The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  Jeanne and he had developed a system of codes for their rendezvous. Often they’d meet in the barn next to Brody’s farm. It was more or less abandoned, no one had bothered to fix the broken window. During one of their first nights together he’d pulled out the last few triangles of glass clinging to the frame, to make sure she wouldn’t hurt herself, though they never came in through the window, why would they when they could walk right in through the barn door. No one ever came to the barn, it was practically abandoned since the Brodys stopped raising milk cows and the railroad laid track behind it, on the Brody property. The train went by, a few paces from the barn wall, which would start vibrating, and Aimé often chose the moment of the train’s approach to say something important, something Jeanne would listen to intently as the noise grew ever louder. When it exploded right behind them, as the locomotive passed in a symphony of metal and steam, they felt no fear, just drew closer together. No one was scared of trains anymore, least of all lovers.

  Aimé walked freely and attracted no attention on Rue Saint-Jacques and Saint-Antoine and Notre-Dame, the long thoroughfares of Saint-Henri that linked the village to downtown. He was an anonymous face among the scores of labourers working on the canal and in the factories opening all along the shoreline. It was crawling with people, they were pouring in from far and wide, Montreal and Dublin and Rome, labourers who spoke twenty different languages at once and carried toolboxes and sacks of potatoes. They had muscular arms and the weight of the sacks made their veins pop out. These were men who could carry two fifty-pound sacks at once, one on each shoulder, no problem, with enough strength left in their voices to tell any man to get the hell out of the way.

  Jeanne lived in a little two-storey wood house on the north shore of the canal, a house built for a foreman, prettily painted but smeared with soot from passing boats and nearby chimneys. The family’s home was in the heart of the worker’s quarter, but they did their shopping with the bourgeois citizens along Rue Saint-Antoine. She had four brothers and five sisters, the youngest born at the end of August. Their father had died under nebulous circumstances. Had he been deliberately killed? Jeanne had doubts; her brother, Jean Junior, was convinced. His talk turned constantly to retribution and punishment and it was causing tension in the home.

  Usually Jeanne dressed plainly, in grey or brown, but when she was meeting Aimé she’d slip brightly coloured fabrics between layers. On the rare occasions when she found herself home alone, she’d rub her neck and armpits with borage and with bergamot, a hard-to-find product in a dazzling silver box she’d found in her grandmother’s things. The first time Aimé saw her, on that scorching day the month before, when she stepped off the tram in front of him, he’d found something irresistible in her austere, dutiful bearing. She’d struck him as a studious young woman, assiduously fulfilling her responsibilities as the eldest child, unconsciously torn between being so pretty, for herself, and so important, for the others. Now, in the evening, in the dim light of the Brody’s barn, he was discovering her coquettish side. She smelled sweet, of perfume, and was quick to flash a mischievous smile when his advances grew too brazen. She said his name exactly how he’d always wanted it to be pronounced.

  After he’d taken those natural, unhurried first steps toward her, he went from being a strangely reassuring presence in the shadows, discernible but never visible, to a sweet, charming face that appeared when she was out doing errands. He made going from place to place more pleasant by adding an element of surprise and the tender beginnings of secrecy. Aimé soon realized that to get to know her he’d have to catch her on her own, which didn’t happen often. The gaggle of children was never far behind her, tugging on her skirts and arms, needy and dependent, as if Jeanne were standing in for both their father and their mother. And to a point that’s just what had happened. The role had been thrust upon her, as if it were only natural. Her mother was still alive but Jeanne was taking her place none the less, with a mixture of resignation and empathy, to give her space to fully embrace her grief in a manner befitting an ageing widow, while sinking into the onset of an apathetic madness, a listlessness that had reared its head after her last pregnancy and never really gone away. Jeanne hadn’t seen her mother out of bed in weeks. She’d taken over all the daily work. The children were now, for all intents and purposes, hers. As he observed her from a distance, gradually honing in on her with the subtlest of advances, Aimé felt this weight on his shoulders as well. It was one he would happily have been rid of.

