Black Bird (15 page)

Marie and Jean-Baptiste argued over who would help Aline in the kitchen and who would entertain Moonie. Jean-Baptiste lost.

“I got a baseball bat for Christmas,” said Moonie.

“I got a book,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“You want to play ball?”

“Uhm, some other time.”

“I’ll get the bat, and you bring a ball and we’ll have a game in the lane.”

“The lane’s full of snow.”

“So?”

“Listen,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I heard you were studying to repair radios.”

“Yeah, by mail.”

“How did you do?”

“I got a certificate. It’s hanging over the TV.”

“Well, look. I’ve got an old radio you could fix for me.”

Moonie looked alarmed. “It’s not transistors, is it? ’Cause I didn’t learn transistors.”

“No, no. It’s tubes. I told you, it’s an old one, short-wave. Angus used to listen to the BBC with it.”

Moonie looked relieved. “Oh. No, you can’t repair tube radios.”

“What? Why not?”

“They blow up.”

When Jean-Baptiste started to argue with “What do you mean?” Moonie’s face betrayed his fear. “Oh,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I get it. Okay, forget the radio.”

“Who’s Angus?” asked Moonie.

“No one, any more.”

“You want to play baseball? I got the bat new for Christmas.”

Angus was dreaming again. It was winter, but he was sweating in the heat. Perhaps he was in hell; at least it seemed certain he was at a funeral, and he thought he
heard people talking about him. Over in the corner, in a cloud of fog, he saw a woman in a coffin. Three other old women attended her, while off to the side stood a man who looked like Death, or a monk. As he approached the woman, without walking over to her, he saw that it was Mother.

It became much hotter. Steam was rising from her. He felt compelled to wake her up. He reached out to shake her, but either his arms didn’t respond or he no longer had any. He began to shout, trying to direct his voice into her ear. It seemed to do no good.

Aline was a little nervous working with Marie on the food. She was worried about the food, too, but Marie had never seemed to like her. Yet she had made the gesture of giving up her room, as if she understood just how intolerable Aline’s marriage had become. And here she was volunteering with the refreshments and chatting without once sneering at God or the Anglos. Together they had prepared Mother for the reception, washing her hair, changing her robe, even giving her a sponge bath. Aline was becoming an expert at it now, like a real nurse. But Marie had held and moved and caressed her mother almost as if she were her own infant, and Marie herself the mother.

Of course, Aline couldn’t know that those were the particular moments in which Marie was feeling her guilt. She saw now that Mother had found life unbearable without Angus, taken as he was so unexpectedly and for absolutely no fault of his own. For
Mother, Marie’s motivations just didn’t exist. There was simply no reason to kill a person. Mother was sleeping away Angus’s absence, and that was Marie’s fault. Even if it hadn’t been deliberate.

Marie was surprised at her newly discovered affection for Mother. She’d always thought she resented her mother, thought she’d been unable to respect her. Now she remembered past holidays when Mother had been awake, alert, smiling and revelling in her children’s Christmas happiness. Marie remembered Angus too, the stiff old Anglo who’d always brought them presents, and surprised herself by missing him. And the dinners Mother would cook, with Grandmother’s help. Funny that Aline, this meek little woman, not much older than Marie herself, was now her grandmother. And unhappy about it.

Not that Grandmother had been particularly happy with Grandfather; there’d been enough Christmas battles and stormy exits from both of them. But at least Grandmother had had the strength to stand her ground against him.

She pitied Aline. She missed Angus. And she felt guilt for Mother’s condition. Yet she was happy to be home.

What was this mysterious pull she felt called Christmas?

For Grandfather the transition from sleeping to wakefulness was an ill-defined thing. Years of waking after sundown with blinds pulled against the light had
blurred the process. Today—this evening—for the first time in weeks, for the first time since the bloody incident with that damned crow, he gently drifted awake with a sense of calm comfort. Without paying attention to his own thoughts, he realized his wound must now be reaching a state of complete healing. He reached for his teeth and remembered that one day they too had ceased to hurt and finally felt natural enough in his mouth for him to feel nothing at all when they were in. He yawned and stretched; Aline had changed the bedclothes this morning and the mattress bore his imprint from years of close contact. How comfortable it was. In the darkness he fumbled on the side table for his patch before turning on the light. Healed or no, he didn’t want to tempt fate, and the sudden light had already more than once stabbed him. He almost reached for the bell, which would bring Aline, but then thought better of it. He remembered it was the last day of December. He’d already been too long abed. Why not get up on the cusp of the New Year? Why not put an entirely new face on everything?

Aline had been good to him these past weeks. She’d nursed and fetched for him no matter how demanding or surly he’d been. He pondered how much he’d taken advantage of her in so many ways, only recently with the poor excuse of his health, and felt ashamed. It was not her fault the crow had tried to kill him. Even if she did harbour it, pamper it against his will.

And he’d never been a lazy man, never been afraid of hard work in his life. It was time to stop lying
down. He rose and drew the blind up, letting in a little light from the rear of the houses across the lane. The lights and the luminescent snow reminded him again that it was the holiday. The telephone poles were strung together with snow-covered cables and topped with shining yellow lamps. The Gothic arches at the rear of the church directly across shadowed the faintly glittering stained-glass panes, and out of their corners and angles came dark greens and reds.

To hell with it. He felt good. It was time for a little cheer. There’d been enough misery this past year; he’d go down to his family and they’d celebrate that it was finally over.

As Hubert was stumbling drunkenly by Mount Royal Cemetery in the dark, Grandfather finally came down from his room. For the first time any of them could remember, he was smiling. Aline saw on his face the look that had attracted her so long ago. He didn’t say a word. He surveyed the living room in silence, then crossed it to Father, who was sitting beside Mother, still stretched out like a corpse and sleeping. “Don’t worry,” he said to Father. “I’ve woken up. She will too.” And he put his arm around Father’s shoulder.

