Vandal Love (20 page)

When she left, despite everything she’d lived, she
knew only two villages. She took what money she’d secreted and a bag of hand-me-downs. She walked out along the coast, spring moon, high tides ravaging below the road, darker pines like rents in a dark sky. Villagers had believed those who went south or west were different, and if they returned it was to suspicion. Hervé Hervé had called them
traitres
. The Ouellets’ daughter had moved to Boston with a tourist and later brought back her own daughter to visit. A girl named Mava Rattledge. Such an ugly name. And in one generation. So perhaps the stories held some truth. Before Georgianne’s father’s time, priests were rumoured to have wandered throughout the States in search of French-Canadians gone astray or the Acadians deported long ago by the British.

Over the years, listening to talk of French places, Louisiana or St. Boniface, she came to think they were close, a few days’ journey, but week after week she travelled west, past billowing and laddered city sky, fields stepped between forest and Laurentide rock. She spoke of a lost son and the children he would have left behind. Months later, in the prairies, the French families who invited her in asked of the Québec where they’d been born. She repeated the hearsay she’d long ignored, herself never speculative, not a gossip: the pollution from the U.S., or the factory trawlers,
les bateaux-usines
that dragged the cod from the gulf.

But alone, walking, she asked herself what had become of the young men with their dreams of swimming pools and barbecues. Had this immensity simply
absorbed Jean? Québec had improved after the Second War. There had been work, possibility. Yes, winters were unforgiving, snow until April, lakes thawing in May, but when the earth breathed and the landscape bloomed, it was a soft country. Not this world without tide. She wouldn’t have continued had she not known what awaited her at home. Once, a few years after marrying Hervé Hervé, as she’d been returning from Saturday Mass, she’d paused on the village road. From other houses, not from a few but from many, came music, children and parents playing together on the violins and piano and guitar, all recreating the steady, pleasant songs of the country. She’d had to ask why God had given her silence.

Winter caught her unprepared. She stayed in cheap rooms. Winnipeg. Regina. Saskatoon. Moose Jaw and Portage la Prairie. She worked where she could, ironing in factories with hundreds of coughing women, fingers gnarled with cold. Her entire life, all beyond her farm and shore had been no more than the quilted colours of a map, but now she doubted God’s presence within this landscape. She’d sensed primitive religions, in storms and prairie fires, in the stillness of winter so far from the sea. It frightened her that she could think this.

The first days of spring, she set off again. Now, when invited in, she told stories she’d once considered silly, of fights and feats of strength. The world she’d struggled against lived on within her like a kind of love, Hervé Hervé who’d been there when she’d needed a new life.
But in the end, it was Jean she spoke of, because she knew that hope and love were not the same.

Each year more and more cars and trucks raced past, clothing her in dust. She saw machines as big as houses cutting swaths through the prairies, pounding highways onto the earth. She paused at every church and prayed. Summer nights she slept in ditches. She dreamed of heaven, of passing Jean in his striped shirt and him not knowing her. After an autumn rain she stopped to dry the hand-me-downs that she still carried, mildewed scraps that recalled lost children or herself, lean in fields, strong in maternity. Garments that had fit no one, like dreams, a stillborn’s first outfit never worn, bad luck, the hollow recognition she’d once been. On that leafless roadside oak, on the Manitoba plains, wind shook the antique rags, terrifying travellers with the loneliness of their flapping.

Then, in a church, half lame and clutching herself, she was shocked to feel the weight of her own hands. She recalled her sister’s hair falling on her cheeks. The blue and white shirt reappeared. The jeans walked past. She limped after. The ghost was the same as seven years before, on that afternoon soft as a bonnet.

Back another road without perspective, a few unkempt houses against planted fields, a weedy yard and a doorway with a cowering boy who saw not a servant of God, eyes bright with prophecy, dust of saints on her shoes, but a stooped woman with a wide jaw and a head as squat as a bullfrog’s. She didn’t speak, just inspected the house as he retreated backwards. She
went into the kitchen. Dishes filled the sink. The bedroom was musty, the shades drawn. A woman was in bed, turned in her sheets.

Mama?
the woman called.

