Winter Child

by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau

  The boy’s friends had given up; too tired and unable to bear the cold, they’d walked home hours earlier and forgotten to tell anyone that the child, likely annoyed at them, his mind made up to see his plan and the night through, had stayed behind alone. Having insisted, even raged, to gain his parents’ consent, pride played a large part in the child’s stubborn decision. He had no sense of danger, was oblivious, desperate, already close enough to the abyss to see the other side should he cross over. He was snatched back in the nick of time.

  Mon père, when you placed your hand between my legs, you had no idea I hadn’t been a virgin for years, at least not there, although I still was one in my mind and heart; the predator that you feared, that you kept watch for through the window, was to be found inside your walls. It was clear to me that you were as innocent as I in this matter and as trusting of the other members of your family.

  I was seven the first time. He’d returned from residential school a few days earlier and we were playing in the neighbours’ barn the way we used to the summer before school started; his body, over the long winter, had endured the passage of a number of clerics, the same men entrusted with watching over his childhood, preserving it from original sin. He told me about a game, a new game he’d learned there, pulled down his pants and asked me to take off my underwear, he lay down on top of me and — mon père, should I be ashamed? — quite simply, I had my first orgasm, it was amazing, dazzling, afterward I wanted to tell you, our parents, but he said, “No way! Papa’d kill me!”

  And so I was introduced to the forbidden, a taboo had been broken, one lived out in silence in the heart of families, between fathers and daughters, or fathers and sons sometimes, often between brothers and sisters, more rarely between mothers and sons or daughters.

  That summer was hot and that pleasure my last; afterward the knowledge of sin tarnished the carnal encounters between my brother and me, I no longer liked this game that was no game. He suffered from spasms that made his heart contract, we never knew the cause. You let it be, never took him to the doctor’s, maybe you suspected something; my mother, panic-stricken, beat a retreat to the wood shed. That summer, I hoped he’d die from his affliction so I’d be free from his frequent demands; I no longer had a brother, or a friend, the realization didn’t set in immediately, but it was there: the person who opened my body to pleasure closed off my heart in doing so. I had no idea his betrayal would affect my ability to trust men, my body responded to the act, which was normal and innocent, only the lover was neither. Your warning came too late, your awkward attempt at preserving my virginity fed into my fear of men dating back to that young girl I’d been, a fear that clung to my body and whose aroma excited and spurred males on, leaving me at times dismayed and confused. I bore the scent of a victim.

  Cultures do exist in which the initiator belongs to the extended family, but not in your family’s culture or my mother’s, whose youth of marrying age would leave for another band in which young girls had few family ties with them; my mother told the story of how for the longest time her grandfather would hide his daughter, my grandmother, from any passing suitor.

  His fingers were so frostbitten that he nearly lost them, those same fingers that obeyed him when it came time to coax new sounds from his guitars; the night sheathed winter in an icy cape as thick as the distance between the sun and the child. His parents were away on a holiday, the children entrusted to Aunt Céline. Not knowing how cold it would be, his mother neglected to tell his aunt that there would be no school bus if the school’s administration decided the temperature was too freezing to open its doors. The little boy waited and waited at the end of the street until a neighbour called the house to warn his aunt that he was crying and there was no school that morning. His aunt’s dismay as she ran out half-dressed to bring him inside where she stuck his hands under warm running water, trying to ease the sting of his pain, and cried with him as he wailed.

  When Céline died years later, when she had had enough of suffering and made the decision to depart, his mother called to tell her child, who lived too far to make it back in time to bid his aunt farewell. The silence at the end of the line was so impenetrable that she thought he hadn’t heard, then came a cry: “NO! NO! MAMAN! NO! NOT MY AUNTIE! NO!”

  A cavernous sob followed, like the belch of a pipe disgorging waste; the depth of his grief frightened her, his tears seemed unstoppable, what could she do to calm him down from so far away? He had trouble speaking through his sobs, “I loved Auntie Céline so much, oh, Maman … why her?”

