Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s just my father’s uncle,” Claudette said. “My father lets him hang around the garage. He’s got nothing better to do. Don’t worry, he won’t say anything about us being here. Half the time he doesn’t know what day it is.”

  He wore a straw hat and grey wool pants and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. The kind my father wore around the house. He beckoned to Claudette and began speaking to her softly, haltingly, in French. His wide face was calm, gentle, no will to harm in it. If someone said to him, tomorrow the world will end, he would reply, so be it.

  Claudette leaned over him. “Speak English,” she said loudly. “Can’t you see I’ve got company? This is Lureen Lafrenière. She’s a girl from school.”

  He looked at me, took off his straw hat and rested it on his knee. My mouth tingled. If I smiled, my face would be forever frozen in that position. I thought I’d recognized that gesture, the wide sweeping of his hand. He spoke again, and to me his voice was like the sound of newspapers being swept along the street by the wind.

  “He thinks he knows your old man,” Claudette said.

  “Oh yeah?” My heart lifted.

  “Wants to know if you’re Prosper’s daughter,” she laughed. “Prosper Lafrenière was an old hermit, older than him. He died last year. I told you, the old guy’s cuckoo.” She made a winding motion at her temple.

  “Tell him that my father’s the barber at Agassiz. His name is Maurice. He used to play the fiddle.”

  She told him. I held my breath. I needed to know something of who I hoped I was.

  “I don’t remember your father. Was he of this place?”

  “Told you, screws loose. Come on, forget it,” Claudette said and began to walk away.

  The old man lifted his hat, waved it at me. “Adios to youse girls,” he said and laughed. I liked him and wished that Claudette hadn’t spoken to him with so little respect.

  I followed Claudette between two buildings to the back of the garage. There were sounds of hammering coming from the garage. Through windows in a door, I could see bright splashes of sparks from a welder. Claudette stood on her toes so that she could see inside. “Good,” she said. “Jimmy’s working today.”

  “Who?”

  “Jimmy Nabess. He works on and off for my father. He’s cute.” She winked. “Maybe later, I’ll invite him to come up.”

  We went up a flight of stairs. She unlocked the door, stepped inside. A gold crucifix hung above the door. She led me through a small kitchen into the living room. A trestle table rested along one wall; along another, pine bookshelves with knick-knacks on them, a highback wooden bench, and beside the bench a pine couch with burlap cushions. A spinning wheel sat in the corner by the window. Above the couch, there were dark paintings of a fort and Indians huddled around a fire, tepees in the background. Another painting: a cobblestone street leading to an old church and tall European-looking buildings with narrow windows lining the street.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “You think so? I don’t. I think it’s crap. My mother had a vacation in Quebec and came back with it. It’s like living in a coffin,” she said. “Be back in a sec.” She went into the kitchen. A moment later she stuck her head around the corner. “Do you like your beer warm or cold? I keep a case under my bed if you want a warm one.”

  I took her love for beer as being part of her French identity and so I said I’d love a warm beer. I went over to the front window and looked out over the town. There was more to Grande Pointe than I’d first seen. I could see the peaks of houses across the river, where the town unfolded in neat rows among lime-green groves of maple trees. It looked like Agassiz, no different. The same muddy river that divided Grande Pointe ran along the edge of Agassiz as well and the same flotsam on that river, the bloated bodies of cows, broken trees, tin cans, passed through their town as it did ours. Claudette came back with the beer.

  I watched as she tipped the bottle, there was a gurgling, and one quarter of the beer was gone. “They put beer in babies’ bottles, the French,” my mother said once, referring to my father’s relatives. “So that they can go out to dances, they take the kids with them, fill their bottles with beer so the kids will fall asleep in the car, and they can have all the fun they want.”

  “And so, what’s wrong with that?” Maurice said.

  And she said, “If they could only see, realize, the damage they’re doing to their children.”

