Arvida

by Samuel Archibald

  Michel began to write and to sleep in the master bedroom. After a few weeks, the villagers began to ask him questions. A few inquired hypocritically after Madame Gemma, others dared to ask him if he intended to leave the manor house and remake his life. As usual, the people in town understood nothing.

  Gemma was in the house. With him. She lived now on the periphery of his gaze, behind half-open doors, and in the depths of mirrors.

  As long as she was there, he would have no reason to leave.

  The Animal

  BLOOD SISTERS II

  Colour had not yet returned to the world but the light was already there like a thick coat of primer blearing the surface of things. Frogs were croaking in the pond and birds were beginning to sing in the branches of distant trees. It wasn’t quite day and it was no longer night, it was a part of the day that belonged to no one and her father poked his head through the half-open door to say in a soft voice:

  “Wake up, my babies.”

  She heard her sister groaning in her bed on the other side of the room. She still couldn’t see anything. Her eyes had adjusted neither to the darkness nor the faint light filtering between the curtains. To her half-shut eyes the room looked like a Polaroid, with all the posters and all the furniture and all the curios in the same place as the night before, except for her sister who had gone to sleep facing her, her arms over her breasts and her delicate fists clasped under her chin as if in prayer, but who was now lying on her back with one arm across her face.

  “Lucy, wake up.”

  Her sister moaned.

  After their father, their mother looked in with her voice that was sometimes piercing and sometimes high-pitched and sometimes low and threatening but never soft. Her mother had a husband and five daughters and two dogs and seven chickens and three rabbits and an indeterminate number of cats. She had a house to run and not much time to be gentle, especially in the morning.

  The little girl who really wasn’t one, the adolescent, sat up in bed and began to stretch. There wasn’t a muscle or a nerve or an organ of her body that was not howling that it wanted to go back to sleep but she’d decided it wasn’t to be and she stuck to her guns. She got on all fours and extended her neck and arms and back just like a cat, making little orbits with her shoulders. She arched and de-arched, bringing her head forward and back as far as she could go in each direction.

  “Lucie, get up before mama arrives.”

  Her sister groaned again.

  “Okay, then sleep. Big ninny.”

  There was not a muscle not a nerve and not an organ that wasn’t pleading with her to stop this torture and go back between the sheets where she would be sheltered from the cold, where her entrails would stop wrenching and tearing and twisting in her belly like the gears of an archaic machine. But she didn’t stop and didn’t listen to the voices and did not go back under the covers. The adults were always comparing themselves to animals. They said they were strong as horses, smart as mice or sparrows, fearful as hares. They were pig-headed or had faces like cows. They tried to set themselves apart as well. She liked her parents because they often spoke more kindly about animals than people. They respected animals and said while reading the newspaper or watching television, “A dog wouldn’t do that,” or “A horse wouldn’t do that.” But they were exceptional. The others lay in wait for an animal’s instinct to betray it so they could scoff at its stupidity. It seemed to be an ordeal for them to see love in the eyes of a dog or their own expressions on the face of a monkey.

  She knew exactly what differentiated men from animals and she knew the difference was very slight and had nothing to do with love or sadness or the capacity of people to feel whatever it was but everything to do with their ability to deny emotions the right to run rampant within them. Man was not the only intelligent creature but he was the only one who could use his intelligence to no longer feel and to no longer be a creature at all. She knew all that and she trained herself not to heed what issued from her heart and her innards. She was training herself this very moment by extricating herself from under the covers despite the supplications of her every cell. Soon she would experience everything but would allow herself to be touched by nothing and she would be not at all animal but totally man, totally woman.

  She accused her sister several more times of being dense and dumb for not being able to get out of bed, but their mother didn’t come to shout at them from the bedroom doorway and when the adolescent and her now wakened sister burst into the kitchen, she stopped them short, saying:

  “Sit down. What do you want for breakfast?”

  “We can’t have breakfast, mama. We’ll be late.”

  “No. Papa doesn’t want you to walk today. He’s going to drive you. You want eggs?”

  The girls sulked a little, then ate in silence.

  The girls loved going to work on foot because they had to cross what they called the fields of the Lord up to Concession Road 3, and Monsieur Béliveau’s fields as far as the gravel road serving the residents of Lac Brochet, and follow the road for a hundred metres before turning right onto the dirt road that had belonged to the hydroelectric company and wound its way through the hills up to the cadet camp. It took almost an hour every morning but they loved doing it together at dawn. Their grandfather had been a guard at the hydroelectric company’s installation. He’d spent half his life tramping these roads and the girls felt that the road was theirs and that the whole world belonged to them when they walked on it. It was an ancient world where an old broken-down shelter became a castle’s ruins. An imaginary world they peopled with creatures they didn’t believe in but that they’d believed in for long enough that the bushes and crevices along the way remained forever their lairs. They imagined imps and fairies, dragons and werewolves; they imagined enormous creatures that were half fish and half reptile and that swam in the brackish current of the little stream, and the girls even contrived to see them forcing their way through the water’s surface with powerful strokes of their fins.

