Trembling River Read online

  TREMBLING RIVER

  Andrée A. Michaud

  Translated by J. C. Sutcliffe

  Also by Andrée A. Michaud

  (in translation)

  The River of Dead Trees

  Boundary (The Last Summer)

  Back Roads

  Mirror Lake

  Copyright © 2011 Éditions Québec Amérique, Inc., et Andrée A. Michaud

  English translation copyright © 2023 by J. C. Sutcliffe

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  First published as Rivière Tremblante in 2011 by Éditions Québec Amérique

  First published in English in 2023 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  houseofanansi.com

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to readers with print disabilities.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Trembling River / Andrée A. Michaud ; translated by J. C. Sutcliffe.

  Other titles: Rivière Tremblante. English

  Names: Michaud, Andrée A., 1957- author. | Sutcliffe, J. C., translator.

  Description: Translation of: Rivière Tremblante.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220409730 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220409757 |

  ISBN 9781487005894 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487005900 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8576.I217 R5813 2023 | DDC C843/.54—dc23

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  Cover image: EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo

  Text design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover design and typesetting: Lucia Kim

  Ebook developed by Nicole Lambe

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  House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.

  To all the children who didn’t come home for dinner

  PART ONE

  Night was falling over Rivière-aux-Trembles. In the maple-lined cemetery, my father lay sleeping amid the mist created by the recent mild spell. Soon enough, February would once again blanket the ground in a layer of ice, encasing pebbles and bits of twigs severed by the frost. Behind the cemetery, a cloud had settled on Wolf Hill, so dense it seemed to be raining on the hillside, and only on the hillside, right above the black pines. The final birds of the dying day chirped a few solitary notes into the still air, while I stood motionless, wondering what to do with this sombre beauty caught between death and the looming darkness.

  I’d spent all day walking along the little muddy lanes that led to the village — or led away from it, depending on whether you wanted to go home or escape the sadness of abandoned places. After hours of wearing myself out, my hands and feet were frozen solid, but I was still second-guessing myself, unable to decide which direction to head in. I’d only returned to Rivière-aux-Trembles to pay final homage to my father, resting in the chapel where he would be shut up until the spring, and to place a few of his favourite Mary-Jean roses on his coffin, where their speedy blanching would allow me to see death for what it really was: a new state of matter. Because that’s all death is, a transformation of flesh and blood; this is what I kept repeating to myself to avoid thinking of the end of all things and all people. My father’s body had been emptied of all thought and could now soar up to a new kind of communion with the world, a state where the perception of light, heat, and cold would not be hindered by pain or knowledge.

  But what did I know of the pain of matter, or of the state of putrefaction’s soul? I imagined potential resurrections and reincarnations that precluded suffering because I refused to believe that death was a definitive, immutable state. My father’s passing had forced me to think about the fact that I would die too, and wonder what I was doing with myself, stalled in the middle of a life just like any other life at whose end there would be no possibility of appeal. I’d promised to leave Rivière-aux-Trembles the minute the funeral ceremony was over and never set foot there again, but the feeling of no longer having much time left myself overwhelmed all my plans. I was surprised at my inability to summon up the strength to tear myself away from this village where my childhood had ended so brutally.

  As I crouched near the tombstone of a stranger who now faced the sunset for eternity, I asked my father to come to my rescue. I prayed to the mother I’d never known, who’d died too young, crushed in full sun; I implored the heavens to send me a sign, and at that very moment the shout rang out, a cry of fear that could just as well have come from the depths of the earth as from the recesses of my memory.

  “Michael,” I murmured, my voice husky from the rain and the cold, “is that you, Michael?”

  But silence fell over the countryside once more, even denser than the stillness preceding the shout. So I ran, I took one of the four roads that cut through my village in the shape of a cross and vanished into the twilight. After a few minutes I stopped, out of breath, resting my hands on my knees. As I lifted my head, I noticed a deer grazing near a thin strip of forest marching over the fields, lost in the fog descending over Wolf Hill. It was like one of those life-saving visions that lead people away from the abyss they were just about to hurl themselves into.

  I took a few steps forward into the field, deep in melting snow, and as the deer slipped into the forest, I let the tears I’d been holding back since the morning flow over the now-sealed abyss. It was finally time for me to go back home.

  I.

  THE STORIES

  MARNIE

  He was twelve and I was eleven, and just like knights in tales of chivalry, we had sworn never to leave each other, unaware that the forever of our promise might be brief. But while Michael Saint-Pierre had kept his promises — his memory had never left me — the forts we built deep in the forest and the intergalactic trips we used to plan now only exist in those increasingly rare dreams in which Michael, perched on the highest branch of an enormous tree, talks to me in childish words about the universe’s endlessness.

