After a while, I left the church.
A headline in the Times:
LEADS DWINDLING IN
MURDER CASE;
SEARCH FRUITLESS
The search for Herve Boisseneau and the knife allegedly used in the three-week-old murder of Rudolphe Toubert has reached a virtual dead end, police announced today …
I put down the newspaper after reading the story, feeling neither relief nor dread.
I told myself: If Herve Boisseneau is ever found, I will give myself up.
I thought of Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities we were studying at Silas B. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”
But I did not feel noble like Sidney Carton.
Did not feel anything at all.
I cut the newspaper story out of the Times with my mother's scissors and placed it carefully folded with the poems and stories I kept on the closet shelf along with my uncle's blue bandanna.
* * *
A house in which no one sleeps is a haunted house. You wake up in the middle of the night and hear muffled voices and soft footsteps and even if you strain your ears and hear nothing, you know that the house is not still, people are in the rooms, standing watch.
The men always kept the all-night vigil at wakes, letting the women sleep. The women carried most of the burden of the wake, providing food and drink and comforts hour after hour, tending to the children and keeping the household going. Certain things never stop even with death. Washing and ironing and preparing the meals, soothing an unhappy child, making beds. When the night hours came, the women went home, except for my aunt Olivine, who remained behind to help my mother until they both collapsed in bed in exhaustion. My aunt Rosanna was not present at the wake. It had been impossible to notify her of Bernard's death. No one knew her address. She had not sent any postcards or letters since her departure a few months before.
“She was going to open a beauty shop in Montreal,” I told my father when he reported that no one knew how to get in touch with her.
My father's lips twisted in contempt. “Rosanna run a business? What a pipe dream. She's probably waiting on tables somewhere.”
In my bed, as I listened to the vague comings and goings of the all-night vigil, the voices gave me no rest.
You killed him.
A heart attack. Bernard died of a heart attack.
Eight-year-olds don V have heart attacks.
It's rare. But it happens. Dr. Goldstein said so.
Dr. Goldstein can be wrong. Dr. Goldstein is not God.
Bernard was always delicate.
Not delicate enough to die.
Please, leave me alone.
Why should you be left alone when you are to blame?
The argument went on during the small, still hours of the night, the voice inside me with its accusations, and I recoiled in horror because the voice was me: I was the voice.
During the day, I went through the motions of mourning, knelt before the coffin, murmuring prayers, avoiding after a while looking at Bernard as he lay stiff and unmoving. By the evening of the second day, I made myself look at him. His flesh had begun to alter, no longer pale now but darkening. His features also seemed to grow thicker, lips, nostrils. He was changing before our eyes but nobody said anything, nobody made comment. Perhaps they did not notice. Perhaps Bernard was changing only for me. I fled the room, the cloying flowers, the suffocating closeness.
My uncle Adelard found me in the shed.
He sat himself down on an old kitchen chair that my father had thrown out because the legs were wobbly. He looked at me with such sadness—the old sadness I knew so well—that my anger deserted me, and left me empty.
I had schemed in the first few hours to approach my uncle and confess what had happened. He would have the answers for me. But now I hesitated.
“When Uncle Vincent died …” I began.
“Yes … I know how you feel, Paul. He was my brother, the way Bernard is yours …”
“In the cemetery that day,” I said, gathering my nerve, “you said that Vincent died because of you …” I almost added: because of the fade. But did not.
“I blamed myself for a long time, Paul,” he said. “Still do, maybe. But learned to live with it …”
“Why did you blame yourself?”
“Because I did nothing to help him. He was in a lot of pain but kept it to himself. He told only me. Pledged me to secrecy. In the night, he'd wake up and I'd hold him. Don't tell Papa, he'd say. And I didn't. I should have told our papa. I used the fade to help him….”
“How did the fade help?”
“I used the fade to slip into Lakier's. Found medicine there. I had heard that a medicine called paregoric had dope in it. To ease pain. Found the paregoric and brought it to him. He slept.