  There was also a real cowboy.

  The handsome Monsieur Robertson sometimes rode one of his horses along the road at dawn and they played a game with him. Always the same. It was a game that never changed. A ritual. They whistled at Monsieur Robertson every time they met or passed him along the road and they said “Howdy, cowboy,” assuming the provocative poses of saloon molls while he greeted them by pinching the brim of his hat and saying, “Med’moiselles.” He didn’t look like their father who was short in stature, both sturdy and portly.

  He was tall and gnarled but his face betrayed the same mix of gentleness and strength as did that of their father, something they didn’t find in most of the men their father resembled.

  This was their path through a world that belonged to them only and they hated it when a car passed by or when their father drove them because as far as they were concerned fairies could perfectly well rub shoulders with cowboys but not with Cadillacs, and for them such machines were huge metal blots on the landscape. But Billy had come back and their father didn’t want them wandering around out in the open so he’d decided that they would spend this morning on a dreary road behind the windows of a pick-up truck that like a dull blade strips the world of all its mystery and magic.

  *

  One Sunday a long time ago their father had come to pick them up in his truck and said to them:

  “Get in, my babies.”

  Lucie was fourteen and she was twelve. They didn’t like being seen in public with their parents any more, but the Sunday excursions still held sway to some extent. They often amounted to a simple tour of the fields of the Lord and the village streets, but sometimes they turned into something else. When they were little that’s how their trips began. Their father loaded up the baggage in secret and came to fetch them in the car with their mother and they drove all four together or all five once Angèle was born or all six once Frédérique was
born or all seven once Corinne was born, and their mother turned to them with, in the palm of her hand, two doses of Gravol, one for each of them, and they woke up somewhere else. In the house of strangers or on roads they didn’t know.

  Once their father had asked them:

  “Would you like to see the ocean, my babies?”

  And he had led them through valleys and across mountains to the great river where they had boarded a boat and seen lazy whales like big boulders just peeking out of the water.

  Once their father had asked them:

  “Would you like to fly in the sky, my babies?”

  And they had driven to a nearby airfield and their father had taken them for a ride in a Cessna with a pilot friend. They had flown over their house on the fields of the Lord, and flown farther over fields and houses and lakes and kilometres of forest. The girls had the feeling that the world was much bigger than they would have believed but also smaller because they could with one bent index figure encircle whole villages. From the sky the world was like a miniature model but when they arrived face on to the brilliant sun over the limitless Lac Saint-Jean, the little girls, blinded, lost all notion of geography, and they believed like the pagans that there existed nothing beyond the lake and that they had come to the end of something.

  That Sunday their father had asked, once they were both settled in the back seat:

  “Do you want to see a bear, my babies?”

  The girls had already seen horses and cows and hares and frogs and all sorts of animals including the eagle owl that had amused itself for months opening the skulls of their mother’s cats to peck away at the insides of their heads, consuming the contents like a sorbet. The girls had always had cats and dogs and they had seen hundreds of insects and had extricated from the muddy edges of the trout pond black and yellow salamanders they kept in a tortoise aquarium and they had even seen a fox once at the back of a blueberry field and a moose on the cadet camp road, but the only bears they had seen were in their imaginations.

  Their father took them with him in the autumn to put up electric fences around the beehives. The odour of honey attracted bears and you had to protect the hives from their attacks. It was just a precaution because there were not many bears around but the girls liked to believe in danger and their father let them do so. They imagined the silhouettes of mammoths writhing and roaring at the edge of the forest with red eyes and frothy mouths and big yellow fangs. Those monsters were all they knew of bears.

  Their father led them to an old farmhouse behind which there was no longer a farm but just a big shed and an old lopsided barn and the carcass of an ancient tractor. Behind the shed there was a cage as big as the shed itself. It was two metres high and its rectangular surface was fifteen metres by ten. The wooden structure was made from big square-ended beams. Six of them were planted like pickets; four marked out the limits of the structure and two reinforced it at the mid-points of the longer sides. Other beams were installed horizontally to form a frame at the end and in the middle of each support. Between the beams there was metal mesh as in a chicken coop but with wider openings, and steel strands that were much thicker. In the cage was a large mound of black fur glinting blue that was pacing to and fro and sniffing the ground. From a distance you might have thought it was a dog but the animal was bigger and it smelled stronger and its eyes were both gentler and wilder and its muzzle looked made out of wood. A man came out of the house. He shook their father’s hand and kissed both girls on their cheeks and ushered them into the cage where they could pet the chained-up bear. Its fur was thicker and stiffer than that of a dog and underneath its body seemed warmer. The old gentleman stayed next to the bear while they were touching it and stroking its neck and said in its ear that it was a good bear and a good animal and talked to it just like you talk to a horse or a dog.