  During the pause before the tide returned to flood the line once more, his mother had a moment’s inspiration. “Honey, remember, she was my sister, think of that, if you’ve lost your auntie then my sister, too, is dead and gone …”

  Another long wave of silence, then these words: “I’m sorry, Maman, I was only thinking of myself. You’re busy comforting me when I should be the one comforting you, forgive me, Maman …”

  She felt again the silken touch of his love in the anguish they shared over the miles.

  So the day you brought up the treasure to be guarded between my legs, your eyes burning with desire and oddly intimidated, I thought that you, too, would find your way to lying on top of me, yet you went no further. I knew your private moments. We had an outhouse back of our log cabin; one day as I sat doing my business, you appeared without warning, I could see you between the cracks in the boards. I was about to announce my presence when you stepped up to the latrine, your cock already in your hand, you’d undone your pants as you walked toward me; I was so taken aback that I said nothing. A stream of urine hit the side of the stall and sprinkled the floor at my feet, your phallus was white and huge, I would have hated to have it in me, it would, I think, have robbed my body of any capacity to climax forever; not even our innate innocence would have spared us.

  A number of years after your death, I dreamt of you and Maman, we were back in the small house of my childhood and one morning on waking I pulled back the curtains over the window at the head of my bed; slender white lilies had blossomed overnight and blanketed the yard. A voice out of nowhere said, “Your father sowed those flowers for you.”

  I awakened, a dream within a dream, and walked into your bedroom where my mother sat crying over your lifeless body lying next to her. I scolded her, “Don’t sleep with a dead man!”

  I dragged your corpse to an armchair and sat it there, then went out to admire my lilies; when I came back, she had returned your body to the marriage bed and was sound asleep.

  By instinct, feeling sullied since childhood, I had tried to rediscover purity by having your spirit offer me immaculate flowers.

  You may have loved Maman with all your heart, but your first love left a mark on you. You kept a picture of the German woman Margot, the one you met when your regiment was sent to Berlin for the Allied victory march, with the other photos of you and your brother Jean, including the one in front of Brandenburg Gate. It’s easy to imagine how your feelings linked to war’s end set the violins to playing when your gaze fell on her, her round cheeks, blonde curls, velvety pink skin, and when her bright eyes pierced yours, you toppled headlong, drowning in the water of that sky blue. One day, speaking of her, you told me, “War pays no favours, it’ll leave you broken inside and out …”

  Nostalgia flooded your features; she still occupied your thoughts, that young girl who approached you because you spoke a bit of her language, and asked for more of the coffee you distributed to the starving, impoverished people. She confided, perhaps to awaken your pity, that her cousin had been raped by Russian soldiers, the first to enter conquered Berlin; it was love at first sight! You asked your superior for permission to marry her and bring her home with you; but no, Papa, so naive, that would have been collaborating with the enemy.

  I slid out of bed to go to the pump for water, and the bucket, normally full for the night, was empty. Your adult pleasures came well before your parental responsibilities sometimes and the night
before you had both had so much to drink that the two of you fell sprawling into bed, not that your snoring kept us from sleep. We were used to it.

  I walked through the dark room, not daring to turn on the flashlight for fear of disturbing your slumber; I let you sleep so you wouldn’t start drinking again. As I primed the pump, your deep voice, its timbre gentle yet husky with sensuality, rang out beside me, provoking irrational fear.

  “Iche liebe sie, Fräulein …”

  More or less meaning “I love you, Miss.”

  I dropped the white tin cup as you wrapped your hands around my waist. The knowledge that you were speaking to your German woman infuriated me. “Stop this craziness, Papa! I’m your daughter!”

  You woke from your secret universe with a start and, realizing your mistake, embarrassed, offered me water.

