The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories (10 page)

‘What do you want?' asked a man who appeared amidst the suits, with an accent that didn't come from the Beauce.

I couldn't tell him I'd come to contemplate the enemy; I was trembling, but deep down I knew that I was brave. I dreamed up a lie:

‘We came for a suit.'

‘Take whatever you want, for you today, half-price!'

My friend Lapin looked around, felt the cloth, compared the colours. (He didn't want a suit.)

‘That one', said the Jew with his strange accent, ‘you'd look real smart in it. I don't sell
schmattas
here.'

The Jew handed him the jacket.

‘A jacket for that price they don't make any more. And today, for the seminarians, I don't charge you the tax.'

Lapin looked at himself in a mirror on the door, a yellowed mirror, then said to me:

‘Give me two bucks, I want to leave a down-payment. It's a bargain!'

Back at the seminary I reread the little paper that told all the great truths, then I lent it to Lapin, asking him to read in particular an article entitled ‘Buy from French Canadians, not from agents of the international Jewish plot.'

Next day, my friend Lapin asked me if I'd go into town with him; together we went to return the jacket to the Jewish storekeeper on Deuxième Avenue. When we walked out of the disturbing shop after receiving our refund, my friend Lapin and I were dazzled for a moment by the bright light of May, already as beautiful as summer holidays. We had just gallantly brought down an enemy, but at thirteen we still had many more battles against many other enemies before us, until the good people triumphed over the bad.

N
o GENERAL
, not even the most intrepid, is decorated with the number of medals worn by the Catholic child I once was. They hung in a cluster about my neck, bringing together most of the saints in Heaven. They were at my service: one protected me against the flu, another against impurity; one would help me find lost objects, another to regret my sins; one would be with me at the hour of my death, another would help me obey my parents. The saints suspended about my neck were ambassadors too, who reported to God my words, my actions and my slightest thoughts.

The bouquet of medals gradually became a weight around my neck. One evening I threw them up towards Heaven, one by one. They didn't fall down to earth; that was the explanation I gave the overseer of my school who made me hunt in the fields, on my knees, for the medals I had profaned by tossing them around like pebbles.

Several years later, I was leaving for France where I would spend several years. This journey troubled my
mother. France was so far away and I was leaving with so little money. France was a country without religion and I had so little. I was going for so long — what would happen to her grown-up child? She didn't want to let me go without protection. That was why, in the middle of the Atlantic, when the sky was low and the waves were churning furiously, I found, sewn into the lining of my jacket, a sheaf of medals.

‘Chçre maman!'

How concerned she must have been about my fate, to have, without my knowledge, sewn these medals inside my jacket! I went into my cabin and wrote: ‘Chçre maman, You sewed so many medals inside my jacket that our boat's listing to the side I'm standing on …' I felt no desire to throw the medals into the raging sea.

Clinging fast to the guardrail so I could resist the powerful wind, and dizzy before the watery abysses that opened, closed and collided, I thought of a story I had heard. It overwhelmed me, for it was the first time I'd heard anyone doubt the value of the medals we all wore around our necks.

In the summer my father used to sit on the gallery that went around the house, facing the setting sun. The men who went by, at loose ends after their day at work, would stop to have a smoke with him. I listened with the ears of an astonished child to the remarks of these men who knew so many things that I was ignorant of. That was where I heard the story I remembered on the freighter tossed about on a stormy sea between Quebec and France, between adolescence and manhood. I thought of the men from my village sitting with my father, smoking. One of them said:

‘In this life two things are important: arithmetic and catechism'.

The other replied:

‘In modern life nowadays I think you oughtta know more arithmetic than catechism'.

My father added:

‘Too much arithmetic and not enough catechism doesn't make for a good life'.

Then Monsieur Veilleux said:

‘Us French Canadians, we know the catechism better than anybody in the world. But are we the richest or the happiest?'

Monsieur Veilleux's words carried a lot of weight; he had travelled to several cities in Quebec and even to Ontario; his experience was broader than that of the others: he had seen the world.

‘Man', Monsieur Veilleux went on, ‘has to know arithmetic better than anything else. Because arithmetic's education'.

One of the men protested:

‘If everybody's got an education the land'll be covered with priests and lawyers and notaries and doctors. Then who'll grow the carrots and potatoes?'

Monsieur Veilleux replied:

‘I'll give you proof that education's better than religion. Now you take two men: one of them's got an education, always going around with a pencil in his pocket. The other man, all he knows is his catechism; so he hasn't got no pencil in his pocket but he's got a load of medals around his neck. Now let's just say these two men, one with a pencil and the other one with the medals, they fall down a well. Both of
them land at the bottom. The medals too. But that pencil's gonna come up to the surface and float. And when you see that pencil floating you're gonna say: “Arthur fell down the well.” And you'll go and rescue him. Now Albert, he's gonna stay at the bottom, with his medals. So there's your proof that a pencil's worth more than medals and education's worth more than religion.'

After this story my father and his friends smoked for a long time, saying nothing, while before their eyes the sun rolled behind the mountain.

Looking at the sea that was deeper than the well in Monsieur Veilleux's story, I mechanically put my hand in my jacket pocket to check whether I had a pencil. If all the saints on the medals my mother had sewn inside my jacket were powerless, from now on I could count on my pencil.

G
RANDFATHER
was a strong man. Grandfather liked physical strength. His entire life had been a hand-to-hand combat, a test of strength. Grandfather knew only what he had conquered through the strength of his arms. When he was young, almost a child, he was a lumberjack; as a young man he already had children; in the midst of the great frozen silence he could hear them crying off in the distance, in his little frame house. Then he would tackle the giant spruce trees, striking with all his muscles tense, battling the hard wood; and the forest would move back. I've seen a photograph of him from that period: among the other lumberjacks, with his face of an adolescent turned prematurely old, he was as proud as a king. I look at his eyes; because I am his grandson I know: he's thinking that he's the strongest.

