The Piano Maker (19 page)

She nodded.

“Now tell me about the gun.”

“Nathan bought it at the store, along with some boxes of shells. We went into the woods and he showed me how to use it. I’d seen him use a gun in Persia, and I’d been impressed. I trusted him. This gun had three barrels, two side by side on top for shot shells and another below for bullets. It was made in England. Nathan said it was a good all-round game gun. It had a kind of hinge action, and he taught me how to load and select the barrels and how to hold it firmly and fire it. I didn’t like using it because of the harsh recoil.”

“But did you become fairly competent in the use of it? Loading it, making it safe or ready? Firing it? Considering what happened.”

“More or less.”

“No.
Did you become reasonably competent with it?
”

“Yes, I did.”

He nodded and wrote something down on a piece of paper.

“Thank you, Mrs. Giroux. Now I would like you to rest as much as possible. Eat well and rest. I’ll see you on Monday before the trial.”

On Saturday she went down into the church for her usual practice session. She’d asked young Mona and Mildred to attend so that they might work once more on their solo parts in the “Wake and Pray” cantata for the High Mass. Mildred’s mature mezzo contrasted beautifully with Mona’s young voice. For practice she used the old
répétiteur
’s method of having them sing the harmony while she played the melody, and then switch and sing the melody while she played the harmony.

“Be bold,” she encouraged them. “Sing from your heart, never from your head. Singing with a single piano is much more difficult than with an organ. An organ can overpower everything, but with a piano they’ll actually hear you. You are doing very well.”

After the session she found Father William and asked if it was all right for her to have a visitor for tea, and he said by all means, and then she asked Morris to take a message to David Chandler. Up in the apartment she lit the first Advent candle again, and then she dressed for the occasion, in the good wool skirt and top and the shoes with the Italian heel.

By the time he arrived, the sun was nearly down and the light on the tile and thatch roofs and the brick chimneys was deep orange. She brought the view to his attention and
for a while they stood at the window. She loved it, she said. It was always different with the changing light, a different mood, a different town almost. The trees and the white seagulls and the sharp texture of the rooflines and the ocean rolling out to meet the sky.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

While she was pouring tea, he told her he was working on the brass sleeves for the organ components. He described what he was doing, but she was thinking of something else and was not listening.

“Mr. Chandler …,” she said, interrupting him.

“Yes?”

“They’ll be saying all sorts of things. At the trial. I understand that the prosecutor is a woman who is very good at her job, which is to get convictions. And I want you to know that I’ll have no control over what will happen from Monday on. No control, Mr. Chandler. It’s quite possible that I lost my mind a bit near the end, in that ice hole. For temporary self-protection, the court psychiatrist said. He had a medical term for it, but I can’t recall it now. I wanted to make sure you understood that. They may get me to say things I didn’t mean to say; they may restrict me to yes-or-no answers that will skirt all context and turn the questioning in their favour. I’ll resist that, but it’s still possible that they’ll say things that simply won’t be true. You will be hearing accusations that … in all honesty, Mr. Chandler, what I mean to say is that anything can happen in that court, and it may be fact, but it may not be the truth.”

He had been listening to her, looking at her over his cup, and now he leaned forward to put it down in the saucer on the table, very slowly as though it might break or some other thing that was in the room right now might break if he wasn’t very careful.

Later she did the dishes and then opened the windows wide. She turned out all the lights and put on her coat and hat and moved the wooden chair into a corner, out of the draft. In the Advent wreath on the coffee table, the candle had burned down into its metal socket and gone out.

She sat in the near-dark with her hands together in her lap. Pierre’s photograph was gone from the shelf, and she stood up and rearranged the books more loosely so they took up more space. She returned to the chair.

The windows were still open and there was some light in the sky. Not much. A shimmer, like the pearly inside of some shells she had seen on the rocks.

She sat like this for some minutes and then abruptly rose and turned on all the lights and closed the windows. She took off her coat and hat and then at the kitchen table with pen and paper took stock of everything she had: Claire and this place now; her health and her music and her memories; the gift of having learned in her youth from exceptional people; the memory of the house on Tonkin Hill and the image of Pierre embracing Claire in Haiphong; the beach in Belgium and Claire turning cartwheels;
sitting in the cork room, adjusting and fine-tuning a piano to perfection. The weeks with Xavier.

She looked at the list and tore off the page and put it aside. There was much more, but she did not want to commit that to paper just yet. There was David Chandler’s kind and troubled look. There was the support of Father William and the friendship of Mildred, and there was Mr. Quormby. There was the memory of Nathan near the end. There was so much that was good.

But first this.

She looked down at the blank page and began to make herself remember.

The dogs had been some northern breed, with shaggy coats and flashing fangs. Males, all six of them, all restless and snarling.

“You need to decide who’ll be in charge of them,” Prosper said to her and Nathan. “It should be the same person every time. So who?”

“I’d like to try,” she said.

The men looked at each other, and then Nathan said, “Good. It’ll keep me free to take compass readings and make notes and maps so we don’t get lost on the way back.”

But Prosper seemed doubtful. “They aren’t pets,” he said to Nathan. “They’re a full working team. If she shows the least bit of weakness, she’s lost already. She can whip
them and make them hate her, but they’ll never submit, and the first chance they get, they’ll kill her.”

“She’s standing right there,” said Nathan. “Don’t tell
me
. Tell her. Just show her how, and she’ll do it.”

Prosper did, and from then on her main task in Deer Run was getting the dogs to obey her and accept her as their leader. She put on heavy leather gloves and learned to harness them and then to drive them pulling the sled.

