At the cuts, Pearl looked at me for a moment and then handed me his ax. I bucked trees and stripped branches, the ache in my arms familiar from a winter of chopping firewood. At lunch, Pearl gave me a few biscuits and shared some water.
The next morning, my mother told me to wash and put on my Sunday suit, and after the wedding, instead of going into the cuts, I helped my mother and Father Earl—my new stepfather—carry our belongings to his tidy house.
The furniture belonged to the company, so there was only our clothing and my mother’s books, pots and pans, drawings, the toys my father had carved, my skates and stick. My mother left my father’s mended clothes. “For Pearl,” she said, though I knew that Mrs. Gasseur would not keep the clothes of a dead man. After three trips, when all that was left were some jars of summer berries in syrup and a few bundles of clothes, Father Earl reached over the door to take down my father’s ax.
“No.” He stopped at the sound of my voice, his hand almost touching the handle. He moved aside as I stepped past him. The ax felt heavier than it had the day before. When I pulled it down, the blade struck against the lintel stone, the sound ringing and clear, like the sound of my mother chopping at the ice. But the last sound I heard in the house was that of my mother’s voice. “No more to the cuts,” she said.
But the last sound I heard in the house was that of my mother’s voice. “No more to the cuts,” she said.
THAT WAS THE SUMMER that my grandfather finally returned to Sawgamet. He was too late to see my father, of course—and I thought of him a little bit like a sinner trying to repent only after he was already burning—but that wasn’t what had caused him to return to Sawgamet.
And maybe because I did not ask my father how he felt about his hand and lost my chance to do so, I asked my grandfather why he had returned. He had been in the house less than five minutes, clearly weary from traveling. When I think about it now, it is almost funny: the picture I have of him in my mind, sitting at the table in my stepfather’s house, is that of an old man, though he would have been not much past fifty. Here I am, past forty years myself.
My grandfather kept his hat in front of him on the table, and he alternated between running his thumb around the brim of his hat and occasionally picking up his cup of tea and blowing on it before putting it back down without taking a sip.
I gave him a moment, and when he did not answer, I asked again. “Why are you here? Why did you come back?”
He spun the hat around once, and then did it again. “Do I need a reason, Stephen?”
I felt my mother put her hand on my shoulder and then she reached past me to put a plate of warmed biscuits on the table. “Your son grew into a man and then had a son of his own. It’s been nearly three decades since you left, Jeannot. And just now you come back, asking if you need a reason? You’ve missed him. You’re too late. Your son is gone,” she said, and then she paused only slightly as she put a jar of preserves on the table, before going on. “And my daughter’s gone.” I recognized the jar of preserves. I had carried them down to my stepfather’s house from the foreman’s cottage.
“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. He said it firmly, but he dropped his head like he could not look at my mother, and for the first time I decided that I liked him.
I felt like I knew him already. I’d heard so many stories. I still hear the stories, even now, when they are just things that have been handed down. When I was a child there were men and women in Sawgamet who had known Jeannot—not in the beginning, of course, not when it was just Jeannot and his dog, when Sawgamet was simply an idea, an uncleared swath of trees waiting to be created by my grandfather—but men and women who had known him after that, in the early days, before the gold gave out, before the land started trying to reclaim what had been taken from it.
Even with all of these stories making him a part of my life well before he returned to Sawgamet, as I watched my grandfather sit at my stepfather’s kitchen table, Jeannot was a stranger to me in all of his flesh and blood. But the way he said, “I’m sorry,” so simple, so clear, made me feel like he was sorry, not just about my father, not just about my sister, but about all of the things that had driven him from Sawgamet.
And then, in the next instant, he looked up and his face transformed, and I could see that however deeply those sorrows weighed upon him, no matter how deeply he wished he could change what had happened, he had not come back to Sawgamet in sorrow. He had not come back to mourn my father, to mourn Marie. He had come back with some thought that all of the things that had happened—the deaths and the destruction—all of the things that he had thought he could leave behind by leaving Sawgamet behind, were now things that he could change.
I think my mother saw it, too, saw the same transformation in his face, the same hope, because, like me, she was still, silent, almost holding her breath to wait for him to speak.
Of course, I say this now, with the weight of the years sitting upon me. I speak as if I knew, as if I, not quite eleven years old, really knew what had brought my grandfather back to Sawgamet. I understood grief, but even then, parts of my sister and my father had started to fade forever away from me, and I had yet to learn what it meant to carry that loss with me year after year after year. Still, I want to think that with all of the stories I had heard, I knew of Sawgamet both as a place and as an idea, and I knew that my grandfather had returned with some sense of the magic that the woods still contained and all of the possibilities that entailed.
My grandfather lifted the cup of tea, blew on it again, and stared at it. We were waiting for him to speak, and like any good storyteller he savored the anticipation, letting us dangle for just an extra moment. Finally, he put his cup back on the table, looked at my mother, who still stood with her hand resting on my shoulder, and then looked down to me.
“I came back,” my grandfather said, “to introduce Stephen to his grandmother.”
“What?” My mother stared at him as if he had lost his mind.