  *

  On the way home their father told them that the old man’s name was Monsieur Roberge. He’d been a friend of their grandfather and had become his own friend when he’d hired him to help build his house. Monsieur Roberge had been an avid hunter all his life and deep down he still was even though he hadn’t hunted for years. You call an avid hunter like Monsieur Roberge a Nemrod, which was the name of a great hunter in the Bible. It was hard to understand for little girls like them, but people who kill animals often love animals dearly, and it’s hard to grasp but a Nemrod like Monsieur Roberge had to his credit only a limited number of kills. Never mind his skill in tracking and flushing out and trapping game, one day a Nemrod could no longer muster the strength to kill it.

  Monsieur Roberge was at just that point when he’d met Billy. He’d not killed for years and went to his camp just to fish and prepare the hunting grounds for his sons. He set up salt licks and dug mud holes and scattered apples and at day’s end called deer and moose. He took animal photos. He never told anyone, but he sometimes got close enough to the moose to touch them.

  One night their garbage can, which they kept outside with a heavy stone on the lid, was overturned and the plastic bag inside was torn open and the contents were scattered all about. To reassure Madame Roberge, Monsieur Roberge blamed it on racoons and their legendary cleverness but he began to check the surroundings looking for clues. The ground was dry and there were no tracks and by the time he saw them the shed had been smashed into and the refrigerator door torn off and what remained of the provisions and plastic wrappings and chicken bones and shattered Mason jars was spread everywhere around the house and you couldn’t hold racoons responsible for that. On his satellite phone he called a game warden he knew and asked his advice. The warden said:

  “If there’s a bear that’s fallen in love with your garbage you’d best kill it. He’ll never get tired of visiting you and one fine day he’ll come when your wife is all alone picking mushrooms or your grandchildren are there for the weekend and you know as well as I do how something like that can end up.”

  Monsieur Roberge had heard about relocating bears. The agents captured a bear in a trap and went to free it at the ends of the earth.

  “But you’re already at the ends of the earth. Where will we put it, your bear? You do that for bears that get near urban spaces or rural communities. We could try it with your bear but that would just pass the problem on to another hunter.”

  Monsieur Roberge said he understood and he hung up.

  The next day he hung from the branches of trees, in every direction, rags impregnated with vanilla extract, and he laid out bait by distributing pails of stale doughnuts and rotten fruit and bacon grease here and there on the property. Then he sat in an old bus seat on his steps and cleaned and loaded his rifle and waited, calm and motionless. An hour passed and then two and then three and in the middle of the fourth hour, at dusk, the bear came out of the woods about thirty metres from the house. It had smelled him but it had also smelled the pail of bait sitting in front of it and it hesitated. The bear looked both ways in the clearing like a child crossing the street. When it turned its head the other way Monsieur Roberge, who had killed nothing and taken aim at nothing for years, shouldered the gun and buried a hundred-and-eighty-grain bullet in its vital parts, tearing in two the bear’s big heart. The bear took ten steps. For the first five it seemed normal and just frightened by the explosion. At the sixth it seemed to be running on ice. At the tenth its legs gave way beneath it as if its four kneecaps had dislocated at the same time. It had come near enough to the house for Monsieur Roberge to see a laborious breath swell its flank. He reloaded and heard the ejected cartridge bounce off the wooden porch. Madame Roberge, who didn’t like to see animals killed, had stayed inside the house. From behind the screen she asked:

  “Is it over?”

  “Yes. Please bring me my knives.”

  He went down the steps with his rifle in his hands. The bear was no longer breathing. He circled the body and thrust the gun’s barrel into the bear’s glassy eye. It was then that he heard the li
ttle growls and saw the small animal come out of the woods at the exact spot from which its mother had emerged. Instinctively Monsieur Roberge took off the rifle’s safety catch even though he already knew that he’d never have the heart to kill it.

  His wife arrived a few minutes later with the knives. She approached cautiously and asked her husband, whose back was turned:

  “Is he dead?”

  “She’s dead,” he said, turning around with the animal in his arms.

  The cub whimpered and nibbled and sucked the ends of his fingers as if they were nipples. It didn’t really hurt.

  “What’s that?”

  “That is my bear.”

  The girls asked dozens of questions when they got home.

  “How did they feed it?

  “The Roberges had an old golden retriever, Jackie. She nursed and weaned Billy like a pup.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear.”

  “Is he tame?”

  “About as tame as a bear can be.”

  “Are we going to go back to see him?”

  “Yes my babies, but you mustn’t mention it to anyone. Monsieur Roberge doesn’t have the right to keep a bear.”

  But of course word spread after a few years and Billy had reached an age where nothing, not his cage nor his chain, could hold him, and the warden put Monsieur Roberge’s back up against the wall, offering to relocate the bear. Twice they’d tried and twice the bear had found his way back. The first time he’d ransacked the Gauthiers’ garbage and the second time he’d killed and eaten the Langlois’ dog. Ten days earlier they’d tried a third time and had transported it a great distance and that’s why their father had insisted on driving them. He sensed that it would be back soon.

  That morning they kept on asking questions as if this conversation was an extension of the other and as if not two seconds had passed in the two years that separated them from the first day they’d met Billy.