Twenty-One Cardinals

by Jocelyne Saucier

  For a moment I wondered whether Tommy had in fact become Angèle before our eyes, whether the gentle Angèle wasn’t actually in hiding all these years under the features of Tommy the shrew, or whether, in the end, they were in fact interchangeable, one appearing at the other’s will – or whether, more confusing still, they were really the same person. And while my mind rejected the idea of having been fooled, I saw myself back in Norco, a young boy of eight, nine at the most, a half-pint under the spell of the very same hallucination and menaced by the same fiery eyes. It was a recollection that had never bothered to surface in my memory.

  Because it was indeed Tommy whom I had surprised in that dress with frills and flounces, all lace and silliness, a dazzling blue dress that danced around her legs. She was twirling and twirling, eyes closed, arms lifted to the sky, swept up in a reverie that was giving her wings, until, suddenly sensing a presence, she had opened her eyes and crashed headlong into mine.

  ‘Angèle’s getting carried away again in one of the McDougall dresses’: that’s exactly what I thought at the time. Strange how I can still remember what I thought, even though I can’t remember what I said. Something harsh and hurtful, something worthy of Geronimo no doubt, because the McDougall dresses bothered us to no end.

  Had Magnum also happened upon Tommy one day, dancing in a McDougall dress? As he made conversation with her in the dimly lit bar, did he have the vision of a little girl hiding behind the dynamite shed, or in the woods, or in a mine building, a little girl carefully taking off her boy’s clothes and, after looking around, putting on a princess dress and stepping into a dream?

  I watched him while he tried to carry on a normal conversation with Tommy, slumped in his chair, still dazed by the apparition of Angèle, and I wondered: have we all figured out at different times that Tommy could become Angèle?

  That night stayed burned in my mind. The three of us at that little table at a bar whose name I don’t know and that I couldn’t find afterward, try as I might, as if it had appeared just for the delirium of that night, the three of us, Magnum, Tommy and me, our three solitudes brought together, three floating islands, three tectonic plates incapable of moving toward one another, each adrift in our own thoughts.

  That night, the image of the half-smiling girl in the Studebaker was clouded forever more. I saw her outlined softly against the little hill in front of the house, floating as if on a screen warped by the heat. Émilien got behind the wheel; he had finished checking the car. Geronimo, who was beside him, sighed with relief. And in back, among the brown paper bags, I see Angèle’s sensible little dress, I see her smooth hair, I see her gentle smile trying to form on her tensed lips, and I see Tommy, wracked with pain. At that point, she was the only one of the three of them who knew that Angèle had stayed at the bottom of the mine.

  Do any of us still believe what we saw?

  Since that night, I have been consumed by the need to find out what each person knows about that terrible day when Tommy stood in for Angèle.

  I couldn’t get anything out of Magnum. Every time I tried to take him back to that night in the little bar, he pretended to have forgotten everything: ‘What a tear. Jesus, I was loaded!’

  Once, I replied without thinking: ‘It was quite a tear. You were so drunk, you thought Tommy was Angèle.’

  His eyes flew open in surprise.

  ‘You were even more drunk than I was.’

  And then, softer: ‘Don’t try to pull that crap on me.’

  The topic was closed forever. We never again discussed the night when Angèle appeared to us in the phantom bar.

  As for Tommy, the reason I hunt her down from time to time at her retreat in the Great North isn’t because I’m hoping for her to come clean. No, I use journalistic pretexts to show up at her home because I want to be there when she’s not paying attention and Angèle’s smile creeps onto her face.

  In fact, no one has come clean. The day we lost Angèle in the mine is too locked down in our minds for it to pop up in a sudden twist of conversation.

  But my quest has been the pretext to track down every member of the family, wherever they are, whether lost in the Andes or behind Chechen barricades. I tracked them all down, one by one, and I’ve kept up loose, on-again, off-again relationships with them so that no one will think anything of it.

  Geronimo was the hardest to find. True to form, he isn’t associated with a humanitarian organization; he funds his career as war surgeon through donations from anonymous rich people who deposit large sums in his Swiss bank account. That’s what I finally found out after making the rounds of every aid organization on the planet. The first time I reached him by phone, he was as cold as a scalpel. He was in Afghanistan.

