But I wasn’t the right man for the job anymore. I understood that when I arrived one day and found Geronimo and the Old Man in conversation in the basement in the middle of the afternoon. They hadn’t gone to the mine that day. In fact, they hadn’t been all week.
A plane had flown over Norco at the beginning of the week, slowly and at low altitude, trailing a device that left no doubt about what we had to fear. Airborne geophysics had started to get results in the North, particularly in the Matagami area. It was new at the time, so when the plane flew over Norco, everyone rushed to see it, and well after it was out of sight, the hicks were still in the streets, jumping and waving for the pilot to turn back and pass his instrument over the mountain again.
‘You should have seen them. Hicker than ever!’
I hadn’t even gotten to the house when the Old Maid starting telling me the whole story.
I had no trouble imagining the hope this flyover generated among the hicks. Their insidious hatred would grow stronger now that there was hope that ‘their’ mine would be returned to them. Because that was indeed what it was about. The reopening of the mine. Modern geophysics wouldn’t miss a super-rich gold quartz vein that our father, with no resources other than his prospector’s luck, had seen twinkling through the rock. So we had to expect that in a few weeks or a few months, a team of geologists would land in Norco to study the anomaly detected by the plane’s thingamajig and find out what had been going on.
The house was on red alert. The Old Maid and anyone mature enough to grasp the situation were watching me with a worried eye.
And of course, my first reaction was to ask where the Old Man was.
When they told me he was with Geronimo, I hesitated before heading down to the basement. That hadn’t been my territory for a long time. But I couldn’t help myself, it was an old reflex. I felt as though he needed me, given the circumstances.
I was wrong. Bitter disappointment awaited me.
They were sitting on empty boxes of dynamite, facing one another, bodies hunched in a position that showed only their rounded backs, bent over the dirt floor, absorbed in the silences of their conversation, and once they heard me on the stairs, they raised their heads at the same time, looked at me as if I had appeared from another world, and the Old Man said, ‘Wait upstairs, Émilien. We’ll be up in a minute.’
He might as well have slapped me across the face.
In the days, weeks and months that followed – because the matter was only resolved in July with the explosion at the mine, our final blast, the one that took Angèle – I withdrew into sullen solitude, the only stance that would leave me with a shred of dignity, which no one noticed because the house was in such a dither. We were on red alert; there was constant tension, day and night. The house was on tenterhooks.
We had never considered the possibility of the mine reopening, and now that the possibility was real, all too real, we had to hurry to hide any trace of our activities. Geronimo and Tintin went to retrieve our supplies, burning on site whatever couldn’t be transported at night, because the hicks had grown bolder and were keeping a close eye on us. But we all knew that these precautions would be pointless once they discovered our tunnel and, at the end of a thousand feet of sweat and black night, the sparkle of the quartz vein.
The Old Man and Geronimo would lock themselves in the basement for hours on end, and when they came out, we would look for the glint of the beginnings of a solution in their eyes, but hiding a thousand-foot hole in the rock is like moving a mountain. It was a lost cause, and we knew it. And I, who no longer hoped for anything, except maybe a glance from our father, waited in my corner and, after a time, I would grab my windbreaker in a huff and throw myself into long solitary walks through the streets of Norco. I would come back home only once I had drunk my fill of bitterness, and I could show my everyday face to the family in the living room.
Who knows what was said during those weeks and months in the basement. Who can tell whether the solution was decided by joint agreement or whether Geronimo took it upon himself to blast the mine, without breathing a word to our father.
The day before the explosion, we celebrated Pester’s birthday. The tension had reached its pinnacle. The Old Man had just learned that Northern Consolidated had recovered its rights to the mine. It was now called New Northern Consolidated and was preparing to send in a team of geologists. All of this he had learned in Val-d’Or, in Amos, at the Department of Mines and in the bars he had started to haunt. He needn’t have taken the trouble; the rumour had spread to Norco on its own steam. The hicks had emerged from their burrows, and the winds of vengeance were blowing.
