I envy you your steady blaze
fed by the Book of Common Praise.
I envy this, believe I do,
that you can be, together, you,
And understand you may not see
that I must, on my own, be me.
And then it had been Odile’s turn. Up she’d sprung and without pause launched into her poem.
Spring is coming with its girth,
And breezy breath of balmy warmth
And burbank, bobolink, and snearth,
Shall banish winter’s chill and dearth,
And luscious joy shall fill the earth.
‘Wonderful poem,’ Clara lied, when everyone had finished and they were crowded around the bar, feeling some urgency for a drink. ‘I’m just kind of curious. I’ve never actually heard of a snearth.’
‘I made it up,’ said Odile with glee. ‘I needed a word to rhyme with dearth and earth.’
‘Like mirth?’ Ruth suggested. Clara shot her a warning look and Odile seemed to consider it.
‘Not powerful enough, I’m afraid.’
‘Unlike the juggernaut that is snearth,’ said Ruth to Clara before turning back to Odile. ‘Well, I certainly feel enriched, if not fertilized. The only poet I can think to compare you to is the great Sarah Binks.’
While Odile had never heard of Sarah Binks she knew her cultural knowledge had been stunted by an education that only admitted fran-cophone genius. Sarah Binks, she knew, must be a very great English poet indeed. That compliment from Ruth Zardo had fueled Odile Montmagny’s creativity and in quiet moments at their shop, La Maison Biologique in St-Rémy, she’d pull out her worn and worried child’s notebook to write another poem, sometimes not even pausing for inspiration.
Clara, a struggling artist herself, identified with Odile and cheered her on. Peter, of course, thought Odile was nuts. But Clara knew differently. She knew that what often distinguished great people of the arts wasn’t genius, but perseverance. Odile persevered.
Eight of them had gathered in the cozy back room of the bistro to raise the dead this Good Friday, and the only question seemed to be, who would do it.
‘Not me,’ said Jeanne. ‘I thought one of you was the psychic.’
‘Gabri?’ Gilles Sandon turned on their host.
‘But you told me you do readings,’ Gabri said to Jeanne, pleading.
‘I do. Tarot cards, runes, that sort of thing. I don’t contact the dead. Not often anyway.’
It’s funny, Clara thought, how if you wait long enough and listen, people will say the oddest things.
‘Not often?’ she asked Jeanne.
‘Sometimes,’ Jeanne admitted, taking a small step back from Clara as though from an assault. Clara put a smile on her face and tried to appear less assertive, though a chocolate bunny would appear assertive to this woman.
‘Could you do it tonight? Please?’ Gabri asked. He could see his party going south fast.
Tiny, mousy insubstantial Jeanne stood at the center of their circle. Clara saw something then, something pass over the face of this gray woman. A smile. No. A sneer.
FOUR
Hazel Smyth bustled through the comfortable, cramped house, keeping herself busy. She had a million things to do before her daughter Sophie got back from Queens University. The beds were already made with clean, crisp linens. The baked beans were slowly cooking, the bread was rising, the fridge was stocked with Sophie’s favorite food. Now Hazel collapsed on the uncomfortable horsehair sofa in the living room, feeling every day of her forty-two years, and then some. The old sofa seemed to be covered in tiny needles, pricking into anything that sat on it, as though trying to repulse the weight. And yet Hazel loved it, perhaps because no one else did. She knew it was stuffed with equal parts horsehair and memories, themselves prickly at times.
‘You don’t still have it, Haze?’ Madeleine had laughed a few years earlier, when she’d first walked into the cramped room. Hurrying over to the old sofa Madeleine had climbed right onto it, leaning over the back as though she’d forgotten how people sit, her slim bottom waving slightly at Hazel, who watched dumbfounded.
‘What a riot,’ came Mad’s muffled voice from between the sofa and the wall. ‘Remember how we used to spy on your parents from behind this?’
Hazel had forgotten that. Another memory to add to the overstuffed sofa. Suddenly there was a hoot of laughter and Madeleine, like the schoolgirl she’d once been, bounced round and sat facing Hazel, holding her hand out. Moving forward Hazel saw something in the delicate fingers. Something pristine and white. It looked like a small bleached bone. Hazel paused, a little afraid of what the sofa had produced.
