And the Birds Rained Down

by Jocelyne Saucier

  It was time to go. There was no longer any reason to linger. Nevertheless, I asked how he died.

  ‘He just reached his expiration date,’ Tom answered. ‘At our age, that’s how you die.’

  There were no goodbyes. They let me leave with no other send-off than a wave of the hand when I turned toward them before taking the trail back to my pickup. Chummy, the only civilized one in the bunch, accompanied me as far as the trail. I had time to take a few pictures before Charlie called him back.

  On the way back, I tried to imagine the thoughts running through poor Charlie’s mind. I had called out to him that I would bring him the pictures of his dog. He thought he was rid of me, and now he had to contemplate a next time.

  I got lost on the way back. My landlord’s directions from two days prior were no longer as clear, and I got confused in a tangle of paths that led me to a lake bathed in light, the same lake that welcomed my aged friends each morning, along the shore of which ran a road in compact, solid sand that led me in a straight line back to the forsaken hotel.

  My innkeeper had made a mistake. He had made me drive a long loop of needless kilometres to the west when there was this road to the east that led directly to Boychuck and his companions.

  They had a protector, a man who fielded questions from travellers, spouting nonsense, sending them on wild goose chases. He was the gatekeeper of their hideaway. I was both intrigued and moved by such precautions to protect a free, hardscrabble life in the middle of the forest.

  Boychuck or no Boychuck, I knew I would be back.

  The story has another witness, and he is about to arrive on the scene.

  To look at him, you would put him in his early thirties, but he is over forty and is only twenty in his mind. He has long, lithe muscles, hair in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, a hoop in his ear, and if one were to go further, say, inside his head, one would find it brimming with ideas; he is always on a quest for something.

  He drives a Honda TRX 350, a recent model, and tows a mini trailer along the road that runs beside the lake. When he arrives within sight of Charlie’s cabin, he raises his eyes toward the roof, a gesture he always makes, to check whether the chimney is smoking, whether Charlie is there, alive.

  He is a regular visitor to this place.

  He comes less often in winter. He arrives with his big snowmobile, a Skandic, a powerful machine that’s not afraid of deep snow and that he sometimes drives full throttle over the frozen lake. Standing on his thoroughbred, he surfs the dunes of wind-hardened snow, flying from dune to dune, testing the void, the feeling of leaving it all behind, of soaring above himself. He gets drunk on the speed and the cold, and then heads back toward Charlie’s cabin. He can see the three columns of smoke rise up into the sky.

  He is also a free man, but he is not the gatekeeper.

  His name is Bruno.

  BRUNO

  They took no pride in telling me that they had had a visitor. She claimed to be a photographer. But first they had to tell me that Ted had died. I should have expected it. He was so old. Too old to make the effort to die, it had seemed to me.

  Just reached his expiration date, Tom assured me, and I sought out Charlie with my eyes. The two of them formed a sound box. When you wanted to know whether Tom was telling the truth, you looked at Charlie. There wasn’t a note of dissonance in Charlie’s eyes. Ted had indeed died of natural causes.

  The three of us knew why that was important to know.

  The three old men had a death pact. I won’t say suicide, because they didn’t like the word. Too heavy, too sad for something that, when all is said and done, didn’t intimidate them that much. What was important to them was being free, both in life and in death, and they had come to an agreement. There again, no oath with hand over heart, no sorrow, just each other’s word that nothing would prevent what had to be done if one of them fell ill to the point of no longer being able to walk, if one of them became a burden to himself or the others. The agreement didn’t apply for a broken wrist or arm – a one-armed man can still get by, but the legs, there is nothing more important in the forest. Locomotion, as Tom would say, emphasizing the O’s as if by uttering them they would get up and walk. The agreement also said that if necessary, they would help. They wouldn’t let their friends fade away in suffering, left without dignity, staring up at the sky.

