Black Bird (6 page)

As for moral quibbles, they were more than just easily brushed aside; they were never raised in their minds at all. it was a simple matter of necessity: in order to carry on the great struggle, their basic material needs had to be met.

Some funds came from sympathizers of all sorts—the unemployed, the working poor, artists, members of the Church; even some Québécois businessmen, who realized that local customers were silent sympathizers and a little word-of-mouth was good advertising. But since their federal unemployment insurance cheques were pitifully small, the bulk of their living expenses had to be charged up to the cause and paid for out of
its treasury. Which meant that a good deal of their time was spent planning and executing what they described as their “capital campaign.”

And so they turned Montreal into the bank robbery capital of North America.

Marie was in her element. True, she was sleeping on couches, on floors, on camp cots in basements. But here she felt alive, she felt purposeful, she felt vindicated. She missed nothing from her family home. Except, perhaps, the regular meals. But youth and idealism know no hunger save lust, which always seems appropriate to grand ideas. Though they often missed meals or ate badly, and though she and the few other women in those circles were expected to prepare what meals there were—along with performing all the other usually female duties—Marie was pervaded with a sense of self-importance that verged on the sacred.

Their leader passed an infectious inner strength to her through the group’s debates, through tirades against their enemies, by their sexual union, and by his very gaze. It mattered not that living conditions were primitive, that personal hygiene was neglected, that the bourgeois affectations of social conventions were ignored (i.e., that the women were sometimes beaten, often insulted or shouted down). What mattered was that in the end, once victory had been ensured and the people of Quebec were commanding their own destiny, they would be able to build a society that would no longer have need of these crisis conditions. An independent and more confident
Quebec would be able to consider such currently unspeakable ideas as anglophone rights, and then to turn to such secondary matters as personhood for women, linguistic tolerance, a healthy economy.

But in the meantime, there were mailboxes to be blown up, store windows in anglo neighbourhoods to be broken and perhaps even visiting ambassadors to be kidnapped.

Uncle and Grandfather were in a quandary. The digging was done; they had access to the gas feed into the funeral parlour’s basement. It was now a simple matter of shutting the valve from the rear of the property and joining a line to their own furnace. But once they did that, there would be no reason to dig any further; and the thought of tunnelling right into the mortuary itself so tantalized them, the same way that the thought of a bank vault would have tantalized Marie’s friends, that they stood silently staring into their own hole, unable to go upstairs and complete the work. Neither said a word—they only infrequently glanced at each other—but both were thinking that Father would not permit the mad scheme they were dreaming of: to operate out of the family home was to invite disaster upon them all. Their work was tolerated by the others, even those who found it distasteful to varying degrees, but to make accomplices of the whole household would be going too far. And altogether it was just too risky; these were bodies not yet relegated to the machinations of the earth and its creatures, not
yet ceremonially put out of mind. Once their absence was discovered, their route would quickly follow, bringing scandal and police in their wake.

Weighing their desire against practicality, the two men sat on boxes and smoked. They shuffled their feet; they flung their cigarette butts carelessly into the pit; they shivered. Finally, hungry and bitterly cold, they rose and mounted the stairs.

It wasn’t long before they had completed the dangerous task of welding a supply line to their own furnace. The one detail they couldn’t properly manage was a regulator on the line. It opened full throttle or not at all, but since they would never see the bill, it mattered little to them. Within an hour the family thankfully began to peel off their layers of clothing and go about the house comfortably; by bedtime, they were finding the air a little stuffy.

Tossing in their sleep, they threw off their bedclothes and lay naked on their mattresses; when they woke in the daylight, they were sodden with sweat, and threw open the windows to let in the cold air.

Afraid that Grace would fly out the kitchen window and fail to return, Aline devised a collar and a line for the crow’s leg from the elastics she’d saved off lettuce heads. “Why don’t you just let the damned thing go?” growled Grandfather. Grace leapt at him from her perch on the fridge, screaming and pecking at his face and batting him painfully with her wings. Aline still had hold of the line she’d been affixing to the bird, and she pulled on it with all her strength. Grace resisted and the elastic merely
stretched. The noise drew the others to the kitchen, where they saw a black storm of feathers where Grandfather’s head should have been, and Aline shouting out to the Lord while she tugged and drew on the line as if she were flying a kite.

Father and Uncle managed to subdue Grace, and Grandfather escaped with only some bloody scratches on his bald head and his dignity battered. But when order had been restored, everyone suddenly noticed they were soaked with sweat, even though the winter wind had the freedom of the house.

Grandfather had never been gentle with the crow, but neither had it ever been aggressive in return. Now Grace pecked and flew at him whenever the chance arose, almost as if the mere fact of possessing a name had endowed her with the right to hate and persecute just as people do. Whenever the two came together, one would scream and yell, the other caw and squawk, with wings flapping and arms waving, as vicious as the tomcats in the lane.

As the house grew warmer day by day the crow seemed livelier and happier, but Grandfather grew more and more afraid of entering the kitchen and so began to take his meals elsewhere—leaving dirty dishes all over the house despite everyone’s annoyance and Aline’s pleadings that he clean up after himself. “That’s your job, not mine. Anyway, it’s your buzzard keeping me from my own kitchen.”

And they all took to wearing as little as decency allowed inside the house. Less, in Uncle’s case, Aline felt, though even she discarded long-sleeved blouses
and dared a cotton skirt that rose above her knees, for the heat was now terrible, especially when she was vacuuming. And the effort of keeping the house at least clean, if not orderly, was a constant and increasingly necessary one: for the first time in years, neighbours began calling at their door.

