Winter Child

by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau

  That morning, hearing our voices, you threw open the door with a smile and said, “How about pancakes for breakfast, kids?”

  My little brothers shouted, “Yay!!”

  My toothache had disappeared.

  His profile stood out against a sky of granite, a grey dawn, a promise of clouds with the dying of another night in the swell of morning on this Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, a relic of ancient ceremonies paying tribute to light at its fullest, the fecundity of summer and its warmth. An outdoor show, an abundance of free beer, a friend of legal drinking age picking up the drinks for him at the service counter since volunteers stood by to check young drinkers’ ID.

  The site was empty, the last partiers having disappeared into the cool air of night’s end.

  He nodded off, leaning against a log that had been spared the huge bonfire built several metres high by the villagers, jerked his head back, with its straggling strand of hair, whenever his chin hit his chest. The screech of gulls fighting over the party-goers’ leftovers pierced the silence without eclipsing the loudspeaker music that continued to inhabit him despite the fists of intoxication methodically pummeling his aching temple from within. His throat ground out clanging cymbal sounds, and his fingers tapped to a rhythm lost periodically to sleep.

  His friend, Martin, stayed sober, not liking the taste of beer, and watched over the boy who, as far as he knew, had never had a drink before. He pulled some cigarette paper and a sandwich bag of weed from his jacket and rolled himself a joint; he inhaled the marijuana’s acrid smoke, releasing it in short puffs that evaporated into the cool air. Worried about the boy’s father’s reaction, his thoughts turned to his bond with his friend, barely sixteen and already so full of sorrow, so similar to the sting of his own suffering; the stockpiling of fear, steep mountains to be scaled with only hope for crampons, the hope of avoiding a fall that could break a spine, crumple legs, reduce bones to dust, the exhaustion of misfortune, a call, a cry for an oasis of supreme tranquility, a time of calm, he knew all about it. The gaping crevasse of the future, the unknown to be crossed, the road with its many obscure, impenetrable, terrifying crossroads, barred from good fortune: together they shared the nothingness of adolescence. He threw the roach into the ruins of the bonfire, leaned toward his companion, shook him awake, “Hey, man! We’ve gotta get a move on, c’mon!”

  He half-carried his friend draped across his shoulders, breathing loudly like a seal; with Martin’s unhealthy obesity causing his legs to buckle, they advanced in fits and starts until the house came into view. The child’s jeans were all muddy, his jacket spattered with vomit. He slumped to the floor in the entrance, cursing and demanding to be left alone.

  I was the ship my son boarded for his journey through life. Even so, he became a castaway since love wasn’t enough to quench his thirst for infinity, for galaxies, stars and distant planets more beautiful than the one he found himself on; yet he loved this planet, suffered to see it sacrificed for our comfort, ocean bottoms dredged for gourmet palates, air and oceans and substrata become the dumping grounds for immeasurable waste generated by our intentional folly. I’ve kept the astronomy magazines he collected and flip through them sometimes to dream of him, imagine him in the magma of stars buried in the infinite.

  Sidewalks jarred my bones, visions of ripping up the asphalt and treading the earth below, so much easier on my hips. He — an urban Aboriginal, the latest catchword — loved the city, loved its smells, its sounds, its forbidden pleasures; I tried to meet him on his terrain, leaving behind my culture of vast forests, solitary lakes, the cry of loons come September and the howl of wolves in January. To enter his world of dust, concrete, squealing tires, wailing sirens; not just in passing as before but to settle there and thrum to the beat of his heart. I was moved by the foliage of trees, apple green against the sky’s azure, a blue that reminded me of his gaze, the immensity had now become his eyes turned on me.

  What if happiness were conceivable? The pleasure of simply being, falling headfirst into wordlust, the bountiful tenderness of tears, holding friends’ hands as they, too, weep for lost loved ones. All love is love, even that of tears for journeys with no return, salt for the spread like an ocean unfurling across the table, purging my grief, quashing the ever lurking seeds of wrath and of hatred, its bones rattling in the winds of rage laden with despair. Rage, so potent, so acute.

