Strum Read online

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Family Tree

  For Marina

  Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.

  On le sent en mille choses.

  C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison.

  Voilà ce que c’est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.

  — Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669)

  1

  The Journey (St.-Gérard), 1954

  The melody had come to him in a dream. It was a haunting sound, refined and vaguely familiar, and it came through the absolute silence of an old-growth cedar forest not yet ravaged by the steel saws. Something in this music drew him out of his body and invited him to a sacred dance, the vision of the forest still vivid in his floating body. Although he was wandering in search of something he did not know, he felt a new sense of peace and purpose, not unlike a thirsty land quenched at last by a replenishing rain.

  At the first light, with the dream more real than any event in his recent memory, Bernard closed the doors of his cabin and set out in the direction of the dawn. The music had come to the young man in his sleep, breaking the silence of his waking hours, which had been silent since he was five years old. But now, following the surge of the music in his inner ear, he walked purposefully beyond the lake and surrounding autumn landscape of his home like a scout embarking on his first tribal hunt. His feet paced out the rhythm of the music for eleven hours, yet he felt no tiredness, his sense of purpose still strong.

  He reached La Pérègrine Creek taking the old loggers’ road to where it met the Salmon River at the base of Mont-Mégantic, following its meandering and keeping just within sight of the undulating terrain of clear cutting. The area around Solpetrière was first settled by French fur-traders in the early seventeenth century near the junction of the creek and the river, and much later became a lumber town. By the time he found his way to this settlement, however, it had become a ghost town, abandoned for more than three decades. A scandal involving a priest, it was rumored, had sent the town into a downward spiral that decimated the once thriving timber camp. Whole families retreated from Solpetrière to other nearby towns, a few settled new camps downriver, and others packed up to move southward to New England, or back to Europe, until the sawmill eventually shut down for lack of willing workers.

  Although he had set out at the first dim rays of dawn on foot, assisted by the occasional motor car, he did not reach this main bend of the river until nearly nightfall, much later than he had hoped. The low-grade light of the sun behind the tree-line now presented him with a dilemma. Finding it much too dark to proceed into the thicket, but too early to abandon his plan, he parted the low branches of the thick undergrowth on the periphery of the forest, brought himself up tall as a warrior, and searched the dense woodland floor with his eagle eyes for a trail, a path, or a clearing of some kind to suggest an entrance, a safe passage through the cauldron of this dark evergreen sea. Meanwhile, the sunset had begun to turn a deep dusky red, gold and navy against the black silhouette of the encircling trees.

  Directly above, a white crescent moon made her half-sliver appearance, followed by the North Star, a frozen spark above the horizon’s diminishing bonfire. He considered whether to enter the dense forest, which would inevitably obliterate the illumination of moonlight. With his sense of purpose still strong, he was keen to advance into the belly of the beast and discover the source of the pull which like a fish hook had lodged itself in a central space in his inner ear and was now working its magic to reel him in. He was a salmon swimming instinctively upriver, through a path of undeniable dangers, a night forest replete with predators. But he confronted his momentary fears with uncharacteristic disregard, for tonight logic and self-preservation were not his masters.

  His initiation into the forest was a baptism of darkness. Almost immediately the dim moonlight disappeared, a lamp blown out by a phantom wind, and the darkness descended upon him, swallowing him in its jaws whole. Even the constant strains of music in his head ceased. He turned his whole body to see from where he had arrived though he was standing merely five steps from his entrance. He could not determine it, so complete was the blackness. For a moment he felt embalmed by it. Never before had such isolation permeated his being.

  Without any internal sound or external sight Bernard was a tree in the darkness himself, suspended in time, space and all existence. And, disconnected as he was from his senses and even his earthly body, he soared, first like the night owl low through the trees and then higher and higher until he burst through the tree tops and at last found the moonlight that illuminated the view. From this vantage point he could see a single massive cedar standing tall in the very heart of the forest before a clearing that suggested the widest part of a creek bed or river. The tree stood regal and imposing, a beloved queen presiding over her subjects, a fearless but compassionate leader. Her benevolence and majesty, her very existence, was overwhelming.

  Then suddenly and without warning, the tree swayed and toppled to the forest floor unceremoniously and seemingly in suspended motion. At that instant, as if the core of his being were transformed into a piece of lead or iron ore, Bernard felt himself sucked back down onto the forest floor just as the awful trembling began to subside. When his eyes opened he was supine on the ground but in a moment he was standing, now sensing the tremor through his feet and the shockwaves filtering through the branches and through his hair. Then, as if on cue, the music slowly began again, first imperceptibly then rising to a crescendo in his inner ear.

  An undeniable force was now taking over. He was being pulled to the center of the uncharted forest as if a strong magnet resided there. He was guided on this journey by a vacillating equilibrium and disequilibrium dictated by that inner music. Approximating an internal compass, it instructed him, directing his progress and informing him when he was off the track. By the time he had walked and climbed a significant distance into the forest and finally reached the fallen tree, the late morning sun had created a cauldron of light in the clearing, a theatre stage set for a giantess — Ophelia lying in silent repose on her watery deathbed.

