La Guerre:Yes Sir

by Roch Carrier

  “Corriveau arrives tomorrow,” she said.

  She fell onto the bed without drawing back the covers.

  “Hurry up,” she said, “I’m cold. Hear the wind? It’s sad, a winter wind. Come on, hurry up.”

  Arthur stretched out on the bed. “I forgot that Corriveau was coming tomorrow. He’ll have soldiers with him, so Henri and I can’t take a chance and leave the house. Corriveau’s going to bust his gut laughing in his coffin.”

  He felt the generous flesh with rapture. Amélie chuckled. But the fingers loosened. The hand was not ravenous. It fell back on the sheet.

  “Corriveau was away for three years,” he said. “I remember, it was the beginning of fall. He didn’t think he’d be away for long.”

  “Yeah, and he didn’t think he wouldn’t be coming back.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if he wanted to come back. The last word he said, I remember as if it was yesterday, he said, ’At last I’m going to have some peace.’ He said that. I can still hear it.”

  “In war, time must pass quickly,” she said.

  Arthur’s sex was too pacific.

  “To be away for three years and come back in your coffin, that’s no life. Whether you’ve got a cortege of soldiers or not.”

  “Dying,” murmured Amélie, “that’s sad.”

  “Dying in a war is sad all right.”

  “Poor Corriveau.”

  Amélie had rolled onto Arthur; feeling trapped by the heavy breasts and the burning belly, he got out of the bed, picked up his clothes, grabbed the broom, and knocked on the ceiling according to the agreement. The heavy objects slid in the attic, the trapdoor opened, and Henri’s head appeared. He yelled, “You can’t even sleep around here! They steal your lawful wife who’s been blessed by the priest and then they disturb you three or four times a night and just as often in the day. Peace! I want some peace, hostie!”

  Arthur waited for a moment’s silence so that he could talk. It came. “It’s sad to come back from the war in your coffin.”

  “It’s sad, but it’s no reason to disturb the whole village.”

  “For me it stirs up my soul, my heart, my liver, my guts, that Corriveau is dead.”

  “Stir up whatever you want, that won’t bring him back.”

  “It’s sad; he was our age.”

  “He was younger than us,” Henri corrected.

  “Dying: I couldn’t stand that.”

  “What’s wrong with you, stomping around under my trapdoor like a cat pissing in the bran?”

  “I’m coming up to the attic. If you want, Henri, you can take my place.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take my turn tonight,” Arthur went on. “But tomorrow’s mine.”

  The scalded pig, all open, the inside of the body a bright red, had its two back legs tied to the ladder on which Arsène had stretched it out. The oldest of his fourteen children, who knew this kind of work well, took hold of one of the animal’s front feet and stretched it with all his might, his foot supported on a rung of the ladder. When the beast was sufficiently extended he tied the foot to a rung and seized the fourth foot to begin the same operation over again. Then Arsene and his son lifted the ladder so that it was vertical and leaned it against a wall of the barn. The youth contemplated the skinned pig, the inside of the animal like an immense red wound.

  “Every time I see a pig laid out like that I can’t help thinking of Christ on Calvary.”

  “Philibert! “ his father yelled. “Atheist! You’ll be damned! Ask the good Lord’s pardon right now and come here so I can give you a boot in the ass!”

  Philibert, his eyes fixed on the opened pig, didn’t move a hair. His father came up to him, grumbling that he was a damn blasphemer, that he would bring down misfortunes on the house, such as foot-and-mouth disease, thunder, cancer, debts, and hunch-backed children.

  “Every time somebody insults Christ, the pope and holy things, he pays for it,” explained Arsène.

  He would have liked his son to understand, but he knew that gentleness is never effective. So he buried his boot in Philibert’s behind and repeated the action until his leg was tired.

