Black Bird

by Michel Basilieres

  Aline was burdened with hosting them, of course, for which she was angry but at the same time grateful, for they did have a positive effect on Mother, who slowly seemed to benefit from their selfish solicitude. Mrs. Pangloss was loudest as usual, even when trying to be considerate of Mother’s precarious condition. She shrieked at the others to speak quietly, slowly, and to refrain from laughter. This last was directed mostly at old Mrs. Harrison, who was the very image of a witch and who never lost the opportunity to claim she was related to a Beatle.

  “Ah, you’re full of shit!” was the inevitable response from Mrs. Pangloss, a woman who admitted that everything in life was false and base; but since she hadn’t the imagination to make any difference in her own life, she accepted as an article of faith that God was doing his best even at this very moment, no matter what disaster was in progress.

  They treated Aline as if she were the maid. She brought them little sandwiches and cookies, and they thanked her too loudly, as if she were deaf, and then turned immediately to plying Mother with stupid remarks:

  “At least he didn’t suffer; it was quick.” Who could tell what sufferings had been involved? thought Aline.

  “Everything’s for the best, dear, you’ll see.” Aline was offended by that one.

  “Was there a will, dear? Did you do all right? He must have had some pile stashed away. He was always so tight with his money.” As if Mother would somehow have been consoled by money, and as if a trait they had reprimanded Angus for in life could be counted as a virtue in death.

  Yet Mother seemed to believe that their concern was genuine and their prattling more than just thinly disguised malice. She smiled whenever one or more of them came by; Aline would have preferred to toss them on their ears, but for Mother’s sake she swallowed her feelings.

  If Mother had no use for any possible inheritance, the same was not true of Father. He perked up at the mention of a will. Who would have suspected any relative of his would have a will? What of any possible value would anyone have to leave? But now he realized this woman could be right, for he remembered Angus railing against insurance companies while fluttering his bank book. He’d forgotten about the unsettled estate, what with Mother’s fragile condition, Marie’s disappearance and the cold.

  But now the returning heat had brought back thoughts of money. He tried to speak of it to Mother, but she pointedly told him she didn’t care about the money. He wanted to know how much there would be, and how soon it would come. He dreamt it would be enough to make an actual difference, enough to invest or to seed a business with. Not merely enough for a good drunk or new clothes or to pay the outstanding bills, but a large enough roll to gather some momentum and change things permanently for them.

  It wasn’t the first time Father had schemed a way to financial security. He’d tried a few things in his time, turning his hand to all sorts of trades and occupations. It wasn’t really out of desperation that he’d done so but at least partly out of a feeling that a man of his talents could mould them to almost any task. Therefore he’d tried making badges and ribbons, he’d tried driving a taxi, he’d tried clerking in a bank, he’d tried being a barber—he still insisted on inflicting haircuts on his relatives—he had tried everything a reasonable man might do, and failed at them all. It wasn’t that his practice proved inadequate to his theory, but that the real market never met his expectations.

  Except that one time he’d been a clerk. The problem there had been getting caught. The episode was occasionally referred to by Grandfather or Uncle as “the Bank Job,” but never to Father’s face.

  Father discovered that getting Angus’s money was just a matter of pushing the forms through, and so he spent the following weeks pushing. While he awaited the arrival of the cheque, he looked round at the overcrowded hallways and rooms, at the broken, scarred and second-hand furniture. Couches were draped with faded bedspreads to hide their torn fabrics; chair legs were held in place with glue and baling wire; lamps were turned so their cracks and chips would face the wall. He’d always longed to be able to afford genuine antiques instead of junk furniture.

