The Tin Flute

by Gabrielle Roy

  "So he has a job, at last!" said Emmanuel.

  "Yeah, and you'd think he was the first guy in the world ever had one. My office this, my office that, my desk, my pen, all my things. . . . He's up to his neck in figures, morning till night. And when he wants a rest from that after work, he calculates down to the penny what his weddin' goin' to cost. Boisvert's buyin' his household at fifty cents a month, the way you buy prunes. Fifty cents on the fridge, fifty cents on the iron, fifty cents on the clothesline and fifty cents on the ring. He even knows what it's going to cost him five years from now to get his pinstripe cleaned, and it's not even out of the tailor shop yet. If you want a three-lesson course in how to succeed in life and get married on ten bucks a week, go see Boisvert. He's got it all written down in a little book. A real case, he is. A small-time Rockefeller with three dimes to his name."

  Emmanuel laughed heartily. He suspected that Alphonse had tried to borrow some money from Boisvert and had been turned down.

  "And what about Pitou?"

  "Dunno. That gang's too fast for me."

  "Well then, what about yourself?"

  "You can see, eh? All alone in the boat. The last of the unemployed. The last of his kind. A real curiosity!"

  Clowning, enjoying his own phrase, he repeated:

  "All alone in the boat."

  "Come on," said Emmanuel. "You're nuts! A guy never had a better chance than nowadays."

  "Just listen to him talk!" said Alphonse. "A real little gent!"

  He pulled his knees up to his chin, sat up awkwardly, with grimaces of pain, rubbed his hips and wagged his head like an old man. The wail of a siren came from the distance. He stood up.

  "Buy me a coke, why don't ya?" he whined. Then he changed his mind.

  "No," he said, "let's get outa here. The old lady's gonna turn up any minute and kick me out. There's no puttin' up with her now her handsome little Pitou don't come around to serenade her anymore. And she's started asking questions, like when's a guy gonna pay up. Now I ask you! Come on," he growled as Emmanuel pulled back the drape and said a few words to Ma Philibert. "You want to hear me talk, eh?" he said from the middle of the room. "All right, you're gonna hear me talk."

  Once outside he seemed to have forgotten that Emmanuel was there. He dragged along, his leg still asleep, flexing his knee like a drunk. As they passed near St. Zoe Street he seemed to realize where they were, and cried:

  "Hey! Not in there! I don't want to see old Guitte just now!"

  "Guitte? Guitte who?"

  "Marguerite L'Estienne. You know, I drop in at the Five and Ten too sometimes. You musta seen her when you went to say how de doo to your girlfriend, la belle Florentine!"

  "Lay off Florentine," Emmanuel said curtly.

  "Okay, okay, I didn't say nothin'," cried Alphonse. He added boastfully:

  "I was supposed to take old Guitte to the movies t'night and pay her the treat. Didn't find the cash. She may still be waiting for all I know."

  "I'll bet she won't wait a second time," said Emmanuel.

  "It's funny, though," Alphonse replied, "there's women, they don't like to be too certain of a guy. But she's a good, big old girl, our Guitte. I wouldn't mind so much if she hadn't lent me all that money. Look, she bought me this hat! And the shoes too, I think."

  "Aw, shut up!" said Emmanuel.

  They walked along in silence. Then Alphonse pointed to a lighted attic room on St. James Street.

  "Hey," he said, "my dad's on his little stint in town!" "Your father? That's right. He's the only family youve got left. Don't think I ever saw him."

  "One thing you missed," sighed Alphonse. "My dad's a character, he's a real character."

  He asked for another cigarette.

  "I'll pay you back all at once," he said, "and the dollar, and the drinks. . . " He stopped for a light, looking curiously at his hands which were trembling. "Say, have you ever been at the dump?"

  "The dump!"

  "Yeah, the one at Point St. Charles."

  "Never."

  "No, eh?"

  He smiled oddly, and suddenly launched into a morbid, astonishing story which Emmanuel at first thought was a complete fabrication.

  "I knew a guy," Alphonse began, "he'd built up a little business at the dump. He picked up all the old pots and pans and he fixed them up and straightened them out and then he sold them to an old Jew. Sure, it wasn't a big business. Some weeks there wasn't much old metal, but sometimes there'd be whole truckloads of lard pails and my buddy, there, he'd have a good day.

  "He had a room in town. But there's thieves on the dump, just like any place else. So this guy built a summer cottage right on the dump, so he could keep an eye on his stuff. Those days there was a whole village in that place, a collection of shacks about the size of a dog kennel. You didn't need a building permit and you didn't have to look far for boards. I tell you, you can't believe all the material there was at that dump. There was bed frames and sheets of galvanized iron, and heavy cardboard, not too dirty. You'd dig around there and pick whatever you needed, bits of pipe, four sheets of tin for the roof, and you chose a lot where it didn't stink too bad, right down by the water. You know, there's people ready to pay a thousand dollars to have a cottage and their Sunday visit down by the river. The guys at the dump, they had all that for nothin', except the Sunday visit. And the quiet! You gotta go a long way to find quiet like at the dump. Just like a graveyard, sweet death well-buried. You didn't hear nothin' at night but the rats goin' at the rotten garbage, and runnin' off with the big chunks of old meat. You left the city behind, the city an' its relief cheques and a bunch of tramps lining up for their bread tickets and all the racket about God knows what, and the streetcars goin' clingety clang and the big cars spoutin' fumes at you as if you had the plague. An' you had no more smoke there, nothin', you were right at home.

  "Well, to get back to my handyman friend, there, the guy had ended up havin' a pretty nice life. He didn't owe a cent to nobody, he didn't cost the city a cent. And he was bringin' up a kid in town, doin' pretty good by him. Then whattaya think? The city health officers come for a peek at the dump — it seems some poor devil was found dead all alone in his shack and the rats got at him — and do you know what they did, Létourneau? Those gentlemen from the health office, comin' down to the dump holdin' their noses with both hands?"

  Alphonse wiped his forehead.

  "Well, they set fire to the whole village. They set fire to it, Manuel. They burned the whole shebang, the doghouses, the old mattresses, the bugs. . . "

  He was breathing rapidly, as if exhausted by telling his story.

  "But when you're used to country air you always come back. The guys built that damn village up again. Not one shack less, not one shack more. Just like before. Same chimneys as big as a flower pot on the roofs. Same pots on the fire inside. And all those thin cats that came back when the people did, from all the places where they didn't get fed right — great big fightin' cats! And maybe you won't believe it, but flowers started growin' in front of the shacks. I suppose it was seeds that came on the wind. An' you can say what you like," he said defiantly, "it's not such a bad life down in that country — an' it is another country! It's not the same country at all! You run your business real quiet, nobody bothers you, and Saturday nights if you don't know what to do with yourself and you miss people and that other country, why you just go into town and make the rounds of society. You pay a visit to the people in the other country!"

  Emmanuel was silent; he had no doubts about the truth. He was embarrassed at having been admitted so deeply into Alphonse's life without being able to help him.

  "Alphonse," he said, "why don't you join up? A guy forgets his little troubles once he's in the army."

  "His little troubles!" repeated Alphonse.

  They were just arriving at the St. James Street tunnel. Alphonse tossed away his cigarette. He stopped in the light of a green lamp burning in a niche of the wall behind a wire grill, casting a glaucous pool on
the sweating concrete. Alphonse's dark locks were dishevelled by the wind, which rushed into this underground burrow. His face appeared to Emmanuel striped with black, as if he were behind bars.

  "Listen, Manuel Létourneau," he said, "I'm going to tell you another story. Believe it or not." He gave a stifled laugh and went on. "One fine day, after I heard you make your very fine speech, I went to join up too. Yes, me. The very next day it was, if I remember right. In any case, it was with a bunch of recruits goin' through St. Henri. There was the drum, and the best-lookin' guys up front and the poor bastards in the back. You musta seen that, eh? They put the tough guys in front and then at the back the guys that're draggin' their feet, they don't show so much. Not a bad trick!"

  "I didn't know. Why didn't you tell me?" interrupted Emmanuel.

  Alphonse shrugged irritably.

  "Anyway, there I was on the sidewalk, stickin' up like a fencepost, lookin' smart as hell, I don't think. I stood on one foot, then the other, tryin' to unfreeze part at a time, when all of a sudden I see this gang arrive. The drum was drumming and the fine fellows up front were flappin' their wings and you'd have thought they were gonna dig a gold mine or find a new Klondike at the end of the world or somethin' better yet. 'By gum,' I says to myself, 'it's a long time since you've seen boys as well fed and dressed, 'Phonsie. Why don't you try it yourself?' I says. And that's how I ended up in the gang with the rest of the jobless.

  "There was one guy right beside me, and he winks at me, eh? Well, I winked right back. I don't like a guy that makes friends all that fast, but what the heck, when you're takin' a stroll that could end up God knows where, you've gotta be a bit sociable with the guys swarmin' alongside, right? I guess the wink said, 'I fall, you pick me up. You fall, I pick you up.' Kind of a bargain. Funny when I think about it, how fast you can make a bargain with guys that don't give a damn."

  "Go on," said Emmanuel.

  "I'm just getting to the best part. No sooner have I got this buddy in the army, but they get us liftin' one foot, then the other, and left, right, you catch on fast. Then away we go like the devil as far as the barracks. What a bunch of nuts! And we picked up more the farther we went. Around Atwater alone we picked up three or four, I think. You know, once you're in, you can't wait for some other sucker to join too. I couldn't be happy that day unless I saw a lineup behind me as long as the railway and then some. I'd turn around sometimes to see how big our gang was gettin' but it was never enough to suit me. I couldn't understand those guys that stayed on the sidewalk just watchin' us go by. 'Come on in/ I says to them, 'it's lonesome as hell in our business unless you got the whole earth lined up on your side.' But the little guy beside me, the winker, he wasn't lonely, not a bit. He was a good-lookin' little guy too, all curly haired and healthy, fat cheeks and not a hair on his face. He never stopped singin' the whole time. 'Save your strength,' I says to him, 'you're gonna run out of songs before we find a place to sit down.' But if you ever saw a kid proud to play the man, he was the one. We turned a windy corner and the wind got into our rags fit to whip them off our backs, and there's my little guy shoutin' into my ear, 'Hey, bud, there's a future in the army!'

  "On the other side there was an old guy marching, all wrapped up in the wind like a bag of laundry. Well, he was over forty, and a bit out of wind, you can imagine. But he says to me too, as we're fightin' our way up a hill, 'There's a future in the army.' You sure hear some funny things there, marchin' along with a gang that's joinin' up. A future! Seems there wasn't a one that wasn't thinkin' about the future! Well, I thought about it too, marchin' along between those two, the little guy and the old guy who'd had his future already. ..."

  "Well?" said Emmanuel.

  "Don't get your tail in a knot," said Alphonse. "Here I am tellin' you a story- people are goin' to listen to ten years from now. They're goin' to understand it twenty-years from now. And all you can say is, 'Well?' Well, I'll tell you all about 'well.' We get to the barracks and they put each one of us through his questions, just like the priest, but they're getting us ready for Extreme Unction, not communion. Just the same it seems you got to know quite a bit for the last rites. You must have gone through that too. I don't know if your officer was as dumb as mine. There can't be many alive like that guy. There he is, an' he pulls out this pen and sits square like he's on a throne, and he blows his nose and scratches his head and straightens out his legs and then he asks me some arithmetic. If I'd had a pencil and paper and been alone to think about my business, it would have been a piece of cake to find the answer, but he lets me have it just like that. I got no time to think about anything and first thing I know he's mad as hell. 'Where have you been all your life? Did you never learn anything?' he says. 'Where have you been?' I ask him right back. 'Not down by the canal, I guess.' 'That's for sure,' says he. 'That's what I thought. No offence,' says I.

  "After that they take me in naked to see the doctor. 'Open your mouth. My Lord,' he says to me, 'I never saw so many rotten teeth in my life. Have you never been to a dentist?' After that there was another one who gave me hell because I'd never gone and bought glasses instead of all-day suckers when I was ten. The funniest of all was the guy that called me all kinds of names because I'd been brought up on beans and fricasseed onions instead of good pasteurized milk. But never mind, I wasn't discouraged. 'There's a future in the army,' I said to myself. 'If the little guy and the old guy and all the papers in town say so, it must be right. They're goin' to crank me up and I'll be all fit for their future.' "

  There was a silence, interrupted by the clanging of the warning bell. The street was filled with a roar and the earth trembled under the giant passage of a locomotive.

