by Steve Weiner
Dawn Gilchrist wrote. She asked him to work one more year. They needed seven thousand dollars for a mortgage. Rybczinski cancelled his train ticket and signed for a second year.
‘I couldn’t trouble you for a bit of red wine?’ I asked.
‘Not at all, my friend.’
Rybczinski poured the fourth glass. His breath was warm. Black ovals moved in the wall boards behind the pornographic women.
After the second year in the tin mines he received another letter. Dawn Gilchrist said there was money for the house but not enough for an apple orchard. Rybczinski put her photograph back on the table and signed on for a third year.
He worked twelve years in Bolivia. When his lungs filled with the damp they fired him. He came back on a boat to New Orleans, took the train to Twin Falls, and walked to Heyburn. Dawn Gilchrist had four children by James Park and lived in a white Victorian house on the edge of Burley.
‘What did you do?’ I hiccuped.
Rybczinski shrugged. ‘Well, I got a job as a railroad switchman. Same as my father.’
‘Why didn’t you beat them up? Why didn’t you kill her?’
Rybczinski laughed.
‘I don’t need trouble.’
‘It doesn’t bother you he’s got her?’
‘Well. Sure.’
‘Daily? Giving it to her in the belly, mouth?’
‘Well, of course, sure.’
‘Twelve years in Bolivia. You won’t get those back, Rybczinski. You won’t get her, either.’
‘I know.’
‘They made an ass of you.’
Rybczinski tried to laugh but it turned into a cough of damp-filled lungs.
‘Boy, they sure did.’
‘Dumb polack.’
‘They don’t come much dumber. Twelve years. Making babies with my woman on my money.’
I stood up. The cranberry crate fell over.
‘You know, you’re a stupid shit, Rybczinski,’ I said. ‘I’ve got half a mind to teach you a lesson.’
Rybczinski grabbed for me but missed, spilled the red wine on his little red-checked table cloth. He suddenly slipped from his chair.
‘I don’t need – teaching – from the likes of you –’ he said in his stupor.
I kicked him in the chest.
‘Ha,’ I laughed.
Rybczinski struggled to his feet. His face was red as a pig’s liver.
‘I invite you out of brotherhood,’ he said. ‘You do this to me.’
I kicked him in the chest again to hear him cough. He fell on me and we rolled against his bed. I stood and he hugged my knees.
‘I need love.’
‘Well, you should have thought of that before you fell in love with Dawn Gilchrist!’
‘You’re so right.’
‘Or Antoinette, or anybody!’
I hit him with the cranberry crate. The crate broke on Rybczinski’s head. He stumbled after me and tried to pull himself up by the desk. I threw a jug of wine at him.
‘STUPID SHIT!’ I screamed.
Rybczinski fell back against the pornographic women. I lost control. I shoved his dirty glass into his mouth and smashed the glass in with a board. Rybczinksi couldn’t breathe. He flailed his arms. He tripped over the bed blankets, banging into his table. I hit him again with my fist and broke his nose.
‘– uh – hhhhhhh – ccchhhhhh – ughhhh –’
Rybczinski ran me out of the shack, swinging a coal shovel. I danced out into his little garden and threw coal at him.
‘Ha ha ha!’
‘– hhhhuchhhhh – me – ’
‘POLACK SHIT!’
I ran up the railroad embankment carrying two of Rybczinski’s gallon wine jugs. The moon glided out. Rybczinski became a staggering silhouette at the shack’s door, yanking at the glass in his throat.
It was almost midnight. Dead twigs rolled down the railroad ties and burst into white flowers. I stepped on to the Burley road.
Jean-Michel
I drank.
I drank two gallons of red wine. I drank until I drooled and I drank that too. After a while it grew warm. I saw shadows sneaking across the field. The black road wound toward the moon like a dark fish swimming upriver. Branches separated. A stallion pounded across the meadow. Cows turned their backs, tails raised, vermilion fold, black hides.
The earth rotated. Stones suddenly rattled across the dark meadow. I was in ecstasy. I was rich, rich beyond anything my father had dreamed of. I was a windblown seed. Hawks glided past my arms. The moon burned my face.
