Griffintown

by Marie Hélène Poitras

  The water, opaque as tar, conceals the reference points; fingers in search of something to hold on to collide with the sludgy walls covered with dead water weeds. Alice leans on the Indian’s shoulder and propels himself to the surface. The Indian reappears a minute later and it’s as if they have just been born into the world. Two brothers expelled from the matrix of a black womb. One night, unbeknownst to anyone, Evan pitched a dead horse into this stream. The horse was swallowed by the water and by the creatures who live perhaps at the very bottom, have lived there from the dawn of time. The Men from the City count on the presence of this waterway to attract buyers and sell them Project Griffintown 2.0.

  When Billy steps out of the office to announce what comes next in the ceremony, Alice and the Indian have already forgotten what the dispute was about.

  “We’ll hitch up the calèches and the black horses,” Billy announces.

  “What about Paul, what do we do with him?” asks Lloyd.

  “In the buggy that takes people on rides to the sugar shack. Needs a cleanup, a scrub to get rid of the mildew and cobwebs. La Grande Folle is coming.”

  They adorn horses and calèches, straighten the equipment, and transport Paul’s remains in the biggest calèche, hitched to four Percherons made light-headed by the manoeuvre. Shortly afterwards, an unruly procession turns onto the streets of Griffintown: five calèches in all, some twenty drivers and Le Rôdeur following, playing the harmonica. La Grande Folle brings up the rear, also on foot. The horses are nervous because the drivers are shouting and still drinking, bottles are smashed on the asphalt, and the sound of horseshoes smashing glass worries Charlie in the four-way harness; he starts to gallop slantwise, forcing the other horses that are hitched up to follow him, and the calèche seems about to capsize like a canoe. The coffin, a clattering assemblage of twisted planks, rolls off its base. The procession continues, noisy and undisciplined, the horses pounding the ground with their shoes, sweeping the air with their short Percheron tails, ears twitching, breathing gusts of moist air through their nostrils while the drivers recall the summer when they’d all got a dose that made them piss green. A memory more or less appropriate given the circumstances, but at least they’re making noise. Their convoy doesn’t go unnoticed and that’s part of Billy’s plan.

  As anticipated, La Mère sees them go past, La Mouche, too. The first is perched on the roof of a neighbouring building, the second is taking refuge behind a porte cochère.

  Back at the stable, Billy sends the coachmen home and waits. An hour passes, then two. Paul’s makeshift coffin has been set down on some bales of hay. Billy wonders once again how to dispose of the body, hoping against hope he won’t have to freeze it again.

  No sign of La Mouche.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, AFTER FEEDING, the horses, the last Irishman mounts Maggie and then, on her back, takes his tobacco pouch out of his shirt pocket, rolls himself a quickie, pulls down his cap, and orders Maggie towards the stream and the Lachine Canal, intending to follow it to the locks.

  Not far from rue de la Montagne, through the half-open door of a small factory that makes multi-coloured suitcases, he observes the employees for a moment. Blue suitcase, then red, yellow, green, pink, all for storing who knows what, planning to go who knows where. Billy is suddenly struck by a dizzy spell. The sky is about to fall on his head and he can’t escape his fate. This helplessness is unbearable.

  Behind him, towering above the skyscrapers, is Mont Royal and its eternal cross, about which he’s heard so many different stories, depending on which driver was telling it, to the point where he doesn’t even know how it got there and most of all, why it’s so important for it to stay in place. No matter what he does, it seems there is always a cross in his field of vision.

  It occurs to him that people like him, who stuff corpses into freezers, are probably no longer eligible for divine aid.

  Billy squints. On the horizon, starlings fly around the first small customs post not far from the locks. A fly settles on his cheek. He waves it away, aggravated. It comes back. He shakes the reins in every direction to force the animal to leave. Thinking she’s dealing with an awkward command, Maggie rushes into a gallop.

  He lets her go on. Maggie enjoys the damp carpet of plants, soft beneath her hooves; she speeds up, lengthens her stride, and her mane is tousled, lifting up and dropping down. Once he has reached the locks, Billy pulls on Maggie’s reins, makes her slow down, then brings her to a halt. He ties her to a lamppost, making a knot in the reins. The starlings are still chattering.

