by Anne H
“Let’s go, chicks, quickly now. We’re going outside. It’s stifling in here. Hurry up. We’re going out.”
They stand up, clumsy in their bewilderment. They follow Lydie without protesting, so much do they long to be with her in the open air and away from all these people who have sought refuge in the store. At once they are out in the rain, the same rain that was drenching her, while she pulls them onto the road, holding each one by the hand and shouting:
“Ah, the rain! I love it, I love it, I love it!”
Very quickly she noticed that the rain couldn’t penetrate Julien’s thick curls but settled there like hoarfrost on a bush. Of Hélène she sees nothing but two long braids of hair and a childlike profile, all pink now in the rain.
She speaks quickly as if she has very little time to tell the story of her life to these youngsters who already expect everything from her. She says that on the pretext of protecting her from the polio epidemic in Quebec City, her parents have sent her to board with the Ouellets. And they’ve taken advantage of her absence to go on a trip to New York.
“I’m sick of this! I won’t hang around here very long, that’s for sure. One of these days I’ll just pack up and go. Today it’s hello my chicks, tomorrow it will be bye-bye forever.”
She chants these last words, almost sings them.
To his amazement Julien hears himself say, his changing voice beyond his control, cavernous, then suddenly flutelike in the wet air:
“Don’t go away yet!”
Bolstered by her brother, Hélène ventures to say very quietly:
“But we’ve only just met . . .”
Lydie walks with them to the Michauds’ house by the river, the one Pauline has rented for the summer.
Pauline lifts the cheesecloth curtain that covers the small windowpane and sees three wet figures standing at the door, in the rain, for a moment until Lydie goes down the road and disappears.
That night, for the first time, Pauline makes a scene, railing and weeping at Julien and Hélène.
“I forbid you to see that girl again. Nobody knows where she comes from. She’s an adventurer, a schemer, a . . .”
As usual, her voice was so feeble and so monotonous, though furious, they had to prick up their ears to grasp the extent of her wrath.
While Lydie, alone on the road, hands in her pockets, soaking wet and shivering, mutters to herself. “I’ll set them free, those little chicks. I’ll be their evil genius.”
A ground swell surges from the darkest part of her, though she thinks she’s just obeying her own free will to relieve her boredom.
Life pretends to be as it was before, when we know perfectly well that never again will anything be as it was. Julien and Hélène do what they can to avoid another confrontation with their mother, while the memory of the day of the rainstorm lingers in their minds, along with the picture of Lydie soaking wet and holding them by the hand, like children being taken away to the end of the world.
Pauline’s vigilance is resourceful and discreet. She showers them with kindness and gentle caresses. The slightest delay in coming home from a walk is seen as an offence, a knife that gives them pleasure to drive into her heart.
“It’s past six, I’ve been worried sick. Where have you been this time?”
“You know very well, at the blacksmith shop watching Monsieur Thibault shoe the horses. I told you before we went out.”
Most of the time she goes with them, down the roads and across the fields, indefatigable. Nothing discourages her. Neither the hills nor the ruts in the road. They despair of ever being alone, of being left in the countryside like two lean wolfhounds without collars.
At night in the lamplight, when their dreams become too great a burden, she approaches them stealthily, softly kisses their foreheads and their hair, gently murmurs the magic words, saying them twice — first to the son and then to the daughter:
“My love.”
It’s not that Lydie has disappeared altogether from the autumn landscape. Often they catch sight of her at a turn in the road, bending over her bicycle, pedalling lightheartedly. She waves to them, greets them tauntingly, calls out:
“Hi, little chicks!”
Julien and Hélène just have enough time to note Pauline’s sudden pallor when Lydie is already on her way down the road.
“Above all don’t look at her. Pretend you don’t see her.”
Pauline’s voice grows faint, is barely audible.
✦✦✦
One fine October afternoon around four o’clock she was with them again, in the suffocating heat of the blacksmith shop, the fire’s glow, the horses’ powerful scent. She seems at home there, absolute mistress of the forge, reigning over the fire and reeking of horse and burned hoof.
