All the Voices Cry (7 page)

M
AX WAS STILL ANNOYED with Bea for having clipped the wing mirror on the way out of the garage. The mirror hung limply, broken at the bone. Bea felt bad about it, since the van was new. She looked out at the poplar leaves spinning on their stems. She knew without hearing them that the lush sound of well-waxed summer leaves had been replaced with a clattering like rice wafers. Fall was coming and after that, nothing but snow.

“Can't we open the windows?” Bea asked, “I'd like to hear the leaves.”

“Air conditioning. Better to keep them shut,” said Max.

From the back seat Cammy's little brown hand appeared with an apple core.

“You can throw it out the window here, sweetie,” Bea said. “It's the country.”

“Don't encourage her to litter, Bea. It's all someone's frontage,” said Max.

Bea looked at the maple seedlings and the crooked fence and the darkness of the firs behind.

“Okay.” Bea took Cammy's applecore. “I'll save it for the compost. Where's the trash container?”

“Here.” Max pressed a button and a compartment slid open. “Don't forget to get it out later,” he said.

“Are we there yet?” asked Cammy.

“The agent said it was around here somewhere.” Bea looked at the map again. “So we've passed Lac Perdu, right?”

“Thought you were doing the map.” Max was unsmiling.

Oh give it up,
she thought.
Get a grip. It's only the wing mirror.
She looked out the window again. The road curved past a stand of beeches. The layered quality of their branches seemed familiar, like hands outspread, pleading for calm.

“Slow down,” she said. “I think the turnoff's back there, after the beeches. Before the dumpsters.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I'm sure.”

Max made a U-turn, and they drove back past three dumpsters overflowing with Labour Day discards. A tilting pile of tires leaned into the ragweed. Nearby, a useless sled lay in the sun, its slats warped with damp.

“Look, a sled,” said Cammy. “Can I have it?”

“It's trash,” said her father.

“But I could fix it,” Cammy insisted.

“Look we don't have time to pick up trash for you, as well as for your mother.”

“Sorry Daddy.”

“Don't worry, love,” said Bea. “If we find a cottage to buy we'll get you a new sled. How about that?”

The van started up the hill. With a click all the doors locked. Bea didn't like it. The van was just too much. The
roadside was bright with black-eyed susans, some pure yellow and fine as stars, others rusty as old nails. Day lilies had seeded in the ditches, and tendrils of purple vetch fingered the greenery. They sped past a swampy area spiked with dead trees. A nerve in Bea's jaw tingled with recognition; she knew this road, she knew these trees. Once upon a time, a boy called Yves had shown her a heron perched high on a skeletal branch in this very swamp. Bea had been ten, spending the summer in a rented cottage with her parents.

Yves lived in the neighbouring cottage. Together, the children explored the surrounding land. Once he plucked at her sleeve to draw her attention to a young fox chasing flies on the path in front of them. Bea thought that nothing could equal the fox, but she was the first to see the weasel slipping along under the rock fall, its dark body undulating like an animated moustache. One afternoon they watched a pair of catfish herding their young about in the shallows. Yves made gestures indicating that the parents ate their babies. Bea watched the tiny wriggling commas with renewed interest. Another day she showed him a snake, run over and flat as a shoelace. The next, Yves showed her a discarded shoelace, flat and braided as a squashed snake.

Inside the cottage, Bea's parents played cards by lamplight and went to bed early. The lamps emitted a soft ball of light, not bright enough to do anything by, except, as she realized now, conceive a second child. Each morning, Bea washed the shadow of soot out of the glass chimneys. At the end of the summer, they beat out carpets, took down flypapers, pulled
the curtains and drove one last time down the bumpy driveway. Bea saw Yves out the back window. Small, he waved from the dock.

The day of the heron, they had been heading out to swim in the lake at the bottom of the hill, but when Yves reached the end of the driveway, he turned and ran uphill instead, shouting for Bea to follow. Just when she thought that she could run no more, Yves started back down the hill into the dip where the swamp pressed close to the sides of the road. Hot and sweating, they passed into a band of water-cooled air, entering a chilled land, where ghosts dwelt in the sunlight. The yellow daisies shone like stars beside the road and the heron rose up in flight. Yves and Bea flapped their arms and ran on down to swim. She kept her T-shirt on. His strong brown legs glistened when he came out of the water, wet as a salamander.

