For Sure (28 page)

“
Stabbed
'im.”

“On purpose?”

“Well! Would be kinda hard to go an' stab somebody widout noticing.”

“Is it his fault? is what I mean.”

Terry shrugged.

“Like if it were
legitimate defence
, you mean?”

But Terry knew very little more.

“Don't know, do I, but I'll tell you one ting, his dad was no picnic. Not dat Shawn was a saint, only his dad could be terrible mean. 'Twas abuse is wot it was, really, now dat we knows wot dat is.”

“'Ow did it happen?”

Carmen was happy to have found the right tone at last, curiosity, but not without compassion.

“Dey had a fight, only I don't know over what.”

“Was ee livin' wid dem?”

“Yah, I tink so. Ee'd got married, only it didn't last all dat long. His wife ended up
takin' off
out west wid some udder fellow.”

As usual, when Terry evoked his past, the English words had slid naturally into his speech. Carmen knew this was not the time to point it out.

When he wants to read, Hans reads whatever is at hand. As though, in reading, the movement of the eyes were as important as the activity of the mind. It doesn't matter to Hans, what he's reading. For example, this pocket dictionary he picked up in a train station, which he reads as though it were a novel, in alphabetical order. To him, this makes perfect sense.

Ludmilla didn't understand how Terry could go back to reshelving books.

“But, what are you doing?”

Terry turned to her, at a loss.

“You're not just going to stay here?”

Terry finally grasped what Ludmilla meant.

“Well, I don't see wot else I can do.”

He looked back and forth between Carmen and Ludmilla, as though pleading his case.

“Dese're folks I've not seen in a shocking long time. I'm not about to butt in on der business now dat tings is turned sour. I's too late now, 'tisn't my place to interfere.”

And with that, Terry went back to shelving books. Carmen and Ludmilla exchanged a pitiful glance, realizing that Terry felt somewhat guilty about what had happened. Terry added:

“I'll go by me parents' at suppertime, an' see wot's wot.”

Blissful violet. Pale violet, dark violet, blue violet, black violet. Violet ink. Violet iodine vapour. Violet stone. Shrinking violet. White viola, blue viola, the violence of a violet bruise.

No matter how he shuffled the tiles on his rack, The Cripple came up with nothing. But Antoinette knew better than to rejoice prematurely over the prolonged clacking.

“Dat fellow killed 'is dad . . . dat's not someting you'd have tawt could happen in a town like Dieppe.”

The Cripple disagreed.

“Hun! Ask me, it's a miracle it don't happen more often.”

Over the years, Antoinette had learned that her husband's occasionally brutal realism was rarely without foundation.

“Wot makes you say dat?”

“And even more so in old Dieppe. Well, anywhere where der's old families, families wot 'ave been der since de beginnin'.”

“On account of?”

“On accound of, it's like I said de udder day, everyting happens over tree generations. Dat fellow's young, ee's most likely part of de tird generation. An' dat generation der is always doin' someting in reaction against wot came before, wot de second generation done. Or didn't do, as may be. It's as doh dey're tryin' to make amends.”

“An' you talked to me about dis before?”

Where bliss is not the satisfaction of a desire but a place of language.

Back home that evening, Terry related the details of the patricide to Carmen, Ludmilla and Zablonski:

“Seems ee stabbed 'im tree times.”

Carmen winced:

“Tree times. Ee must 'ave 'ad a terrible lot of rage in 'im.”

Terry thought so, too.

“Like I said, I didn't see 'im all dat often. When I knew 'im, ee sometimes came on tough, but ee never scared me. I knew 'twas just a way to cover 'imself.”

“Cover himself from wot?”

Terry didn't know exactly.

“I don't tink even ee could tell you. I mean… his dad wasn't a big man. I can't see 'ow ee'd have to kill 'im in self-defense. Mind you, you can never really know a fellow's strength.”

To support Terry, in a way, Carmen wanted to give the young man the benefit of every possible doubt.

“Could 'ave been . . . wot dey call
mental alienation
.”

Carmen used the English term. Even though she believed firmly in proper French, even she did not always have the right word on the tip of her tongue. Ludmilla blew on her smoking hot tea before speaking:

“Yes, temporary insanity is intriguing. It's so difficult to imagine, and yet, obviously it does happen.”

Terry tried to imagine it:

“Fer me, it's like all de neurons in yer brain decides to change place at de same time… like a
perfect storm
.”

. . .

. . .

“Is neuron masculine or feminine?”

Grids and diagrams: learn to count the squares, to follow the arrows, distinguish the colours, read the annotations. Understand the pattern.

Waiting for The Cripple to put a word down, Antoinette reflected on what her husband had said; she tried to imagine what the young murderer could have been trying to make amends for.

“Aha! I knew it!”

The Cripple lay all his tiles down on the board. The word
ferrures
, or “horseshoes,” which combined with
dialyser
to give him 90 points.

“I figured you wasn't takin' all dat time fer nuttin'.”

“I knew dey would all fit in some way, but I had to wait fer de word to come to me.”

In the field of topology, hope is the most popular of the virtues. It is often accompanied by the adjective
good
, as in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. But the question remains: is there such a thing as bad hope?

Antoinette had drawn seven new letters, but she could see no word. She shuffled her tiles
R
-
N
-
Z
-
I
-
H
-
A
-
U
on her rack, hoping for a lucky accident. What she wished for above all was to double, if not triple, the value of her
Z
.