Gripped by fear, they look at her as if she was part of a fearsome mystery being celebrated before their eyes, amid showers of sparks and the untamed stamping of hooves.
Lydie appears not to see them. All that matters to her is the young chestnut horse that is struggling and refusing to be shod.
The blacksmith, bare-chested, emerges from the glow and the din. He raises one huge arm covered with red and blue tattoos. A cavernous voice comes from his toothless mouth.
“Out of here, you kids, scram! We’re too busy for your silliness and getting under foot. Out!”
Once again, the three find themselves on the road, hearing the horse inside the blacksmith shop neighing and struggling, the men swearing very loud.
“Hi there, chicks! You children aren’t very polite. I keep running into you on the road, the least you can do is say hello.”
She repeats her greeting and each time raises her arm and waves.
They try to respond, rather like robots with rundown mechanisms, unable to complete their gestures. They raise their arms no higher than their shoulders, then let them drop.
Her mocking laughter rings out in the cold, echoing air.
She talks about autumn, her favourite season, about hunters who poison the air with their smoke and lethal gunshots, about brown-haired children who could be mistaken for deer.
“Be careful, chicks, watch out for hunters . . . and huntresses . . .”
Loud laughter comes from her throat. She stuffs her hands in the pockets of her blue wool jacket. A long red scarf trails behind her.
They listen to her talk and laugh, are under her spell, offer no word or gesture that might betray their pleasure at being with her.
Soon Lydie’s voice changes, becomes hoarser, more aggressive.
“What funny chicks you are, standing there like statues and never opening your mouths. Did somebody swallow your tongues? I bet it was the mother fox who panicked and started the job. It’s common knowledge: at the slightest alarm a mother fox will devour her young, to protect them. So watch out, children, that mother of yours has long teeth, and today’s the day the alarm will sound. I’m the alarm. I’m standing here before you in the flesh. I’m the public danger, the witch. Beware of going home. She’ll punish you, I guarantee it. She’ll make mincemeat of you just because you ran into me at the blacksmith shop.”
Again her cascading laughter.
Julien turns to his sister.
“Come on, Hélène, let’s go.”
Abruptly Lydie stops laughing, as if exhausted from so much laughter. Suddenly, surprisingly, she oozes sweetness. Her voice is captivating again, is surrounded with silence between the words, touching them, wounding them, again and again.
“No need to be afraid of me, my chicks. Take a good look at me. My name is Lydie Bruneau, I’m seventeen years old and I’m bored. About the same age as you, only not quite so wet behind the ears . . .”
She comes very close to them, looks at them scornfully, says again:
“Take a good look at me.”
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Hélène turns away, tugs at her brother’s sleeve. Her voice is quivering, she’s on the verge of tears:
“Come on, Julien, Mama’s waiting for us.”
Julien does not lower his gaze, despite the blinding sun. He stares at Lydie without blinking. Lydie’s image is trembling before him. He cannot distinguish the green eyes or the swollen mouth. And now, suddenly, he can clearly see the strong white neck that contrasts with the red scarf with a strange sharpness, an insistence, that disturbs him. He could simply put his hands around Lydie’s neck and squeeze a little, and nothing of what he both desires and fears would occur between them. That strange notion only brushes against him, briefly, while the sun dazzles him like a mirage.
Now Lydie has had enough of being a moving target, standing before this boy who stares at her without seeing her, it seems. She stirs, stretches in the light. Julien and Hélène make a show of going away. She slips between them, takes their hands — to stop them. She points to an old forked birch tree beside the river, not far from the blacksmith shop, in a little field lying fallow that belongs to no one.
