The Islands of Dr. Thomas (7 page)

Émilie and her mother shared the rest of the chores, but it was little enough for the privilege of being able to call Langlade home for two months, to have an immense playground with limitless possibilities for games to invent.

At the end of the day, the cardboard crates had disappeared into the shed; the suitcases had taken up residence under the beds; the pantry shelves were warping under the provisions; the stove, which had been on all day, had got rid of the humidity; and the kettle was singing—all signs that summer had begun.

By dusk, all the chores were done and Émilie took the envelope of photos and walked up the hill behind the house. This little mound in the middle of the woods had been her spot since childhood. Here she had played enjoyable games of Cowboys and Indians with her friends. And now, sitting on the headland and looking out to the isthmus of Langlade and, beyond that, Miquelon, she became reacquainted with her paradise.

In a second, painlessly, seamlessly, she felt free from the sadness that invaded her so often. She no longer felt muddled, anxious, doubtful. Here, everything was in its place. “Even me,” she mused. She had always felt this way; she had often noticed that when she was in Langlade she wrote much less. Not because she did not have the time, but because she was at peace with the world around her and depended less on her pen to deal with everyday life.

The isthmus, the ocean, the hills of Miquelon, the mouth of the Goulet that she could make out in the distance, had been there for centuries, unchanged. “This is what Jacques Cartier saw when he came in 1534,” her grandmother, a history buff, reminded her sometimes. Langlade never allowed itself to be put to shame and, with a minimum of effort, it accepted you as you were, asked nothing in return except for mutual respect. Émilie remembered that when she was a child, upon their arrival in Langlade, she would put on her pyjamas early in the evening, much to her mother's dismay since she knew Émilie would be out playing for hours yet, skipping rope with her friends or running after the cows set free to wander after the evening milking. Much later, Émilie understood that by getting ready for bed so early in the evening, she was trying to trick fate. In her child's mind, once she was in her pyjamas, there could be no question of going back to Saint-Pierre.

She had long ago abandoned this ruse, but she still felt a need to perform a ceremony to mark their arrival. On top of the hill, she could reconnect herself to Langlade, like the bushes and dwarf pines that surrounded and protected her. She occupied only a tiny place, a place that was hers alone, and she felt as if she was part of the nature around her, just like these twigs, this mushroom, or this fern. After all, some parts of nature disappeared in the fall and returned in the spring, did they not? The Langlade people who came from Saint-Pierre at the beginning of July were a little like annuals, blooming in this paradise.

When Émilie was on this hill—a fort made of brambles and firs tucked away and hard to find for anyone unfamiliar with all the small paths that wound their way through the alder trees, camouflaged by the tentacles of roots and branches—anything could happen. She was sheltered from the world. At worst, if her fort was invaded or she needed to escape, she could hide or even disappear. When she was little she often imagined the worst case scenarios: war was declared, Saint-Pierre invaded. An enemy contingent tracked them down in Langlade but were back on their way shortly afterwards, unable to find them on the mountain. Here, nothing bad could happen to her.

It was reassuring for her to be here, even today. She leaned up against a large rock, deposited there, her mother had explained, by an advancing glacier millions of years ago. This image usually made her think about the immensity of time, but today her mind was elsewhere, on the envelope of photos she had just placed on her lap.

The first picture made her smile. You could see the high tide mark where she had landed that very morning. The mail boat, an old tub, was moored to the same buoy while the Cap aux Morts rested at the back to the left. The same pebbles, the same waves, the same perspective. For Jacques Cartier, as well.

Doctor Thomas was as careful with the composition as he was with capturing his memories. He had positioned a woman and a little girl beside a man with a big belly and a thick moustache that seemed to hide a mischievous smile. She had seen him before...Let's see...Yes, Mr. Larranaga, a Basque farmer whose farm was located in the middle of the isthmus. It had long since disappeared, but she recognized him from her grand- father's photos. If seeing this rather rustic man made her smile, it was because he was famous in her family for his rough French.

“Mister Larranaga was married several times,” her grandmother told her, always with the same pleasure, “three times, in fact. His last wife had been married once before as well. People died young in those days,” she added, so people would not think these two valiant people were fickle or that they married on a whim. “And each couple had children. That made quite a gang of sons and daughters, and when people asked Mister Larranaga who was the father or mother of one of the children, he would always answer: ‘All this, our children.'” It was a sweet little anecdote which, along with the photo, took on a special flavour.
After all
, Émilie often thought while she listened to her grandmother's anecdotes,
that's history too
.

