Twenty-One Cardinals

by Jocelyne Saucier

  ‘We’ll show them, goddamn hicks! Let’s burn some rubber.’

  I didn’t get a word in edgewise in the ensuing commotion. They were moving the bedlam outdoors: blankets, pillows, the living room sofa and provisions for the night – even the television, which they thought they could get going without the antenna. All under the confused orders of Tut and Magnum, who had taken charge of the operation.

  I grabbed Big Yellow as he went by and asked him where the Old Man was.

  ‘In the basement, as usual.’

  As for the Old Lady, no point in asking. The door to her room was closed. She was sleeping that short, deep sleep that allowed her to haunt our nights.

  As I headed down to the basement, I wondered what harrowing scene awaited me. During the long hours on the road, I hadn’t stopped wondering about the state I would find our father in and how I would comfort him.

  He was standing in front of his workbench, busy scratching samples, and he realized I was there only once I was beside him.

  ‘You came,’ he said with a half smile.

  It was neither a question nor an expression of surprise. He was noting in amusement that I had given in to panic.

  ‘So tell me why you came all this way.’

  His strange good mood made me hope for a moment that all was not lost, that maybe he had had time to sell his shares before the debacle and that our millions were safe and sound.

  In a confused account that I couldn’t myself understand, I told him about my mad dash to Norco, the old woman in the turban who didn’t want to get out of my cab, my worries and the idea both sudden and unhoped-for that was beating a drum in my mind.

  ‘Forget the shares, son. They aren’t worth a nickel – might as well be zero. We have better things to do than to worry about pieces of paper.’

  He was looking at me with his mischievous little eyes, grinning from ear to ear, like a child with a trick up his sleeve.

  ‘Forget the shares,’ he said again in his voice that told of confidences to come. He gestured to the bottom stair while he settled in on a case of dynamite. ‘Sit there and listen up. Listen carefully, because I’m not going to repeat it.’

  And that’s when he told me what first sounded like a fairy tale and then, as he told his story, I spotted all the perils, and all my responsibilities, but I didn’t have even the tiniest clue as to the tragedy that awaited us at the end of the adventure.

  His story took us back four years, to the opening of the mine, when he accompanied the president and the other officials of Northern Consolidated, who were taking a group of journalists on a tour. ‘It was the first time I had gone underground. I had never seen the inside of a mine before.’

  He had been invited as the mine’s discoverer, and he had been forgotten as soon as the introductions were made, so he lagged behind the group, a bit dazed by the racket of the machines and how pitch-black it was, but happy to be left on his own. He was walking slowly. ‘What impressed me was how clearly you can see things with a little light in that pitch blackness.’ The beam of his headlamp sweeping the rock walls of the drift showed him the forms left on the rock by geological movements – faults, folds, slips and igneous intrusions – all things that up to that point had been revealed to him only parsimoniously. ‘I could clearly follow the sphalerite stringers in the volcanic rock. It was definitely a saddle-shaped deposit like I had seen in my copy of The Prospector’s Guide, but seeing it with my own eyes was different than picturing it when you’re prospecting on the surface.’

  He was on the main drift, about a hundred feet from the group, when it happened. He recognized the tingling sensation under his eyelid, and then it stopped suddenly. It was just a light pins-and-needles feeling that travelled over the eye, barely an itch, ‘but I knew that when I moved closer to the wall of the drift, I would find what was making my eyelid quiver.’ He approached the wall, trying to make out in the design of the rock what was so desperately trying to catch his attention. That was when he was overcome by a serious tremor. It was no longer a simple blinking of his eyes. His eyelids were beating the air like hummingbird wings, and a radiant force, ‘a ball of fire,’ travelled right through him. His entire body shook with a feverish tremble, and during those endless seconds when he thought he was dying, he had the revelation of a vein of gold-bearing quartz.

