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First English-language edition. Originally published as Les villes de papier by Les Éditions Alto, 2018.

Coach House Books acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2019: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities. We are also grateful for generous assistance for our publishing program from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

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Title: Paper houses / Dominique Fortier ; translated by Rhonda Mullins.

Other titles: Villes de papier. English

Names: Fortier, Dominique, 1972- author. | Mullins, Rhonda, 1966- translator.

Description: Translation of: Les villes de papier.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190141107 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190141956 | ISBN 9781552453926 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566118 (PDF) | ISBN 9781770566101 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PS8611.O7733 V5513 2019 | DCC C843/.6—dc23

Les villes de papier is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 610 1 (EPUB) 978 1 77056 611 8 (PDF)

Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

To Fred and Zoé – my home

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

EMILY DICKINSON

Emily

Emily is a town built in white wood and nestled amid fields of clover and oats. The square houses have pitched roofs, blue shutters that close as evening approaches, and chimneys that birds sometimes swoop down to fly, frantically, with soot-covered wings, through every room in the house. Rather than being chased out, they are adopted so the residents can learn their song.

The town has ten times as many gardens as churches, and all of the churches are deserted. Bellflowers and mushrooms grow in their tranquil shade. The townspeople speak in signs, but, since everyone uses signs of their own making, they barely understand one another and generally prefer to avoid contact.

In winter, Emily is blanketed in snow, in which learned chickadees write pristine white poems with their dainty feet.

Amherst

Amherst, Massachusetts, is a town – almost a village – out of step with space and time.

When Emily was born, in 1830, the population was 2,631. Chicago didn’t exist. By 1890, four years after Emily’s death, Chicago’s population would be 1,099,850, whereas Amherst had not yet grown to 5,000 souls, minus the one.

It is a cultured little town that has been home to generation after generation of prominent Dickinsons. It was named for Jeffery Amherst, the first baron by that name, the same man who suggested, during the American Indian Wars, giving ‘savages’ blankets that had been used to warm those suffering from smallpox, to, as he said, extirpate this execrable race.

The town could have picked a better namesake.

These days, as we are assailed by an endless stream of images, it is astonishing to think that only one photograph exists of the woman who was among her country’s greatest poets, a photo taken when she was sixteen. In this famous portrait, she looks pale and thin, has a dark velvet ribbon around her long neck; her wide-set black eyes show quiet attention, and there is the trace of a smile on her lips. Her hair is pulled back and parted in the middle. She is wearing a simple striped dress gathered at the waist, with a light-coloured collar, and in her left hand she holds what could be a small bouquet of flowers. A book is set on the table beside her: the title cannot be made out. There are no other photographs that show her younger or older, none where she is elsewhere or standing – or perhaps they have all been lost or destroyed. She has no legs. She never will.

Forever and ever, she will be only this face. This mask.

Emily Dickinson is a blank screen, an empty page. At the end of her life, if she had chosen to wear a blue dress, we would have nothing to say about her.

At age five, little Emily Elizabeth spends a few days at her aunt’s in Boston. On the way there, their carriage drives through a violent storm. Lightning rips through the black sky, rain pelts the windows, sounding like gravel. The aunt holds the child to reassure her. But the child is not afraid. Fascinated, she leans toward the cold glass, rests her forehead against it, and whispers, ‘Fire.’

At the aunt’s house, the windows are set so high up that, even standing on her toes, she can’t see anything other than a strip of white sky. She climbs onto her bed to look at the street down below, the twin trees growing across the road, the people scurrying down the sidewalks.

She makes a first tentative jump, then a second, and a third, higher and higher on the goose-down mattress that yields gently under her weight. The street bounces in time with her, with all of its little characters, like toy soldiers being shaken in a box.

‘Elizabeth!’

Standing in the doorway, the aunt looks furious. The child immediately stops jumping and, standing tall, planted on her short little legs, answers loudly and clearly, ‘Call me Emily, if you please.’

Arobin lands on the windowsill where Emily has scattered bread crumbs. His breast is like one of those miraculous oranges that fill the stockings hung from the chimney on Christmas Eve.

He swallows a piece of bread, then tells long bird stories in a series of trills. He tells of worms, a flighty female, a clutch of blue-green eggs, one of which has mysteriously disappeared. Emily listens, quivering, head cocked, eyes bright. She picks up a crumb between her thumb and index finger and brings it to her lips. It is her favourite meal of the day.

When she sins, it is always the same sin: gluttony, which compels her to pinch a slice of the pie that is cooling in the kitchen, a voraciousness that drives her to pilfer the forbidden volume that sits on one of the shelves in Father’s study. Mother is never fooled and always punishes her in the same way, by sending her to her room, with no distractions that would amuse children. Once Emily’s punishment is over, Mother doesn’t notice that her daughter is always sorry to come out. You mustn’t know Emily Dickinson very well to think she can be chastised by locking her away in silence, alone with her thoughts.

If she could go one day, just one, with no mischief, bad deeds, or horrid thoughts, her whole life would be redeemed by that single, perfect day. But the fact is, she is not sure she wants to behave. Daisies don’t behave, any more than geese do as they fly overhead in a V. They are something better than behaved: they are wild like mustard, they spring unchecked like weeds.

The garden rustles with muttering flowers. A violet hasn’t recovered from being badly crushed. Another complains that the large sunflowers cast too much shade. A third eyes its neighbour’s petals. Two peonies plot about how to keep the ants at bay. A tall, pale lily has cold feet; the earth is too damp. The roses are the worst, annoyed by the bees, bothered by bright light, drunk on their own perfume.

Only the dandelions are quiet, happy just to be alive.

