The Piano Maker (20 page)

“Atanaskewan,” said Prosper. “The old people say it means, or used to mean, something like
where the river ends
. Except there’s no river anywhere near, but there are those
stone markers like pyramids. And so maybe it doesn’t mean river like a flowing water, but something else that flowed freely and then ended there.”

“Like what? Something real or imaginary?”

“To the old people that’s just words,” he said. “To them the imaginary can be more real than a stone. More than this fire. I’ve heard of people saved by the imaginary and I’ve heard of some killed by it. People that know this land, you’d be amazed. They see real things where you can’t see anything. I was travelling with a man once, and in the middle of the night he wakes and gets out of the tent because he hears someone calling to him. I got out too, and I saw no one there. But he did. I saw him standing there and talking, and he was not crazy.”

The nights were never completely dark, and every night they heard wolves at least once. On each occasion she was awake even before the dogs stood and shook themselves. She crawled out of the sleeping bag and looked at them past the tent flaps and watched them answering back, howling up into the sky. Their breath rose high in the air and the hackles on their necks and backs stood so straight she could see pale light through them.

Early on the fifth day the landscape began to change. There were more trees and less snow, and the ground was rising steadily towards an elevation that was in places bare of snow altogether. At the foot of a rocky outcropping they
came across the carcass of a moose. The insides and the top haunch had been eaten and the rest was frozen hard.

“Grizzly,” said Prosper. “It’s not often you see this and they’re rare around here, but see the claw marks? So deep and wide apart? And the strength needed. That’s a grizzly.”

“I thought bears hibernate this time of year,” said Nathan.

“Most do. Not this one, obviously. Or he just woke up and got hungry and had himself a snack.” Prosper stood and looked around. “Not far now,” he said. He pointed at a pile of rocks in the distance. “See over there? On that rise. The first marker.”

“Marking what?” said Nathan.

Prosper ignored that. There was never any doubt that on this leg of the journey it was he who was in charge. He took an axe from his sled and then stood wide-legged over the carcass and swung the axe. Meat and skin and bone came off in hard-frozen chunks.

FOR HIGH MASS
on Sunday, the church was full again. In all the pews people sat shoulder to shoulder, and they crowded the nave and aisles at the back of the church and clustered again at the open doors.

After the cantata the choir sat down on chairs by the communion rail, and up in the pulpit Father William said, “What is this text telling us?
Wake! Pray!
Is it not telling us to wake up and become accountable for ourselves so that we might be able to rise to our full human and spiritual potential? To live a full life? And to pray for help in achieving it? Is it not saying that help is always at hand because we are children of God, and His spirit and His kindness live within us and all we need to do is allow them to be? To have the courage and the faith to allow them to be. Would that not do wonders for our peace of mind and for the way we see ourselves and others?”

There was not one sound in the congregation. They sat absolutely still and listened to their young, outspoken
priest who was so very different in his words and ways than Father McBride had been. Old Bridie, who one Sunday had not appeared in church, and the deputation of church elders that went to look for him found him dead on his bathroom floor with his mouth and eyes wide open as though some terrible insight had come to him in his final moments. They’d propped up his jaw with a piece of soap and closed his unsettling eyes and telephoned the diocese office. Ten days later Father William arrived, down from Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Sullivan was his last name, but after a few weeks hardly anyone used it any more. He was Father William to most, and even just Our William to many behind his back. By then even the old Acadians had already forgiven him that he wasn’t from the Shore either. That he wasn’t even French.

On this Sunday, with just two more Sundays until Christmas, his congregation looked up at him in the stone pulpit and listened, and in the pauses between his sentences they could hear the wind that had come up overnight from the east, and it sang in the edges of the tin flashing around the windows, and once in a while a particularly strong gust set the bells in the tower resonating, and they could hear them hum, each in its own pitch, like some enormous tuning fork.

After the sermon, while Father William came stepping down from the pulpit, the choir rose from their chairs and they grouped around the piano, and Hélène struck the note for the next carol on the program. It was “O Little
Town of Bethlehem,” and after the piano introduction the entire congregation rose and sang along:

O little town of Bethlehem
,

How still we see thee lie!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by …

It was snowing by then, a hard, fast, punishing snow that came nearly sideways and built up quickly against windows and house walls, and the people who had been standing outside the church pressed in more determinedly now, and those for whom there was finally no room turned away and went home or found shelter at the hotel. The skies were dark now and in no time the weather had caused two accidents with horses shying, and then a car with visitors who’d come for the trial skidded at the post office corner into the oak tree there. The snowplow was called out, and the gate to the emergency supply of road grit in the corner by the old gunpowder magazine in the fort was opened.

By Sunday afternoon there were more motorcars in Saint Homais than anyone had ever seen. The hotel was fully booked and the owners of the old Quaker House had come from the city and opened it up, and they’d hired locals to air and heat the place and staff it. By the evening the Quaker was full also and many people who lived in houses with spare
rooms rented them out with breakfast. Among the people who’d come to town were the twelve members of the jury. Only one of those was from the north shore; the rest had come from the city and places in between.

The trial and how it would go was the conversation everywhere. And if she was in fact guilty, would she really hang? And how soon after the verdict?

“The last woman on these shores to get the drop was also French,” said a schoolteacher from the city to someone as they stood waiting for a table at the hotel that night. “The British strung her and her husband up and pressed their two boys into service with the Royal Navy. During the expulsion of the Acadians. What they call Cajuns down south, in case you don’t know,” he said in his teacherish way. “They wouldn’t leave and wouldn’t sign the oath. But it’s all so long ago, and a lot of it’s probably changed with the telling and maybe never was true.”

