The Upper North
Even before the sun has considered coming up, I kick Joffre awake with my snowmobile boot. He rolls off his arms to reveal a pack of cigs crushed into the afghan, the carton imprinted on his pale collarbone.
I tell him in a sure, dry voice, “You’re driving.”
“What time is it?” he groans.
“About six.”
“In the morning?”
“Can’t you feel it?”
I go downstairs and outside to wait for him. There’s snow in the gutters, but the wind is throwing rain around. It’s sad weather. Doesn’t know what to do. The street is empty, save for an old lady curled up in a pale pink housecoat in the doorway to the apartment above the drugstore, holding a cigarette and a coffee mug that’s not steaming. Joffre comes out buttoning his shirt beneath a plaid jacket, his black hair quickly slicked back. He rubs crust from his eyes and asks the old woman to spare a smoke. She provides and lights it.
“You know,” he says, “it rains like this ’cause you dress like that.”
“The rain don’t care,” she tells him.
When it comes to Joffre Riboux, the tender memories are easy to grab, as pins from a cushion. He was my fiancé at one time, during our foolish years—and then he wasn’t, but we still dated a couple times a week for a while. The moment I think of most often came before all of that, though. We were riding a ski lift on Mont Tremblant. We were young and he had a ring, but it slid from my gloves and disappeared below us. I was laughing through tears then, my hands on his face, fingers hooked behind his ears, and I was kissing hungry “I love you”s into his cheekbones. That was the moment. It passed. He still has lots of friends when he’s drinking, but if he’s not, he’s got me.
We chug the smoke between us and then Joffre flicks the butt into the truck bed. Head buzzing, I hop in the passenger side. A rosary dangles from the rear-view mirror as Joffre turns the truck over and punches Ian Tyson into the tape deck.
“Now that’s music,” he says.
I believe him, and he sings along like a stoned owl. I correct the words as he goes. The headlights lead us through town and left on 167 for a run down the Route du Nord toward Nemaska, dodging potholes as we go, and then off on a dirt road for a couple klicks. Telephone poles sling webs of glossy power line in the dark alongside us. I peer beyond to the barren fields and what might be seen there, but the dim light from the truck is immediately overcome.
I can’t turn Rita into words. Her life feels brief as gossip to me, and it carries on that way, changing when I look back on her and depending on who I’m talking to.
Joffre eases over to the shoulder when the time is right and the place is near and he lets the engine hum. Beyond the berm, some small trees are making a comeback against last summer’s forest fire, but just as many are leaning dead and thin as charcoal pencils, their branches shivering naked. There’s a lone birch tree still standing there beside the charred cube that used to be our home. That’s where my oldest sister died.
I can’t turn Rita into words. Her life feels brief as gossip to me, and it carries on that way, changing when I look back on her and depending on who I’m talking to. For ages she had a cough like the slamming of a cathedral door, though she never smoked. Then, upon investigation, they said she’d got lung cancer and allowed her six more months of living. She didn’t make it three.
On a November morning after one of her pre-emptive benders, I went out for a smoke in my nightgown. I found her hanging from the thickest tree branch. The light of the rising sun outlined her body and the dark filled her in.
I remember witnessing the scene as if separated from my senses by a screen door: not falling, but the rocks stabbing into my bare kneecaps, the image of levitating wool socks with rings of white at the top and ribbons of red above those, the distant sound of someone smothering a deep, bawling scream into their palms. At some point I realized that someone was myself.
I had to sneak back inside without waking my mom, who no longer left her bedroom. From the kitchen phone, I called Joffre, cracked lips whispering into the mouth-piece. I shivered outside until he arrived. We lowered Rita gently down and wrapped her in a quilt and laid her in the backseat of the pickup. We had to drive halfway back into town before we could pull over and safely call an ambulance from the Mianscums’ place. Rita hadn’t left a note.
