Arvida

  Pitou convinced the players that during the third period Rémy should guard the goal vis à vis the idols of his youth. The idea wasn’t hard to sell, because everyone liked Rémy, and they’d had enough of Claude Hardy’s immoderate behaviour.

  And so the third period began with Rémy Bouchard in goal, and no one on the bench in the goalie’s spot. Still in the locker room, Hardy had repaired to the showers.

  The Habs were out for blood and everyone expected that the exploit of the commercial league’s stars was nearing its end. As soon as the puck dropped, the Canadiens took control. Talbot coaxed Bouchard like a rookie towards his right, and flipped a beautiful quick pass to Henri Richard on the left. He rifled a shot towards the empty slot that was at least as powerful as the one he’d launched at Hardy in the second period.

  Then something strange happened.

  With a swan’s grace, Rémy Bouchard made a lateral move of improbable fluidity towards his left, stretched out his arm as far as it would reach, and intercepted the puck with the tip of his mitt. In the stands, the silence was total. Bouchard brought his right leg behind his left, and with great dignity pulled himself erect facing the crowd in a pose that seemed more appropriate to a fencer than a goalie. The ovation burst out, and Pitou Parent beside the penalty bench dropped his head onto the table, murmuring, “Oh my god.”

  Maurice Richard came up to him one more time to shout in his ear:

  “So you’ve brought us here just to screw us around.”

  And Pitou, who’d dreamed of meeting the man ever since he was a little boy, heard himself answer, in sadness, and almost despite himself:

  “You know what, Rocket? Go fuck yourself.”

  I don’t know how, but whatever was on fire in Hardy became an inferno in Rémy. He who had been at best a mediocre goalie, found himself stopping pucks with his mask, with his behind, with his calves, with his back, and even with his elbows. He blocked shots while trying to dodge them, blocked them while falling on the ground, blocked them while looking to the heavens to pray that he be spared from them. Yvon Bouchard turned to his brother Laurent, and said:

  “Jesus. We’re going to win.”

  And indeed they won. The Canadiens made twenty-three shots on Rémy in the third period, and only two got through. His inspired teammates scored three more.

  Final score: 8 to 6.

  Pitou, even if he was angry with the Rocket, did everything he could to help his guests, unduly drawing out the third period, which, according to modest estimates, lasted fifty-five minutes. In the end, in any case, good humour prevailed. With his burlesque performance, which amused even his adversaries, who in friendly fashion came to tap him on his pads after each of his improbable stops, Rémy had done a lot to pacify the match.

  Pitou, for his part, had done much to transform it into a circus. It was, after all, the end of the seventies, and Pitou, like everyone, had a slight drug problem. House announcer and self-appointed scorekeeper, he told himself that the little cubicle set aside for those functions would make a perfect hiding place, enabling him to drink his beer in peace and to do a line from time to time. In fact, in an arena where hundreds of spectators could look right down on him, this was without doubt the worst hiding place imaginable. But Pitou wasn’t going to be discouraged by such a small detail. He sniffed away in full view of everybody, made numerous errors on the board, which he was slow in correcting, and accounted for the exodus of several outraged parents. From the middle of the second period on he was practically inaudible, and garbled the names of scorers before assigning assists to players who were absent, if not deceased. Confused, senior citizens in the stands started murmuring in their neighbours’ ears:

  “Eh, what? Elmer Lach’s here?”

  On the ice, however, the Canadiens and Arvidians were now enjoying themselves, fellow feeling having come to the fore with Claude Hardy’s departure.

  They celebrated until late, legends and stars together. Rémy Bouchard was awarded the game’s first star. As is often the case with true heroes, Hardy fêted his exploit all alone at home, banished from the party thanks to his Homeric, moronic gesture. The local paper the next day paid tribute to the evening overall, while censuring the lapses in sportsmanship early in the match, and the shameful conduct of the organizer.

  A low blow Pitou never forgave the journalist, not to the day of his death on December 4, 2010.