Aline was drawn to him suddenly and instinctively. She started across the room and then, as if remembering, halted just before throwing herself into his arms. He smiled and drew her close.

For a moment there was silence, as if none of them wanted to burst this peaceful bubble. Then
Jean-Baptiste said, “Grandfather, you’ve got your patch on the wrong eye.”

There came a sudden knocking at the back door.

Ice had long since formed in Hubert’s beard and moustache. When he yawned, it broke up and fell off his face. He looked up to see where he was: past both cemeteries now and coming along Côte-des-Neiges. It would be so nice to be home already. If only he hadn’t argued so ferociously with the old man. It would be so nice to lie down right here and sleep. If it were summer he would. But now it would be foolish.

His head was pounding; he was all blocked up in the cold as if his sinuses and the base of his skull—and damn it, the top too—were shrinking. He should never have had so much to drink. But his father’d always had good taste in wine, and Hubert couldn’t resist. He was never able to afford the vintages his father drank routinely. Bourgeois affectation.

Enough maudite neige tonight, all right. He started down the hill towards Atwater. Criss, if he had a sled now it would be easier. Down the hill all the way home. And to rub it in, he had to pass by anglo Westmount. He began to run downhill; he’d get past the Anglos as quickly as he could.

He slipped on the ice and shot out into the street with his leg behind him. Calice, that hurt. Stretched his muscle the wrong way. But he got right up again and started running. It was warmer that way. And if
he fell, well, maybe he’d just fall all the way home. At least he couldn’t fall up the hill.

He cheered up when he realized he was enduring this hardship out of his convictions. It was because of his political beliefs, which his father didn’t share. And why didn’t he? Hubert wondered. He was just as Québécois as anyone, he endured the humiliations of the anglicization of his homeland just as Hubert did, just as everyone in his felquiste cell did. Just as all francophones in Quebec (and the rest of Canada!) did, and had ever since the first humiliation of Montcalm’s defeat by Wolfe. Wolfe indeed.

It had been a mistake to go home for Christmas. It was a mistake to think anyone could enjoy a normal life while anglicization proceeded behind their backs, while they were asleep. Every day and every minute the Québécois were threatened with assimilation into the great unwashed English mob of North America. Already too many of them had intermarried, and bred children who could no longer speak French—right here in Montreal, there were French kids with French names who couldn’t speak a word of it. Families broken up by this linguistic gulf. There were grandparents unable to talk to their own descendants.

But the shame of it was the lack of realization, he thought. Like his father, no one seemed to understand that a passion to preserve the language was not simply a fanatical assertion of tribal will. For him a language was not simply a way of communicating, like the telephone or the postal system. A language is a way
of thinking. It’s a way of being, a way of life. If you take that away, you’ve destroyed an entire culture. You can’t have French people who do not speak French. If they speak English, they are Anglos.

“Vive le Québec libre!” thought Hubert. There was no one else about; he left the icy sidewalk for the clearer road, and ran leaping down the hill. He began to shout. For once, it was good to yell out what he’d always only written down, what had been kept hidden for fear of the police. It was a new year; it would be a historic year. Now they were invincible.

“Vive le Québec libre! Le Québec au Québécois! Maîtres chez nous!”

The premier plays as important a part in this story as he does in Quebec politics; but here, although it’s a briefer one, it’s no less tragic.

The invincible Péquiste premier of Quebec, a man dedicated to forging a new nation for the Québécois, was liked and disliked and scorned and respected by anglophones and francophones alike. He was intelligent, resourceful and experienced. He’d been a war correspondent (for an American—English—paper); he had a lovely young wife; he smoked like a chimney even in the presence of the Queen of England herself; he knew how to take a joke; he’d been to school with the prime minister of Canada. In short, not just a cunning politician, but a man of the people as well. Marie and Hubert were among his many strong supporters. They considered him the absolute leader of the
political side of their struggle, just as they were the military side; like Ireland’s IRA and Sinn Fein.

The premier and his wife were discussing which English private school they should send their children to. Lower Canada College had its good points, not the least of which was its location, right here in Montreal. But Upper Canada College, while it was in fact in Toronto and therefore more expensive due to the cost of boarding, had the advantage that it would totally immerse their children in the English language and make them more proficient. It would also introduce them to a different set of someday influential classmates. There was no need to worry about entry into the right circles locally; how could there be for the children of the premier himself? But it never hurts to broaden one’s sphere of friends, and if, some golden day in the future, Quebec should really achieve independence, personal friendships with the powerful people of Canada could not hurt their chances either politically or financially. Which was the point of sending them to English schools in the first place. It was insane not to be fluent in the majority language of North America.

This discussion had begun at the home of some friends where they had spent a quiet New Year’s Eve, away for a brief moment from the minefield of public discourse. These friends had children at Royal Mount, just a few blocks from their Westmount home, and were extolling its virtues; the wife held a seat on its governing board. Now, hours and many drinks and more cigarettes later, after midnight
mistletoe and suitable noise and hilarity, after another bottle of champagne, the discussion was continuing as they drove home.

Both were tired, both were cold. At this time of night, despite the distance, home was not so far away. There were few cars on the road and even fewer people. As do all Montrealers, the premier shot along the empty streets at highway speeds. He fumbled in his coat for his cigarettes and opened the pack easily with one hand. He jabbed at the dashboard lighter as the car began the long downward arc from Westmount Boulevard onto Doctor Penfield, where they would cross Atwater Street into Montreal.