  Wondering why they’re so excited, the groom jumps out, bending his knees — a trick so the pain of impact won’t crack his kneecaps in two — and approaches the handrail. In the water that is largely responsible for the starlings’ turmoil, a red ball with yellow polka dots is swirling at the bottom of a small cascade, kept in place by the current that catches up with the falls in the opposite direction: stagnation in motion. He lets out an oath. Hearing him, Maggie raises her neck, orients her elegant head towards him, stops chewing, and slowly blinks. The grace of a horse, its singular vision, is enough at times to interrupt the man in his mute soliloquy.

  They take the same route back to the stable. The mare drags her feet a little, giving Billy time to roll a second cigarette; he cracks a match, creases his eyes, approaches the flame and inhales deeply, replacing the knot in the reins balanced on the pommel of the saddle. In the distance, the tin castle appears to be about to collapse. There must be a limit to the patching-up, a point of non-return, a moment when forced to throw in the towel and give up before the effect of time, before the work of gravity and erosion. The material bends, splits, falls apart, scatters, and that certainty gives Billy an urge to swallow a handful of earth; he feels the sand crumble, become dust between his molars, all the way to his belly.

  His attention is suddenly attracted to a dried-out, porous object; it could be coral or a crown of thorns, a dried sponge, perhaps white birds squabbling over a morsel of bread. The mass of leaves and twigs that has formed at the corner of Murray and Ottawa advances, twirling, apparently aimless, along William Street. He thinks: I’m alone in Griffintown with the horses.

  After leaving the strip of the Lachine Canal, he arrives at Richmond Street, mute and desolate as ever, and stops suddenly before a scene that takes his breath away.

  Close to the stall used for storing hay, at the end of the aisle where Evan parked his trailer before he ran away, La Mère Despatie watches over the body of her son.

  LEAD IN THE EYE

  *

  KNEELING BESIDE THE REMAINS, La Mère has set down her rifle. She unbuttons Paul’s shirt, frowns. Then sticks her fingers into the wounds and extricates two bullets she holds up to the sun, which turns them red, a ball of fire in a rose-coloured sky. Two shots to the heart, the work of a pistol nearly as ancient as the old Schultz & Larsen given by her father. There’s no possible doubt; the murder has been signed. La Mère slips the bullets into her pocket.

  When she recognizes the groom on horseback in the distance, she whistles and gestures to him to approach, then gets up and advances towards him, her expression like Doomsday. At seventy-five, La Mère looks more than ever like a tough nut to crack and she does justice to the outlaw reputation that runs through the Despatie lineage. She has taken off the green beret she wears all the time. Her shrivelled fingers are stained with pink and liquid blood, like a bird’s, Billy observes, joining her.

  Though still in a state of shock, the last of the Irishmen senses he’ll have to get a grip — and fast; in the presence of La Mère and Paul’s body, he’d be well-advised to say something profound.

  “We’ll have to avenge his honour! I’m going out to track down the piece of shit that did that,” he boasts, fist raised.

  “Stay away from that, kid. Start by getting rid of the asshole’s body. I’ll deal with the rest.”

  Disposing, once again, of Paul Despatie’s body. Billy has the unpleasant impression he�
��s back to square one.

  La Mère glances at the holes in her son’s chest and continues: “In my day, we left the men alone. We respected a kind of … of ethics. We had manners and we didn’t depart from the code.”

  Billy has heard of the methods of the old guard. At the time, prohibited goods passed systematically between the hands of the horsemen. Quickly, clans had formed, including the Despaties. Many horses have perished in appalling slaughterhouses. According to what Billy picked up, struggles for power, horses steeping in blood-stained straw — all that had decreased, then stopped completely, when La Mère Despatie had made a pact with the Montreal mafia, yielding part of her power in exchange for their protection. Normand Despatie had just succumbed to pneumonia and La Mère had inherited some of the business, her son being still too young to take over the reins. It was the beginning of an era undoubtedly not so prosperous but a lot less bloody, one that endured for decades and would no doubt have gone on like that for years … if the mafia hadn’t infiltrated the construction field and spread its roots to the planned redevelopment of the Far Ouest.

