It was always like that. They brought her along on raids she didn’t want to take part in, and the frilly dress would come back dirty, stained, crusted with clay, soot and sap, full of holes, torn, ruined, fit to join the anonymous heap of clothes in the laundry room.
She had no choice. When Geronimo used that voice to ask her – ‘You coming, Foster Child?’ – she had to show her allegiance.
It was said in a falsely reverent tone. There was a menacing sarcasm in his way of emphasizing ‘Foster Child.’ And Angèle, who wanted to prove that she had not gone over to the other side, that she was still ours in spite of her liking for baubles and trim, would agree to ruin her pretty dress in the fields and the forests.
And I no longer knew to whom I owed my loyalty.
Angèle and I were two hearts of the same soul. We lived in symbiosis. We were the Twins, absolutely inseparable, practically Siamese. No one had managed to find anything on either of us that would earn a distinctive nickname, and then a clump of plastic twigs on an old hat stole her soul, and she became the Foster Child.
I didn’t wear the dresses the McDougalls sent. I didn’t play with their dolls. I said no to skipping ropes, I said no to bubblegum pink, I said no to anything that even remotely resembled the contents of those boxes, and I started playing hockey and baseball and practicing jiu-jitsu, passionately, feverishly, to the point where I earned the position of right wing in hockey and became a force to be reckoned with in jiu-jitsu. I became Tommy.
I was on all the raids, in all the brawls. At age ten, I knocked out Big Boissonneault. At twelve, I defended myself against three kids. I fought with my fists and my feet. But I never scratched or bit like a girl. I defended myself, I attacked, I fought with the intensity of the last man standing.
I fought against the stupidity of the hicks, against the winters that dragged on far too long, against the cruelty of the sun and blackflies in summer, against profound boredom. I fought because I had dreams too big for Norco, because you only get what you take in this life. I fought so that I wouldn’t be treated like a girl, so that I wouldn’t have to endure Geronimo’s sarcasm, so that no one would insinuate anything about the mansion that awaited me in Westmount, and so that no one would ever doubt me. I fought so that you could escape them from time to time, your pretty dress fluttering in the wind, and so that Norco’s desolation would light up with the iridescent tulle. I was fighting for you, Angèle.
But of the two of us, you were the more courageous. You and your baubles, you and your archangel’s smile, you fought them off better than I could with my tomboyish insolence. In spite of the humiliation, you never gave up your taste for the finer things in life.
Where did that taste come from? I never really understood. From that feather, probably.
‘The finer things are just as essential to life as trees and fun. They’re as essential as water for fish. A pretty dress is like a flower. It’s like the shade of a tree.’
We rejected the finer things, as you well know. ‘Fool’s gold,’ Geronimo called them. We had nothing but disdain for the foreign objects that sneered at our lives from afar. And you wanted a pretty dress to reconcile us with the world?
‘That’s not what I want. I just want to wear the pretty dresses the McDougalls give me.’
We had these talks often. Angèle would get up on her high horse, and I would try to bring her back to the family fold. The only thing I ever managed to do was torture both of us. She didn’t give up the pretty dresses or the mansion in Westmount.
The first time the short, fat McDougall came to get her to take her to the mansion, I thought the world would implode. I wandered around in a daze for two weeks. ‘Vacation,’ you said before leaving, ‘it’s just a vacation.’
‘A vacation from what? A vacation from who?’
The first time was in the summer of 1957. I remember it well. It was the year the mine closed. The town was in tatters. The price of zinc had collapsed, and with it the hopes of a paycheque among the poor. The town was starting to crack. A few families had left, trailing behind them their houses on makeshift trailers. The others were hesitating between the call of a mine further north and the hope of the price of zinc rising, while, on the mountain, a gang of thugs was dismantling the mine installations. That was just a taste. The serious scramble for the spoils hadn’t even started.
‘Vacation? When we’re going to have the best summer of our whole lives?’
Our mine had been restored to us. We weren’t going to cry or pretend. We were the poorest of the poor in this town. Our father wasn’t a miner, or a labourer, which would have put him on the mine’s payroll and allowed him to lavish gifts on his children. Our father was a prospector, a dreamer through and through. He had discovered the zinc deposit, an enormous one, 2,500 feet by 100 feet, weighing 10 million tons. At the time the newspapers said it was the most important mineral discovery in Canada. Northern Consolidated had drawn up a scam on paper, and he had signed, only too happy to go off and dream somewhere else. And as his children, we would avenge him, would make his royalties worth something, would become kings of the town that he had created – arguments that Angèle couldn’t hear.
‘I just want to go see their house.’
‘A house is just a house: cement, boards, doors, windows. You’ve seen one house, you’ve seen them all. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in Westmount or Norco.’
‘They have a doorbell at the front door, a fainting couch in the front hall, velvet drapes, Persian rugs, leather armchairs in the living room and mirrors everywhere in the bathroom.’
‘ …a fainting couch in the front hall?’
‘A couch where you sit lying down.’
‘You sit lying down?’