“Never was true?” Mildred had overheard that, and she turned sharply to him. “You don’t know nothin’ of what you’re talkin’ about. You just go up to our graveyard and take a look-see, what this is and where you are now. You want to eat here, you best shut your mouth. For many people on these shores it’s what’s come down in memory from their own blood, and it’s real and it’s true. The Americans down in Louisiana and the people in France that took them in and some in other parts of Canada, they’ll always be our friends.”
That afternoon Hélène had spoken to Claire in London for nearly fifteen minutes. Later she wanted to send a message to David Chandler, but she did not know what that message should be. She had seen him in church and he had smiled and nodded, but after the service, in the confusion of the crowds and the choir, she’d lost sight of him. Someone said something about him having to go home because of the road grit in his yard.

At about seven o’clock Hélène heard someone coming up the stairs, and then there was a thump at the door.

“Your dinner, ma’am,” she heard a voice say, and when she opened the door there stood a girl, maybe fifteen, with red curly hair with snow melting in it, and bright blue eyes and a face full of freckles.

“Sorry to knock with the boot, ma’am,” the girl said. “My hands are full with this tray. Mrs. Yamoussouke sent me. Dinin’ room’s full tonight.”

“Of course. Come in,” said Hélène. “What is your name?”

“It’s Marie-Tatin, ma’am.”

That night, because the weather was all the other way, she could lie in bed for the longest time with the window open to the trees and the ocean, and she could hear the wind in the trees and the waves on the beach below. Eventually she rose and lowered the window to just a crack and went back to bed. She thought of Pierre and her mother and father and of Juliette, hoping that thinking of them might seed the night and that dreams of them would come.

ON MONDAY FROM EIGHT
o’clock on she answered the lawyer’s questions. She watched him taking notes and she listened to his reminders about consistency and the power of detail in a testimony. At nine Mrs. Doren came to fetch her. She put on her coat and hat and the new boots and then walked downstairs ahead of Mrs. Doren to the police car. It was standing in the road with smoke rising from the exhaust into cold air. The sky had cleared and there was almost a foot of snow everywhere, except in the road where the plow had gone through. It all looked so beautiful, so free and wide open. It was so easy to breathe.

“The rear door, Mrs. Giroux,” said the matron. “Watch your step there. It’s a bit slick.”

“I will. Thank you, Mrs. Doren.”

They drove to the co-operative market hall and there were cars parked all along the road. Mrs. Doren took her into a side room, where they sat down on upended vegetable crates and waited. They could hear the shuffling of
many feet and a man’s voice saying “Silence!” And then that voice kept talking. “That’ll be the judge,” said Mrs. Doren. “He’s briefin’ the defence and the prosecutor and the jury. It won’t be long now.”

They listened to the judge for some time, and then there was a pause. They heard him say, “Clerk, bring in the accused.”

Mrs. Doren stood up from the crate. “You need to take off your hat now, Mrs. Giroux. And be ready to come with me. I need to be holdin’ you by your left elbow.”

The door opened, and a man in a black suit and a small white wig looked in.

The market hall was filled with people. At the end where she entered, there was a roped-off area where they’d built a riser for the judge’s desk and chair, and on the bricked ground before the riser they’d put more chairs and desks for the scribe and the jury and the lawyers. On the wall behind the judge, a large Union Jack was pinned to the barnwood next to a Red Ensign, and to the near side of the flags were blackboards with the price of produce still chalked on them from the fall. One board said
TOMATOES
7¢
/LB
and another
NO DUCKS/CANARDS TODAY
.

The jury sat in a row of captain’s chairs at a right angle to the judge’s desk; a few yards in front and below the judge’s desk sat Mr. Quormby at a smaller desk, and not far away at another desk sat a woman with a pale face and
black eyes and thin lips. She wore a loose black gown with a white collar, and she sat leaning back casually into her chair. A small white courtroom wig was pinned to her black hair. Probably the assistant Crown attorney.

Behind them in the first row after the rope Hélène saw two Movietones on wooden tripods, and photographers stood clutching their cameras. Everyone was staring at her, and into the absolute silence when the matron made her stand still for a moment, a bright light came on and the Movietones started to grind and click. Flashbulbs exploded by the dozen with a ragged sound.

“Matron,” said the judge. And then louder: “
Matron, over here!
Have her stand next to that chair there by her attorney, and you take your position over there against the wall. And that light, someone turn it off or move it. It’s in my eyes.” He pounded his gavel. “Clerk. Tell them to move that light.”

The man in the black suit walked up to the rope.

Mr. Quormby looked different, with a small wig on too. He stood up and leaned close and murmured something that she did not hear because she was taken aback by the assistant Crown’s hostile expression and her unblinking black eyes.

The clerk came back and said something to the judge, and the judge frowned and then he hammered the gavel three times down on the wooden plate.

When all was silent the judge read the charge, which was first-degree murder, and he asked her how she pled.

“Not guilty,” she said, and the clerk came up and whispered to her to address the judge with
Your Honour
, and she nodded and said, “Not guilty, Your Honour.”

The clerk moved her chair to a spot marked with an
X
in chalk on the brick floor, not directly in front of the judge’s riser but to the side a few yards and turned so that she was facing both the judge and the jury. They made her tell the story of how they found the skull, and the assistant Crown hurried her when she took too long with details. The judge had pages in front of him on the desk and he kept referring to them as she spoke, and the assistant Crown kept standing up and asking questions.