The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories (7 page)

Very early next morning, with great discretion, Ferdinand Chapeau went back to his spring, carrying a pick, a shovel and a bag of cement. When Monsieur Josaphat went to his basin to fill his barrels, the water was no longer flowing. The basin was draining. The day after, the earth at the bottom of the basin began to crack, it was so dry. The foxes were thirsty.

The farmer from the other end of the village who had too many children and had gone into debt at the village tavern agreed to sell water to Monsieur Josaphat. He paid more for it than Ferdinand Chapeau, a ‘faithful, long-standing customer', the farmer insisted.

During the summer, Monsieur Josaphat and Ferdinand Chapeau, with their horses, their two-wheeled carts and their barrels, met from time to time; they didn't see each other.

‘After his own blood', Monsieur Josaphat explained when
he went to the general store, ‘the most precious thing a man's got is his water. You mustn't waste it by giving it to just anybody.'

At the general store Ferdinand Chapeau was very careful not to gloat.

‘The good Lord's always told men to share; Josaphat refused to share so he's been punished with drought. If he showed a little generosity maybe by some miracle the water'd start to pour out of his spring again.'

Monsieur Josaphat didn't feel like being generous and Ferdinand Chapeau was too honourable to return the water to a man who refused to share it.

It was a dry summer, drier than anyone had seen for years. The grass burned; the leaves wrinkled on the trees. The man who had too many children and had gone into debt at the tavern noticed, between drinking sprees, that the two fox-breeders were drying up his well. They found him at the well one morning, shotgun in hand. That day the foxes went without water. You could hear them moan.

‘I know where there's some water', said Ferdinand Chapeau at the general store.

His words were carried back to Monsieur Josaphat, who replied:

‘I'd rather have an empty basin than a basin full of water Ferdinand Chapeau found.'

In the fall, the buyers from the large factories came in their big cars and went away without buying any furs. In November after the heavy frost, people learned that Monsieur Josaphat's foxes, and Ferdinand Chapeau's, had to be killed; they'd caught some disease from drinking bad water.

The grilled cages were silent but the pungent odour of foxes persisted after the first snow. Monsieur Josaphat and Ferdinand Chapeau undertook to dismantle the cages before the first big storms. To avoid seeing each other, they turned their backs as they worked.

One morning, the water came back to Monsieur Josaphat's basin. It melted the snow.

When Ferdinand Chapeau saw this catastrophe he swore he wouldn't wait for spring to throw stones and cement into Monsieur Josaphat's water.

W
HEN HUNTERS
told how they had taken the animal by surprise or how its own foolishness had led it to them, you had only to see the fire in their mouths or eyes to know that killing brought them a great deal of joy.

I liked Louis Grands-pieds' stories. He would never tell any more. That day, we were taking him to the graveyard. My friend Lapin, carrying the censer, and I the holy water, very dignified in our black soutanes and starched lace surplices, were leading the cortège to the site the sacristan had shown us.

For years Louis Grands-pieds had been suffering from an incurable disease. He rarely got up before noon. All day he would drag behind him the weight of his bed. No one dared reproach him for his laziness; a man's entitled to be sad and stooped and tired.

But when the hunting season came! Then Louis would get up long before the sun, he would dress in wool and jump in his car which had wings as it sped through the sleeping villages along a gravel road all curves and humps and bumps. In the dark, when the yellowed grass began to be visible – very pale because of fog and the grey light –
Louis got out of his car, walked around to the other side and opened the door as though for a lady. He took out his rifle.

Softly, without singing, without catching his clothes on the branches, he walked into the forest filled with night. The path was so familiar he could have walked its whole length with his eyes closed. Near the end the ground was softer. Through his rubber boots he could feel moss; the lake was near. He recognized the smell of water mingled with that of the night. Every autumn morning for several years Louis Grands-pieds came that way. Before he spied the lake he took a sip of brandy. As he was walking beneath the branches, day had approached in the sky. The lake exhaled white steam like that which came from Louis' mouth. This was the lake where animals came to drink. He had seen beaver swim from one stump to another. Sometimes he had seen hoofprints, moose or deer. Every morning, Louis Grands-pieds was sorry he had come so late. ‘The moose came to drink in the middle of the night', he thought, looking for a stump that had taken on the shape of a chair, with a back, when the tree was felled. It was Louis' custom to sit there and wait for the game that would certainly come to drink one day. No one else knew this refuge.

