Winter Child

by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau

  The little boy loved the clothes his older sister wore; his mother spent long hours at the sewing machine making dresses while he played at her side or watched cartoons. She gave him bits of fabric, useless scraps whose texture and variety of hues fascinated him; he fetched dolls from the bedroom and held the cotton swatches against them just as his mother did with her daughter, adjusting for size before starting to sew.

  He didn’t understand why he couldn’t wear the same bright colours that his mother’s hands fashioned into gorgeous outfits for his sister. Of course, she outfitted him too: with suits, a jacket and pants, a plain coat, striped overalls, nothing special, nothing really pretty, no ruffles, ribbons, lace, nothing flowery, nothing sparkly. One day as his mother was packing away the clothes the children had outgrown, he grabbed a dress from the pile and said, “Me want this!”

  She smiled, “You’re a boy, honey, boys don’t wear dresses!”

  He cried, “Me want, me too!”

  Tears pearled below his eyelids, his blue eyes steely; his mother sighed, removed his sweater and shorts and pulled on the dress with its tiny pink-and-yellow butterflies and a bow at the back. He walked over to the freestanding mirror in his parents’ room and exclaimed, “Pretty! Me pretty!”

  His mother’s laughter troubled him, something hurtful in her mirth; she turned him away from the mirror and, looking into his eyes, corrected him, “You’re handsome, sweetheart, handsome … My little boy is handsome!”

  He wore the dress all day and through his afternoon nap and forgot what he was wearing until his sister came home from school. Her anger: “That’s my dress, take it off right now! Maman, he’s wearing my dress!”

  She knew the dress was too small for her, but they had a habit of bickering over every last little thing; their mother nipped the argument in the bud giving each of them a vanilla ice cream cone. Her daughter giggled, circling her brother and licking her treat, “Huh! I didn’t know I had a sister, you look so funny!”

  Her brother ignored her and kept his outfit on; when his father came home from work, he smiled, amused, and picked up his son just as he did every night without saying a word, only a wink to his wife. Later, after dinner, Uncle Jean-Paul dropped by, his booming, mean-spirited voice cutting the young boy’s heart to the quick; slimy contempt trickled over his body from the gaze of a man so tall the boy had to tilt his head back to see his face.

  “Lookee here, you a little girl now, m’boy? Not fixin’ to be a homo, are you?”

  This time the child blushed; ashamed, he turned to his mother, “No more play, Mamma, dress off.”

  I guess we can neither foresee nor avoid the winds of malice that buffet human efforts. All the premonitions that came to me, dreams foretelling of one person’s departure, another’s illness, in images so exact there was no room for doubt, yet nothing connected to his death. Why such silence from my dreams? Is it because I could have prevented that death and wasn’t meant to?

  The year before his death, I experienced unusual aches and pains, fatigue I blamed on too much work, not enough exercise and time’s wear and tear, so I spent hours out on the snowbound lake or along park trails, on skis or snowshoes, in runners or on a bicycle. The doctor ordered X-rays, but my back gave no sign of degeneration, no collapsed vertebrae. “That’s rare for a woman your age,” he told me.

  What to do? He recommended a new mattress, a trip to the chiropractor’s, told me he wasn’t against alternative medicine, quite the contrary … the pain kept coming back, insidious, tenacious. I couldn’t read the messages my body sent as it remembered the child’s weight in utero, knowing that its creation — cell by cell in the moist, secret membranes of the womb, the best being chosen from his father and me to make a masterpiece — would soon disappear from this earthly plane, and lamenting that loss with every single fibre, in torment and despair.

  Let’s look together at your limitations that I was eager to overcome and transcend, your fears incongruous in my eyes, every single one of them. Your fear of all that was black. Not of the night, no, but of black men. It left its mark on me. That someone like you, so intelligent, so open-minded, could scorn black people. I could never understand, mon père. I lived for years with a husband who had four black grandchildren, my grandchildren by marriage; you never met them. Never the least bit interested, just a scornful smirk playing at the corners of your lips whenever I spoke of them.