  If you’d been allowed to marry Margot, our story would never have been, we, none of us, would ever have been born: my children would have remained with me in the world of unrealized possibilities and we would never have known life, we would be at peace, spirits in the great nothing. The thought didn’t throw me, as though I knew the fullness of nothingness; the void was preferable to this madness, this hell, this mucked-up life, the mess you chained us to with our mother, a former non-drinker. Oh! I know, Papa, I remember your words of repentance a few months before your death, your confession, “I’m the one who drove your mother to drink …”

  You had forgotten how you stocked the shelves for parties with sweet liquor for us kids, setting the table for death, sardonic, perched on your shoulder. You introduced alcohol into your family, making of your wife an unfit mother, a drunkard incapable of seeing the consequences of her absence and her oblivion. Opening the door to abuse: she who should have protected me from you, from my brother, by being a wife to you and a mother to us all, her children. The two of you robbed me of my strength as an adult in making me shoulder too great a responsibility, much too great for my too-few years. How could I have become a well-rounded mother myself with that gaping hole as a child and a teen deprived of the right to grow up without skipping stages?

  I, too, became a mother unworthy of the name, abandoning my children, worn out from all the mothering I’d had to do from the tender age of six; yes, my son’s wounds, I carry them inside, I accept partial blame for his death. Such a horrific thing to acknowledge, Papa, leading inexorably to hell. Was this what you felt seeing your daughter Céline succumb to firewater, and your sons Michel, Lionel and André skirt the same abyss, only to be saved in extremis? When your eldest son Henry was murdered, too drunk to dodge the knife that should have struck thin air, how did you feel? How did you keep on drawing each breath? Tell me, Papa, how can I go on breathing?

  He wore a white shirt and black pants. It was the first time she’d seen him dressed up, he who usually wore casual clothes, but here he was looking elegant perched on a stool. The small music group waited on stage for the end-of-year concert. On a table in front of his sister, Amélie, in her blue dress, wind instruments had the place of honour. A young man seated on a chair was literally hidden by the cello clutched between his thighs, and a small young blonde girl hugged an English horn to her chest, looking nervous. The children had invited their mother who, by that time, hadn’t lived with them for several years.

  She sat at a remove from the other parents in the auditorium. He struck a chord on his acoustic guitar and suddenly a flight of notes set to dancing joyfully around him. A moment’s hesitation, the young people winked knowingly at each other; the blonde girl nodded and the first movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Aranjuez concerto rose from their instruments, spilling out to the silent audience of adults. The guitar sounded and a hint of Amélie’s flute, interspersed with the cello’s solemnity.

  As they began the adagio, the tender wave of notes blossoming under her children’s hands transpierced their mother’s heart. Though unpolished at times, given the level of difficulty, the young musicians surrendered heart and soul to the performance, throwing themselves into the concerto. Her son’s eyes sought her out as his fingers continued to pluck the guitar strings, playing blind, and he smiled at his mother.

  The phrasing grew more nimble and luminous as they advanced to the allegro in the third movement. The child missed a chord, which Amélie caught immediately; she glowered at him. He grimaced, his playing grew more assured as though navigating on calm seas; he punctuated his phrasing with sinuous jazz licks while continuing to honour the dialogue with his partners. As though improvising and loving it.

  Their mother felt both consumed and exiled by her children’s back and forth, detached like an island torn from the mainland by an earthquake. She should be with them playing an instrument too; alas, she had no sense of rhythm and wondered from what cosmic sphere their musicianship came since no one in the family had a talent for rhythm or sound, maybe from their Cree grandmother, who had never had an opportunity to develop her potential. She had had a beautiful voice; their mother remembered her contralto with its powerful vibrato. The children’s guileless performance raised goosebumps on her skin.

  Mon père, madness ran in your family; you feared your children would suffer from it, too. Bipolar disorder seems to be transmitted from one generation to the next, especially to the boys. My son was often in the manic stages of the disorder, in realms where everything seemed possible; his case wasn’t as bad as others, yet that didn’t stop him from seeing himself as invincible.

