Black Bird (5 page)

They had run through the letters and past-due notices, they had weathered the storm of phone calls, they had swallowed the abuse of bill collectors; they had even pretended not to be home when the gas man came calling. But eventually he showed up with a bailiff, and Uncle grudgingly answered the door.

“We would pay it if we could,” he said truthfully. The men nodded, and politely removed their galoshes so as not to track snow into the house, and Uncle led them to the basement door. “Find it yourself,” he said, and left them.

They discovered Mother among Angus’s worldly remains, like a child with dolls, and they exchanged hellos. When they explained who they were, she showed them the furnace. Under the eyes of the bailiff, the gas man sealed the meter, and the furnace went out.

When they left, Uncle took a pair of pliers from the pantry, wordlessly passed by Mother and her things, and broke the seal on the meter. He lit the pilot light, waited a moment to make sure the settings were correct, and went upstairs for a smoke.

Later the landlord, who was equally unsuccessful in collecting his rent from the Desouches, called the gas company to inform on them out of spite.

The phone calls began again. Father tried patiently explaining that winter was a bad time for them financially, and also no time to do without heating. But like all public utilities, the gas company was heartless; its employees were the kind of uncaring functionaries who do so well in totalitarian regimes, precisely because they’re able to bury their humanity under their position so completely. They merely follow the rules, as if such abstract guidelines affect only other management decisions and not people. When the woman berating Father for being a deadbeat made this perfectly clear, he hung up the phone, collected a hammer and nailed shut the door to the basement. The gas man showed up not just with a bailiff but with the police, and Uncle himself handed them a crowbar to wrench open the door. When they flicked on the light, they discovered Mother still down there.

Grandfather, Uncle and Father held a conference around the now permanently sealed meter. Though they had some elementary knowledge of how to jimmy various kinds of meters, plumbing and fuse boxes, they couldn’t simply snap a wire this time. It was already getting colder in the house; but at least that got Mother up out of the damp, unfinished basement.

Next day Father walked over to the main branch of the public library across from Lafontaine Park, and found a book on natural gas with colour illustrations
and complete details on the workings of the system. It never occurred to him that the library would issue him a card, so he simply stole the book, secreting it in his armpit beneath his winter greatcoat. The three men pored over the book all day, getting colder and colder, putting on sweater after sweater, drinking too many cups of hot tea.

At last they decided they had only two choices: to pay the bill, which was impossible, or to direct gas from their neighbour’s line into their furnace, which was dangerous.

The house on the north side of them was occupied by an old woman and her retarded son, which would have made it ideal, but it was heated by electricity and anyway they were already siphoning that. This fact was never noticed by either the old woman or the electric company because Father had discovered that by removing the meter from its housing and simply replacing it upside down, it ran backward. Every morning one of the men would go out before dawn behind the house and turn it right side up again; and so the meter reader never realized it had been tampered with, and in fact the old woman’s bills decreased. But the Desouches didn’t have any electric heaters, and thought it best not to press their luck anyway. So their only choice was the funeral parlour on the south side.

That evening, behind the protective wall of dead Angus’s boxed possessions, with their work-heavy exhalations rising like steam from the ground, they began digging into the black, hard-packed earth.
Despite the cold, their heavy jackets, scarves and gloves left them sweating.

Upstairs, huddled around the kitchen table, with the oven door open and its element glowing red like lava, the rest of the family were freezing. They too wore coats and toques and gloves, but they weren’t sweating. By this time Aline had said, “Que c’est froid, tellement froid!” often enough that Jean-Baptiste no longer had to translate it as “It’s too fucking cold” for Mother. Nor had he to translate Mother’s “It’s like a grave in here” for Aline.

Through Jean-Baptiste, Aline had been trying to convince Mother to take up her old chore of shopping again, at least by accompanying Aline if not going alone, and if only to get into a building with some heat. Aline herself was finding any excuse to run to the corner store or the grocery, scrounging up what little cash was in the house on the pretext of needing more oregano for the spaghetti or another jar of jam for the toast. But Mother wouldn’t go with her. Though she shivered and suffered with the rest of them, she seemed so comfortable in her mourning that nothing would move her.

“One step at a time,” said Jean-Baptiste. “At least she’s out of the basement.” Aline nodded.

Jean-Baptiste had become the link between the two women, translating freely for each what the other had said. But because he resented this position immediately, this extra burden imposed on him by their ignorance of each other’s language, he took to translating quite freely indeed. Usually he would
deliver intact the general idea of their statements, but often in a way which he knew would incense them unexpectedly.

When Aline said: “Mother, if you come outside the house with me, you’ll feel much better. You’ll begin to come outside of yourself,” he translated this as:

“She says you should get out more, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”

And Mother’s response, “Like anyone else, I treat my own suffering as well as I can. And I can’t help thinking about my father,” was heard by Aline as:

“What do you know about suffering?”

But on the other hand, Mother absently accepted a cup of Earl Grey from Aline and only later thought that Aline must have discovered it was her favourite from one of the others and bought it on her own initiative; and when Mother couldn’t finish her morning toast, she had saved it specifically “for Aline’s bird.”

The two women came to regard each other as capricious and unpredictable, and in the end, although they thought of him as their bridge, Jean-Baptiste became just another obstacle between them.

