Twenty-One Cardinals

by Jocelyne Saucier

  Sometimes she would nod off in the chair and stay there sleeping for a long time. I would have pins and needles all over my body from staying in the same position so long to watch her. The best, but the most uncomfortable, was lying on my back. That way I could get a peek at her and, sometimes, fall asleep contemplating the image of my mother.

  She had a gentleness, a grace that was so inviting that it was like being visited by an angel. All the hardness of her features, all the worries that showed on her face, all the day’s difficulties vanished and she rested, at peace, a thin smile on her lips, her head bowed slightly, her long hair haloed by the brightness of the moon, a Madonna, and all around her body, the matte softness of the light she kept in the palm of her hand and that spread over her nightgown.

  ‘A Madonna. I couldn’t sleep until she appeared.’

  We all have, tucked deep in our hearts, an image of our mother’s nighttime apparitions that haunts our lives.

  She went from room to room, her little flashlight guiding her steps. It was past midnight when she started her rounds. Everyone was in bed, there was no one left in front of the television, the evening’s mayhem had subsided. I would hear her close her bedroom door behind her. Softly, without making too much noise. The house had aches and pains throughout, and in spite of her precautions, my mother couldn’t stop the creaking, groaning and squeaking that accompanied her on her rounds and told us where she was.

  Because of the babies who slept with me, I was the only one who had a bedroom – upstairs, just above our mother’s – and I think it was because of the babies that her rounds began in my room. All the others slept wherever they could find space, the only rule being that the girls and the boys didn’t sleep together, and sometimes someone would spend the night on the sofa in the living room or on a pile of clothes in the laundry room.

  I would hear our mother climb the ladder that led to the second floor through a hole in the kitchen ceiling. The ladder was very steep and shaky, having been built a long time before by our father’s clumsy hands and patched up by one of us when a rung went missing or an upright was about to give way. A staircase would have been more practical, but it was beyond our father’s skills once he had realized, in moving his family into the house, that there had to be a means for moving between the two floors indoors. Maybe he had thought about our mother in her nightgown, in the snow, wind and cold that an outdoor staircase would have exposed her to. Never mind that the groaning of the ladder in the silence of the house made me worry every time that she would get caught up in her long nightgown and lose her footing.

  Nights with a full moon were a blessing. I could take my time studying her as she dozed at the foot of my bed.

  Big Yellow just thought she was an insomniac. ‘It was only while she watched us sleep that her own sleep could creep up and she would manage to outsmart the insomnia a little.’

  I think that her nights were in fact states of intense alertness. She emerged from the whirlwind of her days, made serene by her evening rest, and made the rounds of the beds to see each of her children, as they were when she gave birth to them, restored to her in sleep, relaxed, peaceful and innocent, and she wanted to store that in her memory forever.

  What makes me think this is her gentle, loving gaze, which went to the far reaches of my soul, and the incredible emptiness I felt when her eyes moved to one of the little ones sleeping with me.

  What makes me think this is what Yahoo told me and what Zorro and Nefertiti confirmed. They had run into her one time on their way to the bathroom.

  ‘I was coming out of the WC,’ Yahoo told me. ‘It was a clear, cold winter night, a full moon. The temperature had dipped below minus forty.

  ‘She was coming out of the green bedroom. Do you remember the green bedroom? Fakir had picked the colour, that time we repainted the house.

  ‘I was hurrying, because the cold was burning my feet, and I stopped short when I saw her. She looked like someone out for a stroll. She was barefoot but didn’t seem to feel the cold. She leaned toward me – I was eight or nine – and she said, ‘Get back to bed, Julien. You’re going to catch cold. The floor is like ice.’

  ‘She was tall and beautiful in the moonlight. She had a soft, calm voice.

  ‘I was so surprised to see her, and particularly to hear her say my name, that I dashed off to the bedroom without saying a word.

