by David Plante
Cyriac asked Nancy if she’d like more tea, but she shook her head.
He said, “When we were growing up, Yvon and me, I’d look at the two of them, Ma and Yvon, and I remember when he’d come in and he’d say to Ma, look, look, Ma, look what I found, and he’d show her a piece of rock, maybe quartz, and Ma would try to show him she was as full of wonder about the rock as he was. She would say, It’s like it fell from heaven, so you know there’s some poetry in Francos. But I’d feel so bad that she’d put such will into showing him how wonderful the rock was. Ma lived on her will, if, that is, she had much of a will to live.”
Cyriac rose a little, as if about to get up for something to show her, then he sat back at the table and laughed a light laugh that, maybe, was behind all his talk.
“I couldn’t do that for Ma, show her anything that she’d say was wonderful, because I knew that even if she tried nothing was wonderful for Ma. That was the way she was, and I didn’t mind, not at all, lucky for me that nothing was expected of me by Ma, except, I knew, that I’d be the one to stay home and take care of her. I didn’t expect anything from Ma. Not me. I left high school when I was sixteen, and then I was an apprentice to the printer who had the press, my uncle, the brother of my father. Yvon and me, we were still boys when our father died. We were living with Ma, we’d see her at her crazy times, walking from room to room, hitting the door jambs. And if I remember anything from when my father was alive, it was him telling her, in French, that she was a condemned woman, and why did he marry a condemned woman?”
As if alerted, Nancy asked, “Condemned?”
But, again, Cyriac laughed his light laugh.
“Well, that’s what I remember. Yvon, he remembered different, he remembered Pa saying to her, ‘Look on the bright side, use your will to look on the bright side.’ I’m different than Yvon, I look on the darker side, and I accept that. But Yvon, he couldn’t accept that, and he was always trying to get out to where everything would be bright. And sometimes it looked like he was out there, where everything was bright and, yes, wonderful. She knew, Ma knew, she was on the deepest dark side, and she wanted Yvon out, and it was only when he was really out that she could feel happy for him. I understood Ma, I think I understood her more than Yvon, who didn’t really understand much, not, really, about anything. You’ll laugh, but that’s the truth about Yvon.”
Nancy smiled. “I know what you mean.”
“Anyway, Yvon knew he couldn’t blame Ma for what she was, because she couldn’t help herself, she didn’t have the will. You see, Ma was, well, a kind of innocent, it was beyond her all that made her helpless, and, I’ll tell you, I loved Ma for her helplessness. And, here’s something else I’ll tell you, I loved my brother Yvon for his helplessness, that made him, too, a kind of innocent. He tried and he tried, but, after all, Yvon didn’t have much will. And those are the innocent people.”
Nancy put the mug on the table and threw her head back to look at the ceiling, where the plaster was mottled; then she looked at Cyriac and asked, “His mother really wanted him to be happy with me?”
“When he began to leave right after church to get back to Boston, she guessed it was because of a girl, and, I’ll tell you, this made her happy for him. And she’d smile and even joke a little with him, saying, ‘A bouquet of flowers is always a nice gift,’ and she’d touch him on the cheek and she’d say, ‘I do, I do want you to be happy.’ And, going off, he was happy.”
Nancy pressed her hands to her face.
“He didn’t finish in college, you know,” Cyriac said.
Lowering her hands, Nancy said, “I didn’t know.”