  *

  The next year, my grandfather went to consult his doctor for a pain in his thumb, and learned that he had contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease that would carry him off sooner or later. He wept a lot, and spent much of his time over the following years sitting in an armchair kneading his rosary. It’s said that a little boy stayed near him all the time, and helped him to find the right position on a cushion where he might rest his stiffened ankles. I have no memory of this, but the little boy was me.

  He died in 1981, not having forgotten to remind all and sundry that his condition, in the United States, had another name: Lou Gehrig’s disease. What killed my grandfather had also killed the New York Yankees’ iron man.

  My grandmother was the sole inheritor of the house and her ailing son. She’d never drunk a drop in her life, but in secret she’d taken to downing great glassfuls of whatever was at hand, taken from the bar at any time of day. I know that, because she often babysat my brother and myself, and her eyes were no longer sharp enough to see me hidden beyond her peripheral vision. She liked watching over us a lot, my grandmother. She cooked as if trying to fatten us up, but as we were running around outside all the time, nothing stuck to our bones. At noon hour on school days, we went to her house to eat a quick sandwich, and to play cards.

  She called my brother, whose eyes are not green, the little man with apple-green eyes. She called me her angel with horns.

  In the winter of 2001, my father ran for councillor in Arvida in the municipal elections. He’d set up his campaign office in the abandoned locale of the Orlac Jewellers on Davis Square, right beside the Arvida Brasserie. Pitou Parent was the informal strategist and press attaché. The last weekend before the vote, my Uncle Clinton picked me up on my way down from Ottawa. Then, passing through Quebec City, we picked up my friend Phil Leblanc. Clinton’s plan was to go door to door with my father, canvassing the old Arvida families. For Phil, me, and Marc Laganiére, who was waiting for us on site, it was a matter of phoning people on the list whom we were likely to know, from eighteen to thirty years old.

  Things didn’t go very well, and this is not a story I enjoy telling. It was a dismal end-of-winter, the lawns were yellowed, and everything and everyone was drenched in a scuzzy drizzle. My father had lost about thirty pounds, and was as nervous as a cat. He took me into a corner to hand me a little jar of medicine, nitro pills that our seventy-year-old friend Ti-Bi had given him, totally illegally. My father told me that I had to quickly slip a pill under his tongue should he have a blackout, something that had happened once or twice during the campaign.

  A single photo remains from that lost weekend, showing us sitting around a table, Clinton, my father, Marc, Phil, and myself. Pale from the winter and ashen from fatigue, bags under our eyes and our hair in a mess, we look like vampires. I mean real vampires, out of an old Slavic legend from before there was printing.

  Strigoi sitting around a forty-ounce bottle of Chivas Regal.

  On election Sunday, in the evening, I took my place as scrutineer at the Sainte-Thérèse neighbourhood polling centre in the Saguenay Valley School’s tiny gymnasium, just a few steps from my grandmother’s old house. The results were not good. I left before the last ballots were counted. I knew perfectly well that if the situation was so bad there, at the heart of our territory, it would be disastrous elsewhere. And it was. My father had to shoulder two jobs for a year to pay back the costs of his campaign.

  I brought my bad news to the headquarters with littl
e hurried steps, under the rain. I crossed Boulevard des Saguenéens and the lawn of the Notre-Dame-du-Sourire primary school, trudged through its gravelly playground and up the old coulee path, before coming out beside the Palace.

  In that landscape of my childhood, I told myself that I would never again confuse the mythic Arvida, over which my family had reigned in my dreams since 1947, with the municipality of the same name, in the Saguenay.

  Here, I mean there, we were kings of nothing, princes of our sorry backsides.

  In many respects, the exile had begun long before.

  In 1993 my grandmother left the Saguenay and returned to Beauport, from which her sisters had never strayed very far, and where her son Georges and his wife Maud were then installed.

  The last time I saw her was in 2002. She was in a hospital room in Quebec City, and was not wearing her glasses. As in an old engraving, she was staring with bulging eyes at the emptiness over her bed, as though an incubus were hovering there with its black wings spread wide. The hospital was one of those beautiful old Quebec buildings that take you back in time despite yourself, with ghostly good sisters coming at you around a bend in the corridor, and visitors wondering whatever happened to their hats and their gaiters.

