with the guys...”
“When she’s able...”
“Lots of bars in Sans-Terre...”
“Bars filled with miners...”
“Miners?”
“Yeah, ‘cause of the mines.... Gold, copper...”
“Lots of fights in Sans-Terre bars....”
“She sleeps with miners...”
They left. Barely had the door closed, when I gave a violent start: the Old Mans inquisitive head was perched over the cash register.
“That’s how they are,” he began in a spiteful tone. “They don’t know the value of money! You could tell them a hundred times and it wouldn’t change a thing.... Moreover, it means profit for us,” he said, ending on an angelic note.
I understood he was referring to the tinned coffee.
He watched the two young people walk away.
“I overheard what you were saying.... Indians never forget an incident like that”
“What incident?”
He smacked his tongue, then continued, “The hotel incident! The young Boisvert fellas a dead man if he comes back here! A goner! Hell never set foot in Grande-Ourse again! Barred for life!”
He looked at me, speaking in a low voice.
“Eleven bullets! Eleven bullets in the back. I personally placed my fingers in the holes, young fella. I picked up the pieces...”
The Old Man said he’d been warned that night by the Muppet, who was taking a bath at his place to sober up, and who’d just picked up a whistling bullet in his water.
“A bath!” the Old Man exclaimed, staring at me. “At that hour, what a ridiculous idea!”
Night was about to fall over Grande-Ourse. In the congealing of the setting sun, through the fly specks, the low building could be seen, spanning its sinister mass of planks along the lake shore.
“Damned Boisvert!” whistled the Old Man between his teeth.
He scraped the dust with the tip of his shoe.
“What saved us the morning of the funeral is that everyone was there. Everyone! Whites and Indians! Spared us a civil war, that’s for sure! Seeing everyone at the church impressed the Indians....”
“Even Boisvert?”
He shook his head, chin in the air.
“No sir! Naturally.... The police had already taken the son away.... As a principal witness. As for the father, no one saw him for a long time.”
“Was he found guilty? The son, I mean....”
“Two years less a day in jail for the murder of a man, pal. It also didn’t hurt that he was a minor, obviously....”
“What about the father?”
The Old Man shook his filthy mop of hair. A fine halo emanated from it, which a nearly horizontal sunray coloured purple. He remained quiet, but finally admitted reluctantly, “He was cleared. It seems he was away the night it happened...”
I coughed slightly. “What happened to the young fella?”
Big Ben quietly crossed the room.
“Oh Ummm Don’t know Uh Hmmm. No one around here knows, no one.”
“And then,” the Old Man went on, “everything started happening to Jacques Boisvert. His wife drowned on a fishing trip that very summer.... And he raised a lot of eyebrows, afterwards, when he started hanging around with Giséle,...”
“Where does this Jacques Boisvert live now?”
I got the feeling the Old Man was peering deep into my soul
“Don’t be in too great a hurry, son.... You’ll see him soon enough, as well....”
The general store could no longer count on a watch-dog worthy of the name. His decline accelerated as a result of his spending the whole night tangled in his chain tied to a creaking clothesline sliding over the small yard. He’d bark at anything, at the least stroller who was already at the other end of the village. The tiniest quarter moon was now enough to prompt his wailings. In the morning he’d be found totally crestfallen, twisted in the inextricable tangle of his tether. He became the principal disturbance of the nights he was supposed to guard. The Old Man referred to his rifle, the dump. Benoît suggested we wait.
The Old Man acquired a kitten from the gutter to thwart a tiny group of mice that had the nasty habit of using spoons as lavatories. The newcomer displayed a great aptitude and his progress was so rapid that he soon appeared to be aiming for nothing less than the position of guardian-in-chief. To sharpen his skills, the Old Man took charge of imparting him with the light paranoia he believed essential to the task. As soon as the entrance door opened, letting in a customer, the kitten would steal towards it, rivetted to the floor, hypnotized by the luminous horizon. But the Old man quickly ascertained the intractable element, tearing off after him, arms swinging and legs wobbling, with a resounding, “Get back in there, you little Hérode!”1
All the hair on his back was raised, as the feline escaped to the kitchen where he fully expected to beg for more accessible consolations. He got his name from these repeated scoldings: Hérode. More than anyone or anything, he’d run into the cruel paradox that underpinned the administration of his masters: being surrounded by infinite space all round, but settling for cultivating a siege mentality in the dark, like a precious endive. Despite the traumatizing aspects of the experience, Hérode forged himself a vigorous attitude and never completely succumbed to the culture of living inside a shell, prime examples of which were to be found in the Outfitters’ general store: narrow-mindedness set up as a fortress; continence sublimated by a snarl at the whole world. Hérode was young and vigilant; he rapidly crossed, if not the entrance door, then the boundary between innocent games and real life, where wounds bleed, and suffering reigns. Endowed with a sandfly’s ferocity, but incomparably better equipped, he knew how to dig into your back with one paw. He got into the habit of lurking under a shelf, near the counter, nestled defiantly between large bags of dog food. When a customer moved along the rows of canned food, Hérode would pounce on his legs with a tiny cry of enthusiastic resolve. He’d bite away, making no distinction between hairy pillars and varicosed columns. More than one tall character would fall flat, forehead against the ground, and more than one mushy skinned creature nearly fainted while our friend sharpened his claws on calves marbled like blue cheese. If a customer made the mistake of sticking a blind forearm into the shadows beneath the lower shelf, resolved to grab a bag of dog food, he’d immediately pull it out covered with a strange fur implant. He’d created a kind of de facto blockade around the central supply source for the village dogs.
The Old Man was beginning to worry. He clearly distinguished between protecting the Outfitters’ assets and indiscriminately taking it out on all customers. But he also had to repress a smile
