October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  He’d had thirty years to build up his shell. He lived in a mental Hilton compared to our doghouses. He’d been through everything, from corporal punishment delivered with power hoses, to the eager fingers of the good Fathers. When he was fifteen, Juvenile Court sent him to Bordeaux Prison, which was like dumping a sack of fresh meat into a lion’s den.

  They couldn’t break him there so they threw him in the hole. Light bulb left on twenty-four hours every day, hang the expense. To help him get his head straight, the prison warden offered him the job of washing the hanged men. That way he could at least eat steak at the banquet they held after an execution, with the hangman sitting at the head of the table. The condemned cells began at the end of a hallway. The convicts shared their cups of milk and their egg sandwiches with him, their little privileges. Sometimes he had to stick a broom handle up their backs and between their shoulder blades to help them walk upright behind the priest holding up the Eucharist. The Buck had to stand under the gibbet, wait for the hanged man to stop jiggling in the air and shitting himself, then wait for the doctor to take the man’s wrist and look at his watch and nod his head, and then he had to take him down and wash him.

  “You know what?” he once told me. “The rope isn’t made of hemp.”

  “What do you mean, it isn’t made of hemp?”

  “Nope, it’s made of parachute silk.”

  “Of para …”

  “Yup. Parachute silk. What’re you laughing at?”

  This is maximum security, nothing but one long, endless present. You forget the future and you avoid thinking about the past. It’s like living in an open bar, except all the bottles are empty. I’ll crack one day, just like Buck. I’m not going to blow a fuse. Or die, like Marcel Duquet, in an accident so stupid it had to be a warning. I’ll bide my time, set my alarm. With my paper and my pencil. My escape kit.

  Father Gamache’s face was as fat as a backside, his whole head was bloated, shaved above the ears and topped with a kind of tuft that made him look like a Mohawk warrior in a soutane and decked out with a pair of large glasses. Thick lips. To look at him you couldn’t tell if he was a humanist or a pervert.

  He oozed grease like a pan of bacon. He called us in that day, the kids in the choir. He told us he’d just learned that his predecessor used to give us a quarter for each high mass and the same for a marriage or a funeral, and ten cents for a small mass!

  It was too much for him, emotionally. He let go a high-pitched fart that smelled like methane. Amen! I sang in a low voice. Langlais spluttered with laughter. Father Gamache was as ugly as a chamberpot. But it was obvious that such hijinks wouldn’t go down well with him. He told us that the Baby Jesus was getting low on money, and from now on we’d be getting only ten cents for a high mass.

  “And your ten cents,” he continued yelling at us, “my boys, I will personally make sure that your ten cents is not spent on bubblegum, candies, chocolate drops, or jawbreakers … for the very good reason that each week it will go directly into the pocket of Our Lord to be used to light candles for the souls of little Chinese communists!”

  François Langlais was my best friend. I called him the Little Genius. After the meeting in the church, we walked out along the railway track, trying to walk on the rails, side by side, our arms stretching out from time to time to keep our balance.

  “I kicked a stone that went bouncing into the dorm.”

  “I went to ask for my dollar-a-week anyway …”

  “Not me, I’m never setting foot in that place again!”

  “Me neither!”

  A groundhog was sunning itself on the tracks. I picked up a good-sized rock and snuck up on it. When I was thirty feet away, I rushed at it like a linebacker rushing a quarterback. The groundhog disappeared into his hole in the middle of the track, making a series of piercing little whicks that sounded like he was trembling with indignation. I never even got near him.

  François and I went over the entire arsenal we’d acquired over the previous year or two: bows made from alder branches and a bit of string; some slings; two crossbows; slingshots made from forked tree branches; and an old bicycle-tire inner tube.

  “What we need is a rifle,” said Little Genius.

  “I’d get one if I could,” I said, “but I’d have to pay for it out of my own pocket.”

