And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Read online

  At the top of the list of misfires is Frank Smarz, who didn’t go to Sudbury. He still blames himself for it. ‘If I had gone to Sudbury, I would have put an end to all this before it even got started.’

  Frank Smarz is a man of action. He is not satisfied with assumptions and suppositions. And that is what he won’t forgive himself for. For having deluded himself.

  First misfire, first derailment in a chase that would see its share.

  When they learned that Gladys had gotten off the train in North Bay, they could reasonably conclude that she then took the bus to Sudbury. Because Gladys’s sister Elizabeth lived in Sudbury. Her parents had died long ago, her two brothers were somewhere in Australia or Asia, so the only one left was her youngest sister.

  ‘Think, think, that’s all we did. What’s the point of racking your brains with nothing but air?’

  Air, to Frank Smarz’s way of thinking, is the conversations, the illusions they create, the time wasted getting tangled up in them, and for the first few days of Gladys’s disappearance, everyone convinced themselves that she had just gone on a trip.

  That’s what the sister from Sudbury had told them on the phone. Gladys had slept over at her place and the next morning had taken the train for Chapleau. She had simply decided then, as she sometimes did, to retrace the route of the school train, to go back to the landscape of her childhood. A trip that would take a few days, a week at the most, the sister had said.

  In Swastika they breathed a sigh of relief. They were no longer thinking in terms of a disappearance, but rather a trip, which contained within it the idea of a return. Gladys would come back to them with her joyous smile and would talk about this and that, which would bring back other memories that she would recount again and again. There was no end to the marvellous tales of the life she had lived on the school train.

  Days would pass as they awaited her return, and Frank Smarz would gnash his teeth.

  ‘If I had got in my pickup, if I had driven for four hours, just four hours, I would have been there way before she left for Chapleau, and I would have put a stop to all this.’

  Two years later, I went to Elizabeth Campbell’s. Frank Smarz grumbles whenever I tell him about it. But she didn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know. It is the fact that I did what he never did that ticks him off.

  I had no particular expectations when I knocked on Elizabeth Campbell’s door. I had been warned. Gladys was as talkative as her sister was not. And indeed, when she opened her door to me, I felt I hit a wall of silence.

  The conversation was short, barely an hour. I have never felt the absurdity of my situation more. What was I doing there, five hundred kilometres from home, sitting across from this wordless woman, asking questions to which I already knew the answers?

  I wanted to see her, Elizabeth Campbell, Gladys’s younger sister, whom I had seen only in pictures. I had been told that Elizabeth was a carbon copy of her sister, a younger, less likeable version. But that’s not enough to justify the five hundred kilometres.

  And yet it is. I know that now. They are the kilometres that took me away from my little town and back and that kept me on the move for four years. It is hard to fathom the pull of a small town. When you are born there, when you have your family, your friends, and your habits there and it isn’t enough anymore, it takes more strength than I have to leave. My lack of courage is why I am still in Senneterre, alone, single, and childless, limping from I don’t know how many love affairs. Having always wanted something else without knowing what it was, I had the opportunity to set off in pursuit of a story that kept running off ahead of me and gave me the illusion of movement. I thought I had become a great traveller. I came and I went, always on the move, hundreds of kilometres that maintained the illusion until I found myself back in my bungalow, my old armchair, and the desire to sink into it. The great homebody traveller.

  An old woman had the courage to leave her village one fall morning and, even if only in the form of a younger, less cheerful sister, I wanted to see her. I had no other reason to knock on Elizabeth Campbell’s door.

  She might have had all the features to create a face that looked like Gladys’s. A high forehead, well-defined eyebrows, eyes that appeared to be milky blue but that you had to make out underneath the drooping eyelids, broad cheekbones that opened up her face, all covered with a layer of wrinkles and suffused with a profound melancholy. I was looking at the image of a Gladys who was older, it seemed to me, than the one I was chasing.