  Suddenly he had the brainstorm he felt would shape the rest of his life: he would open a shop and sell and repair antiques. Further, he would open it right next door. That old woman and her son didn’t need the huge old house all to themselves, and he would get it from her. If he had to, he’d bully her into an arrangement; they could live on the top floor, and Father would even give the boy a job, something he’d never had. He’d pay them a woefully small amount of money to rent the entire ground floor as a showroom, and the basement as a workshop for repairs. At first he worried he’d be unable to find real work simple enough for the boy to do. Bah! he decided, he’d merely set him to driving nails into a plank for no reason at all, and give him five dollars at the end of each day. Father imagined himself driving around town to visit decorators and other antique dealers and architects and designers, and standing them all drinks and dinners to drum up business. He’d buy himself a fine grey suit with a bowler hat in which to look his best for his “clients.”

  Mother’s grief became his happiness. Her father’s death was as great a blow as a father’s death always is, no matter how loud he yells or how disappointed he is or how angry, intolerant, even destructive; still she cried for her father because she’d never have another. But for him, his father-in-law’s death was a boon: no more awkward Sunday dinners, no more meddlesome, disapproving advice, no more struggling for the acquiescence of his own wife. For her it was the end of a kind of life, but for Father it was the promise of a new beginning.

  In Grandfather’s life there had been little joy or happiness, and he had worked at keeping that little bit hidden. In a world of poverty and numbing physical labour, happiness was a weakness, a kind of lever to be used against its unwary possessor. A happy person was an unsuspecting person, and an unsuspecting person was, well … victimized.

  The Desouche family history begins in mystery because Grandfather was an orphan. In the aftermath of the last great cholera epidemic in Montreal, before the Great War, he became one of dozens of children who were merely deposited at Catholic schools without references. Thousands of parents had died, but most of them were known or at least known of. Grandfather had no memory of his parents and never knew if they’d died friendless and unremarked, or had simply taken advantage of the general tragedy to relieve themselves of the burden of an infant. It wouldn’t have been unheard of in the days of Victorian poverty, when it was hard enough to find a bed space for one, let alone two or three.

  Grandfather was given a dormitory bed and meagre meals, and classes taught by local priests. And when he was old enough—eleven—he was told to find himself a job. The orphanage’s method of encouraging job hunting was to turn all boys over ten years of age out of doors after morning porridge. Thus Grandfather found himself wandering within the watching crowd one bright spring day, as the ice was cracking on the St. Lawrence River. It heaved house-sized blocks atop one another and over the banks, creating massive white dams, which diverted not only the bored and sensation-hungry residents of higher ground—who had nothing to fear—but the river itself. The first of the joyous rites of spring: the annual flooding had begun.

  With a stolen clothesline and a spade—his first, but not his last—he walked down to the shore and saw the tenements of Griffintown sinking like the ghetto of Venice into canals where streets had been. Furniture and wooden boxes bobbed and drifted with the waves and the current; blocks of ice as big as trucks snapped signposts and broke whole door frames as they slammed past; dogs swam, happy or confused. Families were leaning out of upper-storey windows, calling for help or waiting it out. Neighbours from the ground floor and even higher were doubled up with relatives and friends still higher, if they were lucky. Some not so lucky were gathered blocks away, in the street above the high-water mark, with whatever they’d saved thrown into a pile; some were trying to start a fire to dry out. Here and there a boat went along
the street, bringing bread and dry blankets to the stranded, throwing them in through windows.

  Out of this misery, Grandfather created his first job.

  He hunted along the shore until he found them: two lengths of wooden sidewalk not washed into the St. Lawrence, but dumped well up out of the swell into a cramped back lane. It was a large job for a young boy by himself to drag them into the street. He arranged them side by side and tied them together with his clothesline. Dragging and pushing, he finally got the damned things afloat, though he’d been soaked with frigid water up to his chest.

  Hauling himself aboard with a grunt, he cast the spade over his head and the momentum lifted him to his raft, which pitched violently. The spade made a poor oar, and the raft tended to spin. He found instead a pole floating by and, taking it up, became a gondolier, ferrying the stranded to solid ground.

