Washika by Robert A. Poirier Read Free Book Online Page B

removed the blood-stained sheet from the mattress and threw it into the wood stove. Later that afternoon, she sat in the hotel lobby waiting for the bus. There was a sweater draped over her tiny suitcase and in her hand she held a one-way ticket for the Capital.
    One week later, P’tit-Gus was surprised to see that Claudine was not at her work place when he dropped by, as he did every time he returned from the camp. He rushed down the street to their little house by the river. There he found her letter on the kitchen table. He opened the envelope and, trembling, read how she had been unable to wait for him, how her craving had led her to take on another man, in their house and on their bed. What she had not written was that she had been attracted to the handsome salesman for quite some time. The weeks without seeing each other, while P’tit-Gus was working in the bush, only served to increase her desire for this handsome young man. She was ashamed, she wrote. She would never forgive herself. There was nothing to be done. She was leaving Ste-Émilie and he would never see her again.
    P’tit-Gus threw her letter into the cold, iron stove. As he did so, he saw the crumpled bed sheet and the blood stains, a rusty shade of brown. He returned to work on Monday morning and never mentioned the woman’s name again, not once in the thirty years since those events had taken place.
    P’tit-Gus flipped open his Zippo, lit the paper ball and, when he could no longer hold it without burning his fingers, dropped it into the firebox. The ball moved slightly, folding and unfolding. As it became a mass of black weightless petals, the last of its flame began to creep towards the back of the firebox and then around, until the remains of the ball were surrounded, first yellow, then yellow-red. He watched until the flames came like long, red tongues from the whole circumference of the firebox, darting higher and higher until they touched just above where the paper had been. He watched for the quick bursts of the shorter tongues, deep purple and darting out between the longer ones.
    P’tit-Gus shut the small round door and closed the grilled door after it. He stood facing the heater, listening to the puffing of the flames and the cracking of the cold metal as it began to warm. He stood before the grilled door, feeling the heat coming through his trousers. With his lamp, he scanned the room to make sure that the windows were shut. He walked around to the back of the heater and turned the flow valve to ‘one quarter’. Then he moved a chair with its damp jeans up closer to the stove and started to leave.
    â€œWhat time is it?” a voice asked.
    â€œEarly,” P’tit-Gus replied. “Go back to sleep.”
    â€œIs it raining?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow bad?”
    â€œNot enough.”
    â€œ Sacrament !”
    In the dark behind the glare of his lamp, P’tit-Gus smiled. He did not smile often. There were times when he smiled though, even chuckled, when there was no one around. As the years passed him by, he had become somewhat disconnected from everything modern. He was considered by some to be an aging hermit of a man, completely out of touch with the world around him. But, P’tit-Gus had his life, whatever it was, and there were moments of joy. He would sit on the verandah in the early evenings, smoking a cigarette and chuckling to himself at the best of all jokes, a page in God’s great comic book, he would say, as the sky grew black and the clouds grumbled and the lightning came in long zigzag chains. The boys could not play volleyball in the yard behind the cookhouse, the radio-telephone might cease to function and the wires from the generator shed might spark and sizzle. There would be a puff of smoke and all the lights would go out. It was a time for God’s little joke— la farce de Dieu— and, whether they liked it or not, and P’tit-Gus certainly did,