As the spaces between trees grew larger, the leader stopped and signalled to the men to take aim, the enemy was near. This battle was going to happen. Behind the giant’s head, a fist unclenched one finger at a time. At the end of the countdown, shots rang out, loud and crisp, in the air, in the middle of nowhere, powder exploded into a thousand sparks and a cloud of smoke formed, strafed by rays of sunlight. Then Aimé saw men emerge from every direction to attack, desperate and completely disorganized, running and hollering; men with wounds and broken rifles set upon the rebels and Aimé saw six of them fall as one, as if yanked from behind by giant hands.
Then it began.
Before the men in blue could fire a single shot the leader grabbed Conklin by the hair and dug his eye out. Conklin screamed in pain. Then the enemy thrust the dagger into his throat, and sliced his neck from side to side. The rest of Conklin’s body fell limp, and rocked from left to right, still held in place by vertebrae and tendons. The leader held it up by the hair, dead and jiggling, and the others stood still for a moment, as if to take measure of what had just occurred. Two soldiers in grey were felled by bullets and Aimé saw two or three rebels hit the ground to reload. He started breathing faster and faster. His hands were no longer co-operating. He had to grab a weapon and join his comrades. Behind him cries rang out from every direction, increasingly violent, decreasingly human. It was all around, closing in on him, the only way out was to remain unseen. Whichever way he turned he saw a spray of blood and smoke darkening the atmosphere.
In the thick of the fighting, the rebels had taken control. Awestruck at first, the men grew bold immediately after Conklin’s decapitation. Shots came from every direction. Aimé saw the leader signal to two soldiers, who leaped on an enemy tangled up in his own gear. As the man struggled to pull out his knife, one of the men in grey thrust his own blade into his chest, then came in close to look him in the eye as he sliced upward with great force. Aimé could see the effort in the man’s clenched teeth. To the left, in between two dead stumps that had lain there thousands of years, a man had shoved his bayonet up the anus of one of Aimé’s young soldiers, the first to hit the ground. A Confederate soldier’s sharp, powerful cry rang out and the others joined him, slapping their mouths like the Indians of legend.
Paralyzed and on the verge of losing consciousness, Aimé watched the scene unfolding in front and behind and around him. He was both part of it and in the background, unable to bring himself to act, unable to summon the absurd courage he would need to die alongside his comrades. But who were these young men, when you got right down to it? He didn’t move, didn’t stir, let himself completely disappear while the leader applied boot spurs to a soldier’s face. The blows followed one after the other, he didn’t stop kicking until the soldier’s face was little more than a squashed-in black and purple lump.
The outcome of the skirmish was soon beyond doubt. Every man in blue lay on the ground in unfortunate positions. Of the fifteen Aimé had left Jackson with two days earlier, only five or six were still alive. They were trying their best to get away or take refuge in a thicket to reload or throw random projectiles. Aimé, eyes wide open, unable to question the evidence his senses presented, saw the leader lean over one of the dying men and slice open his chest to then pull out his heart. Instead of biting into it like a piranha, the giant gave it a good toss.
The still-smoking heart fell at Aimé’s feet. He clenched his teeth so as not to throw up. Years later, he wouldn’t share this episode with Crane, the young man with the kind eyes and good manners who had never fought in a war and yet wanted so badly to describe it, realistically and without artifice. He talked about plenty of other horrible things, and Crane listened attentively, ready for whatever would come his way.
They yanked the weapons from the hands of those still putting up a semblance of resistance, hit them on the neck and shoulder blades, breaking bone and tearing muscle. They sliced Achilles tendons, pulled them taut for no other reason than to watch them snap back. Though their enemies were already dead they pissed on them, as if to warm their final dying thoughts. The leader ripped off their genitals and the others followed suit, with a shower of insults. The faces of the living were red, those of the dead almost black. The leader took one of the northerners’ guns and opened the man’s chest with the bayonet, to pull his guts out into the light of day, and kept pulling until all the intestines were fully removed, and the others kept pummelling the dead, blows raining down until a sort of palpable exhaustion set in. They seemed to be in the process of making up their minds whether to go to sleep then and there, or keep on beating these inert things that had once been men.
The sun started going down and one of the soldiers spat on the ground and, as if they were drunk, as if they were disoriented, with jackets unbuttoned and haggard eyes, they got back into formation and disappeared into the woods, toward the river.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MARCH 1960
PITTSBURG, KS
He went by Kenneth Simons now. No one knew exactly where he came from. In town, people thought he was a crackpot and scarcely acknowledged his existence. A few brave souls had visited his house for the 1959 census. They’d knocked on the large oak door that was painted white like the six columns on his porch, grabbed the wrought-iron knocker and knocked, and the sound resonated over the surrounding prairies. That’s one big house, maybe a haunted house, they thought as they headed back to town without looking back.
