For Sure

For Sure

France Daigle

Translated by Robert Majzels

Thanks to all who've
helped me out and that's a
lot of folks for sure

To Berthe, whom I could
never thank enough

CHAPTER 1

What he thought of as his position was, in fact, an adaptation of everything that [. . .] he encountered.

Daniele Del Giudice
,
Atlas occidental,
Éditions du Seuil, 1987

“Dad, go on and sing dat thing you'll be doing after.”

“Afterrrr . . .”

Terry replied absently, as he gathered up the clothes strewn about the room.

“You know! After, when we'll be sleeping.”

Terry was at a loss: they'd given the boy permission to go to bed an hour later than usual, and then he'd been treated to a long and entirely new story — a story with a moral to boot! — and in spite of all that he didn't seem tired. Normally, he'd have fallen asleep four or five minutes into the story. But no, he'd listened to the story of Souricette right to the end, and now he was asking for a song! Did Terry have a momentary doubt that Étienne might be troubled or worried about something? In any case, it had been a busy day and Dad was more than ready for a bit of peace and quiet. So he wasted no time in doing what had to be done to get it.

“You mean Aragon's
Blues?
”

“Ya, Aragonz.”

The Beaufort occurs in Scrabble when the two most valuable letters in a word both land on triple-letter-value squares. To score a little Legendre, one must place one's most valuable letter on a double-letter-value square and another letter on a double-word-value square. Same idea for the big Legendre: the word counts double but the most valuable letter falls on a triple-letter-value square.

“Souricette got it into her head dat she wanted to be a laboratory mouse when she growed up. Well, so she went off to university and after dat she found herself a job in one of dem big companies wot make all sorts of pills. Well, on account of she was pretty sharp and scored real high on all de tests, it got so dose tests dey was givin' her got harder an' harder. Souricette was mighty proud, I can tell ya. She liked dat dey tot she was smart and all, see. Well, she was mighty proud de day de bosses decided to pick de six smartest mice — because dat meant Souricette fer sure — fer a right important test, the X-3X-X3-X test. An' you should know dat dose tests with de number tree in dem, like X-3X-X3-X, well, dose was de most dangerous.

Thinking Étienne was asleep, Terry cut off the story, but he was quickly obliged to take it up again when Étienne moved his legs, which was the boy's way of signalling that he wasn't asleep yet.

“Well alright den. On account of dey'd picked only six mice an' her name being Souricette — like French fer mouse
souris
, and
sept
being de French fer seven, see? — well, Souricette had a kind of achin' in 'er belly just tinkin' 'bout dat test. Someting was boderin' 'er alright, but she'd no idea wot. At last, comes de day of de big test. Dey took all dem six mice an' dey put 'em in a labyrinth. You remember wot labyrinth is don't ya? Course ya do. Well, dis 'ere particular labyrinth was split in two, see, wid one side all warm, and d'oder no heat at all. So tree of dem mice lands up in de heated part an' d'oder tree in de part dat's not heated. Ting is doh, dey'd gone an' put a bit of milk in de unheated part, see, but dere weren't no milk on de heated side. An' why d'you suppose dat was? On account of de company bosses was wanting to find out wot was more important to a mouse: stayin' warm, or havin' a bite to eat. Dose bosses had in der minds dat mice and wee children was more or less de same, an' what a mouse would do, a little boy or girl would do de same.”

Here, Terry paused again, but he was not unhappy to see Étienne move his legs, because he himself had become engrossed in this story he was making up as he went along.

“Come two weeks, de company bosses had der answer, only 'twasn't de answer wot dey'd been expectin'. Alright, hold on now. Dey found all de mice was dead, starved to death all together on de warm side of de labyrinth. Even Souricette was dead. So…de moral of dis story is det: when a body feels sometin' deep inside of him, he's got to pay heed, see. Take Souricette: she was one of dem six mice, even doh her name had the sound of
sept
or seven in it . . . More dan likely she wouldn't have died if she'd paid heed to what was boderin' her. More dan likely she'd have known not to be part of dat test. She had a feelin' down in 'er belly, what some calls intuition.”

