Vandal Love (3 page)

Yes, the convent—she’d have made a good nun.

It is sad.
Tellement triste. Elle était si jolie
.

Jude stumbled outside. A grey sun settled faintly against a distant, watery horizon. Far off, the church’s spire was a frail ensign between sea and mountains. The cold mustered about him.

At the docks he found Hervé Hervé. He asked what they should do —rare words, stumbling,
Qu’est-ce … qu’on devrait faire?
Hervé Hervé had been drinking. He’d just tied down the weir and put up the boats. He stopped and took in Jude with his single eye.

There’s no point, he said against the windy silence. They die. People die. To call a doctor would be a waste of money. You can’t change anything.

In the darkening chill Jude rushed against this rage. He went to the woodpile and grabbed the axe and swung. He split savagely, driving aimless, glancing blows until the handle splintered. He crouched, panting. Not knowing how to cry, he could only groan. Stiffly, he walked to the outhouse. It was set back in the trees. He opened the door and knelt as his grandmother had taught him in church years ago. He lifted the board. Without closing his eyes, he pushed his head inside, down through the thin layer of ice.

The emigration to the factory towns of New England had begun after the rebellions of 1837 and 1838, and increased
to a furor by 1880, the year of Hervé Hervé’s birth. As a boy, he’d watched for wagons in the grey light, the huddled travellers with collars pulled to their ears. He and his father had sworn never to give up these lands. Their hatred of those who left was perhaps their only point of agreement with the curé. Several times each month, sermons described emigrants as lazy and self-centred. They were weakening the Church’s divine mission in North America. They were corrupted by the desires of their wives for luxury.
Aux États
they would lose faith and language. Understandably the first French-Canadians had gone because of politics, for the lack of farmland and opportunity. But leaving the northern winter needed few reasons and had many: stories of the south, of busy sunlit streets and booming factories, the clear proof of wealth that returned in the form of men with store-bought suits and golden pocket watches. At the turn of the century, an article in the paper said that there were ten cities in New England with populations of more than ten thousand French whereas in Québec itself there were only five. Across the border relatives had the wonders of running water, electricity and a steady pay-cheque. Even priests began to go, impressed by the wealth of the new parishes, realizing God’s work could be done elsewhere. The Sunday message changed:
les canadiens
would spread the true faith. Doctors and lawyers closed shop and headed south to open new ones. But for those who stayed, the choice was as real as the land’s settlement, as if they were founding daily their homes on a desolate coast.

A century of the same event is long enough for men to think that it is part of the natural order of things. So when the laws changed in
les États
, the end of the emigration and the closing of the border seemed strange to all—cataclysmic. Those who returned home to visit spoke of the Great Depression, a few families even moving back. It was only during the Second War that the myth of the south, not easily forgotten, was resuscitated.

Among the long-time tenants at the village boarding house was a man named Honoré, who, though very old in appearance, was one of Hervé Hervé’s sons from the first marriage. Hervé Hervé never spoke of him but the story was familiar, dating back to before the Normandy invasions. The war hadn’t been popular. The people of Québec felt no allegiance to England and hadn’t the leisure to pity France. Still, there were the few hearts too big for village life, and Honoré, with his praise and war rhetoric, was soon called
l’Americain
. Troops were then being shipped west for war in the Pacific, and after telling the village how everything would someday be American, how they would all look like summer tourists with quiet cars and blond wives, Honoré packed his bags. Though Jude had never cared for stories, this one had been told too often for him not to know—how Hervé Hervé caught the young man on the way to the recruitment office and beat him with a broken shovel handle. Another son had just died in Dieppe and Hervé Hervé believed he was saving Honoré. But not a month later the boy, almost fully mended, left in the night, enlisted and rode off with a few plucked-looking fishermen to catch the train west.

As Honoré would later tell it, when the French-Canadian soldiers crossed through the Prairie provinces, the locals jeered. He’d learned that French-Canadian anti-war sentiment had roused anger from seaboard to seaboard. The Rockies hung colourless in moonlight. The train climbed, and before dawn, descended again, pausing at an empty station only hours from Vancouver. He hesitated, then left his wagon and kept on down the road.