Turning back to the photo, she guessed that the two other people must be the doctor's wife and daughter. What the woman next to the farmer was wearing did not look like Mrs. Larranaga's clothing; she was accustomed to working hard on the farm, and along with taking care of the animals, the yard, and the kitchen, she was famous for having saved people from certain death on the dune in winter after a shipwreck—and more than once. In the photo, everyone looked happy: the passengers, glad to arrive in Langlade, no doubt, and the farmer to be in such pleasant company. Émilie was happy herself, pleased to see that summers in Langlade had not changed.

“You stand there, Mister Larranaga. And you too, Marthe,” the doctor said to his daughter, who was already busy throwing pebbles in the water.

The farmer, proud as a peacock, stood up tall. He was being honoured by having his portrait done with the good doctor's wife and daughter. The hangers-on who filled the high-water mark that morning watched with interest and envy.

“Doctor Thomas and his family are on board. They are coming to the farm,” the farmer had made sure to tell everyone in sight that morning. He was making his way to the shore to await the little steamship that had just rounded the Cap aux Morts.

Smiling discreetly, the doctor contemplated the scene he had just composed. The atmosphere was one of simple happiness: the fair weather, the soft caress of the breeze in Marthe's and Emma's hair, the obvious pride of the farmer, who held his suspenders with his thumbs, the sparkling waves, the distant promise of the Langlade dune.

A childlike carefree pleasure came over him. The suffering of his patients, the odour of camphor and death vanished, the feeling of helplessness in the face of disease evaporated, his heavy responsibilities temporarily lifted...Today, between the salt air of the ocean and the softness of the meadow, the doctor thinks only of the pleasure of the carriage ride up to the Larranaga farm, the delicious meal promised by the generous farm-wife, the wild berries that would sweeten the dessert, the inimitable stories the farmer would tell...

“Don't move!” he said.

The first day of holidays was about to begin.

Émilie focused next on a series of photos featuring the doctor's wife and daughter: one of them horseback riding in the Goulet, with its singular contrast of the riders and black horses against the dazzling white-hot sand in the August sun; another of a dreamy-eyed rider in the foreground who had stopped at the site of a shipwreck run aground on the West dune. Émilie could tell it was the day after a storm because she could see the disorderly waves of a sea that had not yet recovered from its fit of rage. All of the photos had been taken in the summer.

You had to be intimately connected with the landscape to recognize the season. On this isthmus, windswept just about every day of the year, summer could be distinguished by some sparse and thorny plants that managed to survive in a few of the most sheltered spots. It could be felt more than seen, in the softer surf, in the glow of the sun high above the idling waves, in the green patches around the tolts at Delamaire's place, in the absence of snow on the hilltops in Miquelon. Things that would matter little to a tourist, but to the initiated, meant everything.

She thought that the photos would please François, that they would bring into his office in Paris a little bit of the ocean, a gust of iodine-scented sea air from Langlade,
a little bit of happiness
, she thought, having always suspected he missed it terribly. Just as she did.

Then she looked at the photos Doctor Thomas had taken when he was out hunting, and one in particular stood out, with dozens of Canada Geese with their immaculate bodies and their long black necks that stood like exclamation points of pain on the snow. A hunting companion of the doctor's, dressed in white, was parading in front of his victims, proud of having managed to trick them and kill them, despite the fact that they “usually took wing when they heard the hunter shoulder his rifle.” That's what her Uncle Louis, who loved hunting migratory birds, had told her, sighing with regret at the thought that he had never been able to put a feather of one of these birds in his cap.

She put that snapshot aside, despite herself. François liked hunting. It was a way for him to feel like a local son who had grown up here and still belonged here in spite of having gone away to school at a very early age, and never staying for more than a few weeks since then, his father having died before he had taught him to hunt. Émilie understood that he had started hunting late in life, having learned to do it so he could join his brothers and friends on common ground.

He would no doubt like the idea of hanging this image—so incongruous in Paris—on the wall of his office, if only to be able to see the reaction of his visitors.

As the sun slipped down into the west, she hurried to leaf through the rest of the snapshots, all similar to the first ones—except for the very last one.