  It was winter, and I have no memory of the view from the window. Perhaps the curtains were drawn, it seems to me that it was very dark. We’d spent the afternoon there with my aunts Lise and Hélène. Both of them doctors, they were engaged in an ongoing struggle with their male colleagues to have the doses increased. Those men no longer went to Mass or crossed themselves when a priest passed by, but curiously, they still believed that there was some grace to be found in suffering.

  At one point, a lovely nurse about forty years old, energetic and sexy, came into the room to adjust my grandmother in her bed and to see if everything was going well. She tried to make conversation with her by asking her who were the people with her. My grandmother pointed to my aunts, saying with pride that they were her two daughters, both doctors.

  The nurse added:

  “And those two handsome boys, who are they, Madame Archibald?”

  My grandmother stared at us for a long time, as if she’d never seen us in her life, and she said, in a panic:

  “I don’t know, my grand nephews I think. Or little cousins.”

  My Aunt Lise laughed nervously.

  “No, mama. They’re David and Sam, Dougie’s sons.”

  My grandmother put her hand to her brow and said she was tired. She then shifted her gaze to the unseen exterminator perched over her bed. She breathed a long sigh.

  My Aunt Hélène, a lung specialist who nevertheless shared our nicotine addiction, took us aside and said:

  “Let’s go smoke a cigarette, boys, we’ll let your grandmother sleep.”

  Outside, Hélène and Lise explained that our grandmother would have forgotten them as well, had they not been at her bedside for two weeks. She only remembered the names of her children because they had been dictated to her. She remembered the Beauport of her youth, of her own beauty, and of her fiancé Georges-Émile. She talked about her sisters Marielle, Nicole, Georgette, and Monique, and of her sisters-in-law, Nyna, Mabel, Maude, and Gemma, who had become her good friends. She remembered her childhood and adolescence and her whole life up to her marriage, but she’d forgotten Arvida.

  At that point, I should have understood that in fact there was nothing more Arvidian than to forget Arvida itself. I should have understood that I was myself free to leave it forever, because in any case I was incapable of forgetting anything at all. But I was too young. And my brother and I were devastated.

  Lise told us that our grandmother remembered the time when her life was her own, before in Arvida it became that of others. In Arvida her life had been that of her children, then of the priests who came to eat with the family on Sunday, then of the little hockey players, atom, peewee, and bantam, then of her sick son and her sick husband, then of David and me when our parents had divorced.

  We shouldn’t be upset that she’d forgotten us, she said. She no longer remembered anything of her life with us in Arvida because that life, she’d already given us.

  I looked at my brother. The only intelligent thing I found to say, which was not really intelligent when I think of it, came right out of the language of sports, those rough recreations in which the Arvidians of the entire world batter their bodies, while in their heads make short work of everything they can’t forget.

  I said, in English:

  “Nice try, but no cigar.”

  She died the next day, my grandmother, mother of my father.

  Her body lay in repose during all of the month of January. After, when the ground had thawed in the Saguenay, they brought her back to Arvida to bury her beside my grandfather.

  1 It has to be said, however, that there’s something a bit overblown in this picture. In the city’s original plan, before the parishes were founded and the lots fully occupied, the “English” town and the “workers’” town were built a good distance from each other.

  2 Another Arvidian myth may be similarly discredited: for a long time it was bruited about that the original design for the town had been conceived with the idea of tracing on its very ground the letters A-R-V-I-D-A, visible from the sky. Such a project, which would imply inscribing a bit of the world’s map onto the world itself, would have been unthinkable in the watchful minds of urbanists between the wars.

  3 My favourite anecdote, when it comes to my father’s sporting fame, is also the earliest. One day, when he was six, my grandfather took him to the neighbourhood skating rink. My father was assigned to the blue team, and he scored eight goals. The other parents were angry and laughing at the same time, and after half an hour it was decided that he would switch teams. After a pause, my father pulled on a red sweater, glided onto the ice, and went on scoring goals as if it was the simplest thing in the world. There were eleven other boys on the ice, four who sent him awkward passes, five who tried to stop him from scoring, one bored goalie, and another who’d developed a gut feeling for what a partridge feels on the first day of hunting season. There were eleven other boys on the ice, on which a beautiful winter sun was shining, and it was as if my father were there all alone, at nightfall, practising his skating and his shots on goal.