  So he patiently waited his turn. Sooner or later it always arrived. Whenever Jeanne left home, there he was. At first he was content to say hello in silence by doffing an imaginary cap. As days went by, he noticed that her smile when he passed was increasingly candid, as if she’d been waiting to see him right there, like a familiar, inviting image urging her to come see what the world had to offer, and he knew that somewhere in her memories she’d saved a spot for the young man who’d hailed the tram for her and her brothers and sisters a few weeks, or years, or decades earlier.

  One morning he confidently approached to help her step over a puddle of urine and dirty water, and she held out her hand, without a second thought. She hadn’t planned this gesture, which was both out of character and perfectly natural, an offering that felt like part of some larger plan, as serene and coherent as the work of a master painter in which every inch of space is so much more than mere detail. Jeanne had looked Aimé in the eyes and caught a glimpse of his century-old soul. And, she might have said to herself, how could I not trust someone with so much experience, someone so tried and tested? Or maybe not. When they parted ways on a street corner, they would make polite small talk and Jeanne, who never believed she might come to understand this type of thing, had grasped it in all its intricacies and unspoken subtexts. She blushed and he came back the next day, as she’d trusted he would. It had rained; the puddle was even bigger.

  Because he lied at all times and to everyone, to protect himself, though he didn’t know from what, and since his relationship with Jeanne, sincere though it may have been, was no exception to this general rule, he’d told her he worked at the Redpath refinery. By day he conveyed sacks of raw or refined sugar, he laboured in the tank room and sometimes in the massive warehouse where they stacked cane shipped in directly from the tropics. He was a smooth talker, had had time to learn to express all kinds of notions in just the right tone, supported here and there by memorable images that had etched themselves in Jeanne’s mind, as she listened with closed eyes, ready to hear everything he had to say and hold it in her memory. Aimé spoke like a worldly man who’d had hundreds of adventures, but was only now discovering a woman’s body for the first time. She was a melody, a theme of a thousand variations that would transport him to unknown lands where he would feel at home. Without being too clear on his own role in them, Aimé told her stories of crossing mountains and surprising encounters with legendary figures. He had, he said, met musicians who held their fiddles between their thighs and their bows between their teeth, like this. He’d broken bread with a thousand men in bearskins, men who lived in caves like savages, but read the Bible by the light of gas lamps bought in town. Laid out on a hay bale with Jeanne tucked under his armpit, he talked with his hands interlaced behind his neck, stories unfurling in a monologue unchecked by premeditation. It was hard to know whether he was an eyewitness to the events he described, or had simply heard the stories and collected them to offer Jeanne, these stories like gifts to be unwrapped slowly and peeled of their layers on her own and at her leisure. She tried to keep up but wasn’t always able. Aimé clearly enjoyed talking to her like that, to her and no one else, and she agreed to share this intimacy with him.

  He’d told her that he spent his days hauling sacks of sugar on giant trade ships bound for the four corners of the earth, from Chile to Sweden to New York. No, he’d never been to New York but he’d take her there one day, cross his heart. He promised to take her with him, away from her c
razy family, away from the crazy revenge-fantasies of her brother Jean, who was convinced her father had been deliberately drowned in a mixture of beer and methylene blue. He promised to take her away from there, to a little place no one knew except him, on the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, in coal country where he’d once found a little golden nugget the size of a fingernail. And he gently squeezed her finger up to the nail, to impress on her the size of the nugget, and the wealth it represented.

  By the end of September, Jeanne was ready to give up everything and follow Aimé wherever he might take her, without a care for the responsibilities that had been thrust on her. She thought long and hard on it, in silence, in front of the mirror of the room she shared with four children who were not her own and who slept all around her, the youngest on beds, the oldest on the floor. These children weren’t hers. She owed them nothing, neither her body nor her time. Such was the conclusion she came to when she opened her grandmother’s silver box and sunk the hem of her handkerchief into the perfumed powder. Jeanne left quickly and without a sound, carefully stepping around every creaky floorboard.