She immediately recognized the place although it was taken in the middle of winter (February, she guessed) in Miquelon. It was a picture of Cap Blanc taken from the top of a hill:
the Chapeau, perhaps
, she thought, trying to orient herself. It was not easy, given the lack of landmarks in the picture. It did not really show anything else except an expanse of snow-covered barrens and glacial rocks that had come to rest at the edge of the leaden ocean, motionless and colourless. It was as if nature had been frozen in time, the Earth had stopped turning, and the Moon had fled, taking the tides with her. Émilie shuddered, although she could not help but appreciate the indescribable beauty of the sunset, which at this very moment, to her left, beyond the West dune, had set the isthmus ablaze like a
toro de fuego
on Bastille Day.

This Miquelon was foreign to her. Since she only came to Langlade in the summer, she had no idea what her paradise was like in its winter garb. She did not know where the snow likes to hide, where the snowdrifts pile up like sand dunes, where the wind stings the most sharply, or where the blustery wind erases the roads, hides the paths, and blinds the most hardy of men. Was it possible that the panorama that caressed her this very moment, with all its soft curves and copper-coloured highlights, could turn into this disembodied spectre later in the season? How could nature be both so warm and so glacial?

And why had the doctor climbed the hills that day, in such uninviting weather? What had he seen in this grey and black panorama? She thought the photo was superb in its stark beauty and tried to imagine the photo- grapher's state of mind when he stood behind his camera. What distress had led him there, to be captivated by this cruel and sublime beauty? What spirit moved him to transform such a bare landscape into such poignant beauty?

Three

By the time she returned from Langlade in September, Émilie had chosen the prints she considered the most representative of Doctor Thomas' body of photographic work in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.

“Look,” she told Jacques. “I've put together pictures of Saint-Pierre, the work on the beach, the mariners' celebration, the ice-cutting on Frecker pond—I didn't even know they used to do that! There are also photos of the ocean, of the cod being weighed onboard a banker, of French schooners on the Grand Banks, and of course lots of landscapes. And the photo of the doctor on the ice floe by the island: It was the first photo you showed us last winter, remember? Then some of horseback riding in the Goulet, of shipwrecks on the West dune, fields on the Larranagas' farm...And just to please François, I decided to add one taken after a trip to hunt the Canada goose and one hunting seabirds from a dory in Miquelon.”

Jacques nodded his head in approval, impressed by the impact the photos had when they were all put together. Set apart from the collection he had processed, they revealed the soul of their creator. He found it very powerful.

“And to finish it off, I put in these two,” she continued, “one of Cap Blanc in the winter and one of the doctor sitting on a capstan, holding a seal in his arms.”

“They stand out from the rest of the collection, don't they?” Jacques asked.

“Yes, but it seems to me that the starkness of nature in the photo of Cap Blanc is something like the attitude of the doctor himself, sitting there in his oilskins on the capstan, expressionless and holding a seal. I think he looks troubled. Anyone else would be smiling, holding such a cute and harmless little animal. But not the doctor.”

She suddenly remembered the piercing cries that young seals made in the summer on the sandbanks of the Goulet—shrieks that sounded like the cries of infants in distress—and wondered if the doctor had been troubled by this sound.

“Everything is here!” Jacques declared, proudly.

“Why do you say that?” she asked, curious to hear his professional opinion.

“We can feel the complexity of a man torn between his daily work and his ideals. Despite his reputation as a doctor and the respect with which he was probably treated, the poor man seems to have gone from smile to despair. Look at the contrast, for example, between the photo of Cap Blanc, which is like a heart-wrenching cry from a desperate artist, compared to the horseback ride in the Goulet, the very image of carefree harmony. See what I mean?”

“That's exactly what I thought!” she exclaimed.

“So, is the work progressing? I'll be there soon, you know,” François announced at the other end of the line.

She could sense his impatience. He was somewhere in North America, in Washington, she thought she had heard. To be honest, she had not really paid attention; she was completely caught off guard by his voice. She loved the intonations that were so typical of him, the warm tone of his voice, the spontaneity that moved her each time, especially since she knew how more restrained he was in his working life. He had only to utter a word or two for her to be able to see him as clearly as if he were right beside her.