  I had been told about this a long time ago. By chance of conversation: they weren’t the sort to make bell-ringing revelations. When something important happened, they muttered it just like anything else – Charlie in particular, who was a world-class mumbler. As for Tom, he’d never lost his hotel hustler’s patter, and he turned everything into a joke. But you couldn’t go by that; his hawk eye was lying in wait for you. He was the one you had to talk to. As for Ted, you had to pay close attention to follow his ruminations.

  Conversation always took place in Charlie’s cabin, which was the most comfortable. Tom’s was a dump. We would spend hours there, sometimes entire days, playing cards while letting our thoughts reveal themselves.

  Ted didn’t join us, never did, but I know he was bound by the agreement.

  ‘Our death is our business,’ Tom had said.

  It was February, a snowy, blustery day, one of those days that keeps you inside near a roaring fire, and we were in the middle of a poker game. I had arrived two days earlier. In winter, I came less often. I would arrive a bit like Santa with my sack of supplies. My snowmobile sled was full: fruits, vegetables, fresh, moist cakes for the old guys, and more substantial treats, like parkas, long underwear, a chain saw, a gas lantern, sometimes newspapers too. It amused them to see how the world was getting on without them.

  This time, I had a gas auger. A major innovation, as they would no longer have to break their backs using their ice pick. The auger would make a hole in the lake in no time, and they would have as much water as they needed. And fish, added Charlie, who had wanted to try the tool on a neighbouring lake where the pike, he claimed, were so black they were blue. But a blizzard blew in and kept us playing poker for two days, although Charlie wouldn’t let it go; he wanted his midnight-blue pike.

  ‘Tomorrow, whether it’s snowing or blowing or shit is falling from the sky, I’m going fishing,’ he announced, along with his full house.

  ‘And who’s the one who’s going to find you, all frozen and contorted?’

  Tom’s hand wasn’t very good. He had a pair of jacks.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to make sure I have a smile on my face when I go.’

  My hand was no great shakes either. Not a single pair and this stupid question.

  ‘You still want to face death head on, Charlie?’

  Silence and knowing smiles from either end of the table.

  ‘So neither of you is afraid of dying?’

  I was an idiot, really.

  ‘Go get your salt box, Charlie.’

  The box was on a shelf above Charlie’s bed. A small tinplate box holding white crystals the size of pickling salt. Strychnine. Fox poison, they explained. Left over from the trapping days. It kills a fox in three seconds and a man in less than ten.

  Each man had his own box of salt, and if one day he were called upon to help, each man knew where the other’s box was.

  I thought I was a tough guy, able to roll with the punches, but to hear them talk about their own deaths as if they were akin to taking a leak or crushing a bug, I felt sick to my stomach.

  ‘Our death is our own business,’ Tom said, as loudly as his scratchy voice would allow.

  And then, more calmly, because he could sense my discomfort: ‘You’re too young. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Charlie, as was his way, let Tom finish his rant before adding his two cents.

  ‘I’ve already had a second life free of charge. I don’t see why I would have a third.’

  I knew Charlie’s story – he had told it to me. It wasn’t your everyday story. Married, two children, a job at the post office, a weekend trapper
. The trapper part really tells the whole tale. Trapping is more than an occupation, more than a hobby: something incongruous, an anachronism, an abomination – the thought of it, killing wild animals! The neighbourhood children would follow him down the road and spy on him through the small window in the basement where he scraped his skins. He could feel the terror in the whispers that reached his ears.

  And yet it was in the forest that he was able to take his own measure as a man, breathe the air of the world, feel he was part of the power of the universe.

  As he grew older, he had come to hope that he would die there one day, like an animal, no wailing or weeping, nothing but the silence of the forest greeting its creatures on their way to join the souls of the beaver, the weasel, the mink, the fox and the lynx, his true companions.

  And then his doctor, in telling him about the kidney failure and three hemodialysis sessions each week, unwittingly offered him an honourable way out.

  He was retired at the time; his children were long gone, and his wife had a pension. He put his affairs in order with the bank and the notary, and he headed off to await death.