  Over the past decades, after finding gold in Griffintown, La Mère sat her son on the throne and then went back to the shadows. From her hiding place, she continues to watch over the delicate union between horsemen and the men with black hats.

  The Men from the City haven’t beheaded the right man. How could they have made such a grotesque mistake?

  They tried no doubt to lay the blame on La Mère, who is at once everywhere and nowhere; it’s impossible to point a gun in her direction. Rumours about her are making the rounds: some claim she’s living the good life in Cuba in a hacienda with an ocean view, others that she is living in a triplex in Pointe-Saint-Charles next door to a Polish shop. Joe is sure he spotted her at the Bingo Masson; Dan has heard that she’s taken up trafficking World War I weapons, like her father before her. Rumour has it that La Mère has bought “some shack for the rich” in Brossard near the dix30 mall where she is enjoying a peaceful retirement watching old episodes of Bonanza and listening to her lps of Willie Lamothe and Dolly Parton.

  Fiction, fantasy, and reality are confused as in every story about coachmen, favourable breeding grounds for the birth of legends of the calibre of Laura Despatie’s, a woman at once small and immense, with her rifle on her hip, her murderer’s haze and her built-up boots, legacy of the polio she had contracted as a small child.

  The last Irishman watches her limp away. Cursing, muttering, gripping her rifle like a cane. From now on there are two of them carrying Paul Despatie’s body at arm’s-length.

  * * *

  THE HÔTEL SALOON DISPLAYS a closed sign; it’s not yet noon but already the August sun is beating down.

  In the room at the back, Laura Despatie is pondering her vendetta while she chews plug tobacco and spits it on the ground. She has to reply; grief will come later. After such an affront, peace is impossible and what’s to follow, a risky algebra. For now, La Mère does not grasp what they want to take from her, or communicate with her. No doubt it’s a question of territory. Is it possible there’s been a change of clan or regime in the Mafia? One thing for sure, they’ll have to keep a sharp eye on the livestock. But can Billy really be trusted? It’s been a long time since Laura Despatie has battled Evil in Griffintown; she is unfocussed and her fighter’s reflexes not as sharp as they used to be.

  She is still convinced of one thing: best not to underestimate the intentions of the riffraff who ordered the murder of her son. For now, she recognizes the underling — and he’ll pay for this despicable act — but not the one or ones who pulled the strings.

  Knowing he’ll get there long before Marie, he allows himself a little detour near the construction site behind the Horse Palace. In the midst of the scaffolding, Leo Leonard’s stable is resisting as best it can, like something being tossed about by a storm, though it is encircled by hills of loose stones and brick. The old Irishman put it up for sale some years ago after he got rid of his last horses, but he’s asking so much it’s still on the market, being courted only by a heritage support group.

  She oils the tip of her rifle.

  * * *

  La Crinoline

  It was said that for a number of years, before she took over the Hôtel Saloon, Laura Despatie had run a small house where businessmen and a few lawyers had appointments with prostitutes from the east end of town wearing full-skirted dresses like Claudia Cardinale. On the walls of the rooms with their rustic furniture hung lassos, whips, photos of dried-up mountains, statues of grey wood, giant cactuses, and droves of mustangs. Paul was a teenager at the time of La Crinoline; hidden in a broom closet between two rooms, he would get an eyeful through cracks he enlarged with a screwdriver and a Swiss army knife. When for reasons she would never know she was ordered to place the key under the door, she decided to open a tavern, and the bulk of the interior decoration ended up in the Hôtel Saloon. The double doors in the stairway that led to the rooms were taken down and placed in the entrance to the Saloon.

  On the yellowing photos in the brothel and in the hotel, there was an eternal sky of faded bluish yellow to stare into.

  A few girls from La Crinoline recycled themselves in the calèche business: Trish, Trudy, and Patty in particular, nicknamed “old skins” because of their past lives. One summer Paul had a chance to realize a teenage fantasy: finally to be in the client’s place. With Trish it was several times a day: the office in the afternoon; at night in a calèche; on all fours in a haystack; stretched out on sacks of wood shavings.