  The tree was a mighty thing to behold and Bernard felt minuscule and insignificant in its proximity. At first he hesitated to approach it, as if it might abruptly spring to life, a wounded animal feigning death. From a distance he admired its great size — the girth at its widest part seemed as broad across as the width of the log cabin he had recently built. A tree of that size, he surmised, would surely be at least 700 years old, perhaps even 800 years. He had seen many trees nearly as grand as this one cut down by the loggers, often eight or ten of them at a time, each gripping one end of several saws needed to bring the giants down.

  In his early years he had wept to see such beautiful creatures felled and turned into matchsticks and building timber. A thing of such beauty deserved reverence, he thought. To spare his soul the travesty, he had retired to the very last step of the milling process where the workers finished the planks and readied them for transport to the cities where the great building booms required the steady supply of construction timber. It was here that he was able to almost forget the tragedy of the majestic giants, and by a stroke of providence to discover the beauty of the fine grain hidden within.

  But now at the river’s edge he peered at the great cedar, as he stood close to its wretched tangled roots which reached to the sky, the torn limbs of a terrestrial monster tearing its way out
from the savaged ground. The rest of the tree had fallen transversely across a wide part of the watery passage so most of its trunk was at least partially imbedded in the water. Swirling white-water rivulets formed around the half-submerged branches like long flowing sleeves draped across the arms of a water nymph suspended in a tragic moment of her dramatic dance. He could not even see the terminus of that colossal body from where he stood. It seemed to extend forever into the middle distance, its end view obscured by woody shrubbery, dust and debris still floating through the shafts of light through the tops of the standing trees.

  Clearly the tree had passed of its own accord, perhaps of old age or some other natural cause. The rough bark was beautifully creviced and uniformly dark, rich and reddish brown. Several hollowed knots in its mid-section would have been home for many centuries to a host of small animals which he hoped by now would have found an alternative nesting place.

  His first instincts were to calculate a way to bring the monolith back to the cabin with him. He hesitated, for the thought of utilizing large machinery to cart it away seemed disrespectful. On the other hand, leaving it to lie here unceremonious and soon sodden by autumn rain and the river’s icy waters also seemed a sacrilege. He imagined the impossibly fine, golden grain hidden beneath the rough reptilian exterior, and the multitudinous rings that would reveal the tree’s age, an ancient puzzle of sacred design. Each ring was a single phrase of exquisite music rising, rising in his middle ear. A soliloquy thundering like a white-water torrent edged with the deceptive calm of sonorous blue eddies. A simmering shiver traveled up his spine and set his hair on end.

  As he followed the river farther down its wet and rocky edge, he realized that a large section of the tree’s upper half had broken from the bottom when it made its terrible collapse to the earth. The separated section now lay like a sleeping fawn nestled against its hunted deer mother unaware of her demise. A dreadful sense of responsibility then overcame him, a grim and unexpected visitor intruding upon an intimate moment. He imagined the snow blanketing the fallen tree, then the river filling in the hollows of the creviced bark, eventually splitting it asunder with its winter expansion. He pictured the slow deterioration, the incessant growth of fungus, and the relentless burrowing of insects. He could feel the gnawing at his own body, as if he were the lonely corpse itself lying prone across the swelling riverbed.

  Again, as if being pulled by a strong magnet, he moved toward the fallen tree. A woman’s voice called to him in a strange language, speaking to him in an encouraging tone, beckoning him to come forward, to touch her. Another voice, this time a man’s, seemed to add its encouragement to hers. The man spoke in yet another language, but like the woman sounded soothing and kind. They beckoned to him as if he were now the small animal separated from its mother.

  Small rapids formed around his ankles and entered his submerged leather boots as he stepped into the cool of the river. Then they swirled around his knees. When he finally reached the half-submerged tree, the water had welled up to his torso and the freezing cold gripped his loins with a vengeance. With an almost delirious cry he leapt onto a branch and pulled himself clear of the icy water. He clung to the tree now as if it was a life raft. He rested his head upon the trunk and pressed his ear into the damp bark to see if he could make out the voices that had spoken to him earlier. No voices made themselves heard, but now he felt a presence in his heart and the slow return of the music. His heart raced to the quickening beat of a ceremonial drum. This was the feeling he had as a boy when his mother gathered him into her arms as he cried in muted rage about the ancient cedars as they were felled one by one. She had comforted him while his heart pumped with anger. But this time, his heartbeat quickened not with rage, but with excitement, as if he had discovered a long lost truth.

  Bernard knew the answer to his dilemma. The tree sections would have to be separated completely and somehow floated down the river. He calculated that the job of extricating the smaller top section of the tree alone with only his sharpest handsaws would take him no more than three days. Then, it would be an excruciating wait through a minimum of five months of winter until the first thaw, before he could return to the bend in the river and recover this ancestor.