Eventually he found a ride to the border with a truck of Polish immigrants. He crossed south on foot and enlisted again, this time as an American, and was shipped off, not to the Pacific but to the high deserts of New Mexico. He was sure a mistake had been made. His platoon marched and camped in the desert. They dug trenches and smoked cigarettes, and because of his nascent English, he couldn’t ask questions. At night, the skyline lurid with bombs, he thought that perhaps the Mexicans had joined cause with the Japanese and Germans and soon would be streaming over the border in swastikaed sombreros and Hitler moustaches. Then one afternoon a detonation shook the earth. He’d been crouching, studying English with a rumpled
Superman
comic, and he looked up to see a light as dazzling and penetrating and white as what the curé had described as the seat of Jesus. He held his hand to his eyes and saw its fragile bones.

The summer after Honoré left, an old man shuffled into the village in too-large military boots, sweating terribly. He was stooped, bald and toothless, and the story he
told was of a great detonation, how afterwards he’d marched back to camp and removed his helmet to find his hair glued inside. He thought perhaps this was from the sun heating the metal, but that evening his teeth started to go. He shook and sweated, hardly able to stand. When this passed a week later, he was discharged and given a ticket home. He still sweated, terribly and for no particular reason. Hervé Hervé refused to have him around, and so Honoré took a room in the village. He spent his days on the stoop, proving with time to be a formidable storyteller and brewer of potato alcohol.

After his return, many decided the U.S. was a terrible place, but this conviction didn’t last. Somehow, looking at Honoré, folded and watery-eyed on the porch, they found themselves saying not
is
terrible but
used to be
terrible. It seemed, because of his great age, that the war and its struggles had been long ago. In fact Honoré had a regular audience and took up the role, dressing in a suit of old man’s clothes, his mouth gummy and distracted.

On the evening that Jude went to the village boarding house, he found Honoré sitting in the parlour next to the stove, shivering and sweating at once, red pouches beneath his eyes.

C’est quoi alors … ces États?
Jude asked. The old man squinched up his face and smiled. What is
les States?
he said with laughing gums. That is a big question,
hein, mon gars?

Jude, who’d never looked at a map longer than it took him to realize it wasn’t a picture, had no notion of a distance not lived in. He struggled to make sense of
Honoré’s words, a strange war, deserts and crumbling red stone and plants with needles instead of leaves and snakes that played music with their tails. This human skeleton spoke on with toothless exaggeration, pausing only to slurp from his Mason jar. He described an elusive enemy, weapons that didn’t kill but that aged you. New Mexico was a bad place, he said, too big and dusty. The good ones are California, Connecticut and New Jersey, and especially New York. He described a world of wealth and sunshine and nice cars, women with luminous hair, the absence of illness. He talked about the thousands who’d gone and who were no longer farmers but rich men with golden knickknacks. Jude nodded, understanding at last.

As he returned home, he realized that it made sense why his mother and most of his family had gone to
les States
. Emotion jerked in his belly like a big fish on a line. His aunts were right. Isa-Marie had not been born for this country. She wasn’t a woman who would bear eighteen lineages. Few were. That was why so many had fled, though Isa-Marie would never have the strength or courage. Thinking of everything he’d heard, he wondered if there would be a place for him and Isa-Marie in the magical south. And if he followed in the footsteps of the thousands who’d left, what would he become? What of these mountains and sea? Villagers said that when you crossed the border, you were never the same. Sons who returned were strangers at tables. But he’d had enough whining and moaning, American riches, French-Canadian woes, poverty and exploitation.
Enough of a people whose wisdom came from suffering. Winter had set in, the high autumn tides long passed, and the only solution was sunlight.

When he arrived at the farm, he didn’t go inside. He climbed the mountain path, the wind flapping at his open jacket. In the potato fields he stopped. A few unharvested furrows remained, and he began to work though the sun was setting. By the time he’d raked the last potatoes from the chill earth, clouds had gathered in immense reefs above the gulf, black patches against a reddening horizon. The festooned cables hung between electrical towers like broad stitches. He stood against the wind’s gravity as the hard earth tilted about him and the first stars flickered coldly. He stayed there, perfectly still.

