Street of Riches

by Gabrielle Roy

  pans. "Is this the time to think of such things?" Papa angrily called out to them.

  But they kept going back into their houses, one to collect her coffeepot, another a fine porcelain cup.

  The farm wagons, the small two-wheeled carts, the buggies were piled high with domestic goods; upon these were perched the children, torn from their sleep, and now crying miserably, and hens that kept flying off, and young pigs. Women were hitching cows to the wagon tails. Never, so long as there remained a single movable object, would these insubordinate women have agreed to go. Papa ran about, whipping the horses at the head of the caravan. Terrified, they rushed toward the gap to the south, between the columns of fire which little by little were closing in on each other. Then Papa had the idea of setting fire to the crops to the north of the village. In this way fire would advance toward fire, and perhaps it would burn itself out. Such tactics had already succeeded on other occasions. He called Jan Sibulesky, one of the Little Ruthenians in whom he had always placed the greatest confidence, a man of judgment, quick to grasp what was sensible and make a rational choice.

  "Quick," said my father to Jan Sibulesky, "take with you three or four men and, as soon as you can, set fire to the corners of all the wheat fields."

  This was the moment when the Little Ruthenians gave every semblance of no longer understanding Papa. Jan as much as the others! Oh, the obstinate, greedy, silly men! In their own country they had possessed nothing—or so very little: a skimpy acre or two on the arid slopes of the Carpathians to feed an entire family; and they had left that behind them without too great pain. But now that they had all sorts of things—hay, sugar beets, wonderful wheat, full barns, really everything -they would not part with the least trifle.

  "But if you want to keep everything, you'll lose everything," Papa told them.

  And my father turned into something like a madman. He waved his arms, he shouted insults, thinking perhaps that the Little Ruthenians would at least understand those words. But the foolish wretches through all the thick smoke madly concentrated on pushing their plows around the settlement., Others carried water from the river to the houses to wet down the walls; still others drew pailfuls from the communal well, in the center of the village, which was deep and almost icy. Did they think that this water, so cold it clouded the outside of the pail.

  would serve better to cool the atmosphere than the water from the river? Then Papa tried to go by himself to set fire to the harvest, but the Little Ruthenians forcibly prevented him. Thus Papa realized that they had perfectly well understood his orders, that henceforth he was alone among his own people, as they were on their own against him. This loneliness in the face of danger made him despair. The heat was increasing. Occasional brands of fire flew over the village. A powerful roar filled the air. And everything was in fearful disorder; no longer was there anyone in charge, any obedience. Each man was wearing himself out in individual effort; a few simply awaited the fire, ax in hand. Then the flames at a single bound cleared one of the trenches; they took hold of a thatched roof; in an instant the house glowed with inner light. All was lost.

  "Go, go!" Papa cried to the men. "You've only enough time to save yourselves!"

  I have often envisioned Papa as he must have appeared that night, very tall with his arms stretched toward the sky, which outlined him also in black. What a terrible silhouette!

  But now the Little Ruthenians were trying to save the burning house. So Papa moved toward them threateningly. He raised his hand, showed them the glowing heavens, and, in their own tongue, he asked them: "Don't you know what that means ?"

  All equally bewildered, they raised.their heads toward the nightmare glow above them. Papa said that they looked like stupid birds turning their heads in unison toward an incomprehensible sign. And in their own tongue Papa told them what the sign meant: "The wrath of God! Do you understand? It is God's wrath!"

  Then there took place something infinitely cruel. Understanding at last, all the men made ready to go—all except that Jan Sibulesky whom father had loved and often singled out as an example because of his never-failing judgment. Abruptly Jan rushed toward the chapel and emerged from it holding an icon of the Virgin. His icon in front of him like a shield, he walked toward the burning house. Papa at once understood what Jan was going to do. The flames illumined his face, his mouth, his forehead hardened in unshakable purpose, his blond beard, his blue eyes; in the full light big Jan marched forward, utterly visible; just as visible was the icon he carried, the icon of a Madonna with tender, childlike features. Thus brilliantly lighted, the eyes of the image shone as though they were alive. "Stop, you idiot!" my father cried out to Jan.