  We walked on in silence. On the railway track there was always lots to do. We could put pennies on the rails and pick them up afterward as thin as leaves. We could find detonators, and some even said they’d found dynamite, but we never did. And there were lots of gophers, but our chances of ever killing one would have been much better if we’d had a rifle.

  The old school bus picked us up in the morning, with our lunch pails, our Pepsis, our Paris Pâté or peanut-butter sandwiches, and our Joe Louis, or maybe a Half-Moon or even a Mae West, or some Lady-Fingers, or those little caramel squares. We hulled strawberries in a kind of hangar belonging to the Val-Pie canning factory. They hired mostly women and children. Fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and at night when you went to bed and closed your eyes, it wasn’t Bonhomme Carnival you’d see in your dreams, or the strawberry cheeks on one of his queens. It was real strawberries, nothing but strawberries. Half a cent a case. Fact.

  The overseer who paced up and down the rows was paid to make sure that fingers reddened by haste didn’t crush too many berries. I’ll never forget the older kid, maybe fourteen, who looked at us oddly between two bites of his baloney sandwich and said:

  “Half a cent a case, that’s not enough …”

  “You’re right, but what can we do about it?” a woman said, coming up to him.

  “Go on strike,” said the fourteen-year-old, taking a drink of Kik to wash down his baloney.

  He spoke louder so that the people sitting near him could hear.

  “What could they do, do you think, if everyone went home this afternoon? Sell their jam with their tails? Are you afraid Duplessis’ cops’ll shoot us, like they did in Murdochville? Do you think Val-Pie is going to send in scabs with baseball bats supplied by the company, like what happened in Noranda? Who’d fill these cases for them?”

  He said, “Follow me,” and stood up and left the hangar. No one had ever seen that before: a parade of angry hullers in the middle of the workers’ suburb. Eight-year-olds and mothers with ten children carrying three or four handmade placards.

  The Val-Pie owner didn’t budge when he saw some fifty women and street urchins from the South Shore occupying his building. But he did fold when Jean-Paul Lafleur (that’s who it was) said he was calling in the media from the big city, and newspaper reporters and radio crews started showing up. People started talking about a public enquiry into the exploitation of children by the agrifood industry.

  They settled for a penny a case.

  *

  Léo Godefroid, Gode’s father, was one of the unemployed workers the government thought they could get rid of by shipping them up to the low, burnt-out lands around Abitibi, where the blackflies, mosquitoes, and minus-forty winters gradually did them in. When they returned south, they found themselves joining the masses of workers being chased out of Montreal by the housing shortage, and who crossed the Jacques-Cartier bridge with their broods of kids and established themselves on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, in the countryside surrounding the Montreal ports. The local farmers sold them land for a few hundred dollars and they built their shacks with whatever they could scrounge. In Abitibi, at least they’d learned how to build cabins. At night, they tore apart abandoned railway cars and used this “wagon wood” to make their houses in the fields.

  The cabins were simple affairs, for the most part, with no foundations or running water, made of wood covered with tarpaper. In front, where there should have been sidewalks, flowed open sewers that they had to cross by walking on two or three planks thrown across the ditch.

  Léo shovelled sugar for Redpath in the port of Montreal. He spent the rest of his time with a hammer in his hand
and nails in his mouth, working on improvements to his own and his neighbours’ living conditions. By the end of the 1950s, this cluster of vagabonds had become a residential district, with small, properly built houses, attractive, some of them, and almost comfortable.

  When the first wave of baby boomers hit the schools, the clergy found itself short of unctuous but domineering Sisters and ancient, drooling priests to whom to entrust the task of sensitizing youth to the dangers of solitary sin. They had to call in the laity. One fine morning in September, a young man of twenty-six or twenty-seven found himself standing in front of the grade seven class; he was thin to the point of emaciation, stood straight as a fence post despite being stooped at the shoulders. Face like a knife blade, high forehead, Coke-bottle lenses in thick, horn-rimmed frames. His name was Laurent Chevalier. He sat on the desk before thirty gamins from the workers’ world and, for a full hour, talked to them about the novel Le Survenant, by Germaine Guèvremont. He recited whole passages from the book, which he apparently knew by heart, extolled the virtues of its prose style, with its vigorous populist flavour and its extraordinary poetic quality. Before those thirty pairs of eyes he felt like a missionary sailing into the Manchurian interior. He listened to himself. The pupils looked at him like a herd of cattle being played music by Mozart.

