Vandal Love (19 page)

The rest of her life Georgianne would return to those first years, pausing over the Bible, gulf wind and white cedar, the sound of river ice on waterfall rocks. As a girl she’d never been more than a few miles away: on land, the clapboard houses scattered between embouchure and a waterfall the height of a barn; or at sea, a Jersey village brief as a trick of light on the rearing coast. It had been hers. She knew its history, the lure and flight that had brought families from Gaspésie or the nearby Isle of Anticosti, the first settlements when a
certain Capitaine Fortin discovered a school of cod out past Rigge-Point in the 1860s. The name, Rivière-au-Tonnerre, she loved to clarify, came not from the first waterfall where the houses ended but another, three miles in, two hundred feet high and with the spring debacle loud enough to merit its thunder.

Her first years she lived for those gulf breaths of salt and mountain air. Tall and broad shouldered, she favoured dark dresses that set off hands as big as her father’s. As a girl she’d learned that all callings were inferior to sacrifice. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father depended on her to manage the house and oversee her younger sister. She took pleasure in pumping water at dawn, in the smell of matches when she lit the stove, in sewing her sister’s clothes. She worked tirelessly, expanding the garden, turning the rot of last year’s husks. She wore her father’s old boots, and each afternoon, coming in to prepare dinner, she kicked the perfect print of sandy mud from one sole, then the other. The next day, when they’d dried, she swept them from the porch. Born in 1900, she was sure she would outlive the century and she called it her puny twin. She’d been told by her father, even by her younger sister, had even a faint memory of her mother telling her, that she should take care, cover up better. She knew the holy books called for meekness, modesty, and at church it was her pride she confessed, that she was stronger, that certain concerns need not apply.

When she was eighteen, the influenza arrived, believed to have bred in the trenches of the war, now
working its way around the world, hundreds of thousands dying up the east coast, shortages of coffins in Boston and Washington. Not worried for herself, she didn’t think to worry for others. She watched as black-draped wagons rolled in, as first individuals, then families were carted into town, the Gendrons, father and wife and all five children, half the Levesques, a Lapierre and Bourque and God knows how many others. Her father had decided the family would stay at home, let it pass. One evening they heard someone climb the porch. She went to the door and saw that it was a neighbour, Jérôme Marceau. Her father had been reading aloud the funny bits in the back of the paper, though they’d heard them before. Her sister stopped brushing her hair and the oil lamp shone a silver band along it as if it were one continuous surface. The first snow of the year was falling, and Jérôme leaned against the door and knocked loudly though she was just inside. His breath misted and his face looked rucked and deflated, and he knocked again. His hand held a necklace with a dangling crucifix that tapped the glass.

We can’t just leave him out there, her father said.

That night became the winter, the yellow wings of dusk in a distant cloud-break, the lit billows of fine snow blown in from the gulf and the door opening with a sound like a seal on a jar being broken, flooding them with cold air. Jérôme’s lips were blue, and as he told them everyone was dead, his wife and daughters and sons, Georgianne’s sister watched her with dark, scared eyes. Later, when everyone had gone to sleep, Georgianne
left her bed and lay with her face in her sister’s hair and lifted it and let the heavy strands fall on her cheeks.

Two weeks afterwards, morning sunlight roiled in clouds and struck her eyelids and she woke, breath misting, still no fever. The stove was open and wind through the flue had spread a half-circle of ash on the floor. She lit the first fire in a week and began eating again. Men from the village came and took the bodies away, and in May she saw her father and sister put in the ground with hundreds of others. June was unreal. She walked out past the house through the yarrow and burdock that grew up around the garden. All night she stepped past boreal fir and poplar, through twinflower and wood sorrel and nettles that she tore up with her hands and rubbed on her arms. Village dogs barked at the silent pulse of lightning over the gulf, magnesium flares from cloud to cloud. She came down out of the brush and the dogs raced towards her and set about in a circle, and she shooed them violently with a stick.

