Black Bird (12 page)

The Church spares nothing. There is music; there are carols; there are innumerable candles of all sizes everywhere; smoking censers are swung in one hand while the priest reads, chanting, from a psalter. St. Joseph’s is jammed. Every seat is taken and the corridors are full. The multitude patiently wait their turn at the door, stamping their feet in the cold, their
breath billowing. The crowds pass in and out of the church for hours. Confession is taken, with penitents lined up waiting their turn like the poor at a soup kitchen; absolution is given in solemn tones; communion is taken with necks bent, silently. The priest mumbles continuously and drops the Host onto outstretched tongues like a machine stamping out parts.

Aline, out of breath from the climb to the Oratory, and her father, yawning despite the frigid, clear air, waited patiently for the line ahead of them to shuffle its way inside. Once they were through the doors, the interior space was bigger than expected, as if the confines themselves increased the volume they enclosed. The temperature was rising with every exhalation of the flock and with each new candle lit for a remembered loved one. It did no good for Aline to open her cloth coat and loosen her knitted scarf. Her father too complained of the heat.

The monotonous droning of the chanting priests and praying crowds … the languid swelling and swirling mass of people … the air thick with incense and the smell of paraffin … the hypnotic twinkling of the candles … the late hour, the heat … by the time they’d shuffled their way up front near the altar, Aline was afraid she’d pass out.

Instead, as they passed in front of the niche displaying Frère André’s heart, she prayed for strength. She crossed herself and stared into her hands, chapped from the cold. She closed her eyes but immediately felt vertiginous. She gave up praying
and reached for the rail. Her father steadied her. When she opened her eyes and looked up to the relic, it was bleeding.

Aline silently contemplated the vision before her and tried to determine if it was real or merely induced by the atmosphere. Could she be witness to a miracle? Had no one else seen it? Her father too was staring, but silent, and might just have been in prayer. Surely the Lord would not choose her from among all the faithful to witness His presence? Surely others were more deserving? Her father returned her gaze and she realized he too was seeing the vessel fill with blood. He’d been thinking similar thoughts; and they both now knew their vision was true, and miraculous.

It was left to someone else to cry out in the crowd:

“It’s bleeding. The heart, Frère André’s heart! It’s bleeding!”

A clamouring began. Communion, confession, prayer were all forgotten. At first there were cries of “Silence!” from the priests, in anger that Mass should be violated, and “Ta gueule!” from some outraged but less refined of the faithful.

Aline and her father were no longer looking at Frère André’s heart, but into each other’s joyous eyes; and as the crowd began to press and howl, they retired together from the church, straining against the flow of bodies. They had seen, and had no need to gawk like children; and they had
seen first
. Aline was bursting with the warmth of a communion she’d never before experienced, and so must her father
have been, for the two remained silent even when their eyes met.

The mindless fervour of the crowd could also see nothing but the bleeding heart, and so ignored the overturned votive candles. When the flames took hold and some close to them began to shout the danger, they went unheard in the cacophony of prayer, amazement and denunciation:

“Fraud!”

“A miracle, for Jesus’ birthday!”

“Fire!”

“Praise God Almighty!”

“Don’t push!”

By the time the draperies were aflame, Aline and her father had left the church by a side door and, despite the cold, were slowly making their way down the cathedral steps. So taken were they with the miracle that they never remembered precisely how they’d gotten home; whether they rode the bus as they had come, or hailed a taxi, or even walked the entire way.

There was no newspaper on Christmas, but the following day—Boxing Day—as Aline was pouring her father’s morning coffee, he looked up from the paper and said, “I don’t remember a fire at the Oratory. Do you?”

“Oh, no. No, I don’t.”

“No one seriously hurt.” He read further down the column. “A miracle, they say.”

“Yes, with the crowds.”

And so, from that day on, whenever there seemed
some especial reason to speak to God, something out of the usual line of
Bless Papa and bless Mama and bless the neighbours too
, Aline made the trip to St. Joseph’s and knelt before the relic of Frère André.

For the sake of an eye, for the sake of a bird, she prayed to a shrivelled black heart. “Forgive and heal my husband in your mercy, Lord, and bring Grace back to me.”

On the afternoon Mother went to sleep she’d been thinking about Angus because his death was the cause of her grief and his insistence on regularity was the cause of her malady. And so his was the face that first took shape in her dreams.

Angus had never been in a dream before. He’d had them like anyone else, but this feeling was something different. It was still amorphous, still entirely unpredictable and absurd, still faded at its edges into an insensible void, still finite but unbounded. But it was also definitely not like any dream he could remember because he was inside it, instead of the other way around. Things happened, time passed back and forth, immense objects appeared in his path yet failed to obstruct it. Primal fears took hold instantly without warning or reason, but without incongruity: he was naked before an immense crowd; he’d been climbing a staircase forever; he fell from an immeasurable height; he flew; the car’s brakes failed; he made love to Isabel; he slept; his daughter dreamt he was approaching her.

He asked her, “What the hell happened to me?”

“You died in the war,” she said. “Don’t do it again.”

The peasants were storming the castle and the dance of pitchforks and torches overwhelmed their conversation like surf on the beach. Both tried to speak and failed.

It did no good to turn her as Dr. Hyde had suggested, to prevent bedsores. She simply returned to her side as if she were a boat righting herself. She slept so much they thought she must be sick. Yet she had no fever, never moaned or cried out in delirium, didn’t even toss and turn during her dreams; she always seemed simply and happily asleep. The medication was slowly disappearing, which was a mystery since Mother was never awake to take it.