‘You see, it’s not the same everywhere. I don’t know how people sit lying down or why, but I want to find out. I want to see their house. I want to know how people live in other places. I’ll come back and I’ll tell you all about it, since you won’t come. I promise. I swear. I’ll come back and tell you everything.’
After the feather, it was the fainting couch. I had nothing to distract her from her fascination with all that glitters somewhere else.
When she climbed into the short, fat McDougall’s Olds-mobile, we were on the porch, a silent, solemn family portrait. We were all there. Even our mother. Swept up by the moving crowd, she found herself, a spatula or some other cooking utensil in hand, brutally exposed to the July sun, labouring under the oppressive anger that shimmered in the swelter of emotion. It was clear that we were gathered to withhold our goodbyes from Angèle.
I was there too, immobile, in the front row of the family portrait, clutching my pain to my chest. It’s an image that has haunted me all of my life. My first act of treachery.
I would like to be able to erase the image, to strike it from my memory, but to what end, since there were other betrayals, and I can’t escape Angèle’s eyes looking out from the black Oldsmobile.
Angèle was terrified of the long journey that would take her to the other end of the world, terrified by all the hard, cold faces condemning her for her desertion, terrified by the determination deep down in her heart that was driving her to break loose from us again, terrified, unhappy, desperate, and she looked to me and made a little gesture with her hand. I could barely see her fingers move above the dashboard – you sent me a distress signal, and I let it die at my feet without even looking at it. You weren’t asking for much, just for me to detach myself from the wall of resentment and show you with my eyes that I was with you, in solidarity, in spite of the wrath emanating from the porch, and I stayed stony-faced. I let you leave without a farewell. Our first separation. My first betrayal.
The worst part is that you forgave me. As if you already knew what a coward I could be. Yes, the worst part is having seen forgiveness in your eyes. You knew that I couldn’t step out of the family portrait, that I had neither the strength nor the courage, nor even the desire, and you smiled a sad, resigned little smile
that told me not to worry, that you would bear it all on your own.
The Oldsmobile left, taking you to a place I couldn’t even imagine, and I found myself alone, miserably alone, wretchedly alone, with my shame and self-contempt. For two horrible weeks, I fought with the demons in my soul.
During those two weeks, Norco was under the siege of a blazing sun. It was only mid-July, but the air was filled with dry, late-summer dust. Norco was baking. The town was an enclave, a tiny break in the forest, a small, barren island, with no trees or vegetation other than long grass dancing limply between the houses and, subjected to the fiery sky, it had become a huge hotplate that we roamed in every direction, from morning to night, grey from the dust, brown from the sun, black with the rage of conquerors, with me confused in my feelings. I followed the horde, wondering always where you were, what you were doing and whether I should be glad that you had forgiven me.
Geronimo became our leader. It was uncontested, even by Tut or Magnum, who were older but who didn’t have Geronimo’s insatiable appetite for power. Since the Big Kids had left home, his nerves were stretched taut. At barely twelve years old, it was Geronimo, the restless, destructive little punk, who led us into war. I say war because that’s what he called it, so that’s what we called it. We were at war. Against the thugs who were dismantling the mining installations, against their slaves, the former miners and the future unemployed of Norco who were helping them pile iron and wood into trucks, against the hicks from neighbouring towns who came to editorialize on the disaster at the hotel, against the wailing, crying and gnashing of teeth, against the earthly powers that had cast an evil spell on our zinc, against the blinding sun that gave us nightmares as we slept. I think we had declared war on the whole planet. And beyond that, on all the forces of the universe that kept us there, in that devastated humanity, fiercely attached to our poverty, and convinced that the pure, hard essence of the diamond that was within each one of us would rise from our self-denial.
I was never so fiercely a Cardinal as during those two weeks. I was on all the commando raids. A raid on the mountain? I was the first to volunteer. I would spy on the thugs, steal their tools and gas, slash their tires and, the ultimate pleasure, throw a match in a shed, running to take shelter with the others and watch, if luck was on our side, the wood burning, the shed in flames, the machinery, all of it going up in thick smoke so it couldn’t be shipped off for use at another mine. As for the hicks, both our own and those of neighbouring towns who came to lament their fate at the Hôtel Impérial or the Hôtel Royal, they went home with a dead fish or cat in their car, if the car started of course, if we hadn’t shoved a potato up the exhaust pipe. And then there were all the fires breaking out in the dry grass.
I threw myself headlong into the war. There were so many knots tangled up in my pain: shame, self-contempt and the offence, mine and yours, that I took it upon myself to atone for. Was it the porch of shame I was running away from? I don’t know whether my fury in combat was meant to help me forget that you weren’t there, that you had deserted, or whether it was my own defection that I wanted to be pardoned for, my secret love of your dresses in the sun, the endless tenderness that I still had for you in spite of my siblings’ stubborn anger.
