The little girl was discharged from hospital. The journalists had new and more pressing concerns. They’d spent a few days camped out in front of Thomas’s grandparents’ house, filmed a story about his mother’s death in the 1994 plane crash, it was still fresh in people’s minds, the plane sunk in the ocean somewhere between JFK and Charles de Gaulle: hundreds dead, including Thomas Langlois’s mother, Laura Howells — librarian, city employee — who’d been on her way to an international conference on the changing image of the book. The young man must have been distraught, he must have been rudderless, he’d lost his mother at a tender age and under tragic circumstances. Now he was living with his grandparents and, despite what people were saying, he didn’t go to private school. Thomas was a public school kid, he went to the same high school as everyone else. The whole thing lasted no more than a few days. The talking heads and sociologists each got a turn to talk, the journalists described the little girl like an angel who had touched down on earth to visit, a slow zoom over the photo of her smiling face was in heavy rotation. No one talked about the driver. Less than a week after the story broke, the newspapers lost interest. The girl hadn’t died, she’d get off with some scars, her name was Keysha-Ann Johnston and she lived a few hundred yards from the site of the accident. No one talked about the driver because Keysha-Ann and Thomas were the story. And then no one talked about it at all.
Over the phone, Thomas told Mary that he understood it was a bad idea, of course it was, he saw her point, but he was seriously considering going to see Keysha-Ann at home, at her house. The dust had settled, she was getting better, surrounded by loved ones. There were things he had to say to her, things he wanted clear up, it was so important, Mary got it, didn’t she? Mary got it, of course she did, but she said it again, it was a really bad idea all the same; she said it many times, a really, really, really bad idea. People around here are mad, see what I mean? Yes, of course, of course Thomas understood, he would be mad too, he could put himself in their shoes, but if he knew them, and if they got to know him, they would understand, they would understand in the end. Thomas had to try, he had to tell the girl he was sorry, ask the community for forgiveness, her mother too, he wanted to show her he wasn’t a coward, he understood the gravity of what he’d done, he was the kind of person who understood that actions had serious consequences. Mary interrupted him:
“Thomas, it’s not about whether you’re a coward.”
“I know. But still, that doesn’t change anything, I have to go. Know what I mean? I have no choice.”
“Yeah, I see that. But, Thomas, you’re the one who’s got to understand, they’re not going to welcome you with open arms. And you’ve also got to understand why. There isn’t going to be any forgiveness, or, I don’t know, redemption. No one is going to take you in their arms. Do you get that?”
“Yeah, I get it, I totally get it. I don’t expect anything like that. That’s not what I’m picturing, Mary. Not at all. It’s between me and Keysha. I have to do it for me. Do you get that?”
“Yeah, I get it.”
He knocked on the door of the little bungalow a few days later. It was a hot, late-June afternoon and Thomas was empty-handed, his arms at his side, wearing a white T-shirt. His glasses were spotless, his hair neatly combed. He knocked and heard voices inside, a woman’s and a man’s, they were coming nearer. The door opened a little and Keysha-Ann’s mother looked him in the eyes for a fraction of a second and then started crying and, unable to do anything else, backed up a little with her hand still on the doorknob. At the end of the hallway he heard a man’s voice yelling out “Who is it?” or maybe “What is it?” — he wasn’t quite sure which — and Keysha-Ann’s mother didn’t seem to understand what Thomas was doing standing there on her front porch. She’d only ever seen him on TV, this person who had almost killed her daughter, scared her and sent her jumping backwards. His palms were instantly sweaty and he wanted to wipe them on his jeans. She was still looking at him with tears in her eyes. She asked him what he wanted and he didn’t have time to answer, the man’s voice was back, louder, like a wave of menacing sound in Thomas’s ears, like a wave cresting and breaking at the same time and making the plaster on the walls shake. Mom! What is it? She turned around, the door opened wide and Thomas saw that she was carrying a baby in her arms, in one of her arms. The baby had lighter skin than its mother’s, almost pink, and black, curly hair. She answered the voice from the back of the house:
“Nothing, baby. It’s nothing. Just him, the guy. That guy. Him.”
“Who?”
Thomas spoke quietly so as not to wake the baby:
“I came to see Keysha-Ann. Do you think I could . . .”
She said it again, louder:
“The guy. Thomas.”
A powerful groundswell shook the walls and the roof of the house, and Thomas saw a black shape appear in the hallway in front of him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, not even a T-shirt, and his upper body was dark brown and shiny. He came forward and Thomas instinctively backed up and stumbled on the step leading down to the little concrete landing. The young man pushed his mother. She started yelling at him to calm down. He was Thomas’s age, you could tell, and his arms and torso were muscular. There was a great violence in his movements, you could see the muscles tensing up in his neck and above his shoulder blades. Thomas tumbled backwards and tripped and landed on the sidewalk, holding onto the metal fence. He was barely back on his feet, in a defensive position, bent double in a stance meant to be non-confrontational, when the young man started pushing his chest and yelling, cursing. He was yelling so loud while pushing him toward the street that Thomas feared for his eardrums before he feared for his life. When he fell down on the sidewalk the young man checked himself. That’s when the neighbours started coming out, drawn by the noise. He pointed his index finger in Thomas’s face, nearly touching his forehead, and told him to never come back here. To never try to contact his sister. That if he ever saw him in the neighbourhood again he’d kill him.