The more and better she slept, the more fitfully did Father; which eventually brought the solution to the case of the disappearing pills. He tossed and turned, aware of the unnaturally inert form of his wife. He’d gotten used to her immobility, so that when she did move, it woke him instantly. And this time he saw her sit up, open the vial, shake out two pills and swallow them with water before settling back in bed. And he realized she’d done so entirely in her sleep.

After days of sleeping beside her, he could stand no more. It was just too creepy; he couldn’t share the bed with her any longer. Since there were no available empty rooms except the front parlour, that’s where
they moved her—and her friends continued to visit her, as if she were in a hospital bed.

She lay semi-fetally as if in prayer, with her hands clasped together and her head nodding towards them, her thin grey hair clinging from neglect.

At first Aline was shocked by what seemed to her Father’s disposal of his wife: how could he not have wanted her in his bed? But as she began to assist in the minimal care Mother seemed to need (an airing of the sheets, an occasional sponge bath, feeding like a baby) she came to understand how uneasy her condition had made him. It was certainly unnatural, and yet nothing seemed the matter with her. In fact, if it were possible to judge by her face and the lack of tension in her body, she seemed now to be content, practically happy. It was almost as if she were simply awaiting something and had stopped bothering to suffer through life in the meantime.

When Mrs. Pangloss arrived the day after they’d installed Mother on a folding cot in the parlour, she began a panicked keening: a screeching wail pitched as high as she could manage without cracking her voice. It was her instinctual and habitual way of entering a wake, beginning high and loud with shock and disbelief, and it usually gave way first to a moaning despair and finally to a quiet sobbing in a corner, with only an occasional outburst designed to refocus the other mourners’ attention on herself. Funerals are, after all, for the living.

Aline didn’t know much about Mrs. Pangloss’s habits but she could tell instantly that she thought
Mother was dead. Mrs. Pangloss managed to choke out the usual baffled questions—“What happened? Was it an accident? I didn’t know she was sick! Oh, the poor woman. Was it quick? Did she suffer?”—and as usual didn’t bother to wait for the answers.

Aline attempted to calm her by mustering what little broken English she could, but under the rush of Mrs. Pangloss’s exclamatory grief she was reduced to tugging on the woman’s sleeve and muttering, “Non, madame, non.”

And then, unexpectedly, Mrs. Pangloss did something Aline would otherwise have judged as impossible as anything absurdly imaginable, like walking on the Sun or meeting Elvis; something which shattered totally her view of the woman and cast into doubt her opinions of all Anglos.

Mrs. Pangloss spoke in French.

Aline stepped back under the blow.

Haltingly, as if the words had made no sense to her, she framed her simple reply almost as a question: “Elle dort.” She’s sleeping.

Mrs. Pangloss moaned hugely and all the tension lapsed from her face; she slumped into an overstuffed armchair and buried herself in the cheap cloth coat she was still wearing. She breathed ferociously, holding her heart as if to keep it in place. Aline couldn’t tell if she was relieved or disappointed.

Aline stood nervously, not daring to approach the woman, not knowing what to say or do. Should she take her coat? Should she try to explain Mother’s condition, when it had commenced, why they had
moved her to the front parlour? Should she speak in French or English?

At that moment, Dr. Hyde arrived and relieved her of any responsibility. Aline was torn between her resentment of his presumption of authority in what was really
her
house and not his after all, and her relief at not having to choose a course of action. She hung both their coats and retired to the kitchen to prepare tea.

“Bodies,” said Dr. Hyde, “are fascinating and disgusting.”

He took Mother’s pulse. “They are always with us; they are perhaps the sum of our existence. Yet we always feel as if they were adjunct to ourselves. They are filthy and they produce filth. We may lose parts of them, appendages or even internal organs, and go on living feeling that we are still ourselves. So we speak of them as if they were separate from our existential selves.”

He listened to her heartbeat. “We have mapped them, inside and out; we have charted their histories and divined their workings so that we know what parts belong in which place and how they are supposed to function. We have experimented with them and subjected them to torture, chemicals, extremes of climate, so that we know more or less the conditions necessary to their well-being. We have deduced a Platonic ideal against which we measure ourselves and our patients: this is the practice of medicine.”

He placed the stethoscope on her back and listened to her breathing. “Yet we are forever stumbling across exceptions, aberrations and inexplicable circumstances. Miraculous cures, astonishing survivals, even
unaccountable deaths. And this, Madame Desouche’s curious repose.”

Mrs. Pangloss nibbled a crustless devilled ham sandwich and nodded. She firmly believed that when one found oneself in the presence of a professional, educated man, one should take advantage of listening to him in order to better oneself. Especially if he was a doctor. It had always puzzled her that her friends the Desouches should have Dr. Cameron Hyde as their family physician, and it stunned her now to see that not only had they been telling the truth about it, but he would deign to descend from his famous institute on the slopes of Mount Royal and actually pay a house call.

He was, after all, a famous man who had done unbelievable things. An indisputable genius since the days when
Time
—an American magazine, mind you—had put him on its cover, he was invested with all the unquestioning confidence of the hospital and the university to which he’d brought fame and money by his brilliant experiments into brains, bodies, psyches and souls. So overwhelming was his authority in Montreal that not even those whose heads he’d cut open (whether in an effort to shrink them, or merely to introduce needle-thin electric prods), or those to whom he’d sequestered in sensory deprivation tanks and secretly administered the new, mysterious lysergic acid, or those whom he’d restrained, doused, disoriented or otherwise tortured—not even those poor people (and they were usually poor) had once imagined that their “treatments” were anything but proper. No
one had ever thought that Dr. Hyde’s actions might be unorthodox, unethical, illegal … monstrous. Not for years would anyone suspect that they might be actionable, although frequently they were acknowledged, sometimes by Hyde himself, as “experimental.” But then only grudgingly.