  But it was now a long while since anyone had obeyed him. His great mistake obviously, had been to speak of God's wrath. All his life my father believed that there had lain his crime: to have interpreted God, in a sense to have judged Him. Jan continued toward the flames, singing a hymn and holding the holy image just below his harsh face.

  "You're going to die," Papa told him. "Stop him! Stop the poor fool!" he begged the others.

  But they all stood like spectators, in a living hedgerow, and probably at that moment they were very curious about God and about Jan; so avid with curiosity that they were stripped of all other thoughts. The words of the canticle resounded for another moment above the crackling of the flames; then suddenly they changed into an appalling cry. Never could Papa erase from his memory, right upon the heels of the tones of prayer, this roar of horror. A blazing beam had tumbled upon Jan Sibulesky. The men who had been so intense upon miracles at last made up their minds to leave—and in a stampede. They sprang astride their horses, urging them on with sharp cries; they clambered onto the seats of the two-wheeled traps; they dashed out of the village, jostling each other. Papa begged them, as they passed him, to call out their names, for he could no longer recognize faces in the smoke, and he wanted to reassure himself that none of the Little Ruthenians would be left behind. "Get south" he yelled at each outfit as it passed by. In that direction, between the walls of fire, there was still a gap which, minute by minute, was visibly closing.

  At last Papa jumped into his wagonette and, by the sound of the galloping horses, he tried to follow the caravan now hidden in the smoke. His vehicle, however, was too heavy to make enough speed over the stones and clods of earth. Papa at a bound put himself astride Dolly; then he got out his penknife and began to slash at the leather traces that attached the wagonette to the mare, reducing her speed. The traces were tough and hard to sever, but at last one came free, and then the other. Dolly went faster. The fire, though, was already raging here and there on the only route still open. Papa saw that Dolly by herself could get through quickly enough not to be burned, but that, burdened with a man, she certainly could not. From far up ahead one of the Ruthenians cried out to him to hurry. Papa called back that he needn't worry, he was coming. That was the last human voice he heard that night. Standing beside Dolly he gave her his orders: "Go ... go ... As for me, I still have the

  well of Dunrea; there—if I can get back to it—1*11 be safe. . . . And I'm too tired, really too tired to go much farther. . . . The well will give me a bit of rest. . . ."

  But that night no one was to obey him, not even his gentle, his obedient Dolly, for whom Papa, whenever he left Winnipeg on the way to his settlement, always took with him titbits and lump sugar.

  So he raised his whip and struck Dolly a blow, on her most sensitive part, over the eyes. She went off neighing with pain and reproach. And, running, bending double to avoid the flames, Papa regained the center of Dunrea. His hair, his beard, his eyebrows were singed from the heat. He breathed as little as possible, holding a damp handkerchief over his mouth. He reached the edge of the well. Grasping the rope used to haul up the pails of water, Papa slid down into the deep, cool interior. He lowered himself to the level of the water. Almost at once the roar of the flames surrounded everything. All around the well the grass was afire. The rope likewise began
to burn; Papa saw it come apart, strand by strand, in little spirals of ash. Quickly he pried out bricks, which were only loosely imbedded in the lining of the well; he dug himself a sort of niche, where he succeeded in finding a certain support. Then he cut the rope as high as he could. At just that moment he saw a shadow over the well opening, in perfect outline. He was greeted by a long-drawn-out neigh. "Oh Dolly!" cried my father, "Go ... Go!" He ripped free a brick which he hurled at Dolly's head. Papa said that she leaned in to see whence came the furious voice and projectile. Then she reared and raised herself to a great height, head and mane erect. Papa began to smell the odor of burned flesh.