  ‘She laughed a little, she thought it was funny – she laughed, can you imagine? – and she said, ‘No, Julien, not that one. You’re sleeping in the other room.’’

  What had impressed Yahoo was that she knew where he was sleeping that night.

  ‘Did she operate on radar, or what?’

  Bibi, to whom I told the story, had a simpler explanation.

  ‘She counted us. She counted the beds and who was in them, and she knew exactly where each one of us was.’

  Yahoo’s story supports the image I have of our mother, frantic during the day but mistress of her nights.

  I like to think that we shared responsibility for the household. I cared for the brood of Cardinals, big and small, while she cooked obsessively and watched over our nights. The house was safe.

  I would like to have the same confidence today. The family is scattered around the world. There are no more discussions, no more battles, no more big dreams to dream. Only the slow drip of pain.

  The house is like the family. Battered, disfigured, but holding on. It’s the only building still standing in Norco. I go back sometimes, fearing each time that it will have fallen down, but no, it’s still standing, collapsing under its own weight, open to the elements, and always there, a noble, faithful companion.

  Sometimes, I find it more broken-down, more creaky. Its porches and outdoor staircases have fallen off. It is gaping open on all sides. There are no more doors or windows to protect it. The scalloped trim that gave it its phony facade – the only nod to style – is now home to a colony of birds, barn swallows and starlings that cheep frightfully and scatter when I appear.

  Norco is now just a field surrounded by forest. The impression of a wide-open space that I had back then crashes into the trees that have sprouted up everywhere. There are trees in the Laroses’ yard, the Boissonneaults’ and the Morins’, where the church, the Hôtel Impérial and the Decarufel garage were. The only place that has been spared the encroachment is the block where the three schools stood.

  I don’t recognize the old Norco. Its houses are ruins, its cars mere shells, everything has been flattened under a layer of grass. The forest is preparing its advance, and the mine, hidden away in the mountain that is the town’s backdrop, sits there waiting for me to go take a look. But I won’t.

  I don’t know what miracle saved our father’s dynamite shed from the devastation. It wasn’t even very solid – nothing our father built was ever particularly straight.

  It looks like a big spider. The boards – the ones that are still upright – have separated from the base and now offer only diagonal support. The roof, eaten away by rust, has holes in several places.

  A big spider with a rusty sheet-metal hood.

  It was our father’s domain. He stored his dynamite in it, along with all the prospecting equipment he couldn’t cart around in his van or pile in the basement. He spent a lot of time in the shed, watched from the window by one of the Weewuns who would announce, ‘The Old Man’s going to the shed; the Old Man’s coming back from the shed.’ Our father’s comings and goings were always worthy of comment. We saw so little of him.

  He could spend weeks in the woods, but when one of his claims was close by, for example in Barraute or Lamorandière township, he came back each night. Which didn’t much affect his presence in the house, since he left at the crack of dawn and came back only at suppertime, and as soon as he got up from the table, he headed down to the basement where his rock samples would fill his dreams all evening.

  He was in the basement or he was in the shed. Domestic life didn’t interest him. As far as I know, he
didn’t go into any of the bedrooms apart from his own, where he and our mother would cross paths at the end of the evening, she, setting off on her nightly rounds, and he, emerging from underground. The only time I saw him go upstairs was when Geronimo was lovesick for that little girl with the wild eyes.

  Geronimo and I had just come home from school. We had left the principal practically catatonic. Geronimo wasn’t much better, I realized only on the way home. His eyes had the milky film of fever. I wanted to touch his forehead, but he pushed my hand away: ‘Don’t touch me. I have a headache.’

  When we got home, he ran upstairs using an outside staircase, and I went in by the kitchen. It was spring, the ground was spewing the last of winter, and the children coming home from school were splashing merrily in the runoff of muddy snow, looking for trickling treasures liberated by the thaw. The only ones at home were the Weewuns and our mother. The Weewuns – Tootsie, Wapiti and Nefertiti, the Caboose hadn’t been born yet – were too young to remember, and the Old Lady was in the basement. I’m the only one who saw our father climb the kitchen ladder.

