Washika (6 page)

Mademoiselle
Archambault came in carrying a purple glass jar with a wooden tongue depressor sticking out from the top.

“What is your name?”

“Henri. Henri Morin.”

“Hold your shirt out, Henri.”

With the wooden instrument she brought out globs of pale yellow salve and applied it to his chest, starting at the top just below his neck and sliding it all the way down to his navel. She used long gentle strokes and Henri could feel the coolness of the salve each time she applied a new glob of it. He was beginning to feel better and he wanted to tell her that, and that he even liked the smell of the salve. He wanted to say that, although he liked the smell of the salve, there was another smell that he liked even better, and that he liked the soft way she touched him and that he didn't care if she was older than him.

“There, that should do it.”

“It feels better already.”

“Try to sleep on your back. And, of course, stay out of the sun.”

“Should I come back?”

“See how it is in the morning. Probably it will blister. So do not pick at them.”

“That's it then?”

“Yes.”

Henri had not felt this way before. It was simple enough. All he had to do was to thank her and leave. He carefully buttoned his shirt, leaving the ends loose outside his trousers. He looked at the nurse, at the way her eyes were a light green and how quickly they darted from side to side when she looked at him.

“Was there anything else?”

“No, that's all. Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Henri.”

There, it was done. Now all he had to do was to leave.

“
Mademoiselle
Archambault?”

“Yes, Henri?”

“I'd like to know. What is your first name?”

“Lise.”

“Mine is Henri.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, thank you again.”

“You are welcome.”

“You want me to shake the mat outside? My boots, you know.”

“No, do not bother. I will do it later.”

“All right. Well then, good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Henri.”

“Hey! You like raspberries?”

“Yes Henri, I like raspberries. Now go, you hear!”

Lise Archambault, twenty-eight years of age, an excellent nurse, systematic and tidy about everything in her life, a lonely woman who had not made many friends since the dispersal of her graduating class, laughed for the first time in the three long years she had been at Washika.

Henri opened the door to leave.

“I'll be back,” he said. “You'll see. As soon as they're out, I'll bring you a pailful.”

As Henri walked down the gravel road away from the infirmary, Lise Archambault watched him for a long time through the screen door and, after, through the curtained window of her bedroom.

A
t four o'clock in the morning it was raining and cold. It had been raining softly but steadily since midnight.

P'tit-Gus walked quickly across the yard. He wore a heavy wool mackinaw with the collar turned up so that, at times, it touched the rim of his hard hat. He was a short, stocky little man and there was a no-nonsense look about him as he made his way from the main camp to the bunkhouse-and-office. With his hand in his pocket, he carried a bundle of newsprint wedged under his arm. Walking along the wet sand and lighting his way with a hunting lamp, he could see his breath in the cold air and the fine drops of rain falling in front of the lens.

Arriving at the bunkhouse-and-office where six of the students slept, P'tit-Gus scraped his boots on the short length of square timber at the door. He cupped his hand over the latch of the screen door as he opened it and went inside.

The air in the room was damp. It smelled of tobacco smoke, and fly oil and wet woolen socks. One of the students was snoring.

P'tit-Gus moved swiftly to the north side of the room where the oil space heater was. It was an older model, a brown, rectangular, upright metal box with a grilled front and a small fuel tank at the back. From the top of the heater, a grey galvanized pipe rose to within two feet of the ceiling, turned sharply, and ran the full length of the room before entering the south wall. Grey metal chairs were scattered around the space heater with wet jeans draped over the backs and, directly over the heater and suspended from a wire hung several pairs of woolen socks of all colours, but most were the grey ones sold at the van, with red and white bars at the tops.

P'tit-Gus reached around to the back of the heater and turned the flow valve to “half.” He opened the grilled door and then, very quickly, he opened the small round door of the firebox. The hinges were rusted and P'tit-Gus knew the noise they would make if he opened the door slowly. In the twenty odd years he had worked as chore boy in dozens of lumber camps, he had learned about such things.