He drank a little brandy. He had discovered this place when he was a child and he always came back to it. The sun was climbing higher in the sky, he could see it through the leaves whose bright colours were awakening. There was a splash in the water. A frog. There were thousands in the lake. Louis had laid his rifle on the moss near the stump. He picked up his flask of brandy to fan within him a delicious fire that would drive away the cold of this autumn morning. Another frog jumped in the water. Then a branch broke.
Another frog! This one jumped into the branches! Louis Grands-pieds looked up. Twenty feet from him, its head and antlers surrounded by dry leaves, a moose watched Louis with an old man's eyes. Louis was paralysed. Then, instead of picking up his rifle, Louis Grands-pieds had only one thought: to offer his flask of brandy to this animal with the sad eyes. Instead, he did what a hunter is born to do. He picked up his rifle and fired. The morning shattered like a crystal glass. Had Louis closed his eyes before he fired? When he heard the shot he knew he didn't want to kill the moose, this living, breathing animal, he didn't want to put to death this head with the expression that was so human. The animal fled. Louis swallowed some brandy. He climbed up on the stump and looked at the place where he had seen the moose. The water in the lake seemed like a smooth mirror between the stumps and submerged treetrunks. Louis drank some brandy. Gradually, reflections tinted the quiet water a darker hue.

Why did Louis Grands-pieds not want to kill his moose? He was too good. He had been a good child, he had never pulled cats' whiskers, he had never torn the legs off flies, he had never made a toad smoke a cigarette, he had never stepped on a flower. Louis was too good; he was caught in his goodness like a butterfly in its cocoon. It was the cocoon that had kept him from firing. Every autumn the other men in the village paraded with their deer and their moose exhibited on their cars. Louis had scarcely dared to look at the animal. If he had fired at the moose it was to make it run away.

Louis drained the flask of brandy. Sitting on his stump, in this place filled with perfumes and silence, he decided he
would stop being good. He swore he would kill the moose.

Every morning that autumn until the snow was deep, he returned to the place to watch and wait, rifle in hand. As autumn advanced he came earlier and earlier to the lake where the moose must return to drink. Winter spread out its fine crystalline layer. And the moose remained invisible.

Louis Grands-pieds' incurable illness overcame him, but neither the white blizzards of February nor the July sun could erase from his memory the image of the big moose he hadn't killed because he was too good.

The next autumn, on the first day of the hunting season, Louis got up long before dawn. He drove through the familiar villages that the night erased completely from the mountains, he followed the little gravel road and found again the path to the lake. Louis walked like a hunter whose bullet would strike his victim in the heart. It was still night, dark. Soon the light would awaken. In the first ray of dawn the animals would come out to drink fresh water.

Louis walked. The night seemed to breathe against his ear like a tracked beast.

Louis forced himself to learn not to be good. He drank some brandy. In the clearing. His chair-shaped stump was in its place, grey, amid the high brown grass. He sat, drank some brandy. On this morning which must resemble the first morning God had made for man, Louis despised his goodness. When the moose came he would fire.

Close to the pond there was a crumpling of dry leaves. Branches cracked. The moose.

Louis Grands-pieds shoulders his rifle.

He is too good. He hates his goodness.

Louis Grands-pieds will kill this moose another day.

The moose laps at the clear water.

Louis Grands-pieds places his rifle on the moss.

He swallows some brandy.

On the pebble road leading to the graveyard, in a silence that put a lump in your throat, I heard Louis Grands-pieds' drawling voice tell his story, as he had done so many times. My friend Lapin had heard it too, because he whispered:

‘If Louis Grands-pieds couldn't ever shoot a moose, how come he could put a bullet through his own head?'

