The story of my initiation to dynamite is a big hit in conversations. People cry: ‘Seven years old and he let you play with dynamite!’ They protest: ‘You’re not serious!’ They exclaim, they are scandalized, but they ask me again: ‘Who planted the stick of dynamite in the sand, you or your father?’ Particularly the women, the ones with two or three kids, and the busybody mothers who want to hide their disapproval and think they are being subtle: ‘And what did your mother think about all this?’
Our mother didn’t have time. She would prepare a birthday meal, and we barely saw her behind her enormous table, the fatigue of an entire life making her invisible. But the absent figure of our mother offends these ladies; they don’t understand, so I always tell them that she left us to it, which is pretty much true.
There are plenty of parts of our story that I can’t tell. People are too narrow-minded to accept such a lust for life. We don’t belong to the same species. We never wanted their lives, and I can see in their eyes that our defiance sends them scurrying back to their doghouses with their tails between their legs the minute a particularly Cardinal episode comes up. Over the years, I have figured out which things are the most remarkable, and I don’t pour it on any thicker. I stick close to what’s deemed acceptable.
I don’t tell the story of Geronimo with the stick of dynamite against his chest. I don’t want to see – as I have seen reflected in their sidelong, sticky eyes – Geronimo, savage and cruel, standing in front of the school bus that took the hicks back to Hurault, challenging that girl (her name was Caroline) by stroking the tip of the fuse on the stick of dynamite that was jutting out of his windbreaker pocket.
He was in love with another girl, and this Caroline had been ruining it by telling anyone who would listen for the previous three days that he had tried to kiss her. He was twelve years old, already savvy with dynamite, but not so savvy in love, and he was miserable.
Geronimo wasn’t the horrible bloodthirsty beast that I can see reflected in their pathetic mongrel eyes. He just wanted to get that hick Caroline to admit she had lied. And he would have gone back, day after day, in front of the Hurault bus, with his stick of dynamite conspicuously hidden in the pocket of his windbreaker, if the story hadn’t reached our principal’s ears. She summoned Geronimo to her office, along with the schoolyard monitor who, by unhappy coincidence, was the Old Maid. She made it clear to both of them that a monitor couldn’t tolerate such conduct.
Geronimo would never have given in, and the principal knew it, if the Old Maid’s job hadn’t been at stake.
‘My job as a schoolyard monitor meant more to me than anything. Geronimo knew it. I used the money from my shifts to buy clothes, and I helped the Old Lady out when she was short for groceries. You know how proud she was of her cooking.’
The Old Maid told me a lot more of this story than she had meant to, during one of our conversations about what our family had been. But she never revealed the name of the girl who had stolen Geronimo’s heart. She wasn’t even pretty, but she had the beauty of the devil deep in her eyes. That was all I could drag out of her.
Would he have done it? That was a question she wouldn’t answer, and to distract me from the stick of dynamite, she told me about things I hadn’t asked about.
He would have done it, although what, exactly, I don’t think even he knew.
A young warrior – that’s how I picture him – a young warrior who didn’t know where to thrust his sword, but who was valiantly determined to have his love story.
The Old Maid smiled at the image.
‘Except that time, the young warrior didn’t win the duel for love. His beloved left Norco a little while later. Her father found work, somewhere else of course, and the family followed.’
The Old Maid is our second mother. She took care of us from the cradle and continues to watch over us. We are at either ends of the family spectrum. Her at the front of the line, the eldest girl, and me at the back. Time could have separated us even more, but whenever my work takes me to Val-d’Or, we meet at the Tim Hortons over a coffee and two doughnuts, and we continue our family odyssey, me a fan in the front row and her trying her hardest not to enjoy it.
I sense her resistance, a knot that tightens and keeps me from traipsing wherever I like. She keeps me on a leash; I can feel it. I can’t go farther than her reticence and silence will allow. There is a secret place that she keeps me away from with all her might.
We are always happy to see each other, though. It is incredibly and joyously invigorating, the pleasure of being among Cardinals again. We get so few opportunities. Life has scattered us around the globe.