  She went down Saint-Ambroise, where the first gas lamps had now been installed, to help people get their bearings and feel safe, avoiding their little halos of light. Soon she crossed Beaudoin, a narrow and scarcely inhabited packed-dirt alley leading north to Brody’s fallow fields, in the middle of which, next to a few great maples that had not moved since before Aimé was born, stood a lone barn where she felt beautiful, young, and desired.

  That night Aimé promised to protect her forever, and never abandon her. He promised he’d be there for her until death did they part, in this way asking for her hand, and she put her index finger to her lips, whispering to him not to make any promises, but it was too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JUNE 1980

  PITTSBURG, KS—MOUNT SPRINGER, GA

  Perusing Albert Langlois’s notebooks, most of which were filled after the birth of his son Thomas, we cannot fail to be impressed by the wealth of obscure references and sources and the arduous labour that went into deciphering archival material and collating disparate elements. The few photographs buttressing the thousands of sentences and paragraphs Albert Langlois wrote over a period of many years are of such poor quality as to be barely usable. Certain particularly dog-eared, beat-up pages seem to be more important than others, but we must not judge too hastily, appearances are deceptive, who’s to say that, hidden somewhere in the folds of an unimportant sentence, we may not lay a finger on a grain of truth. That, at any rate, is what Albert would tell himself as he pored over his notes by the floor lamp’s soft light.

  These notebooks are not Albert’s personal journals, though his enthusiasm or his disappointment as he finds or loses a trace of his ancestor is physically tangible at times, as it is when he struggles to make connections between vague clues and precise locations. At the end of 1985, for example, Albert wrote that he was practically certain that Aimé had, in fact, crossed the Tennessee–North Carolina border one year after his own arrival in Chattanooga. This “practically” is what remains of Albert’s honesty, which, in order to keep his reason intact, he could never totally abandon. Still, his mind was made up. Aimé had come close but then slipped through his fingers, he’d missed him. He’d missed him, that was all.

  Where had he been that day? At the public library, rifling like a madman through late-nineteenth-century newspapers, with the help of a colleague of his wife, who had only recently given birth to his son. Was he beside this newborn child, his child, who had miraculously arrived on the anticipated date, his own tiny little leaper, born on the last day of an extraordinary February? Could it be that he was in the process of wondering at this gift from Providence — a notion he couldn’t accept — in the company of his son, who would live several hundred years as Aimé had? No, Albert didn’t believe in divine Providence; he felt everyone was responsible for shaping their future. Nor did he believe in the Fountain of Youth. But that didn’t stop him from searching for clues in the stories and careers of this other leaper whose trace seemed ever to elude him. He didn’t believe in much, but he believed in himself and this story that never stopped growing more prodigious and convoluted, with multiple ramifications that he painstakingly reconstructed in his notebooks and in his roiling mind. Had he felt Aimé coming into view before fading into the distance, only to drop him another signal, or avoid him, again and forever? Weren’t these two things one and the same?

  Where had he been on that day, while his ancestor walked the trails of Clingman’s Dome, the state’s highest point, equipped only with a canteen and waterproof boots? Was he poring over an anonymous sepia-toned photograph that showed a boy of barely sixteen, in uniform, with drumsticks in hand and a Union Army drum strapped to his shoulder? The image had been eaten away by the years to the point where it had little left to tell him, save the suggestion of possible immortality. Was he trying to convince Laura that their child was special, more than all the other kids, and that she must understand why? That she had to give him a few years for this experiment and she’d understand when the time was right? Was he trying to convince her of a possible miracle at the precise moment when Aimé, a concrete example of what he was trying to explain and express and make tangible, was so close at hand? It was 1980 and his son had just been born, on the twenty-ninth day of the second month of the longest year.

  A few years later, in 1985, torn between joy at knowing a little more and anger at being led astray, he had written that there was no longer a doubt in his mind: the evidence he had gathered — he had reams of it — was conclusive.

