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  ILE D’OR

  ALSO BY MARY LOU DICKINSON

  One Day It Happens

  a novel by

  Mary Lou Dickinson

  INANNA Publications and Education Inc.

  Toronto, Canada

  Copyright © 2010 Mary Lou Dickinson

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council

  for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  We are also grateful for the support received

  from an Anonymous Fund at The Calgary Foundation.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  Interior design: Luciana Ricciutelli

  eBook Development: Wild Element www.WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dickinson, Mary Lou, 1937-

  Ile d’Or : a novel / by Mary Lou Dickinson.

  (Inanna poetry and fiction series)

  ISBN 978-1-926708-13-3

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8607.I346I54 2010 C813’.6 C2010-902244-0

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.yorku.ca/inanna

  In memory of Beryl and Geoff — and a childhood on the frontier.

  This is a work of fiction. My family and friends will nonetheless recognize from whence some rivers spring.

  Je me souviens

  Quebec automobile license plate

  *

  “There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold…”

  —Robert W. Service

  Prologue

  THE LAST GOLD rush in Canada occurred in the Abitibi region of Quebec. By the 1940s, there were rugged mining camps scattered through the area where prospectors had staked their claims. Flying overhead at night in a small bush plane, a pilot would see lights like diamonds sprinkled in the bush.

  One of these villages was called Bourlamaque, after a general in Montcalm’s army. It was connected to a larger town, Ile d’Or, which was the commercial centre. No markers told when you left one and entered the other, but the residents near the shaft in Bourlamaque were glad to live in the log cabins that were built for the miners with Anglo money.

  In the 1980s, word was that the one operating mine left in town was soon to close, that the gold was too expensive to mine, that there wasn’t enough of it any more. For a while, there was rumour of a buyer. The people of the town were worried. Some were anxious that dust and noise and the sight of an open pit would be too much for them. But there were even more who wanted the changes because of jobs the mine would continue to provide.

  1.

  MICHELLE DUFRESNE WAS standing near her father’s grave in the cemetery on the outskirts of Ile d’Or when a man with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder walked between the tombstones toward her. She hadn’t seen him in town before, so she was startled when he waved at her.

  “Hi, Michelle,” he said.

  It was then she noticed that his face was somewhat familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you? I’m Nick,” he said. “Nick Petranovich. Remember those dances at the Rialto when we were teenagers?”

  Her face went white. Nick Petranovich was older than she was and she’d had a crush on him. It had surprised her when he’d asked her to dance and talked to her as if she were his age. But she wouldn’t have thought he’d remember that. And she hadn’t seen him since he went away to university in the 1950s. She’d heard he’d become a doctor, had a family, divorced and — she’d read his obituary just over a year earlier.

  “But, but,” she stammered.

  She’d thought that he would have been in his late forties by the time of the untimely news. She didn’t know if he’d been in an accident of some kind or if he’d had a heart attack. Or maybe it was cancer. The death notice didn’t specify and among the charities named for donations, none were ones that suggested anything. She backed away slightly to look at him more closely.

  “The obituary in The Northern Miner,” he said, brushing his hair back with his free hand. “Yes, I can see you might be startled.” He smiled.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Well, the newspaper got it wrong. Can you imagine how that felt? I had to write and tell them I wasn’t dead.”

  Michelle kept staring at him as if unsure what to believe. He was blonde in his youth and now his hair was almost white, but still thick and unruly. There were lines around the edges of his eyes and mouth and his face was thinner than she remembered. The same dark eyes, always intense. It surprised her that after all these years he still wore the same style eyeglasses. The black frames that had made him look so studious in high school might be a slightly different shape now, but that was all.

  “You’re quite handsome for a dead man,” she said finally, recalling a quirky rhythm to their youthful banter. “How could that have happened anyway?”

  He laughed. “Oh, you know, a lot of people left here to go to school or university or some job and never came back. It’s easy enough for someone to wonder what a person they once knew is doing now and before you know it, a distorted story gets reported as factual. They hadn’t checked it out.”

  Michelle nodded, noticing that he was studying her speculatively.

  “You look great,” he said.

  Her outfit was one she had bought in Montreal for a customer and then decided to keep for herself. A striped blue wool poncho over a vibrant purple pantsuit. She was aware the colours enhanced the dark hair that still fell to her shoulders, the green flecks in her wide, hazel eyes. Even with the poncho covering her long, slender waistline, she could see he noticed something about her appearance that perhaps surprised him. The memory of a teenager he once knew who was now a woman?

  “What are you doing here anyway?” he asked. “I thought you left just after high school. I didn’t think people came back once they left.”