The priest refused to seat a suicide in one of the Catholic plots, so we had to rent a backhoe ourselves, because the ground was too frozen to dig.
My little sister, Donna, had been living in Val d’Or up until then. She used to tell me how they’d make her smile and say something in Indian before they’d ring up her groceries, and guys would throw garbage and whoop at her as they drove by on main-street. Then back at home, the kids would call her old Six-Two right to her face. Nobody seemed to remember our mother was of the James Bay Cree, but nobody’d let Donna forget her dad came from Shawinigan Power.
Still, the evening before we buried Rita, she showed up on her yellow 1984 Liqui-fire, everything she owned in a tote bungee-corded to the back, and three orders of Fritou poutine in a cooler. The visor was busted off her helmet, so her cheeks and nose were seared where the speeding wind had entered.
“That cold is cold,” she announced.
Joffre came over with a cord of firewood later that night and delivered an armload of kindling directly to the stove. Partaking of a gentle drink, we relaxed around the living room while it warmed up like a pot of coffee. He’d brought along his Casio SK-1, so he started singing some country tune in a ghastly vibrato. I put my legs across his lap.
“Use a beer?” I asked Donna.
“Yeah,” she said, “but I don’t drink anymore.”
“Everybody drinks.”
“Not anymore.”
“Why the hell not?”
“That’ll kill you.”
“Anything can kill you, Donna.”
“Not like alcohol. That’s a special kind of dying.”
“You afraid of that?” I asked.
“Of what?”
“Dying.”
“It’s not dying so much,” she said. “But living like that scares the hell out of me.”
Finally, we got to speculating about Rita.
“Yesterday’s easy to deal with. It’s done and gone. Tomorrow’s what’s terrifying,” said Donna. “Without even trying, it can kill you. And she gave up. I’d have never believed it, but even Rita gave up.”
She fiddled with her holy rosary, which was wrapped around her wrist, which in turn was wrapped in scars, like a Slinky up her arm. She’d learned early of the unwanted attentions of unlaid men. They’d turned her body into an orchard of anxiety.
“Look, if there’s one thing I know about dying,” I told her, “it’s that you can always do it later. So you’ve just got to put it off until then. It’s all you can do.”
“Then,” she said to me, “what do you think?”
“About what?”
“You think you live on somehow?”
“Well, I don’t know how.”
“Your soul or something,” she said. “Who you really are.”
I didn’t say anything to that. And she didn’t press it.
But sometimes I’d wake up and hear her hyperventilating in the bathroom, and every now and then, I swear, I’d hear her praying Rita could get into Heaven for who she used to be. I suppose Donna had always been optimistic for a manic depressive, though Mom had simply diagnosed her as a moody girl. She was a sudden individual, though.
Donna would slam a door every time rather than let it pause between two rooms.
She stuck around until the semester started up at McGill. The night before she left, they held an awards ceremony at the high school and afterwards, they put on a powwow in the gym. They invited the graduates to dance. Donna benched herself.
“I’ve always been scared of powwows. Grandma said they were evil,” she told me, but her heel began to tap. “Shit, I’m starting to dance. But I’m going to respect her wishes. Even though she’s gone now.”
Last I saw Donna was two months after that at Dave Makepeace’s farmhouse. She’d come back from university for the weekend. Makepeace’s place was a satellite town of its own, a small marvel tucked at the back of Eeyou Istchee where the rules of the dry reserve couldn’t reach. That weekend, the anniversary of Rita leaving us, her leftover friends came from all around in singles or in couples, or in VW vans of four or more. We squished brews and told stories and took turns making breakfast and fresh beds and chopping wood to keep the stove cooking. We glossed over inconsistencies in memory for the sake of a good laugh, and to quiet the remaining silences, we took to launching off fireworks in her honour and blaring that spacey shit, like Bowie or Pink Floyd, underneath every single star in the Milky Way galaxy.
