Bird-in-Hand was officially founded in 1836, but there was a coaching inn there as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century. This establishment, which belonged to a couple comprising Mr. William McNabb and his wife, Dorothy, was called, quite simply, Hotel McNabb, as proven by the pretty sign decorating the front window. Under the business name in gothic font, the artist has drawn, according to either the McNabbs’ instructions or his own imagination, a hand holding a little red bird. Why a bird in a hand? History doesn’t tell us, but if, like me, you are blessed with a lot of free time and a penchant for useless information, it won’t take you long to discover that there’s an English expression, originating in a song from 1781 (“Sung at Vauxhall”), that goes, “One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Which is approximately equivalent to the French “Un tiens vaut mieux que deux que tu l’auras,” or even of that wise verse in Ecclesiastes, which has it that a live dog is worth more than a dead lion. But as “Sung at Vauxhall” dates from 1781 and Mr. McNabb was running his business around 1715, that doesn’t get us very far, except for demonstrating my great erudition or my skill at typing words into a search engine. However, to complicate matters further, we note that this idea of a bird in the hand being worth more than two in the bush goes much further back. It was around 1530, in his book The Boke of Nurture, or School of Good Manners, that Hugh Rhodes wrote, “A byrd in hand—is worth ten flye at large.” But in this case it might rather mean you shouldn’t have more than one iron in the fire, since “byrd” here means a member of the female sex.
In short, for one reason or another, there was a bird in a hand on William McNabb’s hotel sign. And since at that time the place was frequented by settlers from all the countries of Europe (especially Germans and Dutch) who barely spoke English (and read it even less), and since even those whose mother tongue was English were by and large illiterate, what they took from the sign was the drawing. Thus came the custom of designating the place as Bird-in-Hand (or Oiseau dans la main, or Vogel in der Hand, or Pájaro en mano, or птицa в рука, etc.). In any case, at the time, all the coaching inns along the Old Philadelphia Pike were named after the pictures on their signs or, failing that, after some geographical particularity or other. You find places like The Ship, The Wagon, The Plough, The Buck, White Horse, Black Horse, The Hat, etc. It seems, though, that Bird-in-Hand is the only one of these place names to have come down through time to appear on the maps of today.
However, when the post-office mafia got involved and demanded that the town be given an official name, it was given the name Enterprise (yes, like the starship). Why? I can’t find the answer to that anywhere, but I guess it was because of some grumpy official (possibly the same one who inflicted misery on the people of Nameless) who thought that Bird-in-Hand wasn’t serious enough. But Enterprise or no, everyone brazenly carried on calling the place Bird-in-Hand, to the extent that in 1873 the authorities agreed to go along with this done deal, and the town was entered into the state records under its real name.
For a long time, Bird-in-Hand was basically little more than a market. The nearby Amish came there to sell their products a couple of times a week, then went back to their farms. On non-market days, it was essentially a ghost town, with a population that barely made it to three figures. Things changed in 1911, when Jonathan Stoltzfus bought a sixty-acre farm in the area. Later on, his sons opened a hotel and started developing tourism in the region. Today, his descendants (the Smuckers) own just about all the town’s businesses. You’re going to say, “If the guy was called Stoltzfus, why would his descendants be called Smucker?” Well, Smucker sounds more American, which is better for business. Simple as that.
Ò...6...Ò
Why Bird-In-Hand?
That, dear reader, is an excellent question. You’ve no doubt noticed that I used it for the title of this chapter. It gives me less to come up with, and gives you the impression of being a part of things. So, why Bird-in-Hand…?
I’d be lying if I said it was based on a rational decision. In fact, the first answer that comes to mind is “just because.” But since that isn’t acceptable in a text with literary ambitions, I’ll attempt to come up with an explanation. I’ll begin by pointing out that a fair bit of time passed between that notable evening when we decided to go somewhere and the moment of our first move. Not our strong point, making a move. My sister says that if the word vacillatory didn’t exist, she’d have had to invent it just for us. But she’s wrong, and anyway she just says that to show off one of the only big words she knows. Vacillatory means that you fully intend to do something, but you can never make up your mind to get on with it; well, I can swear to you that we’ve never been the least vacillatory. And if you think our trip to Pennsylvania falls into that category, it’ll be time to eat your words when our postcard arrives.
Our first move, then, was to choose a destination (and yes, that does count as a move). To start with, we were only thinking about Connecticut. First of all, the distance seemed just right. It’s about seven hundred kilometres from here to Hartford (a few more or less, depending on which route you choose, but seven hundred exactly going by Interstate 87), which is far enough to feel as though you’ve gone away, yet close enough to not induce a panic attack. We’d established that our mental limit was a thousand kilometres. (Bird-in-Hand, at 980 kilometres from Grand-Mère, just sneaks in.) But the main thing about Connecticut is that that’s where the fictional Stars Hollow is, where Rory and Lorelai Gilmore live. Sure, it’s a made-up town, and probably The Gilmore Girls wasn’t really even filmed in Connecticut, but we still love that state. So Connecticut then, but where exactly? Mystic? Crystal Lake? Wolcott? Moosup? Canaan? All those towns tempted us at one time or another but, as they say on Highlander, “There can be only one.” At one point, without really thinking about it, I burst out with, “Oh, fuck it, let’s just go to Bird-in-Hand and be done with it.” Jude replied, “Well, yes, of course that’s what we should do, for fuck’s sake,” and we burst out laughing. Deal done. We joke around, but joking is our way of being serious.