“Revenez à moi et je reviendrai à vous, a dit l’Éternel des armées,” my grandfather said. He paused for a moment, looking at my mother’s blank face, and when he realized she did not understand him, that she did not speak French, he spoke again. “Return to me and I will come back to you, said the Lord.”
“Malachi 3:7,” my stepfather said. He stood on the threshold of the house, dressed as he usually was during the week in the same kind of work clothing that the other men in Sawgamet wore. He had been at the church when Jeannot came to our house, and I could see that he seemed a little short of breath, like he had come running at the news of my grandfather’s return. I wondered what busybody had gone to the church to find him. “Welcome. I was told you’d come back.”
“You must be the boy’s new stepfather. Anglican, I hear,” Jeannot said. “A priest.”
“And weren’t you meant to be a priest yourself? When you were a boy?” My stepfather said this with a casualness that even I understood to be deliberate, taking a moment to run his boots across the edged rock we had by the door for that purpose.
“That’s how the story goes, I suppose,” my grandfather said.
“The story also goes that you left the Bible and all it entails behind you when you came to Sawgamet. I’m surprised to hear you quoting scripture.”
“Some things never leave you,” Jeannot said.
“Our Bible is a little different,” Father Earl said. “Perhaps something was lost in the translation.”
My stepfather was a kind man. He was always gentle and giving with me, but I thought he meant this as a rebuke to Jeannot, and I was startled by his coldness. Now, with the benefit of being able to look back as a father, I realize that my stepfather was trying to stake his claim on my mother as his wife, on me as his son. He was afraid of Jeannot. Afraid that my mother had not yet come to love him, afraid that the return of my grandfather might upset the delicate balance in his house.
His house. I would be remiss if I did not point out that his house is now my house. This
study in which I am pacing, the study in which I will soon need to write a eulogy for my mother, is the same study in which my stepfather worked for forty years. I still think of the small foreman’s cottage by the mill as my parents’ house—it was my parents’ house—but it was not my mother’s only house.
I know that my mother was happy here, in this house, with Father Earl. Still, it startles me, the sudden thought of just how long she was married to my stepfather, how long she lived in this house. This house—as much as the cottage where I was born, and maybe more so—was my mother’s house as well. She was married to my father eleven years, but she was married to my stepfather for nearly three times as long.
She lived in this house, she will die in this house, and she remains in this house, at least for one more night. Soon, of course, our own furniture and effects will arrive from Vancouver. I do not know how long it will take before I start to think of this house as my own. But that morning, when my grandfather returned to Sawgamet, it was still very much my stepfather’s house.
Father Earl moved fully into the house, shutting the door behind him. “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts,” my stepfather said to Jeannot, and then he stepped behind my mother, putting his arm around her waist. “And I suppose you fancy yourself the Lord in all of this?”
My grandfather looked surprised, and I thought that even though I had just met the man, the look of surprise did not fit his face. He seemed like a man who met everything with a sense of equanimity—something that I remember from my father, and that I have tried to cultivate in my own life as a pastor—but this question had taken him unawares.
“The Lord? No. You have things backwards, Earl.”
I saw the glance that my mother stole at my stepfather and realized that he had bristled at the use of his name. It sounded odd to me, the name Earl coming unencumbered by title from Jeannot’s mouth. Most people in Sawgamet, even the Catholics, called him Father Earl, or even just Father.
“Well then, Jeannot,” my stepfather said, pointedly stepping on my grandfather’s name, “what then do you intend?”
“I’d think it was evident in the scripture.” I was not sure if Jeannot noticed the effect of using my stepfather’s first name, or if he was still surprised at the question, but he seemed to draw back into himself and his voice dropped quieter in the already quiet house. He picked up the cup of tea, and this time took a sip before carefully putting it back on the table.
“Return unto me, and I will return unto you,” Jeannot said again, repeating the scripture. “What do I intend? Why have I come back to Sawgamet? Why now? I came back for Martine.”
He looked at me. “I’ve come for your grandmother,” he said. “I’ve come to raise the dead.”
TWO
Birds
THE TREES PRESSED DOWN so tightly against the banks of the Sawgamet River that Jeannot had little choice but to turn from the river and climb the hill, following a creek into the woods. His dog brushed past him and ran up through the dappled gloom, stopping once to sniff the air before continuing.
Jeannot was sixteen and had been traveling for long enough that the dark and the woods should not have been foreign and frightening, but even though the wind was still, he could hear the trees moving in rustling whispers that sounded like voices. He thought that if he turned his head quickly enough he might see who was speaking, and for that reason he kept his head down and moved with a furious focus. He wanted to be out of these woods as soon as possible, back again tracing the arc of the Sawgamet, looking for a place to stop and pan for gold. Along with voices from the trees, the young man could hear the dog panting, and as he stumbled through a beam of sunlight, he noticed how lean the dog had become.
And then the shadowed whispering came clear and uncluttered, and he heard someone calling his name.
Jeannot.
THE YOUNG MAN, of course, was my grandfather, more than sixty years ago. When he was older, Jeannot grew tall and broad, but on that day, the day that he founded what was to become Sawgamet, Jeannot was sixteen, whip-thin, wire-strong, and able to both give and absorb a brutal amount of punishment.
