Her cousin explains to her that her brother often left the boys’ dormitory at night, often by the gleam of a lamp. A father probably escorted him to the chapel. He came back a few hours later. He never spoke about what went on in the dormitory. Many boys left at night, sleepwalkers or ghosts awaiting their worst nightmare. Fred was spared, but, every night, he watched James leave and bit his sheet, cursing the heavens above for their having to live in this barbaric prison. His first instinct was to pray, which he detested for the rest of his life, after all, the prayer he knew came from a hell that promised to heal him of himself.
Amos, 1970
James
James has become a pariah, a zombie roaming the streets in the reserve. He runs on beer he’s stolen, rarely beer he’s bought, he smokes joint after joint, delusions separate him from the world, he doesn’t listen to anyone anymore. He’s stuck somewhere between the alcohol and the toke, he makes delicate pacts with drug dealers, but most of all he oozes with hatred. Hunting turns him off, work turns him off, he quit school that year; now that he’s sixteen years old, he believes he’s free, free to escape the world, its appalling ways. James is a sad beauty, a violent Adonis, he shows affection only to Anna, holds her hand sometimes, when he feels very lonely, a habit he carried over with him from residential school; his sister, the person who saved his life. He thought he would begin to speak again, be able to go out in the rowboat, go hunting with his dad, sketch drawings on a piece of wood, pick fruit, then eat half his spoils. Those memories aren’t his anymore.
His parents don’t trust him much anymore, he steals, cheats people; he’s become hard, sometimes violent, it’s no big deal to him, blows and insults come out of nowhere. He’s a slave to himself, thinks Anna, she tries to get him talk, to draw other emotions out of him. One night, after drinking a lot, his anger comes to a crescendo, he beats up a teenager who owes him some money. The kid, with his swollen eye, charges him; James is sent to prison for a while. Anna and their parents visit him every day, worried and scared at the same time. They ramp up their efforts to save him from this decline. But James won’t listen to anybody, he’s his own master, his own prison, he is horrified though when he learns that the kid ended up needing sixteen stitches. He thinks he’s turned into a monster.
He’s sent to a correctional home far away from the reserve; once again, they want to make him into someone else, far away from his family. This thought torments James all throughout his youth. He thinks at first that his parents are ashamed to call him their son, but later he understands that, above all, he’s become a threat to himself. An army of interveners keep vigil over the young man night and day, blow on the coals, try as hard as they can to bring him back. The only way to communicate with him is through drawings. James begins to draw out of necessity, he mails tons of drawings to Anna, a jumble of rough sketches that reflect the disorder inside of him. Everywhere a crucifix and always a red-brick prison.
Anna tries to put the pieces of her brother’s story together, string fragments of his pain together, his far-off song. One day, she receives a very long letter, reads it over and over and over again, despite the pain, despite the fury. Anna rereads every word, hugs her brother’s pain a long time, takes on his wounds; the tears on the paper transcribe her love for him. She curses the devil that did this, she thinks about the child of six, wild with joy as summer approached, the reckless child who was always the first to jump naked into the freezing lake at the beginning of May, the boy who wanted to imitate the birds down to their call, the day when he made fake wings out of leafy branches, a cardboard beak, no one on the whole reserve could hear anything but his laughter.
Over and over, she mentally goes back and forth between the six-year-old James and the James of the residential school. She clings to the happy memories to keep from drowning too, to save all that remains of James. She hesitates to disclose everything she knows to their parents, James’s nightmares, the nightmares of his childhood, the nightmares of his youth, that haven’t ended, stamped with the light of a lamp that wakes him, a hand over his mouth, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t wake the others up; otherwise, they would have been punished and my family would have suffered heavy consequences for what I had done. I’m certain he’s still alive, that he hurt other children before and after me. For a long time, I thought it was my fault, I didn’t understand, I was afraid that they hurt you too. He told me that if I told on him, you would be punished just as severely, and that, I couldn’t bear that. To this day, I can’t mention his name, I would be too scared for your sake. There were lots of kids like me and fathers like him, he wasn’t the only one to threaten me.
