Touch (5 page)

“Well then, Jeannot,” my stepfather said, pointedly stepping on my grandfather’s name, “what then do you intend?”

“I’d think it was evident in the scripture.” I was not sure if Jeannot noticed the effect of using my stepfather’s first name, or if he was still surprised at the question, but he seemed to draw back into himself and his voice dropped quieter in the already quiet house. He picked up the cup of tea, and this time took a sip before carefully putting it back on the table.

“Return unto me, and I will return unto you,” Jeannot said again, repeating the scripture. “What do I intend? Why have I come back to Sawgamet? Why now? I came back for Martine.”

He looked at me. “I’ve come for your grandmother,” he said. “I’ve come to raise the dead.”

T
HE TREES PRESSED DOWN
so tightly against the banks of the Sawgamet River that Jeannot had little choice but to turn from the river and climb the hill, following a creek into the woods. His dog brushed past him and ran up through the dappled gloom, stopping once to sniff the air before continuing.

Jeannot was sixteen and had been traveling for long enough that the dark and the woods should not have been foreign and frightening, but even though the wind was still, he could hear the trees moving in rustling whispers that sounded like voices. He thought that if he turned his head quickly enough he might see who was speaking, and for that reason he kept his head down and moved with a furious focus. He wanted to be out of these woods as soon as possible, back again tracing the arc of the Sawgamet, looking for a place to stop and pan for gold. Along with voices from the trees, the young man could hear the dog panting, and as he stumbled through a beam of sunlight, he noticed how lean the dog had become.

And then the shadowed whispering came clear and uncluttered, and he heard someone calling his name.

Jeannot.

THE YOUNG MAN
, of course, was my grandfather, more than sixty years ago. When he was older, Jeannot grew tall and broad, but on that day, the day that he founded what was to become Sawgamet, Jeannot was sixteen, whip-thin, wire-strong, and able to both give and absorb a brutal amount of punishment.

He joked to me that he had fought his way across the continent, that he had been punched so hard and so often in his travels that his nose had barely managed to stay on his face. But he never really told me why he had left the orphanage and his training to be a priest. Just once, when he and my stepfather stayed up late talking in the study, while I was supposedly engrossed in reading a book, I heard him mention a girl whom he had loved, but it is only a guess that this was the reason why he quit his training for the Catholic priesthood, left the orphanage, and traveled across the whole of Rupert’s Land; Jeannot only told stories from the moment when he arrived in Sawgamet; none of his past before then mattered.

I think of Sawgamet now, a town of motion, light, and sound, with a train running through, and with the movie theater still playing
The Wizard of Oz
, with telephone wires expected in the next year, houses wired with electricity, and it is hard for me to imagine what it must have been like for my
grandfather. There are still parts of the woods where you can lose yourself, though they have become harder and harder to find, particularly for me. I have not traveled as far or seen as much as some men, but I was behind the lines as a chaplain when we took Vimy Ridge and held Hill 70, and the world has changed so much since that first day my grandfather came to Sawgamet that to think of the silence he must have encountered is terrifying, almost unimaginable. I have the stories he told me, and the stories that others have told me, and I know what Sawgamet was like when I was a child, but there are gaps in the history of Sawgamet that I cannot fill with anything other than speculation.

Part of it is that there are things that are peculiar to Sawgamet, something about the cold remoteness of the village, that make it feel like it exists in its own country. Elsewhere, points east and south of us, men float their logs in the spring, taking advantage of the roaring meltwaters, but Sawgamet has its own internal logic to it. It used to be that men could not work the cuts in the winters here—sap frozen iron-hard, men’s fingers curling in on themselves, the snow a cumbersome obstacle to traverse—so they floated the wood instead in the fall, trying to push as close to the river’s freeze as possible, eking out a few more days of cutting wood. Even with men working the cuts through the winter now, with the railway come to town and engines replacing horses, Sawgamet still feels like something set apart from anywhere else I have lived or been, and despite the years that I’ve been gone, despite knowing that this will be my mother’s last night alive, coming back here still feels like I have come home.

WHEN MY GRANDFATHER
came to Sawgamet, before it had a name, Jeannot was already more than a decade too late for the Fraser gold rush, but this was still only a few years after the Civil War to the south, only two years before British Columbia joined the Confederation. Where he walked was virgin territory, untouched by white men. So when my grandfather heard the whispering of the trees, heard his name, “Jeannot,” called clearly, as if there were another living thing other than his dog beside him, Jeannot hesitated and then stopped in his tracks.

He could feel the head of the ax pressing against the top of his hand, the weight of the rifle in his other hand, and with a slight horror he realized that by holding both he would be able to use neither. The woods fell silent. For a moment, just to his side, he thought he saw a young man, a boy his own age, staring at him with a hungry fear, but by the time he turned, the boy was gone. He moved in a slow circle, more afraid that he would see someone than that he would not.

He had been alone too long, my grandfather thought, and it was too easy out there in the untrammeled woods and mountains to convince himself that he saw and heard something that was not there. He lowered his head again and continued following the creek up the hill, thinking that when he crested the rise he might be able to see the lay of the Sawgamet River. For the last few days he had been following the river mostly straight up a wide valley. A chain of peaks and mountains rose on the other side of the river and Jeannot liked being able to
see the improbable snow that capped the mountains against the midsummer sun.