  The following year they avoided such excesses and kept their distance. Paul turned to Patty, the glummest happy hooker, intending to attach a smile to her lips. He succeeded, but in exchange she passed on the clap. Over the years most of the coachmen picked up a dose, too.

  When La Mère took over the Hôtel Saloon, the brass hitching post at the entrance to the bar wasn’t merely a pleasant anachronism; the coachmen went to the tavern regularly with their horses. Laura Despatie’s hair was smooth and lush then, long before the wig. Once, La Mère had had a slender waist, clear skin, and pink cheeks; though she’d never been clothes-conscious and was afflicted with a nasty limp that wouldn’t have been tolerated in a horse. No client would have dared show disrespect to Laura Despatie. Once, only once, Dan was sent to take care of the protection money. The year after that the message from the mafia was categorical: it was La Mère they wanted to deal with. The little glass of white port that she served them and the tin of homemade nougat with pistachios and candied orange peel into which she slipped the wad of bills every month must have had something to do with it. But that was her little secret and she would take it with her to the grave.

  La Mere’s visits to Griffintown became more infrequent over time. She entrusted the stable to Paul; and to Dan, her grand-nephew by marriage, the tavern. It was in their best interest not to disturb her about a rickety stool leg or a horse with diarrhoea, or she would bark something like, “You let him knock back a can of Coke mixed with gin, you don’t let him lie down till he shits, and now you’re pissing me off over something that stupid? You asshole!”

  Despotic and impossible to topple, old lady Despatie showed up at the Hôtel Saloon once a year when it was time to pay the pizzo. Peace had a price; it was part of a smooth business operation. Those people were in no mood to laugh, but they always had a word — or at least they’d once had one, until Paul was murdered — whence La Mère’s confusion. Thanks to payment of the pizzo, troublesome visitors were rare and mafia-linked explosions tended to happen in other dives. The transaction between Laura Despatie and a man in a black hat took place in the office, after which the visitor left through the back door and Laura Despatie went back to the bar, giving little kicks to the chairs of customers whose backs weren’t straight enough for her liking. The former manager of one of the last brothels in town swallowed a hardboiled egg, stuffed her cheek with a healthy quid of chewing tobacco, and limped away, God knows where, until th
e next settling of accounts.

  * * *

  LAURA DESPATIE'S TEETH HAVE taken on a waxy tinge after a day spent chewing tobacco and ingesting nothing but a can of tuna and some black tea.

  As it is every Monday, the Hôtel Saloon is closed, yet from the window can be caught a glimpse of a yellowish gleam at the far end of the corridor — a bare bulb, its harsh, dazzling light seeming to spatter the whole room and even beyond, as if the blazing light were trying to run away from its source to contaminate the entire tavern.

  * * *

  AT THE SALOON, WITH the help of a soup spoon, La Mère removed the eyeballs from Boy. In those two holes there is, aside from the sensation of vertigo and the infinity that such a vision procures, a nest of spiders that use the time to run away. La Mère filled in the empty eye-sockets of old cracked leather with the two bullets she’d taken from her son’s remains. She left the spoon on the counter near the stuffed horse and took the time to eat a pickled egg.

  La Mère made a double knot in her shoelaces with fingers still stained with her son’s blood, straightens her beret, holds her rifle against her side, and leaves the Saloon through the back door. In Griffintown not one horseshoe can be heard clacking along the pavement. Only the broken tread of Laura Despatie.

  The cracks around Boy’s eye-sockets are even more pronounced now that they have lead in them. With or without blinkers, the first horse sees nothing but the death of Paul. Beginning now, Griffintown can be summed up as a son sacrificed and a mother pondering her revenge.

  * * *

  BILLY CONSIDERS BRIEFLY TOSSING Paul’s body into the water of the canal. That would be idiotic. Facile, quick — but idiotic. Suddenly he has a strong urge to bang his forehead with a shovel, but he holds back. The groom has run out of resources.

  Three Legs walks past, watching him from the corner of his eye. Despite his missing limb, the cat still has his feline agility; he ripples like a stream deviated from its course. Billy had kept his eyes off this cat during the first months of his three-legged life. At one point, Evan had intended to drown the cat, but was never able to catch him. There’s no suffering left in that animal; his green eyes gleam, damp and triumphant, now that night has fallen.