Now, again, Grandfather frowned nervously and identified the grim thought tickling the back of his mind, where his conscience had lain buried and undisturbed for so many years—that Frère André was watching.
Iron bars; red-tinted plate glass; art deco reliquary. Inside? A human heart abandoned by its owner more than half a century earlier, yet known to have shed blood only a few short years ago. Placed there with reverence for safekeeping. It looks, Grandfather thought, like a potato. A big, unwashed baking potato.
While Uncle kept guard, alternately watching each of the two corridors leading into this museum, Grandfather took his tools from his coat and began to work. He wet a small rubber suction cup with his tongue—a foul-tasting Host—and grimaced, and stuck it to the plate glass. He ground a circle around it with the wheel of a large glass cutter, and stopped nervously—there’d been a loud noise, an odd kind of shriek—but no one seemed to have heard, and Uncle nodded him back to work.
He took out a rubber mallet and wondered if he hadn’t just felt a warm breath upon his neck. But turning, he saw no one behind him except the mannequin of Frère André in his case—behind his own plate of glass, where even if he were breathing, surely his exhalations wouldn’t penetrate the glass. Grandfather put his hand to the back of his neck. Was that condensation he’d spied on the inner surface of the glass, just below the mannequin’s nostrils?
Of course not.
He held the cup in one hand, and smacked the glass a blow with the mallet. A hollow ringing; the plate trembled in its frame, settled, and let go the circle beneath the cup. Grandfather gently pried it away and set it on the floor.
Stupid. He’d not made the hole big enough to snatch the reliquary through. His own heart raced through a few beats.
“Hurry up!” hissed Uncle.
Grandfather put his whole arm into the hole, pressed his body and face against the glass. He began slashing the window of the reliquary in quick strokes, thinking to cut it out of its frame like a painting, and grab the bare heart itself.
It wasn’t easy, single-handed. The glass was cold against his cheek; he couldn’t directly see what he was doing and was forced to glance sideways at his handiwork. Of course, he couldn’t see out of his left eye at all; it was covered by the patch. Damn that crow.
“What’s keeping you?” came Uncle’s voice, nervous and angry.
Grandfather lifted the patch from his left eye. It didn’t really help much, considering he was trying to look through his own head with it.
Suddenly, Grandfather seized up. His heart had been stabbed by a needle, his left arm dealt an electric shock and his left eye—the glass eye—bit into his brain at the rear of his eye socket.
Frère André had sat down.
What the hell am I doing here? Grandfather thought suddenly. He found himself trembling. His knees were wavering dangerously, and he was supporting himself by leaning his armpit into the glass. He felt perspiration collect on his forehead and begin a slow trickling.
Warm. It was as warm here as it was at home.
Uncle came to get him. “Aren’t you done yet?—Christ!” He rushed to catch Grandfather, who was slipping to the floor.
He tried to help himself by catching the lip of the hole as his arm slid out of it, but suddenly his body was very heavy and he hadn’t the strength. He tried to reach the ground with his left hand before he fell to it, but somehow his left arm just hung there, like meat.
Grandfather began to cry. He didn’t understand why. And it wasn’t tears—if he’d felt any pain, he might expect a few tears—but he was sobbing as Uncle caught him and held him up, and he was as astonished and angry at himself as Uncle seemed to be, and realized, as Uncle swore at him and slapped him across the face, that he approved entirely. He would have done the same himself if he could, he thought in that moment. “That’s right. Slap me again. Bastard.”
And suddenly they were not alone.
What the priest and the janitor accompanying him saw was an elderly man in the throes of a heart attack being roughed up by an unsavoury character.
Both Uncle and Grandfather were speechless. Caught.
The priest took over Grandfather and sent the janitor flying to call an ambulance. As he was being dragged away, Grandfather regained his voice, and began shouting back to Uncle, “The heart! The heart!”
The priest attempted to calm him. “We’ve sent for an ambulance, you’ll be all right, my son.”
