The Douglas Notebooks

A Fable

Christine Eddie, Sheila Fischman

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780864927651
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013

Romain was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. At 18, he leaves his family for a home in the forest, learning to live off the land rather than his family's wealth. Éléna flees a house of blood and mayhem, taking refuge in a monastery and later in the rustic village of Rivière-aux-Oies. One day, while walking in the woods, Éléna hears the melody of a clarinet and comes across Romain, who calls himself Starling and whom Éléna later renames Douglas, for the strongest and most spectacular of trees. Later a child named Rose is born. Fade to black. When the story takes up again, Douglas has returned to the forest, Rose is in the village under the care of others, and Éléna is gone.

From these disparate threads, Christine Eddie tenderly weaves a fable for our time and for all times. As the years pass, the story broadens to capture others in its elegant web — a doctor with a bruised heart, a pharmacist who may be a witch, and a teacher with dark secrets. Together they raise this child with the mysterious heritage, transforming this story into an ode to friendship and family, a sonnet on our relationship with nature, and an elegy to love and passion. The Douglas Notebooks was originally published in French as Les carnets de Douglas. This edition was translated by Sheila Fischman.

Even if fought far away, war is always profitable for someone. In Sainte-Palmyre, it was the Bradys. Guided by the smell of a fortune that was hidden at the slightest sign of rationing, they threw themselves into black market foodstuffs, the brewing of beer, and, above all, cooking up deals. Life went on, and before the ink that signed the Armistice was dry, their locomotive was already pulling a tidy fortune put together unbeknownst to the taxman.

Like a black tide, their power extended over dozens, then hundreds and thousands of hectares. Farms, slaughterhouses, grocery stores, factories, hotels: finally, people stopped counting. Everything that fed the region belonged to them in the end. In Sainte-Palmyre, the Bradys got in the habit of presiding over the table. First the father, then the son, that went without saying.

Antoine, offspring of the first generation of prosperous Bradys, guaranteed continuation as soon as he’d chosen a wife from among the daughters of prominent citizens: Alexina, a nymphet somewhat neurasthenic but with a substantial bank account. Their wealth secure, Antoine and Alexina had two children, a daughter, May, and — thank God! — a boy three years later. Which authorized the nymphet to sigh wearily when young Romain was introduced to illustrious visitors: “This will be my last child.” She kept her promise.

Occupied — he making their assets bear fruit, she tending her depression — the Brady parents had little time to devote to Romain. As for May, the sister, her jealousy was transformed into aversion close to sadism whenever she had a chance to be alone with her brother. It happens.

Also, their younger son, though perfectly normal, never knew exactly how to behave with his nouveau riche family who kept up relations only if they were public. To the questions Romain asked — naively, timidly, like all children his age — they made no reply, or replied too quickly and off the point. Not now. How can you think such a thing? Will you please keep quiet! The little boy wandered the gleaming corridors of the manor house with its fake turrets; he hid in the folds of the curtains, hands stroking the heavy velvet; he curled up on the landing of the imitation marble stairs that was wide enough to hold two family trees. In the end, he did indeed keep quiet.

He could have got lost, shut himself away, but for the music that he heard by chance in the kindergarten, and the fact that Monsieur and Madame, thinking it would be polite now and then to offer their guests a recital, agreed to have him take lessons. Then there were the books imported for a small fortune, whole shelves at a time for the sake of appearance, whose pages were sometimes stuck together from never having been read. The real parents of Romain Brady, the only ones who truly mattered, were called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Comtesse de Ségur.

Living a four-hour drive from Sainte-Palmyre, Éléna Tavernier too had to be content with an empty childhood. She grew up in a house full of noise, in which the insults hurled by the father at the mother, Rose, along with a plate or a slap, were brimful of obscenity and contempt. Not to hear them demanded considerable effort from the little girl. She spent the better part of her early years with her ears blocked, dreaming that fairies would intervene and transport her and her maman to a land of wonders —any land at all. That was precisely what she’d been doing the last time her mother screamed in the kitchen while a spot of blood was growing into a lake on the floor. If a clue was needed to discover the whole truth, Éléna found it in the dead woman’s terrified expression just before the priest closed her eyes. Denouncing the father, though, was beyond the strength of a child of six.