Grandfather felled so many trees he was able to buy a farm. In his fields there were more rocks than earth. Grandfather took them away one by one, before he could plant. In the winter the frost would bring more rocks to the surface and every spring he would take up the struggle
again. Then he planted. Grandfather didn't swear like the other farmers; he smiled, because he was the strongest.

A few years later, Grandfather became a blacksmith. I've seen him fighting with the red-hot iron, I've seen him sweating, his face black, surrounded by sparks, battling with the iron — which he always succeeded in bending. He was the strongest. His strength was quiet, like the strength of a maple tree. I had spent so many days of my childhood with him that he no longer knew if I was his son or his grandson, but he always told me as he crushed my writer's hand in his own enormous one:

‘That (he meant his strength), that's something you don't learn in books.'

His big hand would finally open to free my numb fingers and I said:

‘Being as strong as you are, you must be afraid of nothing.'

‘Fear', Grandfather replied, ‘that's something I've never known in my life.'

‘Him, not been afraid?' my grandmother asked ironically, in one of her outbursts of laughter. ‘I can tell you, I remember when he was scared of Protestants.'

Grandfather got abruptly to his feet.

‘If I don't put on some wood my fire's gonna go out.'

And closing the door he grumbled:

‘Fear, that's something I never knew.'

Grandmother took great pleasure in revealing Grandfather's secret to me. She told me the story of Grandfather's fear.

As a young girl, Grandmother had lived in Sainte-Claire. My Grandfather lived thirty miles away, in the mountains at
Sainte-Justine. In order to visit his fiancée, Grandfather took a long road, winding with detours, hills and bumps. The mud lay thick on it. It climbed up hills, then came back down dangerously, avoiding stones and stumps. Between the two villages a few houses were grouped around a small church. Protestants lived in these houses. The small wooden church was a Protestant church. It was a Protestant village.

Grandfather, as strong as the forest, as strong as the rocks in the fields and as strong as iron, was never able to overcome his fear of passing through the Protestant village. As soon as he spotted it he would jump out of his carriage, seize the horse's bridle and take a detour through the trees. When he'd passed the village he would get back on the road that led him to his fiancée.

Grandmother, who had just betrayed a secret, laughed like a schoolgirl suddenly grown old during the joke. I felt myself becoming sad.

Who, I wonder, could have planted such a great fear in the soul of a man who was so strong?

I
N THE EVENING
the bus came back from town. Sometimes it would stop and we'd watch a child from the village, as they used to say, who'd been away for a long time, get off with his suitcases and look around as though he had arrived in a foreign place.

The village was built on the side of a hill. Because of the difference in levels, we could lie in the grass on the slope and have our eyes at street level. Discreetly spreading the blades of grass, we could see without being seen. We could spy on life.

One evening the bus stopped in front of us. The powerful brakes gripped the steel of the wheels and made them shriek. The door opened and we saw shoes covered with grey spats on which broad striped trousers fell; the man placed his foot, in its spat, on the pavement and emerged from the shadows inside the bus. He was wearing a top hat like the magicians who came to put on shows. His coat with tails, as we called his jacket, came down to his calves. There was a white bow-tie around his neck and he carried a leather case like old Doctor Robitaille. The bus set off again. Only then did we notice that the man's face was black.

Was he some practical joker who'd covered his face with black as we did the day before Lent to fool the grownups? We knew that Africa was full of Black people, we knew they had them in the United States and on the trains, but it wasn't possible that a Black man had got on the bus and come to our village.

‘Either he isn't a real nigger or he's got the wrong village,' I said to my friend Lapin, who was lying flat in the grass like a hunter watching his prey.

‘Look how white his teeth are; that's the proof he's a real nigger.'

Without moving his feet, his feet in their grey spats, the Black man looked up towards the top of the mountain, then down towards the bottom, contemplating for a moment. With his leather case, his jacket open to the wind, his black fingers pinching the brim of his top hat, he began to walk towards the top of the mountain. Lapin and I waited a bit before coming out of our hiding-place so we wouldn't be seen. Then, from a distance, we followed the Black man. Other people were following him too, but they hid in their houses, behind curtains that closed after he'd gone by. A short distance from the place where he'd got off the bus was La Sandwich Royale, one of our two restaurants. The Black man stopped, looked up towards the top of the mountain, then down towards the bottom and, dragging his feet in their spats he went into La Sandwich Royale. A terrible cry rang out and already the wife of the owner of La Sandwich Royale was hopping onto the street, arms raised, in tears and squealing as loud as the butcher's pigs.

‘She's a woman', Lapin explained, ‘it's normal for her to be scared like that.'

‘A nigger in the missionaries' magazine and a nigger you see right across from you isn't the same thing.'

The frightened woman didn't want to go back by herself to where the Black man was. Lapin and I had approached the window and our noses were pressed to the glass. The Black man was sitting at a table.

‘The nigger's waiting', Lapin noted.

Several people had come running at the sound of the panic-stricken woman's cries. Pouce Pardu, who'd been in the war, in the Chaudiçre Regiment, had done everything a man can do in a lifetime. He said:

‘Me, I'm not afraid of Black men.'

He went inside. The grownups approached the window and, like Lapin and me, they saw Pouce Pardu come up to the Black man, talk to him, laugh, make the Black man smile, sit down with him, give him his hand. We saw the Black man hold the brave man's hand for a long time, hold it open, bring it close to his eyes. The wife of the owner of La Sandwich Royale had stopped screaming but she was still trembling.

Through the window we'd seen Pouce Pardu take back his open hand and offer a banknote to the Black man. The owner's wife was somewhat reassured, because she said: