Black Bird

by Michel Basilieres

  “We get rid of him.”

  “Dump him in the river?”

  “No. He’d get stuck under the ice. He might drift downstream, but he’d wash up somewhere, someday. I got a better idea. An old acquaintance.”

  Aline and Marie had found something to talk about. Tourtière. They were filling individual little pies with meat and using cookie-cutter shapes to cut out bits of crust to lay on top. Both women remembered past Christmases, when their elders had done this for them; both were smiling and telling how wonderful their grandmother’s tourtières had been.

  And then the police came knocking at the kitchen door.

  Through the frosted panes of glass Marie could see the cops, and Hubert, looking pretty bad. Her knees went weak. How had they found him? Why had he led them to her? Of course they’d beaten him; that would be obvious even without seeing his bloody, swollen face. Her heart pounded. She clutched at the kitchen counter to keep from falling. It was over. Jail. Even worse, Mother would find out Marie had made and planted the bomb that killed Angus.

  Aline opened the door and drew back with a start when she realized the police were holding up a dead man.

  “Where’s the old man?” asked the older cop.

  Aline was speechless. What had these people to do with Grandfather? Who was this dead tramp they were bringing into her kitchen?

  Uncle entered the kitchen, saw the cops. “Calice de ciboire d’hostie,” he said, and ran out.

  “What’s the matter with you people?” yelled the older cop. “Where’s that maudit resurrection man? We got a New Year’s present here for him.”

  Grace began screeching and fluttering in her cage.

  Suddenly, Marie realized that Hubert was dead. She giggled. They weren’t here to arrest her, they were trying to get rid of the body. He hadn’t given her away. She felt almost giddy; being dragged from the depths of her despair was like standing up too fast.

  In the great tradition of underground movements throughout history, Hubert had taken his licks and kept his mouth shut. He’d died to protect the rest of the cell. To protect her. She was still reeling under the blow of his death, but was now wrenched from the unsuspected and violent hatred that had burst into being with the thought that he’d betrayed her, to a shamefaced admiration for her noble, fallen comrade. And an overwhelming feeling of release. The kitchen had never been so warm.

  She fainted.

  Grandfather and Dr. Hyde disliked one another intensely but had done business together for decades. Grandfather retained the distrust of all professions that had been beaten into him in childhood, through the priests, doctors, social workers and others who’d made it perfectly clear which end of the social scale he inhabited, and how much he owed to their kindness. He particularly disliked doctors, especially those to whom he was bound by economic necessity, and like anyone else he projected his self-loathing onto another when his own profit contradicted his sense of morality. He didn’t blame himself for desecrating graves; he blamed his customers for the use they made of the goods he sold them.

  His acquaintance with what exactly was done with the wares he peddled formed his opinion of all doctors. “Vultures. Butchers. They’ll steal your kidneys while your back’s turned.” Or sometimes, if he was in a more expansive mood: “They plant ’em and I dig ’em up again.”

  So when the police came knocking at the back door with a body to dispose of, he knew exactly where to take it.

  What a great fortune this particular corpse was for him. It boded well for the New Year. He’d never had one in mid-winter before, so it was a financial boon. At the same time, Dr. Hyde would be as pleased to see it as Grandfather in this dry season, and as the law of supply and demand operates in all businesses, he’d pay a premium for it. But best of all, and incredibly, for once Grandfather got to play the benefactor, and smugly relished doing a favour for his enemies—the cops.

  This was one good corpse.

  For Dr. Hyde, as for many doctors, a youthful idealism—a desire to help those in need—had drawn him to medicine. Such an ambition could equally have led him to the Church, except for the uselessness of such an institution in the face of the death of God. It wasn’t so much that a dead God could not exist as that, even granting He did, a dead God was a God with no soul. It was an inescapable fact that since sometime in the nineteenth century, hospitals had been growing in number and size just as churches had conversely been shrinking. The century of Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx had proclaimed the ascendance of man through reason, and shunted aside mysticism and ritual, replacing them with technology and experimentation. The faith necessary for the foundation of the Church had been replaced by the demonstrable proof of science. Thus, the path to be tread by Samaritan ambition and megalomania was clearly marked.

