Twenty-One Cardinals

by Jocelyne Saucier

  ‘You forced me to put on Angèle’s dress, her Sunday dress. The flowered dress, the dress that was supposed to camouflage her death. Don’t try to tell me you’ve forgotten.

  ‘You knew full well what you were doing and why. You kept explaining it over and over while you packed my bags, Angèle’s bags. You didn’t give me a second to think. You went back and forth, to the laundry room, to the bedrooms, and you just kept talking. You were trying to bury me with words while you collected her clothes, her books, everything that belonged to Angèle and that had to disappear with her, her dresses, her tunics, her white school blouses, and the McDougall woman’s hat, do you remember? The hat with the feather that you got from the back of the closet, behind a pile of old catalogues? You stuffed the hat and all the rest in brown paper bags that were supposed to be Angèle’s luggage, providing the proof that she was gone, “of her own choosing and never coming back.” Do you remember?

  ‘I haven’t forgotten a word of what you said.

  ‘Save the family. We have to save the family. The hicks will come, the police, the shame, prison, the pain, mother won’t survive, none of us will survive. We have to be strong, stronger than the scum that wants to point the finger at us, stronger than all of it. We have to stop the others from crushing us like bugs. That’s what you said.’

  I couldn’t have resisted her. I couldn’t have torn myself away from what she was saying. She came and went, thrashing about with the fury of an animal caught in a trap. She went through every room gathering whatever might have belonged to Angèle to put a bag together for me before, on the mountain, they recovered from the surprise of the force of the blast and they all came back here, the hatred of the hicks in their wake, and before they had time to think. ‘We have to face it. We have to be ready to face it.’ Her voice wouldn’t give me a second’s rest.

  It felt like an eternity in that green bedroom. I followed the trace of Angèle. I wanted to throw myself into the light that was sucking up her soul and never come back to life.

  There was no point in explaining what happened next; I can see it in every pair of eyes on me. A light dress with yellow flowers stirs in the back of an old car. It rustles, it flutters, the air is pulsing with heat. A thin weak smile is formed, and they watch her disappear into the distance in a cloud of dust. Geronimo watches her up to the covered bridge. He knows he will have to meet my eyes again. Émilien bows his head. It’s too much for him.

  ‘I came back through the woods like you said to. In pants and a shirt.’

  The Old Maid is destroyed. All her machinations, orchestrations, constructions, the most important work of her life, everything she did to save the family, it has all crumbled. There is no secret left, no guard on the ramparts. The Old Maid collapses into a small pile of twisted emotion.

  Did she really think that all by herself, for all those years, she could hold back Angèle’s soul, which was screaming to be acknowledged? It oozed out of the walls of the house. You could feel it, heavy and fraught, feeding on silence and invading our nights. Our mother gave up her nightly rounds. No one came to lean over our dark dreams. Angèle, so incredibly light while she inhabited her body, crushed us under the harsh weight of a soul full of sorrow.

  I didn’t last a year in the house. It was only after I left that I found the spirit’s path that brought me back to my Angèle.

  I swore that never again would I be forced to parade around looking like Angèle. That display in Émilien’s car, while my soul was still deep in the mine, looking for Angèle, as the horror was at its peak, me in her pretty flowered dress, sitting in the back seat, alive, in good health and smiling her smile, and her, crushed to a pulp under tons of rock, that horrible charade that I had to keep up until the covered bridge … Oh Angèle! Can you ever forgive me?

  In the little woods on the way home, I swore that no one would force me to smile Angèle’s smile again.

  The Old Maid sensed it when our eyes met in the hotel lobby. She saw that nothing could force me to make a miracle again. Only in Kangirsujuaq, in the silence of my long solitary walks, does Angèle’s smile return deep in my soul.

  Now that everything has been said and her spirit can rest in peace with each of us, I want to get back to my long walks by the bay, get back to Noah, his smooth, round arms around my shoulders, his warm hands, our silent conversations. I want this ceremony to be over. I want them to give our father the medal and let me live out my quiet days with the man who is waiting for me.

  ‘You haven’t told us everything …’ Tintin begins, as if reading my mind.

  He is in a corner, at the other end of the room, beside an enormous, monstrous philodendron that is half-hiding him. You can barely see his long silhouette and the thick tousled hair that has always been his trademark. But here in the room, we know who has just spoken. We recognize his soft, sad voice.

  The compact crowd around our parents had broken up. As I emerge from my story, I see their eyes, their gestures, heavy and vague. Slowly, very slowly, they break apart and go lean against the walls.

  The only ones left in the centre of the room are two old people holding each other’s gnarled hand.

  ‘You haven’t told us everything,’ Tintin says again, his voice more confident.

  From the other end of the room, Geronimo comes to his rescue.

  ‘He’s right. You haven’t told us everything. There’s one question left.’

  He moves toward me in an almost menacing way, because of all the trepidation inside him.

  ‘What was Angèle doing at the mine that day?’

  The question comes from I don’t know whom behind him.

