Cold sweats

In the dawn everything was grey. A grey air, gloomy and silent with no sounds other than snores of boys, sleeping somewhere close by. There was cold, too, like a cold from the winters that Gabriel knew in Quebec. Winters of sunny snow in the mornings and wind and cocoa off the stovetop when Martine would come over to watch him and his sister after mama had gone to sleep, stiff from a night of standing in the textile mill.

               Now in this cold there was no sunny snow, no wind, no cocoa. Martine was not there. His sister had died two years before. These snores were odd, unnatural, Gabriel didn’t recognize them. The grey was everywhere, in his eyes, on his bed when he rolled over to escape the snoring.

               There was a moment when it all seemed too much like a nightmare and Gabriel sat up quickly, nearly colliding with the bunk over his head. Sweat rolled down the side of his gaunt face, pale, stubbly from a teenage hormone beard, hair matted and thick. In this cold the sweat made him shiver fiercely, but his body burned with a heat like a fever. The snores rolled on, the grey settled down again, he wiped his brow and took deep breathes of frigid air.

               Stirring to his left caught Gabriel’s eye. A mound of grey blankets moving, rolling slowly with a grunt, stopping with a loud creak from the mattress, then after seconds of fragile silence the snoring resumed. Gabriel wanted out of the heat stoked in his body, the sweat in his hair and on his face, itchy, the trickles it left rolling down his sides onto the bed beneath him. He tossed the blanket aside and the heat blew out across his face, and then the cold settled in, with a shiver he reached quickly for the blanket again, ready to pull it over his head, but he stopped.

               In the grey that was not so grey anymore, but more like a blue – an ice blue, like the ice on the lake near his house that Martine would watch him skate on, Gabriel noticed a sweatshirt he had never seen before covering his body. It was thin, stiff to the touch, damp from his sweating, choking him and at the same time distant giving him no real warmth that a sweatshirt should. It glowed blue but was not blue, Gabriel realized it was a light color only reflecting the blue creeping across his bunk now. There was a window near his elbow, freezing damp glass and chipped paint on the sill, tired, lonely with nothing to do and nothing to see other than the countless days drag on and on as it aged more and more, destined to break one day. The blue in the glass was getting less blue now as Gabriel spotted swaying branches through the window, they swayed to and frow heavily, like Martine’s breasts when she would hurry to catch his sister running away across the playground at the park when she didn’t want to go home. Beyond the swaying breast branches was a dark jagged line, a horizon which was turning pink now, mountains soon to be bathed in sun but for now only quiet and cold.

               Gabriel pulled at the thin stiff sweatshirt but it clung to him, like with paste, he twisted around but could not free himself. The blanket fell to the floor and he saw sweatpants of the same color and stiff too, thin, not long enough so his skinny calves showed. There was the scar from when Hugo had slid into him at home plate some summer before, all the other kids thought he was going to lose his foot and Gabriel did too, he couldn’t walk for four days after that and mama was so angry she had to stay home from work. His sister cried at all the blood on his sock and he hobbled after her sticking his foot out, she screamed and ran through the apartment.

               These clothes did not belong to him, Gabriel decided, but he could not decide why he was wearing them. The snores kept on and the blue was turning pale with dark silhouettes and shadows everywhere now, rows of bunks and snoring with blankets laying here and there, everyone asleep and dreaming, Gabriel feared.

               Enough light now settled through the room that Gabriel could see letters on his sweatshirt. He did not recognize them at first and wondered if perhaps he was still dreaming. He quickly glanced about the room and then rubbed his eyes as if to wake himself, but everything was the same once he opened his eyes again. He pulled the sweatshirt off and laid in before him on his lap, the cold air stabbing his damp body with a savageness he was not used to. Across the chest of his sweatshirt were the words PROPERTY OF RCN.

               Nothing about RCN made any sense to him. He recognized the snores as other boys now that the other bunks were visible but nobody appeared to be awake. He wished someone would wake up and tell him what was happening. In haste he pulled the thin sweatshirt back on and hugged himself tightly to warm up, tugging the blanket from the floor to wrap around him.