  Émilien, on the other hand, was fairly easy to find. My letter went to four or five Australian towns before reaching Kalgoorlie, where he has made a new life for himself. We kept up an erratic correspondence, one that was innocuous, almost trivial, but pleasant. That’s how one day I was able to bring up the image in the Studebaker under cover of small talk. ‘Are you still into cars?’ I asked him. And for a whole year, we discussed the relative merits of American and Japanese cars. ‘Do you remember your old Studebaker, how it used to wheeze its way up hills?’ To that, he answered that he had too many beaters in his life to remember them all. In my next letter, I said that I, on the contrary, had kept an indelible memory: ‘Your old Studebaker was where I saw Geronimo and Angèle for the last time. Unless, correct me if I’m wrong, it was Tommy. They were so much alike.’ His answer took months in coming and took on a whole other tone: ‘That day, what was done was done for better or for worse, and you know full well who was in the car with us. Why do you want to make me say it?’

  Whether with Yahoo, Big Yellow or the Weewuns, who were so young at the time of the accident, it was always the same thing. Once I would manage to bring up the image of the Studebaker, a brick wall would go up to stop all my questions dead.

  The Old Maid was the least pliable of them all. You couldn’t make the slightest allusion to the past without her starting to wail that there was nothing left in Norco but a house the wind whipped through, and that we should leave the memories to squabble amongst themselves. ‘Nostalgia is a disease of the soul.’ I don’t believe a word she says. You just have to see her to know how attached she has stayed to the family. Ours, not hers, or rather any of hers, because she has had two or three husbands, many children, and they all left her once they figured out that her heart was too heavy for love.

  She lives in a miserable little room over the kitchen of the Hôtel Caouette in Val-d’Or, alone, her heart blighted, feeling like the world will crumble if she drops her guard.

  Her diviner’s eye can spot Angèle’s image the second it appears. I have tried different approaches, but every time the conversation brushes too closely against a family shadow, I see her rear up, all her senses on alert, eyes full of fury, and then suddenly she explodes about her boss, about her kids who are trying to get money out of her, about anything that will distract us from the image of Angèle, and I wait, because sometimes, after the storm, there are tears, and in between the sobs, she says something that gives me some insight into the burden of her responsibilities.

  The Old Maid forced Tommy to get in the back seat of the Studebaker that day. I know it as surely as if she had told me. And my theory was confirmed as soon as their eyes met in the lobby of the Quatre-Temps.

  They think I had always dreamed of Australia. The truth is that I couldn’t take my family anymore.

  Australia was a way of making them dream. I was the oldest, practically their father, because ours had turned into a rock zombie, and I was overwhelmed. I didn’t have Geronimo’s intelligence; I had nothing to impress them aside from my birthright. Australia was perfect. It wasn’t the stifling civilization of Europe, it wasn’t the plodding pace of a backward society, it wasn’t our American cousins. It was so big and strange, an intergalactic place cast adrift in the middle of the In
dian Ocean, a place you couldn’t dream about without your heart wanting to burst with some combination of fear and joy.

  In Norco, the dream was palpable. When I got home, I could see the talk my great continental explorer character would generate.

  I didn’t think I’d have to one day go through with it. Australia was just a vision, a mirage in the desolation of Norco, and then I dove into the sea of illusion. On August 17, 1965, I booked my flight, and two weeks later, I was on my way to Sydney. Before me lay the land down under, its Great Barrier Reef, its surfer beaches, its golden youth, its friendly smiles. Behind me lay the pain I wanted to shed. I was breaking free from my family.

  I crisscrossed Australia searching for a place where I could rebuild my life, but wherever I was tempted to stop, familiar faces would rob the place of its gentleness and send me back on the road. When you’re a Cardinal, you can’t just give in to the beauty of rustling palm trees in the setting sun. You need a harsh, austere environment you can chafe against, one you can use to condemn those who have it easier. I walked away from the green hills of Tasmania, I fled the beaches and everything that had drawn me to Australia, and I headed for the interior, where the most inhospitable desert in the world awaited me. For five years, I laid waste to my heart trying to forget. I was one of those stockmen who go from ranch to ranch, a veritable armada of the desert, always moving and craving the intense, penetrating pleasures that took me to Kalgoorlie.

