Days by moonlight

by André Alexis

  felt relief at the young girl’s rescue and I was sure I wasn’t alone.

  But then I sensed the crowd’s mood and, for a moment, I was a

  stranger amongst my contemporaries. Were they really more

  disappointed in the McGregors’ loss than they were happy at

  the young girl’s rescue?

  As we walked away from Kiiskinen’s Dale, we were met by

  the Flynns’ neighbour, the man from Belleville, still in the checked

  shirt he’d worn to mow his lawn. He seemed such a polite and

  unassuming man, I was shocked when Ms. Flynn called him the

  rude word to his face.

  – This is my neighbour, she said, the cunt from Belleville.

  And then

  – Cunty, this is Morgan Bruno and his assistant, Alfred.

  – Pleased to meet you, he said. But, you know, many people

  call me Alby. The other is only my nickname.

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  – How did you get such a strange nickname? asked Professor

  Bruno.

  – The nickname is strange, he said, but the story behind it is

  banal, I’m afraid. I was born in Germany, yeah? My family is

  from the nobility. My name is Wilhelm Alberich Baldur Peter,

  Graf von Neuenahr Ahrweiler. My parents are proud of our

  heritage. So, they used to insist people call me Graf von Neuenahr

  Ahrweiler. That’s even when we moved to Belleville. Which is

  where my mother went to practise medicine. When I was in

  Grade 8, I made the mistake of telling someone that Graf means

  Count and that meant I was a Count from Belleville. The rest you

  can imagine. I’ve been called the cunt from Belleville so often, it

  feels like my real name. And, you know, I don’t think about it

  anymore, unless someone asks me where it comes from.

  – Don’t you find it inconvenient? asked the professor.

  – Not exactly, Alby answered. When I was young, I liked it,

  because it made my parents furious. These days I like trying to

  guess who’ll use it and who’s horrified. I thought Brigid would

  be horrified, but I was wrong. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s

  happier to call me cunt.

  – But I’m not calling you that! said Ms Flynn. Cunt from

  Belleville is an honorific.

  – Well, almost, said Alby. But I’m not sure it matters, anyway.

  A rose by any other name …

  Rather than drive us back to her home, Ms. Flynn insisted

  we eat at the Wolf and Pendulum, a place that reminded me of

  taverns I’ve been in throughout the province – television behind

  the bar, Canadian flag above the shelves of hard liquor, a number

  of booths and a number of tables, the place full of people who’d

  been to the house burning or seemed to have been, all the audible

  talk being about McGregors and Ainsleys.

  When we’d got a table, Ms. Flynn ordered food (shepherd’s pie

  and tourtière), and a round of Old V (for all but me), plus a Nobleton

  Hard Pear Cider (for me). Count Neuenahr Ahrweiler said

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  – This makes the second house burning I’ve seen. I think I’m

  going to wait a few years before I see another.

  – Why’s that? Ms. Flynn asked.

  But before the count could answer, a number of people – three

  or four, I think, though the number changed whenever I looked up

  – moved their chairs to our table and joined the conversation.

  – The cunt from Belleville’s right, said someone. The house

  burning is too much. People can’t give the poor anything, without

  they burn it down, too.

  – The fuckers giveth and they taketh away.

  – But at least we’re not Coulson’s Hill.

  – You look up stupid in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of

  the Indigenous Parade.

  With that done – everyone having acknowledged the prob-

  lems of the house burning while ridiculing Coulson’s Hill – the

  conversation turned to what was uppermost on people’s minds:

  the treatment of the McGregors. There was general agreement

  that an injustice had been done. The McGregors had lost their

  home while rescuing a six-year-old child. It wasn’t up to them to

  look after the Ainsleys’ children. That was the committee’s duty!

  The whole thing amounted to taking from the innocent – the

  McGregors – for doing good. Even the Ainsleys thought so.

  They’d volunteered to surrender their home to the McGregors.

  But the committee wouldn’t hear of it. They refused to take

  circumstances into account. It didn’t matter to them why the

  McGregors’ home burned down. The fact of it was all that

  mattered. And what was their reason?

  A short, red-faced man who’d been getting more and more

  agitated spoke up.

  – There’s no reason! They’re damned unreasonable!

  He was shushed by another short, red-faced man. No, no. The

  committee did have a reason. Just not a very good one. It seemed,

  as far as the committee was concerned, that one had to remember

  the whole purpose of the house burning. The purpose was to

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  celebrate the past through understanding. In the past, fate made

  no exceptions. Fire came. Houses burned. Lives went on, differ-

  ently. Had their house burned two hundred years previously, the

  McGregors would have been left as they were now. That was the

  point. For the legions that had come from Europe and pushed

  the Indigenous off the land, calamity was irrevocable.

  A third short and red-faced man – a cousin to the others –

  said

  – But this isn’t the past! It’s 2017! Why shouldn’t we be

  humane when we have the luxury?

