A Very Bold Leap (28 page)

The snow had stopped falling, and in the suddenly clear sky he could see the moon, a pale crescent that only slightly alleviated the darkness. Suddenly, Charles gave a start: somewhere ahead of and below him he had heard the feeble buzz of a snowmobile. He listened for a moment, his head turned sideways towards the sound, which seemed to be coming closer. It was the sweetest music he had ever heard in his life.

He began to shout at the top of his lungs, and dashed down the slope at full speed, caution thrown to the wind, dropping his compass, swerving at the last second to avoid crashing into a tree, and finally falling over onto his side with a cry of pain, his foot jammed into a crevice in the earth. Boff rolled a few yards and lay inert in the snow while Charles writhed and groaned. After a moment, the dog slowly rose and dragged himself over to his master. With a valiant effort, Charles managed to stand up and then tried to free his boot from the earth’s hold, but without success. He sat back down with his knees pulled up and wiped the snow from his foot with his gloved hand; his heel was caught in the vice-like grip of an exposed root that had risen up out of the ground like the jaws of a trap. The more his heel swelled, the tighter he was held. He pulled again on his foot. Pain shot up his leg and encircled his heart. He would have to cut the damned root or die where he was. But he had neither axe nor knife.

He began to cry, overwhelmed by his predicament. Fate seemed to have decided that this excursion of his would be fatal, and that both he and his dog would die out here in the woods — where help seemed so close at hand!

He heard a moaning sound and turned his head. Boff was staring at him, standing on trembling legs, his breath coming in greater and greater gasps, and Charles could discern such distress in the dog’s eyes, such helpless compassion, that it made him cry all the harder. From time to time he would hold his breath and listen, but he could no longer hear the snowmobile. They were well and truly done for. There was nothing he could do now but lean back against a tree, with his dog on his lap, and wait for death as calmly as possible, like the heroes in Jack London’s novels. The cold would slowly numb his pain, making it bearable.

He thought of Céline, of Lucie and Fernand, the three beings who were dearest to him, and he tried to imagine their reaction to the news of his death. Then he wondered how Steve and Blonblon would take it. Would Steve cry at his funeral? Blonblon was so sensitive, he had no doubt about him. And what about Céline? After a long period of mourning, whom would she find eventually? Would she gradually forget him? Probably. Forgetfulness consumes everything, despite all our fancy phrases, all our photo albums and our granite monuments.

All at once he was seized by a renewed bout of fear, a horrible blade that sliced through his entrails and made him squirm and strain like a condemned man in an electric chair. He strained with all his might on his left leg, trying to free his right foot, and kept at it until he collapsed with exhaustion. There was nothing he could do. He was caught like a rat.

Boff gave a short bark. Charles looked at him wild-eyed, in such a state of confusion that he felt he’d been plunged into a nightmare, then he leaned back again against the tree.

And then suddenly everything became clear in his mind.

“That’s it, Boff!” he shouted, grabbing the dog. “Chew on the root! Chew it! Chew it up into a thousand pieces! Try not to get my foot, though! That’s it, boy!”

The dog threw himself into the task in a fit of rage. Where had he found the strength? Bits of wood flew everywhere. Charles laughed nervously, patted Boff’s back, and started crying again.

Within minutes his foot was free of its trap and he was able to stand up, albeit painfully He had to stop Boff from continuing his destructive attack, so invaded was the dog by his incredibly youthful ardour. Charles thought that if he could find a broken branch to use as a crutch, he might be able to walk, but there would be no question of his being able to carry the dog. He saw a suitable branch a few feet away, half-buried in snow, and he crawled towards it on his knees. The violent effort of breaking it from its tree made him turn his head slightly to the left, and he let out a cry.

A ray of moonlight was falling on some kind of metallic surface, somewhat downhill from him. He could see it glimmering between the trunks of the trees. The metallic surface was a roof! There was a house immediately below, perhaps people as well! He was saved.

“Come on, Boff! Let’s go, let’s go get warm! Hell’s bells, hell’s bells, but do I feel good! Oh, boy!”

Ten minutes later they were standing before a small cabin with an aluminum roof and walls of large, round logs, greyed by time. But there was no sign of anyone, either within the cabin or anywhere outside it.

“Anyone there?” Charles shouted, stumbling up onto the small, snow-covered porch that apparently hadn’t been cleared since the beginning of the season.

He turned around. “Come on, Boff! Get up here. Our ordeal is over!”

The dog moved so slowly that Charles went down to pick him up, worried. Saving his master seemed to have used up his final reserves of strength.

“Listen, boy. Don’t give up now, just when we’re out of danger. Ten more minutes and we’ll be as warm as toast! Let’s go inside, boy!”

