by Steve Weiner
‘- Oh! – ’
‘It’s okay?’
‘- It hurt! – ’
‘JESUS CHRIST!’
‘- Yes. – ’
‘Are you all right?’
‘- You startled me a little. – ’
‘Just a little little.’
‘- A little little – ’
‘But now?’
‘- It’s all right. – ’
‘Are you sleepy, Jean?’
‘- I think so. In fact, I am sleepy.’
‘Sleep. Jean, sleep. I had hoped it would be more tender, but, well -’
A bird fluttered high in the netting outside the windows. Its shadows scraped the walls as it struggled for the twilight.
‘- You were very tender,’ I said.
Nine
I was released by an intercession of Colonel Canale. I moved back to the motel on Abattoir Road. It was lonely without Erland Szegy or Roger Vaucaire. I painted birds on the walls. Mostly I walked around St Croix. I knocked on Antoinette Hartmann’s door. She was in Winnipeg.
‘Jean! JEAN!’
It was Etienne Bastide. He had grown a moustache. He was suddenly very tall. He put his hand on my head.
‘Le Gosse,’ he teased.
‘Yeah, yeah. The kid.’
‘So how is life in the motel?’
‘Bleak.’
I must have changed. He looked away. Emilia Street had ruptured again. Freddie Granbouche’s bakery had closed. The apartments in the Lacombe Building were empty. Caritas had boarded up. Etienne pulled a copy of The Watchtower from his parka.
‘Have you been approached by Jehovah’s Witnesses?’ he asked.
‘Who hasn’t?’
‘You don’t like them?’
‘They are losers.’
‘And we are champions of the world?’ he said.
‘Quite frankly,’ I said, ‘Duplessis has the right idea.’
‘You mean – ?’
‘Exactly.’
I slid my finger across my throat.
* * *
I walked past our old house on LeClerc. Forgotten things were in the gutter: carpet, rose-pattern plates, paper lanterns, my crib with a sturgeon leaping through a rainbow, roi de la mer stencilled in blue. Our game of Jardin de l’Oie, a goose every ninth space, death’s head to start again. Spiders crawled on our toys, even in January.
It was Twelfth Night. Children sledded down the bluffs. We put pine boughs, rabbit fur, the portrait of Catherine Labouré on the altar. The propane heater roared. It was so hot the windows misted. Pine needles had died brown and ruffled over the brown floor. My mother baked a fruit cake and we drank to the King of the Bean. Ignace, my father and I went under the table.
‘Le Roy boit!’ we screamed. ‘Le Roy boit!’
Our mother divided the cake.
‘Fabe Domini pour qui? she laughed.
‘Pour le bon Dieu!’
My father’s piece had the bean in it. We kissed him.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Luck changes. Who knows?’
Someone knocked at the door. I opened the door but there was nobody there. We crossed ourselves and spat.
Kelly’s Nursing Home shut down.
The patients were taken to Rutherford. All that was left were seven rooms in a low building, winter light on pieces of beds. My mother cleaned floors for Prange’s. I gave her a gift of lacquered holly berries. At night our motel blinked with red, amber, candles but a dying animal looked at her from the mirror.
Uncle Emil died.
It was a freak accident. Fertilizers ate through his red chlorine sores. He had a seizure. Father DeVaux officiated. Emil’s coffin jammed and my father wrestled it down to the wet clay. He climbed out, trousers black with mud, and lowered his head.
‘May the angels wash thee,’ he whispered.
* * *
My father dressed in black and went before the grand jury.
‘You were the guard on duty in the E-wing on the night the Jamaican was sent into the rain?’ the provincial investigator asked.
‘I was.’
‘Had he disobeyed you?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘By not doing what I asked.’
‘And therefore you stripped him naked?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘He stripped himself. I ordered him.’
‘Is it common to be stripped naked in Her Majesty’s prisons?’
‘Of course. In the gang showers. Changing clothes. In the cells on hot summer nights. Nudity is a frequent occurrence.’
‘Especially when you are on duty?’
‘It occurs, as I say, frequently.’
