Black Bird

by Michel Basilieres

  At last they decided they had only two choices: to pay the bill, which was impossible, or to direct gas from their neighbour’s line into their furnace, which was dangerous.

  The house on the north side of them was occupied by an old woman and her retarded son, which would have made it ideal, but it was heated by electricity and anyway they were already siphoning that. This fact was never noticed by either the old woman or the electric company because Father had discovered that by removing the meter from its housing and simply replacing it upside down, it ran backward. Every morning one of the men would go out before dawn behind the house and turn it right side up again; and so the meter reader never realized it had been tampered with, and in fact the old woman’s bills decreased. But the Desouches didn’t have any electric heaters, and thought it best not to press their luck anyway. So their only choice was the funeral parlour on the south side.

  That evening, behind the protective wall of dead Angus’s boxed possessions, with their work-heavy exhalations rising like steam from the ground, they began digging into the black, hard-packed earth. Despite the cold, their heavy jackets, scarves and gloves left them sweating.

  Upstairs, huddled around the kitchen table, with the oven door open and its element glowing red like lava, the rest of the family were freezing. They too wore coats and toques and gloves, but they weren’t sweating. By this time Aline had said, “Que c’est froid, tellement froid!” often enough that Jean-Baptiste no longer had to translate it as “It’s too fucking cold” for Mother. Nor had he to translate Mother’s “It’s like a grave in here” for Aline.

  Through Jean-Baptiste, Aline had been trying to convince Mother to take up her old chore of shopping again, at least by accompanying Aline if not going alone, and if only to get into a building with some heat. Aline herself was finding any excuse to run to the corner store or the grocery, scrounging up what little cash was in the house on the pretext of needing more oregano for the spaghetti or another jar of jam for the toast. But Mother wouldn’t go with her. Though she shivered and suffered with the rest of them, she seemed so comfortable in her mourning that nothing would move her.

  “One step at a time,” said Jean-Baptiste. “At least she’s out of the basement.” Aline nodded.

  Jean-Baptiste had become the link between the two women, translating freely for each what the other had said. But because he resented this position immediately, this extra burden imposed on him by their ignorance of each other’s language, he took to translating quite freely indeed. Usually he would deliver intact the general idea of their statements, but often in a way which he knew would incense them unexpectedly.

  When Aline said: “Mother, if you come outside the house with me, you’ll feel much better. You’ll begin to come outside of yourself,” he translated this as:

  “She says you should get out more, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”

  And Mother’s response, “Like anyone else, I treat my own suffering as well as I can. And I can’t help thinking about my father,” was heard by Aline as:

  “What do you know about suffering?”

  But on the other hand, Mother absently accepted a cup of Earl Grey from Aline and only later thought that Aline must have discovered it was her favourite from one of the others and bought it on her own initiative; and when Mother couldn’t finish her morning toast, she had saved it specifically “for Aline’s bird.”

  The two women came to regard each other as capricious and unpredictable, and in the end, although they thought of him as their bridge, Jean-Baptiste became just another obstacle between them.

  And an irritable one at that. Jean-Baptiste was increasingly unsatisfied living in the family home. He’d never really liked living there, and he was coming to that age when the idea of living away from his parents was transformed from a nightmare into a dream. And ever since Marie had demonstrated that it was possible by disappearing, he had been trying to imagine how he too might leave. He was held back only by the unfortunate curse shared by all the males of the Desouche line: he didn’t want to work. That is, he couldn’t bear the thought of a regular job, of rising early to ride a crowded bus, of having a boss.

  And recent developments had only nurtured his desire for freedom: Mother’s turning away from life, Aline’s growing dependence on him, and now the freezing cold. The only one in the house who seemed unaffected by the drop in temperature was the crow; and as they huddled around the table, it nonchalantly stared at them all from atop the refrigerator, its head held first at one sharp angle and then another, as if trying to figure them out. In the chilly kitchen, its cawing was like derisive laughter.

  “That damned crow,” said Jean-Baptiste.

  “That’s what Grandfather calls it. Please don’t call it that,” said Aline.

  “Well, it needs a name, then. What am I supposed to call it?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

  At that moment Father burst into the kitchen from the basement stairs, flinging open the door with a crash. The crow screamed and flew about the ceiling, colliding with the light fixture and sending it swaying to and fro like a pendulum.

  Mother jumped up with her hand on her heart and exclaimed, “Gracious!”

  The silence seemed sudden afterwards. Shadows rose and fell on the walls; the crow settled on the washing machine’s wringer.

  Jean-Baptiste said, “How about Grace for short?”

  The family had silently assumed that Marie disappeared out of shame at being found in her brother’s bed. Only Jean-Baptiste knew that if shame was the reason, it was another kind of shame that had driven her from the house. But even he had no idea where exactly she’d gone. Uncle was of the opinion that “A young woman can always find a bed. There’s no reason to worry.” But Father remained concerned, perhaps more than he might have been if Mother had been up to carrying some of the anxiety. It seemed to him that no one else was paying proper attention to her absence; of course, he didn’t blame Mother. And Jean-Baptiste had had an earful from him about not going anywhere near his sister. And what could Aline be expected to think? But the sheer disregard, even scorn, that came from Uncle and Grandfather was a growing irritation that did nothing to soothe his misgivings.