  The child was no more, become a man, with a long, lanky frame. We liked to meet in restaurants, eat and drink beer or wine; he spoke of himself with characteristic humour — he could be so funny. He looked at me fondly, that I remember, such a powerful memory of his gaze on me, so soft, so enveloping, and playfully took on a gruff tone when in fact he was gentleness incarnate. One day, he motioned for me to sit beside him on the grass in a park not far from his apartment, we sat facing the setting sun; he talked of his life, his activities outside work, his hope of finding love. He dreamed of starting a family, it was the first time I heard him speak of his desire to hold his baby in his arms. That confession brought me to tears; how could he have been a father acting as he did like an eternal child?

  Mon père, I clung to those images in an attempt to convince myself I could live without him, without the moments he had granted me over the course of his inveterate adolescent’s life. He was so light, so airborn, why not slide into the slipstream trailing him, let myself be aspirated by a nascent star, why not jump into the chasm of freedom he so loved? I had only to close my eyes, forget all the contingencies around the duty to live, eventualities waiting on a gesture, a well-considered choice to show the way, no more path, no more obligations, no more necessity. Not that my thoughts had turned to dying, no, but to living instead. Free. With him.

  She had a good idea what her son went through once she left home, loneliness for sure. She lived in a small house in the mining town of Bourlamaque; he approached adolescence as though embarking on a war and quit confiding in her, his mother, hadn’t done so, in fact, for quite some time. She owned a car, her first, and picked him up at his father’s to take him home one weekend, left him the big bed and slept on an old pull-out couch with its sagging mattress. That evening, he came to her and asked in a hesitant voice if he could sleep next to her; he was already tall, taller than her, and she made room for him behind her; he turned his back and slept. In the morning, he got up late and asked for bacon and eggs.

  The last time he shared his mother’s bed dated back to his first and last heartbreak. She bore the wound of her son’s broken heart, he who only loved once and forever an older girl he’d dated for two years: a beautiful girl, a coming together of Spain and Quebec. He’d left the region of his birth several years before, studied art, music, switched disciplines, made ends meet in and around Montreal. His mother hadn’t known that the girl left him for another man. He showed up in the village his mother lived in at the time, found her with his aunties at the bar they frequented and ordered a beer. Silence incarnate, in his blue eyes a flicker she’d never seen before, he asked her to drop him off at the exit leading to his father’s house, ninety kilometres away; it was winter, the holiday season. He had hitchhiked this far and was bound and determined to continue his journey through the night; he insisted.

  “I’ll be back in an hour, if you’re still here, come to my place for the night and tomorrow I’ll drive you.”

  He didn’t budge; she went for some water to counter the effects of the wine.

  The car’s headlights illuminated him, a black shadow dotted by the white of falling snowflakes, the winter child among his own people; he was cold and trembled slightly.

  Back in her cabin, she fed logs to the stove and heat flooded the room. He grabbed a chair and set it down next to the stove’s warmth, held his hands out, took off his jacket and toque, all in silence.

  “You’ll have to sleep with me, I don’t have another mattress,” she said.

  “That’s fine.”

  In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, his steel-blue eyes sho
ne, the eyes she’d wished for him, a utopia, since no one else in her family bore the sky in their gaze, all of them First Nations’ descendants on both his father’s side and her own. When the blue stayed blue, like two azure nuggets gazing out at her, she asked around; his great-grandfathers had had those same eyes.

  They’d only just stretched out on the mattress when she felt his body quiver; he shook silently, his face buried in the pillow. She laid her hand flat against his back, after all he was a man now, she had to wait, respect the space between them, he pulled away the pillow, turned onto his side and moaned, his breath caught in his chest, “Maman, she’s left me. It hurts, Maman … it hurts so much!”