  When she walked ahead of me down the hallway to the living room, and I saw her use her hands to help move her stiff legs forward like timbers, I understood the melancholy that emanated from her. She was immobile, a prisoner in this house, alone for too long, and she had lost her taste for others.

  She had succinct, uninteresting answers to my questions about Gladys’s impromptu visit the evening of September 24. Gladys had arrived tired, with a cold, and she had taken the train to Chapleau the next morning. All of which I already knew. The conversation had barely begun, and I had just exhausted it. A heavy discomfort, a keen sense that my presence was unwanted.

  What followed was a strange conversation. Me trying to break the silence with questions about Chapleau, Gladys’s trip, the school train, and her sinking into her thoughts, not paying attention to me, as if I weren’t there. I had hoped to bring her around with memories of the school train, anecdotes. But it was clear that the topic was way inside, deeply buried, and only came out in stray phrases in a long stream uttered with a sigh. ‘The clatter of the rails … large cypress and small larch … the clatter of the rails in the marrow of our bones … large cypress and small larch … in the sharp curve of Metagama … they wait for us … dreams, desires deep in our guts … coming, going, pitching, dancing … slowly … large cypress and small larch wave hello … should we make a wish?… close your eyes … after small larch … after Metagama … your most intimate wish … ’

  She fell asleep in her armchair, legs resting ramrod straight on the cushion on the coffee table, and on her lips, the tiniest trace of an inner smile.

  Back to Frank Smarz. Of all the neighbourhood friends, he was the most useful in reconstructing Gladys’s erratic itinerary. He was also the one who told me about what was happening at Gladys’s house while she was train hopping. He was her next-door neighbour, her go-to man, the one she called when there was a heating or plumbing problem, something major; she wouldn’t have bothered him with a leaky faucet. Frank Smarz knows Gladys’s house as well as he knows his own.

  In fact, this was always how he approached Gladys. ‘Everything okay at home?’ They would talk pipes, windows, heating, but never about Lisana, even though he knew the main problem in that house was Lisana, whom Gladys protected with every fibre of her being against the slightest dirty look, the merest word that might slip out and disrupt the delicate balance at home.

  Frank Smarz never knew the little girl brimming with intelligence or the dreamy teenager. He met Lisana in her mid-thirties when he moved in with Brenda to the house next door. Lisana was already there, having moved back in with her mother a year earlier. She was their age, but had too much life experience, had taken too many nosedives, had too many breathtaking rebounds, and she seemed decades older than them. They had only ever been her mother’s friends.

  The other neighbourhood friends, on the other hand, remember the good years. Gladys and Lisana, blond and laughing, coming home from the school where Gladys taught and Lisana learned. Gladys and Lisana picnicking in the park. Gladys and Lisana in the swing in the backyard. Gladys and Lisana making puppets at the kitchen table. Their laughter and their handiwork were what the neighbours remembered most and what they wanted to share with me. They couldn’t understand how a child so radiant could fade so completely overnight.

  I got to know these people. There was a time when I spent almost every weekend in Swastika. I was won over by the friendship of the neighbours, a scarce, precious resource, which they are aware o
f and tend to. A friendship shared equally, a community friendship – they speak in a single voice. (I see from my notes that after a certain amount of time with them, I no longer bothered to identify who was speaking. It is the choral voice of the neighbourhood friends I have reproduced here. Except in the case of Frank Smarz, to whom I owe the strict accuracy of facts – we spent hours bent over maps and train schedules – and his wife, Brenda, because of the special friendship she thought she had with Gladys.)

  It happened overnight; that’s what they couldn’t fathom. Lisana was studying nursing, a model student, a beautiful young woman, and overnight she foundered, became unrecognizable.

  When Lisana moved back in with her mother, they didn’t understand that either. She needed to settle, to forget about things, Gladys tried to explain. As the weeks, months, and years went by, they grew accustomed to the presence that made the air feel heavy and sucked all the oxygen from the room. ‘If you let her look you deep in the eyes, you won’t have a minute of peace.’ All they could do was escape, and that’s what they did, each in their own way; they turned their backs on her to avoid being unsettled.