  Hour after hour, Father shovelled and sweated in the dark, cold, damp basement, while his two companions silently smoked with a shovel in hand, or grunted to each other as if over the years they had developed their own system of communicating without bothering to speak full sentences. Father found it wearisome. And Grandfather had told him pointedly, “Look, son, you can either talk or shovel. But it’s too hard to do both. Take my word for it.”

  “Hell, I’m worried about my daughter—your granddaughter,” he’d said angrily.

  “I never worry about women,” said Uncle, and he smacked a rat with the flat end of his shovel. “Christ,” said Father. “I can’t dig any more, I’m not used to it like you two. What with everything, it feels too much like we’re digging our own graves. I’m so tired I could just fall in beside that rat.”

  The others took over. Watching their rounded backs rolling, he stood there for a moment under the burden of their contempt. But he shook it off, and went upstairs to his wife.

  Where had Marie gone? Like anyone else who needs a place in a hurry, Marie had gone to her friends’. The Desouches, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea who her friends might be. For them, she had simply disappeared. Naturally she had chosen to associate with people her family would never have had anything to do with—idealists.

  Marie’s friends considered the English to be an occupying power, as they were in Ireland and as they had been in India and so many other places. Anglophone and English were synonymous to them; they couldn’t accept anglophones as Canadians, even though they saw themselves as Québécois, distinct from the French of France. And if you had suggested to them that in the eyes of the natives forced onto reserves, they were just as much occupying foreigners as their perceived enemies, they would certainly have angrily explained the difference
to you.

  Despite so much historical evidence to prove that their own politicians and businessmen had much more in common with their anglo counterparts than with them, that their own journalists and pop stars were just as much lackeys of the local money lords as were those of the Anglos, and that any of them would renounce their linguistic and nationalistic patriotism as so much fascist obfuscation the instant they were offered any personal material benefit, those at the bottom of the social ladder—Marie’s cell—clung foolishly to the belief that the French were a nation loyal to their kindred. Marx had been wrong: it was not the power of money that grouped or divided people. It was language, pure and simple.

  Meanwhile, lawyers, politicians and businessmen, anglophone and francophone alike, learned one another’s language, made deals together, enacted labour laws benefiting the moneyed, carved up monopolies between them and charged their champagne expense accounts to the working taxpayers in two official languages. In Canada and Quebec money had always been and would always remain bilingual. And as always, for those who had it, it provided not only their continuing comfort and success, but also the despair and failure of those who did not. It bought, through the offices of the media, the illusion that if only it were printed in a different language, it would multiply and disperse more evenly and equitably.

  But money was a thing that worried Marie’s FLQ unit only in a practical sense and not as a political force. It worried them only when the bills from those monopolies had to be paid: the telephone company, the electric company, the cable TV. Communications, heating, the flow of information: they were billed in French, and so they paid happily. Or if they didn’t, or couldn’t, they were hounded by French bill collectors; and eventually, their services were cut off by French workers.

  Fortunately, the political struggle cost them far less than their rents. They stole guns, explosives, cars—anything in the way of tools needed to mount their operations. And when it was unavoidable, when they could do nothing without hard currency—to pay off their French lawyers, police friends or drug suppliers—they stole that too, with the same guns and getaway cars. They were careful to observe their linguistic barriers here too; they did not rob the local Caisse Populaire, but instead targeted those great, oppressive anglophone institutions, the Royal Bank and the Toronto-Dominion. Their very names were arrogant affronts to francophones everywhere: Royal, meaning the Queen, and Dominion—need that be explained at all?

  As for moral quibbles, they were more than just easily brushed aside; they were never raised in their minds at all. it was a simple matter of necessity: in order to carry on the great struggle, their basic material needs had to be met.

  Some funds came from sympathizers of all sorts—the unemployed, the working poor, artists, members of the Church; even some Québécois businessmen, who realized that local customers were silent sympathizers and a little word-of-mouth was good advertising. But since their federal unemployment insurance cheques were pitifully small, the bulk of their living expenses had to be charged up to the cause and paid for out of its treasury. Which meant that a good deal of their time was spent planning and executing what they described as their “capital campaign.”

  And so they turned Montreal into the bank robbery capital of North America.

  Marie was in her element. True, she was sleeping on couches, on floors, on camp cots in basements. But here she felt alive, she felt purposeful, she felt vindicated. She missed nothing from her family home. Except, perhaps, the regular meals. But youth and idealism know no hunger save lust, which always seems appropriate to grand ideas. Though they often missed meals or ate badly, and though she and the few other women in those circles were expected to prepare what meals there were—along with performing all the other usually female duties—Marie was pervaded with a sense of self-importance that verged on the sacred.

