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By Root 997 0

mound outside. He carried out piles of herbal magazines, some from the late eighties, and tossed these onto the heap as well. Tonight we’ll have a bonfire, he decided. I’ll greet my guests with an Eskimo bonfire! We’ll roast marshmallows! A marshy-roast! No, for heaven’s sake, what am I thinking? I’m turning over a new leaf, I’m no longer a child. But a marshmallow or two would be good now. He went to the cupboard and, through a window propped open by his mother’s corrective wooden spoon, tossed out miscellaneous bottles and boxes, including a family-size can of petrified Quik and multi-packs of miniature cereal with the sugared ones removed. Some of the tins, covered in dust, came from dates before Best Before Dates. While eating the dregs of three plastic bags containing coconut, almonds and dried cranberries respectively, he spied a bag of marshmallows. Yes! I knew I had some! He reached into the bag and pulled out marshmallows as hard as golf balls. Through the window, left-handed, he threw these too onto the heap outside. “Goodbye youth!” he exclaimed. “Burn memories, burn!”

The last bus of the day, the “Widows’ Shuttle,” was squeezing out the gate as Norval, Samira and Noel entered Mount Royal Cemetery. The wet windows of the bus were agleam with amber, the black silhouettes inside barely visible. The driver, unaccountably, honked his horn twice as he passed in the opposite direction.

In the day’s last lighted hour they walked without words, foot-high packing-snow crunching beneath them and an enormous sunset—with apocalyptic reds and purples—above them. Following Samira’s lead, they paused to wipe the snow from various monuments and mausoleums, revealing memorials to Scots parentage, wealth or benevolent deeds, bravery in war or “good wives.” Some of the dead, Noel remarked, came from famous sunken ships like the Titanic or Lusitania. Others, Samira discovered, were famous themselves, like Anna Harriet Leonowens, immortalised in Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I. Others were infamous, Norval pointed out, like Alexander Armstrong English, who after a career in the British army became Canada’s itinerant hangman. And a vicious wife-beater.

Fifty yards along a winding road, at a fork, was a signboard whose paint had been flaking off for decades. A pale red arrow pointed towards:

LOGE DU PORTIER

GATEHOUSE

(PRIVATE)

They followed the arrow and the mood of the cemetery gradually changed. The opulence of the Victorian section, with its intimations of immortality, gave way to humbler graves of immigrant, infant, soldier, pauper. After a quarter-mile or so, at a crumbling white statue of a naked child leaning against a skull, like a baby Hamlet, the trio saw smoke gyring into the sky. They passed a NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a tree, then an ad hoc electrical box that looked like it was wired by an Indian,20 then a rusting boat of a car that appeared to be carrying a large boulder on its roof.

“Anyone want some of this?” asked Norval, before taking a drink, not his first of the day, from a zinc flask of rye. “You may need it.” As he wiped his mouth with his hand, noises came from behind: first a dog barking, then what sounded like muffled voices. He looked back but saw no one. He took another hit before rejoining the others.

The three approached the run-down but not ruined gatehouse, the original structure of which was charming and fairy-taleish with its conical roof and twin turrets, but which a series of additions had rendered unshapely and asymmetrical, like a house drawn by a young child. They passed a tumbledown carport, which sheltered a 1950s hearse on cinder blocks, then a large maple tree whose trunk and lower limbs had been painted pale blue. A patch of snow beneath it bore two yellow j’s inscribed in urine-writing. As the two men inspected the engraving, Samira pointed to a figure standing next to a smoking mound: a panda-ish man sporting one of those hats that dads wear fishing, a monstrously oversized wool sweater that had seen—on his or someone else’s shoulders—better days, a dandelion