Noise, Sex, Axing, Gaunt, Quill, Bliss, Spy, Bag, Drag, Zinc, Zone, Cane, Cave, Ajar, Hurrah, Fey, Waxing, Wig, Ozone, Debut, Hide, Puke, Feed, Tuft, Lodge, Yew, Tool, Mist, Puker, Morons, Wok, En. For a total of 320 and 205 points.

“Wot colour was Souricette, Dad?”

The tone of Terry's reply was such that it put an end to any further questions. The song was sung, the contract sealed.

“Grey.”

“Awh.”

“G'night now.”

“G'night, Dad.”

The American architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game of Scrabble when he was unemployed during the Great Depression. Over a period of 20 years, he tried to commercialize his invention under different names before submitting it for patent under the name Scrabble in 1948. Since then, more than 100 million games of Scrabble have been sold worldwide, in 35 languages.

Terry invents most of the animal tales he tells the children based on details he picks up here and there in his daily life. Sometimes he challenges himself to come up with a moral to the story, so long as the kids are still awake by then. He prefers not to waste morals — which are not always easy to concoct — on a sleeping child.

In her novel
1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold,
the Acadian author
France Daigle makes no mention of the sale of 312,000 games of Scrabble that year, an average of 6,000 per week.

“Wot ya doin', Mum?”

“Changing the time.”

“On account of your not wantin' to be late?”

“No, I'll be late all the same. Only we've got to change the time twice a year. Everybody does it.”

“Awh.”

Citing the novelist Maupassant as an example, the French dictionary
Le Nouveau Petit Robert
clearly recognizes the existence of the popular pronoun
y
,
popular
referring to a word or expression the upper classes would never use. The dictionary explains that
y
was first used to replace the personal pronoun
lui
(him) before going on to supplant the pronoun
il
(he) in both the singular and plural. The
y
can be found in the works of Balzac and Anouilh. Balzac even used the interrogative
c'est-y,
as in
c'est-y vrai?
(is it true?) instead of the more proper
est-ce que c'est vrai
. In Acadia, the pronoun
y
is still widely used. The feminine
alle
, old French for
elle
(she), becomes simply
a
when it precedes a word beginning with a consonant, as in
a chante
(she sings).

“Wot was I doin' down der? Workin' a machine wot cuts puzzles is wot. Dey had me in a wee booth wid a great big screen, but sure an' 'twas like I's drivin' a lawnmower in a field. I was twistin' an' turnin' to cut around dose pieces. In the beginnin' I don't mind tellin' ya, it gave me de heebie jeebies. De design was all laid out on de screen; I only had to follow it. Ya don't believe me? Ask Tony over der. Eh, Tony?”

Croup [24], R(o)il [6], Don(s) [15], Crou(p)ier [12], Qu(e)en [35], (Q)uai [13], V(i)able [13], Comi(c) [22], Ja(m) [28], (B)ee [15], (O)rnate [12], Swea(t) [30], (D)ean [10], Ye(s), [24], Pe(w) [14], Hi(e) [21], (J)unta [14], (H)oeing [49], Stooge [21], (S)im [24], F(i)x [26], (E)ked [14], Y(e)t [14], (O)ld [19], Ooz(e) [13], (F)a [23], Wi(n) [6], (W)ig [9], L(a)v [8], Ga(s) [5], (o)r [2], Booz(e)d [21], T(o) [2], T(o)ld [5]. One player left with 2 points in her hand, for a total of 257 and 314 points.

It was Ludmilla who introduced Terry to the great Léo Ferré's recording of Aragon's poems. She brought the disc to the bookstore one day, thinking it would make good background music for browsing. Terry immediately fell under its spell.

“Well alright den. From now on, yer de one in charge of music.”

Beginning with Gutenberg's invention — more accurately an innovation rather than an invention — and for three centuries after that, the printing of texts using moveable type would be referred to as typography, a word that refers to both the techniques and process of printing and the style of letters and layout of texts.