  The job had its dangers. His ankles were always awash in filthy, freezing water; some customers insisted on overloading the raft and tumbling everyone and everything into the drink—for which Grandfather was not paid—or simply ignored his calls for payment. Grandfather quickly learned to get his cash up front, and was not one to bargain. Late in the day he’d come back to the orphanage exhausted, starving and shuddering, but with money in his hand.

  Flooding was a short season, only a matter of days, so Grandfather worked as long and hard as he could. As the waters and the ice began to recede, the shoreline became a gauntlet of slime and mud, with half-buried objects or drowned cats or rats, and a hellish stench rising in the spring sun. It was a relief to get to the water and rinse his feet, even though it chilled them to the bone. Now, too, was when the unlucky ones were found: those caught by surprise, or too old or sick to flee when the warning came. The drowned.

  Because his raft was large enough, Grandfather got the job of taking empty coffins around to the houses of the dead and bringing them full back to shore. Only one at a time would do, for a drowned corpse is waterlogged and heavy, and even one by itself was probably not safe, with the slats of the raft barely lifting above the brackish water.

  It was a crowded district, this slum below the tracks, and though they’d been dealt a severe blow, the inhabitants, like anyone else, couldn’t stay forever grim. With the waters now receding, the work of taking stock and rebuilding however they could was underway. Even though they were still wading or swimming or canoeing to their doors, because they weren’t idle, they were as noisy and cheerful as people at work can be. For once, their work seemed to have a clear purpose, and that was a relief from the grinding meaninglessness of their factory jobs.

  And then Grandfather came poling up the street from the river, a small boy beside a large pine box making for the shore, where waited a Catholic priest in a black cassock, a bereaved family and a barking dog.

  Hour by hour the poling got harder, for the water began flowing back into the river. Grandfather was weary and hungry. Despite the sight of the bloated corpses being loaded into his coffins, his stomach growled. Now it was after five, the shadows lengthening, and here was his last passenger of the day: a fat woman. As she was lowered from the second-floor window—one man holding her under the arms, the other in a rowboat beside the raft, taking her legs—Grandfather worried. She was too big. No telling how large she’d been in life, but now, with probably a good fifty or sixty extra pounds of river bilge in her lungs, her stomach and the Devil only knows where else, Grandfather was afraid she’d sink him.

  When they finally laid her in the coffin they couldn’t nail it shut, for every hammer blow threatened to capsize the raft. At last it was simply tied shut with cord, and Grandfather hesitantly began poling the four blocks to the shore.

  But her weight, the cumulative exhaustion of the last several days’ hard work and the ebbing water were too much for the eleven-year-old’s frail arms. Just as he was coming to landfall, with the waiting party of grieving relatives looking on in horror, he slipped to his knees on the slimy planks and, breathless, couldn’t get up again. The raft began to float back to the river. As he lay watching the group ashore recede, they jumped and shouted and wailed like stricken animals. The raft, now totally at the mercy of the current, turned a corner out of their sight and Grandfather turned onto his back, watching the lights go on in windows above and around him, residents pointing and shouting to one another. Just as the street disappeared from his view and the St. Lawrence began to roar in his ears, someone jumped from an apartment window into the water and rescued him. As a strong arm clasped round his tiny chest, and his eyes closed with fatigue, he could just make out the coffin floating downstream to the Gulf.

  When Grandfather woke, it was slowly and reluctantly, for he had a fever in his aching joints and had not slept off his labours. But the cold, bony hands of the priest cared not. Grandfather was spared less pleasant fondlings and extremities only by the priest’s discovery of the purse hidden in his underwear. Where else would he have put it, a child without a room to himself or hope of a bank account, or even pockets to his trousers? The priest’s hands hesitated; retrieved the knotted cloth; and then troubled Grandfather no more. Four days of playing Charon, rafting and struggling in filthy, cold water, all to buy nothing but the time to sleep it off.

  Was this the value of honest labour?

  Even so, considering the alternative, Grandfather was not bitter.

  Yet.