  Dr. Hyde’s early history was a simple cliché. He was a brilliant student and a tireless worker. He was liked and respected by his seniors, his juniors, his contemporaries—in short, he was a pillar of the community and a man clearly headed for Great Things. Honours and promotions came his way as naturally as patients. His reputation burgeoned into fame, his clients came to consist of the famous, and problems were brought to him even if they were outside his field.

  He expanded his field. He’d begun with neurology, the study of the nervous system. But cases began showing up that were clearly the province of psychiatry. So he turned from dissecting, weighing, poking, mapping and patching to listening, soothing, prescribing, interpreting and imprinting. He was famous in both hard and soft sciences. He was an innovator in both and a radical experimenter in combining the two; he led his patients through therapy, and he had them hosed. He listened to their dreams, and he dosed them with barbiturates. He probed their pasts with hypnotism, and he probed their heads with electrodes.

  Some got better, and for that he was lauded. Most got worse, but that was clearly not his fault.

  He had studied medicine, chemistry, biology, psychology; he had mastered surgery, mesmerism, anatomy. And he knew, in his heart of hearts, that all this had done no good. He was as ignorant as he had been in the beginning, poor fool. He could not escape the feeling that despite all his maps and models, all the reproducible effects were meaningless because none of them led to the seat of the soul. He could take apart a human brain or body, he could track the physical effects of emotions and thoughts on paper or film, but that wasn’t enough. The real knowledge of what constituted the fundamental spark was still hidden in darkness, and Dr. Hyde was very much afraid of that darkness. Because if he couldn’t find that brief illumination, that fleeting moment of Being inside any of his patients, he was afraid that he would never find it in himself. He was afraid it did not exist.

  Dr. Hyde continued his experiments for years after his genuine interest had waned, only because his fear drove him to outrun his despair. He could easily dissect any number of creatures, and end up with a table full of dead meat. But if he started with a table full of parts, and managed to induce the same impulses and reactions natural to a living creature, would he end up with a living creature? If it lived, would it have a soul? It was the only way to put the question to rest. Was the soul a real component of a conscious being, or merely an after-effect of a certain material process?

  At Ravenscrag, high on the side of Mount Royal, his private laboratories adjoined his mental hospital. Here he kept the results of his experiments, both when he had minor successes and when the failures were spectacular enough. He had a jar in which the hand of a hanged murderer still crawled up the side; he had a pair of lungs that had breathed by themselves for three days; he had a small brain that he suspected was still busy thinking.

  These trophies were the result of his life’s devotion to the Great Work; and it seemed as if it would all die with him. For if he had no real success, if the breakthrough did not come, it would be impossible to make his findings public. This was a side of his practice that could only be revealed if he managed to establish some conclusive proof.

  And so
for years his jars and solutions, his devices and desires, had kept Grandfather in business. And for years Grandfather had kept the doctor’s researches alive with his spade and his satchel.

  Dr. Hyde strained to conceal his pleasure in acquiring a corpse of such positive freshness, for to give away his eagerness would only drive up Grandfather’s already high off-season price. Yet Grandfather and Uncle too were themselves so pleased and relieved to do some unexpected business that all three postured and restrained themselves, and all three were so concentrated on their own self-control—a discipline none had much practice with—that all were oblivious to the others’ odd comportment.

  Affecting disdain while examining the body, Dr. Hyde asked, “Have you taken to ambulance chasing now, Desouche?”

  “Eh?” said Grandfather.

  “He’s unembalmed. He’s not been buried.”

  For a second, Grandfather worried. But then, “Pickled or not, we take our wares where we can in lean times, Doctor. The both of us.”

