Black Bird (25 page)

She could choose to continue the larger struggle, a struggle that would consume her and all her feelings and hopes, and would leave her no normal human life. Or she could instead give up the years already devoted to the work, and all the physical and emotional energy it had required, and retire into her family—her difficult, simple family, whom she both loved and hated.

Father was delighted to have Marie home.

“It’s time we started working on putting this house in order,” she declared. “Let’s finish the framework between the kitchen and front parlour so Aline can get through without tripping over something or
getting her sleeves caught on a nail. That’s where we’ll open the stairs to the adjoining basement as well, for your workshop. It’ll be less work to combine them.”

His own daughter back—and involved in the family. She’d never cared before, not like this: having an opinion, offering advice, even lifting tools to help—so much more help than his brother or father had ever been. Or his son. She was growing up. Not just that, but having her help in his project to launch a new career, to better the situation for all of them: it was a boon, a refreshing breeze that lifted his spirits and set his ambitions afire.

Years ago, when he’d been a younger man and Mother pregnant with their future hopes, he dreamt one day he’d work beside his son. Physical work like this, where you felt your muscles and sweat, where tools and materials passed hand to hand and where something actually got made. He held a beam as Marie yanked with a crowbar, and remembered that early longing. Now his son was in jail, a traitor to the family, and Marie, his daughter, was bringing him this unexpected satisfaction.

“Here, let me try it,” he said.

“No, no,” said Marie. “When it comes free you have to hold it. It’s too heavy for me, but I can work this lever.” And she put her back into it, instinctively holding her breath with the strain.

She’s smart, too, he thought. She could make a difference around here. She could really change things if she put her mind to it.

Once that was done it was time to attack the basement in earnest.

“We’ll throw out all this old trash of Angus’s,” said Father.

“No,” said Marie. “We’ll work around it like everything else down here. It belongs to Mother now. She’d never forgive us if she woke and it was gone. Any one of these pieces might be a real treasure to her.”

“You’re right,” said Father. He realized then that he and Marie had always bonded through Mother. She was their link, and caring for her was how they expressed affection for each other.

“And there’s plenty of room,” said Marie. “In fact, we’ll raise partitions here and create a little room where I can sleep.”

“You’re fine where you are. Why move into this dank basement?”

“Jean-Baptiste will be back soon. They won’t keep him locked up forever. I need my own room. Right at the end here, and we’ll stack Angus’s boxes right up against it. It’ll be quiet and snug. You can work in the rest of the basement and never know I’m here.”

“To hell with your brother. You stay where you are.”

So that was that. If she wanted a room in the basement, she’d have to hide it.

Naturally the renovations took longer than expected. The sheer amount of physical work was the main deterrent. It loomed over Father’s imagination like an unyielding mountain, an implacable fate. But this was perfect for Marie. It was easy for her to make her own arrangements with false walls and hidden ducts
in the mass of lumber, plaster and dirt being moved about. With Angus’s boxed possessions stacked up against her meagre four feet of false wall, no one even glanced over in that direction, let alone wondered why so much space was lost. And the sealed boxes of books, magazines and old clothes provided effective noise-proofing as well. Which would come in handy when her plan came to life.

Hyde sat in his office with only a desk lamp for company. He was going over his old case notes, reviewing every experiment he’d done for years, trying to remember every error, so as to avoid them all now. He knew he was close. So close, he’d spent some time just staring into the darkness collecting his thoughts, daydreaming the papers—no, the book—he’d write about his work, his experience, his life. It was important. Everyone would see that. He would explain it properly. But for that, he had to turn it over in his mind, prepare his arguments in a logical fashion. He’d wandered, luxuriating in the acclaim he imagined would be his. He scolded himself mentally. He must get back on track. He’d never been a daydreamer, never been a man of fantasy.

If it were possible to artificially create a being in the laboratory, Hyde thought, and that being possessed the traits recognized as the soul—conscious and deliberate actions based on desires and emotions, the ability to master mere animal instinct or reflex reaction, a sense of self that marks one’s own individuality—then
that would go at least partway towards demonstrating that these traits and the soul itself were nothing more than either a property of matter under certain conditions or inherent aspects of a complicated system. Perhaps even the governing component of a series of subsystems, all adding up to a conscious human being. On the other hand, if such a being were created and demonstrated none of these traits or qualities, then that might lend credence to the idea of the soul as either some kind of divine element that predates corporeal existence, and perhaps even outlasts that state, or a biological or genetic element that appears, matures and dies with each individual.

In other words, are we momentary or eternal beings? It’s a purely scientific question, and the answer, either way, would revolutionize our existence.

That’s what the whole ghastly business was about, the years spent taking people apart with scalpels, trying to get legs, arms and organs working and living, even if only one piece at a time. That’s what the opening of skulls was for, piercing living, conscious brains with needle-thin electrodes and introducing random charges into an already working system. He still watched his own old films, black and white, himself in the bleached robe glaring out in high contrast under the operating lights, while the edges of the frame were dark, like a silent film from the twenties. One scene kept turning up in his dreams, a recurring nightmare: an ape waking, blinking weakly and then, clearly confused but instinctively and inconceivably horrified, trying desperately to scream—
but unable to do more than grimace, so wide it seemed its whole skull would fall out. Mercifully, it died almost immediately.

And the other memory, more comical, since he’d no qualms at the thought that the patient was—had to be—fully conscious during the operation. What happens when I touch you here, he’d asked. Burnt toast, Doctor. It smells like burnt toast. That one had made his name, early on, been broadcast to a world amazed at his daring, his skill, his sang-froid.

Hyde smiled. You ain’t seen nothing yet, he thought.