  You and I are going to play a game. When I die, I want to be at peace, relieved of the vile stains that mar your memory; I also want to return them into your hands, unbound, innocent, absolved.

  Listen to what could have been.

  That he would have known me without knowing me, that he would have known me before I knew him.

  That his ancestors would have arrived in America in chains while we, already here, were decimated by the same barbarians who transported his ancestors in shipholds from the continent unknown to me, the dark continent as it’s called. Yes, we both sang and danced, he in his homeland, me in mine, our encounter bathed in blood, in the most abject humanity, that of power and the possession of one human being by another like a beast of burden. His brothers murdered for their ideas, for refusing to tolerate folly, my brothers for inhabiting our territories: eradicating them like quack grass, their presence erased, that the New World be unpopulated. Afterward, it was easy for the others to see us as ghosts, no more than subjects for anthropological studies, our creations good only to be stored in ethnological museums.

  Yet we had nothing, we were naked, had no possessions other than gold in the case of some of my peoples, and a continent — he had the strength of his arms, of his race — because we had been devastated by their smallpox or their fire-spitting weapons; survivors grew hardened.

  We no longer speak a victim’s language, we cross seas, we bring borders together, we sing a poetry of love and sharing. His island is one of warm seas, my land is one of cold snow; his skin is the colour of a starless night or infused with cream tones, mine is said to be the colour of blood; on my medicine wheel and its colours, I am found to the south, he to the west; on the globe, he is from the south and I from the west. Interchangeable.

  Tropical fruit would have grown on the branches of his trees; I like to imagine that he had only to reach up to grasp plenty in his hand, to open his mouth and bite into a mango, let its juice trickle from the corners of his generous lips. His southern nights, my northern sunrises, sweat glistening on his body, goosebumps on mine, nothing but differences, opposites; our paths would have crossed in the happenstance of hybrid constellations because the earth is vast. Our union would have held, it would have engraved its new words on mysteries yet to be discovered; mine would have been traced on the moccasins of First Peoples and his would have been freedom, travel, heady wine, joyous song and he would laugh his black man’s laugh, crisp and booming, that would descend on me, blanketing me in the delight of warm sand; he would have been for me the word made tenderness. Then I would have understood that the path belongs to me, that the visible face of the world, my world, is mine and that it would please you and those willing to see, those who do see, those who walk with eyes open wide, those who are curious, alive, the lovers of life.

  I would have reunited the lovers he and I would become, made of love a conscious decision for a tale that ends well; we would have guarded that love more precious than gold, learned to disregard differences and vexations, our quotidian embedded where the magic of history is found; perhaps we would have succeeded since dreams do exist … and the child would have borne the colour of scorched earth. Would you have loved him all the same? Your black grandson.

  The child’s Métis grandfather lived out in the country in a cabin thrown together after a first one was destroyed by flames at the end of a particularly scorching summer. The wooden building went up in plumes of smoke leaving a hole both in the bucolic countryside and in the old man’s heart who, after a prolonged bender, found the courage to erect other walls around his solitude. Ae
sthetics being of no interest to him, from the outset his new home looked like nothing more than a shack; he never bothered to dress up the exterior, finish the floors or paint walls, no doors separated the rooms, not even the bathroom, which had only a see-through curtain to ensure privacy, so the gloomy hovel that served as the family’s landmark seemed more like an animal’s lair. The black tarpaper held in place by cross planks was conspicuous in its total disregard for the outside gaze.

  For birthdays and celebrations, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, the child’s uncles and aunts prepared copious meals washed down with wine and beer. His parents always attended the feasts; children scattered everywhere, playing, shouting, running or testing the limits of the quad or the snowmobile depending on the season.