This time he was calling from nearby, he explained. Somewhere in America, in a four-star hotel, in a huge room that was neutral to a fault, totally impersonal, with two big double beds. It could just as easily be in Tokyo, Singapore, or Berlin. How many times had he woken up in the middle of the night in a hotel room, feeling totally disoriented and not knowing where he was? However, tonight he felt close to the people he loved. At least a thousand kilometres, as the crow flies, separated them, but even so, because they were on the same continent, with an hour and a half time difference, it seemed to him that he was breathing their air and feeling the same Atlantic breeze on his cheeks.

As they approached North America, François had felt rather than seen a patch of his islands under the clouds. He always insisted on booking a window seat, and halfway over the ocean he would begin searching the horizon. First he watched for the coast of Newfoundland to slowly emerge. The island had plenty of rocky cliffs and mountain peaks, but seen from high above, he could barely see it emerging out of the waves. An immense landmass, where lakes, rivers, fjords, and bays seemed to overtake the rocks, peat, and heather, Newfoundland looked like a sponge soaked in water doing its best to float on the surface of the ocean.

He plunged back into a familiar universe. He tried to identify the coast that was visible, to make out, in the lunar landscape, the minuscule communities hugging the cliffs as tightly as they could, to get even closer to the cod. A few years earlier, during a trout fishing expedition on the southern coast of Newfoundland, he had seen these villages, without streets, isolated from everything and sometimes built directly on the water, houses perched up on stilts, straddling the coast and the wave, like modest Venices of the north where dories were used as gondolas.

The architect had been mesmerized by the ingenious skill of people who were ready to make any sacrifice in order to pursue their trade as fishermen. He had also realized the size of the material gap between the residents of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon and Newfoundlanders. Aside from a few fishing shanties at the tip of Savoyard or the Allumette Cove, which were used a few days every summer, no one on the French islands lived in such precarious conditions.

His nose pressed up to the window, he kept watch for the islands, for the moment (rather unpredictable, since the route changed often) when the coast of Newfoundland disappeared and made way for the islands. He crossed his fingers that no clouds would get in the way, because they could be seen only for a fleeting moment. First the cape of Miquelon emerged, then the dune of Langlade, and the lighthouse at Pointe Plate; if he was sitting on the other side of the airplane, it was Saint-Pierre and the minuscule Île-aux-Marins that came into view.

He had just enough time to look at his tiny “rock,” to feel a tug on his heart as he looked for Voiles Blanches, Anse aux Soldats, Savoyard, all the places he loved, and to catch, on a sunny day, the reflection of a window being closed by a schoolteacher at the end of the day or by a government messenger delivering a notice to the
Conseil Général
officials. It was like a friendly wink to him, thirty thousand feet above. Then there was nothing until they flew over the coast of Nova Scotia. It was a moment of eternity though. All his life, the lives of his ancestors, his family, his friends, Jacques, Émilie, all his memories, his experiences, his favourite places: They were all condensed in these few minutes during which he could contemplate, and in a single glimpse, his islands.

This time, like every other time, he felt torn and could think of nothing else when he arrived in the United States, until he could find a telephone.

It was Émilie who answered. He was hoping that would be the case and had calculated the time difference so that she might still be home by herself, that they could have a chance to talk about everything and nothing, the photos, the doctor, school and her classes, the weather, anything at all as long as they could get as close as possible, and feel, temporarily, some comfort in their closeness.

In October, François set the dates for his trip. Jacques hurried to finish printing the photos Émilie had chosen and get ready to showcase them.

“We'll have to hang them somewhere,” Jacques decided. “That way François can really appreciate them. They're so beautiful.”

“You haven't really got the room, though.”

“No, that's true. We'll have to find some other spot. Let me think about it.”

A few days later, Jacques went to see his friend Edmond, a former businessman who had retired a long time ago and who was passionate about the history of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. A few other people as enthusiastic and determined as he was joined him in setting up a museum to preserve the local heritage. Government officials seemed to be as indifferent to these antiquities as the population was. “Chrome table mentality,” Edmond muttered disdainfully each time someone reported that an oak bed had been burned at the city dump, or that a vacant house on the Île-aux-Marins had been pillaged by tourists who knew the value of the “old junk” contrary to the indifferent heirs who had abandoned it. He struggled ardently against this affliction, and was known for his outbursts.