Now the road had been sealed. The day lilies still filled the ditches, although hydro workers had cut the tops off the pines to make way for cables. Max kept driving, but the road ended in a driveway leading to a summer camp and a cliff face. Bea knew that already. She had climbed there with Yves, searching for fossils.

Bea had to put her glasses on to read the words spray-painted onto the rock. She flushed and looked at the map.
Petit Hibou, ça m'empêche pas de continuer à t'aimer. Yves.

“Funny name for a girl,” said Max. “Old Yves sounds a bit desperate. It's quite the custom round here to proclaim your love on a rock. Remember all those names on the way up to La Tuque?”

“What does it say, Daddy?”

“It says that he won't stop loving her. Little vandal.”

“What's a vandal?”

“A person who wears sandals and writes on walls.”

“Vandals in sandals.”

“Yes, and Goths in socks.”

“Vandals in sandals and Goths in socks, Goths in thocks. Thocks in Goths.”

“Do you think we could open a window
now?
” Bea's voice was sharp. The brittle sound of the late summer leaves came to her. The locusts roared in the banks.

“Looks like this is a dead end,” said her husband. “I guess your hunch was wrong.”

“I guess it was, I'm sorry,” she said.

“No problemo, it's a nice day to be out for a drive, isn't it Cammy? In our sandals in the new vandal.”

“Vandal sandal candle dandle.” Cammy launched into the rest of the alphabet.

The words fell like light blows. Bea endured them all. Surely, she thought, it won't always be like this. They turned and drove back down the hill, past the swamp, past the empty branch where the heron had been, past the daisies, and back to the dumpsters at the bottom of the road.

I
SABELLA'S SKIRT BRUSHED through the ferns at the side of the track, collecting burrs, hooked seeds, the hem dusted yellow by the furry tongues of pollen-bearing plants. She had found the skirt in a costumes sale. Now what she needed was an old crone (she consulted the back of the park brochure) of Atikamekw ancestry, someone bent over, wise in the ways of plants and their healing powers, devoted to helping true seekers like herself. In the absence of a crone, the woman in the ticket booth said she would find a park warden at a hut called Espérance.

Isabella wrinkled up her nose. She had so wanted to feel the quest with the whole of her body; to cross a boggy patch, sensing the step and suck of waterlogged ground, tripping on rocks and roots as she hunted for the plants. But the track resisted her. It remained gravelly and dry.

A horsefly that had been buzzing around her went very quiet and Isabella hoped that it was not caught in her hair. She was beginning to regret not having removed the hair extensions after the show closed. They were much longer strands than her natural hair, tinted deep green, and now they seemed heavy and hot. The director wanted his Ophelia to look like she had
already been floating in the river for a while, because he said they were all ghosts, doomed from the beginning, and no one in the audience could pretend to be ignorant of how
Hamlet
turned out, so the audience, through their expectation, became complicit with the drive of tragedy. Whenever he said
complicit
(and he said it often) he passed his hand over the shaved crown of his head. The director was brilliant; Isabella adored him. She did anything that he asked her to do, anything at all.

Isabella was always at a loose end between shows, which was why a personal quest seemed so attractive. It began with a pamphlet from the health-food store. The pamphlet described a herbal product called Elcarim, proclaiming its value as a potent cure for cancer. In the 1930s, a nurse had received the recipe from an Indian healer. She mixed and bottled huge batches of the stuff with which she healed the sick across the province. The pamphlet listed the plants used in the formula, describing how the nurse had given up the recipe in a sworn affidavit, extracted on her deathbed.
Sworn affidavit.
The phrase was so romantic. Isabella wanted to be that nurse.

