Black Bird (14 page)

When Jean-Baptiste opened the book, words deserted him.

What is a blank book? he thought. It’s a book waiting to be written. It’s not simply blank paper, on which one can scrawl anything: lists, phone numbers, meaningless doodles. It’s cut to size and bound in boards because it’s a complete object whose leaves follow one another from beginning to end, continuously, like a journey or a lifetime. A blank book is not nothing, it’s simply an untaken journey, an unlived life. It’s a concrete potentiality and, as such, an invitation and an affirmation. It’s an acknowledgment that a book should be written upon it, that it can become anything. It can mean anything. And because its meaning must be physically manifest upon its blank pages, it can mean precisely what its owner—its writer, its reader—wants. The giving of a blank book is the giving of a voice.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Marie. It’s perfect.”

There was something so white, so pure, so sacrosanct about a blank book. Dare he spoil that with words?

Oh, hell, yes. That’s what it was for, after all. Marie’s intent had been clear, at least to him. She’d swallowed all her own hatred of his obsession and given him permission to indulge himself. Now, after that, could he refuse? It would be an insult to refuse.

He moped about for days. He took up his pen, flung open the stiff cover and hastily inscribed: “Chapter One.”

He scratched it out. He’d suddenly realized what a huge commitment it was to have written those two little words. If he began a chapter one, he’d be pledging himself to a chapter two at least, bare minimum, even if not to chapters three, four and so on. No, that was too much.

Don’t scare yourself. Don’t make any promises. See what happens, ease into it. No one gets married on the first date. He jotted down some notes. A day later, a scrap of dialogue came to him, and then a response. He put names next to the voices.

Within a week, he was writing a play.

Given the peace offering she’d made, Jean-Baptiste couldn’t refuse to let Marie bunk down among his papers and pamphlets and ink and stencils in the attic. Though he’d come to consider it his own space, it was still technically a common part of the house;
and Marie was in fact being generous, since she had given up what was after all her own room to Aline, who still refused to return to Grandfather’s room—even though she was often in and out of it, ministering to his wants and pretended sufferings.

And it was making Father happy again to have Marie back amongst them, and a little joy here and there couldn’t be a bad thing at the holidays. Especially now that the house was turning into some kind of sanatorium, with Mother in the public ward downstairs and Grandfather in his private room upstairs. Father was full of his plans for the new business and hoping to conclude his bargain with the neighbour woman any day now, and hoping also that Grandfather would be about again as soon as possible so that he and Uncle could help with the renovations of the basement while they had no work of their own to do.

As far as Grandfather was concerned, his principal work for the foreseeable future was to get used to his new eye. He was no longer vain enough to care that it didn’t match his own in colour; or at least, his poverty had thus far overcome his vanity, although it couldn’t be vanquished totally and leave him satisfied with a plain patch. In respect of his lingering if dwindling pride, Father conspired with the family to withhold from Grandfather the knowledge that in fact the eye in question was not new.

Father had purchased it at a reduced price from their neighbours, the morticians. No more need be said about its origins or the character of the funeral directors, or indeed of Father, except that this wasn’t
the first time Father had bought or sold something to or from them, and therefore they understood one another well enough to introduce such delicate topics as the sale or purchase of items, implements and ephemera.

Grandfather began by inserting the eye for only a few moments at a time because he discovered it irritated more than his first pair of dentures had. Dr. Hyde had warned him there would be a period of adjustment, but this seemed beyond expectations. He could only keep it in a few moments, had trouble stopping it from rolling over in his head even though it wasn’t symmetrical, and shuddered every time it bumped up against the socket in his skull when he tried closing his lid over it.

Aline was frightened of the eye. It was gruesome. Even though Grandfather’s socket had more or less healed, this business of taking it out and putting it in again often resulted in a kind of rheumy pus being emitted. She brought him iodine and an eye cup to rinse with, and a bowl of hot water and alcohol so he could clean the eye. She herself refused to touch it.

“Why don’t you clean it for me?” he would whine.

“You’re old enough to clean yourself. It’s disgusting. I won’t touch it.”

“But it causes infections!”

“Mais voyons, is that my fault? Take care of yourself.”

“Some wife.”

And that remark stung her. But then, what kind of a husband was he? If only she’d the strength to say
that and not just think it. He was worse now that he’d returned from the hospital, more easily angered and demanding. She couldn’t do enough for him. She brought him meals and drinks, the newspapers, his prescriptions, disinfectants … she even gave him sponge baths like a nurse. And everyone knew there was simply nothing wrong with his legs, there was no reason for him to be bedridden, except that he seemed to like it.

Aline found herself actually missing that brief period of his absence from the house. The only thing that comforted her was that for some reason, when Grandfather had returned, so had Grace.

The very same day that she’d carried his things up to his room and turned down the bed for him, Grace came fluttering in through the kitchen window and into her open cage. When Aline came down to make tea for Grandfather, there she was. She was cheered to see the bird, and cooed at her and offered her bread crumbs. Grace tilted her head, hopped about and cawed in response. Aline was convinced there was a communication between them.

Marie wasn’t the only felquiste who’d gone home for the holidays. The long months of underground living had taken their toll on the whole cell. Some had neither seen nor talked to their relatives at all since the summer. For most there had been no other human contact, and their only experience of the outside world was the cold wind blowing through the newspapers.
Their tight-knit, tight-lipped world of politics and paranoia was long on sleepless nights and short on long baths, big meals and the unselfconscious camaraderie of beer and hockey games on the family TV set.