P'tit-Gus aimed the light down inside the firebox. He could see the velvety coat of blackness along its wall. At the bottom, the ashes were a dull grey except at the back where the oil had begun to flow and reflect the light of his lamp. He was very careful about things like that. He remembered well that cold February night in another camp when he had come so close to burning his shack to the ground. It was a good old heater, very much like this one but, for some reason that he never understood, the fire had gone out while he had been off attending to his chores. It was twenty below that night and, even though he had a good down-filled bag to sleep in, he knew what it would be like in the morning if he did not light a fire, and how miserable it would be shivering into his clothes. He crumpled up some paper, set a flame to it and dropped it into the firebox. Instantly, the flames went shooting past the door of the firebox and up into the pipe. For three hours that night P'tit-Gus sat by the stove, listening to the roar of the flames and the cracking of the stove and its pipes as the metal expanded, and he held the damper open with a hunting knife to try to keep the flames down. He sat in the dark in his shack as the light generator had long been shut down. He could smell the heat of the old stove and see the cherry-red circle of heat growing on the wall of the firebox.

P'tit-Gus learned his lessons well. He remembered, yet there were always the reminders. There was the memory of the grey-white circle on the belly of the old stove to warn him about the lighting of fireboxes half-filled with fuel. There was the stump of an index finger on his right hand. That was from when he was a young boy and had not yet learned to sharpen a scythe without slicing off part of his hand. There was his short, stocky body to remind him of his poor old mother and her constant nagging when he began to use tobacco at the age of fourteen. Then, there were reminders that no one could see. There was one reminder that not even P'tit-Gus could see, but he knew about it and he never talked about it and, always, he tried not to think about it.

Her name was Claudine and it was a long, long time ago. He was a young man then, full of joy and hope. He was working the lumber camps but he was still able to return to Ste-Émilie every other weekend. During one of these weekends, he met Claudine at a dance at the church hall. He walked her home after the dance that night and it was decided then and there that they were meant for each other. P'tit-Gus was in love and his days could not pass swiftly enough. He worked extra hours to help pass the time, to bring the time closer to when he could be with his Claudine.

With the extra hours he worked, P'tit-Gus was able to place a down payment on a small but clean two-bedroom house, just below the rapids on the Gens-de-Terre River, where it entered the town of Ste-Émilie. On the weekends when he was in town, P'tit-Gus and Claudine worked in their new house: linoleum on the kitchen floor, curtains for the windows, and boiled linseed oil on the small area of hardwood flooring in the living room. They were to be married in June. Claudine worked as a secretary for an automobile dealer in town. Two car salesmen worked there. One of the salesmen was happily married while the other was known to have ruined more than half a dozen lives. He was a handsome man, and charming, so much so that his very own mother referred to him as a snake in the grass.

One weekend when P'tit-Gus was in the camp, Claudine worked alone in their little house. She was preparing bed sheets for the new mattress they had purchased. She heard the door open and before she could rise from over the bed the handsome young man from the automobile centre was standing in the bedroom doorway. Claudine had never been with a man before. She and P'tit-Gus had decided to wait until Father Landry had blessed their marriage. The man entered the room. He held Claudine in his arms and before she knew it, this snake in the grass was lying on the bed beside her. He was gentle for such a big man. He caressed her softly and kissed her and, slowly, removed her clothes. Then, he was inside her. Her heart screamed, no! Yet her body squirmed and convulsed to his every touch and finally exploded in waves of pleasure that never seemed to end. And then he left, without a word, not even a kiss. Claudine removed the blood-stained sheet from the mattress and threw it into the wood stove. Later that afternoon, she sat in the hotel lobby waiting for the bus. There was a sweater draped over her tiny suitcase and in her hand she held a one-way ticket for the Capital.