“The thing is, Paul, I did not think he was sick enough to die. I thought he was only sick and in pain and wanted me to help him. Wanted me to help him keep his condition a secret from everyone else. If that is what made him happy, then I was glad to do it. I used the fade to bring him toys. Went out at night and broke into the stores, brought him things. Did all I could. Loved him, kept his secrets, used the fade to help his pain. But he died anyway. In fact, he might have lived if I had not interfered. Or if I had told my parents what he was going through.” Tears gathered in his eyes. “But I did not expect him to die.”
I touched his arm in sympathy and knew that I could not confide in him after all. The circumstances of Vincent's death were different from Bernard's. My uncle Adelard had not killed anyone. Vincent's death was not an act of revenge.
I left him and knelt before the coffin, not praying, looking at the poor frail thing that had been my brother.
I'm sorry, Bernard, Pm sorry.
But knew that words were not enough.
Bernard was buried on a wind-howling morning, the cold biting at our cheeks as we stood under a faded green canopy that was no protection at all. We huddled together, shivering and shuddering, looking at the gray metal coffin held by straps above the hole beneath it. I averted my eyes and saw Mr. LeFarge at a distance, standing near the fence, leaning stolidly on his shovel, as if this were a summer afternoon.
The words of Father Belander were tossed on the air and blown away by the wind, French and Latin phrases dissipating on the air. Booming thunderclaps accompanied the wind, out of season, as if heaven itself protested Bernard's death and burial. Armand and I clung together, arms around each other, sniffing, tears frozen on our cheeks.
Snow began to fall, whirling madly as the procession made its way home in borrowed cars and a black limousine supplied by Tessier's Funeral Home. The car I rode in belonged to Mr. Lakier and it had a plush interior, everything maroon, and a smell peculiar to my senses: the smell of newness.
“A blizzard,” someone yelled as we hurried out of the cars and up the steps to our tenement.
Everyone settled in the kitchen and parlor, my mother and aunts bustling about preparing food and the men in small groups, drinking whiskey in quick gulps.
After a while, I slipped into the bedroom and closed the door softly behind me, did not look at the bed where Bernard had slept between Armand and me. I went to the window. The panes were white with frost. I tried to wipe the frost away with my sleeve but failed to clear even a small spot.
I tried to cry but could not.
It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.
With numbed fingers I unfastened the latch and raised the window, and was immediately buffeted by the swirling wind and snow. The sting of the cold stabbed my eyes, seared my cheeks.
Thinking of Bernard sealed in the coffin, buried in the earth, still and silent until he became dust—my little brother, dust—I placed my hands on the windowsill, my face remaining exposed to the cold and the snow and the wind.
“Bastard,” I yelled, but did not know whom I was cal
ling a bastard.
“I will never fade again,” I vowed, not knowing whether I spoke aloud or not.
“The hell with the fade,” I cried, repudiating this thing that had entered my life like something evil. “I make this promise. I will never use the fade again. Kill me if I do….”
I waited. For what? I did not know. But waited all the same.
A small noise reached my ears. Barely a noise, a rattle of metal hitting wood. Looking down, I saw the old tin can that Pete Lagniard and I used to send messages up and down to each other from the first floor to the second.
I picked it up, remembering the hot, lush summertime when Pete and I had ghosted through the night on our way to Moccasin Pond. How innocent I had been. As I tilted the can a bit of snow spilled out, and I saw something inside, a piece of paper, flattened and folded. My fingers were so numbed that it was difficult to pull the paper out. I unfolded it eagerly because it was precious suddenly, a souvenir of the summer, an old message left by Pete before the strike and the violence and all the bad things that had happened. Before the fade.
I opened the folded note and saw the scrawled words, twisting like tiny snakes on the paper.
Hello, Paul
The handwriting was unmistakably Bernard's.