  The two women lived together fairly peacefully for twenty years. Gladys had retired and collected more small pleasures around her daughter. Not once was there an ambulance on the hill on Avenue Conroy. People started to believe in the possibility of redemption. She still had her difficult moments, periods of crisis when the neighbours wouldn’t see either of them and would watch from afar, counting the days. They were used to it, just as they were used to the vagaries of the weather, to snowstorms that leave in their wake a heap of scenery to shovel, comment on, size up, telling yourself that, in the end, this one was better or worse, that thank god Gladys had made an appearance again, exhausted, a bit haggard, but out of the house, and there were no more marks on Lisana’s wrists. You can get used to anything, even death lurking, and the neighbourhood friends who maybe secretly hoped for the act that would free Gladys from her burden were clearly no less relieved when the storm had passed.

  Lisana was unconcerned about the dark faces, the way they had of speaking to her distantly, as if she weren’t there and they weren’t there either.

  ‘Disconnected from herself,’ Brenda said.

  ‘Completely shut down,’ her husband would say less delicately.

  When Frank Smarz has to say more than is strictly necessary, he is at a loss. You can sense his exasperation, mired in the words that come and go in his head; he tosses his head in helplessness and then it comes out, brutally, furiously, bearing no resemblance to what he wanted to say.

  The day after Gladys left, many of the neighbours went to knock on her door. Which Lisana cracked open long enough to say, ‘Don’t need anyone,’ closing it immediately, then locking it. She couldn’t stand to see them at her door. Brenda was reduced to watching for the movement of the curtains. Morning and night, she would see them open and close in Lisana’s bedroom. Nothing else moved. For a few days, only Frank Smarz was permitted entry, and then once he was turned away, he had only the phone to ensure there was no irreparable harm happening behind the closed door. Bizarrely, Lisana answered; she didn’t refuse his calls or those of the others who besieged her by phone.

  When he went in the first time, he asked her, ‘Everything okay in the house?’ as a way of reminding Gladys’s daughter he was the go-to man, that he had authority in this house. And she answered, ‘It’s more than I can bear.’

  Frank Smarz thought that it was taking care of the house that was more than she could bear, while Lisana was expressing her complete inability to live. A profound misunderstanding.

  So he went through the rooms to make sure everything was as it should be, relieved to have to check the taps rather than spend any more time with Lisana.

  ‘A power surge’ is how he describes Lisana. ‘She was 25,000 volts, at least.’ A power surge, but contained in cold immobility. When he returned, she hadn’t moved from where he had left her. ‘Everything is all right. You don’t need to worry,’ and he had already opened the door, ready to leave, when he remembered that he had come to give her news about Gladys. ‘Your mother took the bus to Sudbury. She’ll be back soon.’ Lisana didn’t move, didn’t bat an eye, an oracle in the living room.

  He came back in the days that would follow under different pretexts. He would bring her meals that Brenda or another neighbour had prepared. Lisana, with the same intensity, the same immobility, had not a word of thanks for the neighbour, only the words that expressed her inability to live, but that he understood otherwise, and Frank Smarz did his rounds of the house again to see that everything was as it should be, that the meals hadn’t been thrown in the garbage (he checked), and would quickly get away from her.

  ‘What wasn’t right in the house was the silence.’

  It took time for it to dawn on him. While he went from room to room searching for the sound of water running or a draft that would give him cause for concern, he was so relieved to get away from Lisana that he didn’t realize what was actually haunting the house. It was only after having told this story and many others that it occurred to him what was missing in Gladys’s house: the television, the soaps, the noisy game shows, the explosions, and the jingles, the mishmash of sound that assailed you as soon as you went through the door. Because there wasn’t just the television in the living room; there was the radio in the kitchen, the television in Lisana’s bedroom that she would forget to turn off. No matter what time you showed up, the house was shouting, throbbing, yelling from all sides. It was so bad that Frank Smarz came to believe without really believing that Gladys wanted to escape the noise in her house. Without really believing, because who would leave their life behind for such a silly reason?