He painfully climbed the steps onto the porch, shook the door, then, with his fist, broke through a square of glass and unlocked it from the inside. Boff waited at the bottom of the stairs. Charles had to drag him by the collar to get him into the cabin.

Once inside he felt surrounded by a delicious warmth, but realized it was only from the absence of wind. After a few minutes the contrast with the outside disappeared, and the sense of well-being was replaced by one of damp cold.

“Damn, they’ve shut off the electricity,” he muttered after trying a few switches.

He was standing in a small, modestly equipped kitchen. The sight of a wood-burning cookstove, decorated by ceramic squares in the ancient style, was comforting. He limped through each of the three rooms that constituted the cabin, and found some candles in one cupboard and a box of matches in a breadbox, and a pile of split cordwood in a shed attached to the back wall. Fifteen minutes later he had a fire raging in the stove, two candles were burning on the kitchen table, stuck in beer bottles, and he had repaired the broken window with a square of cardboard. The refrigerator was as empty as a moneylender’s heart, but Charles discovered a large bag of peanuts in the shell at the back of a closet, already partly eaten by mice, which nonetheless made a delicious meal. He still had some dogfood in his backpack, and he gave that to Boff, who refused to eat it. Boff was still shivering violently,
curled up in a corner and lying still and miserable, his breath coming in sharp whistles. Charles became more and more concerned, and wrapped him in a woollen blanket, lifted him onto the table, and dragged the table closer to the stove.

But the poor dog continued to shiver.

When the cabin was completely warmed up and three flies had awakened from their dormancy by this inexplicable summer and were flying from room to room in the grip of a strange confusion, Charles took off his clothes and crawled into a sleeping bag with his dog. Despite the pain shooting from his ankle, he fell asleep holding Boff in his arms, as he had once held Simon the Polar Bear when he was a small boy.

When he awoke early the next morning, the cabin was cold again. Boff, pressed against his chest, was looking at him with an attentive and, one would think, benevolent eye. But he was no longer breathing.

C
harles was obliged to remain in Montreal for two weeks while his sprained ankle healed, a process that was complicated by several badly torn ligaments. His period of convalescence cast a shadow over the Christmas holidays at the Fafard household, where Fernand insisted he stay until his ankle was better. Father Raphaël, kept informed every two days of Charles’s progress, telephoned the house himself after a week to find out how his young charge was faring. His voice was a model of compassion and understanding, which Charles found both surprising and curiously touching.

The preacher told him to take all the time he needed to get well. His job would be waiting for him whenever he was ready. Charles had undergone a tough trial. Who wouldn’t need time to recover? Tough trials were part of the human condition. It was in such times that a man was most in need of the support of his friends. Father Raphaël was there for him, in whatever humble capacity was required. Marc-Edouard and Maxime had told him about the terrible ordeal he had gone through, which had caused the death of his old and faithful dog, a death rendered even crueller by the circumstances in which it had occurred. Father Raphaël was not one of those who shrugged such things off; he completely understood how serious they were. When he himself had been a child, he’d had a dog for a companion for a number of years, and even today the memory of its death wrenched his heart. God put a measure of intelligence and goodness in the souls of animals as well as in humans, and we must respect and cherish all creatures since they came from Him.

The sermon went on for many minutes, and ended up trying Charles’s patience. The preacher’s syrupy tone sounded almost absurd. Was this his “telephone voice”? Or was he speaking from some kind of genuine emotion?

Why was he so concerned about Charles’s well-being? Charles wasn’t his son, he wasn’t even a friend. He was an employee. And an employee who not only shared none of his boss’s ideals, but was hostile to all of them; and Father Raphaël had known that since day one. So what was the big deal?

“I think it might be best if I let you rest for a while,” Father Raphaël said, struck by the lack of response from his interlocutor. “I’ll call you again in a few days.”

“Thank you,” Charles said simply.

He went back to his room and his morose memories. Since his return from the woods, his room was where he was most often to be found, stretched out on his bed, reliving over and over his unfortunate excursion with Boff. He would never forgive himself for having dragged his old friend into the forest in the depths of winter; he berated himself for having neglected to take the flashlight and more matches; he kicked himself a thousand times for his stupidity as an inexperienced woodsman; and he asked himself again and again whether a hot bath when they got back to the cabin would have saved his companion’s life. He saw Boff in his mind’s eye, lying on the table, wrapped in a blanket, shivering in front of the red-hot stove as it crackled and ticked, his supplicating eyes turned towards his master. “What if I had simply taken Boff with me when I first went to work for that old windbag, as I had meant to do all along when I got the job?” he wondered. “Poor old Boff would probably still be with me today.”