‘You sent the Negro into the rain?’ the prosecutor persisted.
‘There was work to be done.’
‘But – naked?’
‘We work hard.’
‘Assiduously.’
‘I am nobody’s ass.’
‘I meant, you are diligent.’
‘I dream of prisoners.’
‘Did you place hands on the négre!’
‘I did not.’
‘Did you ever photograph him for your black museum,’ the prosecutor asked, ‘or cause him to be photographed by others, or make him stand in odd postures?’
‘I no longer remember.’
‘Did you cherish his skin?’
‘He had smooth skin.’
Or his eyes?’
‘No. Not his eyes. Not so much.’
‘And the genitals?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Were you interested in his … organs …?’
‘One is always curious about one’s fellow man.’
‘But the nègre …?’
‘Négritude … Monsieur l’avocat… is a very difficult … concept to explain …’
Ignace stood by the motel window wearing a white scarf. His lips quivered. His wall was decorated with white paper-bag snowflakes.
‘Quelle tempête!’ Ignace said. ‘What a storm!’
‘Go back to bed, Ignace.’
‘Garde-là!’
‘I don’t want to look.’
I closed my eyes. I was sick of Ignace.
‘Garde les étrangers-là’ he said.
‘What strangers?’
I cleared a space in the window frost. Over Poniatowski Fields men in black pushed wagons through the howling snow. They pulled themselves forward by grabbing white fence posts. Animals slid side to side in dark cages. Women in fur jackets shouldered the wheels.
‘Are they the Czech circus?’ Ignace asked.
‘No. The Czechs are gone.’
‘They are Doukhobours, naked and chained, marching to Ottawa!’
But they weren’t Doukhobours. Ignace became excited.
‘Flagellants!’ he said.
But they weren’t flagellants.
‘I would like to join them, Ignace, whoever they are.’
‘Why?’
‘To die and live in a new way.’
‘Go to sleep, Jean. You disgust me. What happened to you at Espanola anyway?’
The troupe grew smaller. They became hard, black as death cards under the white sun disc. They went into a cloudy whorl. Down by the black cranes in the harbour, they were lost. Ignace rolled over. He dreamed of Ho Chi Minh, pieces of light, he was a bird-woman.
‘Those women,’ Ignace said, waking. ‘They were beautiful.’
‘Women are beautiful.’
‘We will never know.’
Ignace lay with his forearm over his eyes. He imagined his death again: drowned in Georgian Bay.
‘I believe that women are carnal,’ he said. ‘But the spiritual is in men.’
‘J’tu crois pas. I don’t believe you.’
‘No?’
‘Me, I want to explode.’
‘Yes, I saw you rigid on the couch,’ Ignace said.
‘If I could explode – ’
‘You’d make a mess.’<
br />
‘But I’ll never explode.’
‘So you won’t make a mess.’
Ignace found the whole thing ridiculous.
‘Mais que cé qui t’enrage tout, Jean? What makes you so mad?’
‘Everything.’
‘Egoist.’
‘Si tu savais. If you only knew.’
Ignace became ethereal. I became sad.
‘You’d think you were alone in the world.’
‘Finis ton rêve,’ I said. ‘Finish your dream.’
Ignace slept. He woke.
‘Je l’ai finie mon têve? he said. ‘I’ve finished my dream.’
Ignace sighed.
‘I should have been a parfait,’ he said. ‘I would give the caretas. I would fast to death.’
‘And me?’
‘You? You will wander the earth, a coffin on your back.’
‘And you?’
‘I will die some day, Jean.’
‘What could death mean to such a one as Ignace Verhaeren?’
‘It will be your fault.’
Ignace sat up. His eyes were red. He beat his little chest with an effeminate fist.
‘And I – a heat of love – in a chaste body – !’
We sacrificed everything to Ignace. The best ham, my scarf, tea and rum in the afternoon, he had it all. We rubbed his feet in camphor. We stroked his hair. Ignace ate red apples. He became conceited and cruel. He told me there was a present for me. He said it was in the closet. But when I looked there was nothing. Ignace tricycled around the linoleum floor wearing a peaked cap, blowing a trumpet with a red tassel.
