Travelling Light (21 page)

Bo-so-leel.
It explained the dark hair, the familiar lilt in her speech.

“
Vous êtes canadienne
?”

“My
mémère
's from Canada.” She grabbed the little boy's hand and they started towards the parking lot, where a dozen rusting pickups stood in awkward stances, like men with bad knees.

“
Parlez-vous francais
?”

“Not really, not anymore.” She opened the door of a green pickup as battered and rusty as all the other trucks. “Come on, Jackie, climb aboard. Your mama's going to drive this thing.”

Johnny climbed in on the passenger side. Polly lifted the boy in, then climbed in herself and shut her door. “I hate this old truck, the brakes are shot.” She found a key in the ashtray, switched on the ignition, and ground the starter pedal with her heel. The starter whined a few times before the motor caught, and the truck began shuddering and smoking. She shoved it into gear and steered out of the lot, and they were immediately caught up in the heavy tourist traffic inching through Dock Square. She kept shifting into neutral and gunning the motor so it wouldn't stall.

The little boy had climbed onto Johnny's lap and was gazing out at the cars and tourists. Polly patted the seat beside her. “Hey, Jackie, sit.”

“He's fine here.”

“He loves trucks. And boats. Wait'll he sees an airplane.”

“Is your husband fishing full-time?”

“Leo's my brother.”

“Oh.”

“He says he's never crossing the Piscataqua Bridge again, never leaving Maine. He bought that tub when he got back from the war. He's going to put in a new engine, he says. He wants to lobster, but it's hard when you're not born to it. They don't like outsiders around here, especially Frenchies from Biddeford. They been cutting his traps, trying to scare him off.”

He watched people in bright clothes licking ice cream cones on the balcony of the River View Café. On the other side of the road, tourists waited in line to order lobster rolls and fried clams at the window of Gooch's takeout shack.

“Lot of tourists,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. In this town they're back to making money.”

They finally made it over the little drawbridge. She drove up to the junction and turned left onto the road following the river out to Kennebunk Beach.

“You live in the 'Port?” he asked.

“Biddeford.”

A textile town, five miles up the coast. The mill was on Main Street, one red-brick wall rising sheer from the sidewalk, with rows of tiny windows and iron shutters. When he was a kid he thought it was a jail, not a factory. It used to scare him. He used to dream about it.

“They don't like outsiders in the 'Port, especially from Biddeford. Leo, they cut his gear, and now sometimes he finds bullets they put on the front seat. But he won't give up. He's a crazy Frenchman.”

“Were you lobstering today?”

“Not on Sunday. He just took us for a ride. Jackie loves going on the boat with Uncle Leo, don't you, sweetie?”

“Where's Jackie's father?”

“Killed in the war.”

The old truck's motor was nearly as loud as the boat. The road bent to follow the beach. The fog had blown off, the light was clear and detailed, and people were walking on the shining wet sand.

“It's nice out here,” Polly said. A salt breeze was blowing, snapping flags on whitewashed poles. “I wouldn't mind living out here all summer. It gets awful muggy up in Biddeford.”

“What do you do?”

“I was at
Hôpital Notre-Dame, sort of a bookkeeper for the nuns, but I got pretty tired of it. Now I'm working at a garage, keeping track of the bills. It's tough in Biddeford with the boys back from the war — Pepperell's are letting people go. But the garage is good.
C'est une bonne job.
My
mémère,
she minds Jackie. Where's your parents' house? Is it one of these?”

“Up around the point. You can't see it yet.”

“You don't sound so French.”

“My father's French, my mother's English. I grew up in both languages.”

She braked to allow two women in sundresses, pushing strollers, to cross the road. “Does everyone speak French up there?”

“Most people. But there's English too.”