She decided to gather the ingredients and prepare the Elcarim herself. First she needed a trug to lay the plants in, and then there would be boiling and steeping, leaving the mixture in the dark, straining, reheating, and finally offering her mother a cup of the liquid, which would surely taste bitter and earthy. Honey, perhaps she could add honey, if Moira needed a sweetener.

Isabella made the preparations necessary to spend a weekend away with Moira, booking a motel that she could not
afford, hauling her down the stairs and into the car, tugging the seatbelt tight around her bulk. Moira was collapsed on the couch at the motel now, her body hidden in the great flowered folds of her dress, the non-paralysed side of her face working with effort at the donuts in the box, one eyelid tugged downwards by the frozen waterfall of her face. After the potion had been prepared, the Elcarim would pour through the massive body in a thin stream, for good or for harm working its way along the veins. Her mother would nod, give thanks for such a dedicated and loving daughter. And then she would die.

Isabella stopped short. She had not expected this thought to occur to her. Before her, in the middle of the road, as if dropped from above, lay a shrew caught in the surprise of death, its paws in the air, its whiskers a fan of dewdrops. She crouched down to look at it. Patches of skin shone through the short grey fur gathered with moisture. Her mother's scalp showed in the same way when she washed her hair. Under the shrew's pointed snout a tongue like a pink grain of rice stuck out above teeth that were sharp and dirty brown.

Once upon a time, Isabella's mother had been Moira Delacourt, the lounge singer. Never a beauty, her charms lay in her voice, husky with cigarette smoke. Moira's attentions flew about like thistledown. She delighted in everything, forever exclaiming, taking people by the arm, walking a few steps with them. A bee, she went from flower to flower. The acidic tongue she saved for home, and for Isabella.

What recipe, what formula had Moira followed to bring Isabella up? None, just a selfish kind of blundering, until
surprised by age and illness, she found that she had to rely more than she had imagined on her grown child. And Isabella's life? Not much to tell really, theatre school, work as an extra, a time of famine, bit parts, a lucky break, musicals that toured summer festivals and Shakespeare plays in parks, lovers of both sexes who came and went on the tide of the theatre seasons.

Isabella straightened up, and hurried on leaving the shrew behind. The roadway led uphill under maple trees that leaned in overhead making an enchanted tree cathedral, the ideal place for a wedding procession of children bearing poles tied with ribbons and hoops entwined with roses. She smiled to think how those children would dance and sing, making way for the happy couple.

Espérance was a large log cabin with a roof of shingles that had blackened with age. A sign on the door requested that Isabella take off her boots and respect the spirit of the place. Isabella put her head in at the door and looked around.

“Bonjour, hello?” she called out.

A moose head regarded her from high up beside a fieldstone fireplace of immense proportions but the reply came from behind her, from a young man holding an armful of firewood.

“One minute,” he said.

He brushed past her skirt, crossed the room and knelt down to stack the wood beside the fireplace. She watched him from behind, admiring his buttocks in the khaki shorts. He was not the crone she needed, but maybe he was better: a shape-changer, a thief or an angel. He was cute, whatever he
was, small and slender, with yellow brown curls, a light beard, and round glasses that reflected the panes in the window and the plane of light that was the lake beyond.

They shook hands, so formal and polite. His name was Pascal. Breathless, because it was such a relief to talk to someone, she told him the story, how her mother was a retired jazz singer taken first with paralysis of the face and now with cancer, how this potion, this Elcarim offered a cure, how there was a recipe, written down in a sworn affidavit, and if he could show her what these plants looked like, she could make some herself.

He raised his eyebrows. “You are not the first person to ask me about this Elcarim. Just buy it off the Internet.”

“Can't you at least show me what the plants look like?”

He sighed. “Okay, but you cannot take the plant. It is a National Park.”

“I know. Hands off the pristine wilderness.”

“What is on your list?” He started putting on his boots.

“Burdock root,” she said.

“Ah, Burdock,” he said, jabbing the end of lace through each eyelet in turn, “Cockle Button, Clot-Bur, T'orny Burr,'appy Major, Love Leave.” His French accent made the most prosaic English names chime like bells. “You have some seed pod stuck to your dress, but you want the root. They assist in the elimination of the free radical.”