Pete and I had often been discouraged in our use of the pulley system for communication because our brothers and sisters, aware of what we were doing—it was hard to keep the system a secret—played tricks on us. We found everything from dead mice to disgusting pieces of garbage in the can. I knew that Armand had been the one to leave the mice, while Pete swore that his brother, Herbie, had donated the garbage. We stopped using the system for a while, resuming it after a few weeks went by. My sisters used to leave notes in the can reminding me to take out the rubbish or that it was my turn to wipe the dishes, a chore I hated. Bernard left me a note occasionally, usually a crazy riddle or just a greeting. He never signed them but I always recognized his handwriting.
I stared at the note, the paper brittle, the penciled lines stark and distinct on the whiteness of the paper.
Hello, Paul.
As if he had spoken to me.
I knew that I would never use the fade again, no matter how long I lived. I did not want others to die because of me.
On Sunday, I went to mass with my mother and father. The time for communion arrived. I joined them in the aisle, knelt at the communion rail, my hands folded under the white linen cloth. Raised my head to the priest, opened my mouth, allowed the wafer to be placed on my tongue. Trudged back to my seat, the wafer melting on my tongue. I was careful not to let it touch my teeth. I swallowed the wafer, telling myself: Think of it as a wafer, not communion, not the Body of Christ.
Kneeling, I waited for thunder and lightning, for the walls of the church to crumble, the pillars to tumble against each other. But nothing happened.
That was the worst thing of all.
The nothingness. The emptiness that never would be filled in all the years to come.
Twenty-five years later, I lay in my bed in the third-floor tenement across from St. Jude's Church, in the fade, in the middle of the night, my sister sleeping nearby in the bedroom, innocent of my condition.
I had never broken the vow I had made the day Bernard was buried and refused to consider what nightmares would be unleashed if I invited the fade. The fade had invited itself, however, depleting me, coming again and again, and I was helpless to prevent its assault.
In the safety of the darkness I endured the fade one more time, putting off the moment when I would force it away, postponing for a little while whatever symptoms would appear—the pause, the pain, the cold.
That night, however, there was almost bliss in the way the fade possessed me. I thought of that other fader out there, that unknown nephew who would carry the fade to another generation, whom I had been helpless to assist until tonight.
Rose had given me the clues I needed.
I would find him.
Warn him, protect him.
I would try to do for that poor fader what my uncle Ade-lard had never been able to do for me.
he nuns took him in, fed him, nursed his colds and fevers, treated his wounds and gave him their tender loving care. Thank Christ for the nuns, although he hated the convent itself. Hated the rest of the world too. Hated himself as well, especially the parts of himself he could do nothing about, the headaches and the sniveling. Never could get rid of it, the running nose, ever since the Pa who was not his Pa had knocked him on the nose and sent him reeling across the room. Then, seeing the blood and the warped bone, hit him again and again in the same spot. Ever since, Ozzie's nose had run incessantly and fierce pains sometimes raged in his head above his eyes and shot down to his cheekbones.
“Stop the sniveling,” commanded his Pa who was not his Pa, but a fake and a fraud, then hit him again. “And stop the crying.” When he was a little kid, he would cry when the old fraud struck him and the crying sent the fraud into a frenzy and he would hit Ozzie again, yelling at him to stop the crying, damn you. He tried to explain that he was crying because he was being hit and it was impossible to stop unless the hitting stopped but he could not get the words out because the blows were relentless. Finally, after a long while, he learned to stop crying. Or did something dry up inside him, in the place where tears formed? He could not stop the sniveling, but, by Christ, he could stop the crying. And that's what he did. He did not cry anymore, no matter what happened.
His mother was the reason he went to live with the nuns. Poor Ma, that he loved so much. He remembered her as the smell of bottles. The smell, really, that came out of the bottles, which he learned later was the booze. Gulping the booze behind the door, out of sight, when she thought nobody was looking. It took him a long time to realize she was hiding the sips and the gulps, until finally she hid them no longer and drank the stuff down hungrily like it was food and she was starving. And when the fraud came home, he would hit her for the drinking and hide the bottles and later break them, smashing them into the sink and smashing her too.