Blonblon and Steve came over a few times to cheer him up, secretly astonished that the death of a mere dog would cause anyone such persistent sorrow (a sentiment they didn’t dare mention aloud in Charles’s presence!). But only Céline’s tender ministrations were able to lift Charles from his lethargic state and coax a smile to his lips. Lucie and Fernand were also surprised at the depth of Charles’s grief, and thought that there must have been something else going on — some dark secret somehow related to that itinerant preacher who went around selling eternity wholesale. Finally, one night, unable to remain quiet any longer, Fernand barged into his adopted son’s room and asked him straight out if such were the case.

“Good Lord, Fernand,” Charles replied with a disdainful look on his face. “Where in the world did you come up with that idea?”

Parfait Michaud also showed up one afternoon, at Fernand’s instigation, and tried to reason with Charles. Boff could not have had a more loving and conscientious master, he said, and in any case, he had lived a full life and was about to die anyway.

“Sounds like a funeral oration,” said Charles, laughing nervously.

The notary looked at him a moment, shaking his head sadly.

“Charles, I don’t know if it’s possible to die happy, but I can tell you one thing: Boff died the best death any dog could ever hope for. First he saved your life, then he died by your side, close to the one person in the world he truly loved. I hope that idea will give you no small consolation. There are human beings whose deaths are a good deal more miserable than that!”

Charles looked at him coldly. “No,” he said, “that doesn’t console me very much. The pharmacist I used to work for,” he added, “Lalancette, used to say to me, ‘Other people’s pain doesn’t lessen your own.’”

“Maybe not,” said Parfait, his nostrils becoming slightly pinched, “but sometimes it helps us to accept our own pain, when we compare it to that of someone who is suffering more than we are. But never mind, Charles. I didn’t come here to lay a sermon on you, I came to help make you smile again. I’ve brought you a present. Yes, indeed. I know, I know, but I couldn’t help myself, you see…. With your permission I’ll just skip the formalities and unwrap it myself, because I want to … how shall I say… use it before you do.”

He dug into the pocket of his coat, which he had draped over the back of the sofa, and took out a small package wrapped in paper on which white snowmen frolicked on a red background — leftover Christmas wrapping paper — which he carefully removed. Inside was a book, the dustjacket of which showed an ancient warrior armed with a sword and brandishing a bronze shield.

“It’s Homer’s
Odyssey
, Charles, one of the fundamental texts of our civilization, and a thrilling read, too, once you get used to the idiosyncrasies of the time in which it was written. You haven’t read it already, have you? No, I didn’t think so. Would you mind if I read you a bit from Book XVII? You’re sure?”

“No, go ahead,” said Charles, intrigued, the beginning of a smile forming on his lips.

“This is nearing the end of the story. Ulysses has been away on his adventures for the past twenty years, and has finally returned home to Ithaca, only
incognito, and he has just met the swineherd Eumaeus, who of course doesn’t recognize him.

A few times during his reading, overcome by emotion, the notary had had to stop to compose himself. When he finished, he set the book down on his lap and, for a moment, neither he nor Charles said a word. In the hallway, standing stock still and with bated breath, Céline waited for the conversation to continue.

“So, you see, Charles,” Parfait said after clearing his throat, “even if Argos had a good death, he was a great deal less lucky than Boff. Argos died of happiness after twenty years of living a useless life lying on a manure pile, whereas Boff… well… you know as well as I do … at least…” The notary stood up and held the book out to Charles. “It’s a good read.
The Odyssey
is one of the great books … After three thousand years it still has something to teach us about life.”

Without saying a word, his eyes filled with tears, Charles stood up, put his arms around Parfait Michaud, and hugged him warmly — a gesture that almost made the notary appreciate how Argos must have felt when he was overcome by joy.

Every two days, accompanied by Céline, Charles went to the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital for his physiotherapy treatments. One day, however, he announced that his ankle was sufficiently improved that he could make his way to the hospital on his own.

“This way,” he told her, “you’ll be able to stay at the hardware store and Fernand won’t have to run around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

His appointment was for three o’clock. Forty minutes later, looking somewhat the worse for wear, he threw his crutch into the back seat, slid behind the wheel of his car, and drove out of the hospital parking lot. Instead of returning to Fernand’s house, however, he drove to Villa Frontenac, the restaurant that was famous for its smoked-meat sandwiches, and spent a long time over a cup of coffee and
La Presse
. Then, towards five thirty, he looked at his watch, left the restaurant, and drove to rue Lalonde, not far from the Fafards’;. He’d known the area for most of his life: it was where his old daycare centre had been, in a building that was now owned by a furniture maker. He hadn’t set foot on the property in ages, and saw with satisfaction that the building was empty. The workshop was no doubt closed for the holidays.

Leaning on his crutch, he managed without too much difficulty to open the gate that led into the backyard, and was relieved to see that the old cherry tree was still there, although in a sadly mutilated state. It was the tree beneath which, as a child, he had buried the little yellow dog. He hobbled towards it.