The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories (2 page)

‘Ireland is the country where my parents were born, and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. And I was born in Ireland too. I was a little girl in Ireland. When I was a child like you I lived in Ireland. We had horses and sheep. Then the Lord asked me to become his servant…'

‘What does that mean?'

‘The Lord asked me if I wanted to become a nun. I said yes. So then I left my family and I forgot Ireland and my village.'

‘Forgot your village?'

I could see in her eyes that she didn't want to answer my question.

‘Ever since, I've been teaching young children. Some of the children who were your age when I taught them are grandparents now, old grandparents.'

Sister Brigitte's face, surrounded by her starched coif, had no age; I learned that she was old, very old, because she had been a teacher to grandparents.

‘Have you ever gone back to Ireland?'

‘God didn't want to send me back.'

‘You must miss your country.'

‘God asked me to teach little children to read and write so every child could read the great book of life.'

‘Sister Brigitte, you're older than our grandparents! Will
you go back to Ireland before you die?'

The old nun must have known from my expression that death was so remote for me I could speak of it quite innocently, as I would speak of the grass or the sky. She said simply:

‘Let's go on with our reading. School children in Ireland aren't as disorderly as you.'

All that autumn we applied ourselves to our reading; by December we could read the brief texts Sister Brigitte wrote on the blackboard herself, in a pious script we tried awkwardly to imitate; in every text the word Ireland always appeared. It was by writing the word Ireland that I learned to form a capital I.

After Christmas holidays Sister Brigitte wasn't at the classroom door to greet us; she was sick. From our parents' whispers we learned that Sister Brigitte had lost her memory. We weren't surprised. We knew that old people always lose their memories and Sister Brigitte was an old person because she had been a teacher to grandparents.

Late in January, the nuns in the convent discovered that Sister Brigitte had left her room. They looked everywhere for her, in all the rooms and all the classrooms. Outside, a storm was blowing gusts of snow and wind; you couldn't see Heaven or earth, as they said. Sister Brigitte, who had spent the last few weeks in her bed, had fled into the storm. Some men from the village spotted her black form in the blizzard: beneath her vast mantle she was barefoot. When the men asked her where she was going, Sister Brigitte replied in English that she was going home, to Ireland.

B
EFORE
we bought our house it had belonged to a shoemaker who died in it when he was very old. My mother described him to us: short and bent over because he'd spent his whole life stitching leather. The little shoemaker limped: he had a clubfoot and one leg was shorter than the other. He made his own shoes because he wouldn't have been able to find in any store the small, thick-soled boot shaped like a horse's hoof for his crippled foot.

There was a very low attic on the top of the lean-to attached to our house. That was where our mother used to store boxes of clothing that would be worn by the other children when they arrived. She would let us climb up the stepladder with her. With our heads jutting through the opening in the ceiling, our glances would fall on boxes, suitcases, old magazines, framed photographs - things in the attic which, in the beam of the flashlight, seemed to be whispering secrets. Perched on the stepladder, with my head in a trapdoor which was scarcely higher than the attic floor, I would ascend into a dream from which my mother had to snatch me away. Climbing down the stepladder, I would always return from it a little dazed. In one corner of
the attic was a pile of the shoemaker's tools. They didn't belong to us. The tools were waiting as though the shoemaker would come back and use them: rolled-up strips of leather, shoes to which he hadn't had time to attach the soles, spindles of thread, punches, an awl, a currier's beam with long wooden tongs that held the leather as he sewed it, a tripod, shoemaker's knives. My mother explained what all the tools were used for, but she didn't touch them. Often at night, before I fell asleep, I thought about the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who had lived in our house and died there, and whose tools were still waiting for him.

In those days we knew that man dies only to be reborn. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that if the little shoemaker's tools were still in our attic — and his leather and his thread — he would come back to carry on his trade. The roof cracked, a nail creaked in the wood: in my bed I knew that the little shoemaker had returned. I burrowed deep in the mattress and pulled the sheet over my head. I fell asleep.

One morning I saw my shoes by the bed, with brand new soles made of fine, shiny leather; the worn-down heels had been replaced; my shoes were new again.

‘Who did that?' I cried as I ran down the stairs. ‘My shoes look even nicer than when they were new!'

‘Your shoes were so worn-out it was a disgrace,' said my mother, who was feeding my little brother from a spoon. ‘Last night while you were asleep I took them to the new shoemaker.'

I went back up to my room, suspecting my mother hadn't told me the truth. There are so many things that parents
don't want to tell children, so many things they refused to explain to me, so many things I couldn't understand till I was grown up. This time, though, I guessed. I knew, even though my mother hadn't wanted to tell me the truth. During the night my shoes had been repaired by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot!

I left for school earlier than usual. There was something in our village more important than the sun shining down on us: my shoes. Their gleam was more dazzling than the September morning. I didn't walk to school, nor did I run: I flew. My new soles, sewn on by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who had come back to earth at night to ply his trade in our house, didn't really rest on the ground the way cows' feet did, or horses,' or my schoolmates': they made me fly, though I still looked like someone who was walking. I knew, though, that I was flying. I had been initiated into one of the great mysteries that dwell in the night. I knew that the little shoemaker with the clubfoot had come, I'd heard him limp, heard him pick up his tools and put them down in the attic.

Everyone at our school wore shoes. The nuns wouldn't have tolerated a barefoot student and no mother would dare send a barefoot child to the village school. In the schools on the concession roads more than a mile from the village, little schools built beside the dusty gravel roads, many of the children didn't wear shoes, but we who went to the village school proudly wore shoes. It wasn't until after school that the children of large families would take their shoes off so as not to wear them out too much.