“He thought that he wouldn’t be able to make it, that he wasn’t good enough, or rich enough, or from an old Yankee family, because the Yankees took over everything from us.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Well, I can say a lot, because I know a lot about our history, our Franco history. Yes, I do. You have to go back far for me to tell you what I mean. You have to go back to when the French had almost all of North America. I mean, do you know what la Nouvelle France was? I’ll tell you. La Nouvelle France was almost all of the North of America. Who do you think founded the cities of Detroit, Des Moines, Du Bois, well, the French did, and, too, all along the Mississippi River? Who do you think the explorers were? La Salle, Marquette, even the Jesuit missionaries, they were French. I’m telling you. The French were here before the Yankees. And then the Yankees came, and they went to war. They fought the French and the Indians, too, who were on the side of the French, because the French made friends with the Indians, even married squaws, yes, and French women married Indian braves. My grandmother, Ma’s mother, she was Indian, Micmac. But the Yankees, they defeated the French, and they took over, and here we are, still defeated. It riles me up, it does, and I don’t like being riled up, I need to be calm, because what can I do? I’ll tell you, Ma was condemned—and yes, I’ll say it—by history that she didn’t even know anything about, because none of us does, none of us Francos in America knows about our history. You ask a Franco, what do you know about the French General Montcalm defeated by the English General Wolfe in Quebec, there on the Plains of Abraham? and you get a look, like what? or, what does it matter? and, as a matter of fact, that’s when us Francos lost all of North America. I read about it, I learned about it, and here I am, and maybe, yes, I put too much on it, our history. It’s like our history isn’t even American history. That’s what I think. And you’ve got to think about Yvon, that he was a Franco.”
Nancy now pressed her hands against her bosom as though to protect herself.
Cyriac, riled up, said, “You knew Yvon, but you didn’t know him. Well, I’m going to tell you more about us Francos. I don’t think you know about us, and maybe it isn’t very interesting, but I’ll tell you, because Yvon was, yes, Franco.” Cyriac leaned forward to speak as if he had heard the words from others, over and over, and was repeating them to someone he urgently wanted to know what he had to say, which no one else knew, and here was someone who had to listen to him. “You leave the farm in Canada because it’s bankrupt and you come to the States to work in a textile factory, and you wear your Sunday clothes because now you’ve got work. And I’ll tell you something else about us Francos: we take the worst jobs, the job sorting out the pelts, the dirty sheep’s bloody pelts, in the sorting room, and we take the jobs that no one else will take because that’s the way we are, we’ll do what no one else will do. Do you want me to show you the pelt that’s been in the closet since my grandfather took it from the mill, a beautiful pelt, maybe that he stole, so we kept it hid away all these years?”
“Show it to me.”
Cyriac opened the door to the closet, from where there came the smell of a cellar, and he brought the thick pelt out to hold it up for Nancy, and when he said, “Feel it, feel it deep,” she ran her fingers deep into the yellowish wool; then he hung it back up and, at the table, moved his cup from side to side, thinking.
“Well, to know what we really are, Francos that we are, you got to see us in a small graveyard, all of us standing around an open grave and watching the coffin lowered in the grave, and all with the feeling that we’re all being lowered into the grave, all of us together. And you got to see that with snow falling, always with snow falling. It’s our history, and no one is interested in our history.”
“No,” Nancy said, and she meant that if no one else was interested she was, but Cyriac understood her to agree with him, and he said, “No, you see, no one,” and Nancy was too tired to try to show she was interested; she was, but perhaps she wasn’t, and Cyriac seemed to accept that she wasn’t, that no one was.
He said, “Other people count, yes, the black people count, the Irish people count, and the Italian people, and the Polish people, and, oh yes, the Jewish people count, but Francos, they don’t count, and because Yvon was a Franco, and because Francos don�
�t count, Yvon was the most American person you could ever want to meet.”
This made Nancy become very still.
Again, Cyriac asked if she would like more tea, and now she said she would, and thanked him when he put an unused tea bag in her mug and heated the water to boiling and poured it into the mug, she shaking her head no to milk and sugar. She said, “Can you tell me what had happened to Yvon after he came back from New York?”
He held back for a moment, and she saw in his eyes his animated thinking, then Cyriac said, “Well, Yvon was with you in New York, and Ma said to me that when Yvon came home she’d tell him he had his own life now, so he didn’t have to come every Sunday to be with her and go to Mass with her. It was like she was getting ready for him to come back, and she’d show him how she could be strong. She’d make a fist and say, ‘I can use my will power, I can, and I don’t need Yvon anymore. He’s happy now, and that’s all I wanted.’ She said that.”
“Yes,” Nancy said.