Émilien is in Australia. He’s done a bunch of different jobs that have made him rich. He is the eldest, the Patriarch, as he was once called. We also called him Stan, Stanley and Siscoe, because of an old story about Stanley Siscoe’s wad of cash. But none of the nicknames we gave him stuck: he was too remote, too old, practically an uncle.
Big Yellow is fighting fascism, imperialism, injustice and all of that in South America. I last saw him five years ago. He was on his way to Frankfurt, supposedly for a conference on international aid. I didn’t believe him. I think he’s an arms dealer. That’s what the Old Maid thinks too.
Mustang has been on the move since his first divorce, Tommy is lying low somewhere in Ungava, Nefertiti exists only by cellphone and there is no point trying to get Tintin to leave behind his life of poverty. We see each other in groups of two or three, never all at once. We haven’t had a family reunion since Norco.
So when I saw everyone walk into the lobby of the Quatre-Temps one after the other, I thought this was it, our family reunion, the great Cardinal celebration I had spent thirty years hoping for.
The Quatre-Temps is a long, depressing building with tentacles that reach out into the spruce forest at the southern limit of Val-d’Or. Inside, it’s all fake leather, fake oak and fake smiles. It tries to create the illusion of a luxury hotel. This is where the prospectors’ conference is held every year, in this labyrinth of corridors and illusion. This is where, I hope, the wonder that is my family will be returned to me.
They all came. I don’t know how the word got around. The Old Maid was the one who had told me about it. Last month, at the Tim Hortons. In fact it was the first thing she said, she was so excited.
‘Prospector Emeritus? They’re going to give him the Prospector of the Year medal?’
I didn’t understand. Our father was still prospecting, of course, but at eighty-one years old, he wasn’t what he once was. When I visit him in his little bungalow (an abomination, I still can’t get used to it) and I go down to his finished basement (another abomination) where, inevitably, I find him gripping his cane but busy with his maps, books and rock samples brought from Norco, he is, and to my eyes shall remain, the only truly great prospector in the world. Even though he is no longer out in the field, even though he has swapped pickaxe and compass for the phone, even in slippers and a wool cardigan in his chilly basement, he is still the man we would see coming home from his claims, late in the evening, with the smell of the forest on him, a tired silence and, in his eyes, the metallic glint of the vein waiting for him in the bowels of the earth.
But Prospector Emeritus for 1995? I still don’t understand. He hasn’t discovered anything important since 1944, since the zinc deposit that Northern Consolidated deftly stole from him.
And I don’t understand what happened to us at the prospectors’ conference either.
I arrived in the Quatre-Temps lobby before the others. I wanted to watch them walk in. Most of all, I wanted to see who would come. I had passed along the news to many of them, hoping they would spread the word, but I never thought it would make it around the world.
I hadn’t seen some of them since Norco. Geronimo, for instance. After Norco, he went back to school and hadn’t wavered from his goal. He got his doctorate in medicine, specializing in vascular surgery and orthopedics, all from a Grade 9 education, and by age th
irty-nine he had embarked on an illustrious career as a war surgeon. Chad, Ethiopia, Chechnya: he had been to all the world’s hot spots. A latter-day Bethune of sorts. He had never taken out tonsils. I saw him on TV a few years ago being interviewed about Afghanistan. The jet black hair, the ashen complexion, the eye of a jaguar – I would have recognized him anywhere. He was pure Cardinal.
I didn’t recognize the Twins. They had faded with time. Carmelle and Angèle. Tommy and the Twin, as we called them. Tommy, because she could strike a trout like nobody’s business, because she was our best right winger in hockey and our pride and joy in jiu-jitsu, a real tomboy, the neighbours liked to say. And to show them we couldn’t care less what they thought and that she belonged to us, we called her Tommy. The Twin? Because … there were so many of us, some just went unnoticed.
They had aged from the inside. They had curdled, withdrawn. They were impenetrable. They could have been any woman nearing fifty. I hadn’t seen them since Norco, and it took El Toro saying, ‘Hey, there’s Tommy,’ before I could pick out which gloomy, sullen woman was my sister.
