Twenty-One Cardinals

by Jocelyne Saucier

  I fled Norco without looking back and without asking where this moment of madness would take me, content to just press down on the accelerator, not thinking of anything except getting as far away from there as possible. I took the little road to avoid the covered bridge, for fear of meeting Tommy’s ghost again, and I drove at full tilt along the forbidding, isolated country roads that seemed to be leading me nowhere.

  The first houses started to pop up after I felt I had returned a little to the living, but I didn’t recognize the people, the houses or even the road. I realized I had gotten lost in the land where I was born. ‘Lost in hick territory,’ I said to myself, knowing the joke was on me.

  I took the car down the back roads that crisscrossed, bifurcated, petered out in a long dusty series and all wound up looking alike, and I ended up where my frenzied escape was supposed to take me.

  The house had sad, black tarpaper as siding that gaped in great swaths open to the elements. Small and square, with no stylish touches, not even a stoop in front of the door, it seemed to have sprung up from the dirt like the humblest forest mushroom and didn’t care what people thought of it, in the shade of the tall willow trees that surrounded it. Pretty much everywhere between the trees, sheds spilled their guts onto the grass, and there were the cheerful cries of children, the sweet little face of one of them astonished by my presence, and then another, more boldly contemplating the stranger behind the wheel of the car that had stopped, and finally the dog, barking like a little soldier.

  I had stopped there, attracted by the pleasant image and the far-off echo it awoke within me, not knowing that this was where I would find the haven my soul so desperately needed, but mainly because the house was at the end of a road, in a cul-desac, and I was forced to interrupt my race.

  ‘Dad, someone’s here … ’

  The man was splitting wood in front of a shed, and he looked in my direction a long time before setting down his axe to approach me.

  At what point did I feel Tintin’s radiant presence in this dark, heavy man? He was moving toward me with a step that grew more and more hesitant as he approached the car, and, when he leaned on the door, there was an instant when both of us, at the same time, moved toward one another even before we could say who this man was extending his hand and grinning from ear to ear.

  We stayed that way, frozen in that incredible handshake, unable to tear ourselves apart, until the whining of the children who were playing around us brought us back to the here and now. Then there was a long moment of hesitation. We had to say something, greet each other in some way, but the words stayed stuck in our throats, intimidated by the grace of the moment. I felt the need to break the silence, at the same time as I wanted to prolong the pure beauty of the emotion that united us, and in the end I found no better greeting than: ‘How’s the Old Lady?’

  And he, just as tongue-tied, answered, ‘Come on in. We’ll have a beer.’

  That’s how I entered my brother Tintin’s world, a strange world, filled with children laughing and making faces, a world where he was at ease, used to the pleasures of a quiet life and the rough surface of a broken soul. He lived in this charming little house under the willows with his four or five kids – he himself didn’t keep track of which ones he had fathered and which ones had been left behind. ‘I could never figure women out. They come, they settle in, and before you can say phew! they’re gone again.’ He lived from a little prospecting, chopping wood and trapping. ‘The children take care of the rest,’ he said, gesturing to the mess in the kitchen.

  We talked for hours. About his life, about mine, about what had become of this one or that one, about Norco. There had been an investigation after the explosion. Police had come to question everyone and had left with tons of clues but not a single ounce of evidence against us. The town crumbled soon after. The hicks realized that there was no future for them there, and they left one by one, taking their houses with them if they were up to the journey or leaving them behind. ‘We stopped burning things. There was no point anymore. And anyway, we had to keep something for ourselves. There was virtually nothing left.’

  ‘And the Old Man?’

  Our father had gone back to prospecting. He was no luckier than before, and he didn’t discover anything, but he had gone back to being a prospector. He had found his soul again. Did he know what had happened to Angèle? Yes, he knew. I didn’t need to ask Tintin. I could guess from his way of avoiding the topic that Angèle’s death had weighed on the whole family. ‘Nothing was ever the same after that.’ He repeated it I don’t know how many times.