  – Exactly! said his short, red-faced cousin. What Bobby said!

  We should be building a home for the McGregors!

  Though I didn’t drink anything after the pear cider, I couldn’t

  make out the time on the clock behind the bar. But it must have

  been late when the serious arguments started. Because although

  I appreciated the passion my companions brought to the subject

  of the McGregors, I lost the thread of the argument. I was left

  with impressions: grey hair recently grooved by a comb, white

  T-shirts stretched taut over bulging stomachs, ruddy skin,

  yellowed teeth, missing teeth, phrases that struck me (“My chick-

  ens were inebriated,’ “You can poach rhubarb, eh”), the smell of

  beer, the smell of whisky on someone’s breath, the smell of

  french fries and just-microwaved chuckwagons: slices of ham

  and slices of bright-orange cheese carelessly tucked into a wrin-

  kled hamburger bun.

  Beneath these small impressions, there was something deeper.

  I could feel the flow of that particularly Canadian thing: passion

  brought on by outrage. Outrage seeped into the Wolf and Pendu-

  lum and permeated the place: an outrage that turned, at times, to

  aggression, an aggression that few of those in the pub would have

  permitted themselves unless prompted by their sense of political

  imbalance – the fate of the poor, petty rules running roughshod

  over good people, distant committees dictating to those who lived

  in Nobleton. In the Wolf and Pendulum, I recognized what your />
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  could call a “Canadian instinct” or, if you were being unkind, a

  Canadian addiction: moral reproach.

  Now the house burning made a kind of sense to me. In the

  past, I’ve often been dismayed by how desperately my compatriots

  crave the feeling of moral superiority. No opportunity for finger-

  pointing goes untaken, while the finger-pointing itself leads

  nowhere but to more finger-pointing. On this night, however,

  the cries of “Shame!” or “Fuck the committee!” were reassuring,

  because the emotions expressed were so typical of Canadian

  life, of my life.

  This feeling of familiarity – of reassurance – lasted until I

  went to sleep.

  The following morning, after a quiet breakfast with Brigid’s

  father, we left for Coulson’s Hill.

  The first time I saw five flower ( Monotropa cinqueflora), a variation

  of the ghost plant, was as we drove along Highway 27, the old

  Simcoe County Road between Nobleton and Schomberg.

  Professor Bruno was not feeling well. He (and Brigid) had

  drunk too much the night before. Just past Schomberg, he asked

  me to stop the car a moment so he could let his stomach settle.

  While he sat in the front with the windows down, I walked in a

  ditch by the side of the road. The sun was somewhere above,

  burning through a thin curtain of cloud, the blue sky visible in

  scarlike stretches. There was wind – the trees shook and dry

  stubble in a field sounded like a rattle.

  I thought at first that the five flower was a tall mushroom or

  an unusual fungus. It had white flowers and a white stalk, as

  Monotropa does, but it was growing out of the rotting trunk of a

  fallen elm. Then I saw that it was “four-headed” – four bell-like

  flowers growing from one stalk – and recognized it for what it

  was. I was surprised – cinqueflora is usually found in old-growth

  forests – and pleased. I was also hopeful of finding a fully devel-

  oped flower, one with five heads. I examined quite a length of

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  ditch and, although I didn’t find one, I came away feeling grateful

  that I’d finally seen a flower I’d often heard about, most recently

  from Professor Binama, a former teacher of mine.

  When Professor Bruno’s stomach had settled – he’d spit up

  in the weeds and felt better – we went on to Coulson’s Hill. The

  farms we passed smelled of their own greenery – corn, canola,

  cilantro – and of the greenery around them: Johnson grass,

  Queen Anne’s lace, buttercups, chicory, maple trees, elms, the

  occasional clump of evergreens, sticking out as if there by some

  mysterious design.

  According to Professor Bruno, Coulson’s Hill was named for

  George Coulson, a cobbler from Brighton who, in 1840, had a

  dream that he was destined to find a fortune somewhere in North

  America, that his family was destined for great wealth. A few

  years later, he was on his way across Canada, heading to Califor-

  nia, when he fell ill near what became Coulson’s Hill. Feverish

  and near death, George Coulson dreamed of a seam of gold

  directly beneath the grass on which his burning body lay, a great

  seam that would make him rich. And when he’d recovered, he

  dug up the land beneath him and found pure gold, a brilliant

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  vein in a long stretch of quartz. It was enough gold to make him

  a wealthy man, but not rich. Faithful to his dream, convinced

  he’d find more, Coulson spent his money digging up the land

  around the spot where he’d found gold. He dug systematically,

  for twenty years, until he’d excavated every bit of ground within

  a square mile, save for a kind of hillock, a raised circle whose

  diameter was twenty-five feet.