That Sunday, after church, the gossip was that a man named Hervé Hervé had come into town looking for a wife, that he had children at home under the care of his eldest, then twelve. He stood in a tan shirt rolled at the elbows and a captain’s hat, which he wore at an angle. He had an eye patch like a pirate and was a head taller than any other man and looked at them as if they couldn’t look back. Through his breast pocket showed the outlines of dark cigarettes.

She caught up with him on the rocky slope above the docks. Clouds blew past so that shadows moved along
the coast like those of passing giants. I’ll be your wife, she told him. He looked at the clean hem of her dress and up along her, at her throat and finally into her face and stood there, smoking. She watched the muscles beneath his rolled sleeve. He nodded and motioned her along, and they returned to the church, where he spoke with the priest, not knowing her name yet though the three of them were alone and he could point. The next day, when the formalities were finished, they went to the house. Afterwards she helped him load everything into his boat. Then she stepped in and they sailed south across the St. Lawrence, to a town that looked held together by strung-up fishing nets, to a farm that made her think, upon seeing it, of mud.

Thirty-eight years she gave herself to work, weaned children and husband from the bottle, the former easily, the latter not so and never for the last time. She learned this family’s myths and curses, didn’t let herself fade to what else might have been and watched with her husband’s same static ken while children grew old too soon and feeble ones died. For him pride was a strong family; for her it was a holy one. In this their contest began. He was ashamed when villagers commented on the runts just as she was furious when the others skipped Mass and abandoned themselves to depravity.

There had been no way to have imagined that such a clan might exist. With time she ceased to think of her sons as sons but rather as the brothers. Runts excepted,
they hung about with the demeanour of a street gang, harassed passing children and at night stole cigarettes and bottles from drunks. They were the biggest men any had seen up the coast. On the rare occasion that they spoke it was to brag. She’d heard them talk of bumping up against sailors to start fights, of taking out a man’s eye with a broken bottle, of catching a hotel maid on her way home. Otherwise the house remained silent and she was relieved at the deeper silence of winter when they departed for the logging camps up north.

One afternoon she came upon her second son, Jean, kneeling in the sitting room, on the rug, praying for the family’s salvation. She joined him, and when he finished she reminded him that the meek would inherit the world, though from that point on it wasn’t with meekness that she defended him. He was a quick study and soon a favourite of the curé, and from then on it was generally assumed that he would join the clergy.

At first, with so many mouths to feed, she’d understood why Hervé Hervé had given a few runts away, one to a childless couple and another to an obese baker who was happy with what he could get. She’d been angry but had known the runts would be better off elsewhere. But the day Jean didn’t return from school and the others told her that Hervé Hervé had given him to the innkeeper, she went and got him back. Three times she had to find him, and once she walked forty miles to a shop where she discovered him in a neat apron, stencilling rosettes on the borders of mirrors. From then on she took him everywhere. Evenings they went to the church, and while she scrubbed the floors,
he did his homework in the pews. Every word of worship that she spoke, he repeated, and even once he insisted on helping her. That night, she found him in the bathroom picking at his hands. When she asked him what it was, he hid them behind his back, then cried when she brought them out and saw the raised blisters from scrubbing. After that he no longer repeated her words or helped though he stayed and studied and listened.

When the war began, she was surprised not so much to learn that a few of the older brothers had enlisted but that Jean had. The first letter they got back said that he had a job as a typist, and the second brought condolences from her majesty for the death of another son. Four years later, when Jean returned, he was a small, pallid man with shadowed eyes and he wouldn’t look at anyone. His hands never stayed still unless he was smoking, and he tucked his elbow and held the cigarette guardedly next to his cheek like a femme fatale. Georgianne spoke of how he would go into the seminary now that the war was over. When she’d finished, he said only, Oh boy, the way the tourists did. The next day he was gone.

Later Hervé Hervé told her that Jean had been the only one who hadn’t sent a portion of his army pay, and she said nothing because she knew. Over the next month she received two postcards, one with a picture of Montréal that bore the inscription
Pas loin!
and the other of the Canadian Rockies, snow-capped and immense, and which read,
Loin mais bien content
. A week later her fourteen-year-old daughter ran away, leaving her with twins.

