Black Bird (18 page)

For the first time since she’d been a child, he embraced her. They both cried.

“And the father?” he asked.

“He’s dead,” she said.

That startled him. Should he pursue it? But if she confessed pregnancy, why would she lie about that?
This was not the time for a petty argument to divide them. The father was dead.

“And do you want the baby?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t need anyone to go over the arguments with you. You’re not stupid. And what I think doesn’t matter. You must decide. When you’ve decided, let me know. But you’re a Desouche. So we’ll help you. No matter what.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said.

“It’s nobody’s business,” he said.

Marie made the decision; Father made the telephone call; Dr. Hyde performed the service.

It was a grey afternoon in February. The streets were black with old snow and moisture; the mountain’s trees were bald and grey. They walked together up Pine Avenue to Dr. Hyde’s office, their breath coming in great, laboured puffs up the hill. It was thirty degrees below zero, but they were both damp under their coats. Below them lay the flat field of the water reservoir and then the downtown core; above them, Ravenscrag and the cross.

Father waited in the anteroom. Marie lay in a hospital gown with her feet elevated. Eventually Dr. Hyde came in; he washed his hands and put on a robe but he didn’t wear a mask. As he had with Mother months ago, he explored and probed and occasionally leaned back and stared in silence, as if considering. The room was bright with fluorescent light. Marie stared
at the white tiled ceiling but saw nothing. She hadn’t yet felt any pain and wondered whether it could be over already. Or had he even begun? Why was he simply staring?

He leaned in close between her legs and pushed her thighs apart, and touched her. She shut her eyes tight and suddenly remembered.

Father Pheley. The last time she’d been in a church.

Something entered her and she struggled to control her panic. She’d got herself into real trouble this time. It seemed to go on forever, and she was beyond thinking. This was not what she had wanted for herself, none of this had ever been in her plans. Somehow she’d been incautious and now her only salvation was in someone else’s hands. Literally.

There. Now it was beginning to hurt.

“Just be calm.”

She clutched her hands together, covered her face with them, began to gulp air.

“A minute more. Just a minute more …”

She yelped with pain, and suddenly felt the warm trickle of her own blood.

“There.” He sighed and leaned back. “It’s done. You can go home, Marie. You can rely on my discretion.”

She stood and wiped tears from her eyes. He gave her tissue and she wiped herself. Sobbing, she put her pants on.

“Can I rely on yours?” He wiped his forehead and put his robe back on.

She left the cathedral in tears, as many penitents do. Her sins were many and grievous and she didn’t
understand them. Nor did she understand her penance. But she would never again go to confession, and since she cried hysterically whenever Mother asked her to, eventually Mother stopped asking.

The money meant nothing to him, but Dr. Hyde asked Father for it anyway. Father sighed and handed over the cash. He helped Marie with her coat and steadied her with his arm as they left.

Marie had lost both Hubert and his child but she was still burdened by his things, just as Mother had been with Angus’s. She stood in his dark basement apartment with the ceiling pressing down on her. Just weeks ago the squalor had been invisible to her, immaterial and so unnoticed. But now, because something had to be done with his few belongings, she was forced to confront them. She tried to think what she might do with a hard, soiled cloth couch, a lumpy single bed and its sleeping-bag spread, a cracked plastic radio and his scattered laundry.

This was where they’d made their secret plans together. That bed was where they’d shaken the world, and each other. In the dresser drawers she found his notebooks and pens. In the closet she found stacked boxes of photocopied pamphlets and manifestos.

Open letters to the press, the people and the prime minister; calls to arms, denunciations and revisionist histories of Quebec. They were signed with the
rhetorical names of their committees, their cells, their organization. But in fact they represented the collected works of Hubert Lacasse.

Marie left behind the broken furniture but by default she was now the leader of her cell—it was the least she owed to her former comrade and lover, for dying in silence like a hero, like a martyr—and so she couldn’t leave his papers, the record of his work and life.

But she couldn’t allow them to be found in her possession, either, and when she returned to the attic at home where she’d been sleeping, she found the perfect place to hide them. She emptied her brother’s boxes of chapbook poetry and filled them again with Hubert’s pamphlets. She covered the top layers of manifestos with some of the original stapled booklets, closed the boxes and sat staring at the surplus on the floor.