We knew the name from having seen it between Bald Head and Camel Hump on those lists of “funny place names,” “strange city names,” and other “weird town names” we couldn’t get enough of. It was just another stupid place name, uncommon enough to merit inclusion in these lists, but not weird enough for us to be really intrigued. However, we took it as a sign that it popped into my mind out of the blue. Right away we roped in our favourite search engines (by the by, according to Family Watchdog, no sexual predators are listed in the town) and, after a few short hours, we knew as much about Bird-in-Hand as if we’d been born there.
Ò...7...Ò
A Problem Well-Stated
Whichever way you look at it, there are basically two things we need to get this project up and running: a car and some money. And since cars cost money, we can simplify things further and say that all we’re short of is some dough. We’ve worked out that we need between $10,000 and $15,000 (including the cost of the car) to finance the trip. They say that a problem well-stated is a problem halfway solved, but something tells me it might not be the easiest half.
My important job in the submarine industry brings in roughly a thousand dollars a month. (Twenty-five hours per week at nearly ten dollars an hour: do the math.) You’ll say, “You just need to work more, you lazybones, then your pockets would be a bit fuller.” At first glance that seems like good advice, but it doesn’t actually work like that: if I worked more, I’d become a taxpayer, and I’d end up worse off overall. To really earn more money, I’d have to work a lot more, something like forty hours a week. And I know myself well enough to know that twenty-five hours is the upper limit of what I can stand. The Grand-Mère Subway might not be the busiest in the world, and I might earn my salary simply by standing behind the counter and rearranging the chips rack to save face with the manager, but I frequently come within a hair’s breadth of walking out righ
t in the middle of making a sub. Sometimes I dream about it so much that I think I’m really doing it. Yes, I know I’m a wimp, and I know everyone’s talking about Chinese people in China who slave eighteen hours a day for fifty cents an hour so we can buy nice trinkets at Dollarama, but that’s completely irrelevant. The main thing to remember is that my job brings in a thousand dollars a month.
You and the rest of the taxpayers, in your infinite generosity, subsidize Jude to the tune of just under six hundred dollars a month, via the Ministry of Social Services, for which he is exceedingly appreciative. Our total income therefore comes to $1,600 a month. As far as fixed expenses go, our rent is $425 and the folks at Hydro-Québec send us a bill for seventy-five dollars every month, which brings us to a nice round five hundred for a roof over our heads and the certainty that something will happen when we flick a switch. We spend around $200 on groceries, not including beer. (Add another hundred.) That’s basically it for our fixed costs. (We hook up to the internet by stealing Wi-Fi from someone called Doum37, and as for cable, this guy Mario (the neighbour’s friend) installed it illegally for sixty bucks.
In short, half of our income is dedicated to our basic needs. And the rest of it? It goes up in smoke, evaporates, vanishes into thin air. Pitchers at Chez Véro, crappy celebrity mags, trinkets. Of course, we could save money by choosing to drink at home and by not knowing in intimate detail the love life of the Twilight cast, but, even then, we’d only save a few hundred dollars each month. At that rate, it would take three or four years to reach our goal. And we don’t want to set off in three or four years, we want to go really soon.
A double room at the Bird-in-Hand Family Inn costs exactly $127.65 per night. With meals and minor expenses, we reckon we’d be spending around $250 a day, so about fifteen hundred a week. With $10,000, we could hold out for a month and a half, but we’d need to keep some kind of safety net for coming home, because there’s no guarantee my boss would still like me if I decided to take six weeks of unpaid leave; he could easily decide to replace me by whoever’s CV was at the top of the pile. (Note that this isn’t a prospect I find overly dismaying.) We could also expect to spend a thousand dollars all told on gas, and four thousand for the car. That seems to be the minimum you need to spend on a vehicle to be sure of avoiding problems. You can always try to be crafty and buy an old beater for $300, but you’re no further ahead if it all falls to pieces two days later. That’s not my opinion, I’m quoting (pretty much verbatim) Jude’s dad, who knows his way around cars. He also told us, “If you want to go to the States, it’s good to have a sensible car, because sometimes they won’t even let you over the border if you’re driving a clunker. I don’t know if that’s true, but better not to risk it. Plus, we don’t love the idea of breaking down at the side of Interstate 87 and spending the day sitting next to a gumball machine in some garage in Keeseville, Vermont, while the mechanic talks to us in English, licking his lips every time he looks at us because it’s written all over our faces that we know diddly-squat about cars. So we’ll buy ourselves a decent car, even if we end up selling it when we get back, if we haven’t got too attached to it.
