Black Bird (11 page)

And although bigotry abounded among the English, just as it did among the French, it was true (and still is) that anyone, English or French, could succeed at whatever he or she wished, given the right quantities and proportion of three essential qualities (no, not talent, ambition and charm): hypocrisy, money and friends. This was proven by the fact that as many political and business leaders in Canada have been French lawyers as have been English, more or
less, but that none of these leaders has ever been a farmer or a labourer.

Nevertheless, Hubert had made the mistake of confusing Quebec with a totalitarian country, of confusing Canada, a Western capitalist state in which he was free to organize whatever political or labour unions he wished, to speak and vote freely, to work as hard as he felt necessary to effect political change, with countries where people were tortured and murdered for these things. In his confusion he adopted the methods and rhetoric of revolutionaries from such countries, because all over the West it was becoming the thing to do. Germany had its Baader-Meinhof, Italy its Red Brigades, Peru its Tupameros. He explained to Marie that “louder votes count for more. Votes that explode are supreme.”

Hubert, Marie and the other felquistes rejected much that was common in Quebec. They rejected foremost the idea of a nation that spread from sea to sea; they rejected the idea that a social conscience and responsibility could cross linguistic lines; they rejected the thought of common goals providing common solutions. They rejected even the feeble Canadian notion of patriotism. But they held dear conceits that every people regards with a sentimental nostalgia: that by birth they were entitled to their land, that blood will out (one way or another), that outsiders were depriving them of their natural rights. They would not allow Ottawa to administer social programs and they would not allow English to sully the French face of Quebec. But because nationalism glorifies blood
relations and the extended family of a common religion, they would sell their souls to the Devil to be home at Christmas.

And they couldn’t see the irony in that.

Instead, they celebrated the fact in myth, made it a cultural sacrament taught in their schools and literature, and elevated it to the status of a founding paradigm. Fur traders stranded far from home at Christmas were carried by the devil to their families in a flying canoe. It became a sentimental Christmas display on a downtown Montreal street, a giant inflatable parade float for the Fête Nationale and the illustration on a beer label: Les Maudits. The Damned.

Jean-Baptiste was visiting the shrunken heads at McGill University.

McGill still maintained a small Victorian museum housing the various trophies, plunder and knick-knacks retrieved by the pompous during years of empire building. A great domed central area housed the skeletons of several dinosaurs, surrounded by second- and third-floor galleries displaying insects and geological specimens. Other wings contained stuffed mammals, large and small, set against painted dioramas of the settings they’d been shot in. A sequence of enormous glass cases held a parade of simians from tiny spider monkeys through chimps and apes, each slighter taller and more upright than the last, culminating in a human skeleton displaying a sign that read: Darwin’s Proof.

Jean-Baptiste had been visiting the Redpath Museum since childhood, when Mother and Angus had brought the children to the campus for picnics. When he was old enough, he came by himself. In truth it was a small and unimportant museum scientifically, but it did have its treasures, which lured him back time and again. It was here he’d first seen skeletons of any sort, and here they were in abundance. Tiny rodents, bats, larger predators; serpents, from garden snakes to giant constrictors out of darkest Africa, sabre-toothed tigers, the aforementioned dinosaurs and, yes, even humans. Here was a display of marvels more chilling than any Hollywood movie, because these were real.

They held an eerie fascination for him, these relics, because on the one hand he knew them to be the real remains of once-living creatures, but on the other, the manner in which they were displayed was itself a relic of a once-living era. The mammals, for instance, were stuffed and posed and set against a backdrop painted to look like the wilds of nature—yet so obviously artificial—and had been in place since before the vogue for zoos (that is, for actual living creatures) had supplanted such exhibitions as these. And truth be told, there was something about the cases themselves, with their mahogany trimmings and plate glass, and the sheer age of the mounted and mummified corpses, that bespoke age and dust and decay.

Of course, the Redpath had its own real mummy, a glorious and mysterious object contained in its own room. The brightly decorated coffin stood
open for inspection with the rag-and-bone princess summarily exposed for any eye to behold, in total disregard for her noble origins and surely her own and her long-gone family’s desires for her dignity. Still, since immortality had been the goal of her funerary preparations, she could be said to have achieved it, even in this debased and insignificant form. Her hair escaped the crumbling wrappings but still clung to her skull. It was thin, bleached grey not by the expanse of time since her death but by the comparatively brief exposure to the blazing overhead lamp. Her hands had been clasped on her breast while they were still clothed with flesh but now had fallen—both of them, her fingers still entwined—to her right side. The remains of her face had shifted to stare at her hands as if she were mourning the loss of their use. If she were not so obviously dead, she might be sleeping.

All these items radiated an exoticism only magnified by the accompanying explanatory cards and crumbling black-and-white photographs illustrating the remote, dark corners of the world where the brave safari-suited scientist-explorers had risked all to procure them.

For Jean-Baptiste, the most alluring of the oddities in this phantasmagoria were two simple items almost hidden from view in a little-used stairwell, which he’d only discovered while hunting for the washroom. In a modest case, surrounded by poisoned arrowheads, bone needles and a leather pouch spilling powerful magic, were two shrunken human heads.

Balls of chocolate-brown leather misshapen from (some kind of: what?) misuse, topped with tufts of silky black hair like tassels hanging from the handlebars of a child’s bicycle, they were mounted at the ends of sticks smooth and free of bark, whose bottom ends were wrapped in leather (leather?) grips.