People knew that the weekly paper they picked up from its box every Monday was printed somewhere in that giant house, but didn’t talk about it. The Headlight Sun ran articles on all kinds of social issues, retellings of historical events, and editorials under different bylines every week. Whether these articles were tragic or funny, no one could really say. There were stories about alien abductions and Pawnee kidnappings, expert advice on local flora and fauna, stories about the coming climate changes, sun spots, the ozone layer, the acid rain that was going to shower the earth. The paper was tolerated, in its boxes all along Broadway, why not? Who would want to stand in its way, and why? There were recipes no one would ever try because the ingredients weren’t available in local grocery stores. In Pittsburg, Kansas, no one stocked black salsify or manioc root.
Once, in August ’54, something like collective hysteria erupted when townsfolk found copies of the previous week’s Headlight Sun with an article about the coming tornado, strewn out on the street amid the wreckage of a storm. People demanded explanations, there was even talk of rounding up a mob to go to his house. But a few days later people were too busy cleaning their streets and homes and schoolyards, getting the traffic lights working and the power back on, and everyone forgot all about it.
Every Sunday night the newspaper boxes were emptied and then refilled. The kids would read the comics, never sure whether they should laugh or cry. Then, although it was free, they’d put the paper back in the box.
Though he was never seen around town, everyone knew influential people called on Mr. Simons. Sometimes people claimed to have heard someone, at City Hall or at the bank, talking to him on the phone, completing a transaction or doing some business, making deals to do with infrastructure projects on the outskirts of Pittsburg. Some said Belmont Street, overlooking the lake, was named after him, but it had never been confirmed. He lived far from downtown, near the county and state borders his property line ran along the border between Kansas to the west and Missouri to the east. To the north was the Shawnee Reservation where the Indians had been resettled during the great deportations in the nineteenth century. They said his ancestors were the men and women who’d starved and frozen to death on that interminable Trail of Tears, or Scottish immigrants in the fur trade in New England and Canada. He might be descended from a bootlegger as well, someone who’d seen Prohibition’s silver lining and made a fortune before retiring in a sumptuous house, a mansion in an elegant yet vernacular style, built of European marble on groun
d scorched by the War of Secession. They said he’d been a friend of Bernard and Morrie Gursky. They said he’d spent time in jail.
In town, people didn’t talk about him much, but when they did everyone put their two cents in. If you struck up a conversation with the barber on Locust and 6th, he’d tell you he cut everyone’s hair in this town — everyone but Kenneth B. Simons, the man was a ghost, his hair and beard must drag behind him like a train, dirty and full of insects and unknown microbes. If you talked to the mayor he’d tell you that the man’s taxes were paid, beyond that it was none of his business. Simons was an ordinary citizen, entitled to his privacy like everyone else. At night you’d hear strange noises coming from over there, but even the teenagers with greased hair and leather jackets didn’t dare go out to see what was going on.
It was the beginning of March and the sky was wild, shot through with lightning and ridged with whirlwinds that tore young buds right from the branches. The day before, he had celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a Richebourg Pinot Noir. The wine had aged and taken on depth, its taste had developed over years spent lying on its side on a shelf in the dark, oxidizing and oxygenating at the ideal temperature, forgotten by the world, biding its time. Aimé uncorked the bottle without ceremony, but there was solemnity in his movements. His hands shook when he tried to hold them flat in front of his eyes.
The night had passed in silent nostalgia, overlain with regret and even doubt. It had been so long. Images of the past came flooding back, now that he too could feel his body ageing, like everyone else’s, could feel it losing elasticity and vigour. He’d seen himself in situations he claimed to have invented to make himself interesting — but interesting to whom? He had no one to share his life with, no one to dissuade him or encourage him in his phobias and obsessions. He felt bitter, as if he’d spent his life lying and had only himself to blame. He had his gun collection, his stuffed trophies. An impressive library, if anyone would take the time to have a look and decipher the gothic script on the spines. There were reference books, treatises on sorcery and the occult sciences, two-hundred-year-old almanacs in French detailing the allotment of seigneuries along the banks of the St. Lawrence River. He had aged slowly, it was true, but he was an old man now, he could feel it. So this was what it meant to be old. Thoughts of his eventual death kept him company as he gazed into the flames.
A fire burned in the hearth as night gave way incrementally to day and thunder rang out, shaking the windows. He fed the fire with documents that might have hinted at his true identity. A daguerreotype of Aimé at twenty-eight, somewhere in the Wyoming plains, in the audience for one of Bill Cody and Jack Omohundro’s very first travelling circus shows, and dated in black ink, on the back: June 23, 1873. A contract with the city of Syracuse, signed by himself and the city manager, from the end of the Great War, concerning the provision of rum for clinics treating the Spanish Flu. Dozens of pages from his personal journals, which he had begun while he was a prisoner in Quebec. One by one he tore the pages out, reread them, and threw them into the fire as he sipped his wine. There was something in the atmosphere that lent itself to this, it was the fiftieth leap year he had known, the rotations of the earth, its irregular shape, were in agreement, and his personal story was taking on the appearance of a grotesque farce that he no longer felt like believing in. He doubted the words he had spoken to men whose biographies graced his shelves, bound in leather according to the strictures of a dying art.
