by Steve Weiner
‘“NO!” I yelled.
‘I floated toward her. My feet never touched the tiles. I couldn’t believe how repulsive she was.
“‘DR ROBINSON!” I screamed.
‘The hallucination snapped out.
‘Dr Robinson ran in. He swept me up in his arms. Was it a hallucination? Then what are you? And what can sickness do to me, against that power? You already know what I’m talking about, Jean: when the sickness comes we hold tight, don’t we? We hold tight. Your hard times are just beginning, but already you know one thing:
‘Truth is power.’
Eleven
I went to St Iglesias, Minnesota.
Finns, Norwegians, Germans and Dutch lived on the Nemadji River. The Indians were Menominee and Sauk. The highway ran to the docks and became River Road where burial mounds lined the maple woods. The Grgic and Vilamowych farms started at the Five Star Laundry on Little Oslo Street. It was as pretty as St Croix. There was even a birch copse by Buechle’s Shell and St Vincent de Paul’s mission. That’s where my parents lived now, at St Vincent de Paul, because my father jumped bail.
My father had tattooed his forearm with penknife and ink: Sauve qui peut.
‘I’m sick and I want to come home,’ I said.
Nobody answered.
The red divan and brass floor lamp were jammed between the sink and stove. A brown propane stove was in the middle of the floor. My father’s black museum was by the windowsill and my mother’s altar under a food shelf. I sat on a spare bed. My father knocked me to the floor.
‘That’s Ignace’s bed!’
My mother wore a black armband and listened incessantly to The Little Drummer Boy on our red portable record player. I gave her an ivory cameo from the museum of orphans.
‘Môman. Pardonne-moé,’ I said. ‘Forgive me.’
She threw the cameo out of the window. Logging trucks rumbled up Little Oslo Street, throwing snow. I took pieces of glass and tied them to the window. I twirled them.
‘Look, Mama,’ I said. ‘Chimes.’
* * *
I slept on the pink shag carpet. Pippi was my pillow. Christmas bulbs blinked around the altar and my mother’s perfume was sweet. Headlights turned on Little Oslo Street, flashed and burned my right eye. The cracked linoleum shifted as the building creaked. Stains, wild cowboys and desperate calves, ran over the peeled brown wallpaper. One smelled the frigid Nemadji. In the frosted windows were portraits of anxiety: Antoinette Hartmann, Erland Szegy, Father Przybilski in a drugged stupor.
‘Chus chez nous, à c’t’heure, ici,’ my father said, asleep. ‘From now on, this is home.’
My mother cried at the edge of her bed. I touched her gently on the cheek.
‘Poor Mama,’ I said.
She opened her eyes. She didn’t know where she was.
‘Cé juste un rêve, Môman,’ I said. ‘It’s only a dream.’
She looked around the room. It was a chamber of corpses.
‘You lied,’ she said.
We were primitives, she and I, crippled by bad memories. I made her barley soup. I cooked potatoes, cut tomatoes and served them with oil and vinegar. I rendered a duck to crisp strips. I went shopping and bought the best fish roe, which I made into an omelette.
I heard her voice:
I was cheated.
She developed multiple voices, sing-song:
‘Le sacrifice est consommé
Ignace est massacré
Nous avon, Jésu, contemplé
Ta puissance et ta bonté’
‘The sacrifice is consummated
Ignace is massacred
We have seen, Jesu,
Thy power and thy generosity.’
I made her lemon tea and tea of sassafras. I created throat lozenges out of lollipops, honey and menthol. She ate bread with crosses of egg. I bought a prayer card of Ste Dymphna, but her shadow didn’t move, even when the sun shifted.
Every night at dinner she set places for Ignace: the meatballs he loved, the buttered noodles, piquant sauce, barbecued ribs. She cooked him perch with marmalade marinade. My father finally sent for Father De Vaux and Father Naukkonen.
‘What troubles you, Yvonne Krems?’ Father De Vaux asked. ‘The little peasant girl from Trois Pointes?’
‘Destined to be a saint,’ Father Naukkonen said, smiling.