Uncle picked up the mallet and smashed the plate glass, and took the reliquary from its pedestal. He threw it to the stone floor and it sprang apart. Frère André’s heart rolled onto the cold floor, under the gaze of the mannequin.
Uncle gathered it up, thrust it into his coat pocket and left.
Shocked, the priest crossed himself and murmured in Latin; he briefly thought he should chase the thief, but stayed with Grandfather instead. When the ambulance and the police arrived, he explained to the older cop and his rookie partner that Grandfather had been roughed up by some thug who’d stolen the sacred relic. The older cop looked quizzically at Grandfather, but wrote up his report according to what he was told.
So Grandfather ended up in the hospital again. A heart attack, they told him.
“No,” he said. “Not me.”
The attending physician explained to him just exactly what the classic symptoms and signs were, and how they matched exactly Grandfather’s experience and condition.
“Hogwash.”
The resident produced Grandfather’s X-rays and charts and showed him where the damage was and how his cardiovascular system had been affected.
“Quackery. Smoke and mirrors. You know nothing about bodies. I know about bodies. Don’t bother me with your mumbo-jumbo.”
As he explained to Dr. Hyde, when his old business partner and family physician arrived to take over the case, “I let them bring me over in the ambulance just for show. It was a good diversion. Uncle’s got the goods, speaking of hearts. And have you brought me any cigarettes?”
“We can’t allow smoking in intensive care,” said Hyde, and pointed to the frail woman under the oxygen tent.
Grandfather grunted and demanded, “When can I leave?”
“Well,” said Dr. Hyde, “you did have an incident. I think you should stay a little while longer.”
“I didn’t have no heart attack. I’m as strong as a horse.”
“Did your left arm go numb?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Any pain in the chest?”
“… yes. Heartburn.”
“And you fell to the floor.”
“It was just the shock of realizing that bastard was watching me all along.”
The doctor started. “Which bastard would that be? You were seen?”
“Frère André.”
“Oh. Anyway, I can’t let you out.”
Grandfather’s eyes narrowed. “Listen, Hyde, I’ve got things to do.” Which was a lie, really, but who wants to be stuck in a hospital ward?
“I, too, have things to do. I’m also held back by circumstances beyond my control.”
“I see. My son will be here with the item soon enough. Tomorrow.”
“Excellent. After looking over your results and examining you myself, I’m inclined to think that perhaps you haven’t suffered a heart attack.”
“That’s what I said.”
“But even though your case is probably not serious, in view of your age and your recent operation, I’d like you to stay for observation until, say, your son comes to collect you. I believe you may have had an exclusionary pulmonary deflation.”
“What the hell is that?”
“A case of the vapours. You can go home tomorrow.”
To Uncle’s great disgust, Frère André’s heart bled into his pants pocket, and many people stared in shock at him on his way home.
The heart had been bleeding since the reliquary was broken and it rolled out onto the floor. Perhaps it was the shock of the impact, or per
haps it was the contact with the air. Whatever it was, the heart continued to produce the thick, sticky liquid.
The heart wasn’t really pumping blood. It was, more precisely, secreting the fluid, as an ice cube gives up water in the heat. Except that the heart was not growing any smaller with the effort. And it wasn’t exactly beating, but it did seem to be somehow animate. It was more like a kind of undulation or a rippling, an uneven and irregular pulsing.
In any case, it was a problem for Uncle. He couldn’t wait to get rid of it. In the meantime, he would’ve liked to simply lay it in the sink and let its sickly blood drip down the drain. But he couldn’t let the others see it. So he placed it in an old zinc pail in his room, where it attracted flies whose buzzing annoyed him. He swatted them away from his face just as Grandfather had done when pestered by Grace, and finally went down to the kitchen and took the family fly swatter from under the sink.
When he returned to his room, he found his dog lapping at the pail. He poured the blood into the toilet. He was awoken twice overnight by the sound of the dog’s tongue, and he swatted it away from the pail with a groggy curse. Through his dreary gaze it seemed to him that the dog had grown lighter-coloured and was now a mere pale shade of its former self: a ghost.
