Black Bird (17 page)

And so for years his jars and solutions, his devices and desires, had kept Grandfather in business. And for years Grandfather had kept the doctor’s researches alive with his spade and his satchel.

Dr. Hyde strained to conceal his pleasure in acquiring a corpse of such positive freshness, for to give away his eagerness would only drive up Grandfather’s already high off-season price. Yet Grandfather and Uncle too were themselves so pleased and relieved to do some unexpected business that all three postured and restrained themselves, and all three were so concentrated on their own self-control—a discipline none had much practice with—that all were oblivious to the others’ odd comportment.

Affecting disdain while examining the body, Dr. Hyde asked, “Have you taken to ambulance chasing now, Desouche?”

“Eh?” said Grandfather.

“He’s unembalmed. He’s not been buried.”

For a second, Grandfather worried. But then, “Pickled or not, we take our wares where we can in lean times, Doctor. The both of us.”

Dr. Hyde hmmed. “He’s quite bruised. The blood’s still draining from these wounds. Here …,” he pointed, “and here,” turning the head. “Ribs cracked. This leg’s broken in several places.”

“He’s still dead,” said Uncle.

“Yes,” said Hyde, “perhaps dangerously so. Perhaps he’ll be missed.”

Grandfather took the inference. “Don’t worry, Doctor. If my friends in the police are looking for him, they’ll look under other rocks.” And he grinned, for he’d never been able to say anything remotely similar, and with such confidence.

Hyde studied Grandfather’s face. Friends in the police? Grandfather? That was an entirely new factor, and not one Hyde could welcome. But if it meant there was no danger in this transaction … This was no mummy. This one hadn’t been unearthed after the indignities of formaldehyde and cosmetics. He couldn’t have been dead more than a few hours—and he was practically fresh-frozen. This was worth losing sleep over; this was the one he’d been waiting for.

The black sky was passing towards grey, the only sign of dawn Montreal gets in winter. Dr. Hyde dismissed thoughts of returning to bed. It was time to work, for some things needed immediate attention and he could sleep later.

He stripped and cleaned the corpse to get a better idea of its condition. Broken legs, a crushed rib cage:
these he could replace, but he could do nothing for the heart, which had been shredded by the cracked points of the corpse’s own ribs. The lungs had collapsed but merely needed reinflating. A few stitches required on the face. The main trouble was that much of the skull appeared to have been crushed at the back of the head and the delicate tissue beneath it pulped. Not so easy to replace.

He’d tried it once, in the late fifties, with apes: switched their heads. The operation had taken eighteen hours. The donor had died instantly, of course. The recipient had been kept alive artificially through the operation, and then died when the plug was pulled. There had not been even the remotest indication that more research, more experimentation, more anything, would have promised success. It was a complete and total failure. He’d been too demoralized ever to try it again.

In which case, the only thing to do here was remove what couldn’t be saved and patch up the rest. Dr. Hyde spent some time carefully removing small, sharp fragments of skull from the jellied pinkish-grey mass behind Hubert’s eyes before he put down his tweezers, picked up a scalpel and, with a sigh, simply cut out the bruised portions as if he were removing blemishes from damaged fruit.

Fortunately, this meant there were now large enough pieces of skull to cover what remained. He put Hubert’s head back together the way Aline made a quilt. Fit a piece in here, stitch on one side, find a patch big enough, now one shaped more or less correctly to fill
the gap, and there you go. At the end the head was closed up neatly, almost as if it had never been opened.

But it was a lot smaller.

Why had Marie fainted?

She was no weakling in any sense. It’s true, the kitchen had been even hotter than the rest of the house, what with the oven going for the baking. And she’d had as much cheap, sweet sparkling wine as anyone that night—more than some. And the sight of the police had scared her; the sight of Hubert dead had shocked her.

But Marie was young and in perfect health, and a hardened realist. As soon as she regained consciousness, with the mortician holding smelling salts to her nose, she knew the world was now fundamentally different. It wasn’t simply that Hubert was dead, or realizing how that affected her work, the work of their cell. It wasn’t that Mother was asleep or Grandfather in some strange happy mood, or Jean-Baptiste mysteriously delighted with a gift that was supposed to be an insult and a provocation, or that she’d found herself enjoying time with Aline.

No, it was something else. It wasn’t just a matter of circumstance, and it wasn’t just these feelings of guilt and familial loyalty welling up to overcome her dedication to the Great Work. There was something substantially and almost physically different. If not with the world itself, then with her. What the hell was this magically transformative power of Christmas?

Over the following week she found herself often dizzy, sometimes ravenously hungry and sometimes inexplicably nauseous.

She was, of course, pregnant.

Aline was now fully cognizant of Grandfather’s trade. She felt as if a shroud had been drawn over her. She felt as if she herself were dead. For a single brief moment on New Year’s Eve, she’d thought the old Grandfather, the charming, gift-bearing suitor who’d seduced her into marriage, had returned. Through her mind had flashed the thought that somehow his accident had changed things. That Grace had not just taken an eye but forever altered his perspective, and that he would henceforth see things in a brighter, clearer light. That he would love her and be worthy of love himself.

Instead, the horrible truth had been revealed. Resurrection man, the cop had said. She fought the idea that it could be possible, that such a person might still exist in the modern world; but Grandfather had come when he was called, and had taken charge of the corpse almost with glee. He hadn’t been afraid of it or repulsed by it as she had been.

He was used to corpses.

He’d bundled it up like merchandise, and went off to peddle it.

The whole unholy business gave her the shudders. And now she realized the rest of the family had known what she hadn’t. Had they been keeping it from her,
or was it simply such a part of reality for them that they assumed she knew? What did it matter? It coloured her view of them all; but worse, it coloured her view of herself. She was his wife. She had shared her bed with him.

Her eyes were red with tears and her nose sore from the blowing. She wrapped herself up in her winter clothes and braved the January cold, and rode the bus to St Joseph’s. She tried to pray to Frère André’s shrivelled black heart, but she couldn’t find the words. She simply knelt before it, hung her head and sobbed.

Jean-Baptiste continued working away at his play over the winter. He came out of his room only for meals, the washroom and when someone forced him.

Mother continued her slumber. Dr. Hyde had shown up at the door one day with a real hospital bed for her, with rails to keep her from falling out. He still had no idea why she slept, but he knew the army surplus cot they’d put her in wasn’t going to help.

Father and Marie shared the task of caring for her, and thus spent more time together now than almost ever before. The clear realization that they had in common a concern for Mother was a kind of gift to them both. For Father it meant that Marie wasn’t entirely alienated from the family—from him—as she had seemed in recent years. Perhaps she might be coming back into the fold. He’d always worried more over his daughter than over his son because
it’s common for fathers to do so and because Jean-Baptiste was usually home. For Marie his concern was a clear sign that Father still loved Mother; and if that was possible, after all the hard years, after all the mutual dissatisfaction, it meant two things: that love itself was real, and that a lifetime commitment could actually be met and sustained.

Uncle walked his dog whether it was warm or freezing, clear or snowing, and otherwise kept to his room and his cigarettes.

Aline spent most of her time in the kitchen, the closest thing she had to a room of her own. It simply didn’t occur to her to displace Marie’s things. She bedded down among them as if she were a temporary visitor and Marie would be returning from the attic shortly. Aline moved slowly about her tasks—trying to eliminate the stains from the porcelain sink, putting new shelf paper into the cupboards, cleaning Grace’s cage—in between times of just sitting at the table, gazing out the window and across the lane at the blank stone wall of the church. Grace hopped about from the transom above the door to the top of the refrigerator, making the odd sound or flying round Aline’s head as if trying to get her attention.

Grandfather realized that he was indeed beginning to see out of his new eye. He still took it out every night and cleaned it, and left it soaking in antiseptic, where it settled at the bottom of the glass, looking upwards. He discovered that although both his eyes functioned, they seemed to be out of synchronization or parallax or something.
If he left the new one in and didn’t cover his own real eye, his vision was occluded. They seemed to conflict.

So he still had recourse to his patch, but would shift it now and then from one eye to the other.

He was completely fed up with Aline, and as far as he was concerned, it wouldn’t matter whether she moved back into his room or not. But then, moving the patch to cover his own eye, he suddenly remembered the way her face lit up so briefly on New Year’s Eve, and all she had done for him; and that in fact she was really an attractive and young woman. His desire rose and he regretted their arguments and the circumstances that kept them apart.

Next morning, leaving the eye in its glass, patch over the empty socket, he thought to himself, Yet why should I deprive myself of my conjugal rights? I’m older than her, but I’m not dead. If I want a woman, I should have a woman. And if my wife won’t cooperate, somebody else will.

And off he went.

There came a day when Marie faced the fact that she couldn’t keep her pregnancy secret forever. She’d been mulling over what it meant for her. It was a branch in the road. It was the single most important decision she’d yet had to make, and whatever she chose, it would affect the rest of her life. Whatever she chose, she might live to regret.

She could either become a mother, or not.

Motherhood has often been a delicate question in Quebec. The early policy of the revenge of the cradle—preserving French numerical superiority by making large families a social and religious duty—was loudly espoused by the clergy at a time when they were still the most influential body in the province, especially outside the cities. Later, in the full flush of nationalist sentiment, to have children was to build the state; and when that state was still merely a province that had yet to carry a referendum on independence, every new French vote was a patriotic gift.

On the other hand, to have children and no husband was, if not merely the tragic misfortune of widowhood, clearly a sin. Fortunately for Marie this was at last beginning to change. Most circles in Montreal, English or French, would not have ostracized her. But even the most liberal would have made comments about the hardships she’d face because of someone else’s prudery, and shake their heads in pity. Few would be openly happy for her, would see her child as a cause for celebration and another example of the joy of existence, the miracle of life. Having a child would still be a daring social move. And of course, because life was simply a slap in the face, Catholic Quebec had not yet seen fit to legalize abortion.

Marie also had the very real fear that if she committed herself to motherhood, she’d be abandoning her work. It might not make it impossible, but it surely would make it more difficult still. And it wouldn’t be easy on the child.

In short, to have the child would be difficult; to decide to discontinue her pregnancy would be difficult; to secure an abortion would be difficult. With Hubert gone, she wrestled alone with this problem until she was exhausted and could wrestle no more.

Finally, she went to Father and asked for help.

Father was outraged, disappointed, scared, saddened; he was briefly afraid that the child might be Jean-Baptiste’s—that’s when the word
abortion
flashed through his mind. But after a moment’s consideration, he was flattered and delighted that Marie had come to him.

Father lifted Mother off the bed, holding her in his arms like a groom with his bride. Marie pulled off the sheets, bundled them and unfolded clean ones. Why was Father silent? She almost wanted to yell, “Say something!”

When she’d done with the bedclothes, Father laid Mother back down in her bed. Marie arranged her hair, began to stroke it. Mother slowly turned, first her head, then her shoulders; then she hunched the rest of her body onto her right side. Father watched his daughter caressing her mother, and silently moved closer.