  Michael Superman Saint-Pierre, son of Jeanne Dubé and Victor Saint-Pierre, went missing in the Rivière-aux-Trembles woods on August 7th, 1979. I don’t know what happened in the woods; nobody knows, except for Mike and his putative attacker, but sometimes I believe he’s still alive, that some force whose power I can’t even conceive of came to find him on his branch to take him to Krypton’s twin planet or some distant star humans haven’t yet discovered. At these times, I tell myself I’ll receive a message from outer space one day, something shining out among the myriad stars I sometimes watch until I feel dizzy, a sign telling me that Michael Saint-Pierre is getting ready to come back to earth.

  The truth is that Michael probably died deep in the woods, his disintegrating body swept along by the river into the mouths of coyotes and wolves, unless some predator with an all-too-human face threw himself on Michael for reasons that can only be explained by insanity. But in the absence of a body, I continue to hope that my friend Mike is still wandering around the mossy floor of some distant forest, trapped by thunder-induced amnesia. And if this is the case, perhaps his footsteps — propelled by some fuzzy childhood memory — will end up leading him here, to Rivière-aux-Trembles, this place I decided to move back to after twenty-nine years away from it, all because of a shout of unknown origin.

  Michael and I had heard this same cry on two occasions that summer, the summer of 1979, the summer he disappeared. The first one happened a little before nightfall, when a lack of wind allows sound to travel through the humid air. We were messing around and throwing stones into Catfish Lake — whoever misses the rock on the point is a loser — when a scream ripped through the dawning darkness, making even the birchbark shiver. One last rock sank into the still water and Michael froze on the spot, his arm in the air, as I dropped the flat pebble I’d unearthed from under a pile of driftwood. Our eyes met, and without having to discuss it, we raced to the lake path and ran as fast as our legs could carry us towards the village.

  Before we could reach Morin Sisters Road, where we’d hidden our chrome bicycles, blue with red handlebars for Michael — Superman’s colours — and black for me, because it was the only one left in the store the day my father had bought it for me, I stumbled on a root lying across the path and wiped out in slow motion. My Pippi Longstocking braids, tied with lemon-yellow elastics, flew in front of my eyes, preceded by my Expos cap, while my hands scrabbled at the air, and then the section of sky where my cap was spinning disappeared. With my nose in muddy earth, rotting leaves, and pine needles, I’d felt sure a hand was gripping my left leg and pulling me backwards, towards the lake and its depths.

&nb
sp; This was a first warning, I realized afterwards, the first sign of the fate that would come crashing down on Michael and me, putting an end to all our games. I was imagining the cracked black nails — like the talons of the witches in Phantom Swamp, a mythical place invented to keep children away from the peat bogs east of Wolf Hill — sinking into my ankle when Michael’s hands grabbed me under my arms to help me stand up.

  “Hurry up, Marnie, quick, it’s going to catch us, it’s coming, I can feel it.”

  But it had already arrived, it was already there, this thing that would make even the sun in Rivière-aux-Trembles go crazy.

  The next day, we found out that Martin Bouchard, the oldest son of the mayor, Jos Bouchard, had drowned around eight the previous evening, as he was pulling out the fishing lines he’d cast at the mouth of Blueberry River, five kilometres by road from Catfish Lake, less than two kilometres as the crow flies, and within shouting distance when the air is humid.

  “We heard the cry of death, Marn,” Michael murmured, spitting his gum onto the sidewalk, and we stood frozen to the spot, staring at the forest where death had screamed.

  The second time this shout rang out in the area would also be the last, at least that summer. It was August 7th, a torrid August 7th, and the sun occasionally flickered through the increasingly dense thunder clouds. We were sprawled on the porch, killing time and counting the flies stuck to the front of Michael’s house. Michael was also supposed to be watching his little sister, Émilie, Emmy-Lou, Emmy-Lili, while his mother went over to Mrs. Tremblay’s to teach her how to make a strawberry cobbler using a recipe in which the strawberries could be switched out for raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, plums, apples, or redcurrants, essentially for any small, medium, or large fruit that grew near us.

  The afternoon stretched out endlessly in a humid heat that seemed to affect even Emmy-Lili’s rag dolls, who were lolling with their legs akimbo on the porch floorboards. Our clothes stuck to our skin, Emmy’s fine blond hair formed damp little commas on her forehead, and the mass of crickets gathered in the yellow hay had silenced all the birds. We resented Denise Tremblay, who’d got married in June in a wedding dress like something out of a magazine and didn’t even know how to boil an egg, and we were annoyed with Michael’s mother, who’d got it into her head to transform this newlywed into a cordon bleu chef. When we saw her old Datsun appear in the laneway, we ran to find our swimsuits. Michael called out that we were going swimming, without listening to her admonishments or even bothering to say hello.

  Behind us, Emmy-Lili started crying. “I want to come with you, Mike. Take Mimi, take Lili . . .”