  It seems only the Caboose lived through those dark days unscathed. ‘A happy guy.’ Pretty soon, only he and the Old Maid were left at home with our parents. Norco was being dismantled. The two hotels were removed from their foundations, placed on huge semis and hauled away to continue their slovenly lives somewhere else. The church became the Hurault parish hall, and the schools were torn down brick by brick. Once they found themselves alone on their island, the Old Man agreed to weigh anchor.

  ‘You can’t imagine how many baskets of rocks we brought up from the basement!’

  Tintin’s big booming laugh erased the vision I was creating of our father’s heartrending goodbyes to his town. I pictured him, the poor man, on the little hill where our house stood, overseeing the move, making sure that none of his rock samples got lost in all the hauling. Alone in his thoughts, in spite of all the bustle around him, he saw his town, the town he had given birth to, sinking into what would soon be a shapeless pile of memories. Did he take one last look at the mine? Did he have a final thought for Angèle?

  Tintin’s story was punctuated by those big, good-natured laughs, strange in so solemn a man, and they lightened up the conversation. He had barely launched into one of these bursts of hilarity, when I saw him sneak an inquisitive look at me.

  ‘Did you go back? Is that where you’re coming from?’

  I described what I had seen without telling him what happened to me.

  ‘And do you go back from time to time?’

  ‘No, never.’

  We both knew what his refusal meant.

  ‘You’re not to blame … ’ I began.

  I wanted to continue. I wanted to explain to him, but there was a vast continent between us that we hadn’t yet crossed. We would have to wait for other meetings before our souls would be ready to hear what had to be said.

  We talked more for hours still. The kids – some of them pretty big – made dinner. And it was only once the first shadows of the night appeared that I realized that I would have to leave my brother’s cozy little house, where I already felt I had made a nest.

  We could only talk about the innocuous: the hicks, the war, politics and religion, inspiring the same disgusted contempt as before. We went back to the way we were, two brothers, two Cardinals whom life had separated and who got their backs up as one. And when it came time to say goodbye, I thought that we would do it the Cardinal way, with no fuss, a smart remark at the ready in case of any sign of emotion, and a firm handshake.

  Tintin waited until I was in my car, probably because he wasn’t expecting an answer to his question. The engine was already running, and he popped his head through the window, his face close to mine, and he asked me, as if all day and all night there had been only this question on the tips of our tongues: ‘Do you know what she was doing there?’

  I didn’t know what Angèle was doing at the mine that day. I didn’t have the foggiest idea, and the fact that Tintin asked the question meant that no one knew. Her secret died with her. I left knowing that I would be back, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to come and explore the enigma of Angèle with the only one of my brothers with whom I could speak freely. Over the years, his little house would become the place where I could lay down my pain.

  The shimmering of the sun on the sheet metal roofs of his sheds is a sure guide. Once I see the flashes of light between the willows, I am again drawn in by the image that made
me stop the first time. Tintin built his sheds like our father did.

  The next time we saw each other, he told me, ‘Once they didn’t need me anymore, I stopped going back to Norco. I settled here, right nearby, well before the Old Man decided to leave Norco. I was their handyman. They needed someone. There was nothing left in town. And now, there are all these kids … ’

  He wouldn’t go to Norco, but as soon as he started waiting for me to come, he began maintaining the covered bridge. I recognized the invisible hand that replaced the planks on the deck, solidified the joists and repaired the rafters. He would wait for me from one year to the next, and if the violence kept me on the other side of the world for too long or if my heart refused to go beat itself up in Norco and my visits were a few years apart, I knew it was a long wait. ‘I thought you were dead somewhere off in one of your wars,’ he would say, half-mocking, half-serious, as he opened the door.