Anna spends several days in a state of stupor, she can’t break the bond of trust between her and James. She tries over and over to get a hold of him at the centre; every time, they tell her that he’s out, that he’s gotten into a fight with someone else and can’t take phone calls. Several days later, the phone rings, it’s not James; it’s the director of the centre. She tells the family that James has taken his life, they did all they could to bring him back; their sincere condolences, the police will bring his body to them, James will be buried with his people, Anna wants to die too.
Indigenous reserve in Abitibi
April 2009
Anna will go lay a spray of flowers on her brother’s grave, just as she has done every Thursday for thirty-nine years now. Thirty-nine years later and the memory is just as clear. She still wonders if she could have prevented his death, if she had been able to get a hold of James on the phone, maybe she could have prevented the familial nucleus from imploding. For a long time, she carried a heavy burden of guilt, she told herself that maybe her brother would still be alive, maybe he would have had children, children who, like him, would have jumped into the lake in May. Children who would have proudly born their father’s handsome features.
Back at home, she lays a second bouquet of daisies on the table. She haltingly shuffles through the mail, she doesn’t feel like opening the envelopes. She is still thinking about James, wonders how life would have been if he had lived. She imagines him at the table, playing cards with her husband; his candid laugh, a beer newly cracked open in his hand. She opens the newspaper, skims through it quickly, an article catches her eye: Indigenous children abused in Canadian residential schools: regret but no apology from the pope. She doesn’t read the article, she just wonders when the Church will finally fall to its knees.
In forests where the ancestors called the flurries of snow the breath of death, an artist fashions singular jewels out of feathers, a man of fifty-four responds to a letter tucked into a bottle tossed into the sea, a boy waits for the storm to burst so he can open his mouth and gulp the whole thing down. Nature flares its gills in this book, where forgiveness is both requested and offered. A Blanket against Darkness is full of stories that spring from the earth. Its landscape shows us that we are a northern people and that we are not alone in the world. We live in places filled with relics, where even one sudden movement can cause a whole colony to migrate elsewhere.
Catherine Harton was born in Montreal in 1983. She is the author of Petite fille brochée au ciel, Monomanies, and Francis Bacon apôtre. She was a finalist for the prix Émile-Nelligan, the prix Estuaire-Bistrot Leméac, as well as the prix Alain-Grandbois. In 2013, she was awarded the prix Félix-Antoine-Savard for poetry. Harton is studying psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Literary Translation
Series editor: Marc Charron
The Literary Translation series publishes English or French translations of contemporary or classic works in various literary genres, chosen for their unique qualities from the Canadian and international literary corpus.
Previous titles in this collection
Sullivan, Andrew F. Tout vient à mourir. Trans. Marc-André Clément. 2017.
Shields, Carol. Le poisson orange. Trans. Benoit Léger. 2016.
Poissant, Alain. The Fate of Bonté III. Trans. Rob Twiss. 2015.<
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Laurence, Margaret. De l’autre côté du Jourdain. Trans. Caroline Lavoie. 2015.
Myre, Suzanne. Death Sentences. Trans. Cassidy Hildebrand. 2014.
Shields, Carol. Le Carnaval du quotidien. Trans. Élise Fournier Lévêque. 2014.
Molina Lora, Luis and Julio Torres-Recinos, eds. Cloudburst: An Anthology of Hispanic Canadian Short Stories. Trans. dir. Hugh Hazelton. 2013.
Saidullah, Ahmad. Le Bonheur et autres troubles. Trans. Annick Geoffrey-Skuce, Marc Charron, and Caroline Lavoie. 2013.
Tawada, Yoko. Yoko Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation. Trans. Chantal Wright. 2013.
Wolf, Christa. They Divided the Sky: A Novel. Trans. Luise von Flotow. 2013.
For a complete list of our titles in this series, see:
www.press.uottawa.ca
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