  Dr. Hyde hmmed. “He’s quite bruised. The blood’s still draining from these wounds. Here …,” he pointed, “and here,” turning the head. “Ribs cracked. This leg’s broken in several places.”

  “He’s still dead,” said Uncle.

  “Yes,” said Hyde, “perhaps dangerously so. Perhaps he’ll be missed.”

  Grandfather took the inference. “Don’t worry, Doctor. If my friends in the police are looking for him, they’ll look under other rocks.” And he grinned, for he’d never been able to say anything remotely similar, and with such confidence.

  Hyde studied Grandfather’s face. Friends in the police? Grandfather? That was an entirely new factor, and not one Hyde could welcome. But if it meant there was no danger in this transaction … This was no mummy. This one hadn’t been unearthed after the indignities of formaldehyde and cosmetics. He couldn’t have been dead more than a few hours—and he was practically fresh-frozen. This was worth losing sleep over; this was the one he’d been waiting for.

  The black sky was passing towards grey, the only sign of dawn Montreal gets in winter. Dr. Hyde dismissed thoughts of returning to bed. It was time to work, for some things needed immediate attention and he could sleep later.

  He stripped and cleaned the corpse to get a better idea of its condition. Broken legs, a crushed rib cage: these he could replace, but he could do nothing for the heart, which had been shredded by the cracked points of the corpse’s own ribs. The lungs had collapsed but merely needed reinflating. A few stitches required on the face. The main trouble was that much of the skull appeared to have been crushed at the back of the head and the delicate tissue beneath it pulped. Not so easy to replace.

  He’d tried it once, in the late fifties, with apes: switched their heads. The operation had taken eighteen hours. The donor had died instantly, of course. The recipient had been kept alive artificially through the operation, and then died when the plug was pulled. There had not been even the remotest indication that more research, more experimentation, more anything, would have promised success. It was a complete and total failure. He’d been too demoralized ever to try it again.

  In which case, the only thing to do here was remove what couldn’t be saved and patch up the rest. Dr. Hyde spent some time carefully removing small, sharp fragments of skull from the jellied pinkish-grey mass behind Hubert’s eyes before he put down his tweezers, picked up a scalpel and, with a sigh, simply cut out the bruised portions as if he were removing blemishes from damaged fruit.

  Fortunately, this meant there were now large enough pieces of skull to cover what remained. He put Hubert’s head back together the way Aline made a quilt. Fit a piece in here, stitch on one side, find a patch big enough, now one shaped more or less correctly to fill the gap, and there you go. At the end the head was closed up neatly, almost as if it had never been opened.

  But it was a lot smaller.

  Why had Marie fainted?

  She was no weakling in any sense. It’s true, the kitchen had been even hotter than the rest of the house, what with the oven going for the baking. And she’d had as much cheap, sweet sparkling wine as anyone that night—more than some. And the sight of the police had scared her; the sight of Hubert dead had shocked her.

  But Marie was young and in perfect health, and a hardened realist. As soon as she regained consciousness, with the mortician holding smelling salts to her nose, she knew the world was now fundamentally different. It wasn’t simply that Hubert was dead, or realizing how that affected her work, the work of their cell. It wasn’t that Mother was asleep or Grandfather in some strange happy mood, or Jean-Baptiste mysteriously delighted with a gift that was supposed to be an insult and a provocation, or that she’d found herself enjoying time with Aline.

  No, it was something else. It wasn’t just a matter of circumstance, and it wasn’t just these feelings of guilt and familial loyalty welling up to overcome her dedication to the Great Work. There was something substantially and almost physically different. If not with the world itself, then with her. What the hell was this magically transformative power of Christmas?

  Over the following week she found herself often dizzy, sometimes ravenously hungry and sometimes inexplicably nauseous.

  She was, of course, pregnant.