  Like an endless echo, I hear the question hit the thin wall of their thoughts, the deafening roar that scrapes the depths of our consciousness, and from one to the other, the swell of a single voice that tells me that not one of them knows what Angèle was doing at the mine that day. How on earth is that possible? How could no one have figured it out?

  While I try to come to terms with the fact that I will have to spell it out, tell them what Angèle was, our father’s reedy voice cuts through the silence the room and asks the silhouette that has not left the protective shadow of the philodendron:

  ‘And what about you, Justin, why don’t you tell us what you were doing at the mine that day.’

  Tintin leaves his leafy cover and starts a twisted, arduous, confused story of sticks of dynamite and feelings that don’t want to be named.

  ‘I can’t remember who I was before that day. A normal kid, I suppose, happy and carefree, It was afterward that the sleepless nights and dark days started. I didn’t know how to go on living. I learned again. For the others, not for me. I don’t live for me anymore. I wasn’t thinking of anything when I went into the mine shaft. Not even the danger. I was hoping for a good blast, that’s all.’

  Geronimo comes to his aid when he gets stuck, when he falters on a detail. He explains in turn, blames himself. Tintin gets annoyed and won’t let him claim all the guilt. I’m barely listening. Their story doesn’t matter anymore. Who laid the fatal charge? From what direction did the blast that killed her come? From the mine shaft? The lateral pillar? What does it matter since no one understands what Angèle was doing, why she had gone to the mine, her true motivation?

  Once they have finished flogging themselves, it will be up to me to explain what happened. Would they finally understand? They would have to. I can’t let Angèle’s death be summed up by a few sticks of dynamite stuck in the rock. They would have to accept worse than Angèle’s death. They would have to look at themselves, at all of us, gathered in the living room, around our hideous three-seater sofa … Oh, Angèle! Is it possible that what happened next escaped them, that their consciousness has retained nothing of it?

  I’ll tell them. I will tell the story. I’ll leave nothing out. That last family meeting, supposedly for Pester’s birthday, but that we all knew was a war council. The last-chance meeting, because New Northern Consolidated was at ou
r doorstep. It would swoop down on our mine and discover the tunnel that we had dug if we didn’t find a way to stop it from happening. That pseudo–family celebration was the setting for our own private tragedy that led to Angèle’s sacrifice.

  I will spare them nothing. They will hear it all. Minute by minute, second by second, I will describe that day before Angèle’s death, and then they will know that we are all, all, to blame for it and that there is no point in shouting the odds about the number of sticks of dynamite that this one or that one stuck in the rock.

  How has their consciousness managed to escape? By what twisted road did it slither off so that nothing remains of what happened that day?

  We were in the living room – well, at least everyone who really counted in the family was there. Geronimo, Big Yellow and Fakir, our most ardent speechifiers, settled in to the discomfort of the sofa, a place of choice in spite of the springs that poked through between the divots and the bumps. Beside them, perched crookedly on the arm of the sofa, was Tintin, listening carefully to everything that was being said. And on the other arm of the sofa was Matma. Who else was there? The Old Maid, of course, leaning against the kitchen door-frame, her usual spot. Mustang and Yahoo, straddling chairs in the middle of the room. Behind them, Tut and Magnum, perched on what originally must have been a kitchen counter, now used to store a colossal mess. And in the corner, near the TV, Émilien, silent and gloomy, hiding behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  In fact, the whole day, the evening and part of the night, there were constant comings and goings, agitation that spread from the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to upstairs. Not a room in the house was spared the unrest of this major gathering which, after Pester’s traditional blasting at the sand quarry, led us into endless discussions about remaking the world in our image. As the conversation ebbed, this time, a much more immediate concern came up: how to prevent New Northern Consolidated from sticking its nose in our tunnel.

  Only the youngest were left out of the discussion. They were outside most of the time, rapt in fascination over all the cars parked in front of the house, five or six wheezing, coughing beaters that the Big Kids had driven back from the big city. Outside, Nefertiti, Wapiti, Tootsie and the Caboose were singing themselves hoarse as they drove down imaginary roads: the roar of the engine, the screech of the tires, the clank of the metal. Even when they honked the horns in unison, no one inside said a word about the commotion.

  Between the fervour of our discussions and the racket made by the Weewuns circulated those without status in the family, so to speak: too young for the Big Kids, too old for the Weewuns, they couldn’t sit still. El Toro, whom we should have called Snoopy on account of his curiosity, was everywhere all at once.

  Our father put in an appearance in the living room at the end of the evening. Angèle’s fate had already been sealed. It happened just after supper. Did the Old Man, buried in his basement, and our mother, nearby, in the kitchen, understand what was happening? I was there, in the eye of the storm, and I didn’t grasp the extent of it until it was too late. Angèle had made up her mind.

  We were there, every one of us who was looking in the lull of the conversation to ward off the calamity that would come crashing down on our family. The threat emerged regularly, silent and hostile, in the heated debates. The crushing feeling of powerlessness was overwhelming, because the clock was ticking, and we hadn’t found a way to protect our tunnel from the inquisitive eye of New Northern Consolidated.

  This is the point in the story where Angèle makes up her mind. Lord up above or down below, give my words force because now I have to approach shores filled with quicksand and misunderstandings. How can I make them understand?