“But when Yvon came home after going to New York, there he was standing at the door with his valise maybe waiting for Ma to say something to him, but Ma turned away from him and she pressed her forehead to the wall and she hit her head against the wall, and then she turned back to Yvon and she said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she said, ‘I can’t,’ and Yvon said, ‘I know you can’t,’ and Yvon put down his valise and went to her and held Ma in his arms. Ma was not a mother who held her sons or let her sons hold her. And, I’ll tell you, I couldn’t hardly see them for the tears in my eyes, Ma and Yvon there, and me knowing that something happened to them there, and that Ma gave up trying, and that Yvon gave up trying, and why they were holding each other was because they both gave up. And when Ma kissed Yvon on his cheek, he let her go and she let him go, and she went to her room and shut the door. I made tea for Yvon, and we sat at this table and we didn’t say anything. And that was all, but it was like everything.”
“Yes,” Nancy said quietly.
“Let me tell you, I’m not religious, but I can live good in the world, because I know what happens to you in the world, you live in the dark down here below and you suffer the way the world is, and if you know that, you know how to live in this world. Yvon, he never learned to live in the world the way the world is, and maybe that’s strange because even when we were kids out playing he’d say, ‘Wow, look at that,’ and, ‘Wow, wow,’ and I’d wonder what made him think that a rock ledge from, oh, all the way back to the ice age was, like, wow, because it was only rock to me, but to him it was wow. I did sometimes understand that what he wanted was so big, so much everything, that for him it had to be as big as all of God. Did he believe? It don’t matter, not for Yvon, and, maybe, now not for anybody. And maybe, you know, the best way to hope for everything you want, what only God can give you, is just to long for it even if you don’t believe, because for Yvon longing was belief enough, and there was so much longing in him, so much. Even if Yvon knew that there wasn’t no God, knew that even when he went to Mass with Ma God was not going to help because there was no God to help—well, if you know that, and still you want to believe, but you can’t believe because there is nothing to believe in, that’s suffering you can’t live with. Yvon wanted to believe, he wanted that more than anything else, and I could tell how much he suffered what he could never ever have, not in this world, and not in any other world. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yvon, if he isn’t dead, no, not dead, is still wandering around America, oh, all of America, searching for rocks no one ever heard of. Or maybe he became a monk at some monastery and has no contact with this world, even with me.”
“Yes,” Nancy repeated.
“You know, after he came back from New York, he stayed, though I told him, over and over, to go, but he stayed. Well, Yvon and Ma, they didn’t go to Mass on Sunday anymore. Ma, she stayed in her room, the door shut. Yvon went out for a lot of the day and one day when he came in he asked, ‘Where’s Ma?’ and I said, ‘In her room,’ and I followed him and he stopped at the shut door, but then he opened it, and the room was dark because she’d pulled the shade down and he switched on the light, and I heard him shout, ‘Ma,’ and I saw that Ma was on her bed. She was shaking bad, her eyes open and staring like she was scared. Yvon lifted her from the bed and a knife fell from her hand and blood burst from her neck onto Yvon’s face and his shirt and pants, and she died. He was shivering so much as he put her back on her bed and he knelt by the bed and he leaned his forehead on the edge, and he cried out, ‘Ma, Ma, Ma.’ I closed Ma’s eyes.”
Cyriac grasped his chin and held it tight, then he slowly released it.
“I closed her eyes and I put my hands under Yvon’s arms and I lifted him up—I remember that a chair by the bed fell over—and I held him, held him while he cried, cried and cried, my brother, the brother I loved, the brother I would do anything for, anything, and I was—I don’t know why—calm.”
Nancy, too, all at once felt calm, and she too didn’t know why; she became still. She said, “And then he came to me.”
“I wanted him to go to you. He went to you before I called the police. I washed his face and I buttoned him into his raincoat that was too big for him, and I drove him to the train station and bought him a ticket and I made sure he got on the train.”
Nancy said, “I wanted so much to save him, but I couldn’t.”
“Well, you had to save yourself.”
“Oh, save myself—from what?”
