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.
When she le
ft, 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.
Manitoba–Montréal
1963–1974
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 mention
ed, 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.
Vandal Love Page 15