When the trail led him into the clearing, Jeannot risked a last glance into the trees, but with the afternoon’s brightness and the dark of the woods, he was able to see only a few dozen paces back, and he still thought there was something in the woods, keeping just past the edge of his vision. While he looked, Flaireur padded up beside him. Jeannot touched him lightly on the head, and then the dog trotted into the middle of the clearing and lay down on the ground near a wide creek.

My grandfather always said that he had stolen the dog from a girl in Edmonton who claimed to be a witch, so when Flaireur—named in anticipation of sniffed-out treasure—refused to move any further that day, Jeannot decided that he, too, would go no further. He had already walked for thirty-nine days since leaving Quesnellemouthe, and he thought that perhaps the dog was right; to travel one more day would be to risk the wrath of God. My grandfather dropped his pack, took his ax, and cut saplings and branches to make a lean-to against a fallen tree. He had learned to handle the ax and to fend for himself during the two years and three thousand miles it took him to reach Quesnellemouthe from Montreal, and when he had finished making shelter, he cut fallen wood until he had more than enough to burn through the night.

After he finished cutting firewood, Jeannot forced himself to walk back through the woods and down the hill to the river, so that he could catch a fish to share with Flaireur for their dinner. When it was finally dark, he unrolled his blanket under the lean- to and listened to the low burble of the creek, and beyond that, the muted roar from the Sawgamet. The sounds
of the water and the crackling embers were a comfort to him, as was the slow breathing of Flaireur; the dog had not been willing to move from the spot where he had collapsed earlier in the evening, but he seemed restful now. The wind moved warm across Jeannot’s body. He fell asleep quickly and easily.

When my grandfather woke, the fire had died completely, as had the wind. Flaireur stood above him, the dog’s mouth open in a soundless snarl. Jeannot had spent countless nights in the dark wilderness during his trek, but today was the first time he had ever felt frightened. He had bedded the witch in Edmonton before stealing Flaireur, and now, with Flaireur standing above him, he thought the witch had come back, first to steal the dog’s voice, and then to steal Jeannot’s soul. My grandfather could see Flaireur’s teeth in the moonlight, and when he put his hand out to touch the dog’s neck, he could feel the low rumble that should have carried sound, but all was silent. With a start, he realized that the night had fallen quiet as well. Even the creek had been rendered mute.

My grandfather said that he was never sure if he saw the creature or smelled it first. It was not the girl from Edmonton. It was something worse.

The creature was fish-pale and carried the gagging scent of spoiled meat. My grandfather could not tell if it was a man or a woman, but as it stumbled across the little clearing, Jeannot could see the milk-white eyes that seemed to be searching for him, like the creature knew he was there. Its hair clumped over its shoulders, and its skin was loose and mottled. As the creature’s head turned toward him, Jeannot clamped his hands around Flaireur’s muzzle, forcing Flaireur’s mouth shut and stilling the dog. The creature seemed to pause, and Jeannot felt
his stomach turn at the thought that it might see him through its clouded eyes, but it did not stop. Then, as it disappeared into the woods, sound returned. The creek, the river, the rustle of the wind through the trees, everything except for Flaireur. The dog stayed dumb, and Jeannot knew that he had escaped something terrible.

In later years, when he told the story to Pearl and other men, and they told it to each other and passed it around the way that men do, some men argued that Jeannot had simply been young and scared, or that he had been dreaming. That in the moonlight and his tiredness he had mistaken a bear or another animal for some perversion. Other men, particularly men who had spent more time in the woods or who had dealings with Indians, men who understood that there were things that they had yet to see, believed him. It was a wehtiko—a man turned into a monster as a punishment for cannibalism—come to eat the flesh from my grandfather’s bones. No, it was a shape-shifter, it was the loup-garou, the mahaha, it was an adlet, come to drink his blood.

When my grandfather told me the story, however, he insisted it was none of those things. The creature, he said, was a qallupilluit, a sea witch, who felt the greed for gold running through Jeannot’s body and had come to claim him.

Greed did run through Jeannot’s body, but though the creature did not return for him that night, he resolved to flee. He was unwilling to break no matter how hard he was pushed, consumed by a burning desire to find gold in the northern corner of this new land, but he had no desire to spend another night under the lean-to, waiting for the creature to return.

He spent the next morning trying to coax Flaireur into
leaving with him. Like the day before, however, the dog refused to take another step. Flaireur stayed near the lean- to and continued to bark soundlessly: his bristly muzzle dropped and snapped without making a noise. Jeannot briefly thought of bashing the dog’s head with the back of his ax, but he could not bear to do so. Instead, Jeannot walked down the slope and through the trees, thinking that a fresh-caught fish might work to lure the dog away from his post.

Sitting on the bank of the river, my grandfather thought of the rotted meat smell of the creature from the night before. He would leave even if Flaireur would not accompany him, he decided. He had been so sure of his choice to stop the day before. He thought that Flaireur’s refusal to go on was a sign that this was where he was meant to make his fortune. He knew nothing of mining or gold, only that a decade past the Fraser rush he could easily end up like all of the other greenhorns who came late, worked like dogs, and left empty-handed.