Algoma (4 page)

What had been consumed: two pounds of potatoes, a loaf of brown bread, a jar of Cheez Whiz, a package of cretons, three apples, a pot of leftover cabbage soup, one roasted chicken, two chunks of venison sausage, a bag of carrots, a brick of marble cheese, a tin of cookies, and a bowl of strawberries. The only evidence of the missing food was the boys’ uncomfortably distended bellies.

The potatoes had been sliced into silver dollars and fried, batch after batch, until the saltshaker had run dry. The chicken had been eaten down to the gummy bones and then the boys, like animals, had cracked the bones open for what marrow they could find. At least they had been considerate enough to set the wishbone out to dry on the counter as a gift to their mother. Stringy bits of meat hardening as the hours passed.

When Gaetan arrived home, Leo grinned in a feeble attempt to disarm him.

“Hi Dad,” he said. His eyebrows were raised high and his eyes wide as he tried to gauge the severity of their offense.

Ferd elbowed him in the ribs. “Shut up.”

Gaetan stood silently at the door for what seemed, to the boys, like hours. He stared at them until they began to shift uncomfortably in their seats. Leo nervously picked at a small gouge in the table. A curl of Gaetan’s shiny black hair slipped free of its heavily gelled design and fell onto his forehead. The loose curl defied the sternness of his deep-set brown eyes. Gaetan knew his face from every angle, that all he wanted to say could be said with a look, and he was blessed with the sharp features to deliver it.

In his arms, Gaetan held offerings from the bar to help get his family through the rest of the week, until his next cheque: two jars of pickled onions, a tin of peanuts, a large bag of barbecue chips, a package of beef jerky, and a jar of green olives. He dumped the goods onto the table, the tin of peanuts almost rolling away.

“I’ll give you some money for eggs,” he said to Algoma. She could do a lot with eggs.

Algoma was now standing in the kitchen. She wiped the black smudges of mascara from beneath her eyes and wiped her hands on her sleeves.

“They ate everything,” she said. She stared blankly at the wallpaper’s beige and green floral print, traced the smooth flat petals with her finger. The wallpaper that had been there when she and Gaetan had moved in, before the boys were born. She tried to remember a time before them, the empty space they now occupied.

Gaetan looked at his wife and then turned to his sons. He leaned down low, menacingly, and put his hands flat on the table.

“You took food from our table. Now, you put it back.”

Ferd punched his brother in the shoulder. “Hold the goddamned thing straight up,” he said, “not sideways. I don’t want a hole in my stomach.”

“You must have a hole in your stomach,” Leo said, rubbing his shoulder, “you ate most of the potatoes.”

“Whatever. You ate the chocolates and those were important.”

“It was all important according to Dad.”

“You should get that removed.”

“What removed?”

“That,” Ferd said, pointing at his brother’s birthmark, the sprawling deep red port wine stain on his neck. The birthmark covered the right side of his neck and reached as high as his right earlobe and as low as his collarbone. It was the only visible difference between the two boys and Ferd resented it, the separation it created between them.

Leo touched his birthmark. It was smooth like the skin around it.

“I like it.”

“If you were an animal, the other animals would kill you because of it. Because it’s different.”

Both boys went quiet when they spotted a partridge pecking at small stones on the side of the gravel road. Leo raised the barrel of his .22 in one smooth motion and pulled the cool metal tongue of the trigger. The bird slumped forward.

“I wanted to see what it looked like,” he’d said to his mother after he’d shot a mourning dove in their backyard several months earlier. Algoma had turned the limp bird over and over again in her hands, as if, wound up like a watch, its thumbnail-sized heart would beat again.

At eleven years old, Leo could take his pick of the sky. Despite being twins, the boys were both taller and broader than most children their age. There was no time to be a child in the Beaudoin family. They’d hit the ground running.

Gaetan had introduced the boys to the clearings, stretches of forest, and creeks where they were allowed to hunt and fish on their own, places where they would not likely become lost or be bothered by other hunters or Ministry officials who would take issue with their age or what they were hunting. He wanted them to grow up as he had and no one could tell him different. It was like they were living in a time warp, living as if it were twenty or thirty years ago. That they were little more than children didn’t bother him. “If it was good for me, it’s good for them,” he’d said to Algoma when she expressed concern. Eventually, she knew it wasn’t a subject to be debated if she wanted to be considered a good wife.

