The photographer removed her caption and drafted this:
Angie Polson, between 1965 and 1975. Born in Matheson in 1902. With her twin sister, Margie, she survived the Great Fire by escaping along the Black River on a makeshift raft. The young Boychuck wandered for days searching for them, and, not finding them, left Matheson. He returned in 1922, at which point Margie was married and Angie was waiting for him in Toronto. What followed was a long series of more or less failed rendezvous. Their entire lives, they would be bound by an impossible love. Margie died in 1969, Ted Boychuck in 1996. Only Angie is still alive. She was seen in the spring of 1994 in High Park, Toronto.
She was fairly satisfied with the ending, which left the mystery hanging. She would have liked to have added She was feeding the birds, but she was limited by the number of lines the card could hold. In any case, she told herself, the question was implicit. And what about you? Have you seen her in High Park or anywhere else?
She wanted to find the little old bird lady. She was unaware of her own intention until the word bird came back into her head, ready to be written down on the too-small card. She knew then that this exhibition had no other goal than to flush out the little old lady, wherever she may be.
‘It was raining birds,’ the little old lady had said.
‘It was raining birds?’ Clara asked.
The photographer had just found the title for the exhibition.
A title that, if it fell under the eyes of the person in question, couldn’t help but bring her back to her.
On the first nice day of April, the photographer went to High Park, with one foot in spring and the other she didn’t know where. She dreamed of fir bushes, vast lakes, pure air that fills the chest, and a little old lady waiting on the bench.
Angie Polson wasn’t there. Wishing it wasn’t enough to make it so. In her stead, there was a man. Firmly propped up on the bench, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, the man was lost in thought. In his early fifties, the photographer thought. Nice build, she thought some more. The man was imposing, in fact. Seated comfortably at the end of the bench, he gave the impression of filling it entirely. And his hair, which was a nice dark grey, formed a downy foam all around his head. She thought of Marie-Desneige.
A flock of low-flying pigeons came to rest at the man’s feet. Her thoughts turned to Angie Polson and her square of cotton.
The man became aware of the photographer’s presence, offered an embarrassed smile, sorry, the smile said, I took your place, and with a gesture of the hand, invited her to sit near him.
He wanted to be far away, very far away, to no longer have to deal with anything, to lose himself at the ends of the earth, to no longer have to explain himself to anyone. He was tired of it all. Of work, of responsibilities, of all that was expected of him. That’s what he explained to the photographer in a weary voice as she fed the pigeons with the piece of bread she had brought. ‘I would like to disappear,’ he said again, ‘to become invisible. I want to exist for no one.’
‘I know a place, but you’re too young.’
The photographer listened to the weary voice, but her attention was elsewhere. In the man’s nice build she could picture a place for herself, a warm, comfortable place, a man’s enveloping heat where she could see herself welcomed with two arms folded around her.
His name was Richard Bernatchez. That’s what he told her. Richard the Lionhearted, she thought to herself without knowing why. The heart of a valiant king.
And when, in turn, he asked for her name, she gave it to him in full, thinking of her friends in the woods, whom she had known under false names and whom she would never seen again.
‘That’s a nice name,’ Richard the Lionhearted told her.
A small house under the trees on the road out of a village.
From the road, you can see the cedar shingle facade and the gable that reaches out to offer the veranda some shade. The curtains are drawn, probably to keep a bit of coolness inside the house. It is a hot summer’s day. An old man is getting some fresh air on the veranda.
Charlie smokes a cigarette while nibbling at a sprig of millet.
‘So, are you coming?’
He is a little thinner, with two long grooves in his cheeks, but as for the rest of him, he still has all the vigour of his ninety-one years. He made the return trip to the village under the sun, and now he is getting some fresh air. A nice cigarette, a cold glass of water, life still has its pleasures.
‘It’s time,’ he calls out in the direction of the screen door.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
Marie-Desneige’s frothy head appears in the half-open door. White and luminous. She creeps cautiously with a tea tray and Monseigneur winding around her legs.
She is wearing a pale dress. Blue and coral pink that give her hair even more sheen.
She lays the tray on a sideboard near the double rocker and sits down next to Charlie. He has been waiting for her for a while, because he has a small victory in his hands. Two envelopes he has not opened. They both know what they contain. Their pension cheques. Charlie was confident, but Marie-Desneige didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe that the government cheques could follow them here, here to this village where no one knew them. But Charlie had been a postman. He knew how to do it.
‘There was nothing else?’
Each time he returns from the post office, it’s the same question.
‘No, nothing else.’
‘We should write to her.’
‘How do you want to do that? We don’t have her address, or even her name.’
Marie-Desneige sighs. They often have this discussion. Marie-Desneige, who wants to see her friend again, and Charlie, who explains that it is better this way. It’s time for the woman to live her own life.
Chummy, who is at the other end of the veranda, gets up and comes to stretch out next to Charlie. He knows that it’s time. The two old people rocking gently in the rocking chair, Monseigneur in the arms of Marie-Desneige, and Chummy who consents to Charlie scratching him.
The villagers will be coming back from their jobs in town. The parade of cars will be starting soon.
The story does not reveal the location of the village or its name. Silence is better than needless words, particularly when it comes to happiness, and when that happiness is fragile.
Happiness needs only your consent. Marie-Desneige and Charlie have a few years left in them, and they intend to make those years into a lifetime. They will stay hidden away from the eyes of the world.
There are a number of loose ends in this story. Like the letter that arrived at the cooperage well after the exhibition had been dismantled and the film crew had returned to Hollywood. A letter signed Angie Polson. The old woman had visited the exhibition and wanted to clarify the date Theodore had painted her portrait.
It is not known whether the letter reached its intended recipient.
The exhibition had been a success. All the paintings sold, and there was an article full of praise in the Globe and Mail. The money from the sale of the paintings was placed in trust and awaits a turn in the story.
And death? Well, she is still prowling. But pay her no mind. She lurks in every story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tremendous thanks from the author:
To Sylvia and Mike Milinkovich, who introduced me to William Hough, Robert Rhodes and the marvellous Jessie Dambrowitch, eighty-nine years old, who recalled for me that his father had seen birds falling from the sky.
To the team at XYZ and above all to André Vanasse, who has watched over my novels from the first.
Thanks from the translator to Jocelyne Saucier for her generosity, Alana Wilcox and Coach House Books for doing such a fine job, the query lunchers for their insight and company, and Fabrice Laurent for the French lessons.
Jocelyne Saucier was born in New Brunswick. Two of her previous novels, La vie comme une image and Jeanne sur les routes, were fina
lists for the Governor General’s Award. Il pleuvait des oiseaux garnered her the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, making her the first Canadian to win the award. She lives in Abitibi, Québec.
Rhonda Mullins is a translator, writer and editor. She was a finalist for the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for The Decline of the Hollywood Empire by Hervé Fischer. She previously translated Jocelyne Saucier’s Jeanne sur les routes into Jeanne’s Road (2010, Cormorant Books). She lives in Montreal.
The print edition of this book is typeset in Ronaldson, the very first American metal typeface, which was designed by Alexander Kay in 1884, for the Mackeller, Smiths, & Jordan type foundry of Philadelphia, and was lost to time until it was digitized in 2006 by Patrick Griffin of Canada Type.
Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Photo of Jocelyne Saucier by Cyclopes
Photo of Rhonda Mullins by Owen Egan
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
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