“I’ll coach you,” she said. “If we run into poachers we’ll use the walkie-talkie. You just follow my instructions, like Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac.”
I nodded, still eyeing her outfit.
“You’ve read that, right?”
“Well, I … saw the Steve Martin movie.”
“I thought you went to the best schools in Europe. What did you do there anyway?”
“Drugs, mainly.”
“Give me the badge.”
“What?”
“Give me the badge.”
I plucked it out of my pocket and handed it to her.
“Put your hand on your heart.”
I looked ceilingward but obeyed.
“Do you promise to faithfully execute your duties to the best of your abilities, to protect the wildlife and natural resources of the province of Quebec, and to tell the truth at all times?”
“I do.”
“Do you swear on the bones of your ancestors?”
“I do.”
She pinned the badge onto the left breast pocket of the parka. “By the powers invested in me, you are now a wildlife detective. You have the authority to arrest villains and killers and evildoers. And anyone at all, for that matter.”
Despite her valiant attempts, it was too painful for Céleste to climb into the back of the van, so I had to lift her. I flashed to the first time I’d lifted her in, to the coarse, wet, cumbersome sack—so different from the soft and dry and malleable form I now had in my arms! I set her down on the same sleeping bag and covered her with a wool blanket, though by this time the Westphalia was warm.
From behind the wheel I looked up at an iron sky: grey on grey, swift clouds threatening snow. I flipped on the wipers, which groaned as they crossed the glass, in counter-rhythm with a song on CBC:
Over the river and through the woods
To grandmother’s house we go
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
Through white and drifted snow …
“How are you doing back there?” I shouted as we bumped along the perilous chemin saisonnier. The pot-holes and ruts gave off a silvery blue sheen, and the white plumes of low branches glided overhead. It was so cold that the snow creaked as we drove over it. I turned the radio down and repeated my question.
“Not dead yet,” she replied.
On the highway the street lamps were still on and the morning stars blinked faintly between the clouds. Silver beads of ice glazed the wires overhead. We were the only car on the road.
“I’ve got to be careful,” I said, glimpsing my passenger in the rear-view. She had discarded the blanket and was drawing triangular faces of cats on the back window fog. “I haven’t a clue how fast I’m going!” I tapped on the dash. “Speedometer’s dead!”
Céleste made her way to the front of the van, gingerly, through columns of packed boxes. I objected, but not strenuously, asking only that she keep her mask on. She looked over my shoulder at the instrument panel, then out the window while glancing at my watch.
“You’re fine,” she said after a few seconds. “You’re going … 79.6 kilometres an hour.”
I looked down again at my speedometer, odometer, tachometer. All on the blink. “How do you know that?”
“Well, I know the telephone poles are sixty metres apart. The calculation’s really quite simple.”
She clambered into the passenger seat, wincing. Then reached over and thumped the dash, once, twice. Third time lucky. The speedometer needle, and all the other dials, became unstuck. I checked our speed: a hair under 80 kilometres.
“What’s that in miles?” I asked.
“Forty-nine point four.”
“And in … knots?”
A slight pause. “One forty-seven point three.”
“I was kidding.”
“I know.”
Not far from the church, a yellow vehicle appeared suddenly in my wing mirror, getting bigger and bigger. It pulled up beside us, in the oncoming lane. Cops? No siren, no flashing lights. Céleste, as alert as ever, slid down into the footwell.
The car, or rather tank, remained there, cruising abreast, matching my speed. When I looked over, its passenger window came down. A faintly familiar face, with a drunkard’s grin and periscopically rising middle finger beside it. He sped up and veered into my lane, missing my bumper by a hair. Hummer, licence 666 HLL. My second encounter with this idiot. I pressed on the accelerator, to the floor, until I felt something around my ankle. Céleste’s hand.
“Don’t,” she said calmly.
“You know the guy?”
“No, but let him go.”
I took my foot off the gas. She was right of course. But if ever there was a third encounter of the close kind, I vowed, I would give chase, not stopping until I shot him in the face with Brooklyn’s Walther .38.