It was the heat, of course. In a neighbourhood as poor as theirs, everyone kept their homes as cool as they could bear, preferring to wear sweaters and huddle under blankets in their living rooms rather than burden themselves with larger utility bills. Over the past few days, the neighbours had begun to notice first the open windows, then the snow melting from the Desouches’ roof, and finally even the drifts in the small front yard begin to shrink, turn black and soak into the ground, as if spring had descended upon their house alone.

It was a thing of wonder, but nevertheless to be taken advantage of. Under the pretext of “seeing how Mother was getting along with her grief,” her friends, the women who gathered at the local dépanneur, who’d earlier cautioned each other against disturbing the frail, shattered woman’s peace, came looking for a cup of tea and half an hour in their shirt-sleeves.

Aline was burdened with hosting them, of course, for which she was angry but at the same time grateful, for they did have a positive effect on Mother, who slowly seemed to benefit from their selfish solicitude. Mrs. Pangloss was loudest as usual, even when trying to be considerate of Mother’s precarious condition. She shrieked at the others to speak quietly, slowly,
and to refrain from laughter. This last was directed mostly at old Mrs. Harrison, who was the very image of a witch and who never lost the opportunity to claim she was related to a Beatle.

“Ah, you’re full of shit!” was the inevitable response from Mrs. Pangloss, a woman who admitted that everything in life was false and base; but since she hadn’t the imagination to make any difference in her own life, she accepted as an article of faith that God was doing his best even at this very moment, no matter what disaster was in progress.

They treated Aline as if she were the maid. She brought them little sandwiches and cookies, and they thanked her too loudly, as if she were deaf, and then turned immediately to plying Mother with stupid remarks:

“At least he didn’t suffer; it was quick.” Who could tell what sufferings had been involved? thought Aline.

“Everything’s for the best, dear, you’ll see.” Aline was offended by that one.

“Was there a will, dear? Did you do all right? He must have had some pile stashed away. He was always so tight with his money.” As if Mother would somehow have been consoled by money, and as if a trait they had reprimanded Angus for in life could be counted as a virtue in death.

Yet Mother seemed to believe that their concern was genuine and their prattling more than just thinly disguised malice. She smiled whenever one or more of them came by; Aline would have preferred to toss
them on their ears, but for Mother’s sake she swallowed her feelings.

If Mother had no use for any possible inheritance, the same was not true of Father. He perked up at the mention of a will. Who would have suspected any relative of his would have a will? What of any possible value would anyone have to leave? But now he realized this woman could be right, for he remembered Angus railing against insurance companies while fluttering his bank book. He’d forgotten about the unsettled estate, what with Mother’s fragile condition, Marie’s disappearance and the cold.

But now the returning heat had brought back thoughts of money. He tried to speak of it to Mother, but she pointedly told him she didn’t care about the money. He wanted to know how much there would be, and how soon it would come. He dreamt it would be enough to make an actual difference, enough to invest or to seed a business with. Not merely enough for a good drunk or new clothes or to pay the outstanding bills, but a large enough roll to gather some momentum and change things permanently for them.

It wasn’t the first time Father had schemed a way to financial security. He’d tried a few things in his time, turning his hand to all sorts of trades and occupations. It wasn’t really out of desperation that he’d done so but at least partly out of a feeling that a man of his talents could mould them to almost any task. Therefore he’d tried making badges and ribbons, he’d tried driving a taxi, he’d tried clerking in a
bank, he’d tried being a barber—he still insisted on inflicting haircuts on his relatives—he had tried everything a reasonable man might do, and failed at them all. It wasn’t that his practice proved inadequate to his theory, but that the real market never met his expectations.

Except that one time he’d been a clerk. The problem there had been getting caught. The episode was occasionally referred to by Grandfather or Uncle as “the Bank Job,” but never to Father’s face.

Father discovered that getting Angus’s money was just a matter of pushing the forms through, and so he spent the following weeks pushing. While he awaited the arrival of the cheque, he looked round at the overcrowded hallways and rooms, at the broken, scarred and second-hand furniture. Couches were draped with faded bedspreads to hide their torn fabrics; chair legs were held in place with glue and baling wire; lamps were turned so their cracks and chips would face the wall. He’d always longed to be able to afford genuine antiques instead of junk furniture.

Suddenly he had the brainstorm he felt would shape the rest of his life: he would open a shop and sell and repair antiques. Further, he would open it right next door. That old woman and her son didn’t need the huge old house all to themselves, and he would get it from her. If he had to, he’d bully her into an arrangement; they could live on the top floor, and Father would even give the boy a job, something he’d never had. He’d pay them a woefully small amount of money to rent the entire ground floor as a showroom,
and the basement as a workshop for repairs. At first he worried he’d be unable to find real work simple enough for the boy to do. Bah! he decided, he’d merely set him to driving nails into a plank for no reason at all, and give him five dollars at the end of each day. Father imagined himself driving around town to visit decorators and other antique dealers and architects and designers, and standing them all drinks and dinners to drum up business. He’d buy himself a fine grey suit with a bowler hat in which to look his best for his “clients.”

Mother’s grief became his happiness. Her father’s death was as great a blow as a father’s death always is, no matter how loud he yells or how disappointed he is or how angry, intolerant, even destructive; still she cried for her father because she’d never have another. But for him, his father-in-law’s death was a boon: no more awkward Sunday dinners, no more meddlesome, disapproving advice, no more struggling for the acquiescence of his own wife. For her it was the end of a kind of life, but for Father it was the promise of a new beginning.