Even though Gaetan encouraged their hunting and fishing, shunning activities other boys their age did like playing video games or making skateboarding videos, the boys knew enough to keep it to themselves, and did not tell the few friends they had. Every weekend, Ferd and Leo disappeared into the woods behind their home. The entire town was surrounded by forest dense with spruce. It was like living on an island and just as hard to leave. Little of the outside world made it through.

Once the boys were close enough to home that they could see their house through the branches, Ferd grabbed the partridge and two hares from Leo’s hands and walked the rest of the way. His pockets were stuffed with four mealy apples he’d poached from a hunter’s bait pile. “Finders keepers,” he said.

Leo let his brother carry the animals. He knew better than to argue with Ferd. It would feed them all the same. “Ever wonder why Mom and Dad aren’t like other parents?” he asked warily, a rare attempt to connect with his brother.

“What are you talking about?” Ferd snorted.

“I mean other parents would just buy more food, like at the grocery store.”

Ferd laughed. “Why, when we can feed ourselves? Are you stupid?”

“Yeah,” Leo said, and kicked at the ground. “Stupid.”

If Leo was like his mother, Ferd took after his father in most ways. Stubborn and deeply entrenched in his opinions even if he didn’t know why.

Once the boys passed through the opening they’d made in the cedar hedge that surrounded their backyard, they found their mother on her hands and knees in the garden. Her hands darted frantically through the leaves, searching for anything she might have missed. She dug through the dirt as if she were looking for coins in the sofa the last day before payday.

______________

7:00 p.m. -11°C. Gusting winds.
Blasts of cold air every time the door is opened.

A beer bottle exploded against the wall behind the bar and rained down brown glass onto the counter and floor. The noise was deafening.

“What the fuck!” Gaetan yelled, hands still protecting his head in case there was a second bottle. “What’s wrong with you?”

His younger brother had shown up unannounced at the bar. It was the first time Gaetan had seen him in over four years, and the last time had been for mere seconds. A familiar face in a passing car. Since then, he’d heard that his brother had picked up work in a town a couple hours south of Le Pin. He was shocked by how old his brother looked now, hard lines carved into his face and several scars that hadn’t been there last time they spoke.

“Why haven’t you returned Dad’s calls? Are you coming to Mom’s 60th birthday?” Simon asked.

“Will you be there?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m in town.”

“Then I won’t be. Nothing’s changed unless you’ve changed.”

Simon turned his back to his only brother and stared at the regulars who were trying to pretend they weren’t watching the fight between the bartender and the guy with the badly hooked nose.

Simon eyed down the man in the leather vest who was sitting alone in the corner. The man was nearly twice his size. “What the fuck are you looking at, buddy?”

Gaetan had severed ties with his family the same year he and Algoma married, and he had not set foot in his parents’ home since.

“It’s political,” he’d told Algoma when she pleaded with him to invite his family over for Christmas dinner one year.

“You don’t even read the paper or watch the news. How do you have politics?” she shot back.

The two brothers sat on opposing sides of the sovereignty debate. After a physical confrontation on the front lawn that had resulted in Simon’s broken nose, their mother had banned all talk of politics in the house. Instead of resolving or avoiding the subject, Gaetan ignored everyone involved and even those on the peripheries, like his sister.

“And what about Mary?” Simon asked.

Gaetan visibly winced as he took a sip of the gin buck he was nursing behind the bar.

Simon grinned knowing he’d hit a nerve. “She still thinks you’re going to call or come home one day.” He wiped some glass shards off the bar onto the floor. Emboldened by his brother’s silence, he carried on. “You need me more than you think you do. And if you really didn’t want to know us anymore, you could have moved away. It’s up to you to leave, not us.”

“Out now,” Gaetan said.

Simon smiled and waited another full minute before standing up.

The man in the corner half stood up, but Gaetan waved him down. He turned back to his brother. “Leave,” he said.