Prosper was a lean man in his forties. He wore rough winter clothing and sheepskin boots and a braided leather lash tied around his middle. He asked if she came from France, and he said his father had been from Quebec and his mother a Métis from Saskatchewan.

“What are the dogs’ names?” she asked.

“Names? They don’t know names. They know the snap of a whip, and they know the commands and your tone of voice. You’ve got to be tough with them.”

She found it all very difficult at first. The cold, the harshness. The absolute unforgivingness of everything.

Deer Run was an outpost in the wilderness, a tumble of cottages with thin partitions for rooms, and kennels and sheds and the cookhouse and the trading post. The best thing was the bathhouse, where she took many hot showers, knowing that each might be the last for two weeks or more. All these buildings stood in a clearing by the railside; the outfitter, a big, bearded man known as Zach, seemed to be master of everything there. He carried a revolver on his hip, and he collected rent and
advised on equipment and weapons. He sold tools and supplies.

When the sun was right they could see the gleam of the railroad track vanishing among the trees. In those trees sat large crows with four-foot wingspans, and they cawed and cackled and rasped, and when they lifted off, branches and treetops shook and shed their snow loads.

The days were sunny but cold. There was a thermometer on the sled, and even at noon with the sun out it said minus four or five degrees Fahrenheit, minus twenty degrees Celsius.

They bought a tent and Arctic sleeping bags and ropes and cooking utensils and better clothing and expedition food preserved in frozen portions labelled
Long Trail
. Nathan bought the gun for protection and also because they would have to supplement their own supplies and kill game for the dogs. Raw meat was all they ate. Nathan practised with the gun, and he made her practise also. After the first few shots she hated it.

“You’re not holding it right,” he said, and he showed her how. “Firmly pressed into your shoulder pocket. Like this. Watch.”

At the end of the second day she lay on the bed in her own tiny room in the cabin, her closet, she called it, nursing the bruises on her upper arm and shoulder with packets of frozen peas.

“Remind me, Nathan,” she called through the open door. “Why are we doing all this?”

“For the money, of course,” he said cheerfully from the living room. She could hear him feeding chunks of wood into the cannon stove. “And for the fun of it. All this adventuring in fresh air. You did all right in Vietnam and in Persia. This is just a wee bit colder.”

She heard him closing the stove door, and then his voice came from around the corner of her doorframe.

“But, Helen … can you hear me?”

“Yes, of course I can.”

“You do realize that with the French geologist nowhere in the picture, I don’t really need you – wait! That doesn’t sound right. What I mean is, you don’t
have
to stay if you don’t want to. But I got you into all this, and now that you’re here, I’m glad for your company. It’s much more fun together, and God knows there’s more than enough money for the two of us.”

“I wasn’t really asking, Nathan. I’m fine. I really am. But thank you.”

There followed more days of learning to handle the dogs. She talked to them and gave them scraps of meat from the cookhouse. She tried kindness, but not too much of it. Once, when the one with half an ear missing turned on her, she leapt back and gave him two lashes, but later at feeding time she watered him and gave him his meat like all the others. She learned to tell them apart and then gave them names. Prosper looked on and frowned but said nothing. She gave them names like Bob, Fritz, and Jack, but then got them mixed up and kept inventing new ones,
except for Jack. She always knew Jack because he was the one with the ripped ear. And he was the smartest of the lot. By the middle of the fourth day he stood absolutely still while she put him in harness. She made Jack the point dog, and the others seemed to agree.

They left before sunrise on the sixth day. She harnessed the dogs, and the men packed the sleds. It was minus eleven Fahrenheit, and the air felt like steel. Their breath and that of the dogs rose in undisturbed clouds.

“She’ll do all right,” she overheard Prosper saying to Nathan, and she liked that.

Thereafter, during the days and weeks that followed, their six dogs were her full responsibility. Nathan rode on the sled and looked after the dead reckoning and the mapping for the return trip, and she fed and harnessed and drove the dogs, standing in the crossboard and strapped in for support between the high runners, the way Prosper had shown her.

It was a wild and free and so very unusual thing to do, and by the end of the first full day she knew not only that she could do it, but that she loved it.

They wore lined parkas and thick wool hats and dark glasses with leather side panels to block the glare from the bright sun on the snow all around, and when the wind came at their faces they wore the felt masks they’d bought at the store. She laughed at the men looking like hooded members of some secret clan, but then of course she looked no different.

The sky was clear except to the west, where distant cloud banks were layering. On the second day Nathan shot a moose and Prosper butchered the steaming carcass into portions to be kept on the sled: one lot for them, one much bigger lot for the dogs.

In the evenings they cooked in front of the tents, simple shelters of canvas sheets snapped together and steepled around an upright pole or a tree and fanned out to rocks or pegs. They ate meat and frozen beans or peas and rice most nights, but she always watered and fed the dogs first with moose meat and moose innards, and every evening she unharnessed them and tied them on individual lengths of rope to pegs or trees away from the sled but close to the tents and the fire.

The dogs lay watching them with their snouts on their paws and the firelight glinting in their eyes.

One such evening Prosper said to her, “You are good with the dogs. They like and respect you. I’ve seen that only once before, and he was a man who said that animals look at us and they know exactly what we’re feeling. Not our thoughts, but our emotions. They read our faces like children, and like children they never forget.”

“I believe that. I always wanted a dog when I lived in France, but we never had one. Tell me about the place where we’re going.”