I remember running, stumbling with Donna across the field that night at Makepeace’s, though, through the layers of snow, beyond the glow of the bonfire, under those fireworks. We lobbed snowballs deep into the darkness and listened to them explode against the unknown. It was a beautiful thing.
Walking back to the house, we stopped at a wire fence. We stared, with wonder, at ten or twelve horses standing still as if cursed in stone except for the exhaust rising from their nostrils. The fence clawed like a kitten at my sleeve as I offered Donna a smoke. She declined. She told me of her first semester: “I can’t do anything without them thinking it says something about all of us.”
A pinto approached us slowly from the field, brave and uncertain. It bent down and whickered and Donna reached to pet it, one hand on the fence. The instant her fingertips contacted the horse’s muzzle, the voltage rode her bones and fried him. He leapt back, ripped, whinnying into the dark. Startled, the other horses followed him.
It felt like a bear hug, my laughter was so strong, but Donna yelled, “Why don’t they just jump these goddamn fences and take off?”
By the time Makepeace took the rope away entirely, the pinto thought it was its own idea to live within its limits.
My sides unwound themselves from the laughter. Makepeace had trained the horses slowly at first, and then all of a sudden. In the beginning, he’d tied a rope to the fence post and looped the other end around that pinto’s neck, and he’d let that pinto play wide across the property. Then one day, he’d reeled in a metre of that rope and retied it, then a metre more the next day, and the day after. By the time Makepeace took the rope away entirely, the pinto thought it was its own idea to live within its limits.
“I imagine now’days,” I said, “it sticks around for the feed.”
“So the truth is it’s got nowhere else to go,” Donna told me. “How’ve you chosen to waste your life out here?”
I laughed. “Slowly,” I said. “But how’s life otherwise?”
“Taking forever.”
As she walked back toward the fire, I thought I knew what she meant.
This’ll be November’s first lap since me and Joffre wheeled in one late night and her bare feet swayed into the headlights. It was like wading into a nightmare, but, seasoned now; we left the doors open and said nothing. God, her toes were like blueberries. I hugged her legs and dried my cheeks quietly on her jeans while Joffre climbed the ladder after her, sniffling and smearing his nose on his knuckles and the neckline of his sweatshirt as he worked through the clothesline with his jackknife. Her rosary was folded inside the note in her pocket, which said, in English, “Maybe in the next life.”
Rita had been swinging for a whole year in Donna’s mind before she decided to join her. She’d hanged herself from the same birch tree.
The structure was covered in hides and unzipped sleeping bags to keep in the heat and to block out the light. Our living bodies were steaming already.
They held a sweat lodge at the edge of town the night before we buried her. In my black one-piece, I sat next to Joffre, topless in his own swimsuit, all of us cramped inside that dome skeleton of interlaced branches. The structure was covered in hides and unzipped sleeping bags to keep in the heat and to block out the light. Our living bodies were steaming already.
Charles the Elder squatted on the opposite side. He’d survived Moose Factory, where the nuns would make you eat embers from the fireplace if you persisted in speaking your home tongue. That man must’ve had a lot of ash in his guts.
“Wise ones said people would come from all over to hear our teachings,” he told us, “so all people are welcome. The ones who steal ’em, that’s who’s not welcome. Anyone wanna share anything? A lot of us, we carry garbage. Like supporting the Leafs.” We laughed at that, but didn’t speak. “Nobody wanna share? Well, that’s good! I’m just kidding.” He pointed outside to a space in the snowbank where two volunteers stood cooking stones in a campfire. “The Grandfathers—and the Grandmothers—they waited a long time to be picked up, and we did. And now they’re going home. So let’s rock and roll.”
Balancing it on a pitchfork, one of the boys brought in a melon-sized rock that glowed pure red, and deposited it into the shallow groove at the centre of the lodge. He delivered several more and then closed the curtain. Charles shifted the stones with a caribou antler, and the man to his left sprinkled on some cedar which forced the stones to sparkle in the dark.
