He was spotted a little later in a field. It was after noon, and the wind came up, an incredibly powerful wind that gathered the bush fires into an immense torch. The sky turned black as coal. You could hear a roar in the distance, like a locomotive barrelling full steam ahead, and by god they knew what it was! People yelled; they tried to get Boychuck’s attention. Two young men hidden in a hollow wanted him to take shelter with them, but it was a waste of time because the fire overpowered their voices and the boy heard nothing, and he was no longer visible at the end of the field. It was black as night, the smoke having obliterated the sun.
People believed it was him they saw a little later on a trail not much wider than a wagon, running terror-stricken in a flash of light. He had pulled his shirt up over his head and charged into a wall of flames. This was believed to be the young Boychuck, because behind the wall of flames lay his parents’ farm. But no one was sure. The man who thought he had seen him was in a pool of mud, submerged in the liquid sludge up to his mouth, and he opened his eyes just long enough to feel two burning daggers at the backs of his retinas and to forever retain the image of a boy throwing himself into the flames.
No one knows how Boychuck survived. Neither do they know whether he made it to his parents’ farm, whether he saw them, his five brothers and sisters, his father, his mother, dead, all of them, asphyxiated in the root cellar, huddled up against one other, their bodies blue, frozen in a last effort to suck air through their dead, mauve lips. No one knew, because Boychuck wasn’t saying. At no point in his life did he mention the fire or his roaming.
The survivor in the pond lifted himself out of his mud bed; he was covered in a thick crust of mud that flaked off as he moved, and he thought he saw Boychuck one more time, but the stabbing burn had left him half blind, and he could be sure only of a blurred shape coming down the trail with a heavy step. That man spent a month in the hospital. Patches of mud had baked into his flesh.
The stories of the first instants after the fire all mention an indefinable colour, a light emanating from the sky and the earth, the sky that had opened up once again, and the earth still burning with small fires. Blazes erupted slowly at the bases of trees and burst forth in long of gushes of sparks. The trees that were still standing were black under a blue sky and collapsed in a muffled sound, sending up thick clouds of white ash.
Golden, they wound up saying, there was a golden light in the lull. The light of God coming for us, they said. They all felt as though they had lived through the end of the world.
Three men waited for the angels to come to a pond. Water up to their armpits, long muddy streaks on their faces, wide dazed eyes, they thought they were the last people on earth. With them in the golden light was a moose that had also taken refuge in the pond and, perched on the shoulder of the youngest man, the one who told the story, was a bird that was chirping itself hoarse.
They saw young Boychuck go by.
He groped his way through the smoking ashes. He was covered in soot and scratches, but seemed in good shape. He was stripped to the waist. His right hand was wrapped in a rag, probably a bandage he had fashioned with what was left of his shirt.
They called out to him.
The boy passed very close by without seeing them, and they had to yell after him for him to turn and for them to see his bloodshot eyes, his vacant stare, and to understand that the boy had been struck blind.
He continued on his way as if he had heard nothing, as if he were walking in the footsteps of God himself, that’s what the survivor from the pond said. He was walking like a man mired in the footsteps of a giant.
He was seen in Matheson, Nushka, Monteith, Porquis Junction, Ansonville, Iroquois Falls, and then again in Matheson, Nushka, Monteith, and again in Matheson, Nushka, until he disappeared altogether. Six days of walking aimlessly, of going round in circles. No one ever understood why. From that Saturday, July 29, when the end of the world was thought to have come, until Thursday, August 3, when a woman thought she saw him on the train taking survivors to Toronto, a good six days had passed. What had kept him wandering that way?
In Matheson, he had had his hand bandaged.
Only three houses there had withstood the fire. One of them was transformed into a dispensary. Women tore up their household linens, curtains, towels and sheets to make bandages, and goose fat canned for the winter was used as ointment.
A young girl who had grown into an old woman of ninety-three remembered the young Boychuck. She remembered him because he was wearing nothing but trousers and he didn’t make a sound when they removed the rag stuck to his flesh. The palm of his hand was a bright red muscle.
In Nushka, he had a walking stick and was wearing a shirt that wasn’t his own.
Nushka was a village of French-Canadian farmers some ten kilometres north of Matheson. Now it is called Val Gagné in honour of the diminutive local priest, a hero in the collective memory for having at least tried to save his congregation. Twenty-seven years old, his first parish, no experience in anything, particularly not in forest fires, he proposed to his flock, when all seemed lost, that they take refuge at the end of a clay corridor cut into a hill for the railway tracks to pass through. It wasn’t such a bad idea. The corridor was set deep in the hill, the clay embankments steep, with no vegetation, so one could hope to be sheltered from the flames. But the little priest knew nothing about the workings of fire. The flames did indeed pass above the clay corridor, but they sucked out all the oxygen within it. Fifty-seven people suffocated.