  Your father took the train north with his family during the First World War. Abitibi was a new land that its lone red inhabitants had never sought to change, but the newcomers arrived with axes and saws to chop down forests as well as tilling implements to dig up the earth and plant gardens. Your parents built a general store next to the train tracks; your father had a good head for business and his wife, who could count and write, kept the books. To think that a century has already passed since then makes my head spin …

  Then death toppled them, too; your mother gave birth year after year, and when you, the fifth son, were born, Spanish influenza had the village in its thrall. I dug through parish registries, looking for the date of my grandmother’s death, and saw fifteen other departures for the beyond that same month; you were three weeks old and your family had just lost the woman who was your father’s reason for living.

  I found her tomb in the cemetery and felt a blow reading her name, engraved on the ancient white stone riddled with cracks testifying to the ravages wrought by the seasons. I have yet to find her nation: was she Algonquin, Atikamecw, Abenaki, Ojibwe or even Mohawk? All I know is that she was Métis and her mother Indian.

  You never spoke of your father. The day he died, you took the train alone without telling us, your children; my mother knew. That’s when we learned we had a never-before-heard-of grandfather, one we would never know now, a secret lost to the shame of madness: he had been in an asylum for over thirty years. I asked a cousin to tell me about him. After my grandmother died, he showed the first signs of his break with reality: when he ordered apples for his store, it wasn’t just a few crates to feed the small parish, but a whole wagonload. To help him out, his customers bought the fruit and fed it to their horses, but he crossed a line the day he walked through the village trailing his horse on a lead, the animal painted a bright red. His brother ventured a timid why. Word is his answer was, “To hide my horse from the Jerries.”

  The war had entered the annals of history ten years earlier.

  The thing is, I quite like my grandfather’s gesture, performance art before its time, the colour red heralding us all, my Cree mother, the family’s artists, colours, lines, living art, art treading unbeaten paths leading out from our gut fed up with suffering, humankind’s excesses and the abuse of alcohol, sex, the cold, art to rescue us from misery and from the darkness opening out onto death. As does the written word, because what I write, Papa, is everything inside me quaking with anger, helplessness, outrage. I write so as not to hate you.

  We we
re children left to our own devices. One night, we started into town, you and Maman sound asleep after a day’s worth of partying washed down with plenty of beer and the sweet wine Maman loved, making her giddy, reckless, sometimes wildly funny or stormy.

  Because of a toothache, I couldn’t sleep and sat up outside enduring the pain. A skunk disappeared underneath the porch where the dog slept, it barked, the skunk sprayed, the smell woke up my little brothers, but not you, not even that unbearable stench; they came outside and one said, “Why don’t we go for a walk until the smell dies down?”

  The air was mild, a bit humid; we covered the three kilometres to the village at a leisurely pace, aimless, no gum or chips to be bought since the stores were all closed, no one in the streets. Outside the bar, we slipped in among the few Indigenous men who tended to while away the night there; they made fun of our smell even as they made room for us on the concrete steps and together we watched the sun rise slowly to the east, softening the grey of our surroundings. Charly, a toothless Algonquin man, made a conjuring motion around my head, saying he was a medicine man and that his power would rid me of my pain; he laughed like a maniac, his mouth gaping, dark and wide. My little brothers got cross at the drunks’ teasing, who called them Tijoudji, the nickname they had for you, when it wasn’t Appittippi. They said nothing to me — I could feel the warmth of their respect for the girl who had kept the household afloat from her youngest years on.

  When we returned home, you were both awake, worried; Maman turned away to hide her shame because, despite everything, she wasn’t proud of your drinking binges and my eyes full of reproach upset her. To me, she was almost like another child since her behaviour forced me to assume responsibility for her family during her lengthy absences, that is, when she wasn’t using me as a shield against your — sometimes legitimate — anger. For a number of years by that time, Maman would leave us regularly without remorse to stay with family or friends, claiming that now that she’d taught me how to run a household, her work as a homemaker and mother was done. That reasoning is common to people caught up in an addiction and under the sway of a substance more powerful than their conscience; by lying to themselves, they’re free to continue their libations without a second thought. During that whole period, Papa, you held down the fort, keeping the job with National Defense that was yours thanks to your status as a veteran.