The curé, who was carrying the cross in the procession, ordered us through the words of his Latin prayer:

‘Be quiet, and show some respect for the dead!'

I remember that grey day very well; it was a day when we said nothing more at all.

F
OLLOWING
our own morning ritual, to which we submitted with more conviction than to the one of saying our prayers when we jumped out of bed, we ran to the windows and lingered there, silent and contemplative, for long moments. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, our mother was becoming impatient, for we were late. She was always afraid we'd be late … Life was there all around us and above us, vibrant and luminous, filled with trees; it offered us fields of daisies and it led to hills that concealed great mysteries.

The story of that morning begins with some posters. During the night, posters had been put up on the wooden poles that supported the hydro wires.

‘Posters! They've put up posters!'

Did they announce that hairy wrestlers were coming? Far West singers? Strong men who could carry horses on their shoulders? Comic artists who had ‘made all America collapse with laughter'? An international tap-dance champion? A sword swallower? Posters! Perhaps we'd be allowed to go and see a play on the stage of the parish hall - if the curé declared from the pulpit that the play wasn't immoral and if we were resourceful enough to earn the money for a
ticket. Posters! The artists in the photographs would gradually come down from the posters until they inhabited our dreams, haunted our games and accompanied us, invisible, on our expeditions.

‘There's posters up!'

We weren't allowed to run to the posters and, trembling, read their marvellous messages; it was contrary to maternal law to set foot outside before we had washed and combed our hair. After submitting to this painful obligation we were able to learn that we would see, in flesh and blood, the unsurpassable Dr. Schultz, former hunter in Africa, former director of zoos in the countries of Europe, former liontamer, former elephant-hunter and former free-style wrestling champion in Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom, in an unbelievable, unsurpassable show — ‘almost unimaginable'. Dr. Schultz would present dogs that could balance on balls, rabbit-clowns, educated monkeys, hens that could add and subtract; in addition, Dr. Schultz would brave a savage bear in an uneven wrestling match ‘between the fierce forces of nature and the cunning of human intelligence, of which the outcome might be fatal for one of the protagonists.'

We had seen bears before, but dead ones, with mouths bleeding, teeth gleaming. Hunters liked to tell how their victims had appeared to them: ‘… standing up, practically walking like a man, but a big man, hairy like a bear; and then it came at me roaring like thunder when it's far away behind the sky, with claws like knives at the end of his paws, and then when I fired it didn't move any more than if a mosquito'd got into its fur. Wasn't till the tenth bullet that I saw him fall down …' Loggers, too, had spotted bears and
some, so they said, had been so frightened their hair had turned white.

Dr. Schultz was going to risk his life before our eyes by pitting himself against this merciless beast. We would see with our own eyes, alive before us, not only a bear but a man fighting a bear. We'd see all of that!

A voice that reached the entire village, a voice that was magnified by loudspeakers, announced that the great day had arrived: At last you can see, in person, the unsurpassable Dr. Schultz, the man with the most scars in the world, and his bear — a bear that gets fiercer and fiercer as the season for love comes closer!'

We saw an old yellow bus drive up, covered with stars painted in red, pulling a trailer on whose sides we could read:
DR. SCHULTZ AND ASSOCIATES UNIVERSAL WONDER CIRCUS LTD
. The whole thing was covered with iron bars that were tangled and crossed and knotted and padlocked. A net of clinking chains added to the security. Between messages, crackling music made curtains open at the windows and drew the children outdoors. Then the magical procession entered the lot where we played ball in the summer. The motor growled, the bus moved forward, back, hesitated. At last it found its place and the motor was silent. A man got out of the bus. He stood on the running-board; twenty or thirty children had followed the circus. He considered us with a smile.

‘Hi, kids', he said.

He added something else, words in the same language, which we'd never heard before.

‘Either he's talking bear', said my friend Lapin, ‘or he's talking English.'