To see one was to see the other, they looked so much alike. But I didn’t see them together once during the conference. It was as if they were avoiding each other.
As soon as the conference started, it felt as though my family was slipping through my fingers. Already, in the lobby, as they arrived one after the other, Cardinals gathering near the front desk, I felt an edginess, a desire to slip away. I saw Big Yellow and Yahoo sneak off to their rooms.
The uneasiness grew as more of them arrived. There was the joy of seeing each other again, of course, the outpouring of cries and thumps on the back, happy reunions, as I had hoped. But the eyes of each new arrival showed a flash of panic as our numbers grew near the front desk. Between the cries and back thumps, some deserted, going off to their rooms, and others slipped away to the bar or the restaurant. There were only five of us left at the front desk when our parents made their entrance.
It was like chasing shadows that won’t stand still. I went from one to the other, running, searching, but the shadows slipped away, the groups broke up, and I would find myself alone with an interrupted conversation, my heart in my hands.
It was as if we were repelling each other. As if, above the Quatre-Temps, a giant, crazed magnet were playing with us. As if, after all these years, we couldn’t stand to be together.
There was a moment of grace that broke the evil spell. An incredible image that no one could resist, a moment when we were all drawn to an extraordinary scene, at the centre of the Quatre-Temps exhibition hall. Our father, in front of a state-of-the-art computer, talking about cross-referencing geographical data and satellite images with the young technician, was translating the short young man’s coded language for two prospector friends seated beside him, who were chewing on their astonishment. It was a thing to behold.
I heard El Toro say behind me, ‘He’s never touched a computer in his life!’
We were shocked and amazed.
The diminutive technician, who was just as dumbfounded, was offering explanations and giving instructions, and our father was executing them, his awkward fingers stumbling over the keyboard, as what they had agreed upon appeared on the screen. A prodigy, a genius as he headed to the other exhibition booths, trailing a crowd of curious onlookers behind him.
I was in the front row, between Big Yellow and Magnum. Behind us, beside El Toro, was the Old Maid. I heard her offer by way of explanation, ‘He learned from books. You should see all the computer books he has in his basement.’
Wapiti, a bit further back, begged to differ.
‘That’s cutting-edge technology. He couldn’t have learned that from books.’
I hadn’t yet realized that we were all there.
Our semi-circle around the computer grew smaller under the crush of the crowd. At one point, I was ejected from the arc and pushed against the chair of one of the old prospectors, the old coot with the nicotine-stained teeth. He leaned in toward our father and said, ‘Albert, you have company.’
Our father, eyes wide from the strain of looking at the screen, turned to us. I followed his eyes and realized that the family had gathered around him.
I had recognized the other old prospector right away. He used to come to Norco from time to time. I recognized the scar among the folds of his skin. ‘A mother bear defending her cubs,’ he had told us when, as kids, we climbed on him to plunge our fingers into the purplish gash of the wound. But he wasn’t sure whether he recognized us.
‘They’re your kids? All of them? Yours?’
Senility, no doubt. How could he not recognize us?
That’s when the old coot with the nicotine-stained teeth asked the question that would bring the conversation around to my favourite topic.
‘That’s quite a herd you have there. Just how many are there, Albert?’
I was waiting for the answer. I was waiting for the magic number that would stupefy and amaze. We would dazzle them with our stories. Finally we would all be together again, reunited in the spotlight of our memories.
I waited for the answer to echo through the crowd.
‘Twenty-one. Twenty-one children.’
But among us, in the semi-circle around our father, there was nothing. Dead silence.
The old coot with the nicotine-stained teeth followed up with another question.
‘Twenty-one, and they’re all living?’
The silence turned to pain. A pain that stabbed at me and united us – me, who didn’t understand what was going on, and them, frozen as the seconds ticked by, waiting to hear what our father would say.
‘Twenty-one, and all living.’
Our father’s eyes froze, blank. I turned around. My brothers, my sisters, my mother. Blank stares, all of them.