Then the man began to beat a drum while the woman on Charles’ other side worked a shaker. They sang in slow, mournful semitones, soaring high and dropping low, all of us rocking back and forth.
I was feverish after the first round, moving toward delirious, but as the boys let the air in briefly while they added more stones and more heat, Charles reminded us: “The first round will be the gentlest. That’s for the south door, to honour the children. The east will be for teenagers, and the west for couples. The north is still for the elders,” he said, shining in sweat. “Not many left. Anyways,” he said. “This one’s for you, Donna.”
In the dark again, I felt I was roasting for my sins.
As for the funeral proper, the same priest told us God hadn’t changed His view in regards to suicides in the cemetery. He offered to put us in touch with the gravediggers, though. Then, shaking my hand, and referring to me as the last of the Diamond sisters, the priest asked, “Are you saved?”
I jerked my hand back.
“From what?” I said.
A pair of flat walnut markers that I carved out with Rita and Donna’s names once blanketed their graves behind the house, but that summer fire crept over the dry grass without boundary and torched the markers down to dust too. You can’t tell exactly where the girls are now.
Parked by the berm, anyway, Ian Tyson is warbling, the windshield glazed in rain. Joffre flips on the wipers and they screech the first time going by. I pop the tape out and tell him, “I actually just want to sit and listen to whatever for a little bit.”
So we listen to the wipers and to the low radio static until Joffre cancels them both. The truck pitches in the wind. I see a rabbit cross the road. He sees me back.
I dig around under the seat for a paper bag and bring out the mason jar of cider Joffre cooked up for my birthday. I raise it, twist the top off, and cautiously take a sip. The authoritative taste smacks me in the mouth and electrocutes my gums, then Joffre takes a pull and takes a turn cursing into his sleeve. That’s his home brew for you: some batches are barely alcoholic; others turn out blinding. After subtracting another snort from the jar, I’m nearly disabled. I roll down the window and pour out a sip for the earth, screw the lid on, and slide the jar back under the seat.
“Just look at that fucking stump,” I say, nodding at the burned-down shack.
“I’m glad your mom moved into a home. Even without the fires,” Joffre says, “she would’ve hated staying out here.”
“Well, this used to be home, you know.”
I yank the rosary from the rear-view before throwing the door open and stepping into the rain. I ball up the string tightly and I pull my arm back and I chuck the beads overhand, sending them rippling into the field. A part of me goes with them, but I still get back in the truck. I let my sight run calm down the road. At the end of it, the timberline is starting to throw up orange clouds. I yawn the biggest yawn I’ve ever yawned—it nearly rips my jaw apart—and my eyes water. I wipe them on my wrist.
Joffre tells me, “You can cry, Jenny.”
“I’m not crying.”
“I know what crying sounds like.”
I go, “You’ve never heard me cry in your life.”
“Well, this is making me cry,” he says.
“It is not.”
“Makes me want to though.”
I laugh against my will, letting out a snotty sound.
He says to me: “Jen,” he says, “when we come out here and I see you looking at that bastard tree there, man, I wonder if Donna killing herself wasn’t just selfishness.”
My eyes are swimming. I squint at him.
“Leaving you to go alone now, I mean.”
But I’m already turning away and squishing tears like grapes against the back of my hand. I watch the branches shake.
“It was never suicide to her,” I say. “It was self-defence.”
I hope Joffre will put his arm around me, but he’s never had the courage to do so sober. I don’t want him to do it now. Instead, he goes, “Not even God knew those girls like you did, Jenny Diamond.”
And that’s good enough. If it isn’t, there’s nothing else to be done anyway. So I just close the door. I lean back and tell him, “Okay, Joffre.”
A pair of headlights come up the road burning at maximum wattage, projecting the shapes of raindrops across Joffre’s face. He puts the truck in gear. It’s still dark out, but people are waking up.