  These were just the innocent cries of a child, but they would be forever engraved in the memory I would retain of that day. Years later, these same cries would yank me from sleep — little Emmy-Lou’s sobs as she begged her brother not to abandon her, not to leave her alone during the storm, to take her with him into the woods some people never returned from. Perhaps she’d guessed from the greyness of the sky that she would never again see Michael, her brother, her god.

  Michael patted her on the head and handed her a toffee lollipop that had been lurking at the bottom of one of his pockets. “Mike won’t be long, Lili,” he said, and we straddled our flying bicycles to head down the 4th Line, then along a path to where the river formed a little basin where we could dive without hurting ourselves, avoid the eyes of the forest monsters, and float on our backs as we gazed through the leaves at the changing shapes of the clouds. This was our secret place, our oasis, far from the dull, strict adult world. Michael had named it “the magic swimming hole” and claimed this was where a fortress would rise up out of the water — the fortress in which he would live in solitude once he turned eighteen.

  While we were waiting for the glittering proof of Superman’s distant origins to emerge from the river, we’d built ourselves a shelter out of branches under the pines, facing the swimming hole. That’s where we were when the storm broke out, sorting the stones we’d fished up from the bottom of the water by size and colour. The first drops hit the shelter roof as Michael was arranging white pebbles beside the circle of black rocks whose powers would make us untouchable.

  “It’s going to thunder, Marn,” he said, as he glanced through the opening that served as the shelter’s doorway, and then he ran out to grab our swimsuits from where they were drying side by side on a flat rock.

  He could only have been gone a few seconds, but when he didn’t come back I went over to the doorway and looked out. Mike was standing near the rock, his back to the shelter, swinging from right to left as he lifted one leg and then the other, like the old rusty metal robot he finally got rid of at the beginning of the summer. Our bathing suits dangled from the ends of his outstretched arms and his head flopped down over his chest as if he no longer had the strength to hold it up straight. Looking as though his neck was broken, he seemed to be staring down at his left running shoe, whose lace had come untied.

  At first, I thought it was a joke, that Michael was trying to wind me up, but something didn’t sit quite right. He looked like one of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, which we’d secretly watched a few weeks earlier. He looked like Emmy-Lou’s dolls, with their slack limbs and drooping necks.

  “What are you doing, Mike? This isn’t funny!”

  But he didn’t react. He carried on swaying from left to right, and then started taking cautious steps backwards, his arms still raised, until a light flashed across the sky above the water. Then he leapt back, flapping his arms like the robot in Lost in Space that cries, “Danger! Danger!” Except Mike wasn’t shouting, but, like the robot, he was afraid of a shadow I couldn’t see heading towards him, hidden from me by the trees, his body, and the rain. I looked around for the shadow of this zombie that wanted to devour Michael, but I could only make out the movement of the branches in the wind, behind which multitudes of powerful, threatening arms might well be moving. Just as I thought I could make out the hairy arm, all scratched and slashed, about to rise out of the trees, I heard, over the grumbling of the thunder, the piercing cry of the drowned young man of Blueberry River, the scream that had announced Martin Bouchard’s death. A second flash of lightning immediately ripped through the clouds and Michael froze on the spot, letting our bathing suits fall to his feet in such a slow gesture I thought the damp fabric was going to remain suspended from his open hands and never touch the ground.

  My throat was as dry as if I’d raced non-stop from the village to the Mailloux pond. I repeated that I didn’t find his playacting the slightest bit amusing: “Stop messing around, Mike, you’re not funny at all.”

  When the wind started whirling around our swimming hole, I tried to tell him to come back to the shelter, wanting to say, quick, Mike, it’s coming, it’s here, there’s werewolves and witches, but I had no voice, paralyzed by Mike’s immobility, his petrified body standing in the rain.

  “You’re scaring me, Mike,” I managed to murmur, or maybe sob; I don’t even know anymore, but my fear wasn’t strong enough to rattle his torpor.

  After a few endless seconds, he finally turned to look at me, whiter than the freshly laundered sheets tousle-haired women hang out in the Rivière-aux-Trembles backyards on summer mornings. I thought he was going to faint, but he said a few words to me, or maybe to the invisible spectres standing in front of his vacant, staring eyes. In the howling of the wind that made the trees bend and bow, I didn’t hear what he said, I only saw his mouth open mechanically, his lips purse around strange sounds, Foggy day, ma’am, foggy day, how can you manage? And then, as if he had suddenly come out of a trance, he flashed me a desolate smile, discreetly raised his hand in a gesture of goodbye, and ran off between the trees, pushed by the arms that were multiplying in the storm. I should have run to catch up with him, followed the dark corridor he was disappearing into, but my legs were as soft as cotton wool, while my feet felt as though I was wearing concrete shoes.