In the morning his black Labrador was a golden retriever, and its muzzle and tawny coat were flecked with burgundy droplets. It was bright-eyed and energetic, and Uncle’s usual thundering curses and blows could do nothing to quell its puppyish behaviour.
Later, when he was carrying the pail and its contents—still excreting its viscous fluid, still quivering at the bottom of the bucket like some hapless, limbless frog—up the hill to Dr. Hyde, his dog refused to be left behind. It was following not him, he realized, but the pail. When it filled with blood he’d empty it into the gutter and walk on ahead, leaving his dog drinking at the curb. By the time he’d reached the corner of Pine and University, the main entrance of the Royal Vic, he noticed his dog was now albino, and its only remaining colour was the identical red of its eyes and of the blood on its muzzle. He emptied the pail once more. Passing motorists stared at this ghastly sight of a white dog, a bucket of blood and an ill-kempt man.
He continued up the hill of Pine Avenue towards the Allen Memorial, Dr. Hyde’s institution. As he turned up the driveway he emptied the pail one last time and looked back for his ghostly dog, but it had disappeared.
In the spring Marie organized a propaganda campaign. It would help keep her cell together, give them a sense of still accomplishing something now that Hubert was gone. Under cover of darkness, they crept along in ones and twos with pockets full of his folded tracts, and slipped them into mailboxes at random. They chose a different neighbourhood each time, in a different part of town, and a different night of the week, in an attempt to avoid falling into a pattern—a pattern was nothing more than a web to be caught in. This unpredictability also allowed Marie to choose the right moment for pamphleteering, when it might best bolster their flagging morale.
For the most part their feuilletons were ignored along with the rest of the junk mail people received. Except that it made some immigrants and anglophones nervous, and they complained to the newspapers and police.
And of course Hubert’s politics were inadvertently mixed with Jean-Baptiste’s poetry, and some puzzled people thought again how odd poets are, handing out verse door to door. Obscure and terrible verses which, for Christ’s sake, didn’t even rhyme.
But one man was struck by Jean-Baptiste’s unusually direct dramatic words, and by the bravery of a poet who’d distribute his works door to door in the same neighbourhood and at the same time as the felquistes were making the rounds with their propaganda.
Now this man was a teacher of drama at a local college, and artistic director of his own theatrical company.
The Desouches’ door was always open so as to let out the heat, but it didn’t seem to be working, and had the disadvantage of allowing all visitors a presumed right of access. Professor Woland blew in like a hot breath through a damp scarf, stuffy and stifling. He paraded through the house as if whomever he might encounter would instantly recognize him, and his celebrity would by divine right make the house his own. He jaunted into the front parlour and encountered Mother in her repose. He stopped; he was disappointed there was no conscious soul he could overwhelm with his greeting. He frowned and brought his fist to his chin, stepped back into the hallway and called his greeting before him as he proceeded to the interior.
“Hello, hello. It’s Woland. Professor Woland.”
But the living room was empty. He heard the clank of dishes and turned towards the kitchen.
Aline was surprised by the sound of an unfamiliar voice, so obviously inside her house. She dropped a plate into the sink and went to see, drying her hands on a dishcloth as she went.
“Ah, miss,” began Woland, as they almost collided in the doorway. But he couldn’t continue, because Aline shrieked in shock.
Grace responded, cawing and screeching and fluttering about the ceiling; Aline jumped back.
Now Woland was shocked, by the noise of the two and their quick, frantic, purposeless movements.
“I’m so sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Woland was not happy. This wasn’t turning out the great whirlwind of an entrance he was hoping for.
“Mais qui êtes-vous? Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” Aline was angry. She’d been frightened by this stranger, and he had the nerve to walk about her home like it belonged to him. And he couldn’t even speak to her in French.
Woland began feeling defensive. “Uhm, I’m looking for Jean-Baptiste.”