In front of the house, on our hill, six vehicles were parked helter-skelter, all old beaters, except for Yahoo’s Rambler. We were all there, alerted by the news, worried about what would happen, sombre, tense, armed with the high spirits of warriors to celebrate Pester’s eleventh birthday. Our last family gathering.
Late in the evening, or during the night, I don’t know anymore – time has become confused, it was perhaps only in the morning that I noticed – Geronimo disappeared. He spent the evening in the living room with us, in the middle of the three-seater sofa, in the middle of the discussions that we loved. The discussion that night sailed on a raging sea. We railed against the forces of the universe, against the very idea of God, and, in slightly quieter tones, in the trough of the wave, we grumbled about New Northern Consolidated wanting to take over our mine. As the storm led us to wonder once more how we could save our family’s honour, Geronimo let a long silence linger in the foam of the wave and then, looking at us one after the other, puffing himself up with an air of triumph as the authority of his gaze made its way around the living room, he finally smiled and in a slow, decided voice, he said: ‘Smymine.’
The next day, when we saw the dust raised by the collapse of the mine, we knew what his mission had been.
I took him to Montreal, along with the image of Angèle dying under tons of rock.
It was only later, when I realized I couldn’t live with that image anymore, that Australia became the only choice. I booked my flight, but before I could disappear into exile forever, I had to see whether I had any hope of finding what I had lost. I went back to Norco.
The house was suspended in a state of unreality. No one seemed to be truly there. And when I went down to the basement, the Old Man didn’t seem to understand what I was doing there.
How do you live with eyes boring into your soul, accusing you of killing your sister?
I knew that in agreeing to come to the prospectors’ conference I would have to brave those eyes. The eyes of Tommy and all the others, shoulder to shoulder in their pain. My karma awaited me.
I still don’t know what made me accept. When El Toro called me in Grozny, I could have just told him that I couldn’t leave, that my presence was required, which was in fact the truth, since fighting had resumed pretty much everywhere. On the border of Dagestan, in Gudermes, in Argun, and even in Achkhoy-Martan. There had been a lull in July, after the ceasefire agreement, but since Dudayev had distanced himself from Imayev, peace was no longer in the cards. Flesh ravaged by Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers gave me no rest.
And yet here I am, here, in this low-rent luxury hotel, exposed to the eyes of my loved ones, unable to take a step in the magma of emotion, dizzy to the point of vertigo with all the familiar faces and voices. Here I am at the finish line after running for so many years. Here is Geronimo standing before his loved ones, no weapons or defences, completely powerless, like the child he never was.
I recognized them all. Even the Caboose. Although he is now a man, he still harbours within him the worried, admiring little boy who ran between our legs and who was sent off with a cuff, but who would always come back, relentless as a fly, until he could find protection with one of us, usually Tintin. He hasn’t stopped buzzing around me since I walked through the doors of the hotel.
All it took was a moment; I had barely set fo
ot in the lobby, and I felt the earth shift in my stomach. A sense of imminent, intimate danger went through me like a knife. The threat closed in as the minutes and the seconds ticked slowly by. What in the world am I doing in this bad dream?
El Toro was the first to spot me. He waved to me from where he stood, and then he came toward me, all smiles, his hand outstretched, confident, voice booming, as if he were the host of this reunion. The others approached slowly, and I found myself at the centre of an uneasy vibe, everyone trying to avoid eye contact with everyone else. Tommy hadn’t made her entrance yet, but I knew that with me there, we were just waiting for her arrival to set the drama in motion.
I almost didn’t recognize her. She had aged, like all of us, but more so, in a way that revealed nothing of what she had been. When I saw a woman creep toward the front desk, I thought it was a chambermaid come to collect her pay, a poor old woman broken by life. But her clothes weren’t shabby. She wore a parka, too warm for the season, trimmed with white fox, black pants with a neat crease in the front, short boots and a red plaid shirt, a flame in the opening of the parka. Her clothes were inappropriate, but they weren’t cheap, or dirty, or worn. It was her bearing, bent, hunched over herself, that created the impression of a wretched life spent escaping any appearance of opulence.