Thinking about it made him laugh, at himself and at the thousand episodes of despair and exaltation that stretched out like the life of one of those giant turtles on the world’s untouched islands you could read about in Darwin. They were the only living creatures that had walked with Napoleon, aside from the trees, those ever faithful, almost immortal beings whose company he never tired of. He fell asleep with a thousand projects for the future spinning around in his head, the one thing in his existence he could be certain of.
That morning he again noticed a slight trembling he was struggling to control. When he shaved he had to pay particular attention to his double chin, touching it and pressing it between his fingers and moving it from side to side. His teeth, which had been straight and solid, now seemed to be planted in soft, blood red flesh that was malleable and fragile. When he touched his gums he felt their incipient decay.
Spread out on the table in front of him were drafts of plans for an organization he’d dreamed up yesterday between two moments of introspection. It would be a federation, an association, both a bit of a joke and the one serious thing he’d ever attempted. An opportunity to find other people like himself and let them know they weren’t alone, not at all: there must be thousands, in the United States alone, maybe even just in Kansas and neighbouring states. It would be a closed and exclusive society, a refuge for kids who were sick of being made fun of at school, tired of being constantly teased and told they were only two years old when they were in Grade Four. It would be a secret fraternity of sorts, with lifetime membership. Every member would be, by definition, special. He thought back to what it was like to be young and afraid, with no idea of what tomorrow might bring. It would be an order: the Order of Leapers, a.k.a. Twentyniners, those born in that strange vortex in time, who were special by definition, who time did not consume in the same way as everyone else. At once a brotherhood and a temple where they could meet. A place where, like gold miners, their search might be rewarded, where they would find other men and women who recognized their shared qualities and the mysterious signs that hinted at so much more than faulty calendars and celestial pathways.
Aimé took an open notebook off the table and read what he had written on one of the pages. It was good: it captured the thrust, the tone was right. “You are hereby enrolled in the elite fraternity whose membership is limited to those who have birthdays only every four years. There are no initiation fees, no membership dues . . .” The March sky was clear and cold, after the storms, and Aimé could feel a sense of serenity, a sort of communion taking shape, in his chest, with these children who, he imagined, must feel as alone as he had.
There would be no meetings, only a single grand conclave, a spiritual coming-together once every four years when thousands of Twentyniners like himself would communicate telepathically, connecting with each other at the same moment, for the simple joy of knowing that the others were there, elsewhere, spread over the continent but special as well, each with eyes closed and membership certificate in hand: born together on the twenty-ninth day of the second month of the year, a day that exists only one year out of every four. What could be more special, more magical than that?
Aimé smiled; it was the first concrete initiative he had taken since founding the newspaper. He hadn’t created a single thing since the machine that measured the radioactivity of the powerful winds that blew in from the west, where the government was conducting atomic testing. He couldn’t remember being a child, but he’d been young once, he’d been young for a long time, he knew the value of adventure and the pure pleasure of keeping a secret.
He smiled. A new era had begun.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
NOVEMBER 1864
SAINT-HENRI-DES-TANNERIES, QC
The rain dripping in through the barn roof formed streaks along the boards and sheets of tin, and you could hear it beating on the roof like a drum. Aimé and Jeanne were lying on their backs, naked, their clothes hastily spread out over the straw and moist dirt. Their chests rose and fell in time and they were breathing deeply, Aimé consciously matching his to hers. I’m happy, she thought to herself. She wasn’t looking at anything, save the insides of her closed eyelids, a thousand white and yellow spots as illuminated by electrical currents. Her hand had slid into Aimé’s, palm backward. Their eyes were closed, they breathed as one.
Minutes earlier, Jeanne had told Aimé she was almost sure she was pregnant. This was a matter of speaking. She was sure, and he hadn’t known what to do, how to react. T
hey kissed, like the first time, it came as a surprise and she wasn’t yet fully ready. Her arms fell down beside her body, which seemed to melt under Aimé’s embrace, she was enamoured, she was in love, she didn’t know what to do either, she let herself go. He unpinned her corsage, tore a stitch in her blouse. He kissed her at the point where her neck met her clavicle, and then higher up, near her earlobe. It was very dark in the barn, the lantern was out. Jeanne’s wet hair covered her shoulders.
They’d known each other, and had been meeting in secret, for over a year. Jeanne was nervous every time, so the first thing Aimé had to do was calm her down and make her comfortable. He’d appear when she was least expecting it and whisper a quick word before disappearing. A few hours later they would be together, Jeanne’s neck sore from turning around so many times to make sure they weren’t being followed. She was increasingly worried by her younger brother’s temper. Jean had finally taken his place as the family patriarch, refused to listen to others, and was dangerously obsessed with the idea of his father’s murder. The investigation was progressing, they couldn’t keep him in the dark forever: soon he would find the perpetrator and exact his revenge. He was constantly on the lookout, searching for clues, everyone around him was a suspect. It was hard for Jeanne to get away, to find excuses, and especially to lie, to be constantly lying, lying even to her younger sisters who never let her leave without asking where she was going, and if she had a secret lover. They did it jokingly, but deep down Jeanne knew they knew something was going on.
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