  ‘I moved into my trapping camp and I waited for death, but she didn’t come. I got to thinking that I had been given a second life. I decided I would live this one on my own terms.’

  He waited one more week and then he left his camp as if he were off to his trap line.

  ‘I’m pretty sure they searched for my body, but my trapping ground was so big. They could have assumed anything: that I had drowned myself, that I was rotting somewhere in the muskeg. Pronouncing me dead wasn’t a problem, I’m sure of that.’

  And kidney failure?

  ‘I piss as good as the next guy. Doctors aren’t magicians. They make mistakes just like anyone. Mine got it wrong.’

  So Charlie had arrived one day with his pack, and Ted let him move in near his camp. Tom arrived a few years later. Ted must have decided that they had what it takes; otherwise he would never have allowed it.

  Ted was a broken soul, Charlie a nature lover and Tom had seen everything a man is allowed to see. The days passed, they grew older together and they reached a venerable age. They had left behind lives they had closed the door on. No desire to go back to them, no desire other than to get up in the morning with the feeling of having a day all to themselves and no one to find fault with that.

  The three of them formed a buddy system that provided enough range and distance to allow each of them to believe he was alone in the world. Each one had a self-sufficient camp with a view of the lake, but they couldn’t see their neighbours. They had taken care to leave a thick buffer of forest between them.

  Charlie’s camp was the best maintained. Four cabins: one for living, one for firewood, one outhouse and one for storage. Nothing was left lying around, no shovel, no axe. Nothing was neglected, while at Tom’s cabin, you had to look at the chimney to guess which one was his living quarters, everything was so cluttered and battered.

  As for Ted, no one had set foot in his cabin. It was impossible to trace the path of his thoughts on the walls, impossible to know what his eyes came to rest on. Ted hid himself away for days, even weeks during the winter months – and the winter months are interminable in the North. They would see his tracks in the snow, so they knew he had gone to collect the hares from his snares. They would see a nest of wood shavings near his wood storage shed, so they knew that he had stocked up on kindling. But they didn’t see him, for months they wouldn’t see him, and then suddenly he would appear.

  I hesitate to say that Ted was a painter, so little did what we found in his cabins resemble anything at all, but that’s what he did during the long winter months, and that’s what convinced him to let me plant my pot in his forest.

  I had arrived there on the trail of the Boychuck legend. The boy who had walked through smoking rubble, the man who had fled his ghosts into the forest, one of the last survivors of the Great Matheson Fire of 1916. I had heard the story here, there and everywhere. Small towns in the North collect stories. All you have to do is sit at a bar, and after two or three beers someone will sit down beside you and if you give them the time, they’ll tell you everything you want to know.

  An open wound, was what I heard most often.

  That’s what Steve told me too.

  Steve is disillusionment personified, a man with no ambition or vanity. He reigns over his dominion with complete indifference. The hotel doesn’t belong to him. The owner left it in his hands – abandoned it, really.

  What I like about him is his faraway gaze.

  We were on our second joint. Steve loves his pot. He inhales with a gusto I have never seen in anyone else.

  We were settled into the languidness that I like, and he said, as if we had been discussing the subject for hours:

  ‘It’s the ideal place for what you’re looking for.’

  Neither of us had spoken about my plans for a plantation. But we both knew what we were talking about. I hadn’t come to this part of the world to pluck petals off daisies.

  ‘An ideal spot, but the old man won’t be easy to convince.’

  I left the next day down the sand road he pointed out, which led me directly to the old man’s cabin.

  Ted was waiting for me. He had heard me coming. This man knew his forest. He had heard the soft step of my running shoes on the sand, and he was waiting for me, sitting on a stump in front of his cabin, looking like someone lost in thought but aware of my presence. I could almost have heard my steps as they approached his ear had I not been deafened by the speech I wanted to give him.