Only during the long nights did I find a bit of relief. I tried to imagine you at the McDougalls’, but I had never seen a fainting couch, or even a front hall or a doorbell. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t imagine you in the land of the rich, and the night unfolded, long, black and sleepless, until our mother came to the bedroom where I was sleeping. She would look at me for a long time. I would feel her eyes on my closed eyelids, and after a moment, she would bend over me, softly, and brush my cheek with her weary hand: ‘Go on, sleep. Don’t worry. She’ll come back.’ I would finally sleep, reassured by the image of the black Oldsmobile bringing you home.
The town was still smoking when you came home. We no longer settled for throwing matches at random. Now we had a weapon for lighting fires from a distance, placing them right where we wanted – a distinct improvement since, having become public enemy number one, we now had a commando unit of little brats on our tail.
The bow and cattail. Magnum’s invention, I believe, and our greatest feat of arms. A supple branch of birch stretched on fishing line, and a cattail soaked in oil or gas. September cattails made the best torches. Thick and cottony, they soaked up the gas, and flames roared at the first strike of the match. But in that terrible summer of drought, July cattails were just as thirsty, and all it took was for one of our torches to brush the tip of a tuft of grass for the fire to spread into an inferno.
Fire set off in every direction and in just about every location that summer. Garbage-can fires, brush fires, grass fires: they spread virtually everywhere, along ditches, in vacant lots, near houses. They scorched a litter of kittens and burned Vaillan-court’s stockpile of old tires, licked the brick of the Potvins’ house and nibbled the edge of the forest several times. The fires even had the nerve to surround the fire station. But they were mainly on the mountain, around the mining camp. In fact, we were aiming for the dynamite store.
When people came running from every direction to put out the fire, we came running too with our shovels and rakes, and we fought the flames alongside our fine, brave fellow citizens, who, eyes red with rage and smoke, shouted at us, ‘Get out of here! Bloody hoodlums!’ They raged in their impotence. They couldn’t touch us. There were too many of us. Our parents had left us to our own devices, and we were growing like weeds.
By the end of the summer, many families had left Norco. Tired of hoping against hope, exhausted, worn out, broken by the sun and the war we were waging, the families left, with or without their houses, their beaters filled to bursting with their brood, boxes and piles of junk. And before leaving town, they would make a detour past our house, their old cars hiccupping under the load, and in a din of beeping, clanking and shouting, the father, the mother and the children, their faces wild with rage, their fists raised, their eyes bulging, would insult us, as they had never dared: ‘Stay here and rot in hell, you savages! Wallow in your own shit, you retards!’ We had won.
When the short, fat McDougall’s Oldsmobile appeared at the bend in our road, we were just beginning to experiment with the bow and cattail. But we had a fire going nonetheless, and El Toro was the one who spotted the glint of the Oldsmobile’s metal through the smoke: ‘Angèle’s here! Look, Angèle’s here!’
‘You mean Miss McDougall.’
Geronimo’s grudge hadn’t ebbed. Not even then, with you coming back.
So, rather than running home at full tilt, as we wanted to do, we reminded each other that you had deserted us and forced ourselves to walk at a normal pace.
You looked like a princess. You were like a breath of fresh air, a spring flower in the midst of the acrid smell of scorched fields. The dress, all white and weightless shimmer, the shoes, the gloves, the hat, right down to the delicate little necklace of satiny beads, everything had the alabaster beauty of a creature from heaven. You were enchanting.
Were you even aware of the image you projected? You, so white in front of the black Oldsmobile, and us, tousled and ragged, evil gnomes emerging from scorched earth. Had you forgotten the wrath? Our show of strength on the porch?
I really believe that those two weeks of pampering with the rich folks had made you lose all notion of survival in the family. You were beaming, trusting in the beauty of your finery, and you weren’t on guard.
The first strike came from Big Yellow.
‘Good afternoon, Miss McDougall.’
Nefertiti or Wapiti or another of the Weewuns, I don’t remember which, repeated in their childhood innocence: ‘Goonoon, MiGall.’
Geronimo was the most cutting. Our young chief had to demonstrate the knife-edged cruelty of his intelligence to stay leader of the pack.
‘So, was two weeks licking gold doorknobs enough?’
And by placing his soot-blackened hands on
the collar of the dress, he gave the signal for the massacre.
They approached, one after the other, pawing the fancy fabric, lifting the layers of crinoline, their sticky hands admiring the beads, ribbons and lace, and when there was no white left, when there was nothing more to set her apart, they put a shovel in her hands, and Angèle, the poor mortified thing in her blackened dress, followed them toward a grass fire that they offered by way of welcome.
Once again, I was left to savour the bitter disillusion of my cowardice. I was the one who had said the thing about the gold doorknobs to Geronimo a few days before.
He had wanted to humiliate me. We were in the heat of the action, quite literally. We had just let a torch fly in the direction of the dynamite store. There was Bibi, Big Yellow, Tintin, Matma – there were seven or eight of us in all, lying in wait behind a rubble chute, Geronimo and me on the front lines of the battle, and he said to me, turning toward the others so that his innuendo-laden smile escaped no one:
Twenty-One Cardinals Page 6