‘Soldats du Christ!’ he yelled.
He would come and sit on the edge of my bed.
‘Things have been bad,’ he said, ‘but they’ll improve now.’
‘How?’
‘You can work, with skills you learned at reform school. I can earn money through the Church.’
He laughed and punched me on the arm.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘You’re really nothing without me!’
We heard him in the bathroom by the short bursts of peepee he made. In the evenings we gathered at the toilet.
‘He shit!’ my father said.
‘HE SHIT!’ we shouted.
At night he shook in convulsions.
‘Jean,’ he whispered. ‘What if I fail?’
‘We failed.’
‘It brought us to the basement of life.’
Ignace rose from bed, the blue-white street lamp making blue-white rivulets of sweat down his chest.
‘I could die,’ he said. ‘Then what would happen to the Verhaerens?’
‘We die.’
‘But I speak of the spiritual life. Our failures brought us to the death of the spirit.’
Every night was the same.
‘Hoooooooooohaaaaaaaahhhhh!’ Ignace screamed. ‘Heeeeeeyaaahhh’
And then we went back to eating, smoking, shitting, whatever we were doing, waiting for something we desperately didn’t want.
Ojibways dismantled the warehouses that had collapsed when the methane blew. Conveyor belts were removed to Rutherford. A barge with scrap metal crashed into the steps on Fourth Street. Tommy Shanks and I drank Lamont’s ale at the hotel picture window. Beer mugs and photographs of royalty hung from rafters. British owners put up an old banner: ‘Men Are But Gilded Loam’.
A Portuguese freighter crashed through the breakwater. The lake submerged Fourth Street. Downtown between Fifth Street and Emilia Court was cordoned off. Raw sewage spilled into the trunk-line station and the lighthouse shut down. We stared into the dark for the first time since 1929 and crossed ourselves. St Croix lost its charter and was absorbed into Thunder Bay. People wandered the streets, calling for their children.
Our father was indicted for criminal negligence. Trial was set for March.
Red Two Hats ate lobster at the Fleur de Lis.
He walked to the Bon Garçon and had roast beef. He stopped at Lemke’s Dairy and ate a gallon of vanilla ice cream. At Kelbo’s Fish Restaurant he had crab. Red bought a litre of Jack Daniels, drank it, went to the Old Royal Café and had steak and potatoes. He bought a litre of Polish vodka, drank it and went to the broken wharf and hung himself by a black wire from a pulley.
Officer Zaruba found him dead, jerking, still throwing up.
Yes, there was a fatality against us. Ignace already knew it. My mother’s epilepsy was proof of it. It had crushed my father. And I? I ate it for breakfast. The motel walls grew infinitely far away, and yet sometimes the boards flew up – smash – right in my face.
‘Have you noticed?’ Ignace said. ‘The floors tilt against you, whichever way you walk.’
‘Our French – our sacred joual- degrades.’
‘Yet we sing in high French. Have you noticed?’
‘What can it mean?’
‘Jesu is pissed at us.’
My father salted roads. He carted rubble from Emilia Court. He vacuumed rooms for the Winnebago Motel and killed fleas in the cinema. He played the accordion for the prisoners.
‘Hah! Verhaeren!’
I went to see Antoinette Hartmann. She was in Gilbertsonville.
‘I dreamed last night,’ Ignace said at breakfast.
‘Of what?’Iasked.
‘I ran down Isle of May Street, chased by wolves. Vatican wolves. How do I know they were Vatican wolves? Because they had crucifixes on their chests. They chased me to a basilica on Ojibway Flats.’
‘How bizarre.’
‘I ran up the steps -1 was in Rome now – into the corridors. There was a large fresco of Erland Szegy.’
‘Erland?’
‘Yes. Isn’t it funny how these things work? Anyway, he was upside down like St Peter on a cross. In the next fresco was Red Two Hats.’
‘Red?’
‘Yes. He had been blinded and castrated. His viscera hung out on his knees.’
‘No wonder you peepeed in your sleep.’
Ignace laughed.