“We were going to live in California after the war. Jeff did his pursuit training at Santa Barbara. He fell in love with California and I was going to go out. A bunch of the pilots brought their wives out, only I was pregnant, and pretty sick for a while, then his group got orders for the South Pacific. He said after seeing California he never wanted to live anyplace else. He sent us boxes of oranges for Christmas. We were all going to move out there after the war, his parents, brothers and sisters,
mémère
,
everyone. Was Canada in the war?”

“Yes, two years before the States.”

“You don't hear much about Canada. My
mémère
grew up in Tingwick — know where that is?”

“Arthabaska County. It's what they call the
bois francs
, hardwood country. It's near where my father's family is from.”

“You should meet my
mémère
. She came down here when she was twelve. Got off the train and went right to work at Pepperell's. Her back's all crooked from bending over the loom. She talks about going up to Canada, but she never will.”

There were swimmers in the water, and kids playing in the waves.

“Sorry about your husband.”

“Yeah.” She pumped the clutch and downshifted. “I'm a little tired of all the ‘sorry' stuff, to tell the truth.” She was gripping the wobbling wheel with both hands. “I never was on a boat before the
Marie Claire.
It's nice being your own boss, but I don't know if I'd be willing to fight off the whole town just to spend ten hours a day hauling traps and the rest of the time on my back working on an engine. You were in the war, right?”

“Yes.”

“When I go a few hours without thinking about Jeff, it feels like I'm committing a sin. Even Leo said —” She caught herself. “Okay, that's enough.
Ferme ta gueule.
”

The boy bounced happily on Johnny's knee. They were coming up to Lord's Point. Past the Point it was only a couple of hundred yards to the cottage.

Polly suddenly veered the truck across the road and brought it to an abrupt stop beside the seawall. Switching off the engine, she shook out a cigarette from a pack of Chesterfields, then offered him one. She lit them both with a match. Inhaling, she leaned back until her head touched the rear window. She wore her dark hair tied back. Her neck was long and slender. She might have been an Indian.

“You need to get home,” she said, “but let me finish this. I can't smoke and drive. Holding this machine on the road takes all my concentration.”

“A few minutes won't make a difference.”

“Jeff's father has a funeral home — Salon Funéraire Beausoleil
.
They wanted Jeff to be a priest but he ended up going to the Suffolk School of Law in Boston. He finished just when the Marines were looking for pilots. He could have been a navy lawyer, but flying was something he always wanted to try. He thought he'd be good at it.”

Reaching across, she touched her son's curls. “My life is like someone else is living it, not me. What everyone wants is for me to marry Ray. He owns the shop where I work — Ray Prudhomme, Jeff's cousin. Not right away, but maybe in six months. That's what they're hoping will happen. ‘Ray'll give her a good home, make a good papa for Gérard's boy,'
that's what they say. Gérard
,
that was Jeff's Canadian name.”

“Is that what you're going to do?”

“Oh, Christ. Maybe I will.”

She flipped her cigarette out the window and was leaning forward to turn the key when he placed the palm of his hand on her back and, leaning forward, kissed her.

The first kiss landed on the side of her mouth, but she turned to him, and the next kiss was full on her lips. Her soft, dry lips tasted bitter from the cigarette.

They broke apart. The little boy was still perched on Johnny's lap. Without a word, Polly pressed the starter with her heel, then shoved the truck into gear. Glancing over her shoulder, she steered back out at the road.

“How long are you staying?” she said.

“We're driving back to Montreal tomorrow.”

“Oh God, you're married.”

“Yes.”

“Where's your cottage? Is it one of these?”

“Keep driving, forget the cottage. Just keep going.”

“Which one is yours?”

“That one.” He pointed.

She stopped the truck just past the garden gate, and he could smell the rancid sweetness of the
Rosa rugosa
his mother had planted so many summers before.

“Your wife will be worried sick.”

“Forget about her.”

Both hands on the wheel, she stared straight ahead. “I don't know who the hell you think you are, but you better get out now.”

He shifted the little boy onto the seat, then opened the door and climbed out. She gunned the motor and started off before he'd even closed the door, which clanged shut on its own as he watched the old truck rocking down the road.