  For example, when he crossed the Appalachian Range along the interminable path that ran from Georgia all the way to Maine, Aimé had signed registers in the name of B. Van Ness. Albert had seen them with his own eyes. No one had seen him and no one cared. It came down to the same thing, he had torn out the pages where Aimé’s signature appeared, faded, worn, so real and yet false. When he closed his eyes he saw Aimé walking.

  He’d been thinking about it for ages, it was one of those grandiose projects he’d fallen into the habit of putting off by unconsciously telling himself there was no need to rush. He had celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday earlier that year, alone as always. There was no rush. It sometimes seemed the world was just getting started, a new day dawning. He spoke five languages and read seven. He had been a vegetarian for the last twenty-three years. He invented mechanical objects that were of great utility both at home and in the woods, inventions he’d never patented that had become household staples. Of the many people he’d met in the course of his life, of the hundreds of people he’d spent time with and liked and even loved, sometimes over long periods of time, no one knew his secret. There were times when the desire to tell all and get everything off his chest was strong, but he knew people wouldn’t take him seriously. They’d think he was crazy. He said it over and over in his head, the first sentence of a dialogue that led absolutely nowhere, ever, and was destined to derail and come apart under the weight of its contradictions.

  I was born in 1760 by the Plains of Abraham.

  Increasingly these words made him blush, as the wrinkles appeared on his face and around his nose, and he would say it aloud for his ears only. It made him blush and he felt a pang of shame. His reflection was less and less forgiving. He was getting older. Who would believe him? He’d seen Benjamin Franklin early one morning not long after he moved to Montreal. The great statesman was leaving the Château Ramezay with a four-soldier escort, well dressed and armed with rifles, and Aimé caught a glimpse of him. People had gathered, there were rumours he would address the crowd. It was the year his body started slowing down, as if his biological clock had suddenly stopped, perhaps crushed by a powerful, angry fist. Who would believe him when he was starting to doubt himself? Had he actually seen Franklin? He was a prisoner of mysterious images that forced him to put words to things he couldn’t understan
d, an endless parade of images and metaphors, improbable and inappropriate, one after another, perpetually spinning around internal works that were broken somehow, out of tune. He recalled a brief acquaintance with a man who said that he would never be near- or far-sighted, it had been confirmed by leading doctors, there was no specific word for this phenomenon. They called it a “handicap,” that was the only way to accurately describe it. He was the handicapped one, not the others with bifocals or contact lenses for their ageing, tired eyes; the mechanism of his eyesight was off somehow, the damage had been done in his mother’s womb, or maybe after. Aimé thought about this man and imagined he might have been able to understand him. But it was too late for that now. The man had died in the sixties. Which sixties? The nineteenth or twentieth century? So many questions, it was so hard to say. And, anyway, Aimé had never been close to the man. As he looked at himself in the mirror and saw new crow’s feet, he realized he was going through his worst existential crisis in two centuries.

  Everywhere you looked, new inventions of every description were popping up. Life was getting easier. In a small, secret way, he’d played a part in these developments. In his spare time he’d invented sophisticated machines, spent years developing solutions to specific functional problems. It was all a game to Aimé. He never patented anything, just kept improving processes and observing his inventions out in the world from a distance. When he wasn’t thinking about the tools used to accomplish everyday tasks, he studied Latin languages and read linguistics and anthropology treatises that explained how Germanic dialects had transformed into Old English and Swedish ten centuries ago. He had a passion for things older than himself: igneous rocks, fossils, trees, languages.

  He lived in a large house with columns and a balustrade porch on three of four sides, a house built for cotton traders, surrounded by farmland, outside Pittsburg, Kansas. There were nights out there when the wind blew fiercely and he missed the mountains. That year, the need to walk had grown impossible to ignore and, despite his accumulated wealth and the growing circulation of his weekly newspaper, nothing could stand in the way of his desire to prove he was still capable of accomplishing something great. Who cared if it was something everyone else would file under superfluous?