  It wasn’t the ladies of Hay Street who kept me in Kalgoorlie, but rather the feeling of coming home after many pointless detours.

  No matter where they are in the world, mining towns all have a sense of urgency about them, probably because of the nearby pit. At the time, Kalgoorlie was coasting on the fumes of a glorious past that, in the tumult of the last century’s gold rush, had left magnificent colonnade buildings and the hum of a single mine, Mount Charlotte. Both dignified and coarse, the town had a touch of antiquated despair that was seductive and that later made it a tourist destination. But around it, in Norseman, Kanowna, Broad Arrow, Leonora and Laverton, in those mining towns on the edge, is where you can really feel the fear of the void and the desire to dive into it – ghost towns, or nearly, surrounding Kalgoorlie, such that Norco came to meet me in my exile and made me understand the futility of my escape: no matter where in the world I go, I will always have Tommy’s grief-twisted face to bring me back to the pain.

  The nagging look on Tommy’s face lists all the terrible things we are guilty of, me and all the others. Her face is white with dread, black with the impulse for revenge, it is screaming in pain and it reduces to ash the pleasures I try to steal from life. I can’t escape her. No matter where I go, I know that Tommy is there waiting for me, in the back seat of my old Studebaker, and that from the depths of her soul she will howl, ‘Why didn’t you stop it from happening?’

  It’s the howl of my conscience. In fact, she didn’t say a word until we reached the covered bridge. She was sunk in the back seat, surrounded by all the paper bags that held her things, and Geronimo and I had almost forgotten her, we were so preoccupied by the accident. It was the Old Maid who had forced us to take her.

  ‘Angèle is going with you.’

  ‘What do you mean, Angèle is going with us?’

  ‘Angèle is going to Montreal with you, you heard me.’

  The air was crackling with heat. It was one of those hot, dry days that I had grown to like.

  I didn’t pay attention to the Old Maid’s mumbled explanations – ‘studies … the McDougalls … international school’ – because time was wasting. The accident had just happened, and the hicks would be reporting it to the police.

  She slid into the car without me really seeing her. Would I have guessed? Would I have understood the barbarity of the deception if I had given her even the slightest glance? They looked so much alike. And yet they were so different. Tommy, our tomboy, and Angèle, the Foster Child, as she had been known since she’d heeded the call of the McDougalls. They even had the same little weasel-shaped face, the receding chin, the prominent cheekbones, the narrow forehead and the eyes rimmed with thick eyelashes, but you could tell at a glance that they didn’t run on the same dreams.

  In that moment, I was concerned only with the state of my radiator. We had five hundred miles to go under an apocalyptic sun, and I was wondering whether it would make it. I had seen Geronimo steal a worried glance at the temperature gauge.

  ‘Did you get it fixed?’

  ‘What do you think? I did it myself. I’m not going to let a mechanic touch my car.’

  ‘Are you sure about your welding? If the gauge is anything to go by, it looks like there’s a geyser in your rad.’

  ‘If it makes you feel better, I have a box of pepper in my toolbox.’

  ‘Pepper? Never heard of that.’

  ‘It works. I’ve tried it and it works. You need to use a lot, of course. It’s not like peppering a steak. But a box of pepper will hold you for a while.’

  In a way, I was glad my old rad was giving us a pretext for conversation. Neither of us wanted to talk about what was really on our minds.

  It was at the bend in the road, where it starts to climb a little before the covered bridge, that we remembered she was there. We heard the crinkle of paper, no doubt the bags she was moving, and then that voice, a voice that was neither Tommy’s nor Angèle’s, a deep, cavernous voice, a voice ripped from the pain, hurled at us, a voice that in my dreams chastises me for not having prevented the disaster.

  She yelled, ‘Stop!’

  I braked as though my life depended on it.

