Black Bird (28 page)

The revolution had been a long time coming. It was time for a cleansing.

It was probably time to empty that bucket again. When she opened the door, there he was, praying. He disgusted her. The smell from his pail was strong and he hadn’t had a bath in days, and his hair was stringy, greasy, unkempt. His clothes were limp and wrinkled from prolonged use. His face was dark with stubble. He didn’t even look up at her, continued his whispered mumblings into his hands as if it were she, not God, who was absent. As if he was too good for her,
too good to notice when she entered. That was so typical of the English, assuming their superiority and enforcing it for their own benefit while proclaiming their humanitarian intent.

How could this man, this English man, be allowed to exist, to live, when Hubert had been plucked out by death? And in his arrogance he calls upon the power of his God. The English have always had God on their side; they’ve always claimed divine right. It was always God who was against us in this province. Even the French Catholic priests, black-frocked vultures, pederasts, preaching the revenge of the cradle as if it were for our own good, as if it meant something liberating for us. When for so many it was a trap, a stifling inescapable slavery whose only alternative, the only choice she’d had—what else could she have done, even if she’d wanted the little bastard?—was a haunting, a loss, a bereavement unrecognized by anyone else, as illegitimate as the birth would have been. Not a baby, not a death. No hopes and fears, no loss, no gains, no future—one big No, the vote the English campaigned for: No.

What was really needed in Quebec, even needed all over the world, was a Yes, an affirmation, a welcoming, an embracing …

All of them. The doctors, the priests, Hubert himself. Even her father with his typical male expectations of what she was worth—every one of them had reached right inside her and killed something. Was death so easy to mete out? Like serving dinner or handing over a business card?

John Cross expected his religion to lift him up and set him free, this same religion that had so effectively and for so long suppressed and restrained the people of Quebec, and Marie personally. Worship was painful, a physical suffering just like Christ’s, and she bore the scars from her youth, she still bled where she’d been marked in that profane baptism. But he seemed not to know this. He seemed to truly believe that his faith would protect him from any physical trial, as if when his saviour had died for his sins he’d also agreed to take on any corporal suffering that might occur.

In a rage she knew she’d have to show him, to break through his mindless, brainwashed innocence with an immediate and very material demonstration. It was a revelation: the chain around his neck. She took the cross from his fingers, enveloped it with her own small hand and twisted the gold links into his neck.

The ends of the crucifix stuck out between her fingers like the points of brass knuckles. His face turned red, he struggled, his eyes turned up. She beat him with her free hand, twisting the chain again. He gulped air as she loosened her grip but she only took more slack in her own hand, and began strangling him in earnest.

“Where’s God now, Mr. Cross? Has he forsaken you at last?” The crucifix dug into her flesh as he struggled desperately. She was afraid he’d break free and so held her right hand over her left, using the strength of both fists to contain the cross. He was making harsh, dry barking noises and his face was so
red and full it seemed it might burst. He convulsed, and the points of the cross bit into Marie’s hand.

With barely enough breath, shooting out of him like a rude noise from a freed balloon, John Cross tried to say, “You alone are capable of building a free society.”

He managed enough for Marie to recognize his words, words straight out of the FLQ manifesto. But it was too late now. She’d long ago passed the point where she could abandon this direction in her life. It was like the arrow of time, moving ever and ever forward. Even if she was capable of doubting her immediate actions, her current struggle, she was beyond being shocked back into any kind of repulsion at what she’d become or what she was doing. She was incapable of sympathy for this man or even for herself now, and was performing an act as coldly as drowning an unwanted kitten, or slaughtering a chicken for dinner.

“You alone are capable of building a free society.”

It wasn’t even ironic, as perhaps Cross had intended it, much less an appeal to any personal morality it might waken in her. It neither strengthened nor weakened her resolve, it neither amused nor chastised her. Somehow John Cross had drained the phrase of any meaning just as she was extinguishing his life. Words. All that remained of it were words.

And that was exactly the problem with words, and had always been the problem, and why she resented her brother so, and his love of them: they changed. In some magical way the same words that once had been a solace, an inspiration and a call to arms could
now be an accusation, a derision, an insult. The very words on which rested all her certainty were suddenly the cause of all her doubt.

Slowly he turned purple, and just as he gave up the ghost and went limp, Marie felt her own flesh breaking. He slumped; he was dead. She relaxed her hands; as she did so, she felt a sharp bite and a warm trickle. She opened her left hand and let the crucifix fall out onto his chest.

Her palm was bleeding.

Just the one.

The certainty of Cross’s corpse became for Marie the one fixed point in a universe of doubt. She was suddenly flooded throughout her body with a shuddering of her muscles, each one tightening and loosening again in an instant, and then her stomach shrank in on itself and rose up again under her rib cage.

But all his muscles had relaxed.

And whatever her doubts or certainties, she was now left with the problem of the corpse. As if she had finally inherited the family business.

Marie vomited uncontrollably.

Into his bucket.

Aline was humming a lively La Bolduc tune as she plunged the knife into Grandfather’s right eye with her left hand. She had decided to name this year’s jack-o’-lantern after her husband. She remembered how much her own mother’d enjoyed Halloween, sharing it with her daughter and teaching her its liberating spirit:

“And now, who’s the biggest pumpkin-head in our lives, Aline? Who do we dislike this year?”