               New noises filled the room now, not snores or the flatulence from before but unnatural, horrible man-made noise in the cold morning. It came from outside the pale dead window, turning orange now that the sun was poised to spill across the horizon and turn the world from a frigid night to a freezing morning of coughs and stretches and breakfast smells of bacon and toast, but only if he had been at home when Martine would cook for them while mama sat on the sofa, massaging her feet and sipping steaming tea with a slice of lemon laying on the saucer, the sounds of heavy boots stamping down the snowy stairs outside as men made their way to work at the railroad or the textile mill. Misses Bergeron would see her husband off, standing in the open doorway, frail arms folded across her as snowflakes spilled into the entryway. Mama would hear them across the landing and with a slow wince rise to her feet and quietly open the front door.

               “Ah salut Camille,” mama would say, “care for some tea?”

               On some mornings Misses Bergeron would agree with a wipe of her hands on her apron and step across the landing, sitting heavily on the little chair near the door.

               “Martine, will you bring some tea for Camille, sil vous plait?” mama would ask as she hobbled back across the living room to the sofa. Martine would bring in the steaming kettle and pour as Misses Bergeron smiled, “you know my Leo is still single and he makes such a good living as a brakeman, it really is a pity he hasn’t met the right girl yet” she would say not to Martine but near her, hoping she would understand. Then mama and Misses Bergeron would gossip until the tea had turned cold and mama could hardly keep her eyes open. And as the world braced for another day of work and strain and toil, mama would disappear into her dark bedroom after kissing Gabriel’s sister on the forehead and scolding Gabriel to behave for Martine or he would regret it and she would sleep an uneasy sleep, sometimes with sun stretching across the sheets and other times with windy snow piling up outside.

               Gabriel swung his legs off the side of the bed and his feet fell onto the cold floor, hard, shiny, the windows glowing across it. A chill swirled about the thin pane of glass between him and the bitter morning outside. At the curb a drab bus idled, two white headlights against the pink morning shimmied with the idling. Near the bus a man stood bundled in drab parka and pants, black boots rocking back and forth and stamping the sidewalk for warmth.

               Now Gabriel remembered. A nervous breathing set in, a trembling, a fast pulse and a feeling of a thousand needles in his blood. On the edge of the bed his legs bounced up and down in nervous energy. He remembered the station with its hoards of people all dressed fancy and silent, distant, never looking at him. Martine smiling sadly, her chestnut hair messy from the wind, mama standing beside her, tired. He gazed at them as the train pulled away slowly, watching them on the platform until they were just specks.

               He remembered the quiet train ride across Quebec, the muted villages and towns of snow and dirty mills, the other people on board staring into the hills coughing, the man across from him nodding to himself. As the train climbed out of a valley suddenly there was the ocean, vast and blue, unchanging, unrecognizable (he had never seen it), the others on board uninterested. Then there was the windy ferry ride to Newfoundland and another train, this time with strange looking girls with heavy accents getting on and off at depots along the way until there were only boys left, no one talking, looking sad, nervous, tired from travel. In darkness the train rolled slowly to the platform, hissing angrily as it stopped, everyone lined up in the aisle, eager to get off but scared to get off. The pageantry from the recruiting office was gone; it was just one tired man with a heavy French accent and overcoat calling names from a clipboard, nervous voices in reply, everyone standing around looking at each other, in the darkness beyond the great sea rolled on gloomily.

               Now a door was opened briskly, heavy footsteps clomped along the floor, a cough, the sound of boys stirring, Gabriel watched from the bunk as tall dark men walked to a stop in the center of the room.

               “Everyone on your feet!” a harsh voice rang out. Startled, Gabriel rose, blanket falling to the floor, shivering from the cold as other boys sat up, confused stirring, scared faces in the pink morning shining through the windows. The snores were gone, now it was only rows of boys breathing, shivering, sniffing.

               The heavy footsteps moved about the room. “Welcome to your first day in the navy. You have five minutes to get dressed and get on the bus outside. Nobody wants to be late. Get going.”

               The dark figures disappeared with more heavy footsteps. Nervous, tired, anxious, Gabriel awkwardly pulled on his greatcoat. Mama would just be getting home now, Martine would be asleep, his sister was sleeping peacefully in her gave. He followed the other boys out into the cold.