And an irritable one at that. Jean-Baptiste was increasingly unsatisfied living in the family home. He’d never really liked living there, and he was coming to that age when the idea of living away from his parents was transformed from a nightmare into a dream. And ever since Marie had demonstrated that it was possible by disappearing, he had been trying to imagine how he too might leave. He was
held back only by the unfortunate curse shared by all the males of the Desouche line: he didn’t want to work. That is, he couldn’t bear the thought of a regular job, of rising early to ride a crowded bus, of having a boss.

And recent developments had only nurtured his desire for freedom: Mother’s turning away from life, Aline’s growing dependence on him, and now the freezing cold. The only one in the house who seemed unaffected by the drop in temperature was the crow; and as they huddled around the table, it nonchalantly stared at them all from atop the refrigerator, its head held first at one sharp angle and then another, as if trying to figure them out. In the chilly kitchen, its cawing was like derisive laughter.

“That damned crow,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“That’s what Grandfather calls it. Please don’t call it that,” said Aline.

“Well, it needs a name, then. What am I supposed to call it?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

At that moment Father burst into the kitchen from the basement stairs, flinging open the door with a crash. The crow screamed and flew about the ceiling, colliding with the light fixture and sending it swaying to and fro like a pendulum.

Mother jumped up with her hand on her heart and exclaimed, “Gracious!”

The silence seemed sudden afterwards. Shadows rose and fell on the walls; the crow settled on the washing machine’s wringer.

Jean-Baptiste said, “How about Grace for short?”

The family had silently assumed that Marie disappeared out of shame at being found in her brother’s bed. Only Jean-Baptiste knew that if shame was the reason, it was another kind of shame that had driven her from the house. But even he had no idea where exactly she’d gone. Uncle was of the opinion that “A young woman can always find a bed. There’s no reason to worry.” But Father remained concerned, perhaps more than he might have been if Mother had been up to carrying some of the anxiety. It seemed to him that no one else was paying proper attention to her absence; of course, he didn’t blame Mother. And Jean-Baptiste had had an earful from him about not going anywhere near his sister. And what could Aline be expected to think? But the sheer disregard, even scorn, that came from Uncle and Grandfather was a growing irritation that did nothing to soothe his misgivings.

Hour after hour, Father shovelled and sweated in the dark, cold, damp basement, while his two companions silently smoked with a shovel in hand, or grunted to each other as if over the years they had developed their own system of communicating without bothering to speak full sentences. Father found it wearisome. And Grandfather had told him pointedly, “Look, son, you can either talk or shovel. But it’s too hard to do both. Take my word for it.”

“Hell, I’m worried about my daughter—your granddaughter,” he’d said angrily.

“I never worry about women,” said Uncle, and he smacked a rat with the flat end of his shovel.
“Christ,” said Father. “I can’t dig any more, I’m not used to it like you two. What with everything, it feels too much like we’re digging our own graves. I’m so tired I could just fall in beside that rat.”

The others took over. Watching their rounded backs rolling, he stood there for a moment under the burden of their contempt. But he shook it off, and went upstairs to his wife.

Where had Marie gone? Like anyone else who needs a place in a hurry, Marie had gone to her friends’. The Desouches, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea who her friends might be. For them, she had simply disappeared. Naturally she had chosen to associate with people her family would never have had anything to do with—idealists.

Marie’s friends considered the English to be an occupying power, as they were in Ireland and as they had been in India and so many other places.
Anglophone
and
English
were synonymous to them; they couldn’t accept anglophones as Canadians, even though they saw themselves as Québécois, distinct from the French of France. And if you had suggested to them that in the eyes of the natives forced onto reserves, they were just as much occupying foreigners as their perceived enemies, they would certainly have angrily explained the difference to you.

Despite so much historical evidence to prove that their own politicians and businessmen had much more in common with their anglo counterparts than
with them, that their own journalists and pop stars were just as much lackeys of the local money lords as were those of the Anglos, and that any of them would renounce their linguistic and nationalistic patriotism as so much fascist obfuscation the instant they were offered any personal material benefit, those at the bottom of the social ladder—Marie’s cell—clung foolishly to the belief that the French were a nation loyal to their kindred. Marx had been wrong: it was not the power of money that grouped or divided people. It was language, pure and simple.

Meanwhile, lawyers, politicians and businessmen, anglophone and francophone alike, learned one another’s language, made deals together, enacted labour laws benefiting the moneyed, carved up monopolies between them and charged their champagne expense accounts to the working taxpayers in two official languages. In Canada and Quebec money had always been and would always remain bilingual. And as always, for those who had it, it provided not only their continuing comfort and success, but also the despair and failure of those who did not. It bought, through the offices of the media, the illusion that if only it were printed in a different language, it would multiply and disperse more evenly and equitably.

But money was a thing that worried Marie’s FLQ unit only in a practical sense and not as a political force. It worried them only when the bills from those monopolies had to be paid: the telephone company, the electric company, the cable TV. Communications, heating, the flow of information: they were billed in
French, and so they paid happily. Or if they didn’t, or couldn’t, they were hounded by French bill collectors; and eventually, their services were cut off by French workers.

Fortunately, the political struggle cost them far less than their rents. They stole guns, explosives, cars—anything in the way of tools needed to mount their operations. And when it was unavoidable, when they could do nothing without hard currency—to pay off their French lawyers, police friends or drug suppliers—they stole that too, with the same guns and getaway cars. They were careful to observe their linguistic barriers here too; they did not rob the local Caisse Populaire, but instead targeted those great, oppressive anglophone institutions, the Royal Bank and the Toronto-Dominion. Their very names were arrogant affronts to francophones everywhere: Royal, meaning the Queen, and Dominion—need that be explained at all?