Aline envied Mother. Whatever she was feeling, she felt it all in a dream, and even if it was some kind of pain or suffering, it wasn’t real. Aline, on the other hand, had to face her situation and had no idea what to do. In fact, she was having trouble simply grasping what her real state was, having trouble keeping everything together in her mind to form a pattern or story or a clear picture. She knew only two things: that she’d never known the despair and anxiety that now consumed her daily life, and that her only relief was in Grace.

When she’d been a spinster living with her father, life had been small and difficult: money was a constant problem, they both missed her dead mother, and there was no hope of any improvement or change. Since she married Grandfather, she felt cut off entirely from her father, speaking to him only by
phone. How could she see him without revealing the horrible secrets of her new, unhappy life? Impossible. And it would be unfair to burden him now, when he no longer had to stretch his pension to feed two and had become used to the lavish excess of a single bottle of Crown Royal every month. Bootlegger’s, he called it, in English, repeating the story of how such a respectable anglo family had made their money during Prohibition. And he never ran out of cigarettes now. He travelled in a cloud happily, hacking only when he laughed a little too hard.

She missed her earlier life and pined to go back to the tiny apartment on rue Cartier at the bottom of the hill. But if she did that, if she broke down and confessed that her fairy-tale marriage had turned out to be Walpurgisnacht instead, it would be the end of his rye and his laugh. Even though she knew he wouldn’t hesitate to take her back and would make no complaints. Pensions don’t grow like inflation, and they’d both lived off his meagre stipend long enough. That had been one of her joys in an unexpected suitor, when Grandfather first came around so clearly intent on taking her from his house: that it would make things easier for him too.

Aline was puzzled why the Lord, who’d so clearly favoured her with a vision of the miracle at St. Joseph’s, was now testing her so thoroughly. She’d only fled from one poorhouse to another when she moved in with the Desouches, and life since then seemed one endless, dark litany of disappointment. Grandfather’d turned bitter and vindictive, and had
his horrible accident—which for some reason he occasionally seemed happy for. Mother’d been crushed by Angus’s death; constant family rows drove Marie out of the house and back again; on New Year’s, she discovered Grandfather’s illegal and disgusting trade; Jean-Baptiste’s play broke open a rift in the family, and then he was arrested. Finally, as if it were a sign to her personally that she’d been set adrift by the Good Lord who’d always protected her, the very symbol of their personal compact, Brother André’s heart, had been stolen in broad daylight.

It was flabbergasting. Such brazen heresy. And it couldn’t have been a simple theft; it was crazy to take something of no intrinsic monetary value. There was no shortage of more convertible church property lying about unguarded, that any common thief would more likely have chosen: the silver and gold, the jewelled objects. There was some other reason the heart had gone missing, there had to be. She’d been praying in front of that relic every Sunday since the miracle. Who else knew that? Only God Himself. What more direct renunciation could be imagined?

But why? Why had she lost favour in the Lord’s eyes?

Marie swabbed Mother’s face with a damp cloth, rinsed it, swabbed her arms. She turned Mother as necessary, lifting her arm, bending her leg, reaching as much of her body as she could. Marie performed
these actions with a deep sense of guilt, for being the cause of her mother’s condition. But also with a deep sense of sadness, because she identified Mother’s way of handling her grief with the silence of the Québécois. In the same way that Mother was sleeping through a life otherwise unbearable, the great mass of her fellow Québécois slept through their political and economic suppression. If only they would awaken, how changed things could be. If Marie had transgressed by her actions, by causing Mother’s pain, she would redeem herself by what was to come, by redeeming all her brethren, by awakening everyone to the horror of reality in Quebec, by showing how far they must go, by leading them away from a life made bearable only by intoxication and slumber.

The response to her brother’s play stirred her. It proved she was not alone. It proved that her sentiments were shared, that hers was the voice of the people. Thousands were willing to follow, if only someone could lead. And hardened by her guilt, she knew her only happiness was in doing just that. In leading them out of their complacency and into the new future of Quebec. In awakening the province to its destiny as a nation she would redeem herself and her actions not only in the eyes of the world, but in her own eyes, and, if they knew it, in her family’s eyes too. As she covered her with the cheap blanket, she knew that even Mother would realize that in fact Marie had been taking care of her all along. That a Quebec ruled by the Québécois was better for everyone, even the Anglos.

What the hell was Marie doing? Did she know herself? Angus tried to bring himself closer to her, and felt the anger in her, just as he always had. But now he detected something new too, beneath the frustration and the fear. As he collected himself and reached out to her, there it was, emanating from her like radiation: guilt.

Angus wondered what poor little Marie could be harbouring within her so painfully, and he wanted to help, to extricate the cancerous emotion that was now spreading through her every fibre. But he couldn’t. It was like a barrier keeping him back; it repelled him as if it and he were opposite poles of a magnet.

Angus retreated, dispersed slowly and sadly. Why was everyone so hard to reach? Why in hell could he feel so close to these people, his family, and yet ever be unable to reach them?

As he drifted away he saw, as if out of the corner of his eye—Jesus, to have an eye!—Marie putting a small gun in her pocket and quickly leaving the house.

A gun?

The ride was like a dream. They’d gone over the plans again and again, even walked through the motions with kitchen chairs serving for the car, thought of every eventuality, tested their response to whatever might happen, immersed themselves in this task and its rehearsals until it seemed like the only real thing in the world. Now, riding in the back seat with a gun on her lap, Marie felt as if nothing at all were really
happening, as if she were dozing at the movies, transported along passively as impressions streaked by her eyes. She allowed herself this ten minutes of not thinking or worrying because she knew the others would look to her during the event itself. Just as they had in everything else up to this very point. But now, on the way, with nothing to do but sit in the car and watch the streets of Montreal float by, she let her thoughts wander.