  He had come home from his claims earlier than usual. After unloading his equipment in the shed, he came in and asked me where Laurent was. As if he already knew that Geronimo wasn’t playing outside with the others, that he was feverish, sick and had gone to bed. As if he had had a premonition.

  ‘He’s upstairs. He’s running a fever.’

  ‘Headache?’

  I nodded with a gesture of impotence. He hesitated a moment, looked at me, really looked, and climbed the ladder.

  That moment belongs to me. I never told anyone about it. Just like I never talked about how intimidated our father looked as he went up, his furtive gestures, how embarrassed he was to be intruding in his children’s domain.

  He stayed upstairs for five long minutes. I counted. When he came down, he was just as uncomfortable.

  The Old Lady came up from the basement with a load of potatoes. The Weewuns clung to my legs, and I was never able to explain what had so worried our father, nor the strange impression that this memory leaves every time it surfaces.

  I have never told anyone this story, although I have often been tempted. I know it would give me points if they knew that I was the holder of an unfamiliar corner of our father’s secret life. It would be fleeting pride, I know, one that would evaporate rather quickly in the disappointment of having destroyed the intimacy of the only moment when my father truly looked at me, when I had the feeling of having an existence all my own.

  The one to worry most about is the Caboose. It’s hard to resist the pleasure of telling him, seeing such contagious enthusiasm in his eyes for anything involving our family. The Caboose is ardent, he burns, he is consumed with admiration for our life in Norco, which he never knew, the poor thing. He wasn’t yet born or was still just a wailing little thing – ‘a howling monkey,’ Geronimo said – during the best years. Norco was at the start of its decline. The mine had just closed, the streets were emptying, and we felt like just wanting to become rich, powerful, almighty, the masters of the universe was enough. We were champing at the bit in a dying town. Our best years. The late 1950s, the early 1960s.

  When we talk about our life in Norco, this is the period we are referring to. Almost all of us were still at home. Only the Big Kids had left. Émilien, Mustang, Yahoo and Fakir were in Montreal, and they would come back, their arms filled with gifts, their old beaters bursting with clothes picked up at manufacturer’s surplus sales and, in the trunk, crates of vegetables – cauliflower, broccoli, mushrooms and other curiosities from the Jean Talon Market, ‘Italian food’ – that they laid at our mother’s feet with the air of conquistadors.

  Our best years. The Caboose never gets tired of them. He is constantly looking for an anecdote, a detail, listening for a slight shift in the conversation that will bring us back to that time. When we get together, I know I’ll enjoy going back over the memories, but I also know the pain that prowls around the pleasure. The skies went dark at the end of our best years. When we had to leave Norco, the house was completely devastated.

  The Caboose experienced the dark years with complete impunity. He was only seven when Angèle disappeared. He didn’t know anything about it. The house kept the tragedy in check by holding its breath and coasting on better times.

  The Caboose was so fragile. He had no instinct, he was scared of his own shadow. We always protected him. I kept him out of the jaws of the older ones, and they protected him from the hicks. He was the opposite of all we held dear – faint-hearted, indecisive, in fact, he became a civil servant – and yet he was authentically Cardinal in his rejection of what was not absolutely true. He was a paragon of loyalty to our values, without ever having the strength to embody them. He wore our colours. He was kind of our mascot. And during long stretches of boredom, when winter lingered until May or the summer wouldn’t let up on the parched land, when Norco’s desolation affected us more than usual, the Caboose agreed to be our bait.

  They would leave him on his own, seemingly unsupervised. He would play or hang around somewhere and wait for someone to come pick on him. If a hick approached, the band of Cardinals would emerge, judging the severity of the offence by bearing, gestures or tone of voice. If the hick was alone, he got a good scare, but if there was a group, a memorable fight ensued.