Oui, ma chère
, Georgianne told her, taking her thin, dry hand. I’m here.
Chus là, chus là
.

Only when Georgianne had gone into the bedroom and shut the door did François come out from behind the couch. He stood, breathing as if testing the air, his curls mussed about his head like a large, dark brain. Day had grown faint in the windows. He went outside and crossed the yard and stepped through the weeds where the fence had fallen, and into the cornfield. Thick stalks ran on against the gathering dark and he walked between them until the world remained only as a sense of wind falling on dry husks. He
lay down. Sometime in the night he heard the sounds of truck engines, voices, doors closing. In the morning he woke to bars of sunlight. He saw tiny blue flowers grown in the furrows, and farther off, the black high-laced shoes, the swollen black-stockinged ankles and the patched dress of his grandmother.

From that day on the world seemed an old place, growing older in those weeks that he learned to live in a presence whose severity was the only he’d known. As long as he could recall, he’d roamed. He’d befriended dogs and walked with them and given them names from picture books, Cabot or Cartier. Now he learned of commandments and deadly sins, of his father’s goodness and his family’s strength. He felt tiny compared to this God who was surely waiting to get into the world, the house, to break the windows and overturn the tables and piss on the floor with the self-righteousness of a stallion. When the sky burst with lightning and flooded the ditches, he thought, Here’s God again, messing things up. Then he ran home, terrified that God would let fall something heavy, a well cover or a refrigerator.

In the kitchen, a Bible now sat on the drop-leaf table, a piece of quilted fabric below, thicker than a pot holder, as if the book contained something hot. Under his grandmother’s supervision he read the family tree inside the cover, two centuries of ancestors with mean, historical-sounding names. She told him that he must learn to be like his father, and when she wrote his name—Hervé-François Hervé—he recognized only the middle one. She said if he wanted to be a priest, he must protect his soul, though
when he closed his eyes to find it, he saw only swirling, stellar darkness made by the sunlight on his eyelids.

To Georgianne it was clear that François was one of the runts though she saw no reason to plant this seed of doom. She edited the Hervé story. She decided the best education would be to convince him of his own goodness. Man was born in sin, she knew, and the teachings saved few from their own savageness. Jean was his model, strong when there was need, gentle in his heart, clever at school and bestowed with clarity of purpose, which was bringing François into the world so that he could be a priest.

When in doubt, François had only to ask, and together he and his grandmother would add to the missing father until she lost track and rambled about others, burly uncles, a boy born with a fighter’s face, and Hervé Hervé, for whom there wasn’t a thing not pulled down or knocked over or soundly beaten. Sometimes her murmuring sounded like coffee percolating.

But my father, he asked, he was gentle?

Doux, très doux
, she said. Very gentle and good. Like you. You are a good person.

And wanted to be a priest?

Would have, she said and lifted her hands, but wasn’t. So he could have you. A good person.

François found it odd that his mother had never mentioned any of this. But she’d been sick. The father he worked to recall had seemed more like those other men his grandmother mentioned, strong, with a burlap hug and a lead soldier gifted from a big palm, a smell of plowed fields. One night François had been carried from
bed, wrapped in sheets, to the porch. Mosquitoes nudged at his ear as he dipped in and out of sleep. The east turned blue. His father’s hand was in a bandage. He spoke and the only word François would recall was
Alaska
, pronounced with intensity, like Georgianne’s Amen. Alaska, his father repeated, each syllable even. In the morning he was gone. A-las-ka, François sang, walking the fields, swinging a stick at dandelion heads with a feeling of joy.

Most upsetting, though, was the disappearance of his mother. That first morning, when Georgianne had brought him in from the cornfield, she’d held his wrist in a hand whose calluses were as hard as the bone beneath. Inside she sat him down.

Ta mère est morte
, she told him sternly. Then she explained that because his father was also dead, she, his grandmother, would raise him, but that it wouldn’t be easy—that it was never easy to raise a priest. They are so quickly spoiled, she said.

