The Cruelest Month

‘It’s for you.’ Madeleine carefully placed the small offering in the palm of Hazel’s hand. Madeleine was beaming. There was no other word for it. A scarf covered her bald head, her eyebrows were inexpertly penciled in so she looked a little astonished. A slight bluish tinge under her eyes spoke of a tired that went beyond sleepless nights. But despite all that, Mad had beamed. And her extraordinary delight filled the drab room.



They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years and while Hazel remembered each and every moment of their young friendship, she’d somehow forgotten how alive she’d felt around Madeleine. She looked down at her palm. The thing wasn’t a bone, but a note, all rolled up.



‘It was still in the sofa,’ said Madeleine. ‘Imagine that. After all these years. Waiting for us, I guess. Waiting for this moment.’



Madeleine seemed to carry magic with her, Hazel remembered. And where there was magic there were miracles.



‘Where’d you find this?’



‘Back there.’ Mad waved her hand behind the sofa. ‘Once, when you were in the bathroom, I slipped it into a little hole.’



‘A little hole?’



‘A little hole made by a little pen,’ Madeleine’s eyes sparkled as she mimicked digging and twisting a pen into the sofa, and Hazel found herself laughing. She could just see the girl tunneling away at her parents’ prized possession. Madeleine was fearless. While Hazel had been the school hall monitor, Madeleine had been the one trying to sneak into class late, after grabbing a smoke in the woods.



Hazel looked down at the tiny white cylinder in her palm, unsullied by exposure to sunlight and life, swallowed by the sofa to be coughed up decades later.



Then she opened it. And she knew she’d had reason to be afraid of the thing. For what it contained changed her life immediately and forever. Written in round, exuberant purple ink was a single simple sentence.



I love you.



Hazel couldn’t meet Madeleine’s eyes. Instead she looked up from the tiny note and noticed that her living room, which that morning had been so drab, was now warm and comfortable, the washed-out colors vibrant. By the time her eyes returned to Madeleine the miracle had happened. One had become two.



Madeleine went back to Montreal to finish her treatments, but as soon as she could she returned to the cottage in the countryside, surrounded by rolling hills and forests and fields of spring flowers. Madeleine had found a home and so had Hazel.



Now Hazel picked up her darning from the old horsehair sofa. She was worried. Worried about what was happening at the bistro.



They’d done the runes, the ancient Nordic symbols of divination. According to the rune stones Clara was an ox, Myrna a pine torch, Gabri a birch, though Clara told him the rune said bitch.



‘Well, it got that right,’ said Gabri, impressed. ‘And God knows you’re an ox.’



Monsieur Béliveau reached into the small wicker basket and withdrew a stone painted with a diamond symbol.



‘Marriage,’ suggested Monsieur Béliveau. Madeleine smiled but said nothing.



‘No,’ said Jeanne, taking the stone and examining it. ‘That’s the God Ing.’



‘Here, let me try.’ Gilles Sandon put his powerful, calloused hand into the delicate basket and withdrew it, his hand a fist. Opening it they saw a stone with the letter R. It looked to Clara a bit like the wooden eggs they’d hidden for the children. They too had been painted with symbols. But eggs were symbolic of life, while stones were symbolic of death.



‘What does it mean?’ Gilles asked.



‘It means riding. Adventure, a journey,’ said Jeanne, looking at Gilles. ‘Often accompanied by toil. Hard work.’



‘What else is new?’



Odile laughed, as did Clara. Gilles was a hard worker and his forty-five-year-old body testified to years as a lumberjack. Strong and strapping and almost always bruised.



‘But,’ Jeanne reached out and placed her hand over the stone still sitting in the soft center of Gilles’s palm, surrounded by callus hills, ‘you picked it up upside down. The R is inverted.’



Now there was silence. Gabri, who’d discovered by reading the small pamphlet on runes that his stone meant ‘birch’ not ‘bitch’, had been arguing with Clara and threatening to cut off her supply of pâté and red wine. Now the two of them joined the others and leaned in, the circle tight and tense.



‘What does that mean?’ Odile asked.



‘It means a difficult road ahead. It warns to be cautious.’



‘And what did his mean?’ Gilles pointed to Monsieur Béliveau.