  It is autumn now, he thought to himself. In the spring this river will swell to a mighty roar with its icy white water spilling down from the glacier peaks. The river can carry this giant to another place, a safe place — to its home and mine.

  The swell of the music in his inner ear transformed into the mighty roar of rapids that he remembered from his early years when he could still hear as a very small boy in his father’s large canoe. Carried down a river similar to this one, he felt the elation of the swift rolling action of the boat as it lifted, then crested on a wave, then dropped with a mighty wet splash. His small hands gripped each side of the narrow point of the canoe as his father expertly guided them past large boulders and the occasional drifting tree branch with his single wooden oar alternating side to side. After several hours of this wonderful ride, the gush of the river would quickly subside and swirl imperceptibly into the beckoning and expansive mouth of the glacier lake ahead of them. The boy would then know they had arrived at the special place where they would catch the most beautiful shimmering creatures he had ever seen.

  •

  It was an interminably long week before Bernard was able to make his way back to the forest. Into the back of his father’s old hand-me-down pick-up truck he threw the camp gear and set of sharpened saws. As he made his way on the sealed road for the two and a half hours ahead of him, he thought only of that gravel road that would rattle the old truck mercilessly until the road stopped dead an hour and twenty minutes later. There the trail-head would lead him into La Pérègrine Creek Forest and to the tree that he knew would be there waiting for him.

  Since the day the strange music led him to her resting place deep in the forest, the spirits of the ancient cedar featured nightly in his dreams. Each evening it was the same — floating over the treetops by moonlight, bringing him to the tall cedar whose nightly calamity befalls with a thunderous roar. Two spirits rise up to join him in this mystical flight, their presence stirring like the shifting musical fog filling the night air with its crescendos. Then suddenly they disappear, as swiftly as they appeared, back into the forest as the music explodes into a cacophony of sound.

  Abruptly Bernard sat up in his bed and the melody ceased completely. The almost imperceptible whirring sensation in his head that accompanied him regularly during his waking moments returned to him in that instant. A mixture of shock, sadness, and relief overcame him as the music stopped and the solid reality of his grounded bed conspired with the crisp early morning air to fully awaken him. His first thought was that he could wait no longer; every day the nights grew longer and the days shorter. The first snow would not be far behind.

  The trail into the forest was vastly different by daylight and he had to close his eyes and trust his instincts to arrive at his previous destination, like a hunted animal tracking its own scent to return to the den from which it had fled. Nearly overwhelmed by the difficulty of this task, he questioned his sanity on several occasions. Every turn seemed identical to the last, every excruciating incline leveled around the bend by a sheerer decline. Conjuring up the music again in his head served useless; nothing came to him except the strange confidence he felt in his gut that this was the right path.

  Fourteen hours later disorientation and exhaustion became his companions. His rucksack was weighted heavily by the set of saws. The burden became unbearable; every step nearly decimated him. Not once had he stopped to rest or take food on his single-minded mission, and now, on the edge of utter exhaustion, he stumbled on a loose rock and spilled over the edge of the precipice as his hands groped helplessly at tangled roots and loose branches useless to break his fall.

  The seconds that passed during his plummet down the cliff face expresse
d themselves like underwater minutes. Perhaps even an hour. When he came to an abrupt and miraculous stop a few tumultuous yards below, he found himself hanging in precarious suspension. His rucksack, which came off one shoulder, had wedged itself between tangled tree limbs, but the saws had come loose and separated from the pack during the tumble. They were now somewhere far below, at the bottom of the eight-hundred-foot ravine he guessed. Better them than me, he thought, comically relieved. A kind of delirium had settled in and he found himself shaking with desperate laughter. He had fallen feet first into a pocket of tangled tree roots that held him tightly onto the narrow ledge like a large swallow in a woody, pendulous nest.

  When his laughter nearly exhausted the adrenaline that coursed through his every capillary and vein, he took stock of his situation and mentally searched his body for pain and signs of injury. Besides a burning sensation in both hands, he seemed to be unharmed, intact at the very least. An exposed tree root snaked above his head like a stream of smoke above a candle. This he grabbed with one raw hand and with the last vestige of adrenaline as his aide, extricated himself from the awkward hammock and hoisted himself carefully up along the crumbling dirt wall and back onto level ground. Scrambling quickly into a sitting position against the high side of the trail, he looked out into the expansive view that opened up before him. His heart leapt into this throat, throbbing and pounding in rapid beats. Scrambling quickly back to the edge, he peered down into the precipice. Here was a familiar view — in his dreams of flying this particular vista was always below him.

  The jagged rows of conifers wound down, down, and down yet more; layer upon green-black layer, from where he kneeled on the ridgeline to the very bottom of the ravine. And, sure as the day turns to night, Bernard thought to himself, there it is, that bend in the creek, and my beautiful giant lying waiting on her broken back. It was several hundred feet down below, but the tree appeared to him as clear as day, almost as if clouds had parted and the vision was thrust upward to meet his retina in a perfect moment of electromagnetic transference. The vision was crystalline and inspired in him a notion of infallibility.