  I didn’t have any more visions. Tommy no longer appeared to me at the bend at the covered bridge. Angèle’s presence was the only one I could feel, under the mountain where I went to run aground, lying on my side, listening for a moan, a confession. For Christ’s sake, what were you doing there? Why did you have to be there? Silence. The mountain keeps her secret and I die, I scream, I tear my heart out.

  I try to postpone the moment when I find myself on the mountain. I wander along what used to be paved, lit roads, now no more than tracks with thin strips of asphalt. I go from house to house, from one pile of debris to another. I search among the dried-up cattails for the spot where we would go trout fishing. I look for a place where a pleasant memory can surface, and I spend a long time in front of our house.

  Since my first visit, the outdoor stairs have collapsed, and the kitchen floor has caved in. I don’t dare go in anymore. Under the enchantment of my memories, I would like to see Big Yellow and his pirate’s mop of hair. I want to see Matma, so inappropriately named. I want to see Zorro. But they are just battered memories, images with blurry lines, whereas what awaits me under the mountain is flesh and blood.

  Most of all I want to see our mother. She is old now and still just as lost in her muddled thoughts. Tintin paints a sad picture of her. I can’t imagine her in an overheated bungalow, no children around her, cooking for faceless mouths, volunteers who come to get the enormous concoctions she feels compelled to prepare and that end up on the plates of the destitute.

  I can’t believe that after all this time she doesn’t know what happened.

  How could a woman like her not feel in her flesh that she was missing a child? How could she not have heard Angèle’s heartrending cry under the avalanche of rocks? How could Angèle’s absence after all these years stifle that cry? In spite of how tired she was from all of those children born one after the other, our mother was there for every one of us. I know it, because I would wait for the delicious moment when her eyes would settle on me, at the table when she would serve dinner and count her children, at night when she went from bed to bed and, oh, the joy of it, I felt her lean over my day’s worries. I know that she knew every nook and cranny of my soul. How could Angèle have hidden her death from her?

  That was how I wanted Norco to return my mother to me. Pretty, nonchalant, half-dozing at the foot of the bed where I waited for her, the weight of the day lifted from her shoulders, possibly happy. That is the image I try to rekindle.

  ‘Why don’t you go see her?’

  All I had to do was to stop at Val-d’Or, go to Rue des Trembles, near the shopping centre, and ring the doorbell. The Old Lady would open her arms wide to me. ‘And what about the Old Man, Tintin? Or hasn’t he occurred to you?’

  ‘What about the Old Man?’

  The Old Man would have known in no time what happened at the mine. We thought he was lost in his dreams, impervious to the noise of the house, completely crazed in his obsession with rocks, but I know that his intuition was sharp and that he managed his dynamite with the care of a bank teller. I found that out at my expense when I took a stick of dynamite from him for my number in front of that girl (what was her name again?) who was getting in the way of my romance with the beautiful Nicole with the gypsy eyes.

  ‘The time you made the principal’s boobs shake?’

  Tintin was too young at the time to truly remember the story, but it had been told to him so often that he knew all the details, except no one knew the finale, not even the Old Maid, in spite of her importance in our house.

  The end of the story is that the stick of dynamite I had carried against my chest all day had made me sick, and the Old Man knew it when he came up to the bedroom where I was holding my head in my hands. ‘It’s the nitroglycerine,’ he said to me in a sickly sweet tone that sounded more sarcastic than he intended. ‘The humidity had been at the stick you took. Didn’t you notice that the paper was stained, like by big drops of oil? That’s the nitroglycerine that seeped through the wax paper and gave you that headache. If you can’t tell bad dynamite from good, my boy, you don’t touch it.’

  ‘He knew I had stolen a stick from the dynamite shed, one stick! And he knew which one. He practically had it nicknamed.’

  ‘And you think … ’

  ‘I don’t think, I know. He’s a lot more clever than people give him credit for. With just a little chitchat, without batting an eye, he would stitch me up good, and without my even realizing what was going on, we would have ended up talking about the explosion, and I would have answered his questions. He would have known the exact number of sticks of dynamite I had used, would have been able to tell them from the ones left in the shed, and he would have figured out the rest.’

