The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories (9 page)

Monsieur Juste had hardly arrived back home when the fire began to roar in his forge. The hammer began to strike the anvil again, feverish amid Monsieur Juste's shouts of joy. It was late at night and the hammer was still striking the anvil. Then it was silent for a few hours until, long before the birds began to sing, the hammer started ringing out again. On Sunday the shop was silent, but the hammer struck the anvil at the same time the clock struck midnight.

After seven days of strenuous labour, Monsieur Juste had made seven dozen Anti-Cow-Kicks. The company in Texas had ordered 2,500 dozen! Monsieur Juste put down his hammer.

‘I'm ruined', he said.

T
HERE WERE THOSE
who had travelled like migratory birds and those who lived rooted to the earth, like trees. Some had gone very far. I remember hearing the story of a man who had gone to the place where the sky meets the earth: he'd had to bend down so he wouldn't bump his head against the sky. The man had suddenly felt lonely and he'd written to his wife. The stamp cost a thousand dollars. Some people had gone to New York; another visited a brother in Montana; my grandfather had sailed on the Atlantic Ocean; a family had migrated to Saskatchewan; and men went to cut timber in the forests of Maine or Abitibi. When these people came home in their new clothes, even the trees on the main street were a little envious of the travellers.

And there were those who had never gone away. Like old Herménégilde. He was so old he'd seen the first house being built in our village. He was old, but his mustache was still completely black. It was a huge mustache that hid his nose, his mouth and his chin. I can still see old Herménégilde's mustache like a big black cloud over our village. Our parents used to say of him that he was healthy as a horse; all the storms of life had been unable to bend his upright, solid
pride. At the end of his life he possessed nothing but a small frame house. All his children were gone. Old Herménégilde had spent his whole life without ever going outside the village limits. And he was very proud of having lived that way, rooted to the soil of our village. To indicate the full extent of his pride he would say:

‘I've lived my whole life and never needed strangers!'

Old Herménégilde had never gone running off to the distant forests, he had never gone to the neighbouring villages to buy or sell animals. He'd found his wife in the village. Old Herménégilde used to say:

‘The good Lord gave us everything we need to get by right here in our village! How come people have to go running off somewheres else where it ain't no better?'

He recalled a proverb written by a very old French poet and repeated it in his own way:

‘The fellow next door's grass always looks a heck of a lot greener than your own.'

Old Herménégilde had never been inside an automobile.

‘I'm in no rush to die', he said. ‘I want to do it on foot, like a man.'

One morning a black car longer than the one driven by Monsieur Cassidy, the undertaker, stopped with a jolt in front of old Herménégilde's house. A son he hadn't seen for a good many years got out of the car, all dressed in black, as Monsieur Cassidy usually was.

‘You coming to my burial, my boy?' asked old Herménégilde.

‘No', said the son. ‘I came to take you on a trip.'

Moving from one trade, one job to another, the son had become the private chauffeur to a businessman from Montreal;
before he could ask himself what was happening, old Herménégilde, who had never been in a car before, was pushed onto the leather seat of a Cadillac that pawed the ground like a horse.

‘Father', said the son, ‘you can't die before you see the world a little.'

‘I've seen everything a man needs to see', said old Herménégilde.

The son's long black car carried him off at a speed he'd never experienced. To avoid seeing that he was going beyond the village limits, old Herménégilde closed his eyes. And with his eyes closed the old man didn't see that he was driving through the neighbouring village, where a number of old men had gone to get their wives; he didn't see Mont Orignal, the highest mountain in the region; he didn't see the ten villages the black car drove through at a speed no runaway horse had ever reached. Tobie, his son, was talking, but he didn't want to listen.

‘I'm your son and I know you've spent your whole life as if you were in jail. But you gotta see the world before you die and I'm the one that'll take you out of that jail. Nowadays there's no such thing as distance. My boss, he gets up in Montreal, he opens his eyes in Toronto, he eats his breakfast in New York and then comes back to Montreal to go to sleep. That's what I call living! You gotta keep up with the times. We know the world turns. And you gotta turn with it. I never stop travelling. I know the world. I know life. But you, you've never lived in modern times. It's something you gotta see.'

‘A man can go as far as he wants', said old Herménégilde, ‘but he always stays in the same pair of boots.'

‘I'm not what you'd call a good son', said Tobie, ‘but I'm the one that's gonna show you the world. That'll be one good thing I've done in my life.'

So then old Herménégilde understood that he was no longer allowed to keep his eyes closed. They had entered Quebec City. In a single glance the old man took in houses taller than the church, more people in the street than for a religious procession and cars swarming everywhere, like ants. His son drove him in front of an immense château, a real château whose name he'd heard when people talked about the rich - the Château Frontenac; then he showed him something much older than he was, older even than his late father — the houses built by the first Frenchmen.

The black car stopped in front of a large garden. Tobie helped his father get out.

‘Now people won't be able to say you died without ever setting foot on the Plains of Abraham. This is where we lost our country…'

And then it was time to go home. In the car, the son noticed the old Herménégilde was keeping his eyes closed.

‘Father, don't shut your eyes, look at the people.'

‘I seen too much', said the old man, ‘you showed me too many things today.'

As soon as the son had left old Herménégilde at his house, he hurried off again in the long black car, summoned by other journeys in the vast modern world.

For long months, behind his big black mustache and his closed eyes, old Herménégilde waited for the long black car to return.

I
WAS VERY YOUNG
the day I discovered the truth. It was during the war. (The Second World War had no other name.) The truth told us the world would be paradise if it weren't for the bad people. All the misfortunes in our village and all the misfortunes in the Old Countries were caused by the bad people.