They struggled with the idea that now was the perfect time to stage an event, what with everyone preoccupied not by the language laws but by the holiday. Security would be lax.

On the other hand, so much of normal life was closed down and discarded by the season that there might be smaller chance of disrupting it. In the end, they gave in to their own sentimentality and risked blowing their covers by leaving their basement apartments. Of course, they left by night and flew home as fast as they could to avoid detection; of course, they’d be back in only a few days, after the New Year, before anyone in Quebec woke up again.

They were ever conscious of being in danger in the public eye. In broad daylight they might be recognized by the police or journalists or ordinary citizens—yes, even by their own families. They were being hunted, according to the papers, and they believed it, for in the eyes of bourgeois society they were already convicted criminals: murderers and bank robbers, anarchists, terrorists. They were the damned.

In some ways it would be a hard holiday. They would have to lie about where they’d been and what they’d been doing. There were things you just couldn’t tell people, no matter how close you were to them. But the lure of réveillon was too strong: the thought of Christmas dinner and their mothers happy to see
them, of sharing a drink with their brothers, of trying to show they really did love their families (and if they didn’t, what was their work for, after all? One of the hardships of the lot they’d chosen was physical separation from those they loved; but how much choice was there? Who was going to do the hard work of nation-building if everyone stayed home before the fire?), that lure was strong enough to overcome their fears.

But it wasn’t easy for Hubert to forget his politics, his life work, even or especially in his parents’ Outremont home. It was warm, it was comfortable, but it was paid for by his parents’ years of slow progress and advancement, by their acceptance of the status quo and by a slow-witted provincial bourgeois mentality that infuriated him.

Although his father was no fool. If he didn’t dare think that his son was a murderer, a terrorist, certainly he was afraid that he was at least a fellow-traveller, a misguided, hot-headed youth who never realized when he had things good.

And so eventually the spirit of the season was forgotten. The father and son’s conflicting ideas of what was important and the amount of Christmas cheer they’d poured down their throats combined to topple the tree, to revive the old, unsettled arguments. Whether Hubert had left in disgust or whether his father had thrown the bum out, neither could really say, but somehow Hubert found himself outdoors in the cold, with pine needles and strands of silver tinsel in his hair. On New Year’s Eve.

Hubert had been thrown out of his parents’ house before, but at least this time he had a place to go. It would be lonely, what with the others still at their family homes. He was thinking mostly of Marie, though even if she’d been waiting in their unmade bed, he was now too drunk to enjoy her presence. And it was late, calice. He waited far too long at an unsheltered bus stop, hanging off the post, before a lonely police car came by and the cops chased him home. So there was nothing for it but to walk over the mountain and down to St-Henri. At least it was warming up. He was feeling nauseous, and his head felt so small it hurt.

The Desouches kept Christmas for the family, but on New Year’s they invited what friends they had. Principally this meant Mother’s friends Mrs. Pangloss and Mrs. Harrison. Since poor Mother was still asleep, they invited themselves on her behalf. Father had invited Mrs. McCairn, the elderly woman from next door, and her simple son, Moonie. Not that they’d ever been particularly welcome before, but given his plans for the new business, he thought it wise to treat them as he would anyone else he wanted something from.

Mrs. McCairn, after years of trying to bring her son’s intellect up to her own level—and failing miserably, her head simply being too weak—decided that rather than bear the shame of a retarded son, she would bring her own mind down to his reach. She began by
trying to make them both happier, and celebrated their birthdays whenever the spirit took her. She was already an older woman, but because she’d found this way of increasing the number of her birthdays, she rapidly became the oldest person in the neighbourhood. Even her son was soon older than people who’d visited the maternity ward when he was born. Because she spent the evenings talking about her own childhood, her own parents and things that had taken place in the neighbourhood, and because the sound of her voice lulled him into a trance that was so like his own dreams and memories, he began to remember things he’d never witnessed. His name was Martin, but for years the neighbourhood had known him as Moonie; her name was Diana, but she was only ever known as Mrs. McCairn. No one had ever seen Mr. McCairn, who had died in the Great War, and by the time anyone saw his photo, clean-shaven, smiling in his uniform, sepia brown, Moonie was showing it off as a picture of himself.

“Captain Moonie,” said the local wits behind his back.

“Ach, it’s a fine uniform,” Angus had said. “I’d one like it myself but not quite so grand. Be proud of it, boy. It’s more than most around here have got.”

The three women (Mrs. Harrison bent almost far enough over her own knees to fall out of her chair, Mrs. Pangloss with “Go on, just a little punch—Stop! For Christ’s sake, d’you think I’m a drunkard? Hee hee hee,” and Mrs. McCairn suspiciously looking down from side to side at the chair she was in, as if
afraid it wouldn’t hold her) settled together at Mother’s bedside. Soon they were all enveloped in the cloud of Mrs. Harrison’s cigarette smoke; occasionally her cackling or Mrs. Pangloss’s mirthful shrieking or even Mrs. McCairn’s polite giggling could be heard from within.

Father had also invited the mortician from the other side, who showed up only because he had just concluded two transactions with the family: one re Angus and the other re a certain lump of glass. Of course he wore the same suit he was always seen in, as if he hadn’t another. And why should he? Formal wear was never inappropriate, was it? And black is never out of style. Father himself was forced to speak to him, since no one else seemed to want to, and the mortician, trained by years of funerals, was very much used to standing discreetly by and not disturbing the mourners. And there
was
that woman over by the window. Was this, after all, some kind of a wake? Or perhaps a death watch? In which case, it would be the first time the mortician had shown up in advance of Death’s knocking on the door. Though he was never far behind.