At night, Ozzie tried to block his ears against the noises he heard in the bedroom. The strange noise of the bedsprings, yes, but more than that, the cries of his Ma and sometimes the moaning and then her muffled screams and the grunting of the old man like a wild animal. Ozzie could not bear to hear the sounds and he would block his ears and dig himself deep into the bed and the blankets.
Finally, one night, her cheek purple with bruises and her jaw scarlet and swollen, she crawled to Ozzie's bed and whispered frantically to him that she had to leave, kissing him good-bye and hugging him and telling him that she would come and get him soon but she never did. “Try to stay out of his way,” she said. She went to live in that terrible house on Bowker Street where the whores lived, although she was never a whore. And she died before she could come and rescue him. When the old fraud discovered she was gone, he gave Ozzie one of the worst beatings of all, and then the old faker tore the house apart, smashed chairs against the wall and slammed dishes to the floor, before he finally fell asleep in a heap on the kitchen floor, where Ozzie found him in the morning.
Your Pa is poor and your Ma is a whore.
That was the refrain he heard in school after his Ma went to live on Bowker Street. That's why he hated the kids, especially Bull Zimmer, who chased him every day and caught him sometimes and rubbed Ozzie's nose in the dirt or squashed it on the sidewalk while the other kids laughed. By this time he had learned something else besides not crying. He had learned to endure. Endure, a word from school. Looked it up. So he endured. Did not cry. Suffered the blows. Refused the help of Sister Anunciata, angry at her that time she chased Bull Zimmer away after Bull Zimmer had followed him to the convent throwing rocks and hitting Ozzie on the back of the head with one.
Later in the convent, Sister Anunciata bathed his wound, and ran a cool hand across his brow. She smelled of old medicine on the shelf too long. She was old herself, brown spots on the backs of her
hands, face wrinkled like a crumpled paper bag. That's all he ever saw of her, the face and the hands, the rest of her enclosed in the black and white. He felt her hand cool on his forehead and almost, almost, yielded to it, almost but not quite, holding back.
“Summer's coming, Ozzie,” she whispered. “And you won't have to go to school for a while. You can work here in the convent.”
School was the old brick building downtown where his teacher, Miss Ball, in the eighth grade, was as hard as her name and gave him the freeze, pretended he wasn't there, never called on him to recite, which was as bad in its way as Bull Zimmer hitting him after classes were done. When she looked him straight in the eye one time, he saw something worse than hate. Saw nothing in her eyes. As if he did not exist, did not matter.
“Poor Ozzie,” Sister Anunciata said.
And he pulled away from her but in a gentle way, because she was his only friend. But he still did not want her pity, wanted nobody's pity.
“But I don't pity you, poor Ozzie,” she said. “Pity is placing myself above you.”
“What is it then?” he said, puzzled.
“Compassion,” Sister Anunciata said. “Compassion, boy. And love. What Our Lord feels for us all, although I am not setting myself up as the Lord.”
Always so modest, the nuns, so proper, whispering in the convent, so fearful of being more than they seemed.
“Mea culpa,” Sister Anunciata said, kneeling by his bed. “Mea culpa …”
He looked at her suspiciously, did not trust anyone speaking in another language. “What's that mean?” he asked, eyes narrow, fearing she was playing a trick on him.
“Nothing for you to concern yourself about,” she said.
But the words lingered in his ears.
“Let us pray together,” she said.
He prayed for his Ma, nobody else, not even himself.
Poor Ma, who was not really his Ma, but loved him and he loved her. He knew that he was adopted, that the Ma of his blood had given him away. Often, when he was little, Ozzie got confused by them all. His real Ma and Pa, the blood ones, were gone forever, of course. And good riddance. He would never know their names or where they came from or where they went to. Which was fine and dandy with him. He hated them both, as much as you could hate anyone you'd never known. They had abandoned him, left him behind. Gave him away, for Christ's sake. What kind of people gave their baby away?
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