The war came to an end. The very bad people were conquered. It seemed that happiness was going to return to the earth, just as I asked God in my prayers. All that would be left then would be to take care of the not-so-bad people. I had an uncle who'd become a priest to convert the bad people; I assured God that I was prepared to become a priest too. I was nine years old. Peace seemed to be a good thing.

One man protected this peace and happiness in the land of Quebec — a man not like other men, a man who knew how to help the good people and how to be feared by the bad. My father had tacked up a photograph of our premier in his garage: I looked at it often. The man was sitting down, a battered broad-brimmed hat on his head, an old
habitant's
hat, while before him paraded children to whom he was
handing out money. What a generous man he was! I decided it was better to be like Duplessis -
le chef—
than my uncle the priest. From the mountain I looked around at the other villages, also built on mountains; I looked at the church steeples, the gravel roads, the green trees, the small rivers — and I was happy because no one would come and violate all this beauty as long as Duplessis was there to protect us.

All the Nazis had most likely been put in prison; that was why we heard nothing more about them. But other bad people, very bad people had hypocritically used trickery to rise up and try to dominate the good people; they threatened the happiness of the good people. These were the Communists. Once more, because of the bad people the good people wouldn't be able to sleep without anxiety.

The Communists were beginning to take over the Old Countries. In our village, the curé explained why. Because the Old Countries had abandoned the true religion - ours, that is — they were being punished with a fatal disease: Communism. We in Quebec had continued to practise the true religion reverently; we had continued to pray to the real God. So why were the Communists threatening us? Why were they infiltrating groups of workers who no longer wanted to obey their bosses? Why were the Communists trying to poison us with pamphlets, with letters that told lies about the true religion? Happily, Duplessis was protecting us; he sent a number of Communists to prison and he didn't hesitate to put padlocks, for years, on the doors behind which Communists held meetings to perfect their plan for the domination of Quebec.

At suppertime my parents talked about an article in the
newspaper. The good people's newspaper was called
L'Action catholique.
That evening I read the article, an editorial (I learned the word that evening). The journalist heaped abuse on the Communists. Never in the village during quarrels had I heard so many insults. The good people had the right to insult the bad, ten times more so if the bad people happened to be Communists. I still remember the conclusion of the article: ‘The Catholics of Quebec will stand erect in the face of the horde of Communist invaders; we will fight proudly to the last drop of our blood'. I felt I could see Stalin in Moscow, furious, grumbling into his mustache, humiliated by the article in
L'Action catholique
from Quebec. To fight the bad people I announced that it was better to be, not like Duplessis, but rather like the intrepid journalist who had dared defy the Communists' top leader, Stalin himself.

In my village there were good people and bad people, but there were no Communists. In the autumn I was sent away to a little seminary to learn Latin; I found no Communists there either. When I whispered to my confessor that I wanted to defend the good people against the Communists he blessed me three times, then wrote an address on a bit of paper and took a few coins from the pocket of his soutane so I could subscribe to a magazine that would teach me all a man might want to know about Communism. It was written by a Jesuit missionary who had spent years as a prisoner in Russia and by another man who had been a Communist agent in Canada and then repented and became a policeman. After a few issues there was nothing I didn't know. I was ready to attack Communists like the journalist from
l'Action catholique,
whose style I copied in my own writing.
Then I announced to my friends at the seminary that the Communist danger was greater than we knew, that Communists had infiltrated the factory at the bottom of the hill where they spun wool, and all the factories in Quebec — and even the government. It was impossible to see but it was present, gnawing away like a cancer. Communism had perhaps even attacked some priests. I named names, cited facts I'd read in my magazine. I wrote by hand an anti-Communist newspaper that I circulated in my class. We had to be vigilant. I even made speeches in the club devoted to developing our oratorical gifts - passionate speeches denouncing in no uncertain terms the spies in the pay of Moscow. I still, however, had not seen any Communists. Not a single one. Sometimes we were given permission to walk in the town of Saint-Georges-de-Beauce, in a long line of uniformed seminarians. If I spotted a man who seemed to look a little morose I couldn't help thinking he must be a Communist. Quebec could feel secure: Duplessis and I, with all the strength of my twelve years, wouldn't give up the struggle of truth against lies.

But as I would soon learn, the truth I possessed was not complete. I received a paper in the mail read by ‘only those who don't fear the truth', a little newspaper with big ambitions that in four pages told the whole truth about the real evils in our society. The newspaper dazzled me; at last it shed light on the true face of the really bad people. I had to subscribe to it. The paper told me that the great ills of the world are caused by the banks, the factories and business. And who owned the banks, the factories, business? The
Jews. It took three or four issues to convince me. I even wrote to the editor of the paper: the Communists, I objected, were more dangerous than the Jews. He replied that Communism was a disguise the Jews hid behind as they prepared to take over the world. ‘Don't you know that Karl Marx, the father of Communism, was a Jew? And if you look at Stalin's picture aren't you convinced that he has a Jewish nose?' The editor had written the letter himself, with a pen. How could I still doubt? I remained perplexed for several days, then I received another issue of his paper. On the front page, a headline: ‘Proof of the International Jewish Plot'; under it, a photograph of the three masters of the world: Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. The three statesmen were shaking hands and their crossed arms formed a sort of triangle that the editor had circled with black ink. Beneath it, this note: ‘This triangle, one of the essential symbolic figures of the Talmud, is proof that the traitors are unmasked'. I didn't exactly understand the editor's learned language, but I could only be convinced.

I hadn't managed to see any Communists in Saint-Georges-de-Beauce but there were some Jews. One had a clothing store on Deuxième Avenue. I persuaded my friend Lapin to come and take a close look at the enemy of the entire world. Trembling, we walked into the little shop: the ceiling was low; articles of clothing were jumbled on a large table, suits were hanging on the walls and others were suspended from long tubes attached to the ceiling.