  Shaggy, tall and sturdy, in a plaid shirt and Big Bill pants, he was exactly what you think of when you think of a woodsman. He merely had to turn his eyes to me for me to understand that he had seen the world, and that he had had more than his share.

  I was a young punk then, and he was already very old, so it was looking like the conversation would be difficult. He did nothing to help me. He let me get tangled up in a speech that rambled in every direction. I couldn’t even understand parts of it myself. And he said not a word, made not a hint of movement on his stump. He let me dig myself deeper into impossible explanations until, no longer able to listen to myself, I decided to shut up.

  He looked at me a while longer.

  ‘It could be done,’ he said, quite simply.

  I had a moment of vanity believing that I had swept him up in the excitement, the lure of the illicit, the opportunity to thumb his nose at the world he had rejected. But I soon realized that the old man needed money. He negotiated the deal with the hand of a master.

  He wanted linen canvas, sable brushes, hog’s bristle, artist-quality oils, deep pigment colours. All this from Winsor & Newton, a reputable supplier, very expensive naturally, beyond his means, and found only in Toronto. He painted on plywood with frayed brushes and oils that didn’t hold their colour. Steve took care of his supplies, but he went no further than the hardware store in the next town, two hundred kilometres there and back.

  So Ted painted. It was hardly a mystery. His clothes were always stained when he came out of hibernation. The splashes of colour on his clothes never failed to surprise me. What he ordered from me were mainly dark colours. Coal black, ash black, smoke grey, an indefinable brown called burnt umber. But as to what was on his canvasses, none of us had any idea.

  Ted’s camp was midway between Tom’s and Charlie’s. Every morning after stoking the stove and a breakfast of potatoes with bacon, Tom headed off toward Charlie’s cabin. Every morning, Tom passed by Ted’s and glanced at his chimney. Whether it was smoking in a straight line, hiccupping little puffs or spreading smoke in a low cloud, it was all described to Charlie every morning in their first conversation of the day.

  The smoke that rose out of Ted’s chimney was the most reliable indication that he had gotten up that morning, lit his stove for his potatoes and bacon, resumed his thinking from the night before and started his day as a living, solitary man.

  I s
tudied the chimneys with the same attention. I had to expect that one day death would arrive before me. Strangely, I thought Tom would be the first to go. He was the youngest of the three, still full of the boisterousness of his former life, never settled, always telling stories about this and that, but battered by the follies of youth: blind in one eye, short of breath, a gimp leg. I never thought he had what it took, and yet he held his own.

  They talked about death the same way they talked about the rain or nice weather. I would just have to get used to it.

  ‘Nice day.’

  ‘Yep. Nice day to die.’

  It wasn’t sad or painful, simply a possibility they raised like any other. They had a good laugh at having grown so old, forgotten by everyone, free agents. They felt as if they had erased their tracks.

  As we sat in the cabin, Charlie and Tom were gently needling each other as always.

  ‘Think you’ll die today, Charlie?’

  ‘If I have another night like last night, maybe tomorrow. But if it has to be tomorrow, I’d like it to be at sundown. I’ve always wanted to die watching the sun set.’

  ‘So tomorrow at twilight.’

  ‘Yep. At twilight. But if it’s too long in coming, I think I’ll wait. I don’t want to die in the dark.’

  ‘Not in the dark. If you’re too picky, Charlie, she won’t want you. You’ll be over a hundred, and at that point, you’re old, really old. You’re worthless. You ain’t even worth your shit.’

  And Tom calling me to witness: ‘This pighead will never make up his mind to die.’

  And then silence. Which no one worried about. We were used to silence in which each one returned to his own thoughts.

  This time, the silence was long, smoke-filled and heavy.

  I knew the conversation wouldn’t resume with something trite when Charlie hunched over his mug, threw me a look and went back to his cup, as if the news he were breaking were meant for the tea.

  ‘Ted’s dead.’

  I should have expected it. It had to happen one day, but I wasn’t ready. You never are, and it was a bolt of lightning. Something slicing straight through me.