  "Wouldn't they take you?" asked Emmanuel, unable to bear any more of this vindictive tale.

  Alphonse broke into uncontrollable laughter which shook him as a strong wind shakes a tree standing exposed and unsupported. "Always in a hurry!" he said. "In a hurry to get back to the gang. You'll always be in a hurry, you will. But wait a minute. What you're goin' to hear now is the funniest of all. Imagine this: they took the old boy and patched him up like new. They made a different man of him, I tell you, gave him glasses, tore out his tonsils, vaccinated him from head to foot and stuffed him full of vitamins. They even straightened up his nose, it was a bit crooked. And the little guy — no problem there. He had all his teeth, all his hair, two legs and two arms, and all his good humour too.

  He took Emmanuel's arm and squeezed it hard, as if for a final farewell.

  Then his expression turned gloomy and indifferent.

  "Okay, okay, it's all right. Well, good-bye, good-bye, Létourneau. See you next armistice!"

  And away he went, the tail of his overcoat flapping in the wind. His tall, thin shape disappeared in the tunnel.

  Emmanuel stared after him. Alphonse seemed to him as dead as all the future dead in battle. Crushed by all he had heard, he went his separate way, mulling over a thought which had turned to an obsession, a refrain in his head not to be dismissed: Peace has been as bad as war. Peace has killed as many people as war. Peace is as bad. Peace is as bad...

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Late as it was, Emmanuel gave no thought to going home. He was absorbed in his internal debate. Azarius Lacasse, Alphonse Poirier — he couldn't forget these two beings that had by chance been revealed to him in all their solitude. Why? he wondered. They're both strangers to me. I mean nothing to them. They mean nothing to me. Why did they come upsetting me tonight? Suddenly he realized that their failures had called in question all his fine, youthful ardour, his faith in goodness, his enthusiasm, his drive toward action.

  "You're very lucky, young soldier!" Azarius had said to him. And the other one too, poor devil, had said the same thing in his bitter, roundabout way. Lucky! Life must have been horrible for some if they envied him not so much his uniform and his pay but his bayonet, his gun and all the tools of death! And without even having a clear idea who they were to be used against. Alphonse, for example, couldn'
t possibly hate the enemy as he hated his own country. Was Alphonse the only one of his kind, this unnatural creature? Not at all. Emmanuel could have named twenty, fifty, a hundred like him. Perhaps less bitter but on the same downward slope. What could you offer these men, the ones still hesitating? How could you lead them off to war? With a fife and drum? Emmanuel shuddered, for he thought he had just made a frightful discovery, a fact that defied the imagination: to make war you had to be filled with love, with a vehement passion, exalted, intoxicated, otherwise the whole thing was inhuman and absurd.

  What passion then was strong enough to lift men's hearts and draw them in like this? An ideal of justice, beauty, brotherhood? Did he still possess such an ideal himself? That was the sore point. Alphonse had no such ideal, nor did Azarius. And he, Emmanuel, could he still keep intact his ideal, the passion of his youth, or would he succumb to making war without realizing where it was taking him? St. Henri had him in its power, like a prison of doubt and uncertainty and solitude. He decided to go up to the mountain. At times that walk had brought him peace.

  He left behind the odours of grain and oil and sweet tobacco. Here, high above the suburb, he could breathe a different air, healthy and pure, redolent of fresh leaves and watered lawns. Westmount greeted him: city of trees and parks and silent houses.

  He turned west and soon arrived at the armouries. A young soldier was on sentry duty there, with fixed bayonet. Emmanuel was on the point of murmuring a greeting to this unknown comrade-in-arms when he glimpsed his face.

  It was Pitou, marching up and down in front of the armouries, stomping, clicking his heels, about turn, quick march, all alone in the night, rifle at the slope.

  Already trained, he didn't stop when he recognized Emmanuel, but his face lit up with pleasure.