Aline would name some current neighbourhood bully or some rival classmate, and her papa would call from the living room with the name of a current politician or his boss, and her mother would cackle with glee and suggest her sister-in-law, or Aline’s babysitter—whom she’d caught flirting with Papa—and then her mother showed Aline how much fun it was to stick a knife into a pumpkin named for an antagonist.

Aline’s mother loved Halloween. It was the one day in her proper Catholic existence when she didn’t feel bound by her social constrictions as a woman. It was practically the only time she laughed aloud, and she sang as she prepared for the trick-or-treating.
She smoked cigarettes. She had a drink, and then another. She even swore, by God.

And she played dress-up with her infant daughter. They chose the proper clothes together, they bathed together and brushed out each other’s hair, they dressed. Then came the neighbourhood kids ringing the bell, and they were all dressed up too. It was fun for Aline to see the surprise waiting on their doorstep, and what her mother’s reaction might be. For sometimes she smiled and welcomed the gangs of children, and sometimes she screeched and cackled at them like a witch.

At that, Aline always responded with her own squeaky giggling, as the surprised and frightened kids ran in all directions. Her mother slammed the door. “That was one of those Trembley brats. They’re all bastards.” Together the dressed-up ladies laughed and ate the candy themselves.

Her mother died young, in the fifties, but Aline still allowed herself to keep playing the Halloween games her mother’d taught her. It was a link between them, a time when the universe or God allowed the dead, good or evil, to circulate without hindrance among the living on earth, and Aline felt closer to her deceased mother. It was the only day she felt able to think the unthinkable: “If you’re so good, God, why have you taken my mother away?”

She set her one-eyed jack-o’-lantern in the parlour window, lit a candle in its head and went upstairs to dress. She showered and dried her hair with a hand blower set at full to make it frizzy, and powdered it
with talc to make it grey. In her bathrobe she pulled out all her black clothes of any kind, and threw them all on the bed. When she’d chosen a long black dress with long black sleeves and a long black shawl, she thought about whether or not to wear jewellery. And what kind? What goes with such a dark outfit? No, nothing at all, unless—yes, just a single, glittering, pure white diamond on a simple ring, like a talisman, the only jewellery a witch
should
wear!

And so naturally she thought of her mother’s engagement ring. She remembered she’d left it in Grandfather’s bedroom. She’d better rescue it before he pawned it.

She stepped into the hallway, thinking of the fun she’d have with the children tonight. She stood in front of his door, dreading to go in. He was still asleep. But it would be worth it to complete her outfit for the evening.

Aline stole in as quietly as possible, leaving the door open just a crack to let in light from the hallway. She stood just inside until her eyes adjusted, listening to Grandfather rumbling in his sleep. He’d left the window open and it was cold in the room, except by the radiator under the window, which was too hot to touch. She hated being back here. It was harder than she’d bargained for. Somehow it was still musty, like the whole house. No matter how hard she tried to clean it, it was cramped and closed and mouldy. The house defeated her.

Aline closed the window, tried to shake herself out of her sudden, despairing reverie, and looked over
the dresser for her jewellery box. She opened it and searched among the pile of plastic and glass for the one true stone she had. She found it. Instinctively she put it on the same finger as her wedding ring. And then she thought, I should wear only the one ring; any other detracts from its importance. So she took them both off, put on her mother’s diamond again and placed her wedding ring in the box.

On the dresser was a small framed photograph of Grandfather and Grandmother on their wedding day. They were young, dressed as well as poverty ever allows, standing on the steps of a small parish church. What could she have been like?
Grandmother
. No one would ever call Aline that. Her husband was too old, and she no longer wanted his children. How could this other woman, smiling in the photo just as Aline herself had on her own wedding day, have lived with such a horrible person for so long? Had his children? Was she aware of his job? She must have been. Yet she was a Catholic woman too: they were standing on the chapel steps with the priest above them in the doorway.

That must be it. She’d been caught in the same trap as Aline. Lured in and then unable to escape. Grandmother had lived her life as his wife not because she approved or even tolerated him, but because she was Catholic. And now Aline would too.

On Grandmother’s hand, holding up her bouquet, was a small whitish spot severing one finger: her wedding ring. It wasn’t possible to distinguish it from the one Aline had just removed.

Aline realized the horrible truth: her very wedding ring had been scavenged from the dead. Her heart sank. She wasn’t bothered by its being used, second-hand; she wasn’t stuck up like that. But knowing that her husband hadn’t enough respect for either of them to allow his first wife to go to her rest with the ring that consecrated her marriage, or his second wife to live among his family with her own ring, her own dignity, was approaching the unbearable. To think that Grandfather had robbed even Grandmother’s grave meant that he’d never thought of either marriage as anything more than a simple change in his civil status. It meant she had found herself among people who knew no respect for boundaries, be they personal, societal or legal. It struck her with dread that she was wearing Grandmother’s old clothes as well. Never before had hand-me-downs or second-hand clothes from a church rummage sale weighed upon her mind; but she realized these dead woman’s clothes were hers simply because her husband hadn’t bothered to throw them out.

A dead woman’s ring, a dead woman’s clothes. They signified not acceptance into the clan as she’d first thought, but that she was accepted as a substitute and not a person. That her own, individual life was over; she had been declared dead. Without ever having been allowed to live and speak for herself.

And no one was bothering to do anything with Angus’s things either; they were still boxed and piled against a wall in the basement, like bricks in the very
wall. The Desouches did not honour the dead; they lived off them. They built their lives off the dead, scavenged everything wherever they could find it, feared letting anything go as if to save it up was like saving money, putting away for the future.