  ‘A quartz vein in greenschist. I didn’t see it like I can see you. It was clearer than that. It was as if I could see under your skin, inside the rock, like X-ray vision. I saw it all in an instant. First, the greenschist, which was very dark, and then the vein of quartz, whitish, fractured, unbelievably cracked and, in the fissures, granules of bright yellow, a sun-mustard yellow, you know what I mean: native gold, my boy, pure gold, more than you can imagine. The vein was so full of it that in places it was blinding.’

  The description of that quartz vein put him in such a state that I no longer recognized him.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like gold.’

  His eyes disappeared in a squint with his smile, and he told me, hammering out each word with a trembling voice: ‘You didn’t see what I saw. A vein like that is beyond your wildest dreams. But I saw it with my own eyes. A few feet from the wall, in the greenschist, long, wide and rich, by god! I don’t like gold when it’s cagey, but when it offers itself to you on a platter like that, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

  I would have rather not believed in that quartz vein. But his description, the detail with which he answered my questions about its location, its dimensions, its dip angle, its extent and, above all, his assurance that he would find it exactly where he had left it once he emerged from his trance and went to join the group, ‘two hundred and fifty-five steps from the mine stope,’ all of this meant that I saw it too, in the schistose gangue, running northeast, and in the milky white of the quartz, the gold specks shimmering, the twinkling hope in our father’s eyes, that would take us into the most adventurous enterprise of our lives.

  I knew that he would not let that gold go. He had hoped it would be discovered and the value of our shares would skyrocket. Now that the mine was closed, and they had proven that they were not up to the task of finding it, he believed that the gold was his as a matter of right.

  There was nothing to say, nothing to do. He would go get that quartz vein. I discovered a man who was determined, driven, who was not afraid of the dangers of the mine, or the illegal nature of his enterprise. His voice had grown firmer, and as he was explaining how he would go about it, I felt as though the world were crumbling around me.

  That night, I thought of running away.

  I could smell the burnt rubber and hear the clamour of the Cardinal celebration through the small basement window. I knew that our father’s project would sound like a call to arms for the family, swept up as they had been since birth in a war of hate, and that they would throw themselves headlong into this adventure.

  Extracting the quartz vein meant a covert operation, but how would that work in such a small town? How would we muffle the sound of the dynamite? How would we prevent the hicks from wondering about our comings and goings around the mine? And the truck – because we would need a truck – how would we get a truck? And more worrisome still, the gold, how would we sell it, and to whom?

  All I wanted was to go straight back to Montreal, forget that I had almost stepped into this quagmire, start over, under a new name, with a new personality. But I knew full well that I would do nothing of the sort.

  When I think back to that night, what I remember most is the acrid smell of the smoke, combined with the muddy funk of the basement. It was as if that oppressive odour contained the weight of my responsibilities. As if, that night, the fire had already taken over our lives. Fire and devastation: the ravaging heart of the fire and the desolation of burnt land. Norco was filled with the smell of something burning.

  The summer that followed the closing of the mine was the most scorching. And the siege of devastation that had started under Geronim
o’s rule continued during the five years we exploited the mine in secret.

  I would arrive from Montreal, the car overflowing with things the Old Man had asked me to buy, and well before the hill that led to the covered bridge, my nostrils would be filled with the sinuous smells of the fire that was raging against a cabin or along a corridor of wild grass, behind which ran a band of Cardinals young and old.

  Geronimo was a little punk, twelve at the most, when he turned his attentions to what was called the siege of fire. He always impressed me. It doesn’t surprise me that today he spends his time around the major battles raging in the world. He loves confrontation. He loves extreme tension. In Norco, he was a one-man army of liberation and oppression.

  It was his skill with dynamite that earned him a job as our father’s apprentice at the mine. In the plans that the Old Man and I came up with, that night when everything changed, we had initially chosen Magnum and Tut. They were fourteen and fifteen at the time, ‘strong enough,’ the Old Man had said, ‘to turn the drill steel while the other hits it with the sledgehammer.’ Because this was how he planned to extract the quartz from the surrounding shale. In actual fact, they often had to resort to dynamite, because while schist is weak rock, particularly argillite schist, they encountered tougher structures that refused to give up to the carbide bit of the drill steel. So they restricted themselves to a half stick of dynamite and avoided clear days when the sound of the blast would carry.