Cyriac looked out of the window, and she did also to see that snow was falling among the black bare branches of a large maple tree.
Cyriac said, “From everything.”
Nancy watched the snow settling on the branches of the tree.
“Were you brought up with any religion?” Cyriac asked.
“None,” she answered quickly.
“Yvon said that you’re Jewish. I never met a Jewish person before. You don’t practice your Jewish religion?”
“No.” She smeared the tears across her face with her fingers and she said, “I loved him, I loved Yvon. That was my religion.”
Cyriac raised the back of his hand to his forehead.
Nancy had nothing to save in herself, but she should have been able to save Yvon. Yvon had it in him—she knew he had had it in him—to see all the wonders of the world, and if she had encouraged him in his wonders he would have lived for them.
She said, “Yes, it was in him, it was in Yvon, yes, to shout out, ‘Wow,’” and then she fell back into her chair and sobbed.
Cyriac gave her his wrinkled handkerchief, which he said was clean, and he sat still across the table from her and let her sob, the handkerchief to her face.
Yes, Yvon loved the world, trees, and rain, and rocks. He loved everything. But he failed, failed again and again, because everything was all too far beyond him and he couldn’t go any further than where his love got him; and he let go and gave in to some longing that was always there and always greater and greater, some wild longing, and maybe that was still his great, wild, beatific longing, somewhere out far in uncontrollable America.
And Nancy felt something let go in her.
At last she said, “I’m very tired.”
“Do you want to sleep for a while?” he asked.
“Sleep where?”
“Follow me,” he said, and he led her into a cold bedroom with faded red roses on blue wallpaper. He turned on the radiator.
A glass-fronted cabinet stood against a wall. Nancy went to examine, in neat rows, Yvon’s rock collection, a label in capital letters written in ink identifying each and where each was found:
PHLOGOPITE (New Jersey) ILMENITE (Massachusetts) MUCOVITE (New Mexico) MOLYBDENITE (Colorado) PYRRHOTITE (Tennessee) MARCASITE (Kansas) RHODOCHROSITE (Montana) DOLOMITE (Mississippi) ORTHOCLASE (California) HALITE (New York) BARITE (South Dakota) RUTILE (Georgia) ARAGONITE (Arizona) PYRMORPHITE (Idaho) TEMOLITE (Connecticut) CORUNDU
M (Pennsylvania) ANDALUSITE (California) VESUVIANTE (Montana) EPIDOTE (Alaska) BERYL (North Carolina) CHROMITE (Oregon) COPPER (Michigan)
Only the label remained of the quartz that Yvon had given to her, found in Rhode Island.
Nancy pressed her forehead against the glass of the cabinet. The collection would always remain incomplete, because of course all collections were incomplete, some essential element was always missing. Now lost, the quartz, which at the time Yvon had given it to her had meant little to her, and afterward had meant even less because she had forgotten about it, now meant everything, and that meaning, like the rock, was lost. Like the fragment of meteorite. A small heave of breath rose in her, the last impulse of her sobbing, and she drew back from the cabinet.
Cyriac had pulled the spread off the bed and turned the bedclothes down.
“Is this Yvon’s bed?” Nancy asked.
“It is,” he answered.
Hanging over the bed was a crucifix, the body dull golden against the wood.
“I once knew a Jew who converted to Catholicism,” Nancy said. “He had a crucifix in his room. He became a monk.”
“Get into bed,” Cyriac said.
She took off her shoes and lay down on the bed, and she let Cyriac cover her with the bedclothes. Then he went to the window and for a moment looked out as if searching for something or someone, and she saw, past him, that snow was falling more heavily in the evening dusk. She turned on her side and pressed her face into the pillow as Cyriac drew the blind down to dim the room.
“Go on and sleep—I won’t wake you,” Cyriac said, and he left the room.
Awake, she stared into the deepening dark; the more she stared the more the dark appeared to her with sudden, odd shifts to deepen, and the more it deepened the more she felt that someone was out there, and this someone might appear, and she waited for him. The waiting was familiar to her, as if she had waited in the same way since before she could remember.