As a child these curios had been enough to distract him from the washroom he’d been seeking. He’d stare eye to eye with the tiny people, their eyes sewn shut in an almost sleepy expression, their mouths sewn shut with lips (and here’s how he would ever after understand this phrase)
pursed
, and wonder: What had they seen? What had they said?

As he’d grown he’d been forced to crouch lower and lower, in order to look them in the face, until finally he now resorted to sitting back on his knees as the only proper way to get a look. It had always seemed wrong to do other than face them, since they were still, after all, human beings. He couldn’t bring himself to weave his head about and around the glass case in order to glance behind or above or beneath them, the way others did, or the way he could with statues or mineral specimens. Even the mummy princess was mostly hidden by her centuries-old roll of cloth so that one knew she was a corpse, although her desiccated ashes and dust retained only the vaguest of human forms.

But these heads weren’t objects; these heads had real, recognizable faces. These were people.

Which always led Jean-Baptiste to wonder at the status and fate of people who lost their lives, or pieces
of them. Where were their bodies now, what had become of them? Were those bodies also people? Had they ceased to be human when they lost their heads? And whatever had happened to Uncle’s missing finger? Was it still in some way human, was it still in some way Uncle, or had it instantly, on the point of separation from the rest of him, become something else? A mere thing?

This he’d wondered time and again over the years as a child; today, he also wondered: and what about Grandfather’s eye?

Aline was praying for both Grace and Grandfather at the chapel where she had once been in the habit of going every Sunday with her own father. St. Joseph’s Oratory stood on the slope of the mountain opposite the Royal Vic, which put both the Catholic and Jewish cemeteries between the two and gave it the highest elevation of any church in Montreal. Aline would never have had enough pretension to travel out of her local parish for the sake of worshipping at this grandest of cathedrals, except for the fact of her being present at a particular Christmas Eve’s midnight Mass, when the relic of Frère André’s heart had bled in public.

This rare miracle had marked her and her father in a bond with St. Joseph’s, and they never afterwards resisted the temptation to worship where God had chosen to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. It seemed an unquestionable sign, a direct
invitation to these meekest of the flock to remember that after all, since they would eventually inherit the earth, they might want once in a while to gaze at the riches they would then enjoy.

The Lord of the Poor was never one to stint on His own house, and this one, named after His own earthly father, was no exception. It was purposely erected at the top of a hill so steep it required a stairway like those in Hollywood fantasies of the Ascent to heaven itself. And a funicular for those who could pay the penny. The doors were so large it seemed a giant’s castle. The vaulted ceilings were so high the light-bulbs must have been changed by God Himself, and He probably didn’t have to stoop. Where it wasn’t covered in jewelled relics, embroidered tapestries, enormous stained glass windows or painted biblical scenes, it was merely gilded. The enormous volume of space within its walls produced the requisite booming, medieval echo as the numberless white-and gold-robed priests chanted their way across the altar. The pipes of the organ, pointing straight up to God, loomed so large over the congregation they might have been taken for factory chimneys. The nave seated thousands, so that communion became the endless parade of Judgment Day and the beginning of eternity.

In short, it made Aline feel small, poor, nervous and insignificant.

Just as it, and she, were intended to.

But despite this—or maybe, as they say, because—it made her feel closer to God than any local chapel
ever could. Especially during that particular midnight Mass.

Frère André—a doorman—had been revered in Montreal and even beyond as a living saint: a tireless worker for his flock, a gentle and generous soul, the very Platonic ideal of a Christian shepherd. He lived a long and selfless life, was much loved and never maligned, and at the last he welcomed the summons of the Lord with a humble contentment.

As a reward for this exemplary life, the faithful tore his heart from his corpse and hung it up in public. What, if any, compensation was granted him by the Lord is not on record; but for what it’s worth, he was beatified by the Pope a decade after he died.

The heart was treated for preservation and mounted on a golden silk pillow, in a case handcrafted of purest silver; it was viewed not through mere glass but through a lead crystal window. It was placed in its own permanent niche in the church, and proved itself a worthy attraction. The devout remained so, the wandering returned to the fold and the curious began to pay a token into the poor box for their visits. Prayers, which had previously been divided fairly evenly between the Lord and St. Joseph, were now just as often addressed to Frère André.

Eventually the heart itself showed the weakness of the flesh, and as it dried and hardened, it darkened in colour until its purple was black. But because it was mounted high enough above the heads of even those who didn’t kneel to gaze at it, no one minded. Or perhaps no one noticed; at least, no one ever
remarked on it. In time it became another fixture of the chapel, like the altar, the organ or the cross. It was noticed only as it served a particular purpose.

Even Aline approached it as she did the other artifacts of worship, as if it were not a person or a divine spirit but only signified the proper place to perform the rituals of her religion, simply the object that served to remind her of her devotion.

Until.

Midnight Mass is as much a spectacle in the Catholic Church as it is a religious observance, and as much a social occasion for French-Canadian society as a spectacle. On Christmas Eve, after the enormous traditional dinner and the clamouring for presents that follows, the children are dressed in their finest, no matter how loudly they complain. For once, they want to go to bed. They’re tired, after all, from the excitement of the day and the abundance of material goods afforded by the holiest of Christian observances. But no, the parents all insist, Mass must be observed. They’ve paid to reserve space in the pews; it’s an obligation not only to the Church but to their neighbours, to see and be seen; and to be seen to be devout. So devout as to be able to afford a pew up front.