What were these decaying sheaves of paper but a wasted youth? Cartons full of them had sat alone in the attic for years, since Jean-Baptiste had first begun printing them as an adolescent. Marie knew that some had never left their boxes. Jean-Baptiste had printed, collated and stapled his pamphlets in a rush of enthusiasm generated by the self-love his latest outpourings had caused. But then, panting in the afterglow, he’d come to realize their inadequacies, their emotionalism, their pretensions. Deflated, he’d simply shut the lids and let the paper moulder under the eaves like clothes he’d outgrown.

Jean-Baptiste would never notice how Marie had substituted someone else’s writings for his because he
never opened these boxes any more. And Marie rid herself of his excess poems by lining her coat pockets with them and smuggling them out of the house unnoticed. She smiled and thought of the irony: that it was she who was taking them out of the house. He’d never dared cross the threshold with them, and here she was, introducing them to the world.

And what did she do with them? She dropped them one by one into trash cans as she walked by, or balled them up and tossed them into the sewer. Or she’d heave a handful into the path of an oncoming snow blower. So they settled in place beside candy wrappers and old newspapers or bobbed on the half-frozen surface of thick, black water, or they fell like the packed snow and ice into trucks bound for the Victoria Bridge, where the whole frozen load was dumped into the river and floated gradually out to sea.

It pained Marie to have the ideas and sentiments of a true Patriote hidden under the irrelevant pretensions of her airy and distant brother. But then, rather than doing Hubert’s works any harm, maybe his would do her brother’s some good.

And they did.

Angus was getting the hang of things. If it wasn’t getting any easier, at least it was becoming a little more familiar. He knew he was out of place. He felt the presence of his own things in the house, but he couldn’t find himself. He went to look elsewhere, on the mountain, with his wife. Where else should he
be? He battled the winds careening around the slopes, lost his way more than once and then found himself before the headstone. Now it had his name on it too, not just his wife’s. But he knew he wasn’t there.

And neither was she, he suddenly realized. His wife’s grave was empty.

He allowed the breeze to carry him away and lost concentration. He drifted back to the house, where his things were, where his family was.

There was Jean-Baptiste, cross-legged on the bed, scribbling away in his notebook. Angus waited, patiently he thought, but it seemed like forever. Everything seemed like forever, now. Finally Jean-Baptiste stopped writing and looked up. Right at him, Angus felt, and willed himself to shout.

But it was no use without a tongue, without vocal cords, without lungs. Jean-Baptiste didn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything. His stare was blank, his eyes empty and unfocused, and it made Angus uncomfortable, as though his grandson were looking right through him, as if he couldn’t see him at all.

He gave up.

Work had begun again for Grandfather and Uncle. It had been hard to pry Uncle out of his hibernation, but Grandfather was eager to get back to business. He felt a new strength with the snow clearing and the sun returning. He began to buy the newspaper again, to follow the obituaries. He kept his eye open for stories
of tragic early deaths; youngsters were better, more profitable.

But Dr. Hyde greeted them with reluctance, something he’d never done before. Surely these specimens were just as good as ever? And weren’t the medical students’ exams coming up soon? Demand was always high in the spring, what could be wrong? Hyde paid them less and less, became more and more surly, and offered no explanation to their queries and complaints. A man couldn’t risk what they were risking if it wasn’t profitable. If there was something wrong with their deliveries, he should tell them. This way nobody was happy.

But how could Dr. Hyde have told them the truth? That it had been many years since he’d had to rely on their scavengings for his medical students—since the laws about unclaimed bodies, prisoners dying in custody and public donations of remains had been introduced in the forties. That he’d been paying for far more bodies than he’d ever had a use for, just to keep the supply coming, just to gather an organ here or a limb there that might be suitable for his experiments. Or, if providence smiled on him, for his ultimate project.

But now there was one single organ he still required, and he’d realized they’d never be able to provide him with a suitable one, no matter how many corpses they delivered, no matter how long they toiled in the darkness on his behalf.