“Why don’t we write each other love letters, my chicks? Surely the mother fox hasn’t forbidden us to write? I bet she hasn’t even thought of it. There’s the mailbox, in the fork of the old birch tree. Understand? I’ll go first, to encourage you. Just a short little note to begin with, what you might call an introduction to me and my personal history. After that we’ll see. We might even move on to epistles and poems. It depends on you. On your answers to my letters. You’ll see, it will be lots of fun. Till tomorrow, my chicks. The mail comes in at ten.”
She has already straddled her bicycle and the red scarf floats behind her like a banner.
✦✦✦
Julien is taken up in a kind of drawing frenzy. India ink drawings, very black, in his schoolboy’s copy books. Whole pages of minuscule flowers, insects, dots, lines, squares, an entire dark petit point background where in several places the bright shape of a horse ablaze with sunlight stands out.
“Is that what you call working?”
Pauline stands before him, looking at the drawings.
She sets on the table in front of Julien a slice of freshly baked cake still warm from the oven. Pauline’s kindness exasperates him. She wants to buy me, he thinks. She is frightening and she’s my mother.
While she studies his drawings intensely, he uses red ink to trace a broad scarlet band that is wrapped around the horse’s neck. He extends the band down the length of the page, turning it back on itself several times, as if he was crumpling and smoothing Lydie’s scarf in his hands.
Pauline says:
“For heaven’s sake, Julien, that’s your French book!”
Pauline doesn’t see that as the red scarf fills in the page of the copy book, it renders unreadable her son’s first poem that is scrawled across the same page. A scant few lines Julien dreams of offering to Lydie as a strange and priceless gift.
We shall enter splendid cities
Stripped to the skin
astride steeds of horror.
After prying everywhere, Julien has discovered, under a stack of linen on a bathroom shelf, an old razor that was once his father’s. Relinquishing his mother’s tweezers, Julien shaves like a man for the first time, looking into the half-mirror that hangs over the sink. While Hélène grows impatient and pounds on the door, he gazes at length at his face, red from razor burn. He tries to guess what will become of this face that is still childlike and uncertain, and that he wishes were virile and rough, with a beard as curly as his unruly hair.
✦✦✦
The next day the old white birch looked pink in the rain. All that Julien can think of is to run to the old tree and look in the fork for Lydie’s promised note. Twice he tries to shake off Hélène, who is dogging his footsteps.
“Wait up, Julien! Wait for me!”
“Hélène, you’re as sticky as glue!”
Two letters on blue paper have been left in the hollow of the birch, protected from the rain in an empty tin of English biscuits.
“It smells good!” Hélène sniffs her letter greedily.
“Bah, that’s childish!”
Casually, Julien crumples his letter and shoves it into his pocket, then strides off down the road.
Hélène wanted to read her letter right away. She sat on some stones by the river, the waves coming to her feet, the rain falling down on her. She unbuttoned her wool jacket so she could hide her face inside and read her letter safe from the rain.
On it there is a long line of Xs followed by:
Hélène, you’re as lovely as a tiny flower bud that’s still wrinkled, not yet opened out, all bubbling with nectar and good to bite into. Your pigtails like a model little girl’s should be undone and brushed to their full length and spread out in the daylight. I’ll teach you to ride a bike if you want.
XXX
Lydie
When Hélène looked up, after committing her letter to memory, she chewed it for a long time, then gulped great mouthfuls of river water, dipped up in her joined hands, to help her swallow the blue paper that was now reduced to a pulp.
Hélène returned home by herself. Pauline sniffed her thoroughly, like a mother cat.
“Where have you been, child? You smell so strongly of rain and dead leaves it’s quite amazing. What got into you, going out on a day like this without a raincoat? And where’s your brother?”
Pauline takes her daughter’s jacket and shakes it vigorously, after emptying out the pockets.
Saved, thinks Hélène, I’ve been saved. My mother picked up nothing with her terrible sense of smell, neither the blue paper nor the English biscuits nor the lines of Xs, nor my lie nor my betrayal: only an autumn smell that inexplicably breaks my heart.
Pauline hangs Hélène’s jacket by the kitchen stove to dry. She repeats her question:
“Where’s your brother?”