  Grandfather was an unkind man, but not a stupid one, and so he took life’s lessons to heart. To be happy was a mistake; to be kind was a waste of effort; and to plan for the future was to miss today’s opportunities. Accordingly, he never considered that all the small cruelties he inflicted on Grace, his wife’s crow, were like a savings plan: tiny daily deposits that accrued so slowly their day of redemption seemed infinitely removed. However, Grace had a way of descending on him so unexpectedly that if he’d ever bothered to think along these lines, he would have concluded that all of life’s mysteries are equally impenetrable, and who could say whether any hopes or fears would pay off, ever, in any sort of way? So he continued throwing pencils and forks at the bird, or striking out at it with his hand, but almost always missing, since Grace was as wary of Grandfather as were his wife and family.

  But unlike the others, Grace was confined to the kitchen and her cage, and couldn’t escape Grandfather’s presence merely by leaving the house or retiring to another room. So the crow took to perching on the lintel of the kitchen door whenever she was let loose. There she could see Grandfather before he could see her; and she often took what advantage of this she could. If he entered the kitchen without his old man’s hat, she would defecate on his bald head. If he wore the hat, she would swoop down and snatch it away, and Grandfather would be reduced to chasing her about the kitchen with the broom, swearing and knocking things off shelves and the tabletop. Once, the bird dropped the fedora into the soup, which so distressed her mistress, Aline, that from then on all soups were simmered with the lid on.

  One evening, as dusk was settling, Grandfather woke and groggily bethought himself of breakfast. He found the kitchen empty except for Grace, whose cage was set at the open window. Running his hand over his tired, bald and now always scarred head, Grandfather suddenly thought how easy it would be, with no one watching, to open the cage door. At least one of the problems in his life could be easily solved. If Aline wanted to know who had let the crow loose, he could be just as puzzled as she or anyone else in the house. Of course she would think it was him, but that didn’t deter him. He had been on decreasingly civil terms with his wife since she had moved out of his bedroom, until now he frankly cared nothing for what she felt or thought, just as he would never stop to consider the feelings of his victims—who of course could have none—or their families.

  He tied the sash of his dressing gown and cautiously approached the cage. Grace watched him with her usual indecipherable stare, head atilt. The crow shuffled to get farther away from him, but when it was clear he was coming for the cage, she broke into screeching
and flapping as if he were already poking at her.

  Grandfather retreated, listening for any reaction from the rest of the house. None. Good. But how to open the cage without sounding the alarm again? He settled on a yardstick, and held it out at arm’s length, trying to force the small sliding door upwards. Grace watched as if curious, her head swinging from left to right, occasionally pecking at the stick, once grasping it in her beak until Grandfather cursed and yanked it back. Eventually the deed was done, and Grandfather almost smiled as Grace realized she was free to leave.

  She hopped onto the threshold and tilted her head in the direction of the open window, and then, as if suspicious, towards Grandfather. “Go on, go on,” he murmured. She seemed to consider first his words, and then the darkening sky, before finally she hopped to the sill, spread her wings and leapt into the air.

  Grandfather leaned out the window to see her go, but she was already lost against the deep blue night sky. Could it be true? Was he free of Grace at last? He thought he heard the rustle of her wings; he leaned further out and turned his head to look up the wall above. Suddenly a rush of air hit him in the face as he heard Grace screeching. He swung his head back quickly but couldn’t make it inside the window before she was on him, pecking, cawing and batting him with her wings. Her feathers were razor-sharp, and he felt his cheeks and neck wetting with his own blood under her attack.

  Halfway out the kitchen window, with all his weight bearing down on his chest and unable to get a proper footing in his panic, he grabbed at the bird and tried to tear her from his face. That was a mistake. Now Grace panicked. For a second she was still; inside, Grandfather’s feet slid on the kitchen linoleum as he struggled to brace himself, instinctively squeezing the crow’s breast between his hands—not to disable her, but as if it would somehow steady him. Breathless, Grace let out a mournful rasp, reached over to Grandfather’s red, strained face and plucked out his left eye.