  Tears flowed from Philibert’s eyes. Was this what life was all about? Was this why a child was supposed to honour his father all the days of his life? Philibert had no desire to honour his father. He wouldn’t honour him to the end of his days. He’d go away soon like all the boys in the village. The young boys left the village because they had no intention of honouring their fathers to the end of their days. Philibert knew what he wanted to be when the day came for him to leave… And he wouldn’t come back before he’d forgotten the kicks he had received. These kicks, he thought, should never be forgotten, so maybe he’d never come back.

  “You’re a kid with one hell of a mouth; you’re possessed by the devil, my boy, the living devil. May God protect me, his father, from eternal damnation.”

  Arsène gave Philibert his most powerful kick.

  “It’s not worth killing me,” said Philibert craftily. “I didn’t mean anything bad. I just meant that Christ must have suffered a lot, stretched out on his cross like that

  Arsène replied with another kick. Philibert pursued his idea. “Getting stuck on a cross and having knives stuck in your belly, that can’t be very much fun.”

  “You’re still blaspheming! Are you dead set on making hell come down on us like a rain of fire?”

  Arsène hit his resigned son several times. Then he calmed down. A long silence paralysed them. Father and son were back to back; they remained motionless for some time, not daring to let out the insults they exchanged internally, silently. Arsène resolved to speak. He couldn’t be silent till the end of the world.

  “You know, my boy, that punishment on the cross is still practised today. And it must be more painful today than in the olden days because nowadays our flesh isn’t so tough.”

  Philibert had nothing to say.

  “The Germans are still putting prisoners on the cross,” Arsène went on.

  “I’d sure like to see a German. I’d see how it’s done and then I’d kill him.”

  “The Germans put women on the cross.”

  “Why not men?”

  “The Germans prefer women on the cross. With men they couldn’t do the same thing.”

  “Because the men would bust their teeth.”

  “I think I can tell you now, you’re big enough to understand. I was telling you that the Germans stretch the women out on crosses…”

  “Yes, you told me that.”

  “Women are women, but the crosses aren’t crosses…”

  “Ah!”

  “The crosses are beds.”

  Philibert looked at his father wide-eyed with astonishment.

  “The Germans get on top of the woman attached to the bed one after another, and then they take advantage of her till she’s dead.”

  “What do the Germans do to the woman?”

  “Nitwit!” cried Arsene, booting him in the rear.

  The child suddenly caught on. “Did Corriveau do that too?”

  Arsène looked at his son indulgently. “What am I going to do with you? I’m trying to educate you and then, Sainte Vierge, you refuse to understand a thing. Are you a birdbrain? Corriveau didn’t do that. Corriveau isn’t a German. Our soldiers don’t behave like Germans. Our soldiers fight clean,” explained Arsène; “they defend our rights, our religion, our animals, everything that belongs to us.”

  When would Philibert be able to go to war with the Germans, kill a German?

  “Did Corriveau knock down any Germans?”

  “Today they kill without seeing each other, and without seeing each other they die. Anyway, even if he did see any, Corriveau won’t be able to tell us now.”

  Joseph appeared, his arm wrapped up in rags soaked in alcohol and red with blood that was beginning to harden because of the cold.

  “It’s the Anglais, that’s for sure, that are coming with Corriveau,” he announced
. “The army told Anthyme Corriveau. There’ll be seven. Seven Anglais.”

  “Anthyme was right to buy a whole pig from me,” Arsène noted.

  “There’ll be seven of them.”

  “That’ll make a lot of people trying to find a hair on my pig.”

  “There’ll be seven Anglais, seven soldiers. That means that six are going to carry Corriveau, three on each side. The seventh is the most important. He gives the orders. A soldier doesn’t do a thing, he doesn’t even fart without an order.”

  Philibert was amazed.

  “I can’t wait to see these Anglais; I’ve never seen one.”

  Arsène looked at him in the manner of a man who knows everything. “The Anglais, my boy, are like everybody else. The men pee standing up and the women do it sitting down.”

  He held out a bucket to the boy. “Go ask your mother if she has some boiling water. There can’t be a single hostie of a bristle on this pig. Hurry up!”

  Philibert ran towards the house, the bucket in his hand, thinking of the insulting things he could say to the real Anglais. Arsène noticed some blood on Joseph’s bandages.