I didn’t quite know what to expect from Céleste when we arrived. Joy? Horror? Relief? She felt none of these, as far as I could tell. As I prepared cranberry-bloodorange tea and a cat’s breakfast for six, she sat motionless at the kitchen table, staring out the window, her mouth curved in a vague expression of resignation. Even the cats couldn’t seem to cheer her up, although she had a kind word and a hug for each. I told her about the first time I fed them, about Moon following me through the cemetery rows, but she didn’t respond. I told her about the two racoons I had seen in her grandmother’s study, who had come and gone through the doggy door. It was as though she were deaf.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
Moon was on her lap, the only cat that wasn’t eating. “I’m not bragging,” she rasped. Her voice was sounding worse and worse, like she had lung cancer and was talking through a hole in her trachea.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. She gave Moon a kiss and set her down in front of her dish. Declining my help, she then hobbled up the stairs, pausing at each step, head down, moving as if sleepwalking through a nightmare. She disappeared from view and I heard her bedroom door being shut and locked.
A churchly silence settled on the house, on its living and lately dead, and a sense of guilt began to dye my time there.
XVIII
I slept all day & all night which was a big surprise because when we arrived I couldn’t stop thinking about Grand-maman. I walked to my bed with jelly legs and when I closed the door I started shaking so hard that I couldn’t stop myself. I pulled the covers right over me & felt like a bird with a cloth draped over its cage for the night. I started to panic. I was sure I’d hear strange sounds all day long, like footsteps or windows being pried open. Or that I’d pass out from lack of oxygen. But when I made a little air hole & put my head on the pillow, I fell asleep almost right away! Because I feel safe with Nile?
In a dream I saw Gran’s face & she pointed her finger at me & told me not to be sad, that her time had come, and that Nile would take care of me. Did she mean that we would get married? Anyway, it was just a dream.
Then I started thinking about other things. About bears, and one bear in particular. And about Baz cutting me open like a fish & bleeding me like a deer. I got out of bed & threw up in the toilet, with the taps running full blast so that Nile wouldn’t hear. I sat down & started shaking again, so hard that the toilet seat began to rattle.
“I’ll never get back to sleep,” I thought. Then, without warning, I was in another dream talking to Santa. I was sitting on his knee, waiting for Mom to take my picture, when he whispered in my ear: “Only good girls will make Santa’s list this year.” I couldn’t get the words out of my head so I forced the dream to end & got out of bed again. It was around lunchtime — the next day! I crept down the hall to see which room Nile had taken. He took the guest room, the second-smallest room in the house, just below the maid’s old room in the attic. I told him he could take Gran’s room but he didn’t & I’m glad.
Nile served lunch, if that’s the word, some plant fibre that reminded me of a braided door mat. Stewed weeds on the side, tomato sauce mix
ed with something white, perhaps toothpaste. After I secretly tossed it, Nile asked if I’d like to watch a movie. I said no, I had work to do (making gifts, though I didn’t tell him that) but he talked me into it. He had a big Walmart bag full of DVDs that he spread out on the table. He doesn’t rent them, he buys them! Some were comedies, to cheer me up I guess. I said that I appreciated the gesture, but that I would not watch any movie with a midget in it. And that includes Danny DeVito. Some were “stamp” movies: The Mandarin Mystery, Decalogue IX and Charade. I chose Charade, which was shot in Paris & stars Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn. After the film Nile rewound and freeze-framed an image near the end, of the 3 valuable stamps everyone was after: the Swedish 4-Shilling of 1854, the Hawaiian Blue 3-cent of 1894, and the Gazette Moldave, supposedly the most valuable stamp in the world. In the movie they were worth $85,000, $65,000, and $100,000.
Nile said that it’s really the Swedish 3-Shilling of 1855 that’s valuable. There was a mistake in the colour — the printer made it yellow instead of green. Only one copy of this stamp has ever been found — by a young Swedish boy looking through his grandfather’s collection. It sold in 1996 for $2.3 million. It’s the most valuable stamp in the world.