Simon stood up and headed toward the exit. As he put his hand on the door, he looked back at Gaetan. “I’ll tell Mary you said hi,” he said, and ducked to avoid the highball glass his brother launched at him. Simon laughed. “Same delayed fuse you’ve always had. You’ve never had good timing.” And with that, he was gone.

Shaking, Gaetan walked over to the jukebox and dropped in several coins. He punched in a series of numbers from memory; however the music did little to drown out the sound of his brother’s voice still ringing in his ears.

If he could have done it differently, he would have.

Ferd snapped another cedar twig and tossed it onto the snow to join the others he’d already thrown there. It was Sunday and he’d been outside since the early afternoon, holed up inside an opening in the cedar hedge. It was dark now, almost time for bed. He ignored that he couldn’t feel the tips of his toes and fingers anymore. He’d been sitting on a piece of cardboard on top of the snow for hours. He wiped his dripping nose with his snow-crusted mitt and tossed another twig onto the pile. Under the weak light from the back porch light, he stared at the unfinished note in his lap. He didn’t know how to say he was sorry for all he’d done.

Ferd looked up: a constellation of blank notes suspended in the branches around him. Each folded into a fortune teller with no fortune in it. No message.

For the most part, Ferd tried to tow the line when people, even his family, talked about his brother in the past tense. He never told anyone about the notes he sent to Leo. They would never understand. Instead, he quietly slipped his messages down drains, folded them into small paper boats and left them in the washing machine, tied them to rocks and dropped them to the bottom of the river, flushed them down toilets at school.

What he couldn’t tell anyone was that a part of him worried that his brother stayed away because he was mad at him. He thought of the ways he’d hurt his brother in the past, how he’d undermined everything Leo had wanted for himself. There was the incident with the killdeer egg, and how it had changed everything between them. Ferd didn’t know why he’d done what he had, his actions had come faster than the thoughts behind them. He only knew that he’d wanted to hurt his brother, and he had. Where he was hard and loud, Leo was soft and quiet. Incapable of dealing with a force like his brother. That everyone took to Leo only made it worse. No one looked at him the way they looked at his brother even though they had the same face. A wash of shame coloured his neck and cheeks, and then finally he wrote: It will be different this time. Come home.

Gaetan arrived home while the sun was still down, the darkest blue lightening the eastern sky. Still upset by his brother’s appearance, and fuzzy from the whiskey shots he and the vested man had downed at closing, he fumbled with his keys at the door, scraping paint off the wood as he tried to get his key in the lock.

Once finally inside, he leaned against the closed door and shut his eyes. After kicking off his boots, he walked down to the basement where he lay down on the hard carpet beside Ferd’s bed. He was drunk enough, tired enough, that if he tried to imagine that his remaining son was twelve-year-old Simon, he could. It was the last time he could recall things being good, that he had someone he thought he would be close to forever.

______________

10:47 a.m. -19°C. Wind N, light.
Car frozen shut. An iceberg in the driveway.

Le Pin was located two hundred and forty kilometres northwest of Quebec City and was linked to the south end of the province by a single aging highway. A thin ribbon of crumbling asphalt that regularly failed those looking to leave town after heavy rains or snow. The town itself was roughly the shape of a pentagon. A fortress of stacked duplexes, small brick bungalows, a hospital, a mall, and a pulp and paper mill to keep the wilderness back. Thick boughs pressed against hard wood fences. If only so there was a place with an unobstructed view, the town had been built alongside the Charles River. The Charles was a steeply banked and deep river that, after being sieved by two generating stations, emptied into the St. Lawrence.

Just north of Le Pin, four smaller rivers fed into the Charles; south of town, another river joined the spill from the rest. Seen from air, the network of rivers looked like a hawk’s claw clutching a treed mass of earth, threads of logging roads trailing behind it.

While provincial signs were staked at the town’s north and south borders, it was the wet egg smell from the pulp mill that greeted visitors first, that seeped into lungs and clothes. Set at the north edge of town, the pulp mill rose like a silver smoking castle. A quarter of the town—roughly twenty-five hundred people—worked in forestry. It was a town of injury lore. Splinters and stitches. Falling trees and head injuries. Slips and chainsaws.