  Four days went by that way, on hold, waiting, for Gladys to come back ‘with the feeling that we were missing something.’

  On the fourth day, they got a call that gave them hope they could hang on to. Suzan Sheldon, a school train alum and friend of Gladys’s, called from Metagama. The connection wasn’t very good; Frank Smarz could barely pick up a few words, but got enough to understand that Gladys had just left Metagama and that she was on her way to Chapleau. There could be no further doubt; Gladys had heeded the call of nostalgia and was retracing the route of her beloved school train.

  The school train. We have finally arrived. There was not just Gladys’s nostalgia; there was my own fascination. I was struck, utterly, by the school trains, a head-on collision with major damage, a fascination that kept me in a state of alertness around anything to do with them. To the point of sometimes forgetting about Gladys and getting lost down sideroads.

  Gladys was born on a school train, and she lived on one for sixteen wonderful years, the daughter of William Campbell, a travelling teacher who taught her about all the possibility a day holds and the sun that always ends up shining. Gladys had a happy childhood, happier than any child in the world could dream of, a dedicated childhood, a childhood that had meaning and significance, a childhood like no other, and she returned to it every time she was in danger of foundering. To truly know Gladys, you have to know about her childhood, the years of pure happiness when she took in what she needed, not to be later swept away by Lisana’s dark waters. ‘When you have known happiness, it’s impossible to believe that it’s no longer possible.’

  The school trains are no more. Few people know about their existence. What I know comes from the old-timers, former students I met along my own journey. I searched the internet, the libraries, municipal museums (almost every small town in Northern Ontario has one), and I didn’t find much, a few pictures and information riddled with holes. I visited the rail museums in Saint-Constant and Capreol to see a replica of an old school train. I read, cover to cover, The Bell and the Book by Andrew Donald Clement, a travelling teacher who put in twenty-seven years on the school trains. But the former students were the most useful. They told me piles of stories. I will try to record here only what is necessary for understanding
Gladys and her journey. But I don’t make any promises, because my fascination tends to sprawl and could splash onto the pages.

  So here it is.

  From 1926 to 1967, seven school trains cut across Northern Ontario to bring the alphabet, mental math, and the capitals of Europe to children of the forest. Seven school cars, seven schools on wheels, as they were also called. Set up as classrooms (desks, a teacher’s lectern, blackboards, bookshelves, everything to accommodate twelve students and their teacher), the cars were basically mobile schools. A freight train would pull the car over a distance of around twenty kilometres, leave it on a siding, in the middle of the forest, from which emerged a group of children who for a few days would learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and geography, until another train came to pick up the car and take it twenty more kilometres, to where other children awaited it. The mobile school made five, six, or seven stops along a one- or two-hundred-kilometre line and returned a month later to the children at the first stop, who had waited all that time with homework and lessons. The stops corresponded to the tiny villages where trackmen maintained the track and kept trains supplied with water and coal (it was the era of steam locomotives). This was how education was dispensed, a few days at a time, to not only the children of the trackmen, but also to all those who lived in the surrounding forest, the children of prospectors, woodsmen, trappers, Indigenous people, and fire wardens. Wild little children of the forest, most of whom on their first day of school had never opened a book or uttered a word of English, being the sons and daughters of immigrants, Cree, or Ojibwe. Some of them did their ten years of schooling, some pursued their education elsewhere, becoming nurses or engineers, but all of them cherish the memory of that car that brought to them the wonders of a world to discover, both in books and in the train itself. It’s something they still talk about with awe: the linoleum on the floor, the varnished maple panelling, the curtains on the windows, the flush toilet, the battery-powered radio, the oil lamps – it all gleamed with opulence and novelty in the eyes of children of the forest.