  François and Gode read everything they could get their hands on: Jules Verne, Arsène Lupin, Sherlock Holmes, Reader’s Digest. But it was always François who got ten out of ten in dictation. Sitting with their piles of books on the edge of the sidewalk (they had sidewalks by then), they waited for Mr. Poulin, who drove the Bookmobile sent around by the local Optimist Club. They read Le Survenant and stuffed their heads with images of white geese and other fluttering wildfowl forming floating islands on blue rivers.

  François Langlais was small and was called a fairy, a faggot, a limp-wrist, in the schoolyard. Nonetheless, when Mr. Chevalier suggested he run for class president, he was elected as smoothly as a letter passing through the post office.

  “This is probably the first time,” Chevalier remarked, “that an intelligent person has been elected to any position whatsoever in Jacques-Cartier, but don’t tell your parents I said that …”

  When the bell sounded and the school corridor reeked of pot and school bags spun through the air like weapons, whistling dangerously close to ears, the new teacher signalled Gode to come up to his desk. Young Godefroid’s ears stuck out a bit, his hair less and less blond and bristled in a brush cut. With his thin, somewhat angular face he looked like one of the field mice that made their nests under the boards left lying in the tall grass behind the school, where he and his friends released neighbourhood mutts.

  Chevalier put on his best smile in an effort to put the boy at ease. From the bottom of a pile he took a lined sheet of notepaper covered with sloppy, cursive writing and smelling like ballpoint ink.

  “Your homework …” said Chevalier. He smiled. “I don’t think there are many lynxes in the woods around these parts, so tell me: where are you from, Richard?”

  “From Villebois.”

  “Villebois. Well, well, there’s an oxymoron for us. And where is Villebois?”

  “Abitibi.”

  Chevalier knew the story. Lots divided up on a map and distributed to unemployed workers from the south, spongy soil soaked in black water where nothing lived but pitcher plants and pale, uncompostable sphagnum moss. An image crossed his mind of the Abbé Félix-Antoine Savard, the author of Menaud, striding into the Promised Land at the head of his future parishioners, his biblical dream tucked under his arm to protect it from the whirlwinds of blackflies and mosquitoes.

  “You’ll have to tell me all about it some day,” Chevalier told the boy.

  He raised the paper to his eyes.

  “You don’t make mistakes …”

  “My mother was a schoolteacher. She used to take me with her, put me in my crib under the blackboard. She says my first words weren’t words but the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F …”

  “That explains it.”

  Chevalier shook the paper gently between his fingers.

  “Is it true that the way to kill an otter is to give it a good smash between the shoulder blades with a stick of firewood?”

  “That’s what the trapper said.”

  “‘For every animal,’” Chevalier read, “‘there is its own way to kill it.’”

  He raised his eyes from the paper. Godefroid nodded.

  “‘The fox, you have to take its hind legs and press them against its chest until the heart stops.’ Hmm … ‘A rabbit cries like a newborn baby. You hold it by the legs an’ whack it with a hard karate chop to the back of the head.’”

  Chevalier raised his eyes from the paper to the student standing before his desk.

  “I’ve docked you a point for the ‘an,’” he said, “and another for ‘whack.’ Try to avoid using words from common speech whenever possible. I have one more question for you: did you really watch a man strangle a lynx with his bare hands?”

  “Not his bare hands. He was wearing gloves.”

  “He was wearing gloves,” Chevalier repeated, transfixed. “That’s good. That’s not bad. It’s a good story. All you need is a title for it …”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders.