  The child woke early that day in the grey light of dawn; the stench of alcohol and cigarettes from the previous night permeated his grandfather’s home. On the table sat the leftovers of forgotten desserts; he helped himself to a piece of cake that had escaped the trash bin. He knew how to go unnoticed; in silence, he explored the home’s nooks and crannies, pulled his father’s woolen socks onto his cold feet, made his way to the living room where his youngest uncle lay curled up on the couch, asleep under a Navajo-patterned blanket. At regular intervals, his uncle’s breath lifted a brown lock of hair flopping across his face, his hand dragged on the floor; and it was as the boy’s eyes followed the dangling arm to the ground that he saw a nearly untouched bottle of beer placed there by the teen before he fell into his deep sleep.

  The child ventured a sip, grimacing only slightly at the bitter taste overpowered as it was by a fruity flavour, the syrupy drink sliding from his tastebuds down his throat. He hesitated for a second; “Papa and Maman might get mad …,” he thought, but the newfound treat was worth the risk. He took another swig, a good one this time; his legs began to tingle, his arms to prickle, his head got a pleasantly dizzy feel, a joyful effervescence came over him. He drank again and again; the bottle dropped from his suddenly limp fingers, liquid spilled under the armchair he leaned against and wet his pyjamas. Someone was up and about; the child swayed and staggered to the kitchen, where his mother, her hair uncombed, was about to bring a glass of orange juice to her lips; he laughed, clambered onto a chair then the table and, before his mother’s stunned gaze, stepped to the edge and rocked back and forth before throwing himself at the floor. She let loose a strangled cry and raced toward her son, catching him just in time, “You’re drunk! You stink of beer! Who did this to you?!” She was furious.

  That drink, the effect it had and its taste, would never leave him.

  I could hear the cogs turning, mon père, as you wondered where all this was headed — you knew, you can read me better now than you ever could while you were still alive; I had lost both the man who fathered me and the man I gave birth to, one absence behind me, one ahead, deprived of the men in my life, the true men, my direct relations. Of course, I still have my brothers, but we exist on the same plane, neither forebears nor descendants, they neither precede nor follow me along my path, my wake, my creation; with my son’s death, my male line has been broken, severed, destroyed. The other, the female line, is assured by precious radiant girls.

  Amélie has two beautiful, luminous little daughters, who bestow on her quiet wisdom and joy and little time to wallow in grief. She is an enigma to me with her capacity to accept the inevitable, her sovereign strength. She holds her head high and perseveres, day in, day out, with patience and grace. She and her family are my pillar, my spine.

  Yet you, my men, why were you so sombre, so drawn to darkness, the night, pain, death? So fragile? Why this lot of grief and worry surrounding you and, let’s speak plainly, why did you push my suffering beyond bearable limits? A bird, one half colourful with feathers, the other dried up and grey, a broken wing hanging limp, pitiful, useless; how will I ever fly?

  Where your death dug a grave beneath my feet, the death of my son digs a hole in my wholeness, cleaves my passion for life, drives me to the dark of despair. A direct hit. Until now, I managed to dodge all bullets, invisible radar warning me when to jump aside, despair unable to gain a hold; you Papa, Maman, two brothers, a sister all gone, missing because of the drama your life choices created then imposed on us. Yet the weight of those absences, those missing elements, was shared among several, that is until death deployed its remote-guided drone, confident this time in hitting the mark. Ever since, I’ve lived with silence ensconced in my breast and my belly where for nine months he twisted and turned, the umbilical cord winding round his neck, already headed for the inevitable. Who could understand and say, I hear you, I’m listening, other than another mother who shared the same pain? What greater mourning is there than for a child? You have known that horror. I tried, I wanted to tell of him, of the unspeakable sorrow, words saved mostly for other women, and for my dearest friend Marc whom I didn’t see often but whose undivided attention came with boyish smiles, dimples in his cheeks, an undamaged being as welcoming as a loving mother. He could never be my lover; he felt no desire for me but enjoyed spending time in my presence, with my inner self, not my woman’s body. Not him. To my infinite regret.