That evening, after being fed bowls of potatoes and more stuffed than he’d ever been, he pushed his mother’s door open. The shade had always been drawn in the single window, but now a brilliant sky hung above the swollen darks of sunset and that immense earth. The room seemed too small. He touched the cool fabric of the naked mattress and began to shiver. He ran outside, through the fields. In the distance the lights of a farm showed on the plain like those of a vessel at sea. Cicadas whirred in the windbreaks. He vomited. He came to an electric fence and grabbed it and hung on as the ground
bucked. When he opened his eyes, stars glittered above. He lay in the grass, his voice crying all around him.

Those first months, when his grandmother dozed, he put down the Bible and snuck outside, now off limits, as if nature were a bad neighbourhood. Late summer brought rainless clouds, and he went out through the rattling corn. He’d always been here, humming songs from his mother’s radio or picking flowers for her. He paused to hear the movement of the stalks. He crumbled starchy tassels in his fingers, then peeled an ear without breaking it off. The corn was luminous in the shadow, like exposed skin. He counted the kernels, opened and tasted them with his thumbnail. He lay on the tamped furrows and curled his fingers through the dry earth to where it was cool and moist.

On the first crisp autumn day, his grandmother took his hand and led him from the house, along the road, past fields of nodding wheat to the bus station. East, the signs said as they left town, and he wondered if the first children of creation had travelled those same highways.

Montréal was his new home, buttressed sky, rooftops climbing like ziggurats, and a shabby apartment twenty minutes from the downtown, on Létourneux near Hochelaga. He walked to school, returned for lunch, and each night, a half-hour before bed, was allowed to read from a stack of yellowed comics that his grandmother had discovered in a cupboard and that dated back twenty years. She received charity from the church and other
institutions, boxes with dried goods and castoffs. What little money she earned was from knitting with three elderly neighbours, and together they sat in the crammed living room, talking in vivid bursts. Sometimes they listened to a radio station that played classics, the folk songs of
la Bolduc
or
le Quatuor Alouette
, during which they became silent but for mild exclamations of
Oh, le temps
and
Mon Dieu
. Often they asked François to read from the Bible and interrupted with their praises.

His room was the pantry, emptied of shelves, its only decorations a crucifix and a metallic print of the Virgin. A tablecloth hung in the doorway, checkered red and white and so threadbare that, winter mornings, when the harsh, low sun shone through, he could see the yellowed walls of the kitchen. Unable to sleep, he lay his head on the windowsill and gazed up at the prairie moon. He listened for each hoot in the street, for the discordant note from a distant guitar or a girl’s laugh.

His grandmother arranged for him to be an altar boy, and he was sent home with a dollar for her after every Mass. He helped Père Wilbrod, an ancient priest who reeked of cigarette smoke. Though François wanted to please his grandmother, he struggled in his studies and in catechism. He was shy and dreamy, tiny for his age and often picked on. His grandmother sewed his outfits, his underwear even, cloth so coarse that on humid days the seams crawled like ants along his thighs. His hair was cropped, nearly a tonsure, she having perceived evil in curls. He believed her decree that he was good and that the other children his age had
been corrupted. He concluded that he would someday be a priest, though he felt little in the pews, nothing like standing among the corn, tassels swaying above as he closed his eyes to the sun and turned, eager to be lost, to wander those fields forever.

When François’s mother had died, Georgianne had gone through every drawer and closet but found no trace of Jean, only the mother’s birth certificate, a list of debts and a stack of letters in English, which she could not read but kept just in case. The rest she burned with the sheets from the death bed. She had no doubts. The ghost had brought her, and so she gave herself to raising François, afraid only that he might die like a runt or that the septic drone outside her window take him away. She’d have preferred a village, the quiet to meditate on salvation, but unknown origins would be noticed and gossip could hurt prospects.

Her years of wandering had not been kind. Her knees and ankles were gnarled, feet as twisted as roots. Soon she could no longer go out. François ran errands, and she sat by the radio, dipped into sleep and woke to the puffing of an accordion. Sometimes he pretended to have questions about his father just so he could hear those other, much better stories, Hervé Hervé who’d wrestled champions from miles away,
le Suède, le Géant, le Russe Noir
, or that of the brawny boy and his frail sister. He thrilled at this incredible love.