‘On danse avec nos blondes
Vole, mon coeur, vole!
On danse avec nos blondes
Nous changeons tour a tour
Nous changeons tour a tour.’
‘Dance with the blondes
Fly, my heart, fly!
Dance with the blondes
Change your partner round and round
Change your partner round and round.’
Death floated up the road. He wore a Militant Lamb sash. Death glided three feet off the road. His eyes were red rubies. A corpse held him from behind and sodomized him. They passed through me, up the Burley road.
‘Hurry up, Jean,’ Death said.
I slipped. I stumbled into a grassy ditch. Suddenly Red Two Hats, drunk as a loon, rode from the pines on a black stallion. He carried gourds of blood.
Red opened his mouth.
‘Jean-Michel.’
But he said no more.
Father Przybilski rode out from the pines. He wore a red cassock with black bullets. A crème de menthe bottle banged against his pommel. Wild turkey feathers lined his cope and rodents’ teeth his saddle.
Father Przybilski opened his mouth.
‘Jean-Michel Verhaeren.’
But he said no more.
The Lutheran Ed Gien crashed out of the pines. On his head were moose antlers. He wore a black bandolier of women’s hands. He carried a rifle across his knees and females’ ears, fingers, teeth, were strung from his red reins. His roan reared.
He opened his mouth.
‘Jean-Michel Verhaeren of St Croix.’
But he said no more.
Pius XII crashed out through black spores. His blue face was unshaven. His spectacles glittered. Red slippers flopped in black stirrups because the ecclesiastical flesh was rotted. There was a double-headed eagle on his head.
Pius opened his mouth.
‘Jean-Michel Verhaeren of St Croix, Ontario.’
He pointed with a fish scaling knife at the riders’ bulging shrouds. Ignace dripped lake water from one shroud. My father was tied elbows to knees, his khaki trousers dark at the crotch. Georges Verhaeren’s fists were tied by barbed wire. Bobo, Estée, Emil, were heaped on a red cart behind Father Przybilski. Erland Szegy was dragged over the rotted logs by rawhide tied to his hamstrings.
Pius stood on his stirrups.
You will die, Jean-Michel. Therefore there is no good in anything you do.
Ed Gien stuck a red feather in his hair. Father Przybilski fired his rifle. Red Two Hats rattled a rope of skulls. Mercury-bright clouds screamed. Pius spurred his horse, whirled, and they crashed back into the pines.
Hot air hissed through my skin. I stuffed my ears with newspaper, my mouth with socks, my nose with candy wrappers. Nothing stopped the hissing from the body. The body crumpled. Jean-Michel Verhaeren died. In a way, in a strange way that night, that very night, in a peculiar way, I escaped and died.
I woke in the morning.
It was hot and muggy. I lay on the Burley road. The fog stank. It was a miracle I hadn’t been run over. Pigs wandered down from the farms and ate vomit from my hair, crotch, mouth. I was disgusted but I couldn’t move. I was paralysed.
I am swine.
Seventeen
‘J’irai revoir ma Normandie
C’est le pays qui m’a donné le jour.’
‘I’m going back to Normandy
That’s the place where I was born.’
/> I went to Bunco, Louisiana.
Bunco was on the Calcasieu. Negro prisoners filled levee bags. It was September, but the Spanish moss was already grey. A schizophrenic ate yellow dirt on Bell Street. A locomotive crossed a black trestle bridge. The milkman walked past an ice truck. In a slaughterhouse window was a pig’s head with sunglasses and aluminium foil hat. On it was a sign:
‘Cook me tenderly
Cook me with care
With herbs and green garlic
I’ll eat you next year.’
My mother lived in the old slave quarter.
The stairwell smelled of leeks. My ice skates with red pom-poms were in a cardboard box. A jumble of my father’s tools blocked a grey door. There was an aphasic in the basement crying. An old dog lumbered to me and gummed my crippled leg.
Pippi was very old. His hair was dirty and he had foul breath. He had grown huge, almost chest high. I knocked. My mother had progeria, accelerated aging. She was enormously fat and wore spectacles and heavy shoes. She was a chain-smoking woman in curlers.