When I arrived in the schoolyard the others immediately
noticed my shoes. My classmates came closer to look at them. I went to stand against the big willow, the boys' meeting place, to show them off.

‘You got new shoes!'

‘Lucky you.'

‘I have to wear my brother's shoes when they get too small for him, but when they're too small for him they're too worn out for me.'

I began to explain, sitting on the books I carried in a canvas bag.

‘These aren't new shoes. They're my old ones. While I was asleep…'

And I told my schoolmates, sitting on their books like me, how my shoes had been rebuilt in the night by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who used to live in our house before he died, and whose tools were still there.

A harsh laugh struck me like a slap in the face, interrupting my story; one of the big boys had come over to listen to me and he was laughing, holding his stomach.

‘Listen to him! Did the atomic bomb land on your head?'

A few days earlier the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and it had burned alive thousands of women, men and children.

We heard about it on the radio,
L'Action catholique
had probably written something about it on the front page and my parents had most likely talked about the article in
L'Action catholique —
but I have to admit that I don't remember Hiroshima.

I searched through my memory, trying to find that childhood day, the way you search page by page, paragraph by
paragraph, for a passage in a book you've already read. But instead of recalling something that burned so brightly it could have set fire to a corner of my memory, painfully, all I could remember of that autumn day was the little shoemaker with the clubfoot.

That gap in my recollections still irritates me, but a man likely doesn't choose what will come to haunt his memory.

In the next life, when the people of Hiroshima remember this earth, they will see again the bright explosion that wrenched their bodies from their souls. But I wish they could remember instead a little shoemaker with a clubfoot who, as they were sleeping, came and mended shoes worn out from having played too much on the earth covered with dandelions and daisies.

S
OMETIMES
as he was dunking a cookie in his tea, my father would announce:

‘Tomorrow, son, you're coming with me; it'll do you good to see something of life.'

The next day we would set off in his black Ford and behind us the village, like a hat on the mountaintop, was erased in the dust of the gravel road. We drove down roads where, often, there wasn't even any dust because they were dirt roads and always damp. The car advanced slowly, its belly getting caught in the ruts, while along the road from time to time a frame house turned grey by time would appear in a space chewed out of the dense forest: a flock of children would burst out and come running to watch us pass. These children of all ages, barefoot, wore clothes too big for them, that looked to me like sacks. My father said:

‘The good Lord, he's fair, but he didn't make everybody rich.'

After giving me a few moments' silence to think about this he added:

‘Duplessis hasn't even given them electricity.'

For me, this meant that in the evening all the children
would do their homework around the same table, lit by a single oil lamp: so many children around a single table on which, earlier, they had eaten a porridge, which was what I'd been told poor people ate. Often, my father would stop and go into the house to talk with the father. The children would approach our car and come and look at me. I didn't like the way they smelled of the stable. Often they'd invite me to get out so they could show me a car they'd built out of old wheels, and they'd show me tame animals — snakes, a squirrel, an owl. When I came back to the village my head would be buzzing.

That day, my father stopped before one of the unpainted houses. A man was sitting on the steps in front of the door. There were no children around. They must have been in the fields, picking raspberries. I decided to wait in the car.

‘Bonjour, Philémon!' said my father.

‘Salut, Georges, haven't seen you around for a while.'

‘Is it you that's missing me, Philémon — or your wife?'

A form appeared in the screenless doorway and Philémon's wife called out, before going back into the shadows:

‘You're a pair of skunks, you two!'

‘Your wife expecting again?' my father asked with a mocking smile.

‘This'll make fourteen, Georges,' said Philémon, his satisfaction stretching into a grin. ‘How about you? Not up to making fourteen, eh?'

The shrill sound of a crying child came from the house.

‘Philémon,' my father asked, ‘is that howl telling us your fourteenth's arrived?'

‘If it is, Georges, I better get to work on the fifteenth right away!'

His wife, her form blending with the shadows, reappeared in the doorway.

‘I'd just as soon the children didn't hear when the two of you get together.'

I was in the car, listening; the words were familiar words, but they were speaking a language I didn't know. I understood nothing of what they said. I was careful to laugh at their jokes when they did, for it was important that I seem to understand.

‘What you got up your sleeve for me today, Philémon?'

‘Today, Georges, I'm cleaning my gun. Something wrong with your eyes?'

In fact the man was holding a rifle across his knees, rubbing the barrel with a rag.

‘I like a gun that's as clean as my eyeballs,' said the man. ‘Don't look. It's as bright as an electric light.'

As he spoke the man had taken the rifle from his knees and was pointing it in my father's direction.

‘Watch out, Philémon,' said my father, ‘you're gonna scare me. That's no rosary you got in your hands, it's a gun.'

My father took a few steps back, towards the car.

‘Come on now, Georges, don't be scared. You know very well…'

‘Philémon, that thing scares me.'

Laughing, the man pointed the rifle at my father; with his left eye shut, he aimed.

‘If you was a deer now, Georges, you'd be out of luck today. Ha ha!'

‘Philémon!' my father ordered curtly, ‘put that down. Maybe it's loaded!'

‘Come on, Georges, I ain't crazy; if my gun was loaded I wouldn't be playing with it.'

The man aimed at my father, but the rifle moved. The man's shoulders shook because he was laughing so hard at the sight of my terrified father. My father did his utmost to get away.

‘I can't run, Philémon. My legs won't move.'

My father fell to his knees. The rifle was levelled at him.

‘If you was a deer, Georges, I could pick your forehead or the nose or even the heart. Or maybe … Ha ha!'

His words were shaken by the laughter gurgling from his mouth. The rifle pursued my father. He had folded his hands as he did when he prayed, and in the car I had my hands folded, too.