‘Did I? It’s a pity you don’t have visions, Jean. Instead of other people’s.’
Ignace was excited. He brushed his hair to one side. His legs rocked under the table. My mother studiedly put butter on her roll. Ignace bored her. She looked out where the snow flew up the fields. It was fifteen degrees below. She sipped honey tea. Ignace filled another kaiser roll with strawberry jelly.
‘Listen. I had a second dream.’
‘What?’
‘I was in an abattoir. In Chicago. Arteries shot blood in arcs. Men and beasts slipped in it. Heaving flesh – tons of flesh – all the flesh of this world – I caught the blood in a gold goblet.’
‘Why?’ our mother asked.
‘I was the Holy Father. I was giving absolution.’
Our mother sat in a small shadow. She had creases across her forehead. Ignace pushed another roll into his mouth.
‘I had a third dream,’ he told me.
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said.’
‘I was a voyageur. I transported corpses. Racoons splashed along the river reeds. You know how they look like they’re praying? I saw their shadows on the black eddies. But I transported great treasure.’
‘Dead men?’
‘Yes. When I woke up my heart beat so hard I felt I was having a heart attack. I thought, I am only fourteen. I cannot die.’
Ignace studied patterns of light in the frosted window.
‘What can it mean?’ he asked. ‘Who is it that creates these visions?’
Suddenly Ignace turned to me.
‘Is it not a false identity imposed on me?’ he whispered. ‘Is not this the source of my difficulties?’
‘I, too,’ I said.
‘You?’
‘You don’t think I want to be like this?’
‘Well, t’as mal au cul, at Espanola. That’s for sure. You got a sore ass.’
We drove to Georgian Bay to escape our troubles. White squalls obliterated Canada. It got whiter and whiter. Ice moved in
clumps on the windshield and my mother wiped the fog. My father drank Polish vodka. We came to a Victorian hotel, the Windsor, and drove down a pink gravel driveway.
‘Le bon Dieu has brought us to the Windsor!’ he hooted.
A Union Jack whipped over the white breakfast nook. Chains rattled. We went into the Riviere Room, a red-carpeted dining room. We had crêpes with shrimp, white wine, tarragon. My father drank a bottle of white wine.
He sang:
‘Ah! si mon moine voulait danser
Ah! si mon moine voulait danser
Un capuchon je lui donnerais
Un capuchon je lui donnerais.’
My mother winked at me.
‘If a monk danced with Jean-Michel, he’d get more than a little cap,’ she laughed.
Rain blew through the balcony. White deck chairs, metal tables and umbrellas flew in lake spray. Heavy grey water broke over the lawn. Somebody in black oilskin crossed by the garage. My father ordered the liquor menu. My mother took off her black galoshes and rubbed her cold stockinged feet.
‘Why didn’t she recognize me?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ my father asked.
‘My Mother Superior at Trois Pointes.’
‘Ah. Her mind was old,’ he said.
‘How old is old?’
‘One fades into darkness.’
‘How sweet to fade like that,’ she said.
‘One slips into echoes.’
‘One becomes memory,’ Ignace said.
‘One’s existence ceases,’ I said.
‘It’s black as an Ojibway’s asshole, that’s for sure,’ my father said.
Lightning flashed. The stained-glass window, Ich Dien, glowed red where a white hart jumped. Pippi whined. I took him outside. The rain whirled around the rear stairwell. It was already night. Pippi pissed in their flowers, shook himself and trotted toward the garage. I yanked him back inside, wet footprints on their red carpet.
My father ordered a Windsor Royale: gin, egg white, crushed ice, grapefruit rind, a shot of crème de cacao. My mother had a Whisky Windsor: Jack Daniels with mint, pineapple, a cherry, cream and apricot juice. Ignace had the Sandringham dessert: strawberries in maple syrup. I had a crème de menthe. Misery grew like a forest around us.
‘Let’s fish,’ my father said. ‘Enough of this Barrault business.’
‘In the rain?’ I asked.
‘Fish bite in the rain.’
‘In January?’
‘They have starved through December.’
‘But it’s dark.’