Rose Tavernier was buried at the end of the last row in Saint-Lupien’s small graveyard, where Éléna could go only in secret, before school or after Mass, and she never had time to say Maman, I miss you. The only daughter had no choice but to put up with her only father. Like an invisible and peaceful chameleon, apparently obedient but in a constant state of alert, she learned how to tidy, clean, cook, and study while pretending not to be on guard at every moment. Chameleons, as is well known, have a visual field of three hundred and sixty degrees.

He’s the baker’s son, sighed Antoine Brady to the businessmen passing through the parlour, astonished to see there a child deep in the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. He’s my adoptive brother, May hastened to add to her giggling friends on Sunday, as if to apologize for having to impose on them the scales and arpeggios that were taking over the three floors of the manor. . . . The last child I’ll have, mumbled Alexina, wrapping herself in her cashmere shawl.

Romain couldn’t stand up straight. Romain waddled like a duck. Romain put his elbows on the table and, more often than not, started fights. Romain was too much this and not enough that. When a word dared to exit his mouth, it disconcerted. It wearied his mother, irritated his father. Awkwardness, foolishness, absent-mindedness. All was Romain’s fault. Even the rain that rotted the crops.

“You’ve got the evil eye,” May grumbled into his ear, sinking her nails into the flesh of his arm.

He did his best to mature, though, by searching for a hidden meaning behind the facts of life. Still, at school, the baker’s son took his place in the middle of the pack, from where he did nothing to draw attention to himself. In company, the adopted son didn’t try to make friends but let himself become the laughingstock of the inhabitants of Sainte-Palmyre, whom he observed without flinching. Very early, however, Alexina’s last child made a decision that he had plenty of time to ripen before he fell asleep at night, counting the pocket money he was saving.

During the ostentatious ceremony held in honour of his eighteenth birthday, to which were invited handfuls of strangers, Romain surprised his parents by announcing that he was leaving to live in the country for a while. His sister burst out laughing.

On the morning she would leave Saint-Lupien, Éléna wakened suddenly in an empty house. As often happened, her father hadn’t come home. She took advantage of his absence to set out for school before dawn. Along the way she would stop at the graveyard, where she would place a bouquet of wild violets at the end of the last row.

Standing in front of her dead mother, her school bag in one hand and the barely open blue flowers in the other, the girl tried to recall a memory that would evoke something gentle and strong from a far-off time when life for the two of them still contained — if her father did them the favour of slipping away — an afterthought of affection. But aside from the fine mist that was dancing on the poorly maintained grass along the paths, nothing showed up.

The poor-quality tombstone looked at her sadly as the sun rose. The letters that formed her mother’s name were erased in places, already darkened by time and the elements. When the birds launched into their loud cheeping to greet the dawn, Éléna, who was staring at her mother, could no longer read Rose Tavernier, only ose Ta v . . . ie. Ose ta vie. Dare to live.

She stayed there, motionless and taken by surprise. A wild urge to step out of line ran through the veins of the chameleon.

Neither his parents nor his sister nor his clarinet teacher had believed Romain.

“And who do you think will provide for your needs?” they mocked.

“We’ll see,” replied Romain, avoiding their skeptical looks.

There was certainly a little discussion, but just for form’s sake. Because, at the end of the day, the fact that their son had a sudden urge to treat himself to a few weeks in a field was a relief to the Bradys, who felt that some distance between them, even brief, would be beneficial to the whole family. They greeted the news with chuckles, sure that, in any case, as soon as he was confronted with the rigours of rural life, their son and heir would come running home.

When the snow had melted completely, young Romain stuffed his gear into a bag to which he added a compass, an axe, a package of seeds, and some matches. With the bag at his feet and the clarinet case in his hand, he said a cool goodbye to his mother, his sister, and the servants, as he’d been taught, bowing slightly.

Antoine Brady, never there at crucial moments, had shut himself away in his office, where he broke into a grin that had no witnesses. Focusing vaguely on a column of figures, glad that his inept son was making a decision and sticking to it, he was smiling. Upstairs, watching the scene from a window, the music teacher was smiling even though he was worried, for the Bradys were his most significant source of income and Romain his best pupil by far. Standing on the threshold of the manor, Alexina was smiling too, enchanted by the unusual nature of the event, while May was rejoicing to see her fondest dream come true. Even the domestics were smiling, pleased to have one less room to tidy. Life was smiling on Romain Brady, who had fear glued to his stomach. When it was time, he picked up his travelling bag and started walking. He did not turn around.