“Der's dem dat tinks Oedipus killed his fawder on account of ee was jealous dat ee was sleepin' wid his mudder. On account of Oedipus hisself was wantin' to sleep wid 'is mudder . . .”

. . .

“Freud discovered dat.”

. . .

“Well, today, seein' as Oedipus was supposedly an adopted child . . . some says dat ee didn't know de man ee was killin' was his fawder, an' dat de woman ee wanted to sleep wid was 'is real mudder. He never knew dey was 'is real parents, on account of Polybus and Merope never told 'im.”

Antoinette, who was only half listening, would have liked to make the word
zeux,
Chiac for “dey
”
but she was missing the
X
. Nor was she sure that the word was included in the Poirier or Cormier Acadian dictionaries, which also served as references since the
Officiel du jeu Scrabble®
did not include Acadian vocabulary.

“So dat de whole story of Oedipus maybe means dat children ought to know where dey comes from. Dat if dey was adopted, dey ought to be told.”

Antoinette searched for a word on the board to which she could add her
Z
, but in vain.

“On account of, even if you doesn't tell 'em, dey'll sense sometin'. An' sooner or later dat's gonna blow.”

Antoinette, distracted, replied:

“On account dey was adopted?”

“No. On account of family secrets end up becomin' poison.”

The French word for “bruise” or “wound,” alone on a page:
meurtrissure
.

“Tell you troo, der's not such a terrible lot of murders, if you looks at all de problems families got.”

“Wah? G'wan!”

The Cripple did not insist. His ideas often provoked such reactions. He redistributed the letters on his rack, but found nothing better to play than
myes
for 14 points.

“Wot're myes, anyways?”

“Dey're soft-shell clams.”

“An' why is it we doesn't call 'em myes down 'ere, den?”

Olive green, pistachio green, apple green. Celadon green. Bottle green. Green light.
Vinho Verde
. To go green. Miss the green. Greenland. Green patch. Green at the gills. Green thumb. Green rookie. Green-eyed monster. Jolly Green Giant.

Preparing for bed that evening, Terry and Carmen picked up where they'd left off:

“Ee'll get a
hearing
like all de rest, den dey'll likely put 'im in
jail
. Dat's all I can figure.”

Carmen had never seen Terry like this. She figured he was looking for a particle of consolation in the face of his powerlessness in the situation.

“You never know. Might be ee couldn't do udderwise but kill 'im. If his dad was like you say, it could've been provocation, don't you tink?”

“Could be. But does dat make it justified?”

The answer was obvious. Grasping for something, Carmen fell back onto correcting Terry's use of English words.

“Well anyway, a
hearing
, dat's a trial, an' a
jail
, dat's a prison,
by de way
.”

Terry didn't take it badly:

“I knows it. Just goes to show how hard 'tis when dat Dieppe Chiac runs in yer veins.”

From time to time, just so as not to lose the knack, Carmen, too, let herself slip into a mixture of French and English.

“An
fer yer
information
, dat's why we've a pair of
kidneys
, to
clean out
de blood.”

“Bingo!”

Dream of an anonymous character: a few children and their parents are out for a Sunday drive at Cap-Enragé. When they arrive, the dreamer, who is one of the children, realizes that the cape is anything but enraged. Essentially, it's no more than a hairpin curve in the road at the end of which sits a small souvenir shop, more a hardware store than anything else. The family goes in, and the mother buys a few kitchen items. The possibility arises that the cape is a little further down the road, that they've not quite arrived. The father's behaviour is difficult to decipher.

On her next turn, Antoinette found nothing better than to lay an
H
down on a letter-counts-triple square to produce the interjection
eh
both horizontally and vertically. She didn't like such easy solutions, even though they could sometimes be lucrative.

“Twenty-six. How low I've fallen since me 125 at the start.”

“Wot's de score, den?”

“One hundred and sixty-two fer me, 104 fer you, an' it's yer turn.”

Because, after all, they were not playing purely for the pleasure of making words. They also liked to bet, and to win their wager.

In
L'Officiel du jeu Scrabble®
, only two words begin with an
a
and contain two
y
's:
amblyrhynque
and
antéhypophyse
. In English, keeping in mind that the
y
in the English version is worth 4 points compared to 10 in the French, there are five words with two y's:
alchymy
,
alleyway
,
anybody
,
asphyxy
, and
anyway
.

“Wot
bodders
me most is de little one . . . Can you imagine? Yer six years old, yer mudder
more or less
took off,
fucked
off
wid anudder guy, out West of all places — I mean it's not like she was
plannin'
to come by an' see you on de
weekends
, now is it . . . — an yer dad's in
jail
on account of ee killed 'is own fawder, yer granddad
by de way
, who you've been living wid fer as long as you can remember, an' not just dead, but
murdered
! Dat's not just a heart attack or de like! An' by his own boy own on top of everyting, who's yer dad as well! An' you got no
favourite
uncle or aunt to
smood tings over
, let alone
adopt
you.
Anyways
, yer up de creek
eider way
, on account of obviously dose were de two men you
related most to
, weren't dey?
So
, all youse got left is yer granny,
whose
husband only just died —
murdered
by her
own
boy, don't ferget. But ee's down in
jail
now, wot isn't exactly down de road eider, I gotta say, so she don't feel so good 'bout de whole
mess
, an' now she's got a little guy six years old to care fer, not dat she don't love 'im, but der's like 70 years difference betwixt 'em, an' she's gotta
worry
ee'll end up like his dad,
who knows
? Eh? Can you imagine?”