Archibald Samuel - Arvida

My wife had finally decided not to move our bedroom upstairs. She said she wasn’t comfortable sleeping on a different floor from her anxious daughter. So I decided to renovate, building apartments overhead, along with Denis Harvey, Alain Laganière, and Yvon Bouchard. That kept me busy for a few months. We worked hard at night and on weekends. Sometimes we ordered in Saint-Hubert barbecue instead of going downstairs. My wife never seemed happy cooking us supper, in any case. And sometimes we ended the day a bit drunk and I let the guys go, saying “I’m going to clean up a bit,” then I watched them through the big front windows, taking off in their cars, and I lay down there, right on the floor, with my shirt rolled up into a ball for a pillow. I was never in a rush to leave the construction site, with its good smell of beer and wood shavings, just to go and join my frigid wife in her giant bed.

One Tuesday, I had to go to Lac-Saint-Jean to inspect a factory in Chambord. I asked Danièle if she wanted me to cancel. “No, that’s fine, go ahead,” she said. “I’ll take care of the little one.”

I had a feeling something wasn’t quite right.

When I got back three days later, the girls were gone.

It took two weeks for Danièle to tell me where they were. With her sister in Quebec City, obviously. They’d be coming back, but not to the house. She’d take an apartment because she needed to think. That apartment, I helped her find it, I painted it, and I paid for it for six months. I’m just saying. I went to pick up Julie twice a week to go to a restaurant and then a movie. She didn’t want to sleep at the house any more. Neither of them talked to me much about the dog, afterwards. Either they’d mourned for it normally, or they knew I wouldn’t be a good audience for their paranormal theories. Meanwhile, I’d finished the lodgings on the second floor, and put tenants into them. And no one ever complained about anything, including the mother and daughter who lived in the apartment where Thibeau’s and Vallaire’s room used to be.

I put up with my wife’s little fit of independence for almost a year. Until people in town began telling me there was another man in the picture. Over the telephone, I asked her to explain.

“I don’t know if it’s serious with that man, but you really don’t seem to want to change, Gilles.”

“What do you want?” I asked. “I’d like us to get along but I don’t know what you want.”

“I think for starters, you’d have to acknowledge your drinking problem, and sell the goddam house.”

“Yes, but you, what are you ready to do to put things back on track?”

“What do you want me to do, Gilles? I’m not the one who’s sick.”

I saw red. The little voice in my head told me to shut up, but I opened my trap anyway:

“I’m going to tell you something, my lovely, and you can put that in your pipe. I’m always going to drink because I like to drink and anyway there’s no man in the world who could put up with a goddam crazy woman like you and still be on the wagon. And I’ll never give up my house. Never.”

I hung up. Maybe she called back but I wouldn’t have known because I completely destroyed the phone, slamming down the receiver. It took ten years before we saw each other without lawyers being present.

*

Today Julie’s almost thirty. She has two little girls and a husband. They’re in Montreal. I would have liked them to stay in the area, but what can you do? Since she left for Montreal at the age of nineteen, she’s come to see me every time she’s been back to the Saguenay, but she never wants to stay long in the house, and not once has she slept there more than one night. Yesterday, the whole family arrived together. I talked with my son-in-law, who I don’t know very well, the older girl spent all day in the swimming pool, while the smaller one, who’s not even a year, amused herself in her baby saucer in the shade under a big umbrella. At night we put the girls to bed and ate outside, all four of us, my wife, my daughter, my son-in-law, and me, with crab claws on the barbecue.

It was a really nice day.

We ate like pigs and laughed and my daughter even told some stories out of her adolescence, and then letting her go on, as though nothing were up, I went in to get her mystery notebook. She gave a yelp when I showed it to her, all embarrassed. We talked about knocks in the wall from the plumbing, floors that squeaked, and blurred photos. Still, at one point she said:

“You can laugh, but you never found an explanation for the dog.”

“Ah, your Mélodie… she must have fallen, what can I tell you?”

My wife didn’t know the story, so Julie told it to her. After that I changed the subject, as usual. I said, “You didn’t know, eh, Roxanne, that you lived in a haunted house?” I made myself laugh and told them that Roxanne thought there was a vampire in the basement, an evil creature but not really nasty, a kind of spirit who bled the life out of people’s veins, bite by bite. I even had a friend who taught at the University of Quebec and wanted to interview her about it because he’d never heard of people believing in vampires anywhere else but in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

*

That time when Danièle took off to Quebec City with my daughter, and when Mélodie disappeared, I didn’t sober up much for the entire weekend. I don’t recall everything, but I do remember pacing up and down in the house having imaginary arguments with my wife, and I remember ripping a lot of shelves off the wall and throwing all kinds of stuff onto the floor, and having to pick it all up on Sunday. Saturday night I went to bed early with a big headache.

About ten o’clock, the dog started to yap. I came out of the bedroom and found it sitting right in the middle of the living room, head in the air, barking at nothing. It lay down when it saw me coming. I petted it a little, talking softly, and it followed me into the bed. It didn’t stay for long. I felt it steal off, and half asleep, I heard it, from time to time, coming out with its big dumb yaps.

From when she was born to the age of eleven, more or less, my daughter had her Jack. He was a German shepherd mixed up with all sorts of other things. I’d picked him out of a farm dog’s litter, at Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. My daughter was still in her mother’s womb. Julie and Jack had been a great love story. We often stayed in the country when my daughter was little, so that Jack was her constant companion. Even later, when we were living on city streets where there were more children, she often preferred to stay all alone with Jack.

Two weeks after Jack’s death, my wife turned up with a little miniature schnauzer. “The best little dog in the world,” she said. A friend had given it to her, neglecting to mention that it yapped with all its might at the drop of a hat. She didn’t especially like dogs, my ex-wife, and in fifteen years of cohabitation, I don’t think I saw her scooping up droppings more than five times. But she had the firm belief that for a child, life without a dog was no life at all, and it would require another mutt for Julie to be consoled. I’m not sure that was true, and I would have preferred her to consult me beforehand, at the very least. I’m the one who’d trained Jack, and I’d kept him groomed, and I’d had him immunized, and to tell the truth I could have used a little dog break before taking on another.

Mélodie really had no chance with me. I didn’t much like that dog. Her yapping didn’t help, for sure, especially after my wife and daughter had started using it as evidence for there being something wrong with our house.

In short, I disliked the dog, and it got on my nerves more and more when it started howling its head off. I went down mad as hell to the living room and delivered it a good big kick in the side. I never liked hitting dogs, but for a long time, with her, I hadn’t been able to restrain myself. She got up and came in between my legs while continuing to yip at the top of her lungs. I chased her all through the house, and she ended up making one bad move, crossing in front of the staircase leading to the basement. I was right behind her and was able to give her another kick in the side that sent her tumbling down the stairs.