  A murmur, what else could she say or do but weep with him, her forehead pressed to his, blotting their tears away with a tissue, then he rolled over and she hugged him for a moment, long enough for sleep to ferry him away. The small cabin’s walls creaked under the gusts, now become a full-fledged storm, and above the bed snow tapped against the windowpane; once more, the child had escaped the cold.

  For me, he had Buddhist trinkets, a cosmic egg hand-painted in lush colours with gilt accents. From his apartment I kept his incense burner and sticks, his Chinese medicine balls, a little Buddha and his collection of fragrant teas. Does the invisible reality of our soul manifest when we die? If so, my son’s soul was Samurai with, in the days preceding his leave-taking, the same look and complexion, his long dark hair swept up into a topknot; for several years by then, almost devoid of facial hair because of his Indigenous origins, he had sported a scraggly mustache and goatee, and his eyes, while blue, were almond-shaped. His skin, gone yellow from the hepatitis brought on by the decline in his vital functions, glistened with sweat; he refused to give up on life, fought his caregivers, the doctors, us; he was at war, in a battle to return to the street, his neighbourhood, his privacy. They tied him to the bars of the bed, but he managed, amazingly, to free himself, the formidable rage radiating from my child tearing me up inside.

  I managed to reassure him with gentle words and children’s songs, reverting to the attentive, loving mother he had once known. He asked me to visit the island with him.

  “Should I drive, or you?”

  I knew he’d slipped back in time when he refused to drive, “No way, Maman, I’m not old enough!”

  Playing along, I invited him to take a seat and buckle up, described the sites I knew throughout our imaginary outing, like the snack bar we stopped at where he agreed to drink the tea the nurse brought in.

  My heart was ice, knowing death lurked nearby, so close, but when would it strike? When, in a sardonic rattling of bones, would dame skeleton mow him down?

  Driving home after a day’s shopping in La Sarre, my thoughts turned to my son, casting around for a way to force him to change his lifestyle, cut back on his binging: alcohol, marijuana, sleepless nights, gambling. I never listen to my voicemail before I’ve put away all the groceries and other purchases. But that day, I picked up the phone without thinking and entered the password to retrieve my messages. Heard my son-in-law, Alex, Amélie’s husband, say in a strangled voice, “You’ve got to call Amélie on her cell. It’s bad, your son’s in intensive care …”

  Silence, then a sob.

  My entire being caught in a cold surge. A stab of certainty: his time had run out. Mechanically, with gestures learned in childhood in the face of dread, of fear, the need to act despite it all, I booked a seat on the next flight to Montreal. I didn’t have much time. I would only make the flight if there was no traffic between home and the airport.

  The habit of adversity caught up to me at full gallop, found in the stony expression separating me from the people on the plane, the crowd in Montreal, the taxi driver chauffeuring me to the hospital. Four hours had passed; I clasped Amélie to me in the corridor to the room where her brother lay dying. She told me he had contacted no one, the staff had had to insist for him to give them a family member’s name, he didn’t want to worry us. He meant to get through this on his own, not bother anyone, he had no idea he was dying.

  My daughter took me by the hand and led me to the foot of the bed. Tactfully, his father and his father’s partner stepped away. For the space of an instant, the cold wave turned glacial, flooding my heart, my womb, my breath. Dazed and trembling, I slid onto the chair offered by Amélie. When he saw me, his only words were, “Oh! You’re here?”

  I felt a presence behind us. The entire Montreal family stood there, silent, overcome. The child, meanwhile, was glad to have visitors.

  His friend phoned; actually I called her because of an email she’d sent to tell me she’d only just found out by chance about my son’s death. I could sense her distress and wanted to know her connection to him. She told me she had loved him deeply, but not he her; there were long pauses during which her words gave way to sniffling. The girl was intense, undone. I listened to her, recognizing a trait I shared with my son, the long-standing inability to love someone who would in turn love me: a brokenness. She spoke for over an hour, a great deal about herself, and about him, his refusal to seek medical help or let her advise us of his illness, his worrisome cough, his desire to vanish, to stop keeping on keeping on. Apparently, he told her, “My mother knows I’m not well.”

