She is busy planting lettuce when Yun arrives after covering the last kilometre on foot; the Monte Carlo started to belch out smoke just past Bathurst. She is lugging her enormous suitcase, and the dust it churns up on the small road signals Yun’s presence from afar. Madeleine straightens up and shields her eyes against the sun with a soil-encrusted hand. The travellers always arrive on foot. She drops her tools and goes to meet the new visitor. As soon as they shake hands Madeleine senses that her guest is no exception to the rule: she has come with a mystery in tow. Without knowing why, Madeleine has a feeling this girl’s secret concerns her. Banishing the little voice in her throat that yearns to interrogate, she shows the young woman around her house.
“Your place so beautiful! Édouard is lucky to have grown up here.”
“I’m not sure he sees things that way. Anyway, he’s in no hurry to come back.”
Madeleine instantly regrets saying this and bites her lip. Wide-eyed with astonishment, Yun stops midway up the stairs.
“He hasn’t told you? He’ll be here in a few days!”
“Here? In Grande-Anse?”
Yun nods yes. A hum fills Madeleine’s chest. It’s been a year since she last saw her son. She clears her throat.
“So, how is he?”
“He’s in Montreal. There are a few small things he needs to do before heading out.”
Yun puts her suitcase down at the foot of the guest bed and casts her gaze out the window. The enigma moves through the room, as dense and round as the full moon, which tugs at people’s hearts and, month after month, ordains the Earth’s moods.
For her chore Yun chooses to remove the dead wood from the copse at the edge of the property. Whatever is too far gone to be of any use she burns; the rest she proposes to turn into firewood, which she will stack in the shed. This initiative delights Madeleine, who fetches the axe in the workshop, believing the girl already knows how to use to it. But from the very first blow she realizes this is a training project. Yun’s method is crude; it consists in lifting the axe as high as possible, swinging it down while bending forward with her eyes shut, and striking as hard as possible, usually off-target. After the blade lands a few centimetres from the girl’s foot, Madeleine feels compelled to wrest the implement from her hands to show her how it’s done.
It takes Yun two days to master the technique but from then on each of her moves is perfect. Madeleine is mesmerized by the girl’s work, transfixed by the precise arc of the blade striking the log and splitting it into halves filled with signs, which she would like to read like the lines of a hand. At night, they settle in in front of the fire, toast marshmallows that they don’t eat, chat and absorb a smoky scent that they bring back to their sheets to keep themselves warm when, toward four in the morning, the mercury drops below ten degrees.
Yun discovered North America at the age of six, when her parents left her little hometown in South Korea for Virginia. She grew up between soccer games and Kumon, “after-school school,” where the children were subjected to endless math exercises. Inspired by the Huckleberry Finn story, Yun dreamed of building a raft and sailing down the rivers of the South. But it had been decided she would pursue a science career, and even when she ran away on a makeshift boat she was brought back to her allotted path by her chemistry teacher, who happened to be fishing in a cove.
So she reined in her rebellious urges and surrendered to her parents’ vision of her future. By the age of eighteen she had carved out an enviable place for herself among the top candidates for admission to Emory University in Atlanta. During the summer holidays after her freshman year, rather than rushing into one of the unpaid internships her fellow students were vying for, she gathered her meagre savings and purchased a spluttering scooter, which she bravely drove to Key West. She explored the back roads of Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama, where she was treated to canned beer, stalked on moonless nights, seated before platefuls of scrambled eggs and grits, called “squinty,” “slut,” and “communist,” and gallantly kissed on the hand. In September she returned to her residence with a sunburn of Biblical proportions and a lost cat under her arm. By Thanksgiving the creature had died of pneumonia, and her scooter did not make it through the winter. But the following summer Yun was back on the road again.
When Édouard met her she was on her third trip, determined this time to tour the Americas and not go back to school. Her training in chemistry had not yielded anything even remotely comparable to the bliss she felt while knocking around, so, drawing on all the wisdom of her twenty-one years, she concluded that if a career didn’t afford her as much happiness as travelling it wasn’t worth pursuing.
Night after night Madeleine follows the narrative of her adventures and smiles. Yun expresses herself with the objectivity and precision of someone trained in the sciences, but also with such gentleness that the listener feels she is sharing in a conversation rather than listening to a traveller’s monologue. On their fourth night sitting by the campfire, Madeleine finally clears her throat and responds.
“You know, I have the feeling my son must be very fond of you.”
The next day, Édouard’s silhouette emerges from the dust on the gravel road.
Sitting on the veranda petting Shabby in a desultory way, Madeleine spots in the distance the peculiar, backlighted form of the constantly entwined bodies of her son and Yun. True to his habit, Édouard barely said hello to his mother when he arrived. This time, however, instead of raiding the refrigerator, he locked himself in his bedroom with his new girlfriend for two whole days. Watching the two of them, Madeleine suspects they share the secret that Yun brought with her, but she hasn’t found a way of learning more about it from her son, who replies only in monosyllables. The willow sways in the rising wind and sends a message in a strange language, a message that Madeleine grasps but is unable to articulate. “If only I could be alone with him just for a minute,” she says under her breath. The answer comes of its own accord: “What difference would that make?”
The afternoon sun moves in with the authority of a landlord. Madeleine’s car plunges inland, where the properties appear sturdier and tidier than the jumbled dunes along the shore. When she reaches Paul’s place, she finds him hammer in hand, in the middle of building a new beehive for his steadily growing colony.
“How are the bees?”
“Bursting with inspiration! Here, take a look at their latest masterpiece…”
Untroubled by the comings and goings of the stinging insects, he approaches one of the older hives and pulls out of its entrails a frame overflowing with heavy, coppery syrup. Whenever she visits, Madeleine admires the ease with which Paul moves through this miniature city, and at the same time she wonders if it isn’t precisely his ability to so easily dominate this structured universe that pleases him. Here, Paul is great and all-powerful. And he takes what he wants.
He lifts the frame of honey to Madeleine’s mouth, and she eats out of his hand like a trained animal. Paul kisses her; his beard chafes.
“Your son is back?” he asks, getting back to his work.
“Yes.”
“Apparently there’s a girl with him. They were seen on the beach.”
“They’re on the point of total fusion.”
“So they’re in love?”
“I don’t know,” Madeleine answers thoughtfully.
It seems to her that her son’s adventures never follow this sort of arc. As far as she can tell, his love affairs are mainly about sex.