Archibald Samuel - Arvida

The five together had to wash and peel and prepare and cook and roast and simmer and serve all sorts of dishes. It was hard work, very hard, and they amused themselves as best they could. As the cadets paraded in front of them with their trays the girls greeted them with the same poses and the same come-hither glances they reserved for their cowboys, but the cadets didn’t have Monsieur Robertson’s poise and they blushed and stammered and sometimes spilled their soup or dessert and Madame Rosie laughed until tears came to her eyes and she called the girls “my little devils.”

They never flirted seriously with the cadets. The cadets were a subnormal and weak and insignificant species. It wasn’t healthy at their age to need so badly to obey and be obeyed, to be served and to be servile. They cherished the memory of their cousin Jim who’d been a ne’er-do-well and who’d killed himself the year before. They thought that a good-looking boy their age ought like Jim to be a good-for-nothing and a bit of a scoundrel and not a little play soldier. For them to be interested in one of them he’d have to have less acne and be better looking than the others, but above all he’d have to be his own person whom they could imagine alone on a horse or a motorcycle and not a pallid figure surrounded by a big platoon of imbeciles. The girl cadets were no better. They got crushes on stupid boys and tried to look tough and their khaki pants gave them big behinds and to the girls they were just beefy ugly ducklings.

That day the adolescent wasn’t laughing and wasn’t in a mood for play. She was thinking of Billy who’d never frightened her and whom she’d have liked to meet on the road and she was sad for him and she was praying to the good Saint Anne for him not to return, but above all she was afraid, afraid of the fear she’d have to stroke that night like a big cat rolled into a ball on her stomach and the fear in her belly like nausea itself.

The warden had put Billy into his cage and with his helper had hoisted the cage onto the back of the truck. Monsieur Roberge had whispered a few words into the bear’s ear. And then they’d hit the road.

The three of them had passed through Canton-Tremblay and had driven along the Saguenay and crossed Chicoutimi-Nord and Saint-Fulgence de l’Anse-aux-Foins and had advanced into the mountains until they saw Stone Consolidated’s huge mounds of wood. They’d turned left onto the Controlled Zone road and had stopped at the registration office to show the bear. Only one of the gamekeepers came out, because he hadn’t seen the bear the first two times. Slowly they proceeded along the gravel road across the Monts-Valin hills and passed the lakes le Savard, le Barbu, la Rotule, le Jalobert, le Louis, le Charles, le Victor, le Breton, le Betsiamites, le Marie, le Gilles, and they turned left just before the Tagï River and went on to the Portneuf River camp where they stopped to pee and to show the bear to the woodcutters. After, they drove for another hour and a half until they were in the middle of nowhere in another sector far from the woodsmen and the hunters. Spread out before them were wide valleys covered in new growth and moss and grey, emaciated skeletons of trees that had escaped the clear cutting but had not survived it. They tranquillized Billy again and they pulled out the cage and lowered it from the truck. Billy growled weakly and you could tell he was angry but that he had no more strength left in him. He lay down next to the road after having taken a few uncertain steps. The warden removed his collar and chain and passed his hand through the fur on his head and down between his shoulder blades and he and his helper left with hours of road in front of them as the sun began its descent over the broken line separating the horizon from the highest mountains.

It was almost night when Billy came out of his stupor. He grazed on the plants and currants and blueberries around him and then set out. He felt very far away but he sniffed the ground just in case. He’d find a trail sooner or later. He had nothing against these woods. There was lots to eat and space to move around in and plenty of animals and things to entertain him along the way.

He walked for days and days.

There was in his bear’s soul an ancestral knowledge of the cardinal points and nutritional needs and the seasonal cycle and a certain violence but in his bear’s head he didn’t know solitude and above all he didn’t know that it was normal for a bear not to have a house.

“What’s the matter?”

They were outside. The adolescent was at the edge of the trout pond. Their father had widened the stream that flowed past the house, and built little stone walls around it. Some of the passing trout lingered there and you could see them sleeping in shadow during the day. At night the little girl sat by the water and let her feet dangle. Their mother gave her a hot dog and with her thumbnail she broke off little lumps and threw them into the pool. For a few moments the small pieces made bright spots on the black water and slowly sank towards the bottom before being snapped up by the trout. You could guess where the trout were, seeing the bits of sausage disappear or suddenly veer off inexplicably.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

The screen door slammed and the dog barked where he lay beside the garage.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I said.”

They turned towards the house. Their father was walking in their direction and all at once he stopped and there was a loud report. He turned his head towards the row of trees that cut the property in two at the right of the house and stared into space for a moment as if wanting to see past what was there.

“Do you want to see Billy one last time, my babies?”

Lucie didn’t answer and ran past her father into the house. The adolescent said:

“I’ll go with you.”

The old man was facing away from them on his knees beside the bear, which lay on its side. They got out of the car and approached slowly. Their father cleared his throat. The old man didn’t turn around but raised a hand in the air and signalled for them to come.

“Come here, my lovely girl.”

The adolescent moved forward and placed her hand in the old man’s hand, both rough and moist. He led her as for a waltz to the other side of the bear, facing him, and invited her to kneel as well and guided her small hand into the thick fur under which the bear’s body was still warm and haunted by the echo of a heartbeat.

“Pat him.”

The old man turned around and stood and walked up to their father who said:

“So there was still one more kill in you.”

“There’s always one more.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“That you had to kill him.”

“Don’t be. I made it happen. The day I took Billy. If I’d left him there the good Lord would have killed him and when I saved him I took his life into my hands and I knew I’d find myself here. I knew I was the one who’d have to kill him and that’s how things had to happen because by saving his life I’d agreed to be God for him. Don’t be more sorry for me than for God who counts each of our hairs and kills us all one day or another. You can’t be sorry for me any more than you can be sorry for God, any more than you can blame us or pardon us. That’s been turning around in my head. For about ten years. I’d talked to my wife about it. She was a God-fearing woman, my wife, and I asked her why in a religion where they talk so much about forgiveness there’s no ritual for forgiving God. She said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I explained ‘It’s God’s fault if his son suffered. He’s responsible for children having no father and parents ruined by their children and battered women and women being raped and he’s responsible for all the wars and the dead soldiers and the maimed. Nothing happens on earth that he doesn’t cause or that he doesn’t allow to happen so why do we never try to forgive him?’ She told me I’d committed a terrible blasphemy and she made me promise never to repeat it anywhere and I promised but the next week I asked the same question to the priest at confession. He told me the same thing as my wife: ‘There’s no point in my giving you any Hail Marys but I’m going to pray for you and you’d do well to ask all the people you know to do the same.’ I still said what I thought. I think people don’t talk about it because in a religion where you have to forgive everybody you can’t mention God’s name when you talk about forgiveness. You can praise him and sing for him but you can’t ever say anything about his most important attribute which is to be unforgivable. Everyone has his reasons except him because he’s the one who decides what’s what and he’s the only one who can make things happen differently. It’s the same thing for Billy and me on a smaller scale and it’s the same thing for you and your girls. You’re the whole world for them and you knew when they were born everything that might happen to them and that you’d have no excuses to give them and you’d have to be responsible for everything. Our brothers and our sisters who are idiots and understand nothing they can always say they didn’t know and they didn’t do it on purpose and it’s not their fault and people will forgive them because they’re just the same. But we’re the clever ones and people know it and you can never say it’s not our fault because those with the knowledge are never forgiven.”