  I tipped my bottle, parted my lips the way Claudette had, but the beer didn’t flow down my throat. It foamed, backed up into my nose, stinging. My eyes watered. Claudette laughed and brought me a Kleenex. I asked for a glass and drank the first beer and talked about the other kids at school, some of the boys in our class; and I was surprised that the boys I had gone through elementary school with and now high school, and who I thought were disgusting, she thought attractive. I liked the homestead old feeling of her rough, wooden living room and she wanted a modern one like mine. A feeling of disillusionment was setting in along with a slight lightheadedness. Claudette yawned, looked at her watch. “Be back in a sec,” she said once again. “I’m going to talk to Jimmy. Help yourself to another beer.”

  I went into Claudette’s bedroom. There were clothes scattered about on the bed and cosmetics over the top of her dresser. I looked into the mirror. “Goodness, who is she?” Mika had said once when I was changing, my features rearranging themselves weekly during puberty, giving me at last a broad face, a too-thick nose and deepset eyes, too small; I tried to do tricks with cosmetics but it didn’t help.

  “She doesn’t even look like a Lafrenière,” Mika said and it was true. Several times I’d seen my father’s brothers, and they were both short and fat and small-featured. I pulled my hair up and away, held it into a ponytail, tight, so that my eyes became slanted. Sometimes I thought I was Oriental, or Eskimo. I saw Claudette’s blue bottle of Evening in Paris cologne. I dabbed some behind my ears and then took another beer out from under her bed.

  “And this,” Claudette said, entering the bedroom suddenly, “is my friend Lureen, the one I told you about?” She introduced me to Jimmy Nabess. Jimmy was Indian. He was short and slender; his hair, almost shoulder-length, was caught back behind his ears. He wore a baseball cap, a satin-looking blue jacket with his name on one shoulder, and dusty blue jeans.

  “Hi ya,” he said. His expression said that he didn’t care if I lived or died.

  “I told him we’re having a party, and he wanted to come too. Hurry up and finish that beer. Parties are more fun if you’re drunk.”

  For the next hour, we drank beer steadily, almost dutifully, as Claudette worked hard to fill each awkward silence, the trailing off of conversation Jimmy and I sat side by side on the couch. I grew quieter and quieter because I sensed his dislike for me. Finally, despairing, Claudette said that what we needed was some music and went to her bedroom to get her records. Jimmy moved forward on the couch as though he were about to follow her and then changed his mind, took off his jacket and began squeezing bottle caps. I noted that our arms were almost the same colour.

  “You from Grande Pointe?” I asked.

  “Uhuh.”

  I didn’t know if this meant yes or no. “It seems like an okay place.”

  “It’s the same like any place.”

  “Nabess,” I said. “Is that French?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t want to ask him what it was. “Lafrenière is French. My father speaks French.”

  He shrugged impatiently. “So what’s the big deal? Lots of people talk French. Claudette,” he called. “I’m dry.”

  “Coming, coming,” Claudette said and put a record on the player. She clapped her hands and began to do the twist. The beer had made her face flushed, her eyes shine. “Hey come on,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

  “I hafta get back to work. Your old man will be the first one to kick my ass if I don’t.”

  “Just one,” she said.

&
nbsp; They danced for a full hour. I watched for a while. They were caught up in their dancing, in each other. Occasionally Claudette would suggest that he ask me to dance, but only half-heartedly, and when she turned the record over, she went back to him. I got up from the couch. The room tilted. I walked over to the window. I saw the old man; he was crossing the street slowly. He walked, choosing each step as though it were his last. He stood in front of the cafe, shielded his eyes and looked in the window, searching for someone. Then he began walking down the street to the corner.

  I willed his faltering steps, each rising and falling of his feet. He belonged in the picture above the couch, an old man walking along a cobblestone street. It seemed to me that he was no ordinary person, but larger. I wanted to walk beside him with my arm under his and claim him as my ancestor. I leaned with my forehead against the glass and the cool windowpane felt good against my stiff face. My breath was reflected back to me. I smelled sour beer and something else, the Evening in Paris cologne.