‘Who are you?’ she asked suspiciously through the door crack.
‘Jean-Michel Verhaeren.’
‘Who was your father?’
‘Jack Verhaeren.’
‘And he?’
‘The murderer of James Barrault.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Dead.’
‘Of what?’
‘Exsanguination.’
‘Who else?’
‘My brother Ignace.’
‘And he?’
‘Drowned.’
‘Who drowned him?’
‘I did.’
‘In what major North American body of water?’
‘Georgian Bay.’
‘That is correct. You may enter.’
We sat formally with espresso cups, on the old red divan. Her head bobbed slightly. There was the brass floor lamp, Ignace’s religious theatre. The apartment was very dark. The portrait of Catherine Labouré had its own lamp on the wall. My mother sat like a mountain. Progeria had bowed her legs.
‘You have not aged well, Mama.’
‘With progeria one wins no beauty contests.’
I heard the clangour of irons below.
‘I am swine,’ I said.
She lit a cigarette with an old one. She blew a smoke ring at a blue chandelier. With her forefinger she poked the smoke hole. I presented a gift of wax flowers I had stolen in Burley. The mirrors reflected variations of a fat woman, an unkempt man with an iron bar on his foot.
‘Our values failed,’ she said. ‘We were deceived.’
‘It was just bad luck.’
‘Oh, pauvres Verhaerens!’ she suddenly cried, knocking her head against the table top. ‘Enchaînés par le bon Dieu! All our hopes! Our future crushed!’
‘Please – ’
‘Ignace, everything – swept away – everything finished!’
‘Mama!’
‘Not even children from the Verhaerens!’
I looked out of the window. A duck ran in terror down the shadows. My mother put on an imitation fox fur. She was cold. I sensed wheels, cogs, threads, all invisible, pulling our heads round and round.
‘Raising children is not easy,’ I said lamely. ‘Nor is it entered into with all the hopes and dreams for a beautiful future as imagined for us when we were first born. There are a large number of myths connected with all this. Our tendency to selectively remember and observe this reality.’
‘How would you know?’
I went to the butcher’s, bought a small rabbit and spent the afternoon soaking it in boysenberries.
‘A man who has been tossed around,’ I said, stirring the marinade, ‘who is judged crazy, good for nothing, such a man, whether he limps or not, or has a pinched nerve from lying on roads, eaten by swine, might not be a failure, after all.’
‘What is he?’
‘Exactly. I have lost confidence.’
‘So you had a catastrophe. Was it my fault?’
She became angry.
‘You’re not happy, Michel?’ she said. ‘Try harder. Multiply your efforts. Work. Get paid. Slave. Like me. My poor little condamné. You’re in prison? The days harass you? Oh. How terrible. And night makes you worse? Well, let me tell you about charity, Jean. Let me tell you about bandages that leak and throats that rattle. Let me tell you about clogged drains and betrayal and electricity in the forehead.’
‘Yes? Well, I could tell you a few things about your friend Zena Courennes!’
She sagged on the red divan.
‘There are no moral values,’ she said. ‘And worse: it looks as though there never were any.’
We went on, talking to each other, at each other, past each other, making no impression.
‘Why do we bother?’ she asked.
I went from room to room. The pantry was full of filé, red pepper, tabasco, onion, bacon strips, the shrimp of the parish. I went into her bedroom. The blinds were drawn. The slime haze of the Calcasieu hovered on blue-grey wallpaper. I ate an oreille de cochon. Nothing eased my hunger. I went into the bedroom. Saints and sand, clouds and Saviour, lay on jumbled cardboard.
‘Mama!’ I shrieked. ‘The altar!’
We caught up on news. Canada had a flag. The motel on Abattoir Road was a storage faculty for the school district. Highway 17 was complete now from Wawa to Marathon. France had lost Algeria. Ho Chi Minh had beaten the Americans. Danny Auban was a garage mechanic. Father Przybilski had broken both hips in a fall. Paul Hartmann taught school.
‘And Antoinette?’ I asked.
‘Hartmann?’
‘Paul’s sister.’
‘She was a lovely young woman.’
‘She was,’ I said.
‘You should have married her.’