  “There were reasons,” she said, a frown crossing her face. “I did come back and I live here now.” Her hands trembled slightly as she realized she did not want to reveal too much to someone she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. “What about you?”

  “Well, I didn’t come for the hot springs,” he grinned.

  As if there’d ever been a spa. You might come for the hunting and fishing, for the skiing or the curling, for the opportunity to go underground in one of the old mines that was no longer in operation. But he’d managed to make her smile again.

  “My parents are buried here,” he said. “There’s a stone on the other side of the highway.” He pointed off into the distance. “I had to come and look,” he said, then added quietly, “I’m not sure why, maybe to know about myself.”

  That wasn’t what she thought about when she came out to visit her family’s graves, something she did more often of late. She needed to feel connected. To tell her mother or her father stories and to listen to the wind whisper through the trees as if they were answering her questions. It was awkward that they were buried on opposite sides of the road.

  “Did you fly in?” Michelle asked.

  “I drove,” he said. “The roads are good now. It gave me a chance to stop in Haileybury where I practiced briefly when I finished my internship. My car is parked just outside the entrance to the cemetery. Yours must be the Chevy.”

  She nodded.

  “So what do you do here?” Nick asked.

  “I own the dress shop down beside the theatre on the main street. Chic Choc.”

  “I bet that’s a thriving business.”

  “It does all right,” she said coldly. Was he mocking her? She’d loved to dress up as a child, and as a teenager had started sewing, but he probably never knew that. “I like helping people choose what suits them.” And they liked her sense of colour.

  “Didn’t you inherit The Flamingo?” he asked, his eyes seeking an apology for any unintended slight.

  Her father had opened The Flamingo in the early days of the town. His first job had been as a dishwasher at the mine cookery. Then he worked underground. They said he got the money for the club from high-grade, so named for the quality of the ore. Some men smuggled high-grade up in their black lunch buckets, but to manage enough of it to open a nightclub? He was never apprehended for anything. It had always been a mystery to her how her father had come up with enough money to open the club. She knew clearly now that it was these suspicions around her father that had caused some children to stop speaking with her then. Even though she hadn’t seen Libby Muir, the mine engineer’s daughter, since they were both teenagers, it still hurt that Libby had been one of them.

  Well, too bad! she thought. The mine never promoted any French man above foreman in those days. He
r father was damned if he was going to put up with that. He built a nightclub where everyone could gather. And it was a popular place.

  “My mother inherited it,” Michelle said. “But I guess it wasn’t a business for a genteel Englishwoman. She sold it.”

  “I think your mother adapted to the north, Michelle,” Nick said, as if he knew her mother well. But he would have. They’d all known each other well in the small town Ile d’Or was then.

  “You mean the way she wielded a gun during hunting season?” Michelle asked. “She hunted partridge, you know.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the hunting, but yeah, that, too. I just meant that she always seemed comfortable out there on the curling rink, skiing on the trails, shopping in the general store. She was friendly to me, you know. The little Ukrainian kid with the accent.”

  Michelle laughed. “She had an accent, too.” That very British inflection she’d retained. “Not one that would have been very popular up here in those days with either the French or the English.”

  He glanced away, and then took another tack. “Do you have children?” he asked.

  “They’re grown up now. They’ve moved away, like we did. Elise is married and lives in Montreal. I don’t hear from Dawn very often. I don’t know where she is right now. Maybe in Toronto.” She paused, embarrassed to have said that much. Toronto was Dawn’s last address after the ones in London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg. When on the Greek islands, she’d left no address. The other ones had turned up unexpectedly on a letter asking for money, on a postcard saying she was fine. Once she described the snow falling outside a window somewhere in France and wrote that it reminded her of her childhood.

  “I’ll be a grandmother very soon,” Michelle added. “In January. When Elise has her first baby.”

  “Young grandmother,” he said.

  She changed the subject quickly. “Where do you live now?” she asked.

  “My practice is in Toronto,” he said. “But, for now, I will be living out of this duffel bag. It’s time for reflection. I can tell you, a busy practice in psychiatry doesn’t grant you that. And often it doesn’t give you the satisfaction that you’re doing anything useful either. Oh, I see some of my patients getting better, but I’m tired. I think maybe I’d like to be a hunter like your mother, but I’d go after big game.”

  “Are you going to shoot elephants for their ivory tusks?” she asked, surprised at the way she had fallen in so easily with his teasing. “I don’t know if that type of hunting is allowed any more.”

  “Well, it probably isn’t. But it doesn’t mean I can’t fantasize.”

  “I suppose if you’re a psychiatrist, you’d know more about that than the average person.”