  Aline was now fully cognizant of Grandfather’s trade. She felt as if a shroud had been drawn over her. She felt as if she herself were dead. For a single brief moment on New Year’s Eve, she’d thought the old Grandfather, the charming, gift-bearing suitor who’d seduced her into marriage, had returned. Through her mind had flashed the thought that somehow his accident had changed things. That Grace had not just taken an eye but forever altered his perspective, and that he would henceforth see things in a brighter, clearer light. That he would love her and be worthy of love himself.

  Instead, the horrible truth had been revealed. Resurrection man, the cop had said. She fought the idea that it could be possible, that such a person might still exist in the modern world; but Grandfather had come when he was called, and had taken charge of the corpse almost with glee. He hadn’t been afraid of it or repulsed by it as she had been.

  He was used to corpses.

  He’d bundled it up like merchandise, and went off to peddle it.

  The whole unholy business gave her the shudders. And now she realized the rest of the family had known what she hadn’t. Had they been keeping it from her, or was it simply such a part of reality for them that they assumed she knew? What did it matter? It coloured her view of them all; but worse, it coloured her view of herself. She was his wife. She had shared her bed with him.

  Her eyes were red with tears and her nose sore from the blowing. She wrapped herself up in her winter clothes and braved the January cold, and rode the bus to St Joseph’s. She tried to pray to Frère André’s shrivelled black heart, but she couldn’t find the words. She simply knelt before it, hung her head and sobbed.

  Jean-Baptiste continued working away at his play over the winter. He came out of his room only for meals, the washroom and when someone forced him.

  Mother continued her slumber. Dr. Hyde had shown up at the door one day with a real hospital bed for her, with rails to keep her from falling out. He still had no idea why she slept, but he knew the army surplus cot they’d put her in wasn’t going to help.

  Father and Marie shared the task of caring for her, and thus spent more time together now than almost ever before. The clear realization that they had in common a concern for Mother was a kind of gift to them both. For Father it meant that Marie wasn’t entirely alienated from the family—from him—as she had seemed in recent years. Perhaps she might be coming back into the fold. He’d always worried more over his daughter than over his son because it’s common for fathers to do so and because Jean-Baptiste was usually home. For Marie his concern was a clear sign that Father still loved Mother; and if that was possible, after all the hard years, after all the mutual dissatisfaction, it meant two things: that love itself was real, and t
hat a lifetime commitment could actually be met and sustained.

  Uncle walked his dog whether it was warm or freezing, clear or snowing, and otherwise kept to his room and his cigarettes.

  Aline spent most of her time in the kitchen, the closest thing she had to a room of her own. It simply didn’t occur to her to displace Marie’s things. She bedded down among them as if she were a temporary visitor and Marie would be returning from the attic shortly. Aline moved slowly about her tasks—trying to eliminate the stains from the porcelain sink, putting new shelf paper into the cupboards, cleaning Grace’s cage—in between times of just sitting at the table, gazing out the window and across the lane at the blank stone wall of the church. Grace hopped about from the transom above the door to the top of the refrigerator, making the odd sound or flying round Aline’s head as if trying to get her attention.

  Grandfather realized that he was indeed beginning to see out of his new eye. He still took it out every night and cleaned it, and left it soaking in antiseptic, where it settled at the bottom of the glass, looking upwards. He discovered that although both his eyes functioned, they seemed to be out of synchronization or parallax or something. If he left the new one in and didn’t cover his own real eye, his vision was occluded. They seemed to conflict.

  So he still had recourse to his patch, but would shift it now and then from one eye to the other.

  He was completely fed up with Aline, and as far as he was concerned, it wouldn’t matter whether she moved back into his room or not. But then, moving the patch to cover his own eye, he suddenly remembered the way her face lit up so briefly on New Year’s Eve, and all she had done for him; and that in fact she was really an attractive and young woman. His desire rose and he regretted their arguments and the circumstances that kept them apart.

  Next morning, leaving the eye in its glass, patch over the empty socket, he thought to himself, Yet why should I deprive myself of my conjugal rights? I’m older than her, but I’m not dead. If I want a woman, I should have a woman. And if my wife won’t cooperate, somebody else will.