The young Boychuck was seen the night of the carnage. Rain had started to fall, drizzle really, nothing that could put out an inferno but enough to cool things off a little. Did he meet Simon Aumont? Probably not. Simon Aumont was likely already unconscious in his oat field, a baby a few months old at his side, dead, while he, Simon Aumont, survived his terrible ordeal. He was working in the forest when the bomb of fire went off, and he ran to the village to help his family, finding his wife and nine children asphyxiated on the doorstep. Only the baby was still breathing, still in her mother’s arms. He brought her to the oat field, believing he would find enough air in the open space, but the intense heat overcame him. He collapsed, with the baby at his side; in surviving his ordeal, Simon Aumont become a symbol of pain in Nushka, and one of the most dwelled-upon stories, the one they harped on the most, while he never wanted to breathe a word of it.
Nushka, village of the dead.
Boychuck arrived there along the railway tracks, where he stumbled upon the first of many corpses in the carnage. That’s what is thought to have happened anyway, because he was found sleeping in the rain. He was taken for dead.
A woman and her two children were travelling to Monteith along the same route. They had a cow with them, the only possession they had been able to save. They were planning to get to the experimental farm in Monteith where the father worked.
The woman has long since died, but the boy, who was eight at the time, and the little girl, who was six, told the story. First, the shock of discovering bodies piled one against the other. The children thought they were sleeping. The mother knew the truth and pulled them by the hand away from the mass grave. That was when there rose in the night a long, sad monotone cry. The cow had instinctively recognized death and launched into a funereal lowing. This woke young Boychuck from among the dead.
He almost smiled, the images from a dream probably lingering, and then, feeling the rain on his face, he asked in a sleepy voice if it was over, if it was morning already.
They set off together.
This fact and the others that followed are the rare verifiable and verified parts of Boychuck’s wandering, because there were other people who saw him on the evening of Saturday, July 29. They remembered the wailing cow in particular, but they did not forget the blind young man.
The days that followed the Great Fire were days spent in movement. Fathers searched for families, wives searched for husbands, children searched for parents. Young Boychuck was one
wanderer among many. The legend would be formed later on, as the years and the stories went by, because the tale of the Great Fire was told for years, and in all the various accounts, one figure kept coming back: a blind boy walking through the smoking rubble.
It seems, however, that he was not blind the whole time. A man said Boychuck helped him load bodies onto a train car. Another had seen him among those unloading an aid train. And the woman who thought she had seen him on a train bound for Toronto did not mention the young man’s blindness. She had noticed him because he was alone, completely alone, and staring vacantly, she said. Even though he helped some people with their luggage, he did it as if he weren’t really there, as if he had left another person to act in his stead. It was this vacant stare that made him recognizable in every account and was why he was so long believed to be blind, although he had probably regained his sight gradually, fire blindness in most cases being a temporary phenomenon.
The image remained: a blind boy walking through the smoking rubble. It was fuel for stories and haunted the imaginations of survivors, and it was the founding image of the Boychuck legend.
In Matheson, where a small municipal museum does what it can to preserve the memory of the fire of 1916, there is nothing on the subject of Boychuck. Not one photo, not a single written account, nothing. But if you talk to the woman in charge of the museum, it’s as if there is only one thing you need to remember: the fire forced a blind boy to walk for days to reach his beloved. Only love can explain the young man’s strange behaviour – first love, the love that gives you wings and transports you beyond yourself.
The photographer listened to the woman from the museum without really believing her. There were so many stories about Boychuck, the most far-fetched of which was the one about the gold brick. In the mythology of the North, there is always a mysterious gold brick somewhere. Stolen gold, buried somewhere, and the thief, hunted by his pursuers, dies while trying to flee or comes back and cannot find his hidden treasure. There have been countless gold bricks just waiting to be dug up in Northern Ontario. Boychuck’s wandering was supposedly explained as a quest for gold exposed by the fire. The photographer didn’t buy it. How could a boy go off in search of gold after losing his mother and father and when all around there was nothing but death and desolation?
Maybe there was no real motivation for it. Maybe he was wandering aimlessly, suffering from fire madness, like some said, his mind paralyzed, completely overcome. It wouldn’t be the first time someone faced with a wall of flames took leave of their senses. No reaction, no instinct for survival. Fire is fuelled by oxygen, taking it from the hills, from the lowlands, from wherever it passes and, before you know it, sucking the lifeblood out of the brain. Fire madness, like fire blindness, is, however, a temporary phenomenon, a few seconds, a few minutes at the most, unfortunately deadly if no one is there to shake you out of it, because after the brain is deoxygenated, it’s asphyxiation or, worse, being consumed by the flames, charred.
In fact, there is something more insidious when it comes to insanity, a sort of fascination born in the spread of the flames, their strength, their omnipotence, their dazzling colours in the smoke, a horrified contemplation that continues through the race for survival and that, as the dead are counted, takes on an irrepressible need to keep moving to feel alive. Fire-crazed, that’s what was said of young Boychuck. The photographer could almost believe it.
She did not believe the drivel about the flowers. He was spotted in a ravine, walking through ashes waist high, a stick in one hand and a bouquet in the other. Flowers like the sun, yellow petals and golden brown centres. Flowers for his beloved, the woman at the museum had said. The photographer let her talk.