  It took Geronimo only a year to replace Tut and Magnum. One day I arrived and it was done. Tut and Magnum were champing at the bit at home, and Geronimo was leaving in the morning with the Old Man, officially for the mining properties along the river – a ruse that fooled only the hicks, because, apart from the youngest, Wapiti, Nefertiti, Tootsie and particularly the young, feeble Caboose, who were always kept in the dark, we all knew that prospecting activities behind the mountain were just an alibi for our comings and goings from the mine.

  My heart clenched when I learned who the Old Man had taken on as his apprentice. It was pique and jealousy mainly, because I could imagine their conversations in the damp dark of the mine. The clandestine nature of the task, the hostile environment of the abandoned mine, the constant danger of a rockfall or poorly controlled blasting – all that brings two people closer than years of drinking together. Particularly given that mining as imagined by the Old Man – artisanal in the extreme – required constant collaboration. It involved notching the rock to serrate it, first the green shale and then the quartz. The quartz vein was tabular in shape, two feet by four feet of beautiful white opalescence streaked with gold, and rose northwest over a dip of forty-five degrees, such that it had to be followed in a tunnel with just enough room for two men, a jackleg drill and a compressor. Every operation in such a restricted space required reflection and inventiveness, with no margin for error. More than anything I worried about the seductive appeal of Geronimo’s intelligence in such conditions.

  I rarely went to the mine in the five years after we took it over. My role in the affair, while important, kept me away. I was always on the road. I had given up driving the taxi to become a sales rep for Mines & Mills Supplies, a company that sold mining supplies. Aside from the advantages for our own procurement, my job put me in contact with mine managers, which gave me a way to discreetly sell our gold. The Old Man and I talked about it at length during that fateful night in the basement, and we had come up with a solution: finding a small gold mine and a less-than-scrupulous manager who, to supplement his ore and drive up the stock price, would agree to buy our gold on the QT. And this is why the small used truck we bought came down the mountain every evening, engine and headlights off, bringing a ton of our beautiful gold-studded quartz to the Goldstream Mine.

  All these precautions couldn’t keep the hicks in the dark about our activities indefinitely. Norco had changed a lot since it was abandoned by Northern Consolidated. It was no longer just a pack of poor people searching for themselves. They hadn’t managed to build a life somewhere else or hadn’t even considered it, and they stayed, lost in a town that was blighted by lack of hope, like those miserable wretches I sometimes see emerge into the oppressive heat of the afternoon at the Australian goldfield.

  They loathed us as passionately as we loathed them. The siege of fire had reduced them to a hateful, dark, impotent mass that held back its venom, just waiting for the heavens to intervene and bring them justice. There were only a few of them left, a dozen families maybe, slinking along in fear of new troubles, victims of a reign of terror they had acquiesced to, and they watched us from their windows.

  It never occurred to us that they would report us. We held them too firmly in our grip, we thought, for a sudden fit of dignity to make them that bold. ‘I dare them,’ Geronimo would say. ‘Let them try and say just one word out of line … ’

  I wasn’t part of the war of harassment waged against the hicks all those years. My position as the eldest, thank god, exempted me from such displays of power, which I had no inclination for. Even Geronimo had to give them up. He was too old to beat on snot-nosed kids and run around chasing grass fires. But he still enjoyed the cruel games, and he was the one who instigated the most inspired of them.

