For Sure (61 page)

“Are ya dead, Dad?”

Étienne was amusing himself by tracing the long blue lines on Terry's forearms, while the latter lay on the sofa, pretending to be dead.

“Well, wot do you tink?”

“If you was really and truly dead, you wouldn't be talkin'.”

“Der's lots of different ways to be dead, don't you know?”

“I know dat, Dad!”

“Do ya, now?”

“Well sure! You could be dead in a car accident, or somebody could be shootin* you dead.”

“Mmmmyeah . . . But you could also die laughin.' Or you might be dead tired. Or you could be wot we calls a
coq-mort
.”

Étienne immediately thought of Terry's summer cauldrons of steamed clams.

“You never heard Grandad Thibodeau say
coq-mort
?”

. . .

“A
coq-mort
is de kettle fer boilin' water fer yer tea or coffee. Folks called dat a
coq-mort
back in de old days.”

“How come you got blue lines all down yer arms, Dad?”

“Dose're veins, boy. Der tiny pipes dat carry de blood all over yer body. You got dem too.”

Étienne examined his forearms.

“Only yer vines are a whole lot bigger.”

“Veins, not vines.”

. . .

“Mine're bigger on account I's a dad. A dad needs a whole lot o' blood to be protectin' 'is wee children from all dem big bad wolves.”

And with that, Terry transformed himself into a wolf and threw himself at his son, who laughed and yelled:

“Dad, yer ticklin' me hihihi!”

“RRRRrrrr . . .”

“I knew you wasn't dead hihihi!”

“RRrrrrRRRrrr . . .”

According to
Le Grand Robert
, there are 82 main onomatopoeias in French:
ahou
,
aïe
,
a-reu a-reu
,
atchoum
,
bé
,
berk
,
beu
,
bim
,
bing
,
blablabla
,
bof
,
boum
,
bredi-breda
,
broum
,
brrr
,
bzitt
,
bzz
,
cahin-caha
,
chut
,
clic-clac
,
cloc
,
cocorico
,
coin-coin
,
coquerico
,
cot cot codac
,
coucou
,
couic
,
crac
,
cric
,
cricri
,
crincrin
,
croc
,
cui-cui
,
dig
,
ding
,
drelin
,
fla
,
fla-fla
,
flic flac
,
floc
,
flonflon
,
frou-frou
,
glouglou
,
gnan-gnan
,
gouzi-gouzi
,
guili-guili
,
guilleri
,
han
,
hi-han
,
miam-miam
,
miaou
,
mimi
,
ouah
,
ouille
,
paf
,
pan
,
patapouf
,
patati-patata
,
patatras
,
pif
,
plaf
,
ploc
,
plof
,
pouêt
,
pouf
,
prout
,
psit
,
rataplan
,
ronron
,
tac
,
tam-tam
,
taratata
,
teuf-teuf
,
tic-tac
,
tire-lire
,
toc-toc
,
tsoin-tsoin
,
vlan
,
vroum
,
zest
,
zim boum boum
,
zzz
.

Wiktionary
lists 195 English onomatopoeias, only one that is common to both French and English:
zzz
.

The Portuguese alphabet contained only 23 letters until 1990 when
k
,
w
, and
y
of the French and English alphabets were added. In the domain of language, the 10 million inhabitants of Portugal are slightly behind the 170 million Brazilians, whose official language is also Portuguese. For example, it was only in 1973 that Portugal adopted the simplified spelling enacted by the
Academia Brasileira de Letras
in 1943, and ammended in 1971.

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

?

. . .

HYPOCRITIC:
n. and adj. — 2005; attitude consisting in expressing one's negative ideas and feelings to everyone except those persons who inspire them.
“Beware! The hypocritics recognize each other, but they walk among us.”
(Daigle)

Even the mashed potatoes in Terry's shepherd's pie were delicious.

“Alright den, now's de time to add de secret ingredients. All of you kids close yer eyes.”

Étienne, Chico, and Marianne put their hands over their eyes, while peeking through their fingers, in hopes of penetrating Terry's secret.

“When yer eighteen, I'll be tellin' you de secret, only you'll have to promise not to go tellin' it to anudder livin' soul. And 'specially, you can't be tellin' it to yer kids until der eighteen demselves. On account of dat's de way de secret of de Bourques came down to us all de way from de time of de Deportation.”

Their eyes ostensibly covered, the children listened to Terry coming and going, lifting the covers off pots, sniffing at the contents, replacing covers, occasionally dipping into one or the other. Fully aware that the children were cheating and watching his every move, he punctuated his seasoning with comic ritual gestures at which the children could not laugh at the risk of giving themselves away.

“On account of we had to keep de secret recipe from de English.”

“How come?”

“On account of dis 'ere secret makes a body strong! An' we didn't want de English to be gettin' stronger dan us, now did we?”

Known edible oysters (illustrated): Tallmadge, Fischer Island, Saint-Simon, Cockenoe, Belon, Cotuit, Malpèque, Moonstone, Caraquet, Hama Hama, Kumamoto, Chef's Creek, Nantucket, Mallet, Wellfleet, Trail's End and Pemaquid. A footnote specifies that the months-ending-in-er rule no longer applies to the freshness of oysters, because of the speed of modern means of transportation.