Just before dawn Hervé Hervé woke to the honking of geese high above. For a moment he thought it was spring, that yarrow had grown up outside the window, but it was only flurries that had fallen, catching in the dead tufts of flowerheads, lit by a setting moon. He lay in bed, listening to the thrumming of the refrigerator motor downstairs until it clicked off. He felt the stillness of the house. Oddly his thoughts wandered back against the years, the way he’d culled his children, building his family like everything else, and the runts who’d died, whom he’d known would die, the exigencies of the land simply too great a law. He’d looked in on Isa-Marie occasionally, with no strong emotion. She’d hardly
been able to open her eyes. Returning home drunk one night, he’d seen Jude walking the road in his underwear, asleep, mumbling, his bare feet gleaming against the packed and frozen earth. Whatever strange motherless, fatherless bond the twins had shared was too much. They’d both been idiots, one gentle, the other brutal, and while Isa-Marie had inherited something of Jude’s strength, it now seemed the opposite, Jude’s love no less an infirmity.

Hervé Hervé lay a while longer, remembering and hoping that he was wrong. The previous night, he’d gone into her room. He’d pulled back the sheet and seen that she was dead. He’d been about to leave, but something had touched him, pity for Jude perhaps. He’d drawn the blind.

Hervé Hervé listened. He was certain. Where would Jude take her? How far could he go? Hervé Hervé pushed back the covers and got up and dressed. He went downstairs and out to the barn. He broke the ice lids on the water buckets, then stood, watching the road. Perhaps he was the last thing his countrymen who’d left had seen or would remember, a large angry man staring with his one eye, waiting as they passed. For years he’d hated them, but he hadn’t known how much it was possible to lose—not just his family but the power of pride and love and the easy law of violence. He couldn’t imagine his children elsewhere or other than what they were. Did they carry with them something of this world, its land and sea? In the first dim emanation of that December morning, everyone he’d loved vanished along
the road. They never ceased, constantly moving and vanishing against a grey light. The St. Lawrence thrummed the boulders of the coast, the wind as steady as gravity. He pictured those he’d lost as wood set into a fire, the south a country of ash, a land of ghosts.

The people of Gaspésie were a mix of Acadian, Normand and Channel Islander, Jersey or Guernsey, Irish and Indian and Scot, and though Loyalists had been there since the American Revolution, they set themselves apart. But the Hervé family could be traced back to Brittany, to a mute who’d given the strength of his blood and the name of a Breton saint. He’d somehow ended up in Québec when the cod industry was building towns for seasonal work. Stories had it that he’d never made a sound. A wise woman had
rubbed his tongue with elder sap, put hot ashes in his palms, hung his baby teeth on the neck of a yearling goat and run it into the sea, but to no end—as a newborn he didn’t cry or cluck, and as a man he lifted stones, received wounds and made love without a grunt. Why he should have been content to leave the banked homesteads of Brittany, his ancestors would never know.

In the century after his arrival his name became a quality of the blood, a tale too exaggerated to be true, making the Hervé men seem at once incomplete and too much. All through Gaspésie the name was known for giants because, in a forgotten past, the family had begun christening male children with the patronymic, hyphenating it to tell them apart. When each son became the head of a house, he claimed the title of Hervé
père
. Hervé Hervé’s only departure from this tradition had been to let his wife give the runts the less illustrious but infinitely more appropriate appellations of martyrs and saints.

To many, a story is the endurance of human strength, but by the time Hervé Hervé had been born, the adventures of his ancestor had been forgotten, until then passed on only by others, the Hervés themselves too silent a clan. Though the original character was lost, for all the Hervés as for Jude, their name and the power of their blood was enough. He’d wanted nothing else.

Frost had sketched bouquets on the window glass. Jude sat a moment longer, then filled a bag with clothes. He
put on three pairs of socks and went into Isa-Marie’s room. The mound of blankets barely revealed the outline of her body. Someone had pulled the blind, and this angered him. He raised it even though it was night. He spread her blankets on the floor one by one until she lay uncovered, her nightdress twisted under her arms, her hips as tight as spools.