The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea Read online

  The Boy Who

  Belonged to the Sea

  A MOVING STORY OF FRIENDSHIP

  AND THE POWER OF IMAGINATION, FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE PECULIAR LIFE OF A LONELY POSTMAN

  The loss of a parent brought them together. Two boys united by grief.

  Set on the rugged north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, where the wind merges with the forest and the waves, where albatross whirl overhead and snow lies deep on the land, two lonely boys form a powerful friendship. Together they take refuge in a magical undersea world of their own creation, searching for a sense of belonging. But for one of them the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur, and the loyalty of his friend is put to the test in a journey that threatens to end in tragedy.

  Also by Denis Thériault

  The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman

  The Postman’s Fiancée

  To Hélène and Camille.

  If it weren’t for them, I’d be a wanderer.

  1

  During a deep dive, a euphoric state resembling alcohol intoxication may occur. Known as ‘rapture of the deep,’ this phenomenon is due to the narcotic effect of inert gases on the nervous system, brought about by the increase in pressure.

  The gulls emerge from the east and gather in crowded clusters on the crests of all the rooftops to wail in unison. They call and answer one another, provoke each other, they scream like witches at a midnight revel, and since my bedroom is upstairs, in the attic, I can hear them tramping about. It sounds as though a battalion of gnomes were manoeuvring above my head. At the window, I see them lined up on the top of the shed like living bowling pins. Sometimes there are so many you’d think you were in an old movie about crazed birds, but, unlike what goes on in Hollywood, our gulls remain harmless. There’s no risk of their bills suddenly digging into our caps. Even the garbage bin doesn’t interest them. It’s like that every morning. To what, I wonder, do we owe this faithful attendance at first light?

  I have nothing against gulls, but their raucous dawn serenades annoy Grandfather. It wakes him up, while he’s made a tradition out of sleeping late. He’ll come out of the house in his pajamas and try to disperse the web-footed little devils by pelting them with stones, but his aim isn’t very good, so all he manages to do is amplify the chorus of outraged protests — when he doesn’t break a window, that is. If it were up to him, he would slaughter the disagreeable feathered creatures with his Winchester, but Grandmother hides the bullets. She refuses to be part of such a massacre of innocent birds, so we put up with the shrieking until the gulls themselves get sick of it, at about seven, and suddenly fly away all at the same time.

  To tell the truth, this commotion, this early rising, suits me just fine. It drives away the night and its icy mists of fear. It lets me enjoy my May mornings, feast on the special light that fringes the sky at daybreak in the springtime. When the gulls arrive, I go down onto the shore, right up to the cathodic hiss of the languid water. I love to see the sky glow red when a flaming, brand new sun blasts across the horizon, proudly surfacing once again at the end of its sombre journey. This is the time to investigate the previous night’s underwater events and discover the evidence — simple surprises, sometimes dead ones — the tide has surrendered. The other day, in front of Madame Papet’s place, they found a washed-up basking shark the length of a house, with jaws so huge it could have swallowed me whole without even noticing, like plankton. The men scratched their heads at the sight of the enormous carcass. They argued back and forth, wondered what to do with it; they couldn’t leave it there because it was obviously causing an obstruction, and also because of the smell which had already begun to rise. While they started to cut it up with a chain saw, some guys from Fisheries and Oceans turned up to record this wreck on land. They stopped the work and took photographs just like police inspectors. All that was missing was the tape, that yellow thing they put up to decorate a crime. I thought they were going to take our fingerprints while they were at it, but they didn’t after all; we weren’t suspicious enough. After the photographs, the government people sent for a crane and a truck to haul the shark away. I don’t know where to. The morgue? A museum? The dump? More likely to the Department of Oceanic Affairs, I suppose, where they’d put it away in a cartilaginous folder. Or in a very large — previously deodorized — file thirteen.

  I wonder what that shark died of. It had no injuries, wasn’t tangled up in any net. Some shark disease? A maritime problem? A tsunami? An overpowering wave of melancholy? What is the lifespan of a shark, anyway?

