, inside our homes where the great seaway narrows into a river like any other.
Thomas Langlois sat on the steel track, thinking about fate and destiny and the many ghosts in the closet of an American family as long and old as the Mason–Dixon Line, but much more full of twists and turns. When the rail began vibrating he got up slowly and stood further back, closer to the station, a blade of grass between his teeth. He looked at once ten and seventy years old, his palm laid on the station’s exterior wall, daydreaming like any other kid, or some old wandering soul. A tad melancholic, sort of peaceful. The train didn’t much pass or stop in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
He lay his hand on the station wall to hold on to the vibration rising to meet him, climbing from the earth up the wall; to hold on to that early morning several months back when his father came into his room and told him he was heading back up North. Where? Thomas asked. Dans le nord, he replied, up North. That’s where my funny English comes from. That’s where I’m from. Why? Thomas asked, and his father said, Because. Leaving no room for more. And now he had his hand on the wall and was watching the train go by and telling himself that this strange vibration rising through the wooden planks of the building, making the ground move, connected him to his father riding the train to this inconceivably distant North, over the mountains, across the Appalachians; the bond was stronger than the similar cast of their eyes and mouths. Very early on that morning several months before his father had closed the door to his room and, as the rectangle of light contracted, Thomas thought he saw the old army duffle on his father’s shoulder. Like the train, the vibrating ground in the afternoon was much more concrete to Thomas than any facial features he and his father shared.
Of course, this chain of thought possessed a broken link. Thomas had a hard time separating his ideas from other information, took it all and knitted it together into strange stitches of meaning; he could fathom the symbolism’s depths but could not comprehend its span. It was all mixed up in his mind, thrown in together with the rest of what his father had said. Like how he knew a fishing line dropped in a lake might reach the bottom, but had never surmised that the same bottom reached all the way across the lake. Or how he knew his feet could get permanently stuck on the lake bottom, but didn’t understand that sand and silt were one and the same substance. He also knew his father wasn’t coming back. He knew the language full of dry, cracking sounds his father and mother spoke in secret sometimes, a tongue he didn’t understand and would never learn, was the language of the plank his palm rested on now.
Ten feet to his right there was a wild animal. He was good with distances.
One fact of Thomas Langlois’s life we need to know from the outset is this: he was born in a leap year. We mentioned it earlier, in more abstract terms. It may not mean a thing to us, but throughout Thomas’s childhood it meant a great deal to him. It’s important for us to consider this fact now, not to assimilate or be inspired by it, but because it weighed on Thomas’s life and shaped his worldview. We’re not saying he was obsessed by stars, planetary movements, the moon
’s pull on Lake Chickamauga and Lake Nickajack, though he was; we’re saying his birthdate made him feel separate from the others, at once younger and older than everyone else, whiter than the white prairie trash, blacker than the worshippers at the Union Avenue Baptist Church, redder than the first Cherokee to settle the valley.
Another reason he felt separate from everyone else was the foreign way his name was pronounced in his own home. To-ma: that’s how his father said it. He understood, his father didn’t speak the same language as him and everyone around him, and this was unusual, wonderful. At home his name was To-ma and outside it was Taw-mass, with a crisply rendered final “s.” That “s” disappeared when he crossed the threshold of his home. Even his mother, who spoke the same language he did, and whose every word he understood perfectly, called him To-ma, and it sounded even stranger coming from her, as if she’d found a laborious method of cleaving the word “tomahawk” in two. Somehow Thomas’s name sounded undecided, not quite finished, when his mother said it.
After his father went up North for good, his mother started saying the final “s” in Thomas’s name. She also started telling him about her family and Thomas’s family tree.
From our standpoint this arborescence is intriguing. We can look at it, ponder the branches and the roots and connect them to our own existence on the other side of the mountains. One of the first details we have to remember about this family tree, about Thomas’s ancestry and family story, is that the characters’ roots and histories connect with ours, up here, up North. These people cover sentimental and geographical terrain that eventually reaches and touches us. Though these are stories of the South we have no choice but to tell them here. They’ll traverse the Appalachian Range and Canadian Shield; it’s important to discuss them here, even up North where it gets so much colder and we don’t see colour quite the same.
The Longest Year Page 1