In Saint-Lupien, Éléna was getting ready to do the supper dishes when out of the blue her father announced that he’d promised her to the grocer’s son in exchange for a case of Scotch. Éléna would have slit her wrists rather than marry, so young, such a big lump of a man who could neither laugh nor read. Which was what she replied, but her father retorted that he had no intention of asking her opinion and ordered her to shut her goddamn trap.

Belches interrupted the father’s grunting. Staggering towards Éléna, he raised an arm to hit her and began to spit insults. The girl ran to the front door. Along the way, she grabbed the first thing that came to hand, an oil lamp that shed a harsh light on the room, and hurled it impulsively at the fuming hulk. She opened the door to rush into the night, unaware of the fire that was already sweeping through the dilapidated house.

It was not until she hadn’t enough breath to keep going, on the other side of the cornfield with its dry, winter-blackened stalks, that Éléna collapsed. She was cold and could no longer feel her scraped ankles. Her heart was pounding so hard that she felt as if she were being pursued by an army of soldiers. It took her another few minutes to realize that she was out of danger. Getting a grip on herself, she resumed her race, determined to get as far away as possible from the deserted plain where she had always lived. In the distance, a house was burning. One might have said that the sun, for the second time that day, was coming up.

In Sainte-Palmyre, the harvest season was going full tilt and Antoine Brady was kept busy calculating the profits, gross and net, from his truck farming. The time had come to choose a college for Romain, and Madame his mother had finally started studying what various private establishments had to offer — all of them prepared to bow and scrape to welcome a Brady among their donors. As for May, she was counting the hours between the beauty parlour and a tennis champion who was introducing her to the delights of lengthy kisses.

In the afternoon, there was dramatic pressure on the stock market and Monsieur double-locked himself inside his office. Alexina dragged out a telephone call to a school principal who was explaining the attractions of a novel method for teaching quantum physics, grovelling all the while. May, meanwhile, was wriggling on the tennis court, her weight on her right leg, both hands clutching the racquet, gaze focused on her opponent’s biceps, not his ball. The servants, who needed instructions to prepare for Harvest Day, an annual feast to underline with pomp the fame of the Bradys of Sainte-Palmyre, demanded Romain, for want of anything better. Which forced the others to face facts: the son hadn’t come home. Honestly, that child!

Other investigations had to be launched. Nearly a month went by before anyone noticed that something serious might have happened. The searches ended on All Saints’ Day, when Antoine Brady allowed his advisers to convince him that pursuing their efforts was unrealistic. On Christmas Eve, policemen showed up at the manor and stared at the floor as they told the family that a decomposed body found next to a stream a few kilometres from a nearby town was without a doubt that of Romain. They were sorry.

The following week, a short private ceremony was held to commemorate the dead man’s brief existence.

Romain Brady had walked north for seventy-six days before he found a forest vast and deep enough for stopping. He had disappeared into it to look for a river. He paced his territory several times before deciding on the spot where he would settle.

Building a den was no easy task. The first winter, though not particularly harsh, left Romain with a fever because of the wind and snow that seeped inside through the cracks in the unhewn timber. When the days began to grow shorter again, though, Romain knew that he would never again fear the cold so much. His cabin built of superimposed logs may not have been very big, but the fireplace of large grey stones would keep it warm. The thickness of the walls, cemented with a mixture of grass and mud, would keep him cool in summer. Carefully corded wood was waiting in the lean-to.

Romain was thinner and exhausted, but content. A number of villages were at most a day’s walk away, and he soon realized that he would not lack any essentials. The river provided clear water and abundant pike and trout. The earth in the clearing grew the seeds that he’d taken over the weeks from big vegetable gardens in Sainte-Palmyre. The forest was home to game. The sun dried clothing. Snow, salt, and the cool water in the streams preserved food.

Pocket money was useful for obtaining essential foodstuffs, as well as materials that couldn’t be found in the woods. Glass for the opening in the wall on the south side. Candles and sugar. An aluminum pan for collecting rainwater. A flexible tube that com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyrights
• 1. Location
• 2. Close Up
• 3. Wide Shot
• 4. High-Angle Shot
• 5. Dissolves
• 6. Fast Motion
• 7. Music
• Credits
• Acknowledgements
• Author's Bio
• Back Cover