  * * *

  In spite of the gulls, I’m never the first one to arrive on the beach. There’s always that other kid who’s ahead of me — Luc Bezeau, with that mug of his that reminds me of a radiation victim from the other side of the world, with his Newfie boots, his gawky clown-like walk, and that cap emblazoned with the crest of a heavy-machinery company, incongruously topping his worrisome scrawniness. He comes from the west, dragging along his garbage bag like a janitor as he combs the shore. He collects the empty bottles from around fires lit the previous night by careless fishermen looking for caplins or by other passing gypsies. In a satchel, he gathers empty shells of shellfish, crab backs, feathers, and bits of whalebone. In the beginning, I took him for some sort of environmentalist, but I changed my mind when I saw him leave in his wake all other types of waste. Rain or shine, he turns up every morning, as if that were his mission, except on Sundays, for he has religious obligations on that day. He serves mass at the village church, and since I go there with Grandmother, I can see him orbiting Father Loiselle, that gaseous giant, like some dusky dwarf. Luc makes a peculiar altar boy. With his heavy boots sticking out beneath the skimpy white vestment, with that air he has of a gag that fell flat, his Hawaiian mop of jet-black hair, and especially that faraway look in his almond eyes — those strange X-ray eyes he aims at you as if to see right through you — you’d think he’d just disembarked from a UFO or stepped out of a dryer, but that doesn’t stop him from performing his functions expertly. He officiates with a pope-like solemnity. Priestly, scratching himself occasionally — but always unobtrusively — he stands close to the altar like a kind of liturgical watchdog and anticipates Father Loiselle’s every gesture. It’s as if he were directing the service by remote control. During the sermon, he stands at attention, his arms protruding from his too-short sleeves, yet he remains vigilant, prepared to jump in, ready to spring into action and, all along, only his fingers will move, wriggle, bend, and unbend. If he were to be dropped down on the main street of Dodge City with a Stetson on his head, he might easily be taken for a crack shot at the crucial moment of a confrontation. The desperado of the beaches. The guy who draws his altar cruet before his shadow has a chance to catch up with him. The fastest jingler in the West. I must admit he impresses me with his shy-sponge-like austerity. That face he has of an explorer of the beyond matches my gloomy mood and arouses my curiosity. If he let me, I would definitely try to befriend him, or at the very least say hello to him on the beach when he comes ambling along at the crack of dawn, but that’s impossible because he’s opposed to such familiarities. As soon as he sees me slouching about near the flagpole or on the verandah gobbling up a chocogrunt, he hurries away without even looking at me. Could he be terribly shy? Or is he perhaps too sensitive to the aura of tragedy that emanates from me? In any case, he gives me a wide berth, the way Ulysses steered clear of certain notorious corners of the Aegean. He still walks by our house because he has no choice, but furtively, without stopping, and always scuttles away, shadowed by a fear I simply can’t understand.

  2

  Papa suffered from snowmobilitis, a common malady abov
e the fiftieth parallel, what with the north pressing down on you and winter somehow or other needing to be tamed. In most cases, the symptoms abate when spring arrives, but with Papa the illness was chronic, chronological even, and incurable. It was a passion that withstood the therapeutic heat of summer — a latent fever, stirred up by strong October winds and set truly ablaze by the blessed first snowfall. Snowmobiling was something Papa couldn’t get enough of. He could have slept on his beloved machine and, come to think of it, he must have dozed off a lot as a baby in that pram they had mounted onto skis and often hitched up to the family Ski-Doo. It was at the handlebars of his snowmobile that he’d broken out into pimples, that at age fifteen he’d won his first professional race on the track at Brûlé, and it was naturally during an Ookpik rally a few years later that he met Mama, a young, fearless Amazon riding a vehicle as powerful as his own. She, too, had grown up on a snowmobile. Clinging to her father’s back like a papoose, she had whizzed along the trails since her earliest days; and when she was five, she’d begun riding her first Ski-Doo at Christmas time, a miniature model that actually worked. Realizing that his life would no longer have any meaning unless it included this exciting Nordic Eve, my future father set about winning her. He pursued her ardently beneath the dense foliage. He courted her with an ambulance driver’s sense of urgency, and my future mother responded favourably to the humming advances of this tall yeti with the appealing smile. It was on a snowmobile that they dated, got engaged, went to their wedding ceremony, then drove away at the head of a roaring torchlight procession. It was on a snow-mobile again that they reached the isolated log cabin deep in the heart of the woods that was to house them during their honeymoon; and it was undoubtedly on the seat of their frisky snow scooter that I was conceived, in a great rustling of hurriedly unzipped nylon.