  ‘So that’s why you never went back to see him, so he wouldn’t know I was with you that day?’

  ‘Listen to me: I’m the one who decided to blow up the mine. I’m the one who’s to blame for what happened that day. Me alone. There’s no point in two of us having to shoulder that responsibility.’

  When we get to that point, to the blame I refuse to share, Tintin’s eyes grow wide and get glassy with anger.

  ‘I’m not some little shit you can lead around by the nose anymore. You can’t keep telling me what to think and what not to think. Your controlling will never end.’

  Seeing him so unhappy, I sometimes tell myself that we should have let the truth come out. I would have gone to prison, Tintin probably too. Maybe we would have shared a cell, and we would be out by now. We would have atoned for what we did together, and together we would have asked for Angèle’s forgiveness. That would have been better than the solitude, me running from war to war in the distant hope of a stray bullet, him having retreated deep into his land, cultivating poverty and self-denial, and the others, El Toro, Magnum, the Old Maid, Tommy, their lives not much better. And what about the Caboose, the poor kid who vaguely knows that a secret has slipped by him and who goes from sibling to sibling, searching for a past that has been kept hidden? Could we have forged a bit of peace and happiness for ourselves if we had agreed to live out our tragedy in the light of day?

  ‘Our family was never looking for happiness. So we can’t resent never finding any.’

  Tintin’s observations are disarmingly lucid. Living like he does at the end of the road, his only company children, who ask him for nothing or so little – bread on the table and the freedom to run through the fields – he has had plenty of time to think and sort through his thoughts.

  ‘You know, poverty is freedom. When you don’t have to fight for wealth and power, all that’s left is what you need, and that’s plenty to fill a life.’

  ‘And what do you see from on high in your poor man’s nirvana?’

  ‘I can see that we messed up our hearts and our minds.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that it’s about time that you release me.’

  We had this conversation during my last visit, just two months ago.

  We have been meeting this way, periodically and with the same intensity, for the past ten years,
and I had created a somewhat idyllic image of my brother lost and found, free of any ties, poor, ‘majestically poor’ says the Caboose, who is still in awe of the days when we were the kings of Norco, which he tries to rediscover in Tintin’s stubborn silence.

  ‘The others come to see me from time to time too, and they all get that same look when they see how poor I am. It’s as if I were the keeper of something that’s precious to them. My being poor isn’t a sort of pride or self-denial. I just don’t know how to live.’

  I too had admired Tintin’s poverty. Until I realized that he was deeply unhappy. Because of me. Because of the silence that I forced on him. Because his soul had remained a prisoner as long as I refused him the right to share the blame for Angèle’s death.

  We left each other with gloom in our hearts. Before leaving, I muttered to him what I had said so many times and which, I could tell, was no longer enough.

  ‘It’s enough that there’s one guilty party. There’s nothing to be gained by pointing the finger at each other.’

  And he said, sadder than ever, ‘Still with your grand ideas. The Great Geronimo who roams the big old world with a heavy sorrow that he can’t lay down, revelling in his battle honours. What would you do without that as a defence?’

  I went back to Grozny. Dudyev had just rejected the disarmament agreement. The separatist camp was divided. Twenty-odd injured men awaited me. I went back to my scalpel.

  And then I got the call from El Toro.

  I still don’t quite know why I came to this conference. After the unsettling reunions, we found ourselves in a strange, unreal place, no one quite knowing how to find a new balance in the whirl of emotions. We sought each other out in the crowd of geologists and prospectors in ties, thinking we were avoiding one another. Groups of Cardinals formed and dissipated like sand dunes in the wind. And Tintin trailed around the halls, an unhappy fellow, waiting for me to give him back his share of the truth.

  Truth is not where we think it is.