The Caboose looked at us one after the other, then all at once, and my stomach lurched. I’d thought he had figured it out. At the Tim Hortons, when I feel like he’s on the verge of illuminating part of the shadow, like he’s going to put his finger on it, grab on to my silence and be pulled through the curtain, I distract him. I tell him about Geronimo, I tell him about Tintin, I tell him about Norco, the long grass, the vast blue desolation of the winters, our house, the madness of our evenings, our dreams, our freedom, which is more than he has asked for, and he forgets the shadow that rose up. But there, at the Quatre-Temps, in the crush of the conference, I was trapped. I couldn’t stop what was happening.
It was old Savard who saved us. Old Scarface. The Weewuns loved him. They would climb his great, grubby carcass, plunge their fingers into the furrowed flesh and, every time, ask him how he got the scar. He was already old at the time, and he reeked like a man ravaged by years spent roaming the forests and the grimy hotels of Val-d’Or. He would hang around the kitchen, teasing the Old Lady and me with shameless vulgarity, the only civilities he was capable of in the presence of women. I would have chased him out with a broom if he hadn’t been there for our father. And I could have kissed him when he offered us an out.
The silence was thick, and we couldn’t react when old Savard, suddenly realizing he recognized us, pointed at Geronimo and asked our father:
‘That’s little Laurent, the one who used to follow you everywhere. Did any of the others go rock crazy?’
The people around us laughed, because little Laurent is almost six feet tall. Because the expression rock crazy is an archaic one, and it landed like a fossilized joke among the young geologists assembled. Because everyone had felt the weight of the silence.
We laughed too. Though it took us a few seconds to get the laugh going, having been paralyzed.
It had all gone over the Caboose’s head. I was sure of it when I saw him take an interest in the conversation. There was no shadow in his eyes. On the contrary, he was elated, our Caboose, convinced that old Savard was going to take us back to his memories of us when he used to come to get the latest on our father’s dreams and when he let the Weewuns slide do
wn his long legs.
‘Laurent is more interested in bones than rocks now. He’s a doctor. Patching ’em up in Chechnya. He’s a surgeon.’
‘You would have done better if you’d had a lawyer. You’d be rich right now if you had a lawyer for a son.’
‘Ugh! Not a lawyer! But one of my sons went rock crazy. He had a claim in Fancamp township with Lachapelle last year. And then there’s my oldest, Émilien, who’s sampling rock in Australia. That’s hardly a stone’s throw.’
Savard kept needling our father who, never having understood sarcasm, let himself be carried along by his old friend’s teasing. People were laughing kindly. The conversation had taken a reassuring turn. I was breathing more easily.
I took a quick look around me. Tintin had disappeared. I saw Nefertiti slip out quietly, and I met Tut’s eye, which assured me that he would do the same. Quietly, carefully, we beat a retreat, and if anyone had decided to do a count, they wouldn’t have known to go off in search of the twenty-first.
The Caboose was so absorbed by what the three old men were saying that he didn’t see anything. He is insatiable when it comes to stories of our family. The old-timers were reminiscing about a trench they had cut into hard quartz. Smoky quartz, gleaming black: that detail came from our father. It had been a long way from Norco, light years from our family history. But it was about mines – incredible, rich, gigantic – hidden in the rock, waiting to be discovered, so our father was talkative, with his soft, singsong voice that used to startle us at the table, so rarely was it heard. It was more than enough to make the Caboose’s day.
He is insatiable. Sometimes if I’m not on my guard, I find myself swept up in memories I haven’t erased – how could I? – that are buried in the back of my brain. All it takes is the slightest thing. All it takes is for the Caboose to show a little too much interest in a detail, and the conversation brushes back up against the shadow I have skirted.
I hadn’t wanted to tell Geronimo’s love story. It had a courtly beauty – the Caboose had described it that way – but was unbearably painful, the same type of pain that has plagued our hearts since Angèle disappeared. We have a gift for pain. And when I think back to Geronimo’s heartbreak, I poke around in the hurt that has disfigured us all so horribly. Pain begets pain, and the Caboose, who has been spared, sees in that story only the beauty of the gesture.
Twenty-One Cardinals Page 2