In the lobby, El Toro’s voice rang out: ‘There’s Tommy!’ Even then, I couldn’t quite believe it was her dark, closed face.
It was only once Tommy crossed paths with the Old Maid that I recognized her. Her body straightened up with the savage pride of an animal, all her features lit up and, in spite of the wrinkles, in spite of all the years, in spite of the fear that gripped my heart, I saw Tommy’s black eyes bore into the Old Maid, eyes that have never stopped haunting me, accusing me of having killed Angèle.
Tommy had left her land in the North, and she had us all in her sights. Particularly me. She wouldn’t forgive me anything. Not Angèle’s death, not the McDougall dresses, not the Latin sessions in the living room. I would be spared nothing of what I had done or said. Wordlessly, with only the force of her eyes, just like in Émilien’s car after the explosion at the mine, when I thought I was merely escaping the hicks and their thirst for vengeance, and she bayonetted me with her dark eyes and showed me Angèle buried under the tons of rock that I had just blasted.
How can I explain what happened that day without breaking the fine thread of lies that keeps us all in equilibrium? Everyone thought I was the one who blew up the mine. I was the only person responsible for Angèle’s death. And that’s the way it should be. There is no point in two of us being under the glaring lights of accusation.
That day I knew I was leaving Norco forever. The hicks weren’t going to miss a perfect opportunity for revenge for everything we had put them through. I didn’t know it then, but in running from the police – their inquiries would inevitably turn to us – I had to run from my family as well.
All I wanted was to destroy any trace of our activities at the mine. The Old Man and I had discussed it at length, and no clear solution had presented itself. Blasting was considered, but immediately rejected. ‘Too dangerous,’ the Old Man had said. I had proposed the idea of dynamiting the central pillar of the mine stope, a column of rock about twenty feet in diameter, rising over sixty feet to the ceiling of the enormous room dug in the centre of the mountain, the heart of the mine. ‘It’s way too dangerous. If you blow up that pillar, the entire mine will collapse. And you’ll be at the centre of the explosion. You’ll be swallowed whole.’
‘And what if we blast on the east side? If we blew up the pillar at the entrance to the drift that leads to our tunnel? The east lateral pillar?’
It was still too dangerous. He would turn himself in to the police shackled hand and foot rather than see his children risk their lives in an operation that involved too much dynamite and too much rock. Sometimes his cautiousness was exasperating.
Having drilled from every angle, I knew how to blow up the lateral pillar without killing myself.
At night during the week, I transported the dynamite and fuses we needed to the mine, with Tintin, who was my accomplice of the hour. Tintin had earned his name. He was always running to the rescue of the small and the vulnerable. He protected widows and orphans, specifically the Weewuns, the Caboose and sometimes even Angèle when he saw her on the verge of collapsing under the weight of a trial, but when put to the test, he was the first to leap into the fray, the first to sneer at foolishness and fear. He was my most faithful right-hand man in the war we were waging to take back our rights. He was naïve, but with a sense of duty that never wavered.
He was the one who had helped me remove our equipment from the mine in the weeks before. And now, we were undoing everything we had done. We were bringing back the drill, the compressor and the explosives, and we were starting to drill blast holes at the base of the east lateral pillar.
I had to explain why.
I should have been wary of the kid’s questions. He quickly understood that by blowing up the lateral pillar, I was intending to obstruct the drift and, with a bit of luck, the entrance to our tunnel. But what interested him, like me a few weeks earlier, was the central pillar, an all-out blast, the complete collapse of the mine, an explosion that would attack the stone structure of the mine and would leave only a miserable pile of rocks at the bottom of a crater, an indiscriminate hole from which neither another mine nor evidence of our activities could be extracted. And just as I had done with the Old Man, he peppered me with questions.