  Their leader passed an infectious inner strength to her through the group’s debates, through tirades against their enemies, by their sexual union, and by his very gaze. It mattered not that living conditions were primitive, that personal hygiene was neglected, that the bourgeois affectations of social conventions were ignored (i.e., that the women were sometimes beaten, often insulted or shouted down). What mattered was that in the end, once victory had been ensured and the people of Quebec were commanding their own destiny, they would be able to build a society that would no longer have need of these crisis conditions. An independent and more confident Quebec would be able to consider such currently unspeakable ideas as anglophone rights, and then to turn to such secondary matters as personhood for women, linguistic tolerance, a healthy economy.

  But in the meantime, there were mailboxes to be blown up, store windows in anglo neighbourhoods to be broken and perhaps even visiting ambassadors to be kidnapped.

  Uncle and Grandfather were in a quandary. The digging was done; they had access to the gas feed into the funeral parlour’s basement. It was now a simple matter of shutting the valve from the rear of the property and joining a line to their own furnace. But once they did that, there would be no reason to dig any further; and the thought of tunnelling right into the mortuary itself so tantalized them, the same way that the thought of a bank vault would have tantalized Marie’s friends, that they stood silently staring into their own hole, unable to go upstairs and complete the work. Neither said a word—they only infrequently glanced at each other—but both were thinking that Father would not permit the mad scheme they were dreaming of: to operate out of the family home was to invite disaster upon them all. Their work was tolerated by the others, even those who found it distasteful to varying degrees, but to make accomplices of the whole household would be going too far. And altogether it was just too risky; these were bodies not yet relegated to the machinations of the earth and its creatures, not yet ceremonially put out of mind. Once their absence was discovered, their route would quickly follow, bringing scandal and police in their wake.

  Weighing their desire against practicality, the two men sat on boxes and smoked. They shuffled their feet; they flung their cigarette butts carelessly into the pit; they shivered. Finally, hungry and bitterly cold, they rose and mounted the stairs.

  It wasn’t long before they had completed the dangerous task of welding a supply line to their own furnace. The one detail they couldn’t properly manage was a regulator on the line. It opened full throttle or not at all, but since they would never see the bill, it mattered little to them. Within an hour the family thankfully began to peel off their layers of clothing and go about the house comfortably; by bedtime, they were finding the air a little stuffy.

  Tossing in their sleep, they threw off their bedclothes and lay naked on their mattresses; when they woke in the daylight, they were sodden with sweat, and threw open the windows to let in the cold air.

  Afraid that Grace would fly out the kitchen window and fail to return, Aline devised a collar and a line for the crow’s leg from the elastics she’d saved off lettuce heads. “Why don’t you just let the damned thing go?” growled Grandfather. Grace leapt at him from her perch on the fridge, screaming and pecking at his face and batting him painfully with her wings. Aline still had hold of the line she’d been affixing to the bird, and she pulled on it with all her strength. Grace resisted and the elastic merely stretched. The noise drew the others to the kitchen, where they saw a black storm of feathers where Grandfather’s head should have been, and Aline shouting out to the Lord while she tugged and drew on the line as if she were flying a kite.

  Father and Uncle managed to subdue Grace, and Grandfather escaped with only some bloody scratches on his bald head and his dignity battered. But when order had been restored, everyone suddenly noticed they were soaked with sweat, even though the winter wind had the freedom of the house.

  Grandfather had never been gentle with the crow, but neither had it ever been aggressive in return. Now Grace pecked and flew at him whenever the chance arose, almost as if the mere fact of possessing a name had endowed her with the right to hate
and persecute just as people do. Whenever the two came together, one would scream and yell, the other caw and squawk, with wings flapping and arms waving, as vicious as the tomcats in the lane.

  As the house grew warmer day by day the crow seemed livelier and happier, but Grandfather grew more and more afraid of entering the kitchen and so began to take his meals elsewhere—leaving dirty dishes all over the house despite everyone’s annoyance and Aline’s pleadings that he clean up after himself. “That’s your job, not mine. Anyway, it’s your buzzard keeping me from my own kitchen.”

  And they all took to wearing as little as decency allowed inside the house. Less, in Uncle’s case, Aline felt, though even she discarded long-sleeved blouses and dared a cotton skirt that rose above her knees, for the heat was now terrible, especially when she was vacuuming. And the effort of keeping the house at least clean, if not orderly, was a constant and increasingly necessary one: for the first time in years, neighbours began calling at their door.

  It was the heat, of course. In a neighbourhood as poor as theirs, everyone kept their homes as cool as they could bear, preferring to wear sweaters and huddle under blankets in their living rooms rather than burden themselves with larger utility bills. Over the past few days, the neighbours had begun to notice first the open windows, then the snow melting from the Desouches’ roof, and finally even the drifts in the small front yard begin to shrink, turn black and soak into the ground, as if spring had descended upon their house alone.

  It was a thing of wonder, but nevertheless to be taken advantage of. Under the pretext of “seeing how Mother was getting along with her grief,” her friends, the women who gathered at the local dépanneur, who’d earlier cautioned each other against disturbing the frail, shattered woman’s peace, came looking for a cup of tea and half an hour in their shirt-sleeves.