  These apocalyptic battles made the Caboose the hero of the hour. His siblings carried him home on their shoulders, and he got the glory of telling the story that evening in front of the TV.

  Poor Caboose. He never managed to make a place for himself. They were too big, too hard, too sure of their strength, and, being born sickly and pointy headed, he didn’t think he measured up. He would run into the fray, scared and cowed by the show of strength, receiving a claw mark on the way, sticking out his tongue and tossing a bad word right back, but he never managed to assert himself.

  They tried to toughen him up. They took him everywhere. He was on all the expeditions, but it was a waste of time. He didn’t pick up a single ounce of cruelty. He was an onlooker to their games, an onlooker to our life, and we continued to protect him, our gritless Caboose, our scared little Caboose, our most faithful admirer.

  He hasn’t changed. Still fretful and nervous in his suit and tie. Too frail for us to let him see our pain.

  He was the first person Geronimo asked about.

  ‘Is the Caboose here? Has anyone told him? And the Old Lady? How is the Old Lady?’

  I knew that the conference would be sort of a reunion when I saw the great Geronimo get out of a rental car in the hotel parking lot. If a phone call had convinced him to leave the war wounded, that meant all the others would come.

  He had grown thicker, his step was heavier, but he still had the look of a young wolf. When he got out of the car, he breathed in the air by lifting his muzzle, and he looked all around him before walking along the row of cars. I recognized him right away.

  But would he recognize me? So many years gone by. I had aged without realizing it.

  I don’t know whether it was the intensity of my stare behind the glass wall of the hotel lobby or whether he really saw in me the Old Maid of thirty years ago … He didn’t hesitate, his eyes didn’t even flicker. He came toward me and gave me a hug.

  We spent an eternity between the doors of the entrance, flowing into one another like magnets, until the bustle of the lobby brought us back to reality.

  ‘The Caboose is here. Boy, is he here. He’ll be on our heels. He won’t leave us be for a minute. But don’t worry, no one has told him anything.’

  From that point on, confidences would no longer be possible. On the other side of the door awaited the family reunion that we had been dreading for thirty years.

  I reluctantly stepped back from my brother’s full-grown body, the smell of other countries, the enveloping warmth of his clothes, and together we dove into the rush of emotions.

  The conference was a booby trap.

  We were all su
rprised and delighted to be there, but that brief moment of happiness quickly dissolved with the horror of what we saw: we were going to be assembled around Angèle’s absence. Our eyes all reflected the same panicked vision of our mother making her entrance at our father’s side and, upon seeing her children gathered in the hotel lobby she would count us, as she had in Norco, and discover that Angèle was missing, Angèle, the gentlest, the most likeable, the only one of her children who had a gift for happiness. A sight that would be more than she could handle. A sight that was more vivid to me, as the keeper of the house, than to the others, and I stopped the looks from Cardinals dead in their tracks as they pleaded for me to do something fast to foil the invisible hand that had laid such a cruel trap for us. So there were only a few of us near the front desk when my parents made their entrance.

  From then on, it was all just evasion, dodges and equivocations. Our mother was too caught up in her thoughts, wandering the maze of the hotel unaware of our manoeuvres. The Caboose, on the other hand, didn’t stop following us, flushing us out wherever we hid. If he sensed our pain, all would be lost. To him, the bottom of the chasm would have the beauty of a Greek tragedy, and he would shout out the nobility of our pain to the world. The Caboose’s admiration is incurable.

  Tommy was the only one who could save us. She has spent a long time living among the Inuit; she has learned their way of blending into the icy desert. It took me a while before I recognized our insolent, boyish Tommy in this woman of no particular age. She still wears pants and a shirt over a shirt, like back in the day, but she has lost her swagger. With the freshly ironed pants and the shirts, which are actually quite pretty, she has become a strange hybrid, both a warrior and a delicate flower, velvet on a backdrop of ice. With the ice in flames.