I understood later, much later, that my answers to his questions were what helped him figure out what dynamite charge to set in the middle of the shaft (which is what he did, the poor guy) for the force of the two explosions, his and mine, to meet in a single blast and tear down the central pillar, resulting in the explosion that we both wanted, a huge and terrible detonation that shook the depths of the earth, at once exploding, lifting and rupturing the mountain’s bare summit, which collapsed in an unspeakable din, the rocks splitting, smashing together, crashing together, the thunder of their fall to the bottom of the gaping hole of the mine, the creaking of the mother rock cleaving from all directions, a trembling I felt beneath my feet. The combined force of our two blasts shattered the internal structure of the mine and struck the very foundations of the rock on which it rested. It was more than we could have hoped for, beyond all expectations, a complete victory. And I savoured the glory of this victory, not knowing that Tintin, on the other face of the mountain, was hurrying to join me.
I heard a final convulsion of the mountain, a muffled and deep explosion, and I hastily brushed the dust from my clothes because I knew full well that the explosion would attract the horde of hicks and that I would have to face them.
I posted myself behind a mine building to watch their arrival, and that’s where I was when I saw Tintin appear. He was covered in dust and sweat, out of breath from running, but he was beaming with pride. I didn’t understand.
‘What are you doing here?’
He smiled a wide, triumphant smile in response. He was bursting with pride, and he was staring at me, his eyes shining, searching for complicity in mine. I didn’t want to understand.
‘For Christ’s sake, what are you doing here?’
I can see us there, me, an idiot lusting for glory that I refused to share, unable to face facts, and him, Tintin, a brash young kid in awe of his exploit, claiming his share of the praise. I was torn between what I needed to understand and the smack that would recalibrate his emotions. And then the hicks arrived, and I knew what I had to do.
They came at top speed, the men, the women, the children, an undistinguishable mass, stunned, dazed, addled by some inkling of the disaster, and they crowded around the crater, contemplating their misfortune in silence and, when their wits returned, when they had formed a vague idea of what might have happened, they retreated to the mine office, saying my name, ‘Geronimo! Where’s Geronimo?’ I knew then that no matter what happen
ed, there had to be only one guilty party to offer them, because the vengeance of the weak can be a terrible thing indeed.
I grabbed Tintin and I said, looking him straight in the eye so that my words would sink into every fibre of his being, ‘Only one person is to blame for this and that’s me. You stay here and don’t show your face until you’re cleaned up.’
I thank god for the inspiration I had at that moment when he was getting ready to climb up on the mountain and show himself to them. Neither of us knew at that point that Angèle was at the bottom of the mine. I was just trying to protect him from the fury of the hicks. And I’m glad that I had the good sense to lift a burden from him that he wouldn’t have been able to bear. He didn’t have what it takes. He was everything you could hope for in a Cardinal, but deep inside him lay great sensitivity, too great for me to have let him shoulder the blame for Angèle’s death.
I told him again when we met up years later: ‘Only one person is to blame, and that’s me.’
Tintin is a gentle soul. He wouldn’t have survived if I hadn’t taken full responsibility for what happened that day. How could he have? I was older, tougher, harder, and the only way I managed to live with the burden was by sinking deeper into the carnage, massacres and internecine wars, which dwarf my soul under a pain that is greater than mine. A war surgeon. I didn’t choose a career, I didn’t choose to be a hero, I simply buried myself in a pain that wasn’t my own. It was the only instinct of survival that I had left after Tommy’s black eyes bore into my heart and showed me Angèle, my sister, my favourite sister in spite of what people may think – Angèle, the strongest, the most intelligent, the best one of all of us – Angèle, her body crushed under tons of rock.
She was the most brilliant of us all. She could have done our name proud if we had let her live. She was twenty-four-carat Cardinal, but so unpredictable, so puzzling. How could she be interested in the mathematics of imaginary numbers and baubles at the same time?
Twenty-One Cardinals Page 12