  By the time he was fifty-seven, Coulson had spent most of his

  gold searching for more of it. Yet, neither age nor lack of funds

  put an end to his digging. This did: the hillock, derisively known

  as “Coulson’s Hill” by his neighbours, was all that was left to him

  of his dream. If he dug it up and found nothing, his twenty-year

  search would have to be called a delusion. To have found another

  modest seam of gold would have been almost as bad, scarcely

  worth the decades he’d devoted to it. He was at an impasse.

  George Coulson died in his seventies, having neither exca-

  vated the hill nor permitted anyone to do the digging for him.

  After his death, no one was interested in his plot of land. No

  one believed he’d been much more than a fanatic. So, Coulson’s

  Hill, which now serves as the name of a village – a crossroads,

  really – became something of a synonym for broken dreams,

  hesitation, and futility. Professor Bruno could not think of Coul-

  son’s Hill without feeling both pity and scorn.

  My own feelings were harder to pin down. I agreed it was a

  pity George Coulson had never learned for certain if he was

  meant to find more gold. But I also felt – maybe because I’d just

  seen my first cinqueflora – that Coulson, by refusing to dig, had

  kept alive the possibility of finding something precious. Despite

  the professor’s view, the name Coulson’s Hill struck me as hope-

  ful, maybe even forever hopeful.

  – No, not really, said Professor Bruno. The hill was dug up

  long ago. It’s buried under the 27 somewhere. No one ever found

  anything there but shale.

  I must have looked puzzled because he added

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  – The fact you believe in a dream doesn’t make it real, Alfie.

  A thought that’s difficult to deny. But it occurred to me, as

  Professor Bruno spoke the words, that being awake is no proof

  that what you see is real any more than being asleep is proof that

  it’s not. The realms – sleeping and waking – are different, but

  you have to be attentive in both. Not that my dreams are as

  hazardous as reality. They’re strange and sometimes frightening,

  but there’s a consistency to them as well. The memorable ones,

  the ones that recur, almost always begin with me going on a long

  trip – as I did when I was a child, travelling to churches with my

  parents. They often end similarly, too, with some variant of us

  (me, my mother, my father) driving home along the curve of the

  lakeshore, the cn Tower in the distance.

  Mr. Henderson, the friend of Skennen’s who’d been recom-

  mended by Ms. Flynn, lived just off the 11th Line. He was a tall

  man. At a guess, I’d say he was six feet five and looked as if he

  weighed at least three hundred pounds. He was intimidating. As

  was his voice. It was a loud whisper. He’d got it – the raucous

  whisper – when, as a younger man, he’d been hit in the throat by

  a bar stool. The stool hadn’t hurt him all that much. It had been

  wielded by his younger brother, Henry, when they’d both been

  drunk, after winning a number of bets as to where on Mr. Hender-

  son’s person hard objects could be broken.

  – I don’t do that kind of thing anymore, he said.

  There was no bitterness in his voice. If anything, the
re was

  nostalgia for the days when he’d had brooms, plates, chairs, and

  beer steins broken on his head, shoulder, chin, and elbow. He

  spoke affectionately of his brother, Henry, the “icy crook,’ who’d

  recently passed away.

  – Ah, he said, Henry could steal your shorts while you were

  wearing them.

  I found the idea of stolen underwear amusing, partly because

  I’m finicky about my undershorts and partly because I’ve rarely

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  “gone commando,” disliking as I do the flops you get when you

  don’t wear briefs. Mostly, though, I was amused because I was

  suddenly reminded of Anne, who disliked my farting if I was

  naked, because flatulence was somehow worse to her when done

  “without a barrier.”

  As if the world were of the same mind as me, these thoughts

  were accompanied by a terrible odour, like gusts from a summer

  outhouse. I’m not certain anyone else noticed. In fact, I wondered

  if I were the cause of the smell. Had I farted without knowing?

  Or was it Mr. Henderson? The odour didn’t stop the conversation,

  but my thoughts and self-consciousness negatively influenced

  my first impressions of Mr. Henderson.

  To be fair, this mild anxiety about flatulence came from my

  parents. Not farting in public is part of the civility they taught me,

  a civility they expected from me. But they were inconsistent. My

  farting in public was taken as something that tarnished their

  reputation. At home, I could fart almost without consequence.

  They didn’t like it, but neither of them objected too much if acci-

  dents happened. (I don’t believe I ever heard my mother fart. My

  father I only heard once and that was while he was delivering a

  sermon at St. Andrew’s, poor man.) But my parents considered

  it impolite to notice when others were flatulent. And there was

  the contradiction: if it was polite for me to ignore the flatulence

  of others, why should others not ignore my flatulence? Now that

  I’m older, I realize that this is, more or less, how it works. People

  fart and you politely ignore them while holding your breath. As

  a child, though, I wondered why my parents didn’t simply allow

  me to fart and then allow convention – the tacit agreement that

  we not acknowledge the public flatulence of others – to take

  over. The other thing that puzzled my nine-year-old self was my

  first inkling of how tricky society can be. Since farting at home