Boychuck’s wandering continued throughout his life, it seems, because he was seen again six years later, handsome and elegant in spite of his work clothes. He was part of a railway maintenance crew. Handsome and elegant, but dark and taciturn – you could pull a word out of him here and there, but never a conversation. He left after three months, came back four years later, left and then came back again, appearing and disappearing with no trace. He was known as Ted or Ed or Edward, depending on the habit his co-workers formed, never the same ones – railwaymen, carpenters, prospectors, not a single one among them claimed to be his friend. The first name changed, but that vacant stare remained.
The photographer wondered how she would manage to capture that vacancy in a photo. Those who had known him as an old man said that it was impossible to see anything in his eyes. It was like trying to read a book that had not been written. You got lost imagining what you wanted to see.
The eyes are what are most important in old people. The flesh is hanging, sagging, gathered in wrinkled knots around the mouth, eyes, nose and ears. The face is ravaged, illegible. You can’t know anything about an old person unless you look into their eyes – their eyes tell the story of their lives.
If the gaze is vacant, the photo will be too, the photographer told herself.
She had photographed some hundred old people without knowing what she would do with all the photos: a book, an exhibition, she had no idea. She let herself be swept along on a quest she didn’t quite understand. Her project found meaning only in the pleasure she took in meeting very old people and the history in their eyes.
All this had started one afternoon in April, two years earlier, in High Park in Toronto.
The first days of April are a blessing in Toronto. A little old lady, tiny in her blue wool coat, was getting some sun at the end of a bench under a large bare oak tree.
That patch of bright colour in the washed-out browns of the end of winter, that was what first captured the photographer’s attention.
There was the deep blue of the coat, the magenta of the beret, the white curls that escaped it, a dazzling white, and around the rim of the beret and at its centre, an embroidering of silver beads that sparkled in the sunlight. At the lady’s feet was a large canvas bag with Moorish patterns, and on one end of the bench was a square of cotton in yellow and red plaid with balls of crustless bread laid out on it, which she was feeding to the birds.
The photographer took a spot at the other end of the bench and watched her discreetly.
She was very old, wizened to the bone, and there was something unresolved in her, as if she were carried along by an infinite number of thoughts that scattered in the air while she fed the pigeons. She moved methodically and slowly. When her square of cotton was empty, she would draw a hunk of bread from her bag, remove the soft part and form balls that she placed in tight rows on the square of cotton.
The photographer didn’t dare take her picture. She should have. There was a pink light that sparkled at the corner of her eyes.
She didn’t remember how she struck up a conversation or how they came to talk about the Great Fires.
The little old lady was a survivor of the Great Matheson Fire. She told her about the sky black as night and the birds that were falling from it like flies.
‘It was raining birds,’ she told her. ‘When the wind came up and covered the sky with a dome of black smoke, the air was in short supply, and you couldn’t breathe for the heat and the smoke, neither the people nor the birds, and they fell like rain at our feet.’
The conversation wended its way with their thoughts. The swamp white oaks that populated High Park, the still reticent spring, the noises of the city that reached them occasionally, back to the Great Fires, litter on the park paths, the end of civility, and again the Great Fires.
‘When the flames reached the sky,’ she had said, ‘it was as if we were swimming at the bottom of a sea of fire.’
Images that the photographer committed to memory.
But the little old lady was going to leave. Her stores of bread were depleted and the daylight was fading. She was going to leave without the photographer knowing anything about her, not even her name, and as if it were the only thing to know, as one would do with a child, she asked her age.
‘O
ne hundred and two,’ the little old lady said, and her eyes twinkled with mischief.
She had pulled herself up from the bench by leaning on her cane and walked straight ahead, leaving the photographer stunned. Was she really one hundred and two?
It was all there, the twinkle of pink light in the eyes of an old lady who was having a little fun with her age and the image of birds raining down from a black sky. It all started there. The photographer would not have ventured out along Northern roads, would not have thrown herself into this quest, if she had taken a picture at that moment, if she had snapped the birds raining down in the eyes of the little old lady in High Park.
Enticed and intrigued by a little old lady who had images of such destructive beauty locked inside her, and then enticed and intrigued by all the old people whose heads were filled with the same images.
She had come to love them more than she would have believed. She loved their worn-out voices, their ravaged faces; she loved their slow gestures, their hesitation before a word that escaped them, a memory that wouldn’t come; she loved seeing them set themselves adrift in the currents of their thoughts and then, in the middle of a sentence, doze off. Old age seemed to her to be the ultimate refuge of freedom, where one releases oneself of any bonds and lets one’s mind wander at will.
She had met all the known survivors of the Great Fires. Boychuck was to be the last.
‘Dead and buried,’ Charlie had said. ‘Just reached his expiration date,’ Tom had told her.
The legend of the Great Matheson Fire was no longer of this world. She was not terribly surprised. It wouldn’t be the first time that she had knocked at the door of someone who had died the day before, the day before that, or ages ago. Nor was she overly saddened or disappointed. Tom and Charlie were worth the trip. The two laughing hermits were rare specimens in her collection of old folks. She was determined to return to their hideaway. To take pictures or for the pleasure of conversation, no matter – her quest had long ago gone beyond a photo project.
And the Birds Rained Down Page 6