This calmed Aline a little; perhaps he was some friend of her grandson’s. Still, he was quite rude. She had a chance now to look at him for the first time. He was a tall man, and thin. He wore a light grey jacket, tight, with matching pants; black shiny shoes; black leather gloves; a blue tie rather like a cravat; and a small, high black hat. He had a pencil moustache and, somewhere, she suspected, a monocle on a ribbon. This was a friend of Jean-Baptiste’s?
The commotion attracted Father, who stood now in the hall behind Woland. “What is it? Who are you?”
Woland turned to him gratefully. “Ah, sir, I’m looking for Jean-Baptiste. I understand he lives here?”
Father considered this question, which seemed to throw doubts on Professor Woland’s legitimacy. If he was a friend, surely he’d know whether Jean-Baptiste lived here or not. Still … “Are you a friend of his?”
“Not exactly,” began Woland.
“Then who the hell are you?” Father exploded. “Haven’t you heard of doorbells?”
“Well, the door was open.” Woland was beginning to feel the heat, and loosened his cravat.
“For Christ’s sake. Your mouth’s open, shall I put my fist in it?”
Woland was baffled by this fury. Somehow, he’d lost the authority he’d been planning to claim here. He’d never gotten the chance to assert it. All his daydreams of sweeping the household, whomever it might contain, off its feet and into his plans vanished. The crow was still flying around, dangerously close, thought Woland.
“If I might just see Jean-Baptiste,” Professor Woland rallied. A bad start, yes, but no reason not to sally forth. A few proper steps and he could put this unfortunate beginning behind him, get to the business at hand and still probably win the day.
“Oh. Whom shall I say is calling?” asked Father, with a false deference.
Woland pulled himself up. He was sure his next words were going to change everything. After this, he’d be back in his dreams. “My name is Woland. Of the Black Snow Theatre Company.”
Father grunted. He walked slowly back down the hall to the foot of the stairs and, while Woland watched expectantly, shouted up:
“Jean-Baptiste! Some fairy from a theatre to see you.”
“It’s the oddest thing,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I just finished writing this play last week. How did you know?”
“A play? E
xcellent! Just what I was hoping. Let me have a look at it.”
“Well, I have to have it typed.”
“Let me see.” Woland grasped the book from Jean-Baptiste’s hands and began flipping through its pages. At last he turned back to the front and began to read. He stood holding the book and his walking stick in the same hand, absently pacing in the room, nodding and “Hmming” as Jean-Baptiste, who sat on his bed, could only wonder, stupefied, how indeed this man came to be calling for his play. Out of the blue.
“Of course it’s just the first draft,” said Jean-Baptiste.
“Yes, yes. I’m so glad you realize it,” said Woland. “You wouldn’t believe how many writers refuse to change anything. But no, no, I wouldn’t worry if I were you. This is very good. Needs work, it’s not yet a play, it’s just words here on paper, but already I sense the potential.”
“Good.”
“Let me take this away and read it, and we’ll meet again next week. You’ll come down to my office, we’ll have a nice coffee.”
“I still have to type it,” said Jean-Baptiste tentatively.
“Oh, your handwriting’s perfectly legible.” Woland put the notebook into his inside jacket pocket.
“Excuse me,” said Jean-Baptiste, “but that’s the only copy.”
“Is it? I’ll be careful, then. I’ll make you a copy myself, at the office. Come by on Tuesday and I’ll have a photocopy for you, and we can chat longer then. I’ll read this on the weekend, but already I can tell we’re going to work together.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like the original book back.” Jean-Baptiste held out his hand.
Woland shook it. “Oh, of course, how stupid of me. Tuesday, then, say eleven-thirty? Perhaps we’ll have lunch.” And Woland practically ran out of the room, flew down the stairs and disappeared into the street.
Woland threw the photocopy on the desk. Jean-Baptiste’s heart sank as he saw that many lines of dialogue had been crossed out with wide strokes of a black marker. He knew this was going to happen.
Woland handed back Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. He opened it and flipped a few pages. What he saw shocked him.
Black Bird Page 14