  She yelled again, ‘Stop! I’m getting out here,’ and already I knew Angèle couldn’t summon that much authority. It was Tommy. I felt as though I were being sucked into the abyss. I parked the car at the bottom of the hill slowly and carefully, putting off the moment I would have to face the person sitting in the back.

  Geronimo was turned toward the back seat, frozen, devastated, tormented, astonishment and horror alternating in his eyes, and Tommy – because there could be no more doubt, it was Tommy in Angèle’s dress – Tommy had him locked in the force field of her black, intense stare. She let him see all of her pain, and as she pulled some pants and a shirt out of a bag, the clothes that would settle the question, she did not take her eyes off Geronimo, to tell him what I was starting to understand without a single word coming out of her mouth: ‘Look at me. Look at my clothes. See what you’ve done. Angèle died in the mine. You killed Angèle.’

  Geronimo pushed the idea away with all his might. No, no, no … he refused to believe it, he fought, he begged, No! But I could see that he had accepted responsibility for Angèle’s death.

  In my worst nightmares, it’s Angèle who comes to accuse me – the Patriarch, the oldest – of having left her to her fate. She towers over me, her presence expanding to fill the space, leaving not even a crack, and, miserable little insect that I am, I look for some way to get away from her. I wake up hoarse, with a sweaty girl beside me, threatening to kick me in the balls if I don’t stop screaming. But more often than not, it’s Tommy who appears in the back seat. She’s wearing the dress she had on then, a plain dress, flowered cotton with a shirt collar, Angèle’s Sunday dress, and she looks into my soul. It is torture, pure and simple. The dream is merciless in how it haunts me. I know it will loosen its grip only when it has broken my resistance and when, exhausted and out of breath, I see myself running from the body in the rubble of the mine, running from those outstretched arms begging me for help, running from the young man I was, and when the nightmare gets to that point, I know I will see Tommy, triumphant in her pain in the back seat of the car, pulling a rustle of lace and silk from one of the bags, and, without taking her eyes off me, brandishing one of the McDougall dresses: ‘Why didn’t you do anything to stop this?’

  I can’t take my family anymore.

  I got a room at the Nullabor Guest House in Kalgoorlie, hoping that women and booze would get the
better of me. In my letters – because they ended up finding me – I told them I was prospecting in the area. The region, Goldfield as it’s called, may have been turned inside out, but there are still fortunes made on a stroke of luck. Not that long ago, there was a new rush in the spoil heaps of the Golden Mile. Why shouldn’t I be one of those tourist-slash-prospectors who stumble upon a nugget after a heavy rain? I also told them that I had a vineyard in Swan Valley, sailboats for rent in Freo, anything so that they would believe that I was bound to exile by the sacred ties of prosperity.

  The Old Man would have been disappointed if he knew that I have turned into what he most despises: a gambler. He has always steered clear of luck – with luck returning the favour, because all his life he prospected a few feet away from it, except for the Norco zinc deposit – and he wouldn’t want to hear that one of his sons was doing business with bookies. ‘Ugh! Men with nothing but money on their minds.’

  Derbies are serious stuff. And then there’s blackjack, poker, roulette and bets made with just about anyone at the end of a bitter night. But what I really like is two-up. It’s an Australian version of heads or tails, slightly more formalized than the version played elsewhere because you need a ringer (the referee) and a spinner (the one who holds the two coins on a small board) as well as ten or so men, sometimes fewer, sometimes more, ready to bet on how the coins will hit the floor. What I like are the few minutes while the ringer takes the stakes, which for me are a delicacy of suffering and delight, because during those few minutes, I’m in another state, a state of frenzied concentration, tense as tense can be, absorbed by the two coins on the small board, and I wait for them to talk to me: heads or tails.

  I wait for that quiver of the eyelid that tells me that the coins are going to come up heads. A slight tremor, scarcely a shiver, barely a tightening of the skin, a flutter of the wings of a butterfly under my eyelid, and I know that both coins will fall heads up, no matter what twist the spinner gives them and what somersaults they perform in the air. It’s a moment of red-hot intensity that’s worth so much more than the money I win.