She looked out of the single sash window beside her bed. “I do not know.”
“But you must at least remember staying behind with your father? Watching the rest of us leave? Chantal, Pierre, John-Joe?”
At the mention of John-Joe’s name, she glanced up at me, then returned her gaze to the window.
“Something about John-Joe? What do you remember?”
“Nothing. Rien.” Her eyes remained fixed on whatever she was watching outside. I moved over to the window and looked out onto the barnyard. Her brother was picking his way through the slush towards the house. I turned back to Yvette. She watched me intently, then said more as a statement than a question, “You save my life.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I doubt you would have survived the night.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sore,” she replied with her shy smile. “My head is sick. It is difficult to respire, non, I mean, breathe.”
“You had quite a fall. I’m surprised you didn’t do more damage.”
She lay so still then in her virginal bed, with her eyes closed, that I thought she’d gone to sleep. I started to leave. But at the sound of my tiptoes on the white-painted floor, she opened her eyes.
“It is nice you are my friend. It is first time I have one.”
Such loneliness made me want to reach out and hug her close to me, but I squeezed her hand instead. “And I want you to know that if you ever need any help, you can come to me, okay?”
“I’m sorry. It is my fault my father angry at you.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”
“I am not good.” She picked at a loose thread on her quilt. “I told you Papa said I can help you make the ski trail. It is not true. When I ask, he say no. I come anyway. I want to be with…” She raised her eyes briefly, then dropped them back down. “With you,” she finished, which made me wonder if someone else hadn’t been the attraction.
So Eric had been right. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure things will work out.”
And with this opening of the door to friendship, I continued, “While we were waiting for help, you talked about someone hurting you. Then you mentioned your father.”
I stopped there, not wanting to make the direct link. I’d leave it up to her to decide where it went from this point.
For an eye blink, I thought I saw a flash of recognition, but she immediately responded, “I do not understand.”
The door to her room abruptly opened, and her brother stepped in.
Yves remained standing at the open door, his brown eyes fixed on the mirror of his sister’s brown eyes. No words passed between brother and sister. I shuffled my feet, feeling embarrassed, but not knowing why. Then he said to me, “Enough. You must go.”
I turned to Yvette and, patting her gently on the hand, promised to return in a couple of days. Then I followed Yves out of the room, down the dark hall with its closed doors, down the narrow stairs to the front hall, where I gave the entertainment centre and priceless antiques one last glance.
As I stepped out the front door, I asked my question again, “Yves, you didn’t tell me where you worked?”
“No, I didn’t,” he replied, closing the door as his final answer.
I felt my blood rise at his rudeness, then realized there was no point in getting angry. The son might have a refined veneer, but underneath he was just as boorish as his father.
six
For the next couple of days I watched winter’s first big blizzard bury my twenty thousand dollar investment under fifty centimetres of snow, while I tried not to think about Eric’s princess. I figured it was safer to pour out my anger on something more tangible, like money. Love was too risky. Besides, I feared that if I confronted him about the woman, he might leave me out of his equation altogether. So I sat and stewed while Champlain’s granite nose vanished under a sheet of white.
Although such a dump of snow so early in the season would help to establish the base needed for the February timeframe of the ski marathon, it put an end to any further trail work that could be done by my depleted crew and the four other volunteer crews.
Eric would need to pay out big money, money he didn’t have, to bring in the professionals with their high-powered snowmobiles and log clearing equipment. Since the whole point of the venture was to make money for the Migiskan Band, he’d wanted to avoid this big cost by using band members and other volunteers, like my work crew. Now, with this unplanned expense added to the already incurred cost overrun for marketing, he would have difficulties breaking even. This would not only play havoc with band finances, but would also leave me with little to show other than a sore back and a depleted bank account.
At least he wasn’t quite ready to kiss all our money goodbye. After several brief phone calls over the past couple of days, during which neither of us referred to his surprise visitor nor discussed getting together, we agreed to survey the entire 65K course via snowmobile to determine the amount of remaining work. With the blizzard now finally over, we planned to set out at the crack of dawn the next morning. In the meantime, the other crew leaders and I would meet with him this afternoon at the Fishing Camp to review all possible options for completing the marathon course.
As I sipped my morning coffee at the kitchen table, I watched a small black-headed chickadee flit onto a perch of the bird feeder hanging from the roof of the back porch. He grabbed a seed from the plastic column filled with black sunflower seeds and flitted out again to be replaced by another. Three others waited their turn on the porch railing.
Suddenly they dispersed as a fury of blue and white feathers and loud squawks zoomed down onto the feeder, immediately joined by two other large blue jays. I watched with alarm as one terrified chickadee flew into the kitchen window with a dull thud and fell to the wooden floor. I rushed outside, fearful it had broken its neck. But the small grey ball of feathers roosted securely on it feet, its head moving slightly from side to side, blinking. It was alive.
Feeling it was best to let nature take its course, I left it alone and retreated inside, where I watched over its recovery. After about twenty minutes of almost no movement, it suddenly stretched its head, fluffed its feathers, and without so much as a cheep, lifted its wings and was gone. The only residue of this near tragedy was a tiny feather stuck to the window where the bird had struck.
I supposed if Eric had been watching by my side, he’d say that the Creator, kije manidu, had sent us a message. But not having the wisdom of Eric’s Anishinabeg ancestors to call upon, the only message that sprang to my mind was that the weak and the small would prevail despite what the large and the mighty dished out to them.
My thoughts turned to Yvette. Fragile she might look, but in the four days since her accident, she seemed to be showing a lot of resilience. When I’d visited her the day before, she’d appeared to be making a quick recovery. Despite her father’s restraining presence, she’d ventured downstairs to see me, served