Edmond dealt with all the decisions of the Friends of the Museum, all the serious issues, all the political games, artfully and with good humour; he was highly skilled at getting what he wanted. Matters were dealt with at his house, in his living room with a glass of scotch before dinner. Edmond went out once a day, cane in hand, to take a walk, but he never visited anyone. Whatever the circumstances, people came to him. He held a Salon every evening at six-thirty, and with the help of a bottle of Black & White they brought from time to time, his regulars made themselves at home. His wife discreetly served the more delicate souls some Saint-Raphaël or some port.

So it was in these chambers, which housed the leaders in the domain of heritage preservation of the islands, that the photographer came to discuss Doctor Thomas' work and the series of prints he had just finished. He did not say a word about Émilie's involvement in the project. She had confided that she preferred to stay in the shadows for the time being. But he explained the problem: Where was he going to be able to exhibit such a fine collection so that his famous purchaser could see it in its best light?

“In the museum,” replied Edmond, putting down his glass of scotch long enough to light a cigarette. “In the museum,” he repeated emphatically.

“You have no more room in your museum than I have in my shop!” retorted Jacques, with a smile.

“Well, we'll just have to move something then. And anyway,” he added, not one to miss an opportunity, “it would be good to give everyone a chance to see these photos. They deserve it. Would you let us have them for a week or two?”

“You know very well we have far too many things in the museum already, Edmond,” said an old lady who seemed to be lost in the big armchair next to his, but whose fragile physical appearance hid an iron will.

“Oh, we'll find a way, Henriette,” Edmond replied. “We always do, you know.” He directed a complicit wink her way.

Henriette had supported him since he first started talking about the museum. A retired schoolteacher, exceptionally gifted with the French language and blessed with limitless curiosity, she had taken upon herself to search the archives for historical documents. She had found some, in terribly bad condition, that had been put on the floor of the basement in the government building to sponge up water after the flood, as the janitor who opened the door for her so she could begin working explained to her, clearly seeing nothing wrong with it.

It was Henriette who, in her name and Edmond's, had written numerous letters to politicians asking them to find a place to house the museum. And again, it was Henriette who had convinced the local population to share and display their souvenirs. A few announcements in the “Local Notices” on the radio, which they all listened to religiously at noon before the news, was all it took. Between “For sale: two-year-old puppy” and “The Gaspard family is pleased to announce the birth of their daughter...” the idea of a museum had taken hold.

The governor had come for a before-dinner drink—followed by the mayor, the senator, the member of parliament, the chair of the
Conseil Général
—all suddenly committed to protecting the history of their forefathers and all eager to be named as founders of the museum. As far as the population was concerned, people were thrilled to show off their family heirlooms and, in some cases, to get rid of them without having to make a trip to the dump. In any case, they answered the call and came with their wooden clogs, their compasses, old photos, rosary beads, Jesus of Prague miniatures, old coins from the Napoleon period, oars, and killicks.

“But how are we going to find room for them?” Henriette mused.

“Let's see,” said Edmond.

Silence reigned for a few moments while everyone pictured the museum in their minds. It was situated on the third and top floor of one of the oldest buildings in Saint-Pierre. Anyone who managed to make it to the top of the endless staircase, out of breath, was offered an interesting choice: to the left was the museum and to the right was the library, which would have been equally at home in the museum given that some of the books were old enough to have been handed down from Antiquity. Although there were still some empty shelves in the library, the museum gave the impression of being about to explode.
A real mess
, Jacques had often thought.

Across from the front door was a hallway lined with an eclectic collection of objects. On one wall were fishing tools, displays of mariner's knots, family trees of the Vigneau or Poirier, the Acadian families who had settled on the islands; on another, there were photos of schooners and a collection of war decorations. The whole thing was a whirlwind of information that visitors tried their best to grasp.

The corridor led to a little room in which stuffed samples of the island's fauna were displayed: snowy owl, spotted owl, silver fox, rabbit and partridge, snipe and geese, all looking more real than nature. In the showcases, slivers of rocks reminded the viewer of the geological origins of the islands. In short, this was the natural history section to which had been added, for want of an herbarium, an original copy of an herbal guide,
La flore laurentienne
, by Brother Marie-Victorin, an eminent Quebec botanist whose studies of the flora of eastern Canada described in minute detail the plant life of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.