  And he told how the inside of the well became broiling hot, the air so unbreathable that he had to go lower yet. He did it with the help of the rope, which he had tied to a stone projecting from the inner wall. He slipped into the water up to his knees, then to his waist. Half his body was freezing and numbed, while upon his head rained sparks of fire . . . and he thought that the end had really come. Papa said that he had been sure he was dead because suddenly nothing mattered to him any more. This was what gave him the deepest anguish when he thought back afterward: that everything, in the depth of the well, had become so dismal, so smothered, so extraordinarily silent. He had not thought of us; all he felt was quiet, so great a quiet that it was beyond iesisting. These were his own words: "Neither regrets, nor hope, nor desires : a state of com-84 Street of Riches

  plete quiet." At the bottom of the well he barely could succeed in remembering life, having been alive. And how could he have the least taste for any return from so deep an indifference! Papa, believing himself dead, was a trifle astonished that death should be so gloomy, glacial, empty ... and so reposing ... that in death there should no longer be any affection possible. Within him there was a desert, just as above his head—in Dunrea -there was also a desert.

  Papa said that then, in this absence of life, he had seen Agn&s, come to wait for him as she always came to meet the tram that brought our father back from Winnipeg. He said that he had seen her at the trolley stop, at the end of our short Rue Deschambault, and that close to her stood our old collie dog, which always accompanied Agn&s. Such was the vision that in the end had penetrated so far to find Papa, in his quiet; regret at seeing the child and her dog futilely waiting day after day, for weeks and months—here was what brought his dead soul back to life. He had rediscovered the language of other days, faraway words. "Go home, you and the dog—back to the house!" he had tried to tell Agn£s. And this word "house," which his lips pronounced, none the less only awakened an extreme astonishment in the depths of his brain. "The house! Whose house? Why houses? .. ." And again he tried to persuade the stubborn child, standing at the street corner, despite a cold wind, and shivering, to go home. "There's no use waiting for me; I'm already dead. Don't you understand? To be dead is to have no more love—at last!" But Agn&s answered Papa in the bottom of the well: "You'll come back; I know it . . . maybe even in this next tram "

  And Papa had been startled at hearing himself speak; the sound of his voice had made him understand that he was not dead. Because of the child at the end of the street, he made an enormous effort to fasten himself with the rope to the wall of the well. He had fainted.

  The next morning the Little Ruthenians found him in the well.

  When Papa opened his eyes on the desolation that was now the Lost River, he believed in Hell. Curiously, it was not with the furnace of the night before, with the outcries, with the un-followed orders, that he was to associate Hell, but with this—a thick silence, almost inviolable, a dismal land, black everywhere, a dreadful death.

  Raising himself up on the charred soil where they had laid

  him, Papa tried to give courage to his Little Ruthenians; since they had not lost their lives, they had not lost the essential thing. Neither he himself, however, nor the Little Ruthenians, had much further use for this essential thing. They said that tney had, all the same, lost their lives, at least ten years of their lives... . And Papa remembered to ask about the women : "Are they all safe?" "Yes," the Little Ruthenians replied, "they are all safe, but weeping for their dear houses, their oaken chests, their chests full of fine linen...."

  Papa returned among us ... and yet did he ever return ? Appalled at his appearance, Maman asked him, "Has something happened to you, Edouard? What on earth has happened to you?"

  But Papa merely put her off with an inconsequential account of what had taken place, how he had lost a settlement. For a long time that was all he ever admitted. Only to Agnfcs, when one evening she came and sat close beside him and looked at him tenderly—she was not afraid, never was afraid of his half-burned eyebrows—only to Agn£s did he tell how he had once meddled with the business of explaining God to men; perhaps it was a day when he regretted not having remained in the depths of the well.. . . When Lazarus emerged from the grave, we have no knowledge that he was ever gay.

  Still, there remained this most curious thing: Papa, become, as it were, a stranger to joy, so far removed from it that he was almost unable to recognize it in a human countenance, was nevertheless, sensitive to suffering.

  Oh, here indeed was something that troubled us: when we laughed, when on occasion we succeeded in being happy, Papa was astounded! But let a misfortune, a sorrow strike one of us, then we saw Papa come alive . . . return to us . . . suffer all the more!

  Alicia

  I must tell the story of Alicia; certainly it left the greatest mark upon my life; but how dearly it costs me!