  It was his way of shifting responsibility onto me to discourage her involvement. Yet we were close, he and I, even without words, we understood each other; I’d had a vague sense that he had had enough of his life, believing himself incapable of returning to an even keel, ignoring my pleas that he consult specialists or accept help. I could see you in him, mon père, I could see the same look in his eyes as in my brothers’ when they turned down any outside assistance, could see him mired in his pride and pigheadedness: his drinking was not a problem.

  I wish he could have known happiness, I would have sacrificed a gift life has bestowed on me so far, a sense of joy, and given it to him instead; ever since his very first girlfriend, his first and last love, he had known unhappiness. The lovers he chose, either struggling felines or feral scrappers quick to unsheathe their claws: he liked strays from elsewhere, always indomitable, quick to disappear beneath the bed when visitors showed up at the door. Or friends who lived like parasites off his fridge, depriving him of food, or beer, or money.

  “No big deal, there’ll always be another paycheque!”

  His words. After his passing, postmarked envelopes lay scattered on the table with the cheques for Greenpeace that couldn’t be cashed because of his empty account once he no longer had a good head on his shoulders.

  At the same time, he grew up feeling he had no right to happiness and accepted it. There had been so many trips down death’s road that it became more familiar to him, more reassuring than the years stretching ahead, and he courted danger, even as an adult: riding his bike in the dark, blind drunk, down the staircase from Mount Royal, the spectacular fall that ended in nothing worse than bruises. Or skiing down the steepest slopes, poleless, his first time on skis, yet managing somehow, pushing off with a laugh, arms spread wide, hair flying in the wind, so full of life, so tall and strong that I couldn’t hold him back and only my heart skipped a beat as I welcomed him afterwards. His proud, radiant smile.

  I was so worn out from worrying about him that the night he finally took his leave, I slept soundly for the first time since the day before his birth. He was my moth child, flitting around the flame of the beyond; I saw him enveloped in the sheets of eternity, warm, serene at last, waiting to return, I hoped, to light my dreams. For he was still that little boy free from malice, fair and generous; his only way of being was with the absolute freedom of original purity.

  The day before, I’d gone out seeking warmth; in his bounty, grandfather Sun tugged at the tender shoots exploding at trees’ fingertips. In front of the produce merchant’s storefront, potted flowers paraded their colours and perfumes, their delicate petals open in silky invitation; I bought daisies with saffron hearts and oranges.

  It is so hard, mon
père, to plumb the depths of the pool of blood that is grief. Emerging from my dive, sticky with tears, skin cracked, the jerk of my breath translating countless earth tremors, eyes lowered, I gently stitched the cleansed wound back together until the next time. It had to be done, for life’s sake, so the path wouldn’t end, the path of poetry in all things, the whiteness of canvas waiting for paint, the smiles bestowed on those left behind.

  I didn’t like the way the doctor’s sedatives scrubbed at my thoughts, mired my brain in gelatin, imprisoning words, turning sentences into snails, slithering trails along leaves. The pills wound me tight in plastic wrap, crushed the nimbleness of prose, my body had no tolerance for chemicals, my insides liquefied; in the end, I chose sleepless nights over the half-light of impotence with drool hanging from my lower lip.

  Daffodil blossoms fired golden sparks across the tender green shoots of the lawn. I had not yet found the courage to revisit the various apartments my son had occupied over his twenty years in the city, a pilgrimage so as to be with him, keep him here with me a little longer. I knew each of his abodes. But I could no longer remember the address of the apartment in the west that he had shared with other students. I had visited him there once. He started washing plates to serve up the pizza I brought, the counter invisible under all the dirty dishes, his friends partying on, leaving it to him to pick up, clean up. He had decided not to oblige anymore, so the mess had grown; he was set to move to an apartment by Café Cherrier, a grim dwelling invaded by cockroaches as soon as the lights went out, where he slept with his bedside lamp on.