The Road Past Altamont

First published in French in 1966, The Road Past Altamont pierces to the heart of a child's world, craeting a delicate, yet substantial network of impressions, emotions, and relationships.

In her writing, Gabrielle Roy allowed "nothing extraneous or false to stand," according to the translator, Joyce Marshall. The literary style of Roy, whose fiction reflects her childhood on the Canadian prairie, has often been compared to that of Willa Cather. The Road Past Altamont takes a sensitive French-Canadian girl, Christine, from childhood innocence to maturity. Four connected stories reveal profound moments during her early years in the vastness of Manitoba. Christine's testament to Grandmother's creative power, her great adventure with an old gentleman at Lake Winnipeg and her clandestine one with a crude family of movers, her journey through time and space with aging Maman--all these characters and events convey Gabrielle Roy's preoccupation with childhood and old age, the passage of time and mystery of change, and the artist's relation to the world.

One
 
I was six years old when my mother sent me to spend part of the summer with my grandmother in her village in Manitoba.
 
I balked slightly at going. My old grandmother frightened me a little. She was known to be so devoted to order, cleanliness, and discipline that you couldn’t leave the tiniest thing lying about at her house. With her, it seemed, it was always, “Pick up after yourself, put away your things, as the twig is bent . . .” and other admonitions of the sort. As well, nothing exasperated her so much as the tears of children, which she called “mewling” or “caterwauling.” That was another thing: her rather curious way of speaking, partly invented by herself and often far from easy to figure out. Later, however, I found several of my grandmother’s expressions in my old Littré and realized they must date back to the time when the first settlers came to Canada from France.
 
Yet she must have found time heavy on her hands, for it was her own idea that I should spend part of the summer in her company. “Send the little sickly one to me,” she wrote in a letter my mother showed me as proof that I would be welcome at Grandmother’s.
 
Those words “little sickly one” had already made me feel none too well-disposed toward my grandmother; so it was in a more or less hostile frame of mind that I set out for her house one day in July. I told her so, moreover, the moment I set foot in her house.
 
“I’m going to be bored here,” I said. “I’m sure of it. It’s written in the sky.”
 
I didn’t know that this was precisely the sort of language to amuse and beguile her. Nothing irritated her as much as the hypocrisy that is natural to so many children—”wheedling and coaxing,” she called it.
 
So at my dark prediction I saw something that in itself was unusual enough. She was smiling faintly.
 
“You’ll see. You may not be as bored as all that,” she said. “When I want to, when I really set my mind to it, I know a hundred ways to keep a child amused.”
 
But, for all her proud words, it was she herself who was often bored. Almost no one came to see her any more. She had swarms of grandchildren, but she seldom saw them, and her memory was failing, so it was difficult for her to tell one of them from another.
 
From time to time a car full of young people would slow down at the door, perhaps stop for an instant; a bevy of young girls would wave their hands, calling, “Hello, Mémère. How are you?”
 
Grandmother would just have time to run to the doorstep before the girls disappeared in a whirlwind of fine dust.
 
“Who were they?” she would ask. “Cléophas’s daughters? Or Nicolas’s? If only I’d had my spectacles I would have recognized them.”
 
“That,” I would inform her, “was Berthe, Alice, Graziella and Anne-Marie.”
 
“Ah!” she would say, struggling to remember whether these particular girls were the daughters of Nicolas, of Cléophas, or of Alberic.
 
The next moment she would begin to argue with herself. “But no. What am I thinking? Most of Nicolas’s children are boys.”
 
She would go to sit for a moment in her rocking chair beside the window to try to settle the matter once for all and make a complete inventory of her descendants. I loved seeing her like this, looking for all the world as if she were unraveling some skeins of tangled wool.
 
“In Cléophas’s family,” she would begin, “there’s Gertrude first, then the oldest son—now what is that big dark boy’s name? Is it Rémi?”
 
“No, indeed. Now let’s see,” I would answer, beginning to lose my patience. “Rémi belongs to Uncle Nicolas.”
 
“Ah, you don’t say,” she would remark with a vexed look.
 
But I noticed that little by little she became less troubled by my awareness of her infirmities—her dimming eyesight, her faulty hearing, and, what was even more irritating to her, the failure of her memory.
 
The following day another group of young people might descend upon us, this time by buggy, “but only for five minutes.”
 