  He had become the family’s leader. The uncontested, indisputable leader. With Tut and Magnum gone, he was now the oldest, if you didn’t count the Old Maid – who, despite her twenty-two years and her indispensible presence, was still a girl – and if you didn’t count me. I had put myself second under the weight of my responsibilities. I was just the faithful courier who could be counted on for the dynamite, the gas and the tools needed to exploit the mine. I came and went, I appeared and disappeared, always on the road, in a state of perpetual anxiety about what was waiting for me at home. I was worried about what might happen at the mine, an accident, the police; I was worried that one day I would see the Old Man in handcuffs, worried about our mother, who had withdrawn into unintelligible muttering since the birth of the Caboose, since she was no longer making babies, worried about what more Geronimo might have come up with. Who would be his victim this time? Tintin? El Toro? Or poor Angèle, whom he was constantly hounding?

  Tintin was his lieutenant, his right-hand man. He was the one who was burning and subjugating Norco on his behalf, and he was the one Geronimo would turn on most often. Tintin accepted the humiliations and mistreatment with the self-denial of a knight facing an initiation rite.

  But he turned his attentions to Angèle when she came home from the convent, or worse, from the McDougalls’. Angèle was a funny little girl. She had grown up with hopes that wilted in the dump we lived in. She was always looking for an escape, but she always came back to us, fresh as a rose, light and smiling, until Geronimo would resume plucking off her wings.

  There was a surgical precision to his strikes. He knew exactly where to hit. In Angèle’s case, it was barely tolerable cruelty. She had never been slapped, knocked about, beaten, or anything like that. Aside from Tommy, who gave as good as she got, the Cardinal girls were never in physical jeopardy at home. No, the treatment Geronimo reserved for Angèle was particularly nasty. Like forcing her, when she came back from the convent, wearing a white blouse and a spotless tunic, to count the cats rotting in a barrel behind the house in preparation for the infamous festival of cats, when the Cardinal clan paraded down the town’s deserted streets with the poor things impaled on stakes. After she had counted the carcasses in the barrel, he would ask, ‘Do we have enough?’ and she had to figure out the number that would keep her from having to go back there, somewhere between the number deemed satisfactory and what there was in the barrel. ‘You’ve forgotten that we need some for your guardian angel too, Sister Angèle.’ She would go back to the barrel. ‘And how many is that in Latin?’ When the others no longer found the game funny or once he’d tired of it himself, he’d say in a disgusted tone, ‘Go change. You smell like dead cat.’ She would stay there, utterly helpless, her uniform dirty, standing in the middle o
f the living room, until Tommy would grab her by the sleeve and lead her to a bedroom.

  I never got used to the look in her eye at those times, or rather the blank look in her eye. Her eyes staring and wide open with effort. She was waiting for the end of the ordeal, taking refuge somewhere inside herself, where pain meets the soul. Joan of Arc at the stake.

  Would I have changed the course of events if I had found the strength to stand up to Geronimo?

  I was twenty-five at the time. I was a man, and he was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen, his body barely out of adolescence, arms and legs flapping around him like panicked animals, his face spotted with acne, but grit in his muscles, a fierce look in his eye and a determination to terrorize. I was under his power, like the others.

  No one stood up to him, not even the Old Man. He made himself invisible. We didn’t even see him at meals anymore. You had to watch to catch a glimpse before he fled from the table down into the basement. And Geronimo, later in the evening, after sitting enthroned in the living room and dispensing sarcasm and smacks to whomever he wanted, would then go down the stairs to the basement. The murmur of their conversation would chill my heart. It was hearing them that made me start to dream of Australia.

  All I could find to salvage my dignity was that miserable dream. The dream – not something I had to commit to at first, a fantasy barely taken shape in my mind, the illusion of a departure that was supposed to give my presence more value – was only a dream, a hoax, a smokescreen meant to mask my powerlessness. I never really believed in it until the day I had to face the fact that I no longer had access to our father’s private world. It was Geronimo he confided in now.

  I had become the quiet force you turn to when a job needed doing. I was the one they asked to take Bibi for an abortion when she got pregnant. Poor Bibi. She cried all the way to Montreal. And I was the one they turned to when we had to get the image of Angèle alive out of Norco.