‘Or the mother of a saint,’ Father De Vaux said.
‘Now I envy Protestant houses,’ my mother said.
‘It is not for us to question God’s will.’
‘Bring Ignace back.’
Father De Vaux swallowed hard and coughed.
‘It is not possible.’
‘Then God is not God,’ she said.
My mother took all our cash from the ceramic pumpkin. She went to the Menominee. Without even a kerchief she walked to Vernon Street and asked Fred Black Shoes to bring back Ignace. Fred Black Shoes told her to bring pepper from a house that death had never seen. She ran down Vernon Street. She knocked on a door. Ildefonse Hammerfest opened the door. He wore a purple bathrobe and maroon slippers. His eyes were bloodshot.
‘Pepper …’ she begged.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘My wife has passed away.’
She ran to Fjornberg’s Hardware. Dick Fjornberg leaned out the window.
‘Pepper …’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Our son is dying.’
She woke Gary Lauk the trading post gas pump operator.
‘Pepper …’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘My brother has died in his sleep.’
She ran over the boulders. Menominee passed by in an outboard. The moon wasn’t up, only a red mist on the shores. It was a funeral party, going down to the St Croix River, Wisconsin.
‘Pepper – ’
Three dead Menominee, still wrapped in braided rawhide and coloured burlap, sat up.
‘Death is King,’ they said.
She cleaned houses for Protestants. She left early with a black bucket, red rubber gloves and housecoat. In the evening she sat on the red divan, propped the St Iglesias Journal on her lap, put on spectacles and turned on the lamp. But, of course, she was illiterate.
Hungry for news, she listened to Ontario radio. Eisenhower’s engineers had dredged the New York locks. Sea bass had been caught in Lake Erie. Mary Evans would swim Lake Huron. My mother sewed by the lighted portrait of Catherine Labouré, by artificial flowers and wax oranges, listening to Les histoires des pays d’en-haut, or singing along with La Bolduc.
My mother wore red gloves to handle our laundry. We are repulsive to her, I observed. I played French-Canadian reels on the red accordion. She wipes what we touch. Observe her grimace.
One midnight I opened a jar of preserves. I sucked out half-fermented apricots. I saw my father doing the same. Sweet, heavy syrup dripped to the floor. My father and I avoided each other, sliding around the room, back to back. We were starving.
‘You saw Ignace,’ I said. ‘Or you heard him.’
‘I saw nothing. Heard nothing.’
‘He’s here.’
‘Not.’
‘Is.’
Yes, we were inarticulate. We communicated by gesture, gaps, senseless winks. Our life was artificial, half-remembered, while all about us was decomposition. They had cut out my tongue, but I had the power to destroy the earth.
‘I’m lonesome,’ I said.
‘Barrault deserved it,’ my father said.
‘Nobody listens to me.’
‘They want to poison me. Though, from far away, I suppose I don’t look like a criminal.’
‘I scream because nobody listens to me.’
‘Bah. We’ll all get our throats cut, anyway.’
‘As though I was dead.’
My father turned angrily.
‘T’es pas assez importante pour qu’on passe notre temps a t’espionner, t’sais,’ my father said. ‘You’re not so important we spend our time spying on you, you know.’
I grew silent.
>
‘Jean,’ my father asked. ‘Do you confess?’
‘Frequently.’
‘And what do you confess?’
‘That I have evil thoughts.’
‘That you touch yourself in an impure manner?’
‘That, too.’
‘And that others have made you female?’
‘I have.’
‘But of Ignace, nothing?’
I confessed to Ignace’s death. But my mother slipped into insanity.
I shined shoes at the Blue Mound Bowl-a-Dome. A Menominee corpse stuck his stinking black leather sandals on my stand. I looked up. His broken teeth were yellow, the corrupted flesh black. There was a foul wind out of its mouth.
‘What are you living for, Jean?’
The black Nemadji threw timbers flying. In those days of purgatory I saw red antler-headed animals on the streets of St Iglesias. Wires to our apartment whipped in frenzy. My father used me as a footstool and wiped his hands on my hair.
