Arvida Read online

  Antigonish

  America’s a bad idea that’s come a long way. I’ve always thought that, but it doesn’t paint a very good picture.

  I should have said: America’s a bad idea that has gone every which way. An idea that’s spawned endless roads leading nowhere, roads paved in asphalt or pounded into the earth or laid out with gravel and sand, and you can cruise them for hours to find pretty well zilch at the other end, a pile of wood, metal, bricks, and an old guy on his feet in the middle of the road, asking:

  “Will you goddam well tell me what the hell you’re doing around here?”

  America is full of lost roads and places that really don’t want anyone to get there. It took fools to make these roads and fools to live at the end of them, and there’s no end of fools, but me, I’m another kind of fool, one of those who tries to reinvent history, pushing on to the very last road, and the very last god-forsaken destination.

  I’m sure they’ve made a much more welcoming road now, with scenic walks and lookouts and all that stuff, but in those days, driving the Cabot Trail at night in the middle of a storm was a crazy idea. The guy at the Cape North gas bar had been polite enough not to say anything. He’d only said, “Drive fifteen, twenty miles an hour, no more, and God willing, you’ll get to the other end.”

  I had a Ford Galaxy 500, 1966, with a Thunderbird V8 engine, 428 cubic inches, under the hood. It guzzled gas big time, that’s for sure, and it gobbled up lots of asphalt, but that night it was rolling really slowly and nibbling away at increments of the road and the darkness and the fog that covered us and covered the trees, the cliffs, the Atlantic Ocean, and the whole world for all I knew.

  Antigonish.

  Menaud was sleeping beside me, so I couldn’t tell him that the word made me think of Antigone, the daughter of the king of Thebes, and above all of antagonist, which was especially appropriate given that I was battling the Cabot Trail, tacking hard with the steering wheel and the wheels themselves. I probably wouldn’t have let him in on that anyway. Menaud had the torso of a wrestler perched on bird feet, forearms like Popeye the sailor covered with long black hairs in zigzags, and between his incisors a hole big enough for you to poke in a finger. A thick beard lent a bluish cast to his neck and cheeks, and a single bushy eyebrow spawned a whole repertoire of grimaces where it overhung his evil eyes, hunched in their orbits like grackles in a stolen nest. He liked getting drunk, fighting in taverns, and telling stories he’d made up, and he’d never read a book in his life. We’d agreed, in ’65, on our strange way of travelling, making as many miles as possible in the time we had, but after that I don’t think we ever saw eye to eye on anything until in ’68 Johnny Cash brought out the disc he’d recorded in Folsom Prison.

  It was he, Menaud, who planned the trips. When he was fifteen, working on his father’s farm, he’d decided to see the entire world. At eighteen he realized that he was subject to seasickness and afraid of flying. All he had left was America, if he wanted to satisfy his desire to see a world beyond the wide but constricted horizon of his agricultural land. The worst part was that he didn’t even like to drive. He was the one who’d decided we’d take the Cabot Trail, and he’d decided we’d do it at night, and now he was snoring beside me with a bottle of Dow between his legs. He’d said:

  “Seems you gotta see that.”

  I wondered what on earth he could see, spread-eagled on his seat with an arm across his face. Even with my eyes open, I could see almost nothing. A few feet of wet pavement in front of the headlights, and the pounding rain. The road was all ups and downs, in bends and twists, no more than an inch or two from the precipice. For most of the way I’d been driving by instinct, like blind creatures living in grottos and attics, sensing rather than seeing the forms things took in the rain.

  I was half hypnotized when I saw her. She was standing by the side of the road wearing a short red coat, unfastened, over a big white dress. I barely saw her face, veiled by her black hair, very long, tossing in the wind. I was so numb that I kept going for a hundred more feet at least before putting on the brakes. It must have been pretty sudden, because Menaud woke up. He took a slug of beer.

  “What’s happening?”

  “There’s a girl back there, beside the road.”

  He turned his head, without really looking.

  “You crazy?”

  I sniffed, lit a cigarette, and opened my door. I said to Menaud:

  “Wait here.”

  “I’m not waiting outside, that’s for sure.”

  By the time I took three steps my clothes were soaked and my cigarette was out. I threw it onto the shoulder. The slope was steep enough that I had to brace my legs. I walked and walked, a lot farther than the spot where I’d seen the girl. And I didn’t find her. I went back along the cliff, peering down at the rocks and the sea, two hundred feet below. I couldn’t see much, and my clothes were now wet through. At one point I stopped and looked carefully, trying to pick out a form in the water or on the rocks. There was nothing, but I waited for a long time. The clouds were swollen with water, like the plastic sheets you hang up over drying wood, and they were full of electricity, too. I couldn’t see well. I was dazzled by the lightning and blinded by its absence. I heard a din that was more like thunder than surf, I saw the waves crashing and exploding against the rocks in a commotion that had nothing gentle or harmonious about it, I saw the ocean like an immense black mass streaked with foam, and I understood that every time I’d seen the sea before that night, on the bridge of a ferry, at the lighthouse at Pointe-au-Père, or on the beach at Cape Cod, I’d seen a postcard, I’d seen a lie.