Grandmother would hurry to set the table, perhaps hoping to bribe them to stay, but nothing of the sort: the moment she had gone down to the cellar to fetch a pot of gherkins, the girls in their Sunday clothes would be caroling, “We can’t wait. We’re on our way to Rathwell. . . . Bye bye, Mémère!”
 
She would come up, blinking a little, and ask, “Have they gone?”
 
From outside could be heard a great racket of departure.
 
“Oh these modern young people!” Grandmother would exclaim.
 
We were alone in the little house, listening to the lamentations of the prairie wind as it writhed interminably in the sunlight, forming and re-forming tiny rings of dust.
 
Grandmother would begin to talk to herself, perhaps unaware that I was listening. One day I heard her sigh at the window.
 
“You’re always punished by the very things you thought you wanted. I probably wished too often for comfort, to have everything neat and tidy, to be free of children clinging constantly to my skirts with their doleful wailing. I wanted just one minute to myself. Now I have a whole century to myself!”
 
She sighed again, then began to reproach God.
 
“Why does he listen to us when we ask for things that won’t suit us when we get them? He ought to have sense enough not to listen.”
 
Then she remembered my presence in the house and summoned me with a little gesture of the hand.
 
“Well, at least I know your name.”
 
Then she asked, “And what is your name again?”
 
“Christine,” I told her with some annoyance.
 
“Yes, that’s so. I knew. Christiane.”
 
And, lost in her thoughts, she asked, “And how old is that little girl?”
 
 
There was one time of day when I never failed to feel a sense of boredom and lassitude coming over me. This was the moment when the sun, just before it disappears, casts a great red light over the prairie, a remote strange light that seems to extend its vastness and at the same time empty it of all human presence, as if giving it over to wild dreams of the time when it existed in utter solitude. It seemed then that the prairie wished to have no people, no houses, no villages upon itself, that it had tried, with a single stroke, to rid itself completely of all this and be once more as it was in the old days, proud and lonely.
 
At Grandmother’s, moreover, there was no way to avoid this disturbing sight. The village was small and Grandmother’s house stood right at the end of it; the prairie surrounded us like the ocean on all sides except the east, where a few other little houses could be seen, our companions on what seemed to me a terrifying journey. For in the complete immobility of the prairie, one had the sense of being drawn forward on a sort of voyage across an endless land of everlasting sameness.
 
Suddenly, understanding neither my sorrow nor its source, I burst into loud wails.
 
“Oh I’m so bored, so bored, so bored!”
 
“Will you be still,” said Grandmother irritably. “You make me think of a coyote howling at the moon.”
 
I tried to be still, but soon my strange sorrow, nameless, with no cause that I could define, seized me again and I howled more loudly than ever. “Oh I’m so bored, so bored, so bored!”
 
“Ah, the poor Innocents!” said Grandmother.
 
This was always her term for unhappy children, especially when they were in the depths of their inexplicable distress. She might have been alluding to the Massacre of the Blessed Innocents— I do not know— but whenever she saw a child weeping bitterly she would exclaim, in an indignant voice, “Ah, the poor Innocents!”
 
In vain she offered me all the many good things to eat there were in the house, and finally, knowing no other way to distract and console me, she said, “If you’ll just stop caterwauling, I’ll make you a doll.”
 
Immediately my tears stopped.
 
I looked skeptically at my grandmother seated in her high rocking chair.
 
“You find dolls in stores,” I said. “You don’t make them.”
 
“That’s what you think,” she said, and began as usual to complain about stores and high prices and the present-day custom of buying everything ready-made.
 
When she had vented her anger in this way, a little glimmer came into her eyes that I had never seen there before; it was quite extraordinary, like a light suddenly kindled in a place one had believed abandoned and overgrown. What she was going to accomplish today began, however, in the simplest way in the world.
 
 
“Go to the attic,” she said, “and fetch my big scrap bag. Don’t make a mistake. Get the one that’s tied on top with string. Bring it to me and then you’ll see whether I can make what I’ve a mind to make.”
 
Still incredulous, but curious too and perhaps secretly hoping to catch Grandmother napping, I went in search of the big scrap bag.
 
From it Grandmother drew some bits of multicolored material, all clean and sweet- smelling— Grandmother’s r...