My father worried about losing his tools. He hid them under the bed. He inspected them at night. He counted them. He cleaned them. He recounted them. He had brought knives, hatchets, axes, hoes, spades, files, nails, scale and weights, cloth, a shroud, braided mat, baskets, his Swallowfield uniform and badge, clipboard and summer hat. St Vincent de Paul became his museum.
To amuse him I bleached my hair, wore a black shirt and polished my shoes red.
‘Ah, you little schemer,’ he laughed, ‘… so terribly naughty … you little schemer …’
I wiped the sweat from my face.
‘This St Iglesias,’ my father confided, ‘is my tomb.’
‘It is bleak.’
‘This country is banal.’
‘Nothing is as it was.’
No, of course not. My nose was crooked where he had broken it. Ignace was drowned. It was an alien red sun caught in bare trees. We were bloated and disfigured, our skin hung from the elbows. My father and I searched the apartment for ourselves.
‘I am not originaire here,’ he whispered on his hands and knees. ‘I want to be shipped back to St Croix.’
‘When you’re dead?’
‘Like a sack of shit. Where the Métis are respected. Where there are no Barraults, no extraditions. Carried up Abattoir Road on an embroidered mat to the cimetière. The priests blowing incense and the girls with white lilies.’
‘Lilies?’
‘The virgins. They’ll all be there. Agnes Victoria and her sister Adelaide, Phyllis Suze and Rachel Patrice. The Indian Mary Willow Water, that fat slob. No, not just virgins. Antoinette Hartmann. Antoinette will be there, too.’
‘Did you seduce Antoinette?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You always liked her,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘She was special.’
‘Antoinette has such’ – he struck his chest twice – ‘vitality!’
‘Her eyes.’
‘Her eyes!’
‘Even her hands,’ I said.
‘Well, and what about her fine hair?’
‘Her lovely throat!’
‘Her sweet voice!’
‘Papa!’
‘What?’
‘DID YOU?’
My father stayed inside during the day and walked St Iglesias at night. He kept looking for the FBI. We visited Del Badaude’s brewery. The mashing screw turned in the ooze, Del raked it, and the whole basement stank. Del brought out dark bottles of ale.
‘Money is the goal,’ my father said.
‘Damn right,’ Del said.
‘If an asshole became a millionaire Eisenhower would lick him.’
‘Women would spread their legs.’
‘Money,’ my father said. ‘That is what I have devoted my life to.’
My father sang.
‘Money, money, I love to call you honey
You’re my bunny, money, my honey
Who stole my money?’
‘We ought to sell our wives,’ my father said.
‘Would you?’ Del asked.
‘Sure.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred dollars American.’
‘It’s not legal.’
‘You can if she has a halter around her neck,’ my father said.
Del wiped his lips.
‘How much?’
‘One hundred ninety dollars.’
‘Well – ’
‘She’s crazy, you know. She prays. Day and night. A goddamn vigil.’
‘I like crazy women.’
‘Do you?’
‘They come like rag dolls with – frenzies – ’
My father shuffled the cards.
‘Three hundred dollars,’ my father said.
Del whistled.
‘That’s quite a bit, Jack.’
‘She’s a woman, after all.’
‘I know, but – ’
‘Still moist.’
‘Is she?’
‘Oh. Yes. Certainly. She drips with love.’
‘Well. Maybe two hundred. If she drips.’
‘Five hundred.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you, Jack.’
‘Enough haggling. Play.’
My father and I visited the Finns’ tavern. It had once been a garage over the waterfront. There were dioramas of fjords, miniature skiers through pines. A reindeer antler was over the door, carvings of hamlets in Norwegian pine. The Brotherhood of Hammerfest came in on snowshoes.
‘We should have been Finns,’ my father said.
Bitter black seeds streaked the windows like coal dust in the rain.
‘Did you taste them?’ my mother asked. ‘They’re good.’
Nothing helped.
Pippi saw the wind and howled all night. Coal smoke filled the air. Coal dust blew right across the floor and voices came from the black pipes. An insane celestina played downstairs.