  I went back to the car, running through the heavy rain. Menaud didn’t ask me any questions and that suited me fine, because I wouldn’t have known what to reply. By the time I’d calmed down and we were on our way, he’d gone back to sleep.

  About four in the morning, I left the Cabot Trail for the 105, crossed from Cape Breton to mainland Nova Scotia through the Canso Canal and drove for a while on the 104.

  A little after 4:30, I shook the dead weight next to me, and said:

  “Menaud, we’re here.”

  He stretched, on the seat.

  “This is Antigonish?”

  “So it would seem.”

  The town glimmered in the darkness like any other town. We couldn’t make out the city hall on Main Street, or St. Martha’s Hospital, or the campus of St. Francis Xavier University. Just the rooftops, the elevated silhouettes of a few buildings, and a good hundred dim lights beneath a pale grey sky. Menaud took out his notebook and made a cross in it.

  “The Cabot Trail, check.”

  “You slept all the way, Menaud.”

  I took a mouthful of beer, which by then was as fresh as piss in an iron pail.

  “Which means what?”

  “That technically, you didn’t see the Cabot Trail.”

  “I’ve just done three hundred miles on it.”

  I let that go. The week before, we’d passed the site of one of the oldest abandoned mines in eastern Canada. I’d never worked in a mine, but my father was a miner, and already in 1969 I’d seen in his eyes, on his clothes, and in his body, his bent back and his stiff neck, enough of mines to do me for a lifetime. Chopping down trees wasn’t any less hard, but at least you were outside. I’d taken advantage of the fact that Menaud was sleeping to drive right past. When he woke up, he’d said:

  “Are we getting near the mine?”

  “The mine? We passed it an hour ago. You were sleeping like a log. Anyway, that would have put us behind schedule.”

  “We’re going back.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going back.”

  “I just told you we passed it an hour ago.”

  “We’re going back.”

  “For God’s sake, Menaud. We’ll get there in the dark.”

  “
We’re going back.”

  There was no point trying to reason with him. We went back. The mine was like a series of crude stairways carved into a meteorite crater. He looked at it for about ten seconds before making a cross in his notebook. That’s how Menaud travelled.

  We found ourselves a hotel, but I didn’t sleep for long. In the morning we visited the town on foot. After, we stopped to eat. In all my life, I’ve never seen anything so disgusting as Menaud’s breakfasts. He put ketchup on his eggs and mustard on his toast. He poured syrup on his bacon, and when he found an accommodating waitress, he added a fried onion on top of all that.

  I was going to leave for Cape Breton in the afternoon, aiming for the other side of the island, to visit Louisbourg. In ’61, archaeologists, historians and architects had begun the reconstruction of an old French fortress that had been destroyed by the English in 1759. I really wanted to see that, but Menaud didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He’d decided to stay in Antigonish while I was there. I’d have to come back and pick him up, and return to Quebec via New Brunswick. It wouldn’t be a big detour to go back through Antigonish, unless Menaud ended up drunk in some ugly duckling’s sheets, and made me search for him all over town. I’d have preferred to keep him with me.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to come?”

  “Forget it. No way I’m going another hundred miles just to see some pencil pushers digging a town out of the mud.”

  He always talked that way. I worked to pay for my education, he worked because beer doesn’t come out of the water tap. Travelling through time and space both was just a bit too much for him. That was about it.

  “You shouldn’t talk that way, Menaud. Seems to me you were born in the mud too, like tadpoles or couch grass, and you crawled up to your parents’ farm. Your mother adopted you because she thought you looked pathetic with your little girl’s legs and your monkey’s ears. She was never very particular about men in any case.”

  I know plenty of people who would have punched me in the face for less than that, but not Menaud. He liked playing the tough guy, he liked to say he’d been in prison, and he was the only man I’d ever met who you could flatter by saying his father had been a thief and his mother a whore.

  He gave me a big smile with his rotten teeth.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s what happened.”

  I took off on my own. I wasn’t afraid. In those days people told all kinds of stories about drivers picking up white-faced hitchhikers who vanished without a trace right in the middle of a trip. No one had ever told me about a woman in a red coat haunting the Cabot Trail, and anyway mine wasn’t even thumbing a ride. She was just there, looking out over the high seas with her dry hair, as if our nights were her days, as if she saw, in the midst of the storm, an enormous sun shining over the strait. Of course, I know I didn’t see a ghost on the road that night. I may be old now, but I’m not crazy. Except it’s remained a mystery to me, not knowing who put that woman in my head, who’d given her that silhouette and that face that I’d never seen anywhere. There’s something unknowable in all that, like how you can never really tell if it’s the water, the wind, or the salt adrift in the wind that carves animal shapes and women’s faces out of the fjords.

  The Montagnais who cut wood with the rest of us in the camp, I always asked him to tell me what the Indians called the places we went. One day when we were really far north, I asked him the name of the lake where we’d stopped for lunch. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s not that. Your lake has no name.”

  “What do you mean, no name?”

  “No one ever comes here.”