As for the Hawaiian Blue 3-cent of 1894, Nile said that it’s actually the 2-cent of 1851 that’s valuable, worth about $750,000 if unused. In 1892 one of its owners was murdered for it by another collector. To be specific, Hector Giroux killed Gaston Leroux. I wrote all this down — my memory’s good but not that good.
As for the “Gazette Moldave,” Nile says it doesn’t exist.
While I ate Lucky Charms out of the box, with Mercury on my lap & Comet on one side & Moon on the other, Nile told me some interesting things about the movie. About the casting. He said that Cary Grant was worried about the difference in their ages (over 25 years, more than me & Nile!) so he insisted that the Hepburn character pursue him, rather than vice versa. Which is cool because it cancels out the creepy factor. Why am I mentioning all this? Because it gave me an idea: I will pursue Nile, even though he’s a bit off, and it will cancel out the creepy factor.
I’m not beautiful like Audrey Hepburn, so I’ll be Jane Eyre instead. Jane was plain like me, and an orphan and runaway too. And Nile will be Rochester — old, rich, proud, sardonic, moody & morose. Naturally, his moroseness goes away after he meets me. He calls me his “elf,” his “changeling.” And Nile’s ex is like Rochester’s wife — mad — and he never goes back to her. Then we separate for a while & I dream that Nile is calling my name & when I finally find him he’s blind. But he regains sight in one eye so that he can see his child when it’s put into his arms …
More later. Is that a snowplow I hear?
XIX
Céleste slept like the dead her first day back home but seemed to be awake for the next two. I could hear her pacing about in her room in the wee hours, or wandering the halls like Ophelia.
Although she never mentioned it, she must have heard the same things I heard during the night: a snowplow grinding up and down the church lane, snowmobiles roaring through the graveyard, a ringing black phone with ghosts on the other end …
“Don’t come in!” she would hiss each time I knocked on her door. A whispery voice that rasped like a file.
She was making ornaments for a Christmas tree, I soon discovered, for a tree she didn’t want. At least not at first. “It’s a stupid tradition,” she said over a quick lunch I’d prepared, a blameless shiitake conchiglie with dark opal basil and white cilantro sauce, from a recipe Earl had given me. “It’s stupid to take the life of a young tree, and plastic ones are just as stupid.” Her mouth was encarmined with tomato sauce, which matched her bloodshot eyes. When I told her that I had found a red pine in the cemetery, one that had been felled and left to rot (two other taller ones had been poached), she thought that decorating it would be a nice memorial.
“Can you get some gifts for the cats before the stores close?” she asked. “Nothing for me, though. Promise? And some candles?” She then raced back to her room, or rather limped quickly.
For once I was ahead of her. While she was locked away upstairs the previous morning, I had slipped out, riskily, and purchased two dozen candles, six packs of Luv cat treats and as many catnipped fluffballs. Along with a Christmas log, microgreens, pink champagne, and three gifts for Céleste.
“And leave you alone?” I replied. “Sorry, can’t do it.”
Late on Christmas Eve, close to midnight, Céleste began trimming the tree with her handmade decorations: multicoloured clay figurines of deer, lynx, cougars, wolverines, bears (riding on the backs of cardinals) and swans, a pair of each, some of which she had just made, others from Christmases past. Added to these were some of her plaster and pewter dinosaurs, to which she attached red ribbons and loops. No angels, no star. After arranging and lighting the candles, two of them in corner nooks beside old brass snuff dishes, she put two wrapped boxes under the tree.
“You believe in God, right?” I asked.
“Yeah. God and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”
“No, seriously.”
“I’m an evangelical atheist. Like my grandmother.”
“So why are we celebrating Christmas? You believe in Christ?”
“Do you?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’ve never doubted,” she said, “that a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away for disturbing the peace two thousand years ago. And in fact I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for him. But as for his being the son of God? No.”