Ò...8...Ò
Some Bad Ideas
It was only at the end of a long brainstorming session, during which all the schemes for getting rich quick were investigated and rejected one by one, that we developed a more or less workable plan. At school, whenever we organized a brainstorming session (or a “brain stirring,” as we called it then), the teacher used to say, “When you’re brain-stirring, there are no bad ideas. You need to get everything down and then sort it out later.” She’d have eaten her words if she’d been there with us. It was a total bad-ideas fest. Here’s an excerpt, to give you some idea.
Jude: I’ve got it! A pyramid scheme.
Me: Nobody makes money on pyramid schemes, except the guy at the top of the pyramid.
Jude: Obviously it would be our pyramid, so we’d be at the top, so it would be our pockets getting full.
Me: Except that to start a pyramid, you need to convince five of your friends to sign up, who then have to convince five of their friends, etc. Think about it: have we even got five friends?
Jude: Yeah, that’s a problem. The lottery then?
Me: Are you serious?
Jude: Yes, hear me out. The chance of hitting on the winning number in the 6/49 are one in 12 million. One ticket costs two dollars. You with me?
Me: So far, so good.
Jude: Right, so that means that to play all 12 million possible combinations, you’d need to spend 24 million. You just wait until the top prize is higher than that, and play every combination. Even if it’s only 25 million, you’ve still got a million dollars profit.
Me: That’s so easy! And we wonder why there are still any poor people in Quebec. And if someone else has chosen the winning numbers and you have to share your 25 million, you’re down 12 million.
Jude: Eleven point five.
Me: Fine. But just out of curiosity, where do you get the 24 million to start with?
Jude: All right, I give up. Your turn to suggest something.
Me: Um… we could sell an organ we don’t need on the black market. A kidney, say. We have two, but you can manage perfectly well with just the one.
Jude: Where would you find an organ trafficker?
Me: Same place you find everything—the internet.
Jude: You’re full of shit. You’re telling me you’d seriously be game to go to some illegal operating theatre in some basement apartment to be put to sleep by a Chinese man who sterilizes his instruments with Jack Daniel’s?
Me: You racist! Why would he be Chinese?
Jude: Dunno. Some film I’ve seen, I guess… Anyway, answer me: you’d be up for it?
Me: No.
Jude: We could open a massage parlour with extras.
Me: What kind?
Jude: The kind where the customer pays eighty dollars for an hour’s Thai massage and twenty dollars more if he wants an extra.
Me: And I’m guessing it would be me dispensing these massages…
Jude: Yes. Well, you are a girl.
Me: Indeed I am. Absolutely no way, but I do have a couple questions. No, make that three. One: how come you know the going rate in this kind of establishment? Two: what is a “Thai” massage? Three: what’s the “extra”?
Jude: As to your first question, the internet again. What did you think? A Thai massage is when the girl rubs her breasts on the customer, and the extra is a hand job.
Me: I don’t have breasts, so that settles that problem.
Jude: Do you think the Petro-Canada cashier would recognize us if we wore masks?
Etc.
It went on like that for a good two hours. Discouraged by how pathetic we were, we were going to throw in the towel, adjourn the meeting until the following day, when we stumbled across the Idea of the Century. (That’s what we called our just about workable plan, to give us hope.) It pains me to write it, and nobody would ever know if I tampered with the truth a little; nevertheless, my conscience obliges me to confess that the Idea of the Century came from the neighbour. (No need to introduce the neighbour, he’s nobody, some random guy; the only interesting thing about him is the way we got to know him, a pretty incredible story that I won’t tell you right away so as not to get too scattered, but I’ll find some way of shoehorning it in later on.) So, it was the neighbour who came up with the Idea of the Century. Well, it might be fairer to say that he put us on the right track. There he was, sprawled on the couch while we were stirring our brains, and as usual we weren’t paying much attention to his presence or to what he was saying. It actually took us several minutes to realize that he had, contrary to all expectations, suggested something not entirely idiotic, and for us to say, “Come again?” But before I tell you about our idea, I really need to introduce you to Sébastien Daoust, who will play a key ro
le in its implementation.
Ò...9...Ò
The Local Literary Scene
You can accuse me of taking the long way round, of going from Shawinigan to Trois-Rivières via Winnipeg, but I think I’m totally entitled to take this tale wherever I want. It’s the author’s whim and not up for discussion. If you want to read stories that go from A to B as quickly as possible, breathless tales with a ton of narrative unity (if the term narrative unity is too difficult for your little head, you simply have to consult the first work of literary theory, Bakhtin’s Esthétique et théorie du roman, Henry James’s The Art of the Novel, or even Marc Fisher’s Advice to a Young Novelist, from which I’ve already slipped in a word or two and which will be further dealt with later), if you want a book where something happens, go and buy a John Grisham or a Mary Higgins Clark and leave me in peace. That said, it’s true I could sketch a portrait of Sébastien Daoust in a few pencil strokes (all the easier since he’s not especially interesting) and then come back to the topic at hand, but the truth is I’m quite happy to have a chance to tell you about the Grand-Mère literary scene, of which Mr. Daoust is only the most modest representative. No kidding, for a town that isn’t exactly a megalopolis (around twelve thousand, max), Grand-Mère counts among its inhabitants an impressive number of well-known writers.
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