  “What’s the matter, Joseph my friend, did you scratch yourself?”

  Bralington Station.

  The train could be seen in the distance, the engine ploughing through the snow covering the forest. At the station you couldn’t see it approaching, there was so much frost on the windows. You could only tell it was coming by the noise. The stationmaster withdrew into the shed, sliding the door on its rusted pulleys so that the employees could unload the merchandise there. In his little station, smelling of charcoal and the loafers’ tobacco, the station agent had forgotten about all the snow.

  He swore, “May God change my mother into a horse with the head of a cow if I’ve ever seen so much snow in my life. And I’ve seen some.”

  “Snow,” said the storekeeper. “There’s more snow than there are hosties in all the tabernacles. This morning I want to go out the door, like a gentleman. So I can’t even open it! It was blocked by the snow. Hard snow, like ice. Okay, so I climb up the stairs, I open a window, and I go out the window like a ciboire of a savage.”

  “I used to be in the Royal Navy,” said the stationmaster. “The first time I found myself in front of the ocean I said to myself, I said: ’Open your eyes. By Christ, you’ve never seen so much water all at once.’”

  “Me, I don’t like water. A glass of water makes me seasick. Goddamn water. There’s only one way not to make me seasick: put alcohol in my water.”

  “Okay,” continued the stationmaster, who had not lost his train of thought, “today when I saw all that snow I said to myself, ’Open your eyes, grandpa, you’ve never seen so much snow.’”

  “You can’t please everybody, but the polar bears must be pretty happy.”

  The conductor loomed into sight in a cloud of snow, as though blown by a gust of wind. In his hand he held a watch that was attached to his stomach by a little chain, and he watched it beat as if it were his heart. “With all this snow,” he said, “you don’t move very fast. We’re behind two hours, seventeen minutes and forty-four seconds.”

  “With all this snow,” repeated the stationmaster, “there’s a danger that polar bears will come down from the North. It’s been known to happen: polar bears have come down into the villages. Because of the snow they thought they were on home ground. In cases like that they devour everybody in the village. Polar bears never have indigestion. When I was sailing in the navy…”

  The conductor didn’t have time to listen to another fragment of the stationmaster’s autobiography. “We’re late,” he interrupted. “At every station everybody has to work faster: the time lost by the train has to be made up by men.”

  Storekeepers were bringing down cases and packages. The stationmaster checked to see that they were in good condition, to make sure that the fastening had not been broken or the wrapping undone during the trip. As each object was inspected he made a little mark on a list that he brought up close to his nose so he could read it.

  “Eaton’s? OK. Mont-Rouge? OK. Brunswick? OK. Montreal Shipping? OK. Clark Beans? OK. Marini Spaghetti? OK. Black and White? OK. Black Horse? OK. William Scotch? OK. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,… Corriveau? Corriveau?” he shouted. “Corriveau? Where have you put Corriveau?”

  “Corriveau?” somebody asked from the inside of the car, “What’s that, Corriveau?”

  “Corriveau’s a coffin.”

  The voice in the car gave an order. “The dead guy gets off here. Where did you put the dead guy?”

  “Are you going to let him off?” asked the station-master impatiently.

  “He isn’t here now,” said the voice in the car. “He must have got off to stretch his legs.”

  “He should have better come and help me shovel,” said an employee who was trying to clear the platform.

  “That baptême of a corpse, he isn’t there,” complained the voice in the car. “There’s always trouble with these dead guys. I’d rather ship ten living men than one dead one.”

  The stationmaster’s voice took on the dry tone of someone in authority. “Friends, I don’t want you to make a mistake with that package. Corriveau is one of us. He’s going to get off here. I want Corriveau to get off with his Anglais.”

  “Ah! “ sighed the man inside, relieved. “I get it. If you’re talking about the Anglais, all their baggage is off.”

  The man appeared in the door of the car, triumphant. The stationmaster marked his sheet in the necessary place and went back into his office.