“Because there’s no God.”
“Well, your friend God really took great care of my grandmother. And my mother. And me. And all the animals
around here killed for fun.”
“So why are we celebrating?”
“Because this is a holiday from pagan times too. Candles, lights, even trees. It’s not altogether Christian.” She walked over to the foot of the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”
While she was in her bedroom I placed my own gifts under the tree. And hung two Christmas stockings lumpy with walnuts and tangerines. Should I deck the halls with balls of holly? I parted the curtains, wanting a white Christmas backdrop. Low in the sky, near the horizon, were vapourish waves of light, the blue-green streamers of an aurora. It’s a wonderful world.
I was stoking the pine-log fire, and seeing goldfish and guppies and angelfish swimming through the flames, when Céleste made her grand entrance. Slowly down the stairs she came, sans spectacles, squinting, in a distressed black frock, black ankle boots with a crisscross of laces wound through button-hooks, and tights of billiard-table green. But for the black lipstick and mascara, she might have been a pubescent Victorian widow. As she paraded by me on her way to the tree, I told her she looked great.
She waggled her eyebrows. “Miss America on the runway, that’s me.”
We opened our presents at midnight on the nail, that being the Quebec tradition. Céleste put her glasses back on and lackadaisically pulled out my unwrapped offerings from three plastic bags: a stamp album (she’d asked for one); my album of prehistoric animal stamps (she’d admired them); a telescope (which she’d not asked for); and The Best of Jimi Hendrix (ditto). She said thank you, but I think I had disappointed her.
“Do you know who Jimi Hendrix is?” I asked.
“No.”
A shocking gap in her home-schooling, that. “He was …” I didn’t quite know how to describe him in a sentence or two. “The greatest … well, you’ll see. He was part Indian like you.”
I received two well-thumbed volumes from her private collection—Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, both wrapped in white paper adorned with hand-drawn silver swans—along with something protected between two heavy pieces of cardboard. A drawing? Yes, a blue-pencil portrait. Of yours truly.
“Beautiful,” I said, my eyes slowly taking in the subtle shadings and sure lines. “Now I know what I’d look li
ke with successful plastic surgery.” It was the first “normal” drawing of a human I’d seen of hers. Her figures were most often grotesque and distorted à la Bosch or Bacon or fitted with devil horns; her animals, on the other hand, were always true, always beautiful. “Thank you.” I reached over and gave her an awkward hug.
“That one I just dashed off,” she said, blushing. “Look under the tissue paper.”
I did so and found another drawing, one that had taken much more time: a painting of Céleste and her grandmother in an airplane, after the photograph in the study. It was in the photorealist style, which I’d always thought was pointless non-art. Until now.
“Thank you, this is stunning, I … I’ll treasure it, I really will.” I examined the faces, the detail of the blue-and-white plane, the little metal “skis” over the wheels, the colours of the frozen lake. “Thanks for … you know, all this. The books and … all the work you put into … thanks.”
“Yeah, sure. After all, not like you ever did anything for me.”
I nodded, my eyes trained on the painting.
“I started that one a while ago,” she admitted, “but just finished it last night.”
I looked again at the farcically flattering portrait. Thought I’d better change the subject before ruining it with teardrops. “Can a plane take off on a frozen lake? Or would the wheels just spin all over the place? Or the skis just … slide.”
“When I was seven I asked my grandmother the same question.”
Sounds about right. “I guess you were a bit backward at that age.”
“Think about it.”
I used to be fairly good at thinking, but over the years I seem to have weaned myself off the habit. “Do I get three guesses?”
“It’s amazing, Nile, how many people don’t understand the concept. The wheels have no friction, or practically none. They’re on the plane to reduce friction. They don’t drive the plane. They’re only there to stop the plane from dragging its guts along the ground. Its fuselage. Other than that, they apply no real force on takeoff. The engines act on the air above the ice, pushing the plane forward, and since the plane can move forward, it can generate lift and take off. Once it reaches a certain speed, of course.”