  As usual, Angèle and I were side by side, sitting on the floor against the wall facing the sofa. Neither of us had said a word during the discussion. We wouldn’t have dared. Words were reserved first for the occupants of the sofa, who debated all topics with equal authority. The others jumped in when they felt the floor was open, and then there was a heated clash of arguments that reminded us of a time not so long ago when we were the kings of Norco and nothing could touch us. And just like in the good old days, someone would get up to visit the bathroom or just to stretch their legs, with a resounding Smyplace, accompanied by a bit of buffoonery or a triumphant fart.

  How could I make them understand that Angèle didn’t mean to reject the family or any of its codes, that she didn’t mean to offend or defy anyone when she got up and rather than the Smyplace we would normally expect, she said, clearly and distinctly, each word tolling the bell for her, ‘That’s my place.’

  I don’t know what she was thinking. I don’t even know if she was thinking when she did such a stupid, senseless thing.

  It was an unspeakable insult. Coming from anyone but her, it would have just been a joke, a witticism without consequences, but the thin thread Angèle had been dangling from for so many years couldn’t hold up to such acrobatics. Did she want to test the thread’s strength? Did she want to find out to just how much she belonged to this family?

  The sentence was stiff, merciless and without appeal. No hearts went out to her. Not even mine. I was frozen, my eyes cast down at the floor. My final betrayal.

  A deafening silence swept across the living room, one end to the other. A stinging absence of heart. Angèle was standing in the middle of us, tortured, waiting for a sharp, biting word, a nasty remark of some sort to fly from some direction and deliver her from what seemed like an eternity. Nothing came. The silence was her punishment, her sentence.

  I was a breath away from her. I could have touched her just by moving my hand, only slightly, barely a twitch, not even a gesture. Nobody would have seen it, and she would have had someone to hang on to, someone who could have grabbed her as life was slipping from under her feet. But I did nothing. I too was under the spell of the affront, and the sentence. I was hangman and victim. I was mired in mixed feelings. I was a coward yet again. Angèle, can you ever forgive me?

  The silence spread like a storm through the house. The Weewuns stopped their racket. No one was running on the stairs anymore. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. Time stood still. Angèle looked around at each of us, looking for a crack in the wall of condemnation and, not finding it, she left the living room with a decided step. She had made up her mind.

  How could we have been so blind?

  With her certain step, she went to load up on dynamite to blow up the central pillar of the mine. She was so gentle and swanlike, but she was going to sneak into the great cave of the mine and with her dainty hands, tie a string of dynamite around the pillar and wait for the explosion to free her.

  She knew full well what she was doing. Since her visit to the mine with Geronimo, she understood the importance of the central pillar, but she thought she was alone in this tragic endeavour. And when Geronimo and Tintin each arrived with the heedlessness of conquerors, they didn’t realize that Angèle was one step ahead of them. It was a horrible twist of fate.

  She didn’t commit suicide. She sacrificed herself. She set herself on fire at the family altar. To save us all and to make amends for an offence she had not committed. To seal her belonging to the Cardinal clan forever. Angèle, can you ever forgive us?

  Jocelyne Saucier was born in New Brunswick and lives in Abitibi, Québec. Two of her previous novels, La vie comme une image (House of Sighs) and Jeanne sur les routes (Jeanne’s Road) were finalists for the Governor General’s Award. Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) garnered her the Prix des Cinq continents de la Francophonie, making her the first Canadian to win the award. The book was a CBC Canada Reads Selection in 2015.

  Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator living in Montréal. And the Birds Rained Down, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Il pleuvait des oiseaux, was a CBC Canada Reads Selection. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, as were her translations of Élise Turcotte’s Guyana and Hervé Fischer’s The D
ecline of the Hollywood Empire.

  ALSO BY JOCELYNE SAUCIER

  La vie comme une image (Les Éditions XYZ, 1996),

  translated by Liedewij Hawke as

  House of Sighs (Mercury Press, 2001).

  Jeanne sur les routes (Les Éditions XYZ, 2006),

  translated by Rhonda Mullins as

  Jeanne’s Road (Cormorant Books, 2010).

  Il pleuvait des oiseaux (Les Éditions XYZ, 2011),

  translated by Rhonda Mullins as

  And the Birds Rained Down (Coach House Books, 2013).

  Typeset in Albertan.

  Albertan was designed by the late Jim Rimmer of New Westminster, B.C., in 1982. He drew and cut the type in metal at the 16pt size in roman only; it was intended for use only at his Pie Tree Press. He drew the italic in 1985, designing it with a narrow fit and a very slight incline, and created a digital version. The family was completed in 2005, when Rimmer redrew the bold weight and called it Albertan Black. The letterforms of this type family have an old-style character, with Rimmer’s own calligraphic hand in evidence, especially in the italic.

  Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover design by Ingrid Paulson

  Photo of Jocelyne Saucier by Cyclopes

  Photo of Rhonda Mullins by Owen Egan

  Coach House Books

  80 bpNichol Lane

  Toronto ON M5S 3J4