“So dey tells me I's to follow de green dots to some place where I takes a number and waits me turn. Well, at de end of de green dots, dere was a whole lot of bodies already waitin'. So I figures I've plenty o' time to go fer me blood test 'fore they calls me name. Over at de bloodtests, most times, it's right quick. So off I goes to bloodtests, but when I gets der, tings was a whole lot slower dan usual. On account of one of der staff was sick, is wot dey tol' me. Anyhow, I could see 'twas goin' to take a whole lot longer dan I tot, so I says to meself, I'd best go back over to dem green spots, but right when I's liftin' me arse off the seat, what d'ya know dey calls me name. So in I go! All dey wanted was a wee tube full. More's de pity 'cause it were mighty fine lookin' an' a bright shiny red. Anyhow, by the time I gets meself back to de green dots, dey'd already called me name over der a couple of times. De nurses was kind doh, and dey lets me troo all de same. Only, dat didn't go down so good wid de folks sittin' der waitin' on dere turn. One of dem ups and asks me where I bin, like she knew me! I didn't say nuttin'. Anyway, 'twas written up der on de wall,
take a letter and sit down
, and dat's just wot I done, I'd taken a letter and sat me arse down.”

L'Officiel du jeu Scrabble®
, the
Larousse
dictionary for francophone Scrabble, always capitalizes the name of the game and follows it with the registered trademark symbol ®. As for the lexigraphs of the
Robert
dictionary, the word
scrabble
refers both to a registered trademark and to a board game requiring players to make words using randomly selected letters, but in the
Robert
,
the word is always lower case and without the ®.

Terry handed the telephone to Ludmilla.

“It's for Mrs. Didot . . .”

Although Didot Books was more than four years old, there were still a few customers who thought that Didot was the name of the foreign woman with whom Terry had partnered to open the business. At first, Terry had made an effort to clear up the confusion:

“She's called Ludmilla Bellâme; dat's wot 'er parents named 'er. Didot, dat's a historical-like name fer books.”

“Wouldn't dat be Diderot?”

“Naw. Diderot, dat's anudder fellow. Writer or philosopher more like. Well, really he's a bit o' boat.”

“Dat's wot I tot. De
Encyclopedia
and all dat . . .”

“Didot, he was more a printer. Designed letters an' de spaces betwixt words an' betwixt lines, an' de like. In dose days, printing was more like an art.”

“And when was dat den?”

“Around de same time as de Deportation.”

“Ya don't say!”

Judging by a rapid impromptu poll taken among 102 Université de Moncton students, grey is not a particularly popular colour. The study on colour reception sought to determine if people associate specific colours to individual letters of the alphabet. The students turned out to be eager participants — anything to get away from the official curriculum. The poll revealed that 28 subjects imagined the
a
as red, 21 saw it as yellow, 10 as white, 9 as orange, 8 as blue, 7 as green, 5 as pink, 4 as silver, and 3 as aqua. Two admitted to seeing nothing at all, and the last 5 saw the
a
as beige, grey, gold, violet, and auburn respectively.

One day, when he was alone at home — Carmen having gone to see her parents with the children — Terry had launched into Aragon's
Blues
, and discovered that he knew all the words. This was a surprise since he'd made no effort to memorize them. He took pleasure then in singing the song by heart, and even enjoyed belting it out without the obstacle of a guitar in his arms.

The manuscript-like design of the earliest typographic characters can be explained by the fact that books at the time the printing press first appeared were still being copied by hand. In 1766, Fournier the younger classified typeface styles into roman, italic, bâtarde, cursive,
lettres de somme
, textura or
lettres de forme
, and Gothic Modern or
lettres tourneures
. But it was a Thibaudeau — given name Francis — who drew up what we consider today to be the first true classification of typefaces; this classification is based on the historical importance of the serif, a horizontal line of varying thickness at the base and head of a letter. Thibaudeau defined four general families of typefaces: sans-serif typefaces (Antiques family), rectangular or slab-serif typefaces (Egyptian family), triangular-serif typefaces (Roman Elzévirs family), and linear or hairline serif typefaces (Roman Didot family). Francis Thibaudeau also identified a number of sub-families. This was in 1921.