  The smell of the cologne reminded me of fruit cake, almond paste and my grandparents standing with a tray loaded with chunks of dark fruit cake at their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Grandma wore a loose-fitting white dress made of some light material that did not show her large body, but hid it so instead of looking fat and awkward, she seemed to float. She wore gold leaves in her white hair and so as they approached me, I thought she was a vision, a fairy godmother who had the power to grant wishes. And I would have asked her to take away my aches and pains. I was never without sore limbs, “growing pains,” my mother called them, and an uneasy stomach. I did not think they were growing pains. I felt that my bones were going to crack and splinter because of some inner pressure. I would have asked my grandmother to make me feel happiness. But she frowned at the tray of cake my grandfather carried and said, “Nah, Papa, look at what you’ve done. You’ve cut far too much cake. It will only be wasted.” And the fairy vision vanished.

  “Give it to the children, then,” he said. And it came to me how their conversations always seemed to centre on food, the growing of it, the preparing of it and the eating. That was all that mattered. To me, their lives had been narrow and confining; even here, now, at a celebration, they were unable to step across the limits and celebrate. I was angry and so I said, “Don’t waste the food on us kids, feed it to the bloody pigs instead.”

  The old man had reached the corner. He seemed to hesitate and then he turned sharply to the left and began crossing a bridge which spanned the same river that flowed past my grandparents’ cottage. I could see that river through the leaves of the vine arbour where I was sent as punishment, to reflect in solitude upon what I’d said about feeding good food to the pigs. Two words my grandfather forbade us to use because he said we didn’t know their meanings: starve and hate. I knew my words had cut him deeply. There were several boys playing along the river bank trying to skip stones and I forgot about what it was I should be thinking as I watched and wished I were down there to show them how to do it and at the same time, make them feel stupid. Grandfather came in and sat down beside me. He didn’t speak for a long time and then asked, “Why are you always so angry?”

  “I guess I was born that way. I can’t help it. I couldn’t help being born.”

  “Not so, not so,” he said. “God made a much brighter girl.”

  His way of speaking irritated me. “If you say so, then it must be true.”

  He pulled at my chin in an attempt to have me look at him. His hand smelled of sunflower seeds. His pale blue eyes were moist with sorrow. I couldn’t explain my anger. I thought I was a freak, I didn’t belong because I was totally different from every other member of that family.

  “People make me mad,” I said.

  “I’m sorry for you, then. Because you become their slave when you let them make you angry. Being angry doesn’t change anything. You can never change what people say and do. The only thing you can change in this world is your reaction to what they say and do. You’re hurting yourself by being angry. Look here,” he said. He took his penknife from his pocket. He cut a v into a vine leaf, lightly, barely perceptible. “When you come for German lessons on Saturday, I’ll show you what anger does.”

  The following Saturday, the scar in the leaf had become deep and brown and the leaf had grown, but was misshapen. “That’s what you’re doing with your life,” he said. “With your anger you make marks in it that will never go away.”

  He left me to think on this. I thought. I thought he was minimizing what I was feeling with cheap tricks with a penknife. I went into the garden. I picked up the hoe. I chopped and hacked until I had cut down all of his sunflowers.

  I turned from the window, feeling morose and angry at the same time for Claudette’s lack of attention to me. And for the first time I wondered, how was I going to get home?

  “My mother will kill me,” I said. “I think I’d better head for home.”

  Claudette danced over to me, stuck her fingers into my chest and pushed me backwards towards the couch without missing a beat of the music. “You can’t go yet. Jimmy wants to have a dance with you.”

  She brought me another beer and put on a record. It was a slow song. She put her arms around Jimmy’s neck, he put his hands around her waist and his leg between hers and they moved in time to the music.

  I belched loudly. My stomach was swollen and felt full. I was in a haze, stupefied, and so I lay down. Through half-closed eyes, I saw Jimmy place his hand on Claudette’s breast, his hand, brown, against her pale blue sweater and I thought, he shouldn’t do that, he’s squashing the pom-poms on her poodles. “Oh no,” Claudette said in response to something Jimmy had whispered in her ear, “not with her here.”