Pomme couldn't believe it:

“You didn't go an' tell dem dat!”

“I never planned to . . .”

“Well, I sure hope not!”

“Only it just came out. Like de next ting you knows, der it is, and you said it.”

Terry had thought about it, but he couldn't see how he might have avoided the blunder. He added:

“'Tis weird de tings you finds yerself explainin' to a kid sometimes.”

Zed understood this more than ever:

“Fer sure you doesn't all de time know wot to say an' wot not to say.”

Pomme tried to imagine what his own life would be like with children. Terry, the most experienced of the three in the paternal arts, added:

“An de ting is dis, no matter wot you says, der's no way of knowin' wot effect it's gonna 'ave on dem. I worries when I tink wot dey'll be comin' out wid when dey's twenty-five! Some ting you told 'em when dey was four years old, you never tawt would affect 'em!

And Zed added:

“One time I's feelin' bad on account of I tawt I'd blabbered sometin' dat boddered 'im, so den I goes to put tings right, an' it got terrible complicated, on account of de boy had no memory 'tall of wot I'd said in de first place.”

Early morning Freudian slip: Herménégilde Chiasson show(er)ing in Frederiction.

Sitting on the living-room carpet, Marianne is amusing herself taking out and replacing in her basket the eggs they had painted the day before. Terry has been watching her.

“Wot you up to, Marianne?”

Marianne does not allow herself to be distracted. Her tiny hands, also daubed in paint, continue to shuffle the eggs back and forth.

“Eh, Marianne? Wotcha doin', girl?”

Marianne raises her head, looks at Terry, goes back to what she was doing.

“Yer puttin' all de eggs in de basket?”

. . .

“Some folks'd say you oughtn't to be puttin' all yer eggs in de same basket.”

Marianne raises her head again to look at Terry.

“Does ya want me to tell ya why?”

Marianne is enjoying herself, and not asking for anything.

“No? Alright den. Some udder time, maybe.”

Marianne replaces a blue egg in the basket, next to the pink and yellow egg.

The stain-removing balls of olden times could remove everything except ink stains and rust. They were made of grated Marseille soap, pure alcohol, egg yolk, turpentine, and smectite. But in fact, there was a sort of ball that could destain almost anything: tar, wax, oil, and oil paint. This ball was made of white soap (Marseille), pure potassium and the essential oils of juniper berries.

“Face it! If Acadians reads de word
c-l-o-w-n
in a French book, der not likely to be pronouncin' it ‘
cloune,
' now are dey. Der more likely to say ‘clown,' just de way 'tis written. No?”

Twelve idiomatic expressions in French that include the qualifier
petit
or “little”:
la petite main
(little hand), an apprentice seamstress or cook, an assistant to a trained person officially possessing the know-how;
le petit mal,
an absence seizure, which simulates the epileptic seizure or fit, also known as lunatism, demonic, and the scourge of Christ;
le petit mineur
, a kind of sniggering heard preceeding a subterranean catastrophe;
le petit thé
, the name Acadians give to the gaultheria leaves or wintergreen;
le Petit Robert,
a French language dictionary contained in a single volume, as opposed to the
Grand Robert
, which is contained in six;
les petites besognes
or small tasks one might give a child to keep it close;
les petits maîtres
or minor masters, painters the encyclopedias of Art do not mention, but who have left their mark in a particular geographical region;
le Petit Nord
, as opposed to Canada's far north, this region is bordered to the south by Lake Superior, to the west by Lake Winnipeg, and to the North by Hudson Bay;
les petites lectures
or children's literature;
le petit mi
, the thinnest guitar string;
la petite reine,
another term for a bicycle;
la petite pilule
, a pill that miraculously relieves all physical discomfort, helps one to sleep, to see life through rose-coloured glasses.

“So now 'ere dey goes, de wee boy an' de wee girl boat togedder to the henhouse wid der basket.”

Terry marched his fingers across the carpet, whistling a tune, the way someone might on their way to the henhouse.

“Inside of de henhouse, dey goes lookin' troo de straw to find de eggs. Dat was wonderful fun, on account of dey'd never done it afore now. From time to time, de chickens was yappin'.”

“Naw, Dad! Chickens doesn't yap!”

“Is dat right? Well den, wot does dey do?”

“Dey pecks!”

“Naw, dey cackles!”

Étienne was impressed. This had to be the first time Chico had bested him in French.

“I'll say, dey was cacklin'!
Caaaque-­quat-­quat-­quat-­quat-­caaaque
! An' in between der cacklin' dey was peckin', dat's when dey was hungry.”

Marianne's gaze had wandered; clearly she was finding the story a trifle long. Terry cut to the chase:

“An' den, just as der comin' out o' de henhouse wid der basket full of eggs,
bump bump
, wouldn't ya know, de little fellow's foot trips on de door sill, an' down ee goes. An den' you hears
crack
,
crack
,
roll
,
bump
,
crack
,
roll
,
crack
,
crack
,
roll
again an'
crack-bump
again. De basket tipped o'er, an' all de eggs're broken.”