  Unless they had a good reason, the Indians never strayed from their traditional portages and their navigable waterways, and they felt no need to give names to places they never visited. It was a European obsession to go everywhere and it became an American obsession to build roads that led nowhere. Those roads, Menaud and I, we’d done at least half of them. We couldn’t count them in those days, we couldn’t know where they would lead. America was a kind of big asphalt map traced right onto the land, a continent to rediscover. I’m sure they’re all labelled now, those roads, mapped so you can follow them with a finger on your GPS. My son-in-law has even bought a car that talks. It’s always telling him he’s taken the wrong road, and I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let a machine speak to me like that.

  After 1971 I never heard from Menaud, I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and I decided that one morning he must have gone back to the mud at the fort of Louisbourg, or where he came from. We’d travelled together for a long time, he and I, and we’d probably still be travelling together if I hadn’t met Louise during my last year at university. We’d never much called each other my beauty or my love, nor later my wife or my husband, but one day she said to me, “If you like, we could get married.” It’s not a great love story, certainly, but it’s ours. I’d never thought about marriage before, but I said yes right away, and later I realized that was exactly what I wanted. We had four daughters more beautiful than their mother and more intelligent than me. They’re big now, but they can’t leave hold of their mother, whom they telephone three times a day. They have the whole world at their feet, and you’d think they were afraid of everything. It’s something I can’t understand.

  Louise is a doctor, and I was a forestry engineer. She’s spent her life taking care of people, and I’ve spent mine taking down trees. That’s the way it is. In a few months, she’ll be retiring too. And we’ll travel. We’ve travelled already, but not much in recent years. Louise likes it a lot, but not me. They always hold us by the hand on those tours, and it seems to me that you can’t really travel bundled up with other little oldsters in a bus, with guides who explain everything you see through the window like you’re all six-year-old children. I’d like to show her the ground we covered, Menaud and I, back then.

  Meanwhile I garden, I read, and I do errands. About four o’clock I go out to buy what we need for the night’s meal and the next day’s lunch. They’ve built a big supermarket right next to Canadian Tire, on the other side of the overpass. You have to turn right for the groceries and left for the highway. I often turn left. Louise knows it, just as she knows that I always come back in the evening with the supper.

  Cryptozoology

  Late June.

  Half asleep, Jim hears the rain falling non-stop onto the truck, the two woodsheds, and the piles of wood waiting to be dried, cut, split. He imagines the rivulets streaming down the little dirt path winding its way to the road for kilometres through angiosperms and gymnosperms, the great cavalcade of all the species present at that latitude, spared by the forestry company because it wasn’t worth their time to clear the concave tongue of land stretching from their camp to the road between two mountains. Half asleep, Jim knows his land and knows that the rain is irrigating the sugar maples, the cherry trees, the paper birch, the black ash, the trembling aspen, the red oak, the linden trees, two white pines as tall as the CN Tower, the rotten trunk of an American elm, centenarian three times over, that had to be cut down because it was sick with bark beetles, the balsam fir, the white spruce and black spruce, the Canadian thuja, the red-fruited sumac from which Doris, in the summer, makes a kind of acid lemonade, and the mountain ash with their big orange fruits that drive the birds crazy. Jim hears a great mad wind that’s blowing through the trees and whistling between the walls and under the outhouse roof.

  Half asleep, he’s on the same plane as the other forest creatures, waiting for the storm to calm where they lie on their beds of branches, leaves, and moss, less comfortable than his own. Though he’s seen the bad weather heal itself a thousand times, part of him thinks the squall will last forever.

  Half asleep, Jim tells himself that the rain will stop and that, as always after a storm, the animals will come out of their shelters in search of sun. As the first ligh
t shines through, the partridges let their chicks frolic out in the open on the gravel paths, and the rabbits swarm like insects along the roads, veering off very late, sometimes too late, when they hear tires crunching on the gravel. It’s during this brightening that he’s seen the rarest animals. The black bear on the woodcutters’ camp road. The moose that crossed the Joe Roth River while he was teasing trout massed in a shadowed bowl, with great arcing casts. The lynx by the lake, crouched in grasses, under branches. Half asleep, Jim can tell by the weight and smell of the air that the rain won’t be stopping for a while and that he must summon the patience of the other animals, those that hunt, those that answer to the periods of the moon and only come out at night.

  He gets up and puts water on the stove to heat in an old iron kettle, and goes out on the porch to gather logs and birch bark from the wood box. The air is cool, humid inside and out, and the cabin floor is as cold as a steel spoon before you dip it into the soup. His father stirs in his bed and opens his eyes. The water begins to rumble in the kettle. His father emits a sigh that becomes a rattle, then a coughing fit, and asks:

  “What’s new?”

  “Not much, pa. You?”

  His father sits up in bed.

  “We wanted to go fishing with Luce. We took the rods and the tackle, then Luce waited in the boat while we loaded the cooler on, then the worms. She was wearing your mother’s hat, with a really nice army jacket.”

  Jim lights the balled up newspaper he’d thrust into the stove under the crossed logs.

  “Did you catch anything good?”

  “No. At the last minute Réjean arrived and said he didn’t want her to go with us. So we never went.”