  Our Alicia with her huge dark blue eyes! And the so-strange contrast in her between those eyes and her coal-black hair! From Maman she had inherited also the loveliest eyebrows I remember ever to have seen, so roundly arched, so high and sharply delineated that they gave her glance an expression of amazement, of pain at the spectacle of life. She was still herself, with her pale, slender face; yet no, it was no longer Alicia. For already she no longer recognized those she so deeply loved; me alone, at times, she still knew. Her strange eyes would come back from so far way that to see them return filled me with dread; then she would look at me, smile at me as before; maybe she would even kiss me in the joy of rediscovering me; but she clung to me too tightly; and of her, of Alicia, I now was frightened ! Then she would go back to where she had come from; her eyes would lose us all, relatives, friends, little sister. There would be no one but herself imprisoned within her queer look. Even then I could imagine how terrible it must be to be all alone within oneself.

  "Whatever is the matter with Alicia?" I would go ask Maman.

  At home we were always very reluctant to cry where anyone could see us. But how very often, at that time, when I went into the kitchen and found Maman alone, I caught her wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron! And she would hastily become a person with a great deal to do, who cannot be bothered. I would insist, "What's the matter with Alicia ?"

  They—I mean the grownups—were protecting me from the truth. They told me Alicia had nothing the matter with her. Is this what constitutes childhood: by means of lies, to be kept in a world apart? But they could not prevent my seeking; and seeking by myself alone, without help, kejft bringing me back into their world.

  It was summer. A hotter, more brilliant summer I do not think there ever was on Rue Deschambault. We were as though

  readied for happiness, with our trees full of fruit, flowers all around the house, the lawn well cropped. If I remember that summer so well, certainly it was because the season was so out of joint, so little in tune with our thoughts. Alicia alone seemed not to be aware of this contrast. She, who was the cause of our misery, withdrew from it as though she had no part in it; almost all the time she was humming.

  One day she went up to the attic.

  Constantly we would ask each other, worried, as though concerned about a tiny little child who had eluded our watchfulness, "Where is Alicia?"

  And almost every day I would find the answer, "In the attic."

  Once, though,
it took me a long while to discover her. She had hidden herself in the depths of a dark cupboard, and when I at last found her, she was holding her head in her hands; this time she was crying.

  Yet how was it that, having found her in an attitude which indicated she wanted to play hide-and-seek with me, I had no feeling that this was a game, nor any taste to join in it? In the past she and I had often played at hiding from each other; yet when we found each other once more, it was to bubble with laughter or accuse each other of cheating. "Where is Alicia?" Maman would ask me.

  And I would tell her; I would say: "Today she's braiding flowers and singing."

  Why was it so sad to see Alicia spend hours weaving flowers together to make necklaces and bracelets for her adornment? Merely because she was no longer a little girl ? ...

  One day in the attic Alicia put on a long white dress; around her waist she fastened a wide, sky-blue belt; in her hair she tucked some roses. I had never seen her look so lovely; and why was it sad to see her thus? She leaned out of the garret window toward the street and began scattering petals from the roses over the heads of the occasional passers-by. And she sang plaintively, "Here are flowers . . . good people. . . . Here are roses for you who walk by! . . ."

  I don't know why, but I felt obliged to go tell Maman that Alicia was throwing roses at the heads of the people in the street; one might have thought it somehow disgraced us.

  "Go back up to her; try to distract her," said Maman. "Get her away from the window."

  That day, however, Alicia did not even know me. When 88 Street of Riches

  I tried to make her move, she abruptly gave me a malignant glance and began screaming "Judas! Judas!" at me. I was terribly afraid of Alicia, and ran off trembling. Yet it was only yesterday that Alicia had been taking care of me. She was responsible for me when Maman was very tired or when, wanting a full afternoon undisturbed to tackle some major sewing project, she handed me over to Alicia. She would say, "Alicia, don't you want to take the little one for a walk? Will you look out for her?" Many an older sister would not have enjoyed constantly to be encumbered with a little girl like me. But Alicia never wounded me by seeming to be bored at the prospect of having to look after me.