  When it all got too much, a man would appear in my dreams, a frequent visitor after the initial dream encounter. He appeared to me a month before the first loss, that of Henry, my eldest brother. The man was a stranger, unknown to me yet familiar, leaning against a cave wall, an ironic smile playing on his lips. Dreams are like that, the choice of decor singular; his features were dusky, their origins hard to place, perhaps many-fold, his eyes dark. A shadow who was there for me, allowing my words to spew forth like gravel, the vomit of loose stones against his hands that brought peace as they brushed against me. A church man, a space of silence and serenity to which the wounded turn for hope and refuge. I believed he didn’t exist in real life and could only come to me at night in my silence; I could feel him at my back, his wholeness, and the only words he uttered, “I’ll stand behind you always.”

  Words woven through my sorrow despite the desert to be crossed, the thirst for eternity: those words were my lifeline, my North Star, my guide on the march when one world has ended.

  In my sleep, I turned to look, to drink in his features; pure love engulfed me, absorbed by his essence I found my way home in his Christlike eyes akin to those of prayer card saints. The day I have had my fill, I hope to merge with that absolute darkness, with my luminous phantom, my double.

  His presence, though incorporeal, sustained me, kept me from losing all bearings despite my appearance of waking madness. The way I saw it, given my half-crazy family, I must surely be as well.

  There are those who are only on this earth in passing, not fully incarnate, who explore life as though it were a planet encountered on a journey through space. I have no idea whether reincarnation is possible; I always felt that he was of another era, long ago, and that his desire to live life intensely came from knowing how little time he had. A few years earlier, one of his aunts phoned me, she had heard on the radio the name of a young man killed in a car accident overnight; the name sounded just like my son’s. Gripped in the ice of terror once more, I dialled his cellphone immediately, hoping he wasn’t at work. His reaction: “It’s not my time yet, Maman.”

  A few months after his birth, I suffered from postpartum depression after that fever that nearly stole him away; the ground split open, triggering a flurry of panic, a black bottomless pit ahead of me just below my feet, I was hallucinating and knew it, I clung to reason to keep from crying out in terror. Could it be that deep down I knew our story and how it would end? I’d stand over his crib and watch him sleep, his gentle breath on my hand calming me instantly, then I’d rock him in my arms until composure returned. In the interest of holding nothing back, that same winter, I’d let him sleep all bundled up in his sled outside as I shovelled snow. One day a neighbour forgot to cut the engine to his snowmobile and, for whatever reason, the snowmobile shot into the street and collided
with our house, just a few short centimetres from where my child lay; I nearly fainted at the sight.

  He and two friends built a fishing shack out of planks from scraps left over from odd jobs done by their fathers, who had helped the boys with their project that summer. Come winter, they transported the shack to the lake, installed a small stove inside and piled wood in one corner. The boys loved to go ice-fishing over the holidays. One January evening, they asked for permission to sleep on the floor in the shack; all bundled up, they would take turns stoking the fire.

  Around midnight, his father, unable to sleep, checked the temperature outside, which had dropped to near-polar levels. Worried, he pulled on his winter gear and brought out the snowmobile, which sputtered then sprang to life. Biting cold seized his throat; he pulled his scarf up over his chin, lowered the visor on his helmet and, within minutes, was racing across the lake at top speed.

  The full moon cast a sinister glow across the countryside, the long-limbed shadows of trees along the shore stretched like never-ending fingers toward the tiny square of the cabin from whose chimney no smoke rose. His father raised his visor, incredulous at the boys’ carelessness; anguish shredded his nerves as he opened the door calling out the child’s name, the wan light outlined his boy’s caterpillar shape against the frost-covered floor.

  His son was all alone, coiled in his sleeping bag, half-frozen, his fingers so numb he could no longer feed logs to the stove whose fire had finally died away. His father bent down, slipped his own mittens over his son’s stiff hands and, in a rush of adrenaline, scooped up the boy still wrapped in his sleeping bag and sat him down in front of him on the skidoo whose engine roared, bringing warmth.