  After the wedding, my parents decided to settle in the neighbouring town of Villeneuve, the North Shore’s industrious heartbeat, where jobs were up for grabs. This is where I came into the world and reached the one-metre mark. But the old village of Ferland was only a half-hour’s drive away, and we went back there every summer because of the sea and the lingering memory of the primordial amoeba. We returned to it even more often in winter, to enjoy the snow, since Ferland remained a snowmobiler’s paradise; from the backyard, at my maternal grandfolks’ place, you could get to the bush along the corridor created for Hydro-Québec’s pylons, which spell their monotonous hinterland alphabet in giant letters all the way to Nunavik. Every winter weekend then, the ancestral residence at Ferland was a springboard for those wilderness fanatics my dear parents happened to be. But I often let them go off by themselves, for even though I’d inherited Papa’s famous pram-on-skis and they had regularly carted me around in it, I was immune to the hereditary snowmobile virus. Not that I was allergic to the machine — I knew how to compete on occasions in a good race on the snow-covered beach and there were times when it exhilarated me to cleave through the dazzled darkness of a silent northern forest — but unlike my parents, I didn’t make it a reason for living. I quickly had my fill of endless space and disapproved of any kind of racket made in the open air. I was against the premature thawing of tiny furry creatures, against terror being struck into the hearts of nice little squirrels. My personal world had loftier interests, and certain harmless vices, such as reading. To the pristine whiteness of snowy glades, I preferred the less immaculate but, in my eyes, so much more thrilling expanse of the pages of a book. And while my parents were having a ball in Siberia, I would much rather savour some horror story and piping-hot chocogrunts in Grandmother’s bay-windowed living room. This is precisely what I had decided to do on that day, that calamitous Saturday in February when my world crumbled. In a way, one could say that reading saved my life.

  * * *

  It was the kind of day that jolts the mercury into a nose-dive. The stinging north wind howled like a banshee, and that was nothing compared to the blizzard being forecast for the evening, but it would have taken a lot more to intimidate my parents. Those stout-hearted children of Thule weren’t about to give up their exciting weekly cross-country ride on account of such a little thing; it was all they’d been looking forward to the whole week. And after the motor of their Polaris started up without rebelling unduly, they had vanished into the blowing snow. They’d promised to be back at dusk, but the sun travelled across the sky and sank without waiting for them. Our supper congealed on our plates while we took turns at the window, watching out for them to emerge from the snowstorm that had just begun. Finally around eleven o’clock, headlights lit up the yard, but they were those of a police car, and two contrite constables turned up in our frantic living room to stun us with terrible news. A long way off in the darkness, fifty-four kilometers north of Ferland, the QTI train from Pineshish in the Monts de Fer stood still in the eye of the chaos with its two hundred cars of iron ore. And scattered all about the track were the remains of my father and those of his noble machine. They had found Mama an hour later. She had been ejected at the moment of impact and catapulted into a snowdrift well away from the rails. She was frozen when they put her onto the chopper. It wasn’t until they got her to the hospital that they noticed she was still breathing. Her condition was considered critical: fractures, concussion, serious hypothermia. They didn’t know if she would survive.

  They couldn’t quite figure out what had happened. The train had struck my parents while they innocently sped along the railway track. Most likely, they hadn’t heard its horn because of their helmets and hadn’t seen anything because of the blizzard. A lapse in concentration, carelessness, a miscalculation, and other stupid things. The kind of event that should never happen but happens anyway, just to hurt people. A statistical blip. Or rather blatant incompetence, in my opinion, on the part of the Guy in Charge of Special Effects. An illustration of his indifference or even his cruelty. Yoo-hoo, up there on your cloud! Did you enjoy yourself, you celestial psychopath? Did you snicker up your sleeve? But I’m talking nonsense. The cloud is sure to be unoccupied, and in the end God may be nothing more than a mothy myth.