  “A text without a title is like a majorette without a baton. The baton doesn’t define the majorette, but it announces her. What do you think of Ecce Lynx?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means ‘Behold the Lynx.’ It’s from the Latin,” he hastened to add.

  “I know what Latin is. I was a server at mass. My mother says it’s a dead language.”

  “She’s right.”

  “Then what good is it?”

  Chevalier looked at him with a pensive air.

  “This lynx of yours, is it possible it’s not dead?”

  Gode opened his eyes wide. He didn’t answer.

  “You can go join the others now.”

  But when he was at the door, he stopped and turned around.

  “Monsieur?”

  “Yes, Richard?”

  “What’s an oxymoron?”

  In 1960, François enrolled in the Franciscan day school, whose mission was, theoretically, to encourage boys with religion vocations to pursue them, but to which certain sympathetic teachers directed promising young minds. They didn’t have to dive into a font of holy water at such an early age, it was enough “not to oppose the idea of submitting to the influence of the Holy Spirit” to have the purse strings of the Works and Vocations Fund opened like magic, as well as the doors to the study of the classics. In other words, playing the game paid huge dividends.

  For François, the main difference between the day school and the public school was that whereas formerly the brothers questioned him about his “nocturnal practices,” the new brothers were more interested in what he was reading, in particular if he was reading “forbidden” books by authors like Flaubert and Balzac who, in Quebec, were still circulated more or less on the QT. One of the freethinkers at the centre of this trafficking was none other than Professor Chevalier, whose reputation as a social miscreant was already beginning to be taken seriously by the clergy. Gode had gone into the technical stream, received his electrician’s licence, and was working for the Canadian National Railway. How many workers did it take to change a light bulb at CN? Nine. One French-Canadian and eight English bosses to tell him how to do it. Gode grew tired of filling out forms in triplicate every time he needed to fart. He handed in his resignation and became a cook in a chip wagon, working out of an old Coteau-Rouge bus in Jacques-Cartier, selling “hotdogs stimés.” In the 1962 federal election, Chevalier ran under the banner of a tiny democratic party that was pretty much socialist, and the collared pack hounds leapt at the opportunity to sack him from teaching.

  Gode and François took to hanging around the offices of Top Step Editions, which had just been founded by Chevalier, who had been practically reduced t
o poverty and whose offices were situated in the “Placard,” a two-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and their offspring (one little branlequetee and two small branlequeettes) above a hardware store on Chambly Road.

  Using shoe polish, Gode disguised his windbreaker and vest and turned himself into a kind of poor man’s James Dean at the new shopping centre. He read all the poets: Giguère, Chamberland. At the same time, François was working his way through Nausea, Lost Illusions, The Human Condition, The Plague, and The Guermantes Way. In the Placard, Chevalier supplied them with cigarettes and talked to them like grown men.

  “There’s a paradox in Malraux’s heroes,” he said to them. “For all their metaphysical pessimism, they take part in a revolution in the name of hope. Maybe revolutionaries are unhappy because they believe in happiness more than they appear to …”

  To François, Sartre was a god. Then he favoured Camus over Sartre. Then it was Hemingway, whom he had just discovered, over Sartre and Camus, then Steinbeck and Hemingway over Sartre and Camus and Malraux. Faulkner he found heavy going.

  Sartre had written that for Hemingway, style came from ethics rather than from metaphysics, Langlais told them, to show that he, too, knew how to use the word “metaphysics.” After that he kept quiet, as though he had said all that needed to be said on the subject.

  “I think Malraux and Hemingway had a lot in common,” Chevalier suggested. “A fabulous talent for personal advertisement. But when we’re talking about writers, as opposed to, say, soap brands, then we have to talk about myths. Don’t we run into Malraux at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls?”

  “No,” François corrected him. “There’s a French guy who fights on the Republican side and who calls himself André Marty in the book, but he really existed. I checked …”