That evening, after cleaning the church, she sat in the detergent-smelling dark. A few candles burned low in the glass and threw broken shadows against the stone. Once, in Rivière-au-Tonnerre, whales had come near the coast, rolling and blowing mist, and she’d taken her sister to see them. Those gathered had stopped watching the whales and turned to gaze at her sister, who’d reached for Georgianne’s hand to go. You have the same eyelashes as me, she’d told Georgianne that night. Yes, but just that, Georgianne had said. It surprised her to remember. She touched her face. Age had made her cheeks and fingers numb as if with cold. Her joints ached. She wanted to cry but it was easier to forget.

Those years she found comfort only in church and the sewing of clothes. She dressed the family, though garments came home torn from fights, smeared with dirt and indeterminable blood. Listening to the curé she was caught by the Bible’s repetition, the earth and dust and stones in which men laboured, and she knew now that sickness and child-bearing, the hard days in high windstruck fields had been retribution. She’d been too prideful, too confident of her strength. But now, as the needle dipped and pulled, she let herself dream, flashes of youths lifted from toil by a perfect shirt, like a picture in the Eaton’s catalogue. It was age, she thought, shaking it off.

That spring was sudden after a relentless winter, hot days, warm nights with uncommon southern winds
broken by torrential rains. Ice floes split loudly as they descended towards the gulf. Plants grew and bloomed before the ground had dried, wet earth with minute flowers sprouting over it. Late one afternoon she left her daughters preparing dinner. She climbed the stairs and went into her room and eased the door closed, and guiltily lay down so as not to muss the bed. Outside, the sun shone like a yellow flare in thin cloud banks. There was the steady chopping of shovels in wet earth and the slapping of thrown mud and the wind with a sound like a sail being blown. It seemed she had dozed. She had a sensation of falling, of rushing air and a rising shape as if the wind had billowed the curtain though the sash was down, and when she opened her eyes, the figure stood not so much in stillness as suspended upon it, like dust motes in light. He looked older in that way of schoolchildren with flour on their faces for Christmas plays, though he wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt, each bar distinct, almost brilliant. He stood stiffly and his expression recalled that of a man she’d once seen frozen in river ice, cut out and carried to the village in a crystalline coffin. It was dead and blissful all at once and it held her. Then maybe she blinked —she couldn’t mark the moment—and she sat up kicking.

Evening had made clefts of shadow along the mountain’s incline, and she stood awhile, caught in residual stillness before she knelt on the rug. There wasn’t the faintest impression of footprints. She could think of nothing else. Jean, she finally said,
reviens
, then added a brief, uncertain prayer. If the apparition had been Jean as a boy
in his beaver-lined jacket and overalls, the leather cap he’d wanted for his eleventh birthday and that she’d secretly made, she’d have known she was tired and thinking him up, but why this, her son dressed like a tourist?

In the days that followed she mentioned the apparition only to the young curé with the pale eyes, asking him if it was a message. She’d heard him speak on the subject of miracles, the bishop in Montréal who’d healed the crippled black child, true charity. The curé listened, then visited the next day to inspect the house, to speak with Hervé Hervé.

That evening she took the postcards from an apple crate that had, almost forty years before, been converted into something of a hope chest. She didn’t doubt she was getting soft but senile, crazy? For ten years she’d prayed for Jean regularly. In ten years he would have had children. What else was there for her here? Her sons and daughters were disappearing, fleeing. She’d tried too long to preserve this family, but the conditions that had once made the country inhospitable had lived on with Hervé Hervé. She’d been too strong to see and now her blindness had ended.

She went downstairs. Jude had come in, hours after the others. He removed boots caked with mud. At ten he looked like a cavern dweller with his flat, inexpressive face, the layer of dirt, muscles on every part of him. He glanced at her indifferently. He had her eyelashes, her sister’s, and she couldn’t help considering how in another time or place they might all have been different.