October 1970

Louis Hamelin

My name is Marcel Duquet and I am going to die in about five
minutes. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the crows look like
nuns’ veils blown open by the wind, and I like the rumbling sound
the tractor makes, the way it fills my ears as another row of hay falls
before the harvester. I am forty-two years old, I have a round bald
spot on the top of my head, which is so hot I feel like a prisoner
who’s been scalped by Indians and hung by my feet over a bed of
coals until my brain starts boiling. The red scarf tied around my
tonsure is brighter than the paint on the Massey-Ferguson; it must
be a visible splash against the maples and the blue sky when I make
the turn at the bottom of the field.
Now that I’m on the uphill run, I can see him walking toward me
through the cut hay. It’s Coco. And it’s like my heart stops beating.
Then it starts again: thoughts, the saliva in my mouth, the family
of crows. In a way, I already know what he wants. I look around,
nothing but the field bordered by the split-rail fence, the aspens
and pines, the sugar bush, above them the thick blue arc of sky, the
invisible river at the end of the land. And here, Coco Cardinal trudging
across the field, face completely red, glistening with sweat, fat,
hunched over, hands paddling the air, winded.
I get down from the tractor, leaving the motor running, and
walk toward Cardinal, who has stopped a short distance from me.
He’s waiting until I reach him. Squinting into the sun, the light too
harsh. As I close the distance, I wipe rivulets of burning sweat from
my eyelids and forehead. I stop three feet from where he’s standing.
I swallow. I manage a smile.
“Hey, Coco. Been a while . . .”
He shrugs. He’s sweating like a pig, his summer shirt completely
unbuttoned and soaked under the armpits. His upper lip glistens,
as though his lungs were trying to get out through his nose. His antred
eyes want to unglue themselves from his face. Before he opens
his mouth to speak, a black fist grips my insides.
“Well, if it ain’t Marcel. They let you out of prison, eh? I hope
they rammed a broomstick up your ass first.”
He finds this funny. He giggles. I take another look around, the
standing hay is stronger than I am. No one else in sight. My heart
pounds in my chest but I hardly hear it. I can barely move. But, as I
said, I manage to smile.
“I survived, as you see . . .”
He sneezes once, twice, again and again, his face twitching uncontrollably.
Still doing coke, I see. As he sneezes he also seems to
be thinking. I wonder if I should take advantage of it, get the jump
on him, grab him by the throat and finish him off some way or other.
But I let the opportunity pass.
“There’s people say you talk too much. That since you got out you
turned into a real chatterbox . . .”
I try to swallow; nothing. He spits on the ground.
“A goddamned stool pigeon!”
He’s not using his normal voice. I try to gesture in protest, but
my arm feels like it weighs a ton. With him it’s the opposite: he
moves his arm with the lightning speed of a cobra and suddenly
there’s a gun at the end of it. I feel the metal rim against my forehead,
sucking everything out. My brain melts like a block of ice,
useless, nothing else.
“And the other thing, you asshole, is that you stole my wife . . .”
I try to say no, but all I can do is shake my head, not so much
because of the cold metal against my skin, although it’s still there.
Everything happening to me seems very far away, far from my head,
which keeps falling, gently spreading out into the round darkness
that pushes back at me harder and deeper, at the centre of my forehead,
on my skin beaten by the sun. There’s excitement in his heavy,
menacing voice.
“On your knees, Duquet! Now! On your knees in front of me! I’m
not gonna say it again . . .”
I let myself fall and it’s like an act of deliverance, I start to say I’m
sorry, I want to say it, my eyes raised through a valley of tears, to the
muzzle that bores its hole into the silence, this blind full stop in the
field, this pitch of forgotten light, of sun, earth, hot. The standing
hay and the hay cut down by the reaper. Bewilderment.


The skull makes a cracking sound, like a coconut under the tractor’s
rear wheel, followed by a sickening squelch and the grinding of
bones and other pulpy bits. Cardinal puts the engine back in neutral,
his breath coming in great gasps, and, like an idiot, clutches
his legs. A violent spasm has gripped them, thrown them into an
interminable shaking fit. With every limb trembling, he forces his
left foot down on the brake pedal.


When he’s finished, he jumps to the ground and steps away from
the tractor, turns back for a final look feeling almost calm, although
his legs are as rubbery as they are after sex. Now he peers critically
at the composition of his canvas. He closes his eyes, rubs the lids,
opens them again, and takes another look.
He nods. Job well done. Takes a deep breath. Removes a plastic
bag from his shirt pocket and, with a length of straw, knocks
back a noisy snort of its contents. Then he turns his back on the
scene and, for a moment, takes in the panorama of cultivated fields,
woodlots, barns painted shades of red from strawberry to dried
blood, the glinting silos that stretch from where he is standing to
the horizon. Behind him, the tractor is still running. A final glance.
There’s no way he can hang around. He decides to get back to the
side road via the neighbouring field by following a line of elms and
hawthorns and wild apples that can’t be seen from the main road.
He reaches the cedar fence, climbs it, balances precariously on the
knotty top rail, which is the colour of Appalachian granite sculpted
by a century of weather, and remembers an expression, rib fence,
what split-rail fences are called in the Baie-des-Chaleurs region.
Maritime language.

And Coco loves boats.

From OCTOBER 1970 by Louis Hamelin, translated by Wayne Grady. Copyright © 2010 Éditions du Boréal. English translation copyright © 2013 Wayne Grady. Excerpt reproduced with the permission of House of Anansi Press. www.houseofanansi.com. All rights reserved.