The flowers the children picked in the afternoon are lying in a wicker basket. Father takes a pansy between his pale fingers and explains in his pastor’s voice, ‘To preserve them, you need to dry them first.’

In Father’s hand, the flower seems to be wilting already. He puts it down and takes out a volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the set of which stands, ordered 1 to 21, on a shelf in the middle of the bookcase. He opens it, carefully leafing through the pages.

‘After a few months, the pages will have absorbed the plant’s moisture, and you can glue it in your herbarium.’

Emily is filled with silent wonder: books drink the water of flowers.

Father continues in the learned tone he uses when he is teaching, which is to say, always.

‘To remember where you placed the specimen, I suggest choosing a page number that corresponds to a famous date. For example, the date of the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War … ’

He waits.

‘Thirteen thirty-seven,’ Austin, Lavinia, and Emily whisper in unison.

Austin and Lavinia select a volume, gently insert the petals of a flower between the leaves of the book, muttering to themselves, ‘Declaration of Independence,’ ‘Fall of the Roman Empire,’ ‘Mother’s birthday.’

Emily alone seems to scatter flowers at random in the volume she has chosen. Father watches her for a moment, his brow knit.

‘How will you find your specimens if you put them just anywhere?’

She smiles.

‘I’ll find them.’

Months later, when in the dead of winter they pick summer flowers from the bookcase, she opens the dictionary without a moment’s thought. While the others mutter numbers, she says a single word, just one, like magic: jasmine, and jasmine appears.

Emily has illustrated the dictionary entries.

She picks mint leaves, rose petals, and camomile flowers and gives them to Mother to hang to dry in the kitchen. These plants are not for the herbarium. They are to drink during the winter.

In a small bag, she keeps the seeds snatched from the birds at the end of the summer, the eventual garden.

Mother is in the kitchen; the girls are setting the table for dinner. Father is already seated. At the head of the table, as is fitting, he waits. Lavinia lays out the everyday cutlery, and Emily follows her with the blue-and-white porcelain plates.

Father makes a tsk sound as soon as she puts his down.

‘Yes, Father?’

‘I would like to know why I always get the chipped plate.’

Emily backtracks and squints. It’s true: the plate she has placed in front of him is missing a piece, the size of a lunula of a fingernail.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

She picks up the plate and calmly crosses the dining room and the kitchen, opening the door to the garden. There she spots a large, flat rock. She drops the plate on it, and the shards go flying. She goes back in the house with the same measured step and says, ‘It won’t happen again. I promise.’

Dumbstruck, he doesn’t answer.

His reflection on the waxed table is as astonished as he is. In the grass, the shards of porcelain look like the remains of a lost civilization.

‘Snow!’mm

Austin is the first one up. He runs into Emily and Lavinia’s bedroom, and Lavinia jumps to the window: the garden is blanketed in white, the trees trimmed with garland.

The three of them race down the stairs to put on their boots, coats, hats, shawls, and mittens. At the foot of the stairs, Father eyes them. He says nothing but is wearing his grandfather-clock expression. The children compose themselves just a little.

No one has been outside yet: they are the first to tramp in the white sheet of the garden, drawing three interconnected labyrinths. They make snowballs that explode like floury firecrackers on their dark coats.

Out of breath, Emily drops onto her back. She flaps her arms, then spreads her legs and brings them back together, to make a snow angel. Austin collapses on her right. Lavinia on her left. A host of angels appears in the snow, like a string of paper dolls.

It is still snowing. The snowflakes burn when they land on the children’s rosy cheeks. Their lashes are as white as if sprinkled with icing sugar. When they finally get up, their imprints stay sprawled on the ground – three little recumbent statues in snow.

Years later, leaning out of her window one December morning, Emily sees them again, three little ghosts, age five, seven, and nine. The children are no more, gone as surely as if they had been buried. Years later, looking out at the first snow, she bursts into tears.

In a portrait by Otis Allen Bullard, the children look like variations of the same person (their mother? their father?) – in any case, adults shrunk to childlike proportions: the serious expression, the long nose, the weary smile. They are practically interchangeable, except that Austin is dressed in a little suit with a white collar, while the two little girls are wearing dresses (sea green for Lavinia, a darker shade for Emily) with lace collars. They all appear to have short hair, parted on the side, but the girls’ hair may be pulled back. To the modern eye – and perhaps to the eye of the time as well – it could be a painting to remember three departed children, or one that was done years after the brother and sisters grew up, with the adults they had grown into as models.

Because, of course, we know the children survived, grew up, that one of them even had children of their own. Perhaps what the painting shows is that becoming an adult doesn’t spare the child from death.

On Main Street, they walk past the grand house built by their grandfather Samuel.

‘That’s where you were born,’ Austin tells Emily.

She knows. They were all born in that house. She refrains from answering, ‘And that is where I will die.’

‘When grandfather had it built, it was the first brick house in town.’

She knows that too. The big house where she lived until age ten holds no secrets for her, even after – shame, sacrilege, humiliation – Grandfather lost it, and they had to share it with the family of the merchant who bought it. On the west side were the Dickinsons. On the east side were the Macks. Every time Emily encountered one of them in the hallway, she would jump as if she had come upon a ghost or an intruder who had slipped in through the window. What were these strangers doing in her house?

Nearly four years after leaving it, she remembers it down to the last detail: the smell of wax on the blond wood floors, the shaft of sunlight that filtered in through the half-open blinds in Father’s office and that made the gold lettering on the spines of the books shine, the murky light of the little milk house where she and Austin would lap the cream off the neck of the milk bottles, the cool cellar fragrant with beets and onions, her bright bedroom.