The following week Wright Howells wrote an article for a small-circulation Methodist newsletter. After not publishing anything in more than a decade he had found his voice again. His outings in the old Buick lasted longer and longer, he would set off to meet people, plan events, and come home with legal documents and statistics. Thomas found himself unable even to open his mouth in Wright’s presence. The old man was increasingly intimidating. He felt uncomfortable, had a hard time accepting this improbable alliance his grandfather seemed to hold so dear, as if Thomas’s nearly killing a young girl and now dealing with the fallout were supposed to bring them together. Wright talked non-stop about the hot-blooded people who lived downtown, about self-ghettoization, how the suburbs were held hostage by a “black belt” of violence and drug abuse. With Thomas he used sociology terms and scrupulously avoided religious rhetoric, but beneath the surface of his words lurked a deep-seated anger, the exasperation of a fair man who believed he had given his all to the community, only to watch it go to pot before his very eyes. They had assaulted his grandson. At first Wright had spoken of lawyers; now he was talking about getting out in the streets, holding public meetings, bringing different parishes together to take a united stand against the wild accusations certain reactionaries had brought against Thomas, making him out to be something he wasn’t. Wright railed against the way opinion leaders spat venom, had no idea what they were talking about. Josephine wasn’t sure how to react. She hadn’t seen Wright like this for years. Thomas was trying to get closer to her, slowly, unconsciously, but she just seemed to be moving further away, lost in thoughts and memories that belonged to her alone and which she felt no inclination to share, content to signal her approval with a nod whenever Wright asked her a direct question or demanded, straight out, Am I right? One day, very early in the morning, Wright came into Thomas’s bedroom, something he never did, in the half light of dawn, and said, Those niggers ain’t going to get us,
boy. And to Thomas’s ear, coming from his grandfather, that uncompromising man of martial bearing who loomed so large in his mother’s stories and descriptions, it wasn’t the word “nigger” that was most shocking or incongruous, no, he had been expecting that. It was the incorrect, common, downright ungrammatical “ain’t.”
The bus took Wilcox Boulevard all the way from Thomas’s neighbourhood to Mary’s. It was still Wilcox Boulevard in Avondale but there were no massive elms and when Thomas got off the bus he thought he noticed something strange about three young men leaning against the wall of the 7-Eleven smoking a joint. They were staring at him. And he sensed that they kept on staring at him, staring at his tingling spine, as he set off toward Mary’s. He was afraid they would follow him. There was something unnatural about his walk, and this awareness only made it worse. His spine was tingling, the fibres of his shirt chafing against pools of sweat gathering in the hollows of his back. It was hot, a real Tennessee scorcher, the kind of day that ends in evening windstorms, or even thunderstorms, or maybe the first tornado in over a decade. They never got twisters around here, no one had seen one in years. Tornadoes rarely developed between the mountains, or in the cordillera between Mount Lookout and Mount Signal.
When Thomas reached Mary’s, his shoulders were bent under the weight of a thousand stares. She welcomed him with a smile but he couldn’t help feeling she was watching the street after she let him in and shut the front door. After a long conversation, during which Mary cried profusely, as she served him coffee and lay her hands on his, she showed him a letter she had gotten that day: a letter from Albert Langlois to his son, addressed to Mary, with a short introduction explaining that he preferred to make contact through her, though he didn’t want it to burden her. He’d always trusted and respected her, he wrote in his strange English, which even he called “rusty.” On a separate piece of paper Albert told Thomas where he was, what part of the world, what he was doing there. When he read that information, tucked away in the middle of a short sentence about his sadness at having learned of Laura’s death, long after the event, Thomas felt no surprise, every line was a confirmation, one detail at a time, of what he had always known without actually knowing: his father had gone back to Quebec, to a town called Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, where he was born and had grown up, between the Chic-Chocs and the St. Lawrence River, not far from us at all if you stop and think about it. His father had left Chattanooga because he thought he had finally found what he had been searching for without respite for more than thirteen years. He had found information about his ancestor, a certain Aimé Bolduc, and thought it was the answer to the riddle that brought him to Tennessee in the first place, where he had met Laura and he had married her and they had had a son.
He read the words of his father, Albert Langlois, who had abandoned his family and felt guilty about it. This was the first time since he’d left that he communicated with Thomas, and he would wait for an answer from him before reaching out again. If Thomas agreed, they could try to mend the fences that had fallen into disrepair and collapsed in the years of silence.
He looked up and Mary looked back at him, with love almost, with what looked to him like love in the process of cracking and breaking apart under the stress of multiple emotions, like so many juggling balls she couldn’t quite keep in the air. She looked at him with her big brown eyes and asked if this letter was what he had been waiting for. Was he happy it had finally come? He said he didn’t know exactly what this would mean to him, but he was happy to learn his father was doing well, or was still alive at any rate, up there. Mary rested her hand on his and said to Thomas: I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come back here, not for a while at least.