I made gestures of propitiation: rubbed doors with interlocked thumbs, right angles against the axis of walking. I distended my mouth. I polished her cornelian amulets. I washed our cupboard of emptiness. I dressed like a Finn. Nothing worked.
My mother slipped between the cracks.
I called the last meeting of les buveurs.
Etienne Bastide, Herman Pic and Paul Hartmann came down from St Croix. We gathered in a switching shanty and burned the Deadwood death cards. We buried the Deadwood whip. We each took fragments of the Quai des Brumes poster and lit candles for Erland Szegy, for Ignace Verhaeren. It rained. Rivulets ran through the shanty.
Paul Hartmann gave me a photograph of Antoinette. She wore a blue party dress with a white corsage. Her hair was darker. Her dress had cleavage.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Danny Auban told me Colonel Canale had been killed in an automobile accident in Sudbury. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
Etienne stood with me under the eaves. I got plastered in the rain. As it rained I walked out. Etienne walked after me.
‘Oh, buveurs désolés,’ I cried. ‘Our lives are so bleak!’
Paul Hartmann started to cry.
‘All our misery,’ he said, ‘came to nothing.’
So, after five years and countless adventures, billisme broke up and died for ever in a railroad shanty outside St Iglesias, Minnesota, 3 March 1955.
My crippled foot got worse. I went to Dr Bernard, who fitted me with a thick-soled heavy rubber black boot. Sometimes I sat outside the park and watched young boys build forts of green budding branches.
My father earned money with card tricks on Fourth Street and Bakewell. He shovelled walks, begged and worked as a clown for the public school. He played the kazoo and snare drum on Little Oslo Street.
One day he put on his black suit, grabbed me by the hand, and took me to Toynbee Hall. Toynbee Hall was an orphanage. The window panes were fitted with sharp metal strips and there were cages on the roofs so nobody could commit suicide. The diet was potatoes and stir-about.
There was a laundry room. The boys worked at Nemadji Motors. There was no fire alarm. Girls scrubbed floors. Many were retarded. They were easily seduced. Babies lived in a dormitory on the third floor. In 1942 a fire had killed thirteen.
Mr Victor explained.
‘The truth has to be told. These boys and girls are ineducable. No amount of schooling is going to make them intelligent citizens. They represent a level very, very common among Indians and Negroes. The dullness appears to be hereditary. The fact that there are so many like this suggests that the concept of racial mentality will have to be investigated.’
My father ground out his Chesterfield.
‘I don’t think we can support him much longer,’ my father said. ‘Or want to.’
A scream came through the caged vent. Mr Victor looked away, startled, then winked at my father. My father signed papers. Another scream came through the vents.
‘What do you think, Jean?’ my father asked. ‘Could you handle this? Could you succeed at being an orphan?’
I went home, took my father’s rifle and stuck the barrel in my mouth. I counted to ten. Darkness squeezed. I felt veins like steel bands tightening.
‘… eight… nine …t—’
Suddenly the door flew open. Ignace stood there stupidly, blinking, his galoshes dripping. He held his books the way girls do, against his chest. His ear muffs dangled, the strap hanging down.
‘Jean! What are you doing?’
‘Goodbye, Ignace – ’
Ignace ran across the room, knocked the rifle against the window, and slapped my face three times.
‘You’ll get blood all over Mama’s floor!’
Buds opened suddenly on my mother’s altar. A rock crystal garden blossomed in pink. Our window chimes, which I painted with green flowers, tinkled untouched in the wet air. My mother stared out the window, far, far away.
‘Mama,’ I whispered. ‘Do you have a presentiment?’
She nodded.
‘Is le bon Dieu coming?’ I asked.
‘Somebody is.’
On 7 March 1955, after a week of restless fevers, my mother saw St Martin of Tours standing in the door.
‘Yvonne Krems,’ St Martin said, ‘who flies above boundaries.’
‘Yes?’
‘Fly with me.’
‘Where?’
‘To Ignace.’
‘Will it be cold?’ she asked.
‘In a strange way.’
‘Will I be lonely?’