  “I might know more about it in general,” he mused. “But now I’m looking at what pops up for me in particular.” As he stepped back and shifted the weight of his bag, any hint of a smile had left his face.

  The graves extended for a few neatly laid out rows with lines of trees between them. A few plants and the grass were well tended. In the other cemetery on the opposite side of the road, the Protestant one where her mother was buried, weeds and grass had been allowed to grow wild. Michelle tried to keep her mother’s grave neat, but she couldn’t take care of the entire surrounding area. She always felt there was something more she could have done to spruce it up, but she never quite managed the perfection she envisaged.

  Nick’s expression softened as he watched her. “It’s good to see you. Would you have time for dinner while I’m here?” he asked.

  “I’ll make time,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound too eager. “How long are you staying?”

  Nick shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “For as long as it takes, I guess.”

  2.

  NICK CLIMBED UP the side of a rock that was covered in moss and pine needles to peer out across the trees toward the mine in the distance. Earlier there would have been Mayflowers growing in the crevices and, after that, blueberries. Soon everything would be covered with unfathomable depths of snow. It was in rocks like these, deep inside the earth’s crust, that veins of precious metals had been found by early prospectors and later dug and blasted out by underground miners like his father. Had it not been for the gold, the town would never have existed. Nor would there have been children who found this particular rock at the side of the road across from the company houses. He recalled coming here to hide, thinking it was his rock, only to discover an empty Coca Cola bottle and a package of matches, indicating someone else had discovered his secret spot.

  The head frame of the mine, holding the cables for the cage that went underground, stood out above the trees and Nick could see it clearly. He also heard the throbbing sound that came from the mill. This was often where he had waited to see his father come across the path from the mine. Roman Petranovich came up from underground, covered in black grime, his hard-hat with the small light on it tipped just slightly back on his head. Black lunch-bucket under his arm. Nick shared this with Michelle; both Maurice Dufresne and Roman Petranovich had worked in the depths of the earth. His father for much longer.

  It was just before the war that Roman uprooted his family and brought them to Canada from the Ukraine. Nick was two years old at the time. His father could tell that war was coming. They would be safe in Canada. So Nick was told as he was growing up. Everything was left behind the day his father announced they were leaving. At first the family went to Manitoba where Roman Petranovich farmed for a couple of years. But those were lean times and Roman finally left to look for work in the mines around Kirkland Lake and Ile d’Or. When he found underground work in the Quebec bush, he brought his family over from Manitoba. Nick was four by then and his sister, Jeannie, was an infant. The baby their mother had been expecting when they left the old country was stillborn.

  They moved into a house in Bourlamaque, down the street from the mine engineer, Walter Muir. Nick’s mother grew vegetables in the backyard where she often talked to Nick and Jeannie in Ukrainian. She never learned English, but Mrs. Muir always greeted her as she headed toward town from her house further up Champlain, near the bush. Nick often saw the two women smile and gesture at each other. Unlike so many who were married to men who worked on surface at the mine, Mrs. Muir was friendly to everyone and didn’t seem to notice that his mother was different. Mollie Petranovich had embarrassed him with her thick accent and her almost nonexistent English. Now he felt sad about that. Not long before she died, he realized how much he loved his mother. This woman he had been so ashamed of would have done anything for her children. He’d loved Marie that much, too, albeit in different ways, but now they were divorced.

  Marie, he thought. How could that have ended so badly? His experience of love was laced with regret.

  He’d met Marie at a fraternity party when he was studying medicine at university in Montreal. One of his friends was a Delta Sig and sometimes they caroused and danced at the frat house until long after midnight. Marie had been with his friend that night, but Nick had also danced with her.

  “Would you mind if I called her?” he’d asked afterwards. Nervously. “Well, not really, I guess,” his friend had shrugged.

  Marie hadn’t looked that interested in her date that evening and hadn’t hesitated to accept Nick’s invitation. There were sparks between them. A few months later they were engaged and right after graduation, he from medicine and Marie from sociology, they married. Their first year was spent at an internship at a hospital in Michigan; afterwards they went to northern Ontario for a locum tenens in general practice. Nick didn’t think Marie, who’d always said she’d prefer to live in Montreal rather than anywhere else, would want to leave the lakes and the ski trails once she settled in Haileybury. Gradually he realized from her yearning comments that she wanted a different kind of future. One with more time and more prestige, more money.

  At the end of the locum, he took up a psychiatry residency, circulating through the hospitals of downtown Toronto. It wasn’t Montreal, but they’d made the decision together to move south from Haileybury to Toronto for the residency.