She offered to walk him to the bus stop, to keep him safe, hold his hand and protect him from the people who wanted to hurt him, those who might believe he was trying to provoke them by coming back around here. She held his hand until the bus stopped and Thomas got on, but it didn’t change a thing because on the bus ride home he was beaten up by a bunch of guys who wore black coats and work boots even in the suffocating heat. There was nothing the driver could do to stop it.
Before he passed out Thomas thought about waves breaking on the rocks, the salty breeze and drafts of seaweed, but it might have been an illusion caused by the smell of blood and dust in his nostrils and the corner of his mouth.
PART TWO
ALLEGHENIES
CHAPTER FIVE
DECEMBER 1864
NEWPORT, VT
As far as anyone can tell, Aimé left Montreal in November and crossed the border a couple weeks later, somewhere around Stanstead, likely in the middle of some field or on the fringes of an uncleared forest, almost certainly under cover of darkness. Perhaps he sailed the frigid waters of Lake Memphremagog on some junky skiff with a pair of young Abenaki men he knew and trusted. He could also have travelled by stagecoach, hurtling over the landscape to the clopping of horseshoes and snorting of horses, but that seems unlikely since his aim by that point was to go unnoticed and be forgotten.
The scattered documents and testimonies Albert Langlois had gathered in over a decade of research mostly place Aimé in Newport, Vermont, starting in December 1864. It was there he came in contact with the Van Ness family and entered their social circle. But the paper trail is rife with contradictions. It’s hard to ascertain anything with certainty. To retrace his story and give it even a modicum of linearity we will, at times, have to choose one tack over another, bearing in mind the possibility that errors of fact have slipped in. The strictures of intellectual honesty and our respect for our sources demand that we keep a watchful eye out for discrepancies between the teller’s horizon of expectation and the rigour of his investigation. We feel this is how Albert would have wanted it, though it’s too late to ask him now.
In early December, Newport was in an uproar. A company of green recruits had just left for Washington, sent off with speeches and choked-back tears on the front steps of City Hall. It didn’t help that the cavalry had returned bearing news of a rebel attack at St. Albans, on the banks of Lake Champlain, some sixty miles west. The hostilities were drawing dangerously close. Twenty armed men led by Bennett Young had come in by the northern highway and taken over Main Street. They proclaimed St. Albans part of the Confederacy, claimed victory in the name of President Jefferson Davis. Barns were burned and all three banks robbed, even the City Bank, despite the soldiers posted at the door. The skirmish lasted several days and took one life before the perpetrators made off with a hefty sum. People said they were hiding out in Quebec City or Montreal, where the Royalist government would never extradite them to the Union. People said they’d planned to kill the governor and burn his house down, but settled for emptying the bank vaults and firing their rifles in the air, accompanied by credible imitations of Sioux and Apache war cries.
Word was they’d left town three days later, on October 21, at dawn. News was trickling into Newport now, too late as always, with the urgency of cavalry soldiers dismounting their steeds. The townsfolk were barricading themselves in their homes. In some families, every son had enlisted, leaving the old men to clean the family rifle and practise shouldering and reloading as they’d done in the War of 1812. There were lineups at the blacksmith, people waiting to melt down jewellery for shot, and poring over maps to mark strategic locations to post men.
Aimé had come to a town where this atmosphere coloured even the nights, when torches burned bright and shots rang out more frequently. He took a room at Frederick Van Ness’s hotel, where he was at first suspected of spying, a common fate of travellers in dark times, though nothing came of it. There were plenty of strangers in town, especially Canadians come to work or write articles, and Aimé stood out only for his slight accent that people found hard to place. Preparations were taking a great deal of time and energy. Envoys had been dispatched to the surrounding territories, to summon the few men who were still on
their land and so raise a militia. Norwich Military College had sent a division, they were expected by train at any moment. Days were spent casting bullets and ramming cannon, nights gathered in the hotel lobby or on the church steps, in silence or in noisy preparation, awaiting the enemy reprisal.
The first time he talked to Aimé, Frederick Van Ness took him for a Dutchman, an intuition he chose not to corroborate. Van Ness asked his guests as few questions as possible. How long was he planning to stay? How would he paying? We don’t take foreign currency anymore, it’s the inflation. Aimé approached the hotel front desk and Van Ness was struck by how much he resembled his own son William. They exchanged a few words, standard niceties, and Aimé went off up the main staircase to his room, with all the vigour and weariness of a man aged at once twenty-six and one hundred and four. On the streets outside, people were running around with torches. Sometimes you could hear the faraway cries of a patrol convinced it had seen horses off in the distance at the river bend. Evacuation plans had been drawn up for the dignitaries: they would flee by boat to Quebec’s Eastern Townships, where their allies would be waiting for them. Twice during these days of constant panic the alarm sounded, and a fight broke out after heated words in a tavern that stayed open too late.
The Longest Year Page 7