We had many discussions. I emptied her tea cups of ash and butts, thinking, remembering. She listened to the radio, polkas. The apartment filled with cold fog in the morning, stifling heat in the afternoon. You’d have thought we were in Surinam. The sun never quite came through the burnished blinds. Blue vapour curled down the corridor.
‘Perhaps we could fit you with an artificial leg,’ she said. ‘The one you have is for the birds.’
I bought my mother a cane. For her, Bunco turned upside down. All pretty things had turned ugly. I asked her about her pain.
‘It is forbidden to die,’ she said, ‘before Jesu calls.’
‘Yet many do it.’
‘Their souls are in hell.’
‘I lost mine,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know I had one until I lost it. Ha.’
And:
‘Ha ha ha ha ha.’
We played poker, sometimes piquet I won the capot every time. I had carte blanche. I had it all. We played mah jong. We forgot what we were playing. My right arm died. I wired a battery to it, tied the wires around the bicep but it flopped like a rubber hose. I was at the end. I was drugged. Periods of hysteria followed fits of dazed stupidity.
My motjier sang:
‘La Pluvoise est coulée
Si léger, si léger …’
‘The submarine, the Pluvoise, has sunk,
So swiftly, so swiftly …’
Pippi died. I took him to Eliade’s taxidermy and brought him home on wooden wheels.
My mother’s face became a mask. She developed whip-motions of her head. I bought her a wig, but it was a Negro’s and she left it in the box on the dining-room table.
I walked the scummy Calcasieu. I was overwhelmed by the mediocrity of our fates, the unreality of my existence. I caught dragonflies and snapped off their heads. It felt like twenty years since I had first run away. Maybe it was twenty years. I went home and looked for a calendar.
Etienne Bastide came, uninvited, to Bunco. He was six feet four inches, thin, abnormally pale. We went to the Fleurs de la Rivière, red chairs in a sunken floor, and had beignets and café au lait, then oysters in the half shell, barbecued shrimp, andouille, boudin and courtbouillon. We concl
uded with chocolates in ginger, espresso and cigars.
‘It is over for you?’ Etienne asked. ‘Le grand dérangement. The great exile?’
‘Yes. I swam in deep waters.’
‘Tu sais, t’étais ben malade depuis longtemp. You know, you were sick a long time,’
‘It was a nightmare.’
‘Come back with me.’
‘Etienne, I don’t remember a thing.’
‘The United States? Nothing?’
Etienne gave me a newspaper clipping. The retired assembly-line worker Reynolds Kayran had died in Dearborn of emphysema.
‘Thank you.’
Etienne gave me a present: a portrait of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the transvestite.
‘Thank you, sweet Etienne.’
Etienne took my mother to Bunco cafés: Au petit Elégance, A bon Diable, Au Temples des Douces. She and Etienne ate macque-choux, crawfish, okra. Negroes stood on Charity Road selling red coral, shells, alligators, cinnamon, gum copal, tangena, breadfruit. Etienne and my mother sat on crab boxes and watched Negroes work the grey Calcasieu. Etienne sang:
‘Un’ belle Marie coolie
Un’ belle Marie coolie
Un’ belle Marie coolie
Vous belle dame, vous belle dame pour moi
Mama est an African’
Un belle coolie
Vous belle dame, vous belle dame pour moi.’
Gumbo bands came to the Calcasieu. Drunk Cajuns, speaking Congo French, pounded on doors demanding live chickens, danced on Pork Street. Blind from gin they staggered through the slave quarter.
‘Hé quoi! Citoyens! V’en faire de la music.’
Etienne and I rowed the marshes around Lake Calcasieu and slept in the marais. Boats bumped past the cypresses: La Jeunesse, L’Enfant du Paradis. We caught a grosbec and roasted it on firm ground. Etienne showed me how to prepare salt bindweeds. There were specklebellies, snows from Canada. In the morning we were covered in the sickly smell of crushed vines.
We explored a ruined house. Cheveux de frise hung over a ruined gate where ivy broke through the walls. We found old ammunition. Water lilacs covered the cistern. Light flashed deep below. Etienne kept trying to seduce me with joual.