  My grandfather was bursting with pride. He said to everyone, “That’s my son.” He blushed and stammered when other fathers congratulated him, he had the same expression as on the spring night he went to knock at my grandmother’s door in Beauport, my grandmother who lived with her parents, and he who knocked, bearing his insignificant bouquet of daisies. He had the same expression as when she said, “Yes, that would be nice, let’s take a walk.” Exactly the same, except that he’d aged.

  After a while, the other boys began to have had enough, and to the chagrin of their fathers, they started to behave like children. A little blonde boy began to sob like a sissy because my father had made him trip as he stole the puck from him for the fourth time. Another threw a tantrum because he could never get to touch that damn puck. Yet he was on the same team as my father, and from the stands you couldn’t see what he was complaining about. He tried unsuccessfully to shatter his stick by hitting it against the boards, then threw it as far as he could, left the rink, teetering on his skates, and refused to go back on the ice.

  When the reds had scored eight goals, it was decided that enough was enough. All the fathers had enjoyed themselves, while all the children left in bad humour. My father included.

  He sulked on the way home with his father and big brother, he sulked some more at home sitting at the dining room table, while my grandfather and uncle recounted his exploits to the rest of the family, describing his sixteen goals one by one, with the verve and precision of the voices on the radio. He sat tight-lipped, with his arms crossed. My grandmother set a steaming plate in
front of him, full to the brim, which smelled good, but that he glared at as though it were full of gravel. When my grandmother, who’d pretended not to notice his behaviour for a good quarter of an hour, returned to the table with two more plates, she asked him:

  “Dougie, will you please tell me what’s wrong with you? You scored sixteen goals this afternoon. How many do you need to make you smile?”

  “Yes, I know, mama. I scored sixteen goals. But I didn’t win.”

  In our family ever since, you will find a marked tendency to prefer even catastrophic defeats to tied games.

  4 Only that’s not what he said in French. He said “Héros de ma queue,” which means “Heroes my... prick? cock?” Whatever. Had he said “Heroes my ass,” it would have come out “Héros de mon cul.” It was common in Arvida, in the somewhat coarse milieu of my father, in any case, to replace the traditional “de mon cul” by “de ma queue.” Implicit in the expression is the awareness that the appendage in question is both the only thing a man possesses of which he is the sole owner, and the wellspring of all his misfortunes. An interesting variant consists in replacing the possessive “my” (ma) with a “your” (ta), while tacking an ending onto someone else’s sentence, usually to cut short any hint of boastfulness.

  “Things going well at work, Jean Guy?”

  “Oh yes, very well. They’ve just named me manager.”

  “De ta queue.”

  The Last-Born

  God knows how he could get it into his head that two thousand dollars would be enough for him to kill somebody. What does it mean, after all, a sum like that? He could easily have worked it out, Raisin, he always spent in multiples of twenty. Two thousand dollars was never more than two hundred cases of beer / a hundred nights at the movies if you counted the popcorn, the Pepsi and the bus / thirty or so half-hours in the little room with the girls from the topless bar who never charged him like the others when they did consent to take his money. They arrived from everywhere those girls, on the three a.m. bus that left them off in front of the gas station, mostly on Wednesdays. From time to time Raisin stayed up late and hung around to watch the new ones disembark. There were three or four per week. Lots of Blacks for the last two years. The clients weren’t too happy about that, people didn’t go much for Blacks around here. But he liked them a lot. The girls had beautiful fat asses, little breasts with big black nipples, they sprayed themselves with a revolting scent, part pine oil, part bubble gum, but Raisin dreamed that it smelled of the far away, the not here. For him this was the aroma of Africa and Haiti, and the smell was good. A lot better in any case than the odour of the pulp and paper mill that lingered in the air in the heat of summer, and that the faintest breeze wafted abroad, pristine and potent, for kilometres round about. The locals were used to it, but not him, the smell lodged in his nostrils, stuck to his palate, a ghastly stench of rotten eggs.