  Through his wicket he noticed the képis of some soldiers who were sitting in the waiting room. “Hey! boys,” he asked, “did you get a nice trip?”

  “Not too lovely, monsieur,” one of the soldiers replied in French.

  “I understand English, boys. You may speak English. I learned when I was in the navy — Royal Navy.”

  “All the peoples speaks English,” said the same soldier, still speaking French.

  “Where is Corriveau?”

  “What means Corllivouuw?”

  “Corriveau is the name of our poor boy, boys.”

  “The man is in there,” said one of the soldiers, indicating the coffin on which they were sitting and smoking cigarettes.

  The one who was the leader got up; with a single military movement the other six soldiers took up their positions. Then they gave the stationmaster a military salute and carried away the coffin, leaving the waiting-room door open to the cold.

  The stationmaster grumbled: “You can see these maudits Anglais are used to having niggers or French Canadians to shut their doors. That’s what Corriveau must have done: open and shut doors for the Anglais.”

  A thin man, an employee who had finished his work, was going from one window to another as though he were looking for something important. He wasn’t discouraged although he kept running into opaque frost. He walked as though he knew where he was going. The man pulled his finger out of his nostril. “Life,” he declared, “is nothing but this: there’s the big guys and the little guys. There’s the good Lord and there’s me. There’s the Germans and there was Corriveau. There’s the Anglais and us; you, Corriveau, me, everybody in the village…”

  The man plunged his finger back into the nostril, where it had lots to do.

  “Corriveau,” said the stationmaster “is the first child the war has taken from us.”

  The man removed his finger from his nose and pointed it accusingly towards the stationmaster. “You mean Corriveau is the first child the big guys have grabbed away from us. Shit on the big guys. They’re all the same: Germans, Anglais, French, Russians, Chinese, Japs; they’re all so much alike they have to wear different costumes to tell each other apart before they throw their grenades. I shit on all the big guys, but not on the good Lord, because he’s even bigger than the big guys. But he’s a big guy too. They’re all big guys. That’s why I think this war, it’s a war of the big guys against the little ones. Corrive
au’s dead. The little guys are dying. The big guys last forever.”

  The man stuck his finger back in his nose and began again his promenade from one window to another, all of them covered with frost.

  The stationmaster lit his pipe. “If Corriveau had died here, in the village, in his bed, that would have been very sad for a young man. But he died in his soldier suit and far away from the village; that must mean something.”

  “That means that the big guys get bigger and the little ones go bust.”

  Madame Joseph wished she were a dog. With sharp claws and furious barks she would have chased, dispersed and bitten the legs of the gang of urchins blocking her way.

  Madame Joseph was going back to her house. She could not endure, on her own, the pain of becoming the wife of a man who had chopped off his own hand with an axe. She had gone to tell her neighbours about her troubles. “Life is hard,” she had said, tears in her eyes. “You marry a man and you find out you’re sleeping with an invalid. What’s Joseph going to do with his stump in my bed?.”

  It was a sad story indeed. The neighbours, helpless before her misfortune, all promised to pray for her and Joseph. In any case it was not certain whether Josph had done wrong, because it said in the Gospel, “Tear out thy hand or throw it on the fire.” Because that was truly said in the Gospel, Madame Joseph was almost consoled.

  She returned, then, along the snowy path dug in the piled-up snow by the horses and villagers. She walked with as much dignity as possible because, behind the curtains, they were watching her; in the houses they were talking about her and Joseph.

  The children in the street were too busy with their game to see her coming. Divided into two teams, everyone was armed with a curved stick as in a hockey game; they were fighting over an object, probably a frozen horse turd, trying to push it into the other side’s goal. Sticks were raised and came crashing down; the players held on, knocked each other around, waved their sticks, banged them together with a dry sound. Suddenly the object shot outside the milling group; the players ran after it, tripped each other, exchanged blows with their sticks, their elbows, got hold of it again, all the time shouting and swearing as the sticks came crashing down, clattering on one another. The object was rolling farther along on the snow again, among the shouts of joy and swearing of those who had scored a point.