  It was only at the funeral parlour, in front of a closed coffin, that they dared to give me the last and worst detail. My heart was in shreds as I stood by the insidiously gleaming box that concealed my father’s mortal remains, and I rebelled. I couldn’t accept that I wasn’t allowed to gaze at his face one last time. I demanded that they unscrew the lid. Grandfather led me to the adjoining room and explained why that was impossible: Papa’s body had only been partially recovered. Among other anatomical gaps, his head was missing. It had been crushed by a hundred steel wheels. I remember feeling dizzy all of a sudden, and numb with cold although the radiators were boiling hot. The last thing I can recall before I toppled over and everything faded to black, is the quiet music. That blasted cantata gliding through a haze of incense. It was enough to make one loathe Bach for the rest of one’s days.

  Obviously, then, snowmobilitis was a sickness that could be fatal. I’d heard it said that passion was like that — it made people lose their heads. Now I had proof of it.

  3

  Mama at least isn’t dead. She continues to live in spite of that nasty bash on her head from the train, but she lies slumbering in an Arctic more distant than the Pole. Beyond dreams even, say the medics. That’s all they’re able to say, though; Mama is outside the scope of their textbook knowledge.

  Every day, we go and watch her sleep at the hospital in Villeneuve, and I linger by her bed for a long time, bent over her elfin face. Her brow, a virgin snowfield. Mama, Nelligan’s frozen pond. On the screens around her, nothing happens. Mama blinks, Mama twitches, Mama breathes. But the EEG curve remains flat. She’s asleep, moored to our world only by the tube that feeds her. Nothing but liquids, like a plant. Mama is one of those flowers that have been put away in a cupboard, plunged into an artificial winter. Here, at least, there is plenty of light. Her room is on the fourth floor, and through the window you can see the islands floating in
the bay.

  The doctors maintain that she can’t hear anything, but we talk to her just the same. Grandmother chats with her and imagines her replies. As she sits there knitting tons of mittens, she fills her in on the village gossip while I brush her hair. And when Grandmother leaves the room to go and say hello to her friend Armande in the long-term-care ward, I finally have a chance to look after Mama in my own way. I stretch out close to her and rub her cold limbs. She is like a soft statue. To warm her freezing hands better, I slip them underneath my thick sweater against my bare skin. I never cry; I’m too afraid she might hear and be upset. I save my tears for the nighttime.

  They don’t know when she’ll come back to us, or if she’ll ever emerge at all, but I have faith. I know she won’t abandon me.

  * * *

  My grandfolks have prepared a bedroom for me upstairs and, to lessen the anxiety they exude concerning me, I do my best to smile. After Villeneuve, with its supermarkets, its traffic lights, and its port which attracts ore carriers from all over the world like a magnet, I felt funny ending up in Ferland. It’s a place unlike any other, a kind of magical village where anything that happens keeps people’s tongues wagging for a long time. The hamlet has a history that’s more or less my own, since it was my fourth great-grandfather who hit upon the preposterous idea of founding it two hundred years ago. The one and only street bears my name, in fact; it stretches out over ten kilometres and links the three hundred houses that have shot up over the years between Pointe-Rouge and the Gigots. The Uapush River drenches the heart of the village and, at its mouth, set back a little on the headland, stands the red-and-white house where my mother grew up, which is now going to be mine for a while.

  Ferland is the sea. On the map, it’s still only the Gulf, but an exceptionally clear sky is needed for the bluish mirage of the South Shore to loom dimly into view. It’s a crossroads where the elements meet, a natural crucible where the wind merges with the forest and the waves. Ferland swings between silence and howls, the dog-days and absolute zero; it’s a land haunted by gods older than the Guy in Charge of Special Effects, a hideout of imaginary freebooters and woodland giants, a shuddering parable of the world’s creation, an enclave where the storytellers are better than on TV. In winter, the bay is a cryogenic wilderness, a lunar landscape enlivened only by the occasional bold appearance of a federal icebreaker, but, in the end, spring always prevails, and in summer it’s a transplanted bit of Scandinavia, a fawn-coloured sandy beach edged with ammophilous plants, a procession of tufted dunes. Ferland is a starry night, and when a gentle southern breeze caresses the sea so that it glitters like a dark jewel, Ferland is a living mirror, a rippling, eerie expanse of milky moonlight.