He joked to me that he had fought his way across the continent, that he had been punched so hard and so often in his travels that his nose had barely managed to stay on his face. But he never really told me why he had left the orphanage and his training to be a priest. Just once, when he and my stepfather stayed up late talking in the study, while I was supposedly engrossed in reading a book, I heard him mention a girl whom he had loved, but it is only a guess that this was the reason why he quit his training for the Catholic priesthood, left the orphanage, and traveled across the whole of Rupert’s Land; Jeannot only told stories from the moment when he arrived in Sawgamet; none of his past before then mattered.
I think of Sawgamet now, a town of motion, light, and sound, with a train running through, and with the movie theater still playing The Wizard of Oz, with telephone wires expected in the next year, houses wired with electricity, and it is hard for me to imagine what it must have been like for my grandfather. There are still parts of the woods where you can lose yourself, though they have become harder and harder to find, particularly for me. I have not traveled as far or seen as much as some men, but I was behind the lines as a chaplain when we took Vimy Ridge and held Hill 70, and the world has changed so much since that first day my grandfather came to Sawgamet that to think of the silence he must have encountered is terrifying, almost unimaginable. I have the stories he told me, and the stories that others have told me, and I know what Sawgamet was like when I was a child, but there are gaps in the history of Sawgamet that I cannot fill with anything other than speculation.
Part of it is that there are things that are peculiar to Sawgamet, something about the cold remoteness of the village, that make it feel like it exists in its own country. Elsewhere, points east and south of us, men float their logs in the spring, taking advantage of the roaring meltwaters, but Sawgamet has its own internal logic to it. It used to be that men could not work the cuts in the winters here—sap frozen iron-hard, men’s fingers curling in on themselves, the snow a cumbersome obstacle to traverse—so they floated the wood instead in the fall, trying to push as close to the river’s freeze as possible, eking out a few more days of cutting wood. Even with men working the cuts through the winter now, with the railway come to town and engines replacing horses, Sawgamet still feels like something set apart from anywhere else I have lived or been, and despite the years that I’ve been gone, despite knowing that this will be my mother’s last night alive, coming back here still feels like I have come home.
WHEN MY GRANDFATHER came to Sawgamet, before it had a name, Jeannot was already more than a decade too late for the Fraser gold rush, but this was still only a few years after the Civil War to the south, only two years before British Columbia joined the Confederation. Where he walked was virgin territory, untouched by white men. So when my grandfather heard the whispering of the trees, heard his name, “Jeannot,” called clearly, as if there were another living thing other than his dog beside him, Jeannot hesitated and then stopped in his tracks.
He could feel the head of the ax pressing against the top of his hand, the weight of the rifle in his other hand, and with a slight horror he realized that by holding both he would be able to use neither. The woods fell silent. For a moment, just to his side, he thought he saw a young man, a boy his own age, staring at him with a hungry fear, but by the time he turned, the boy was gone. He moved in a slow circle, more afraid that he would see someone than that he would not.
He had been alone too long, my grandfather thought, and it was too easy out there in the untrammeled woods and mountains to convince himself that he saw and heard something that was not there. He lowered his head again and continued following the creek up the hill, thinking that when he crested the rise he might be able to see the lay of the Sawgamet River. For the last few days he had been following the river mostly straight up a
wide valley. A chain of peaks and mountains rose on the other side of the river and Jeannot liked being able to see the improbable snow that capped the mountains against the midsummer sun.
When the trail led him into the clearing, Jeannot risked a last glance into the trees, but with the afternoon’s brightness and the dark of the woods, he was able to see only a few dozen paces back, and he still thought there was something in the woods, keeping just past the edge of his vision. While he looked, Flaireur padded up beside him. Jeannot touched him lightly on the head, and then the dog trotted into the middle of the clearing and lay down on the ground near a wide creek.
My grandfather always said that he had stolen the dog from a girl in Edmonton who claimed to be a witch, so when Flaireur—named in anticipation of sniffed-out treasure—refused to move any further that day, Jeannot decided that he, too, would go no further. He had already walked for thirty-nine days since leaving Quesnellemouthe, and he thought that perhaps the dog was right; to travel one more day would be to risk the wrath of God. My grandfather dropped his pack, took his ax, and cut saplings and branches to make a lean-to against a fallen tree. He had learned to handle the ax and to fend for himself during the two years and three thousand miles it took him to reach Quesnellemouthe from Montreal, and when he had finished making shelter, he cut fallen wood until he had more than enough to burn through the night.
After he finished cutting firewood, Jeannot forced himself to walk back through the woods and down the hill to the river, so that he could catch a fish to share with Flaireur for their dinner. When it was finally dark, he unrolled his blanket under the lean- to and listened to the low burble of the creek, and beyond that, the muted roar from the Sawgamet. The sounds of the water and the crackling embers were a comfort to him, as was the slow breathing of Flaireur; the dog had not been willing to move from the spot where he had collapsed earlier in the evening, but he seemed restful now. The wind moved warm across Jeannot’s body. He fell asleep quickly and easily.
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