One week later, P'tit-Gus was surprised to see that Claudine was not at her work place when he dropped by, as he did every time he returned from the camp. He rushed down the street to their little house by the river. There he found her letter on the kitchen table. He opened the envelope and, trembling, read how she had been unable to wait for him, how her craving had led her to take on another man, in their house and on their bed. What she had not written was that she had been attracted to the handsome salesman for quite some time. The weeks without seeing each other, while P'tit-Gus was working in the bush, only served to increase her desire for this handsome young man. She was ashamed, she wrote. She would never forgive herself. There was nothing to be done. She was leaving Ste-Émilie and he would never see her again.

P'tit-Gus threw her letter into the cold, iron stove. As he did so, he saw the crumpled bed sheet and the blood stains, a rusty shade of brown. He returned to work on Monday morning and never mentioned the woman's name again, not once in the thirty years since those events had taken place.

P'tit-Gus flipped open his Zippo, lit the paper ball and, when he could no longer hold it without burning his fingers, dropped it into the firebox. The ball moved slightly, folding and unfolding. As it became a mass of black weightless petals, the last of its flame began to creep towards the back of the firebox and then around, until the remains of the ball were surrounded, first yellow, then yellow-red. He watched until the flames came like long, red tongues from the whole circumference of the firebox, darting higher and higher until they touched just above where the paper had been. He watched for the quick bursts of the shorter tongues, deep purple and darting out between the longer ones.

P'tit-Gus shut the small round door and closed the grilled door after it. He stood facing the heater, listening to the puffing of the flames and the cracking of the cold metal as it began to warm. He stood before the grilled door, feeling the heat coming through his trousers. With his lamp, he scanned the room to make sure that the windows were shut. He walked around to the back of the heater and turned the flow valve to ‘one quarter'. Then he moved a chair with its damp jeans up closer to the stove and started to leave.

“What time is it?” a voice asked.

“Early,” P'tit-Gus replied. “Go back to sleep.”

“Is it raining?”

“Yes.”

“How bad?”

“Not enough.”

“
Sacrament
!”

In the dark behind the glare of his lamp, P'tit-Gus smiled. He did not smile often. There were times when he smiled though, even chuckled, when there was no one around. As the years passed him by, he had become somewhat disconnected from everything modern. He was considered by some to be an aging hermit of a man, completely out of touch with the world around him. But, P'tit-Gus had his life, whatever it was, and there were moments of joy. He would sit on the verandah in the early evenings, smoking a cigarette and chuckling to himself at the best of all jokes, a page in God's great comic book, he would say, as the sky grew black and the clouds grumbled and the lightning came in long zigzag chains. The boys could not play volleyball in the yard behind the cookhouse, the radio-telephone might cease to function and the wires from the generator shed might spark and sizzle. There would be a puff of smoke and all the lights would go out. It was a time for God's little joke—
la farce de Dieu—
and, whether they liked it or not, and P'tit-Gus certainly did, there was not a damn thing they could do about it. That, above everything else, was what gave P'tit-Gus the most pleasure.

Standing in the room, behind the glare of his hunting lamp, the joke was almost as good. This young man, he mused, this student from Ste-Émilie who has come to Washika to work and earn money during the summer months, has only one prayer in the evening and that's for it to rain hard enough in the morning so that he won't have to go out to work.

The rain pattered softly on the tarpapered roof. P'tit-Gus smiled. He could hear the stretching of the flat springs of the bunk as the student who had spoken to him rolled over onto his side and pulled the blankets up over his head.

During the summer months the inner door was held open by a wire twisted around the latch and wrapped around a nail on the wall. P'tit-Gus removed the wire and closed the door behind him. As he shut the screen door, another student awoke and P'tit-Gus could hear him and the one he had spoken to swearing, and then a third one yelling at them to shut up.

W
hen Henri opened his eyes that morning, he was not sure that he was really awake. He tried looking about the room. It was dark. He could not see where the windows were. The first bell had not sounded. He was sure of that. He was a sound sleeper and, except for the first night at Washika, always slept until the very last moment when Dumas Hébert, standing outside on the cookhouse landing, would lift the steel rod from its hook, place it inside the triangle, beat all three sides with a circular motion of his arm and fill the camp with a sound that no one could ignore.