The problem is how to keep ourselves warm in the meantime.
When the villagers had finally gone, and Michaél was hauling water up from the river in buckets, I gathered some kindling and split some logs to build a fire in the centre of the cabin. There are no floorboards yet, just beaten earth, so I made a stone circle to contain the burning wood.
Although the room quickly filled with smoke it would, I knew, soon disperse through all the cracks and crevices between the logs, just as the smoke in our old blackhouse made its way out through the thatch.
But the next thing I knew, the door had burst open, and Michaél came running in, yelling, ‘Fire, fire!’ at the top of his voice, and threw a bucket of water all over my carefully tended blaze.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted at him.
But he just stared at me with big, manic eyes. ‘You can’t light a fire in the middle of a wooden house, man! You’ll burn the fockin’ thing down!’
I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. And it wasn’t long after dark that it became so cold that there was no option but to turn in for the night. It was Michaél who broke our silence finally and wanted to toss a coin to decide who got the bed. But I told him that since it was my house it was my bed, and he could sleep on the bloody floor.
I don’t know how much time passed after I extinguished the oil lamp, but it was black as pitch when I became aware of Michaél slipping into the bed beside me, freezing hands and feet bringing all of his cold air with him. I thought long and hard about kicking him out again, but in the end decided that two bodies were likely to generate more heat than one, so pretended that I was still asleep.
This morning, neither of us have commented on it. By the time I was awake, he was up and had built a fire out in the clearing and got a pan of water boiling on it. When I came out with my tin mug to brew a cup of tea, he mentioned very casually that he intended to build a bed for himself today. ‘That fockin’ floor’s far too hard,’ he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I
At Chemin Kirkpatrick, Sime turned off to drive north into the town of Bury. It nestled among the trees in the valley of a small river of the same name. Bury had sent men to die in two world wars and commemorated them on plaques at the Bury Armory.
The road that led down to the town was called McIver, and it cut past the Bury cemetery. The last resting place of Sime’s parents lay on the slope on the west side of the road. Carefully cropped grass was punctuated by headstones that bore the names of Scots and English, Irish and Welsh. But in the town itself almost all traces of English and Celtic culture had been supplanted by French, with the exception of some street names. And even those were gradually being replaced.
He had arranged to meet Annie at their grandmother’s house in Scotstown, but he wanted to stop off first to visit his childhood home. A pilgrimage to the past.
He drove by the end of Main Street and followed the bend out of town, then turned left to cross the river just beyond the timber yard. A restored, bright red fifties pickup truck stood in the drive of a green and cream-painted clapboard cabin with rockers on the porch. A little further on, set back behind the trees, stood the house that had always fascinated him as a child. A folly with turrets and a multifaceted red roof. The house itself was clad with rounded shingles, like fish scales, and painted blue and green, red and grey and peach. Like a fairytale house made of coloured candies. It hadn’t always been so colourful. The old lady who lived in it when he was a child had despised children.
It was a strange homecoming. Bittersweet. His had been a happy enough childhood, and yet he had never quite fitted with the rest of his family. He was sure he must have been a disappointment to his parents. He wished now that he could meet his ten-year-old self here on this road that he had walked every day to school and back. The things he could tell him. The advice he could offer.
His old family home stood derelict in an overgrown garden. The sale of it had been left in the hands of a realtor, but there had never been a single enquiry for it. Sime had never quite understood why. It was a fine two-storey house with a front porch and a good bit of land, set in an area of cleared forest on the edge of town. His room had been up in the attic, with a semicircular window looking down on to the road. He had loved that room. It had set him apart from the rest of the house and given him what had felt like a commanding view of the world.
He stood now on the road beside his idling car and looked up at that boyhood window on the world. There was no glass in it. Much of the clapboard siding beneath it had fallen away, or been stripped off. Pigeons were roosting in his old room. Crows lined up along the roof above it like harbingers of doom.
What happened to happiness, he wondered. Did it evaporate like rain off a wet street in sunshine? Was it anything other than a transient moment that existed only in the memory? Or maybe a state of mind that changed like the weather? Whatever happiness he had known in this house was long gone, and he felt only sadness standing here, witness to something lost for ever, like the lives of his parents, and all the generations that had gone before them.
He closed his eyes and almost laughed. The medicine prescribed by the sleep doctor was doing a pretty poor job of cheering him up. He got into his car and set off for Scots-town.
II
Sime had very little recollection of Scotstown. Although he knew it had been founded by Scots colonists in the nineteenth century, in school he and his classmates had been disabused of the notion that it was so called because of the number of Scots who lived there. In fact it had been named after John Scott, the first manager of the Glasgow Canadian Land and Trust company, which had established the settlement.
It had once been a thriving community, with a lucrative lumber business, and a hydroelectric dam on the River Salmon. The railway had brought freight and trade and people in great numbers. Sime supposed it had probably still been an affluent little town when he was a boy, but its population had dwindled now to a few hundred, most of its industry closed down. Sawmills stood in silent decay with weathered For Sale and To Let signs tacked on to peeling walls.
It was during his first year at school that his mother had found a job at the dépanneur in Bury, and school holidays had become a problem. That first year, and for several thereafter, she had driven Sime and Annie over to Scotstown during summer and winter holidays before she went to work, dropping them off at their granny’s house. And it was during those years that their grandmother had read to them from the diaries.
Her house on Rue Albert reflected the decline of the town. It stood, like his parents’ home, in a wildly overgrown garden. In its day it had been impressive. Two storeys, with a porch running from the front around both sides, and a large deck at the rear. It was painted in white and yellow, with steeply pitched red roofs. But the paint was faded and flaking and green with moss. The wooden balustrade around the porch was rotten.
A car stood parked in the footprint of two towering pines and a maple tree that cast their shadows on the house. Trees that Sime remembered from his childhood. And he reflected that they had probably outlived by a hundred years or more whoever had planted them. He drew in behind the parked vehicle and stepped out on to the sidewalk. He recalled himself and Annie playing hide and seek here as children, shimmying down the slope to the river behind the house on hot summer days to fish in the shade. The sound of the river itself rose up from beyond the back garden, and he could almost hear the creak of his grandmother’s rocking chair as she read to them on the porch.