At last they came to argue. Dr. Hyde’s form was outlined in the door where he stood by the light
shining out into the yard. They could barely see his face, but by his stance and his voice they knew he was troubled, and whatever it was came out as anger towards them.

“I’ve no more use for the dead,” said Dr. Hyde. “Don’t bring any more corpses, or I’ll have you arrested.”

Uncle grunted angrily. Grandfather said, “All right, Doctor. But the police would want to know why we’d come to sell them. Your reputation couldn’t save you from scandal at least. We’d all be arrested.”

Words flew back and forth in the heat of the argument, but they all knew none of them would talk to the authorities. In the end, after the anger was spent, Dr. Hyde sounded not just exhausted but almost despairing:

“There’s only one thing I need.”

What he needed was a miracle.

Aline was miserable. The winter had been long, the spring merely allowed the dog shit in the backyard to thaw, and she struggled with the idea of leaving not just Grandfather’s room but the Desouche house. When she’d married, her father had moved into a smaller apartment, and now she was afraid to burden him again with her presence. He’d no money, either, except his meagre pension, and she knew that sometimes he’d been reduced to sharing the cat’s dinner. She’d no reason to stay where she was except for Grace, and she couldn’t impose herself and the bird on Papa and his cat.

But Grace began to get more lively as the days got longer, and louder too. Aline still fed her bread crumbs out of her hand, and spoke to her as her only friend. Grace responded with her cawing and screeching, and at times Aline felt it was quite musical. If only her voice were a little less strident, not so loud. She began responding to Grace’s calls by imitating them but pitching them just a little lower, a little softer. It became a game for them, and a little amusement in Aline’s bleak life. The back-and-forth cawing and chirping went on longer, just a little longer, as if Grace had caught on that Aline was talking to her. Occasionally Grace would begin the game unprompted. Aline was charmed, and joined her voice to the bird’s.

Grace was teaching her to sing.

Jean-Baptiste was dizzy. He’d been inside the world of his own head for so long, had concentrated on every line of dialogue in his play so closely, had dreamt its action over and over and over again so many times, that as he looked up from his small desk at the room around him, he felt almost as if it had magically appeared out of nothing at all, and the real world of his imagination had dropped out of existence. How strange it was: the unmade bed, the papers and magazines stuffed between the pages of scattered books, the dirty plates and cups he’d never returned to the kitchen, the laundry piled in the corners.

He gathered the cups and plates and went down to the kitchen. It was dawn, and he and Grace had it to themselves. He washed the dishes, gave the crow some bread; he splashed water on his face, stretched, and looked out the kitchen door and up into the sky. It was the same sky, but now he was different.

He’d finished a play. He was a playwright.

It was a complete surprise; he’d never had the least interest in the theatre and had rarely even been, except for school trips as a child. He didn’t even like Shakespeare. But now he was a playwright, he had a complete script sitting on his desk upstairs, and he knew it was good.

But what to do with it?

St. Joseph’s, a spiritual sanctuary like any other, had no locks on its chapel doors. It would be unthinkable to prevent a supplicant in need of solace from obtaining it. It would prove too shallow an opinion of the Lord’s children to fear any might be tempted by God’s material riches. It would be a miracle if anyone could, after climbing all those steps, have strength enough left to carry anything off.

Panting with the exertion before the great double doors, Grandfather and Uncle sat on the threshold to get their breath back and lit cigarettes while they were waiting. Across Queen Mary Road, at the foot of the hill they were on, lay the grey stone Jesuit college where Frère André had stared at the spot where they were now sitting and dreamt of the church they
were soon to enter. The church where he was entombed and wherein lay, appropriately enough, his very heart.

Inside, before the heart itself, they found themselves alone with Frère André. Others were praying in the chapel, under the dome of the great altar, at Frère André’s tomb itself and even in the original small wooden chapel behind the oratory. But here in the museum of the thaumaturge of Montreal, they were alone except for the presence, in the three display cases, of mannequins representing the priest in his original settings. There in the leftmost case was his entire bedroom, the very floors, furnishings, windows and ceiling from across the street; while the rightmost case held the tiny hospital room in which he had died—including the very bed and his very sheets, hospital white and hospital crisp.