Reaching for the
Rosa rugosa,
he pinched one of the prickly stems between his fingers, then leaned down and breathed the musk without trying to pluck the ragged little pink flower. There was a dab of dark blood, almost purple, on his fingertip. He touched it with his tongue, tasting salt. No sense of taste if he were dead.

Now it's night, he's in the new-old Buick on the iron bridge above the St. Lawrence, and he isn't thinking about his wife or his daughter, or even Polly Beausoleil. He's thinking of the long-since dead, the Irish navvies with their dredges and barrows, the Mohawks in their moccasins cat-walking iron beams two hundred feet above the river.

Then, all of a sudden he's across. The Buick floats down the bridge ramp almost by itself, he barely needs touch the wheel. Commissioned or demobbed, lost or found, dead or alive, he's on the South Shore. The powerful scent of farm country rises up, cattle, manure, late-summer, hay and he feels the big car bending itself south onto the highway for New England.

AUTHOR'S
NOTE

The oldest story here (“In Montreal”) appeared in
Best Canadian Stories 1977
; the newest (“Civil Wars”) was written last week, provoked by the experience — occasionally painful — of rereading the others. Most were published in a 1987 collection,
Night Driving
. I have revised the older stories, but tried to avoid rewriting. I approached them more in the spirit of a translator.

I have arranged the stories (roughly) by geography, which seems to correlate (roughly) with tone, theme, and the ages of the main characters. The first stories are mostly set in Montreal. The characters or voices are boys or very young men. The next bunch is set on the road or in the West, and the protagonists are usually lost souls in their twenties. The last group of stories is set in cities, with characters edging towards their thirties — which doesn't, of course, seem so old anymore. At the very end is a pair of stories that came up when I was trying to write my way into an extended family story that is
the subject of my first two novels,
The Law of Dreams
and
The O'Briens
, and is the story I am still writing in my third novel. “Cup of Tea” and “Travelling Light” are approaches to that family story.

I grew up in an apartment on a hillside in Montreal, within a reasonably affectionate middle-class Canadian family. There was a good deal to be explored there but I did not notice it at the time, or only caught it in glimpses. I got the title of the original collection from my gentle father, whose final piece of advice when I was eighteen and leaving home for the first time — heading out west in an old car — was, “Never drive at night. That's when all the nuts are out on the road.” Leaving home, going out west, spinning down the night road, was very much the spirit behind the original collection.

The young man who wanted to be a writer and who self-consciously rackets through many of these stories was a Dylan-obsessed boy eager to quit the staid Montreal apartment, to leave the hillside and the impeccably middle-class family. There are thousands of versions of that boy, or that girl, throughout history. Later on, writing screenplays in California and not doing very well at it, I began to see that my real subject as a writer might be everything I'd been trying to escape, but the stories here — most of them — are still about the voyage out. Their dynamic is night driving, night drives. They seem to be heading for the wonderful, scary place that people in Maine, where I live now, call “away.”

But even as I was assembling
Night Driving
, my gravitational curve was bending towards home. “The Servants' Way” and “Yellow Dress,” both from
Night Driving
, aren't road stories at all. In one, a boy leaves home but the story's about the home. Both are grounded in an urban, middle-class childhood in a specific time and place. I've not lived in Montreal for decades but that city still seems radiant to me.

These stories now seem to be mostly about growing up. A young person is in love with language and syntax but is not very wise and owns little first-hand experience. He's often not writing what he knows. He doesn't know what he knows. He doesn't grasp that experience counts for a lot, that wisdom exists, that silence is — sometimes — golden. He's trying to claim a life for himself. Sometimes he's trying to fake it. He does, however, believe in the world.

In my first novel the protagonist reminded himself
An animal is all you are. And the world's just ground and light.
A writer's corollary to this might be:
Well, then, pay attention.
That is what the young man who wrote these stories was trying to do.