  My stomach heaved and the room swung violently. I had heard that if you’re drunk and the room moves, lie with one foot resting on the floor and the motion will stop. I tried that and closed my eyes. It didn’t work. I smelled something thickly sweet, it was the Evening in Paris cologne and it made my stomach even queasier. Claudette laughed drunkenly. Jimmy manoeuvred her across the floor towards the bedroom door with his pelvis. He backed her up against the wall and kissed her, his back to me now, his head going around and around and the room turning with it. My stomach revolted.

  I bolted from the couch, stumbled past them into the bathroom and retched over the toilet. My whole head was numb now. The same thing had happened when my dog Laddie got hit by a car. My mother had demanded a response of grief from me. “Cry,” she said and they all stood waiting, my sisters and my mother, waiting for me to cry. “You loved that dog,” she said, “why don’t you cry?” And I would not cry because I knew that she did not say it out of a feeling for me, but out of the necessity to be proven right, so she could say, “I told you, the world’s a dirty place.” My refusal to cry had cut its mark into me. And here I was, my grandfather had died and I was a piece of wood, numb in the head, unable to express what I should be feeling for an old man who had really cared about me.

  “For God’s sake,” Claudette said. “Vomit and get it over with.”

  I tried, I strained.

  “Shove your finger down your throat.”

  I stuck my finger into my throat, gagged, but nothing happened.

  “Let me help,” Claudette said. She stood behind me, wrapped her arms around my stomach and squeezed suddenly and hard. The flood of vomit, everything I had eaten, drank, whooshed forth, splattering the toilet seat. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. I heaved and upchucked until there was nothing to come but green bile.

  Claudette brought me water to drink, slapped me on my back as though I had just achieved something great. “Way to go,” she said. “You’ll feel better now. Whenever I drink too much, I just stick my finger down my throat and then I can keep on going.”

  “I’m not keeping on going,” I said. “I’m going home. My grandfather is dead.”

  “So?”

  I put my head into Claudette’s pom-poms. My face began to fall apart, piece
by piece. My mouth trembled and I couldn’t make it stop. I began to weep. “An old man is an old man, right? It doesn’t matter what nationality, they’re all the same. He was old and he was mine and he died.”

  “Christ,” Claudette said and pushed me away. “I hate sloppy drunks.”

  But I didn’t mind. I didn’t care what anyone would say.

  JOURNEY TO THE LAKE

  aurice was in the basement when Truda came home for the weekend and her call had jarred him from his deep reverie. He looked about like a person awaking from a dream. He stood in the centre of the laundry room with a .22 rifle in his hands. Quickly, he put the rifle back into the rack on the wall. The automatic washer clunked into gear and began its final spin cycle. “Hello,” Truda called down the stairs, “anybody home?” Their first words, all of his children, upon entering the house had always been the question, “Anybody home?” What did they think? Were they worried that everyone had vanished?

  “Down here,” Maurice called. He picked up the basket of wet laundry and went up to meet her. He smiled at the sight of Truda’s large chunky body filling the doorway at the top of the stairs. He saw in her grey eyes the affection she had for him, magnified several times by the thick lenses of her glasses. She was plain, this daughter. Nothing pretty about Truda, but good and solid. He was almost sorry that she wasn’t going to marry Brian, sorry for Brian that he’d missed out on Truda.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” Maurice said. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.” He set the basket down, hugged her tightly.

  “Working overtime, I see,” Truda said.

  “A woman’s work is never done,” Maurice said. “I’m doing a few chores for the old lady. She had to work late tonight. Big wedding tomorrow. Just let me get this here out on the line and I’ll rustle up a bite to eat.”

  “It’s okay,” Truda said. She shed her knapsack and set it on the floor. “I ate before I got on the bus.”

  “Well, I had a good supper too,” Maurice said and thumped his stomach. “But that don’t stop me from eating again.” He’d gained more weight, he could feel it in the pressure against his belt buckle. Standing for any length of time made his abdominal muscles ache. But what the hell, he told himself, if a man can’t eat, may as well shoot himself.