Hélène shrugs, stops herself from uttering a ready-made reply from Sacred History:
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
✦✦✦
He strides along the road beside the river, hands in his pockets, chin buried in the turned-up collar of the jacket that he’s outgrown.
The little field with its old forked birch tree is far behind him now. He is still walking. His whole body feels as if it’s burning under the wet clothes. He walks beside the river, suddenly loses sight of it, and then a space filled with grass and brush appears between him and the river. Sometimes an entire field appears, while the running water of the distant river, invisible now, persists in its murmur. Then he sees once more, from very close, the arm of black water between the island and terra firma where the blacksmith’s little boy drowned last year. The flat tip of the island, covered with logs, sandy as a beach, becomes blurred in the rain.
He hears the noon angelus ringing, oddly clear in this landscape drowned in mist. He knows Pauline expects him home for lunch, but all he wants to do is put as much space as possible between himself and his mother so he can read his letter in peace.
The rain has stopped. The island is far behind him now. The roar of the rapids in his ears has been muffled for some time. The mist lingers, white and insubstantial; it rises from the river, soaks his face, his hands, his dripping clothes. He shivers. Dreams of getting warm, of holding in his hands and bringing to his lips a blazing glass of the alcohol he has never tasted.
An abandoned barn, half ruined, low and lopsided, next to the road. Thrusting his knee into the worm-eaten door, Julien tumbles onto dry hay that smells of dust.
His hard-earned solitude spreads out around him into the shadows. His heart pounds in his chest. I’m just tired from walking so far, he thinks to reassure himself. Nothing’s really bothering me. I still love nothing and no one. His wet clothes cling to
his skin. Icy sweat trickles between his shoulder blades. His numb fingers are unable to take Lydie’s letter from his pocket. A strange dread makes him tremble. He fears more than anything in the world the insults and scorn that might come from Lydie.
Dear little Julien: You mustn’t be afraid of me, you sweet silly child. It is wrong for the woman who rules your life to require you to be silent. Forbidden to speak to me. But I’m there watching out for you. I can hear your confession, my angel, and your little sister’s too. You’re enduring violence, my curly little lamb. Surrender. I shall teach you the work of damned and dangerous poets, and you’ll see how you resemble them deep in your innocent little heart.
Lydie
Julien peers for a long time at the skinny wrist emerging from his too-short sleeve. I’m growing by the minute, he thinks, my mother keeps telling me so. Soon I’ll have reached my full height and then I’ll pit myself against that girl who mocks me. What a pretentious letter, from a person who likes the sound of her own voice. Here’s what I’ll do with it. He goes through the motions of tearing it up, then he stops, carefully folds the blue paper, and puts it back in his pocket as if afraid of damaging it. “Lydie, Lydie, Lydie,” he says aloud in the silence of the barn.
The hay crackles under his weight. Julien turns and turns again, gradually overcome by a reverie at once cruel and sweet, so close to fever that he cannot ward it off. Soon he sinks into a half-sleep from which he escapes by fits and starts, tries to bring into the daylight some fragments of fabulous poems half-glimpsed in his dream, offered to Lydie and at once swallowed up by the night.
He stands up, buttons his jacket, teeth chattering, afraid he has caught cold. Dreams of getting back as soon as possible to the warm house that waits for him in the village.
But before he gets there he still has a good way to walk, and his legs are giving way beneath him. He must, without fail, go past the blacksmith shop.
✦✦✦
At first, standing in the fog alongside the road, he sees only a glow, as from an old lantern, a comforting beacon in the submerged landscape. He goes towards that glow like someone who is lost. Lightheaded with fatigue, he is drawn to the flame of the forge like a moth to a lamp. He tells himself stories for reassurance. A stop, just a brief stop on the way home, he tells himself, only long enough to warm my hands and the rest of my body before I continue on my way home. The hope of seeing Lydie again brings him, powerless, weak, and defenceless, to the threshold of the blacksmith shop.